Hodes, Martha (Martha Elizabeth Hodes)

PERSONAL:

Education: Bowdoin College, B.A, 1980; Harvard University, M.A, 1984; Princeton University, M.A, 1987, Ph.D, 1991.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY; Swarthmore, PA. Office—Department of History, New York University, King Juan Carlos I of Spain Bldg., 53 Washington Sq. S., 7th Fl., New York, NY 10012. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of California—Santa Cruz, assistant professor of history, 1991-94; New York University, New York, NY, assistant professor, 1994-2000, associate professor, 2000-07, professor of history, 2007—, director of undergraduate honors program, 2000-01, 2005-06, director of graduate studies, 2003-06. Workshop codirector of Storytelling across Disciplines, New York University Humanities Council, 2004-05. Advisor to documentary films, including for television series History Detectives, PBS.

MEMBER:

American Historical Association, American Studies Association, Organization of American Historians.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellowship in the Humanities, Whiting Foundation, 1989-90; summer seminar fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 1990; Littleton-Griswold Research Grant in Legal History, American Historical Association, 1990; Regents' Junior Faculty Development Award, University of California, 1993-94; American Council of Learned Societies fellowship, 1994-95; Fellowship for University Teachers, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1994-95; University Research Challenge Fund, New York University, 1996; Goddard Fellowship, New York University, 1998; Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, Library Company of Philadelphia, 1999; scholar-in-residence fellowship, New York Public Library Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 1999; Rockefeller Archive Center research grant, 2003; Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History fellowship, New York Public Library, 2003; The Sea Captain's Wife was named a Best Book of 2006, Library Journal; Golden Dozen Teaching Award, New York University College of Arts and Sciences, 2007; Allan Nevins Prize for Literary Distinction in Writing of History, Society of American Historians, for White Women, Black Men.

WRITINGS:

White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1997.

(Editor) Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to books, including Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, edited by Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, Oxford University Press, 1992; Ameri-can Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender, and Race since the Civil War, edited by John C. Fout and Maura Shaw Tantillo, University of Chicago Press, 1993; Major Problems in American Women's History: Documents and Essays, edited by Mary Beth Norton and Ruth M. Alexander, D.C. Heath, 1996; Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 1996; Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History, Houghton Mifflin, 1998; American Sexual Histories, edited by Elizabeth Reis, Blackwell, 2001; Sexual Borderlands: Constructing an American Sexual Past, edited by Kathleen Kennedy and Sharon R. Ullman, Ohio State University Press, 2003; American Dreaming, Global Realities: Rethinking U.S. Immigration History, edited by Donna R. Gabaccia and Vicki L. Ruiz, University of Illinois Press, 2006; Haunted by Empire: Race and Colonial Intimacies in North American History, edited by Ann Laura Stoler, Duke University Press, 2006; and Väter, Soldaten, Liebhaber: Männer und Männlichkeiten in der Geschichte Nordamerikas: Ein Reader, edited by Jürgen Martschukat and Olaf Stieglitz, Transcript (Bielefeld, Germany), 2007. Contributor to journals, including Perspectives: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, American Historical Review, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Women's Review of Books, Reviews in American History, and Journal of American History. Coeditor of "American History and Culture Series," New York University Press.

SIDELIGHTS:

A scholar of African American history, Martha Hodes has written and edited acclaimed books that are revealing of the changing attitudes of sex between black and white people in the United States. Her award-winning White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South is based on the author's extensive research of court cases. Here she finds that cases involving interracial marriage, rape, paternity, and related complaints were taken on a case-by-case basis before the Civil War. That is, immediate prejudice against black men or women was not usually evident. In one 1825 case, for instance, a white woman accused a black man of rape resulting in pregnancy. When the case went to court, evidence and testimony argued that she had been in an intimate relationship with him for some time, and he was therefore found not guilty. Sometimes rape cases led to lynchings, Hodes admits, but not always. Legal status of children often was an issue in mixed-race liaisons, too, and Hodes notes that typically the children were declared slaves if their mother was a slave and free citizens if their mother was white.

After the Civil War, however, the tension between whites and blacks increased significantly. No longer was there the clear barrier of slave versus free people to form a convenient measuring stick on legal and social issues. Consequently, racial prejudice took the place of law, and a subjective social code meant that stereotyping became the new standard of behavior. "The social code preached that no white woman would want a black lover, and hence any sexual contact must be rape," explained Julie Winch in the Women's Review of Books. "Those who did seek out black partners were ostracized, assaulted and in some cases killed. Alternatively, they could be persuaded to say they had been raped." On the other hand, black women were quickly labeled promiscuous, and thus it was acceptable for white men to rape them, while black men were seen as presumptuously asserting their new free status if they wanted to be with a white woman.

"The strength of White Women, Black Men is that it works on two levels," reported Winch. "On one level it is a wide-ranging and carefully researched exploration of a subject ignored by scholars of the South for too long, namely sexual relationships between black men and white women. On another level it is a provocative study of changing power dynamics in the South, and the consequences for all Southerners, irrespective of race or gender." There was high praise all around for Hodes's book, with Library Journal contributor Anthony O. Edmunds calling it a "brilliant work, imaginatively researched and well written." "Her argument rests on evidence painstakingly compiled in a breathtaking display of historical sleuthing," concluded David J. Bodenhamer in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

Hodes focuses her attention on one remarkable case of interracial love in The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century. This "gem of historical writing and research," according to Library Journal critic Linda V. Carlisle, is about Eunice Connolly. After an unsuccessful marriage to a white man who sympathized with the South, Connolly married a black sea captain from Grand Cayman Island. Her new husband was highly respected in the community, and Connolly enjoyed a happy life there. Hodes shows that this white woman from New England found greater joy in her life with a black man than with a white man. More importantly, she reveals "the complexities of 19th-century racism," related Carlisle, calling this an "outstanding" history. A Publishers Weekly writer felt that the text is "sometimes a bit affected [but] lucid and her account is engaging." Entertainment Weekly reviewer Tina Jordan asserted that the narrative "comes surprisingly and movingly, alive."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 15, 1997, Grace Fill, review of White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South, p. 367.

California Bookwatch, November 1, 2006, review of The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century.

Entertainment Weekly, September 15, 2006, Tina Jordan, review of The Sea Captain's Wife, p. 79.

Financial Times, October 28, 2006, "In Brief—The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race and War in the 19th Century," p. 33.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, October 1, 1999, David J. Bodenhamer, review of White Women, Black Men, p. 345.

Journal of Social History, spring, 2000, Joshua D. Rothman, review of Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History.

Journal of Southern History, February 1, 2001, Diane Miller Sommerville, review of Sex, Love, Race, p. 226.

Journal of Women's History, September 22, 2000, Pippa Holloway, review of Sex, Love, Race, p. 239.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, June 1, 2000, Roland Littlewood, review of White Women, Black Men, p. 332.

Library Journal, November 1, 1997, Anthony O. Edmonds, review of White Women, Black Men, p. 92; September 1, 2006, Linda V. Carlisle, review of The Sea Captain's Wife, p. 160.

Publishers Weekly, July 17, 2006, review of The Sea Captain's Wife, p. 150.

Women's Review of Books, April 1, 1998, Julie Winch, review of White Women, Black Men, p. 10.

ONLINE

New York University Department of History Web site,http://history.fas.nyu.edu/ (July 19, 2007), faculty profile and curriculum vitae for Martha Hodes.

Sea Captain's Wife Web site,http://seacaptainswife.com (July 19, 2007).