Battle For Equality Research Articles

One More War to Fight: Union Veterans' Battle for Equality Through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Lost Cause by Stephen A. Goldman (review)

One More War to Fight: Union Veterans' Battle for Equality Through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Lost Cause by Stephen A. Goldman (review)

One More War to Fight: Union Veterans’ Battle for Equality through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Lost Cause by Stephen A. Goldman (review)

One More War to Fight: Union Veterans’ Battle for Equality through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Lost Cause by Stephen A. Goldman (review)

Parental Equality in the European Human Rights Regime: Does European Human Rights Law Allow for Mothers and Fathers to be Evaluated by Different Standards in the Context of Custody Disputes?

The rise in divorce rates around Europe has led to an increase in custody cases before national and international courts. In these challenging and often volatile cases, rights of children and parents are simultaneously at stake, rendering decision-making at the courts a highly delicate balancing act. Debates regarding custody policies have been characterized by changing gender roles and a battle for equality, while gender-based parenting roles have become less distinct. This raises questions with regards to the perceived divide between mothers and fathers in family adjudication. The aim of this article is to identify what European human rights law has to say with regards to parental equality in custody disputes, and to what extent it leaves room for parents to be evaluated by different standards. Two main factors are brought forward: contemporary values and perceptions of parenthood, and the indeterminacy of the best interests of the child. The effects of these two factors are analyzed in the context of case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union. The article argues that differing evaluation of mothers and fathers in custody-related disputes is, to a certain degree, allowed by the European human rights regime, whenever such difference is deemed justified by the best interests of the child.

Third Gender Rights: The Battle for Equality

The identity of an individual is often determined by the moral dictates and judgments of the society. However, individuals who seek to challenge these with their personalities, sexual orientations and inclinations are often shunned, abandoned and treated as the “other”. Abandoned by families and ridiculed by negative stigmas, they are usually left with no other option, than resorting to begging or singing in weddings, to make a living. Even with such vulnerability to harassment and violence, their agony mostly remains unnoticed. This only indicates the extent of helplessness and neglect this community faces. Various rights granted to this community are seldom potent and welfare measures hibernate on paper. Though the Indian Constitution makes mighty promises prohibiting discrimination of all sorts, there exists ambiguity concerning the concept of gender and the effects that such a prohibition can have on third gender rights. With the Supreme Court taking a proactive step in the NALSA judgment, there has been significant attention drawn towards transgender rights, which will be examined in the paper subsequently. Highlighting the historical growth of the transgender people and analyzing their position in jurisdictions across the world, this research paper aims to shed light on the murky world of suffering and discrimination this community has been relegated to in India. Despite some positive developments that have contributed to increased awareness and recognition of their plight, major problems still plague this section of the society. In addition to the social and legal position of the transgender community and the judicial treatment of the same, the paper also seeks to act as an expose when it comes to make-believe cases of being transgender.

Ambedkar and the Struggle for Women’s Equality

The article highlights Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s battle for equality and sketches out his political campaigns which were designed to boycott caste rules and allow ‘untouchables’ access to temples, wells and other civic resources—all with the intention to raise public consciousness against the practice of untouchability. And, importantly, the article talks about how women were included in these campaigns. It throws light on how Ambedkar addressed women as mothers and social change initiators; and how, as a lawyer and legislator, he engaged with the issues of not only the ‘untouchable’ women but also of women as a part of the labour force.

Women in science: A temporary liberation.

The First World War ushered women into laboratories and factories. In Britain, it may have won them the vote, argues Patricia Fara, but not the battle for equality.

