Lives Of American Women Research Articles

Methods and theory for analyzing intensive longitudinal data in family research

AbstractAlthough family scholars have long relied on longitudinal data, electronic methods of data collection like web‐ and app‐based surveys have greatly increased the amount of data with many repeated measures at short intervals, sometimes called intensive longitudinal data. The authors provide a conceptual overview of this type of data, paying particular attention to the appropriate frequency for the intervals, and discuss some of the unique contributions to Life Course Theory that can be generated with such data. They illustrate two analytic techniques that especially benefit from an intensive longitudinal design—sequence analysis and between‐within regression—by applying these methods to intensive longitudinal data from the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life Study that represent a “micro life course” of pregnancy risk (partnering, pregnancy desire, sex, and contraception) during the transition to adulthood. Their sequence analysis shows that singlehood, hormonal contraception, or partnered abstinence dominated most young women's micro‐life courses. Black/African‐American young women's micro life courses were similarly dominated by singlehood but were even more frequently dominated by partnered abstinence than their non‐Black/African‐American peers'. However, Black/African‐American women's micro life courses were less stable, potentially explaining their higher undesired pregnancy rates. A between‐within regression model shows that Black/African‐American coital contraceptors were less likely than their non‐Black/African‐American peers to use withdrawal (rather than condoms). They conclude by suggesting some potential ways that intensive longitudinal data capturing micro‐life courses can contribute to important outstanding research questions in family research.

The Ideal Situation in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: A Feminist Viewpoint

this research provides an insight into American women's lives and the historical incidents in the nineteenth century. Within the nineteenth century, there was absence of equality between women and men. In nineteenth-century society, men were accepted to be stronger than ladies, both physically and mentally. This research strengthens the existing theory about women's writing. It can also be used as a starting point in further research to obtain more perfect women's writing research results. Via a context-oriented technique, our research plans to investigate the effective ways through which Ruth fought against patriarchal society to achieve her freedom and her dreams from feminist theoretical viewpoints. According to the analysis, Ruth Hall is the public expression of rage by a feminist and is used as a political-strategic instrument. She believes that God gave women the right to be intelligent and acquire talent so that, as Fanny Fern has, they should be able to use this ability by writing. The novel was willing to clarify how some females were able to resolve the injustice they were left with.

Effects of exercise training on health capabilities and life satisfaction among overweight and obese African American women.

More importance has been placed on exercise training due to increase in the overweight and obese population. However, few studies have researched the effects of exercise training on the health capabilities and life satisfaction levels of overweight and obese African American women. This study sought to determine the effect of a 12-week exercise training on health capabilities and life satisfaction levels of overweight and obese African American women. Participants, who passed an initial screening and pre-assessment, were measured current health capabilities and life satisfaction levels both prior to, and following, the 12-week exercise training. The results from this study indicated an improvement in health capabilities, although with no significant differences following exercise training, while a significantly higher life satisfaction levels was observed among the overweight and obese African American women. The findings suggest that exercise training can be beneficial to enhance overweight and obese African American women's health capabilities and life satisfaction levels. Exercise professionals should provide the appropriate exercise trainings so that overweight and obese African American women can optimize life satisfaction levels.

