Women and Gender in the American West

Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: the Case of Interracial Marriage

 F OR scholars interested in the social construction of race, gender, and culture, few subjects are as potentially revealing as the history of interracial marriage. Clearly, the phenomenon of interracial marriage involves the making and remaking of notions of race, gender, and culture in individual lives, as well as at the level of social and political policy.Yet, the potential of the subject has barely been tapped.The vast majority of studies have been carried out by social scientists, who search for laws of social behavior that might either predict or account for the incidence of interracial marriage. The handful of historians who have taken up the topic use their insight into change over time to expose flaws in nearly every theory social scientists have proposed. But whether historians focus on the actual patterns of intermarriage or on the enactment of laws against it, they tend to accept the social-scientific assumption that race and sex themselves are immutable categories,the“givens”of historical analysis;they stop short of investigating historical changes in notions of race and gender. Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: the Case of Interracial Marriage Peggy Pascoe Jensen-Miller Prize 1991 * Peggy Pascoe,“Race,Gender,and Intercultural Relations:the Case of Interracial Marriage,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies : (). ©  Frontiers, University of Nebraska Press. Reprinted by permission.  Peggy Pascoe Assumptions like these are distinctly at odds with the work of both the vast majority of feminist scholars, who see gender as a social construction ,and a growing group of ethnic studies scholars,who challenge the notion that race should be conceived of as a biological category. When I started to think about writing a history of interracial marriage, I found the gap between these two sets of assumptions at first puzzling, then intriguing.Now,I think it is a vital clue to the way a study of interracial marriage might address three central conceptual challenges faced by women’s historians seeking to write multicultural history: . the challenge of exploring the interconnections between gender and race relations; . the challenge of learning to see race, as well as gender, as a social construction, and . the challenge of choosing a definition of culture suitable for writing intercultural history. In this rather speculative essay, I will use my preliminary research on the history of interracial marriage in the U.S.West to offer some thoughts on each of these challenges. First, however, a little background is in order. Probably the most intriguing aspect of the history of interracial marriage in the United States is that,although such marriages were infrequent throughout most of U.S. history, an enormous amount of time and energy was nonetheless spent in trying to prevent them from taking place. From the colonial period clear through the mid-twentieth century, state legislators made it their business to pass laws designed to prohibit what they came by the s to call miscegenation, a term that means mixture of the races.The laws were enacted first—and abandoned last— in the South,but it was in theWest,not the South,that the laws became most elaborate. In the late nineteenth century, western legislators built a labyrinthine system of legal prohibitions on marriages between whites and Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Hawaiians, Hindus, and Native Americans, as well as on marriages between whites and blacks. Legislators targeted both interracial sex and interracial marriage,but the  Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations latter drew the strongest prohibitions and the most litigation, largely, I think, because marriage involved property obligations.Although most northern states repealed their prohibitions after the Civil War, in the South and the West, laws against miscegenation remained in force through much of the twentieth century. Many were erased from the books only after the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in . Interracial marriage has been studied far more often by social scientists than by historians, but both groups have seen it primarily as an issue of race relations.Yet, as any historian of women would suspect, interracial marriage is also an issue of gender relations, in obvious and not-so-obvious ways.The first challenge in writing its history is to learn to see interracial marriage as a matter of both gender and race relations. To begin with the obvious, the campaign to prohibit interracial marriage reflects U.S. gender hierarchies, as well as racial hierarchies. One of the very first prohibitions on interracial marriage, passed in Maryland...