From SlutWalks to SuicideGirls: Feminist Resistance in the Third Wave and Postfeminist Era

From SlutWalks to SuicideGirls:Feminist Resistance in the Third Wave and Postfeminist Era Tram Nguyen (bio) Over two decades ago in the January 1992 issue of Ms. magazine, Rebecca Walker called for a Third Wave of feminist consciousness. Walker was incensed by a collocation of events hinging on race, gender, and class ideologies. With Shannon Liss, she mobilized a collective and foundation to promote voting rights, education, wage, and prison reform. They provided those in need with emergency funding for abortions, women-led projects, and reproductive rights activism (Walker and Liss 2012). Although she coins the term, Walker is less interested in developing a coherent, new feminist theory than in building coalitions with other social justice leagues through the Third Wave Foundation. Hers is a feminism of intersectionality, but one that also proffers self-empowerment, lived experience, and the plurality of pleasure. To Be Real, an anthology of stories and testimonials from women and men, reflects the confessional and individualist drive of the Third Wave. The work of conceptualizing this new feminism continues to be negotiated by feminist academics and practitioners for whom the core of Third Wave feminism is its rejection of Second Wave’s seeming essentialist and rigid positioning of women’s politics and lives. But Third Wave feminism is troubled by divisions within its still-forming body of activism and theories, as well as by postfeminist seductions. While Third Wave feminists such as Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards reject the label of “postfeminist,” a skein of their Third Wave feminism that advocates embracing the pleasures of “girl culture” coincides with postfeminist tenets. The term “postfeminism” first appears in Susan Bolotin’s 1982 article “Voices from the Postfeminism Generation,” in which the [End Page 157] author contends that the battle for equality has been won, and it is time to stop “harping” on women’s oppression (29).1 Naomi Wolf would go so far as to assert that Second Wave feminism victimizes women and exaggerates claims of women’s suffering and gender inequalities (1993, 135). For Wolf, who is situated in both Third Wave and postfeminist camps, the alternative is “power feminism,” which “believes women deserve to feel that the qualities of starlets and queens, of sensuality and beauty, can be theirs … [and which] knows that making social change does not contradict the principle that girls just want to have fun” (137–38). Wolf’s glide from “women” to “girls” resonates with Baumgardner and Richards’s statement that “while it’s true that embracing the pink things of stereotypical girlhood isn’t a radical gesture meant to overturn the way society is structured, it can be a confident gesture” (2000, 136). Power feminism, or girlie feminism, envisages not women combating institutional sexism, but girls experimenting with personal choices in a perpetual state of youth and innocence. But where is the political power in feeling the starlet or talking to friends at a dinner party? In Manifesta, while drawing on the critical challenge to normative perceptions of female sexuality by Judy Chicago in her installation The Dinner Party (1979), Baumgardner and Richards proceed to encourage a depoliticized version of Chicago’s work by commenting that “a good dinner party (or a gathering of women) is just as likely to be a place to see politics at work as is a rally” (2000, 15). Third Wave feminists and postfeminists encourage “girls” to immerse themselves in the pleasures of femaleness, to find self-fulfillment and carnality, rather than to dismantle, critique, expose, or challenge systematic discrimination and violence. In Third Wave Agenda, Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake acknowledge that “despite our knowing better, despite our knowing its emptiness, the ideology of individualism is still a major motivating force in many third-wave lives” (1997, 11). The contradictions within and between these new feminisms have, nevertheless, powerfully shaped young feminists as well as popular perceptions of young women in the twenty-first century who are taught that loving “feminine trappings” does not equal being duped (Baumgardner and Richards 2004, 60). True, but it also does not equal a threat to the status quo. As the Third Wave matures, it must struggle to clarify its core feminist values so that women’s sexual...

“How Much Can You Read about Interracial Love and Sex without Getting Sore?”

Interracial marriage and relationships were illegal in much of the United States in the early twentieth century. The black press devoted a great deal of attention to this topic, often connecting it to African Americans’ encounters with racism and their struggle for civil rights. Part of this coverage in the national black weekly newspaper the Baltimore Afro-American included short and serial fictional stories on interracial romance. These stories, however, were often a contested medium among readers. Thus, a public debate occurred over the question of interracial romance stories and their place in the Baltimore Afro-American over the course of four months in 1934. This article examines this debate. Ultimately, interracial romance stories brought readers into conversation with each other and the Baltimore Afro-American to create a discourse that tied interracial romance to the African American battle for equality in the early twentieth century.

Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America by Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin (review)

Reviewed by: Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America by Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin Barbara A. Gannon Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America. Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-59213-465-6, 632 pp., cloth, $35.00. Well before Rosa Parks decided she would not give up her place on a bus, the black men and women of Civil War-era Philadelphia fought for their place on streetcars. Journalists Daniel Biddle and Murray Dubin tell the story of these men and women as part of a broader examination of the civil rights struggle of African Americans in Philadelphia before, during, and after the Civil War. They do so through the lens of one man's life, and death, that of Octavius Catto—principal of an all-black school, orator, and talented baseball player. Despite his short life (he was murdered in 1871 at the age of thirty-two), he was an important civil rights figure. That few Americans today remember him or the other African Americans in this early struggle for equality is one reason the authors wrote this book: they wanted everyone to understand that "the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century was the second or third organized effort by African Americans to be treated as the equals of white persons. This book is about the first civil rights movement" (1). The authors are journalists, not historians, and do not pretend to engage any particular scholarly debate; rather, they wrote this book to remind Philadelphians about a forgotten aspect of their city's history. To tell this story, the authors cross a number of traditional boundaries of time and space that delineate historical studies, because they want to show that the free [End Page 381] states were not always totally free and that the slave states included free black men and women. Moreover, like the geographical border between slavery and freedom, the temporal boundaries that divide the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods are not as relevant as one might think when discussing the African American struggle for freedom. Prewar antislavery agitation and postwar efforts to define freedom exist as different points on the same line within the broader context of the first civil rights movement. In that spirit, the book begins in Charleston; Catto's friends and family lived in that precarious place occupied by free black Americans in the South before the Civil War. Even under these less than ideal circumstances, Catto's family and their community struggle to create a larger space for free black men and women within a slave society. Eventually, his family went north to Philadelphia, where they joined a vibrant community working with its white allies in the antislavery movement—while creating a number of all-black organizations, including the Institute for Colored Youth. Catto served as principal of this pioneering black high school. In addition to creating important African American institutions, he and his cohorts struggled to break the color line, with mixed results. They succeeded in integrating the streetcars but failed in their attempt to integrate local baseball leagues. The authors also describe the virulent racism of white Philadelphians, particularly Irish immigrants, who used mob violence to oppose their efforts, exacerbating these struggles. Ultimately, this type of violence led to Catto's untimely death on Election Day 1871. While the book's title suggests that it is about Octavius Catto's life, its subject is actually the broader civil rights movement in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. One of the first chapters describes the antislavery movement in Philadelphia in the late 1830s and 1840s and details the violent opposition to abolitionism and abolitionists; Catto was a child during this era and played no role in this particular movement. In fact, much of the antebellum period description is of the activities of other prominent black and white civil rights leaders, such as Frederick Douglass and Lucretia Mott. This approach is understandable, given the paucity of sources on African Americans like Catto and his family, who may have been relatively well-known in their time but did not leave enough...

Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America (review)