Black Women and Historical Wellness

Black Women and Historical Wellness Kimberly Akano (bio) Stephanie Evans's Black Women's Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace, Albany: SUNY Press, 2021 Amid individual, interpersonal, and sociopolitical stressors, what resources have Black women leveraged to care for themselves and their communities? For some like Harriet Jacobs or Angela Davis, stretching served as a lifeline for dealing with physical confinement during periods of enslavement or imprisonment. For Black women like Anna Julia Cooper, writing and mindfulness nurtured their intellectual health while navigating challenging academic institutions. Still, others such as Eartha Kitt and Tina Turner found comfort while moving their bodies to accomplish daily household chores—out of view from the public eye that typically followed them. For all of these women, such strategies formed the building blocks of robust practices that aligned the mind, body, and spirit. These women and many others are part of a larger tradition of Black women's embodied efforts to pursue health and healing. In Black Women's Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace, historian Stephanie Evans traces an expansive history of Black women's ideas surrounding mental health and physical well-being as they navigate stress and trauma in their everyday lives. This history decenters an emphasis on South Asian and white American iterations of yoga to shed light on African and African American contributions to yoga history—what she ultimately calls "Africana yoga" (365). By adopting a capacious understanding of yoga to include prayer, exercise, and meditation practices, Evans argues that African American women's pursuit of wellness is anything but new. Instead, Black women's healing traditions reflect an enduring legacy of "historical wellness," the sustained ways of being and knowing that Black women apply to prioritize individual and communal health (364). For Evans, a [End Page 329] historical wellness approach to Black women's understandings of wellness requires situating their healing traditions within the larger context of Black women's struggles against racism, sexual violence, and the many other challenges that threaten African American women's flourishing. In doing so, she reorients readers toward a critical examination of the role that both gender and race play in histories of mental and physical health—an aspect that is sorely understudied within most scholarship on yoga. This approach also seeks to consider how the experiences and epistemological contributions of Black women "show us inner peace is possible, historical, practical, and teachable" (136). As a work of intellectual history, Evans attends to a selection of Black women's memoirs and autobiographies to analyze how African American women have narrated their stress management strategies over time. In particular, she focuses on the writings of Black women senior elders (those age seventy and above) and Black women midlife elders (those age fifty and above). Evans situates these writings before and after 1975 when the first issue of Yoga Journal, a national publication, gained national attention. Using her method of "narrative portraiture," Evans artfully weaves biographical data with historical analysis to provide robust depictions of African American women's lives (43). These portraits offer an intimate look at subjective experiences of loss, trauma, and healing. They also suggest that past and present socio-political developments such as enslavement, the Great Migration, and the #MeToo movement required African American women to assess and refashion their varied approaches to health over time. For example, Evans gestures toward an increasing need for Black women to reconsider how nuanced understandings of wellness may positively contribute to more contemporary conversations about social media usage, classroom pedagogy, and public health policy. Indeed, rather than settling for one-dimensional portrayals of Black women that overemphasize life's trials or triumphs, Evans considers the "beautiful, ugly, and healing" moments that inform the dynamism of African American women's wellness writings (36). Perhaps one of the most striking examples of what Evans ultimately calls "Africana yoga" involves Rosa Parks's dedicated yoga practice, which, in part, sustained her lifelong commitment to activism. Evans's keen analysis of Rosa Parks's engagement with yoga stands as an apt illustration of one of her primary assertions that "it is political for Black women to claim ownership or possession, of their own bodies" (47). In other words, Black...

Resistance against Women’s Objectification Portrayed in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

In the early twentieth century, African-American women in the southern United States faced double oppression as a result of patriarchy and racism. They strive to reclaim their independence, all the more so when they are bound by their marriage. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is Zora Neale Hurston's magnum opus, which chronicles the objectification of a young African-American woman called Janie Crawford during her marriage. Through the lens of Black Feminism, this research aims to identify the many forms of female objectification present in the novel and to ascertain the responses taken by the main character in response to the objectification. This research makes use of Martha Nussbaum's and Rae Langton's objectification ideas. Additionally, this study employs Kumea Shorter-Gooden's resistance strategies to evaluate the main character's strategies for resisting objectification. Janie Crawford was subjected to nine distinct forms of objectification by both her first and second husbands, Logan and Jody, according to this study. Additionally, this research illustrates how Janie Crawford's opposition to objectification is fueled by the concept of self-definition. In general, the findings indicate that the novel is centered on the problem of women's objectification and is a timely representation of African American women's lives in the early twentieth century.

Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories: Native American Women's Autobiography by Annette Angela Portillo

