Oregon's Others: Gender, Civil Liberties, and the Surveillance State in the Early Twentieth Century (Emil and Kathleen Sick Book Series in Western History and Biography)

Finalist for the Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction, Oregon Book Awards, sponsored by Literary Arts

Nativism, pseudoscience, and the campaign against the enemy within

In the era of the First World War and its aftermath, the quest to identify, restrict, and punish internal enemy “others,” combined with eugenic thinking, severely curtailed civil liberties for many people in Oregon and the nation. In Oregon’s Others, Kimberly Jensen analyzes the processes that shaped the growing surveillance state of the era and the compelling personal stories that tell its history. The exclusionary and invasive practices ranged from multiple wartime registrations for women and the registration of “enemy aliens” to the incarceration of women with sexually transmitted diseases, the use of deportations, and forced sterilization at the Oregon State Hospital and other institutions. But some Oregonians resisted the restrictions and challenges to their civil liberties. Their fierce determination to maintain their rights and freedoms fueled movements for human rights, social justice, and dissent that still reverberate today.Comprehensive and compelling, Oregon’s Others examines the collision of civil liberties and persecution through the lens of gender, gender identity and presentation, ability, race, ethnicity, and class.

Kimberly Jensen is professor of history and gender studies at Western Oregon University and author of Oregon’s Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life in Activism and Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War.