Reviewed by: Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America Anthony Waskie (bio) Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America. By Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010. Pp. 616. Cloth, $35.00.) Award-winning Philadelphia Inquirer reporters Dan Biddle and Murray Dubin populate their dramatic story of the life and premature death of Octavius Catto, United States Colored Troops recruiter and civil rights activist, with heroes and villains, street battles, riots, mayhem and murder. Though an obscure figure today, Catto played a leading role in the struggle for black equality in the era of emancipation; he stood at the center of a lively community of black activists in Philadelphia and beyond. The authors follow the lives and careers of a number of Catto’s friends and associates—the “band of brothers,” as they called themselves, even though there were prominent women activists among them. Included in this group were William T. Catto (Catto’s father), Frederick Douglass, William Still, and many other members of Philadelphia’s elite black community. And then there were the villains, the opponents of black equality in Philadelphia, best epitomized by “Squire” William McMullen, a Democratic ward boss who used threats and intimidation—murder, even— to swing elections. McMullen and his gang of thugs were responsible for Catto’s murder, as the young man returned home from voting, just as he had “tasted freedom.” Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Octavius Catto grew up in Philadelphia, where he attended the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY), the city’s premier black school. In a city known for its racism and southern proclivities, the ICY had become, according to Frederick Douglass, “the ‘heart and hope’ of colored Philadelphia” (289). There Catto and his teachers and classmates began their activist careers, demanding abolition, education, and equal rights. To Catto, education and equal rights were closely interwoven and inseparable; “knowledge is power,” Fanny Jackson, a fellow teacher at the school, liked to say (171). Discouraged by the state’s reluctance to accept black recruits in the summer of 1863, Catto nonetheless became an active recruiter for the United States Colored Troops and continued teaching at the ICY until his death. After the war, Catto served in the Pennsylvania National Guard, Fifth Brigade, attaining the rank of major. In 1864, Catto helped found the [End Page 459] national Equal Rights League; Pennsylvania’s chapter of the league successfully lobbied for an 1867 state law integrating streetcars and for ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869. Philadelphia’s first two interracial elections highlight the continued need to look more closely at Reconstruction in the North. Although the 1870 election came off with no violence owing to the presence of federal troops, the riot that occurred in 1871 might just have well occurred in postwar Memphis or New Orleans. With the Republican Party squeamish about calling in federal troops and facing mounting threats of violence, city offi cials called the black soldiers of the Fifth Brigade into the contested wards to quiet the disorder. Catto was shot before he could arm himself, by a gunman who was familiar with his activism and who identified him closely with the ascendant Republican Party. In some sense, his death was not in vain, as the Republicans swept to victory in the elections, and Philadelphians briefly closed ranks and mourned the young man as another of the Civil War’s victims. But a few years passed before there was a trial, and though everyone seemed to know who killed Catto, no one was convicted of the crime. Philadelphia’s civil rights community was hit hard by the loss. Dubin and Biddle tell this story with verve and conviction and based on solid research. The bibliography and extensive endnotes are a testament to the ten years of work that went into the book. A quick mention might be made of a few errors in the text which a close edit might have captured and corrected. The authors locate Harrisburg’s Camp Curtin on the wrong side of the Susquehanna River, for instance, and misstate the rank for Sergeant Major Robert Forten. But these...

Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America

This is a densely contextualized life history of one of Philadelphia's most prominent mid-nineteenth-century free black activists, Octavius Valentine Catto (1839–1871). Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin skillfully situate their subject at the center of multiple concentric circles. At the farthest distance from the core is the Atlantic world—Liberia, England, Ireland, Canada, Haiti, Panama—places of expatriation and repatriation for African Americans and places from which they drew symbolic support in their struggle for full citizenship and slavery's abolition. There are more tightly drawn regional circles for analyzing race relations as well—the North, the South, the Midwest, the West. The tightest geographical circle in which the authors examine Catto is Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. There, Catto and his peers navigate a triangulated course for citizenship among Quakers and abolitionists, anti-black Irish and Democrats, and nativist or business-minded Whig or Republican allies. The narrative is an exposé of the antebellum North and of Philadelphia as “the northernmost Southern city” (p. 246). William Catto, an ordained Protestant minister with flexible denominational loyalties, moved his family in 1848 from South Carolina to Pennsylvania for a better life. Yet free blacks in Philadelphia could not vote, ride streetcars with whites, easily attend school, or expect equal employment opportunities. Above the Mason-Dixon line, African Americans might encounter laws limiting their in-migration. The fear of race amalgamation was ubiquitous. Mercenary slave catchers operated illegally or with dubious legal authority, snatching African Americans off streets and selling them into bondage. And everywhere, the prospect of racial equality caused whites to riot and instigate violent mobs against African Americans at the slightest provocation.

Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin . Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America . Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2010. Pp. x, 616. $35.00.