Reviewed by: Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories: Native American Women's Autobiography by Annette Angela Portillo Alicia Cox Annette Angela Portillo, Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories: Native American Women's Autobiography. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2017. 216 pp. Cloth, $65; e-book $65. Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories refreshes decades-old scholarly debates about Native American autobiographical discourses. With a focus on Native American women's life stories, Portillo applies new theoretical approaches to canonical nineteenth-century autobiographies by Zitkala-Ša and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and pays due attention to underexamined contemporary life stories by Delfina Cuero and Leslie Marmon Silko. Portillo's most novel intervention, in her penultimate chapter, is her examination of Native women's use of social media and "communo-blographies" to internationalize Indigenous rights movements and social justice activism. This interdisciplinary study expands the canon of western literary and cultural production by including lesser-known works of Native women's autobiography and making a case for reading Indigenous women's cyberactivism as a digital-age extension of Native autobiographical traditions. Portillo's introductory chapter reviews scholarly discussions about Native American autobiography and Indigenous sovereignty, her definition of "sovereignty," a contested term in Native American [End Page 443] studies, borrowing David Wilkens's concept of "inherent tribal sovereignty" that "comes from the creator" rather than human government (165, n.29). Portillo's term "sovereign stories" draws on Linda Tuhiwai Smith's argument in Decolonizing Methodologies (1999) that Indigenous epistemologies, including historical and environmental knowledge, have ensured their survival in distinct peoples whose identities and cultures are rooted in their relationships to their lands. Portillo proposes that Native women's life narratives perform "acts of survival" that "resist silence" and "recuperate indigenous-centered epistemologies" (2). Portillo defines "blood memory," a concept theorized by Nancy Marie Mithlo and Chadwick Allen, among others, as "memories … about ancestral identity … rooted within the landscape and geographies of the body as a place and space that is distinct from national topographical maps" (4). This concept resists the tired, racist use of "blood" as a signifier of or metonym for identity and instead posits that bodies are (hi)storied places per se; bodies may move about untethered, yet are rooted in the land through history, relationality, interdependence, and belonging. Therefore, Portillo cautions that we not confuse "the concept of 'blood memory'" with "government-imposed definitions of blood quantum" (13). Portillo often uses the term "shared knowledge" synonymously with "blood memories." The chapter on Delfina Cuero's Autobiography, edited by Florence Connolly Shipek (1968), analyses Cuero's critical Indigenous perspective on settler colonialism and will particularly interest scholars of place studies and borderland studies. Portillo argues that Cuero remaps "her people's presence through storytelling and place naming" and thereby "disrupts the erasure and silence of the Kumeyaay," an Indigenous people whose ancestral homelands straddle the international border between California and Baja California (17). Her exploration makes a significant contribution to scholarship on an important though understudied text, suggesting that Cuero's autobiography's mediation by anthropologist Shipek has caused it to be marginalized in literature studies and recommends using Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez's interpretive method of "a convers[iv]ely informed listening-reading process" to read as-told-to autobiographies as literature (33). [End Page 444] The chapter on Leslie Marmon Silko's Sacred Water (1993) and Turquoise Ledge (2010) will interest students of ecocriticism, ecomemoir, and animal and plant studies as it addresses Native perspectives on environmental justice and explores how Silko asserts "an indigenous-centered critique of land desecration, exploitation, and genocide" (18). The section on Sacred Water, an "experimental multi genre life story" that "incorporates pictures, glyphs, and written text," may also interest visual studies scholars (57). After reviewing the history of non-Native peoples' use of photography "as a tool of domination against Native American communities" (54) through appropriation, misrepresentation, and stereotyping, Portillo argues that "images of landscape, clouds, sky, and animals" (53) in Sacred Water continue Silko's family's traditions of looking at "photos … to complement the narratives and stories told by her relatives" (56). Portillo coins the terms "phototelling" or "photomemories" to name Silko's method of juxtaposing photography with written narrative...

Because of Sex: One Law, Ten Cases, and Fifty Years that Changed American Women's Lives at Work

Because of Sex: One Law, Ten Cases, and Fifty Years that Changed American Women's Lives at Work

Taste as Emotion: The Synesthetic Body in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth

