Lives Of American Women Research Articles

The Hungry Self

The importance of food as a cultural marker of difference has until fairly recently been neglected in multicultural discourse. This is probably because food – the acquisition, preparation and serving of it as well as oral and written expressions about food – has traditionally been the domain of women, who have often been relegated to the back of the bus (or literally sent to the kitchen) when it comes to multicultural/political issues. Yet very often activities connected to food are the sole source of power and expression for ethnic American women, serving as a means of self-affirmation, as well as a repository of familial memory. For Italian American women especially, who traditionally spend so much time in the kitchen, food has been a means of controlling a world in which they have very little power, a creative outlet, and a source of the sacred. Like Alice Walker's foremothers, who expressed themselves in quilts and gardens, Italian American women have recreated in their very sites of confinement sites of creative expression and empowerment. On the other hand, many Italian American women, writing about their lives, have rejected food and the production of it as a means of protest against a culture that has denied them opportunity for personal and artistic growth. This study examines the various ways in which Italian American women have written about food and food issues as they relate to their own experiences. I hope in this way to contribute to the discourse on food in multicultural studies particularly as an issue in ethnic American women's lives.

Different Paths to Different Feminisms? Bridging Multiracial Feminist Theory and Quantitative Sociological Gender Research

This article examines the limitations of the sociological research on feminist identities and ideologies that ignores the intersection of race and gender. Drawing from multiracial feminist theorizing, the author asks, Is self-identification as feminist a biased indicator of the salience of feminism in African American women's lives? Do women's racial statuses mediate the relationship between particular life events and experiences and the extent to which they embrace feminism? and To what extent are racial differences important when considering what women understand feminism to be? To answer these questions, the author conducted multiple group analyses of structural equation models to analyze data from the 1996 General Social Survey. Her findings are consistent with multiracial feminist theories and suggest a need to rethink traditional approaches to feminist research so that women's differences are no longer marginalized.

If It Takes A Village, Why Am I Doing This Alone? Motherhood and Citizenship in Modern America

any women with children struggle to fi affordable, quality child care. Even those of us lucky enough to work in the academy, with somewhat fl exible schedules and occasional access to university-sponsored childhood education programs, scramble to accommodate school holidays, sick kids, and any number of schedule confl icts from time to time, not to mention the cost of quality care. Yet we rarely fi nd ourselves asking, where's the help? Why is there so little public and private support for parenting? Instead we ask, am I a good enough mother? Am I spending enough time with my child? Should I, given the fi nancial ability, pitch it all and devote myself to my child full time? Is there enough Xanax in my medicine cabinet to make this a realistic alternative? Two new works—Emilie Stotzfus's Citizen, Mother, Worker: Debating Public Responsibility for Child Care After the Second World War, and Susan J. Douglas and Meredith Michael's The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Moth- erhood and How It Has Undermined Women—provide some historical context and important insights into this dilemma. These three authors speak power- fully to the ways in which motherhood has shaped American defi nitions of citizenship in the second half of the twentieth century. Both books seek to explain the remarkable (in comparison to other industrialized nations) lack of public support for child care in the United States. More broadly, they each explore the incredible disconnect between American gender ideology and the reality of most American women's lives. In Citizen, Mother, Worker, Emily Stoltzfus analyzes the battles sur- rounding public child care in the immediate post-World War II years. Most students of postwar history are familiar with the unprecedented, although grossly inadequate, effort to provide child care for female war industry