The reason that African American history continues to be such a rich field is that so much of it remains undiscovered. Every new inquiry raises questions about things thought long-settled, forcing reconsideration upon reconsideration of the larger synthetic narrative of U.S. history. The sources are elusive and often incomplete, and there are also interpretative hurdles that we must recognize, confront, and overcome. Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin's new book demonstrates all of this, showing both the promise and the perils of doing African American history, what the field can offer, and the obstacles confronting practitioners. Tasting Freedom presents itself as an examination of the life and times of Octavius Catto, a teacher, activist, and baseball star from Philadelphia. Studies of nineteenth-century black Americans tend to focus on abolitionists, the underground railroad, and the subversion of slavery generally, Biddle and Dubin note, but through Catto they want to show what life was like for free blacks “whose freedom was in name only” (p. 2). Such studies remain few, despite the flowering of African American history as a distinct subfield. Leon Litwack's North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States (1961) and Gary Nash's Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720–1840 (1983) are two obvious exceptions, but we need more. The authors make their bid to broaden this literature with Catto's story, tracking his family's origins in South Carolina through the early years of freedom in the North, the world of the abolitionists, Civil War, and finally Reconstruction. Along the way, all of the luminaries of the antebellum freedom struggle make appearances, and the villainy, tragedy, and general meanness of antebellum American society are revealed in all their ignominy.

Tasting freedom: Octavius Catto and the battle for equality in Civil War America

Tasting freedom: Octavius Catto and the battle for equality in Civil War America

“Lift Every Voice and Sing”: the public relations efforts of the NAACP, 1960–1965

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been credited in recent years as a crucial force in securing equal rights for African Americans in the United States, particularly during the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s [Black Scholar 19 (1988) 9; J. South. History 59 (1993) 1; Historian 55 (1993) 453]. Indeed, Watson [Historian 55 (1993) 453] argues “no other organization contributed more to making the U.S. Constitution responsive to the needs of all citizens.” Yet, during the early 1960s, while its leaders were engaged in the battle for equality under the law for African Americans, they fought on another front as well: maintaining their position as the preeminent civil rights organization in the eyes of African Americans [Historian 55 (1993) 453].

Towards Equality Through Legal Reform

SUMMARYThe focus of this article is the author's experience as one of the organizers of a recent campaign for tongzhi rights in Hong Kong. Tongzhi in general refers to lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trangendered people, and in some cases, their supporters as well. After ten years of public education and political advocacy, the tolerance level of the general public towards homosexuality has increased. However, despite this improved atmosphere, the situation remains far from ideal. Citing the recent legal advocacy campaign as an example, this paper illustrates how the proactive approach of tongzhi activists has resulted in significant progress in the battle for equality. These efforts began with Hong Kong's first tongzhi-led campaign supporting pro-tongzhi candidates to win seats in the Legislative Council, which subsequently contributed to the formation of a Subcommittee within the new Legislative Council with a specific mandate to review the situation of discrimination against sexual minorities.

Olympia Brown: the battle for equality

Olympia Brown: the battle for equality

Women and the Scientific Idiom: Textual Episodes from Wollstonecraft, Fuller, Gilman, and Firestone

Previous articleNext article No AccessWomen and the Scientific Idiom: Textual Episodes from Wollstonecraft, Fuller, Gilman, and FirestoneLois N. MagnerLois N. Magner Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 4, Number 1Autumn, 1978Women, Science, and Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/493569 Views: 6Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1978 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Renate Kroll F, (Jan 2002): 98–134.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05004-5_6Alan P. Barr Evolutionary Science and the Woman Question, Victorian Literature and Culture 20 (Nov 2008): 25.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150300005106Alison Wylie, Kathleen Okruhlik, Leslie Thielen-Wilson, Sandra Morton Feminist critiques of science, Women's Studies International Forum 12, no.33 (Jan 1989): 379–388.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-5395(89)80014-7BARBARA IMBER AND NANCY TUANA Feminist Perspectives on Science, Hypatia 3, no.11 (Dec 2008): 139–155.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1988.tb00060.xHoda M. Zaki Utopia and ideology in Daughters of a Coral Dawn and contemporary feminist utopias, Women's Studies 14, no.22 (Aug 1987): 119–133.https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.1987.9978691Katherine D. Neustadt The nature of woman and the development of American folklore, Women's Studies International Forum 9, no.33 (Jan 1986): 227–234.https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-5395(86)90057-9