An' they chased him 'n' never could catch him 'cause they didn't know what he looked like, an' Atticus, when they finally saw him he was real nice ... His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me. Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them. --Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird My genius from a boy, Has like a bird within my heart; But could not thus confined her employ, Impatient to depart. --George Moses Horton, Moses Horton, Myself George Moses Horton, the self-described Colored Bard of North Carolina, was born into slavery in Northampton County, North Carolina at the turn of the nineteenth century. Denied a formal education, Horton taught himself to read through the illicit study of cast-off schoolbooks and by listening in on the spelling lessons of local white children. As described in his eponymous poem, his genius fluttered from a young age, but a black man living in the Antebellum South, he was physically and emotionally confined by the laws and stereotypes of his time. The biological justification of Horton's captivity relied on a racialization of bodies that distinguished and categorized individuals along lines of subordination and domination. Rarely were the emotions of slaves considered, their temperament, like intelligence, was often regarded childlike, and therefore not capable of complexity or nuance. Horton's use of the feminine to portray the powers of his genius--his poetry--is telling, he, himself, relies on familiar tropes, writing of his poetic yearning, she like a restless bird, would spread her wing. As a racially marked subject, Horton divorces himself from the creative impulse, referring to his genius she, and endowing his poetry with associations of feminine, white beauty. In doing so, he draws attention to parallels between poetry and femininity that see them delicate and gentle, but also trapped and disenfranchised through these connotations. These characterizations also extend to emotions, where historical binaries categorizing the relationship of gender to reason have posited femininity with whiteness, and women squarely on the side of sentiment. (1) As 'leaky' subjects held sway by tides of tears and menstrual blood, white women, through their associations with emotion, have been devalued in comparison to stereotypically masculine traits of intellect and objectivity. The consequences of this structuring work alongside similar lines of mind-body dualism, privileging those emotions connected with knowledge and the faculties of the mind against passion, feelings, and other baser affective qualities associated with the physical body. With regards to race, this structuring mirrors the disturbing ease with which emotional qualities slide into corporeal qualities in the case of racialized subjects, reinforcing the notion of race itself truth located, quite naturally, in the always obvious, highly visible body (Ngai 573). Given white femininity's adherence to a code of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity--virtues believed to be inherent in feminine nature [...] African American women's lives and labors in the antebellum South contrasted sharply with this iconic womanhood (Harris-Perry 55). As a result, false notions of hypersexualized black femininity were created as a way of reconciling the forced public exposure and commoditization of black women's bodies with the Victorian ideals of women's modesty and fragility (Harris-Perry 55). Horton's notion of freedom and the use of the feminine pronoun in his poetry, then, draws attention to the ways in which race and gender, and the divisions within and between these identities, are not only sites where social hierarchies are enforced, but also where their similarities are made visible. …

Self‐Construal, Career Decision Self‐Efficacy, and Perceived Barriers Predict Mexican American Women's Life Satisfaction

This study used the social cognitive theory of well‐being (SCTW; Lent, ) to examine the role of career decision self‐efficacy (CDSE), perceived educational barriers, and independent self‐construal on the life satisfaction of 176 Mexican American college women. A 3‐step hierarchical regression analysis indicated that independent self‐construal, CDSE, and fewer perceived educational barriers significantly predicted greater life satisfaction among Mexican American college women above and beyond the influence of socioeconomic status and generational status. These findings are consistent with SCTW and highlight the need for counselors and researchers to be aware of the role that self‐construal, CDSE, and perceived educational barriers can have on Mexican American women's life satisfaction. Implications for practice at the secondary‐school and university levels are discussed.

African American women's life issues today: vital health and social matters

African American women's life issues today: vital health and social matters

Individualization, opportunity and jeopardy in American women's work and family lives: a multi-state sequence analysis.

Life course sociologists are increasingly concerned with how the general character of biographies is transformed over historical time--and with what this means for individual life chances. The individualization thesis, which contends that contemporary biographies are less predictable, less orderly and less collectively determined than were those lived before the middle of the 20th century, suggests that life courses have become both more internally dynamic and more diverse across individuals. Whether these changes reflect expanding opportunities or increasing jeopardy is a matter of some debate. We examine these questions using data on the employment, marital and parental histories, over the ages of 25-49, for five birth cohorts of American women (N=7150). Our results show that biographical change has been characterized more by growing differences between women than by increasing complexity within individual women's lives. Whether the mounting diversity of work and family life paths reflects, on balance, expanding opportunities or increasing jeopardy depends very much on the social advantages and disadvantages women possessed as they entered their prime working and childrearing years.

Sister Friends: A Reflection and Analysis of the Therapeutic Role of Sisterhood in African American Women's Lives

Research with ethnically diverse women has found that friendships can enhance women's health and mental wellbeing (Greif & Sharpe, 2010). Sister friends can be crucial in assisting African American women and women of ethnically diverse backgrounds to face, address, and overcome, major transitions including stress and traumatic stress. Through a reflection and analysis of the relationship with a sister friend, the author explores the strength and challenges of sister friendship as well as therapeutic value. Recommendations are provided for sisterhood as a clinical intervention as well as for women therapist's self care. A case study of an African American woman in need of mutual sister friends is summarized. This exploration is shared through a womanistic psychology.