“Children Having Children”: Race, Innocence, and Sexuality Education

This feminist ethnographic study considers the rhetoric of “children having children” in debates over school-based sexuality education, a rhetoric that is universalizing but racialized and gendered. I use participant observation and interview data I collected in a North Carolina school system that serves a predominantly African American, low-income student population. I explore educators', activists', and policymakers' responses to state legislation requiring that public schools provide sexuality education that teaches students to abstain from sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage. In school-board meetings, proponents and opponents of the mandated instruction alike cast low-income, African American girls as central to perceived problems of teen pregnancy, promiscuity, and disease. Those advocating “abstinence-only sexuality education” argued that their curricula would protect innocent children from others' corrupting influence; racialized language and images suggested that these “others” were poor, African American girls. Those promoting “comprehensive sexuality education” recast these girls as “children having children”—innocents who needed guidance and who could not be held responsible for their missteps. In some ways, the rhetoric of “children having children” is a redemptive response to notions of African American and low-income women and girls as sexually excessive. However, the rhetoric is ultimately constraining, for it forestalls concern about boys' and men's sexualities, elides the specificities of African American women's and girls' sexual lives, and fails to recognize African American girls and women as simultaneously sexual, struggling, and worthy of protection.

Representative Women: Slavery, Citizenship, and Feminist Theory in Du Bois's “Damnation of Women”

In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Damnation of Women,” which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

New paradigms for transcultural nursing: frameworks for studying African American women.

African American women continue to experience disparities in health status when compared to their European American counterparts, yet, often their unique perspectives are not presented in the nursing literature. This article will discuss various theoretical frameworks arising from Black women's thought and reality that can be used to enhance and expand transcultural nursing knowledge. Historical, sociocultural, and literary perspectives will be used to illuminate the realities of African American women's lives. Selected frameworks arising from these realities will be discussed that recognize the impact of race, class, and gender on the lives of African American women and have the potential to guide nursing research and practice.

A Concomitant Examination of the Relations of Perceived Racist and Sexist Events to Psychological Distress for African American Women

Conceptualizations of the role of racism and sexism in African American women's lives suggest that racism and sexism may have unique and interactive links to psychological distress. Path analysis was used to examine concomitantly these links for a sample of 133 African American university and community women. Respondents'·self-reported experiences of perceived racist and sexist events and psychological distress were gathered. Results indicated that perceived racist and sexist events correlated positively, and comparably, with psychological distress; but when examined concomitantly, only perceived sexist events accounted for unique variance in psychological distress. Furthermore, racist and sexist events did not interact to predict distress. The substantial correlation between reports of racist and sexist events and the overlap in their relations to psychological distress suggest that the constructs of racism and sexism may, at least in part, be fused for African American women.

Sifters: Native American Women's Lives (review)

Sifters: Native American Women's Lives (review)

Beyond apocalypse and apology: a moral defense of abortion.

The movement to preserve and advance reproductive freedom is suffering the consequences of a great victory. The establishment of the constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade was a monumental step that changed the lives of American women. Girls grow up today under the mantle of Roe, never having known a world in which illegal, unsafe, degrading and sometimes fatal abortions were the norm. That is a cause for celebration as Roe turns 30. It is also, however, a cause of complacency. Complacency corrodes all freedoms. It is particularly dangerous to reproductive freedom because opponents of the right are single-minded and fervent to the point of fanaticism. Their crusade has fueled three decades of incremental restrictions that make it risky or burdensome to get an abortion and, for some women, block access altogether. Understandably, the prochoice movement has grown frustrated with the unending onslaught, and the public, numb. The movement's responses to this conundrum have varied over time and among its many spokespersons. Yet two recurring approaches — to jolt the public by forecasting Roe's reversal and to court reluctant supporters by steering wide of abortion altogether — are problematic. Being clear, straightforward and unabashed about the importance of reproductive freedom, and realistic about the impending threats, offers the strongest chance for rebuilding public support. This article first critiques what the authors call the apocalyptic and apologetic approaches to defending abortion rights. It then presents the most compelling reasons to support the right to abortion.

