Julia Bowes

This sure reminds me of a conversation I was having with @jessicacalarco.com last week. Also reminds me of @juliabowes.bsky.social's forthcoming book: When do we REALLY stress our deep individualism? When “manhood” needs reasserting.

My argument summed up in a cartoon by Finley Briggs (a cartoonist I one day hope to write an article on...) from Medical Freedom, 4 no 5 (January 1915):73 in which a respectable white father, “The American Citizen,” is responsible for dropping his daughter off at school.

Pt3: These ideas were not contained to local conflicts over vaccination. The same gendered ideas about individual liberty and defense of "family government" surfaced in opposition a proposed federal dept of health, & critiques of industrial labor laws, anti-suffrage, & anti-feminist politics too.

Pt2: Anti-vaxxers argued that school vaccination laws were an unjust exercise of state power because they violated "parental rights" and "individual liberty." Parental rights was shorthand for right of respectable white men, "the individual," to govern their homes free from state interference

Pt 1: Tying vaccination requirements to compulsory schooling laws was the best instrument public health officials had to promote immunity in the Progressive Era.. But that meant school vaccine requirements & medical exams became a breeding ground for anti-statist and alternative health networks

Re-entering the online world of academia to share my latest work post-mat leave -- my very pithily titled article "Another Human Sacrifice Thrown to the Pitiless Moloch of Police Power" on anti-vaccination politics at the turn of the twentieth century. TLDR below.

An outstanding and timely exploration by Julia Bowes: white manhood's fragility was exposed by vaccine mandates, leading to broader critique of state authority and expertise in the late 19th/early 20th century.

doi.org/10.1017/S073...