Reasons for using contraception: perspectives of US women seeking care at specialized family planning clinics

BackgroundThe availability and use of contraception to prevent unintended pregnancy has had profound and positive impacts on the lives of American women. This study looks beyond the aggregate benefits of contraceptive use to examine the individual-level benefits and reasons for using contraception reported by women themselves. Study DesignWe surveyed 2,094 women receiving services from 22 family planning clinics located throughout the United States. ResultsA majority of respondents reported that birth control use had allowed them to take better care of themselves or their families (63%), support themselves financially (56%), complete their education (51%), or keep or get a job (50%). Young women, unmarried women and those without children reported more reasons for using contraception than others. Not being able to afford a baby, not being ready for children, feeling that having a baby would interrupt their goals and wanting to maintain control in their lives were the most commonly reported very important reasons for using birth control. ConclusionsWomen value the ability to plan their childbearing and need continued access to contraception and contraceptive services, allowing them to realize the benefits that accrue when unintended pregnancies are avoided.

College women in the nuclear age: cultural literacy and female identity, 1940-1960

In the popular imagination, American women during the time between the end of World War II and the 1960s-the era of the so-called feminine mystique-were ultraconservative and passive. College Women in the Nuclear Age takes a fresh look at these women, showing them actively searching for their place in the world while engaging with the larger intellectual and political movements of the times. Drawing from the letters and diaries of young women in the Cold War era, Babette Faehmel seeks to restore their unique voices and to chronicle their collective ambitions. She also explores the shifting roles that higher education played in establishing these hopes and dreams, making the case that the GI Bill served to diminish the ambitions of many American women even as it opened opportunities for many American men. A treasure-trove of original research, the book should stimulate scholarly discussion and captivate any reader interested in the thoughts and lives of American women.

"Strange Love": Searching for Sexual Subjectivities in Black Print Popular Culture during the 1950s

"StrangeLove": Searchingfor Sexual Subjectivities in Black PrintPopular Cultureduringthe 1950s Leisa D. Meyer Myrtle Hartgrove, Atlanta, GA—Dear Editor: I just finished glanc ing through your first issue of Tan Confessions, and frankly I feel that you've gone to a lot of trouble to waste a lot of valuable paper. What is the point behind the whole thing? Those stories that you call "true to life," are simply impossible. No self-respecting woman with an ounce of decency would allow any of those things to happen to her that you have published as "the truth." You should be ashamed to advertise such trash on the same page with such honorable publi cations as Ebony and Negro Digest. Jane White, Los Angeles, CA—Dear Editor: Thanks a lot for coming out with your new magazine, Tan Confessions. I am a long time buyer of romantic magazines and while I know that they are trash I would much rather spend my money for "colored trash" than "white trash."1 The disparate reactions of myrtle hartgrove and jane white to the firstissue of Tan Confessions indicate that the sexuality rendered in this monthly publication's intimate stories was deeply contested ter rain for African American readers. I seek in this essay to analyze more broadly such contestations, drawing on a range of articles, letters, and responses in black popular culture magazines in the period immedi ately following World War II. Through an interrogation of the negoti ations among individuals and within groups, we can see the complex and diverse sexual subjectivities (or potential subjectivities) of African American women as they are articulated, debated, weighed, explored, FeministStudies38, no. 3 (Fall 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 625 626 Leisa D. Meyer reconfigured, and at times, rejected. What becomes clear through this material is that while there was an explicit and often direct engage ment with white normative cultural presumptions concerning Afri can American sexuality, there were also alternative racialized sexual subjectivities that were explicitly proposed, discussed, and debated within these pages. Myrtle Hartgrove's comments hold up the "decent" and "self respecting" woman as a bulwark against the "trash"—stories of black women's romantic and sexual encounters — offered in the pages of Tan Confessions. Hartgrove's invocation of respectability guards against the longstanding racist trope of hypersexuality and its concomitant insinuation that African American women are not "respectable."2 Many African American women refuted the racist hypersexual image in order to protect themselves and their daughters from its conse quences and also to assert desire and claim their sexuality and sexual subjectivity. Hartgrove here engages in a "politics of respectability"— historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's oft-cited phrase describing African American women's promotion of restrained behavior, espe cially restrained sexual behavior, as a "strategy of reform" during the early twentieth century. For Higginbotham, this strategy enabled African American women to "define themselves outside the param eters of prevailing racist discourses."3 Historian Paisley Harris on the other hand has critiqued this strategy and its consequences, charac terizing the politics of respectability as having a "gatekeeping func tion" that established a "behavioral entrance fee" for membership in African American communities. While this "entrance fee" offered some challenge to hegemonic cultural views of African Americans, it also constructed and maintained status distinctions within African American communities.4 Subsequent studies of African American women's lives and sex ualities have expanded this understanding of the "gatekeeping func tion" of respectability beyond the particular historical moment that Higginbotham explores. As Michele Mitchell suggests in her essay on African American women's history, it is "important to ponder whether African Americanists who theorize gender and sexuality have fomented new silences." She goes on to note her "lurking suspicions" that "certain subjects are avoided because they have been deemed Leisa D. Meyer 627 either dangerous or damaging" and voices her "uneasfe] about the costs attached to this particular quiet."5 Literary scholar Matt Richardson also speaks to the problems of these silences in African American history: The tradition of representing Black people as decent and moral his torical agents has meant the erasure of the broad array of Black sex uality and gendered being in favor of a...