"Maintaining a Home for Girls": The Iowa Federation of Colored Women's Clubs at the University of Iowa, 1919-1950

This essay examines the Iowa Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (IFCWC) campaign to operate a house for African American women at the University of Iowa from 1919 to 1950. (1) It seeks to add to a growing body of literature which focuses on African American philanthropy and collective black economic enterprises. An examination of the experiences of African American women at the University of Iowa and the IFCWC Home campaign offers an interesting case study that builds on recent research work on African American Women's philanthropy. (2) The IFCWC's economic enterprise developed because between 1913 and 1946, the University of Iowa barred African American students from campus and some student activities. The experiences of African American women at the University of Iowa are unique for two reasons: 1) the house they occupied was one of a few dormitories in the nation owned and operated by a formally organized group of African American women; and 2) the campaign to maintain the IFCWC Hom e provided mostly middle-class African American women students with the organizational, intellectual, and leadership skills necessary to become the next generation of black women activists. In general, the experiences of African American college women at predominantly white coeducational institutions in the early twentieth century are unique because white women often had the guidance and support of white women administrators and/or faculty. (3) African American women, on the other hand, had to look outside the university for such mentors and role models. The question remains then, how did the alliance with the IFCWC help to keep students connected to the African American community; and how did the community respond? How did limited employment prospects that resulted from race and gender prejudice help to bring about a sharply focused movement to make a college education available to a number of Iowa's young African American women? I contend that the IFCWC prepared African American women at the University of I owa to assume positions of leadership in organizations such as the IFCWC, National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the Order of the Eastern Star (OES), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a host of other local and regional civil rights organizations. (4) Upon graduation, these women also assumed responsibilities in their local communities in their effort to the race. This work places African American women's lives at the center of inquiry in a preexisting historiographical paradigm which often excludes them through a preoccupation with African American men and white women. A few scholars, such as Linda Perkins, Elizabeth Ihle, Jeanne Noble, and Ellen Lawson, have completed various studies on African American women's higher education. Other scholars, such as Amy Thompson McCandless, offer thorough and insightful comparisons of the southern white and southern black women's education in the twentieth century. Outside the works by this small group of historians, the experiences of college educated African American women have been marginal. Particularly missing from current studies is any examination of African American women in the midwest. (5) Although African American women's historiography has recently focused on Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, these works avoid any elaborate discussions of African American women's history in midwestern states west of the Mississippi River su ch as Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa. (6) To be sure, this study is not only specific to Iowa, but to African American women who attended the University of Iowa. I contend that racism did not paralyze these women's struggle for equality. They transformed their experiences with racism into a call for social activism, racial uplift, and service to their communities. (7) As Kevin Gaines, Stephanie Shaw and other scholars point out, although African Americans agreed on the ideal of uplift they did not always agree on what types of behavior were appropriate. …

Sifters: Native American Women's Lives

Sifters: Native American Women's Lives

Sifters: Native American Women's Lives

In this edited volume, Theda Perdue, a nationally known expert on Indian history and southern women's history, offers a rich collection of biographical essays on Native American women. From Pocahontas, a Powhatan woman of the seventeenth century, to Ada Deer, the Menominee woman who headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1990s, the essays span four centuries. Each one recounts the experiences of women from vastly different cultural traditions-the hunting and gathering of Kumeyaay culture of Delfina Cuero, the pueblo society of San Ildefonso potter Maria Martinez, and the powerful matrilineal kinship system of Molly Brant's Mohawks. Contributors focus on the ways in which different women have fashioned lives that remain firmly rooted in their identity as Native women. Perdue's introductory essay ties together the themes running through the biographical sketches, including the cultural factors that have shaped the lives of Native women, particularly economic contributions, kinship, and belief, and the ways in which historical events, especially in United States Indian policy, have engendered change.

Sifters: Native American women's lives

Sifters: Native American women's lives

"Good Enough" Methods for Ethnographic Research

In this article, Wendy Luttrell reflects on key decisions she made in her own research in order to illuminate reflexivity for other ethnographic researchers. Luttrell addresses the crisis of representation in ethnography, advocating that researchers name the tensions, contradictions, and power imbalances that they encounter in their work, rather than attempting to eliminate them. The author reexamines her own study of working-class American women's life stories to make the case for what she terms "good enough" research methods. Through her own self-reflective lens, Luttrell describes several key realizations she made throughout the research process, and traces seven decisions she made as a result.