Healthy Vocations: Field Nursing and the Religious Overtones of Public Health

This article argues that the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) field nursing program of the 1930s, which continued much of the same assimilation-style health care practices begun generations earlier by missionaries and field matrons, perpetuated the nineteenth-century link between religion and health care. Following in the footsteps of their female predecessors, field nurses targeted native women for health education, emphasizing personal hygiene and individual responsibility at the expense of socioeconomic causes of illness. Native women nonetheless appear to have maintained agency and power in negotiating health and health care. Peaking during the era of OIA Commissioner John Collier's Indian New Deal, the history of field nursing problematizes this period, particularly with regard to women's experiences. The article is significant for its exploration of field nursing as a contested site of cultural negotiation, revealing issues of power and difference in the lives of American women.

Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class , and: "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films , and: Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class, and: "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films, and: Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture Jessica Petocz (bio) Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class by Lisa B. Thompson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009, 200 pp., $40.00 hardcover. "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films by Stephane Dunn. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 192 pp., $50.00 hardcover, $20.00 paper. Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture by L. H. Stallings. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007, 334 pp., $49.95 hardcover, $9.95 on CD. Some of the most astute, moving, and well-known work in the Black feminist tradition revolves around the "problems" of Black women's sexuality—namely, the problem that others use it to play out battles over race, class, gender, nation, and sexuality and the subsequent lack of attention to their actual sexual experiences, desires, and subjectivities. Their scholarship demands that we recognize this displacement and the machinations it hides, but that we also create spaces for the enunciation and appreciation of the diversity of Black women's sexualities. Audre Lorde, Hortense Spillers, Tricia Rose, Cheryl Clarke, E. Francis White, Barbara Christian, Angela Davis, Cathy Cohen, Patricia Hill Collins, Ann DuCille, Evelyn Hammonds, Darlene Clark Hine, bell hooks, … their names recall incisive intellect, beautiful words, and powerful stories. Drawing upon these rich sources, three new books by emerging scholars give a sense of the depth and breadth of a field that has grown into its own. In their work, Black feminist thought is anything but provincial—instead, their attention to the lives and work of Black women revises widely held ideas about race, gender, and sexuality and their relationship to our shared social context. Rather than revise theories that do not account for race and/or gender, these books begin with a sophisticated intersectional approach as developed with Black feminist thought. Through an analysis of representation and lived experience, each author dispels hegemonic conceptions of Black women and their sexualities. They employ nuanced argumentation, historical contextualization, interdisciplinary sources, and commitment to multiple politics in order to portray sexuality as a dynamic social and psychological force. Furthermore, they refuse to privilege theory, representation, or experience, opting instead to integrate these methods. In doing so, each author makes insightful claims without erasing the contradictions within the cultural representations and lived experiences of Black women. These texts present a needed opportunity to engage with popular cultural studies from politicized perspectives without denying the pleasure they provide. In these analyses, sexuality emerges as a transfer point between different axes of [End Page 274] power and demonstrates the inextricability of the material and the discursive. As teaching texts, these books provide challenging yet accessible intersectional analyses in interdisciplinary contexts that can be incorporated into courses as diverse as visual literacy, hip-hop, social movements, performance studies, historical studies, folklore, literature, action films, and queer theory. For readers within these fields, the books reinvigorate longstanding debates with new questions and fresh ideas. In Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class, Lisa Thompson explores the powerful role that sexuality plays in contemporary African American middle-class women's lives. Thompson situates the Black lady in an environment of impossible and disempowering demands that demonstrate "how her sexuality stands in for a host of other concerns, anxieties, and fantasies in the minds of others" (7). Against this backdrop, Beyond the Black Lady presents an affirmative account of contemporary African American women's cultural texts that present new narratives of sexual agency. As Thompson explains in the introduction, several forces align so as to elide or diminish our attention to middle-class Black women's sexuality (6–11). Yet, Beyond the Black Lady is more than straightforward restoration of their voices, for it also aims to reconceptualize how race, class, and gender are represented, performed, and lived. The book shows that, stereotypes and social pressures notwithstanding, Black middle-class women's cultural production...

An Examination of African American Women's Lives in Postwar Philadelphia

An Examination of African American Women's Lives in Postwar Philadelphia Lisa Krissoff Boehm (bio) Lisa Levenstein . A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xvi + 199 pages. Illustrations, tables, maps, appendix, bibliography, and index. $35.96. This work, a part of the prestigious John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture, edited by Waldo E. Martin and Patricia Sullivan, makes a noteworthy contribution to the growing yet still underserved field of African American women's urban history. Levenstein's work is heartening on a number of levels, and we need more scholars to consider undertaking projects of this type. As I have argued in the Journal of Urban History's special January 2010 edition on teaching ("Adding Gender to American Urban History"), urban historians ought to produce works that cross subfields with greater frequency. Urban historians tend to craft books aimed at a narrow audience and seem hesitant to make theoretical or narrative leaps between genres. This hesitancy denies the field greater readership and historiographical impact. Urban history can be successfully merged with political, economic, environmental, gender, labor, immigration, African American, and other types of history. A Movement Without Marches is simultaneously a book about poverty, African American women, public policy, and postwar Philadelphia. The book openly draws inspiration from the likes of Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996) and Arnold R. Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1840-1960 (1998). Levenstein makes a very important contribution by studying what she terms "the gendered construction of racialized urban poverty" (p. 5). Levenstein writes about African American women in poverty, a topic that has proved onerous for many academics due to the stereotypes that must be confronted. Levenstein rejects the term "underclass," which "not only paints a false portrait of poor women's goals and values, but it also severely misconstrues their work habits. Regardless of their employment status, women who sought and retained assistance from public institutions were workers, first and foremost, because they labored to care for their households and [End Page 556] their families with few financial resources" (p. 24). Levenstein is upfront about addressing the ways in which the women may have exhibited traits commonly attributed to the underclass, admitting that the women "received public assistance, became pregnant unintentionally, suffered from depression, or used drugs and alcohol" (p. 24). Levenstein could point out here that these traits can be applied to a broad number of Americans—middle class as well as working class—especially when one considers how many Americans have relied on unemployment assistance at some time in their lives or made use of child tax credits or other financial relief. The author notes on page twenty-six that any study of African American women in poverty runs the risk of misinterpretation, given the broad range of negative stereotypes attributed to these women. The nature of the book necessitates a thorough exploration of the women's personal lives, and the author must divulge some unflattering stories. Extensive reliance on court records unearths very sensitive tales; however, Levenstein approaches her work with the utmost sensitivity and need not worry about being misinterpreted. In a clearly prepared table, Levenstein notes how the black population of Philadelphia expanded from 219,599 in 1930 to 529,239 by 1960. Much of this notable increase is due to the movement known as the Second Great Migration, which Levenstein does not refer to by name but mentions fleetingly in a few places in the book. The economic, cultural, and political aspects of the city that lured hundreds of thousands of southern migrants to settle there ought to be contrasted with the startling conditions the migrants encountered in their daily lives in Philadelphia. As return migration remained low, the North must have remained preferable in some ways. Migration studies and narratives, although there are relatively few focused strictly on women, have been a staple of postwar urban and African American history and ought to be further incorporated into this work. Reference to the conclusions of sociologist Stewart Tolnay, who refutes...