If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion

Seven years before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 comprehensively disqualified all members of China's laboring class from immigration status, the Page Law sought to stem the tide of Chinese prostitutes entering the United States. Yet during these seven years it was not just prostitutes but all Chinese females who encountered at best hostility and at worst expulsion when they reached the Golden Door. In this first detailed account of Chinese American women's lives in the preexclusion era, George Anthony Peffer investigates how administrative agencies and federal courts enforced immigration laws. Peffer documents the habeas corpus trials in which the wives and daughters of Chinese laborers were required to prove their status as legal immigrants or be returned to China. He also surveys the virulently anti- Chinese coverage these trials and the issue of Chinese immigration received in California newspapers, confirming that Chinatown's prostitution industry so dominated the popular imagination as to render other classes of female immigrants all but invisible. In the words of one immigration judge, the United States remained favorable to Chinese immigration in the preexclusion period if they don't bring their women here. This important study amplifies the voices of immigrant women who did not fit into the preconceived categories American officials created and establishes a place for them within the historiographic framework of Chinese American studies.

Unbound voices: a documentary history of Chinese women in San Francisco

Unbound Voices brings together the voices of Chinese American women in a fascinating, intimate collection of documents--letters, essays, poems, autobiographies, speeches, testimonials, and oral histories--detailing half a century of their lives in America. Together, these sources provide a captivating mosaic of Chinese women's experiences in their own words, as they tell of making a home for themselves and their families in San Francisco from the Gold Rush years through World War II. The personal nature of these documents makes for compelling reading. We hear the voices of prostitutes and domestic slavegirls, immigrant wives of merchants, Christians and pagans, homemakers, and social activists alike. We read the stories of daughters who confronted cultural conflicts and racial discrimination; the myriad ways women coped with the Great Depression; and personal contributions to the causes of women's emancipation, Chinese nationalism, workers' rights, and World War II. The symphony of voices presented here lends immediacy and authenticity to our understanding of the Chinese American women's lives. This rich collection of women's stories also serves to demonstrate collective change over time as well as to highlight individual struggles for survival and advancement in both private and public spheres. An educational tool on researching and reclaiming women's history, Unbound Voices offers us a valuable lesson on how one group of women overcame the legacy of bound feet and bound lives in America. The selections are accompanied by photographs, with extensive introductions and annotation by Judy Yung, a noted authority on primary resources relating to the history of Chinese American women.

Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women, 1800-1870 (review)

"Purposive exercise," Jan Todd notes, differs from other physical activities, such as casual play or competitive sports: in purposive training, individuals apply highly structured methods to achieve "specific physiological and philosophical goals" (p. 3). American women--both past and present--have embraced purposive exercise, Todd argues, because of its "implicit promise of improved appearance, the quest for better health, and a desire to feel stronger and more competent" (p. 3). Her conviction that physical training can transform and empower women stems from her experiences as a sport historian, physical educator, and former competitive powerlifter.

Women and the dynamics of marriage, household status, and aging in victorian canada and the united states

This article compares the life course transitions and household statuses of Canadian and American women and men in late nineteenth-century Canada and the United States. Using a set of integrated census data from 1871 Canada and the United States in 1880, the article suggests that household status differences between the two nations centered on gender. Canadian and American men timed or experienced their own transitions into and out of marriage and household headship at similar ages and to a similar extent. Demographic and economic differences between Victorian Canada and the United States, however, produced distinctions in Canadian and American women's life course transitions and household status: for Canadian women, older ages at first marriage, and the prolongation of the duration of the status, spouse of the household head. For their part, American elderly women more frequently lived as single and widowed heads of households than did their Canadian counterparts.

All the daring of a soldier: women of the Civil War armies

Elizabeth Leonard has unearthed the stories of the hidden and forgotten women who risked their lives in the American Civil War. These women spied for their cause, remained on the front line as daughters of the regiment, and even enlisted to fight as men. Leonard investigates why they chose unconventional ways to play their part in the war and gives us a striking portrait of American women's lives in the 19th century.

American Women Writers to 1800

This anthology captures the diversity of writings and experiences of women in early America. Representing women's writings in numerous generes (from letters and peitions to peotry and novels), the anthology offers rich ground for a radical rethinking of early American women's lives and writings, and challenges our assumptions about early America itself.