Review

A Black Daughter of the Revolution Frances Smith Foster Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution. By Lois Brown. Chapel Hill: The University Press of North Carolina, 2008. xiv + 690 pp. I am a daughter of the Revolution, you do not acknowledge black daughters of the Revolution but we are going to take that right. Pauline Hopkins, 1905 (qtd. in Brown 537) Therein lies the tale. If we recognize the name Pauline Hopkins, we know her as editor of the Colored American Magazine and author of Contending Forces, Hagar's Daughters, Winona, and Of One Blood. We would not be surprised, would generally expect, that her biographer would validate Hopkins's reputation for fierce insistence upon national citizenship and racial and gender equality by quoting or alluding to the titles of her best-known works. However, Lois Brown chose to title her densely researched epic Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution and to build her reconstruction of this "fifth-generation New England writer, feminist, and public intellectual" with a self-definition, at an occasion, and on a site redolent with a legacy of freedom fighting and resistance (16). In so doing, Brown eschews the obvious characterization of a solitary, feisty female in favor of a scion and regional representative, an example and exemplar, a subject and a metaphor. In so doing, Brown manifests a central cause and effect of Hopkins's and other early African American women's lives and letters and becomes herself another "black [daughter] of the Revolution." Hopkins's and Brown's perspectives on and practices of life writing are characteristic of African American women's literature, especially that of the nineteenth century. They use words as weapons, practice art as activism, combine [End Page 433] personal narratives and political prognostications to test the abilities of language as testimony, testimony as witnessing, witnessing as influencing, impacting, and changing. To better understand and appreciate the contribution that Brown makes with her biography, we need to look back and to look around at what has been done in the African American autobiographical tradition and at what we need to do if we are to write honestly and effectively about it. Using writing as fighting is a tactic rife with complex and sometimes conflicting imperatives.1 Art enlisted for a cause must avoid the captivity of propaganda. Aesthetic activism requires and exploits subtle directness and wide-lens focus. It assumes naïve readers but needs readers who are experienced with word weaponry. Titles become forays. Seemingly simple or excessively detailed, they signify more than meets the eye. For example, in 1836, Jarena Lee's autobiography The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a coloured lady; giving an account of her call to preach the gospel indicates that Lee intends to record her personal material history but with a focus upon her spiritual development. Designating herself as "a coloured lady" invites comparison with Hopkins's "black daughters" not simply by calling attention to themselves as women of color but by their mufti that displays a status regularly denied women of African descent. Lee is a "lady." Hopkins is a "daughter." Like Hopkins, Lee not only confronts racism but sexism as well. Each writes as an infiltrator in male-dominated fields and claims a share of that territory for themselves and for other women. In 1846, one of Lee's fellow itinerant ministers and occasional traveling companions published Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, An American Female of Color: Together with Some Account of the Great Religious Revivals in America. This title not only reinforces the work of Lee but skirmishes with traditions that assumed women should not write histories. Reading Elaw's Memoirs comparatively with Lee's Life moves the characterization of these individual women as defiant, religious fundamentalists to members of a religious sisterhood, illuminates their literary kinship, and reveals signifying as more than a rhetorical technique in oral African America. Titles tell part of the tale. Some narrators also tended to acknowledge multiple motives. Elizabeth Keckley penned a similar palimpsest, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, she says...

Effect of melasma on quality of life in a sample of women living in southern Brazil

Melasma can cause a significant effect on individual emotional well-being. Melasma Quality of Life Scale (MELASQoL) is a specific questionnaire elaborated to assess the burden of melasma on patient's quality of life. To evaluate the clinical aspects, severity and the influence of melasma on daily living of a sample of Brazilian women. Cross-sectional study that enrolled 85 women with melasma older than 15 years of age. Trained investigators asked 55 questions to collect epidemiological and clinical data. The disease severity was clinically assessed using Melasma Area and Severity Index (MASI). Patients answered the Portuguese version of 10-item MELASQoL scale without coaching. The mean +/- SD age was 41.1 +/- 6.8 years, and the mean +/- SD of MELASQoL score was 37.5 +/- 15.2 (median, 35). Patients with previous psychiatric diagnosis had significantly higher MELASQoL scores (mean, 42.8; SD, 13.6) than patients without this antecedent (mean, 35.4; SD, 15.4; P < 0.05). Patients with less than 8 years of school attendance also had significantly higher MELASQoL score (mean, 44; SD, 16.9) than more graduated ones (mean, 34.4; SD, 13.5; P < 0.05). The mean +/- SD MASI was 10.6 +/- 6.6 (median, 10.2). There was no correlation between MASI and MELASQoL. This study confirms that MELASQoL-BP is easy to administer, adds important information about the impact of melasma on South American women's life and, finally, contributes to building evidence on the validity, reliability and cultural adaptation of the Portuguese language MELASQoL version.