Women Critics Research Articles

Feminism and women's film criticism in post-war Britain, 1945–1959

Feminist film criticism is widely thought to have started in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the “Images of Woman” debate associated with critics such as Marjorie Rosen provided the foundation for later developments in feminist film theory. Antonia Lant has recently claimed the immediate post-1950 period to be a barren time for female-authored publications on film and cinema. This article argues that, contrary to received wisdom, the post-war period (1945–1959) in Britain was a time when women's film criticism flourished, with writers such as Dilys Powell, C.A. Lejeune, Catherine de la Roche and E. Arnot Robertson enjoying high-profile careers. Moving beyond a simple recovery of women's “hidden histories,” this article highlights the points of connection between the post-war period and later film criticism informed by second wave feminism. Through a case study of de la Roche and Robertson this article explores how women critics in this period were similarly preoccupied with screen representations of women and women's roles within the film industry, anticipating the later concerns of Rosen and others. I argue that a cross-media focus is a productive method for generating insights into women's critical agency at this time, and conclude that women's film criticism demonstrates something of the wider shifts taking place in gender relations in British society.

Aestheticism and Decoration: At Home with Michael Field

Talia Schaffer’s work on the poet Rosamund Marriott Watson and her theories of home decoration has been key to understand how female aesthetes reconfigured and re-appropriated this aspect of aestheticism. Looking at the aesthetic writings of Marriott Watson’s The Art of the House, Schaffer has shown how she forged a new, complex version of aestheticism by both aligning herself with male aesthetes in their critique of women’s arts and crafts tradition and distancing herself from male aestheticism by re-articulating an aesthetic of the home embedded in feminine décor.But how did female aesthetes inhabit and live that aestheticism We know nothing of how Watson’s theories informed her own life as an aesthete. For this reason the case of Michael Field is particularly important. Michael Field never wrote on home decoration, but an examination of Bradley and Cooper’s diaries, letters and photographs reveal their unique approach to the house beautiful movement. As they put it in their diary, Works and Days: “To-day’s dreams & desires—the tongs with wh. the angel makes living coals of our lips to-day—these are the things to be expressed in our walls, in our furniture, in our dress.” This expressive, living aestheticism is at the core of this essay.

Selected 20th and 21st century representations of tribalism and modernity in South African literature: reassessing socio-historical process through (re)considerations of works of verbal art

Opening with a brief historical contextualisation, the article takes the reader back to humanity’s prehistoric origins in southern Africa, then to its (and mankind’s) earliest known culture, that of the San/Bushmen, followed by the (returning) migrations of Khoikhoi and Bantu peoples to the area. Usings even literary texts, discussed in their order of composition, the article discusses these evocations as representing a spectrum of ways in which regional tribal cultures were, are or may be seen.The Khoikhoi elder Hendrik’s tale, told as well as transcribedin Afrikaans [now available in an English translation], is the first text; it addresses the ability of a tribal culture to correct aleader’s power abuse by means of verbal art and skill. Secondly, the great Xhosa poet S. E. K. Mqhayi’s advocation of a balance between tribal and Christian values is addressed, followed by Bessie Head’s critique of women’s denigration, seen as facilitated by Batswana tribal and modern cultures. Lauretta Ngcobo in her second novel evokes a dignified rural black woman’s struggles with the exclusionary and oppressive effects of both apartheid and Zulu tribal customs, while Zakes Mda’s novel achieves a wise and ironically tinged balance in depicting tribal traditionalism and modernity in a Xhosa village. David Donald’s is a delicately empathetic evocation of a dwindling Bushman culture besetby both white and black incursions in early colonial times, while (lastly) the essay considers the recent novel by Thando Mgqolozana which warns, in a devastating account, of the physical and psychological harm effected by the deteriorating practice of circumcision of young males among the AmaXhosa. This mosaic of texts establishes the strengths as well as the dangers of a range of southern African tribal cultures over arange of time and in different settings.

Pākehā Women and Māori Protocol: The Politics of Criticising Other Cultures

Feminists have fiercely debated whether it is wrong for outsiders to criticise gendered customs and practices identified with cultural minorities. This article explores the ethics of criticising other cultures by analysing the reaction to public criticism of Māori ceremonial protocol by two Pākehā women. It argues that the response to outsiders' criticism does not depend in a simple and direct way on whether insiders have resisted the criticised practice. There is a history of Māori women formulating critiques of the gender roles in Māori ceremonies, but the public response from Māori women to the Pākehā women's criticism was overwhelmingly negative. The outsiders' criticism was understood as an attack on the incorporation of Māori cultural expression into the public sector, rather than as a gesture of support or solidarity.

Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot (review)

Reviewed by: Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot Lesa Scholl Wilkes, Joanne . Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. 183 pp. $99.95. Women Reviewing Women brings together the inspiration of a women's literary heritage found in Gilbert and Gubar's seminal Madwoman in the Attic and Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own, and the critical role of the periodical press in canon-forming. Wilkes refocuses our attention, not on the canonized women novelists but on their contemporary female critics, who played an integral role in making their canonization possible through their reviews, biographies, and histories. By examining female reviewers, this study profiles their participation within the cutthroat world of the periodical press — an environment much recent work has focused on as being available to women because of the convention of anonymity. Essentially, Wilkes addresses the extent to which nineteenth-century female reviewers were influenced by their acute awareness of the often tenuous position of the female author and how that influence is made manifest in their criticism. She challenges assumptions of homogeneity, both in how these women responded to other female writers and in how feminine writing was defined throughout the century. The connection between Wilkes's reviewers and critics hangs on their engagement with Austen, Brontë, and Eliot. What becomes apparent is the way that, through the context of this triad, they build into each other's work, showing the development of women's criticism throughout the nineteenth century, creating a heritage for women's intellectual activity. In the introductory chapter, Wilkes situates her writers within the conventions of the Victorian periodical press. This is particularly relevant to the convention of anonymity, which they adopted at different times to conceal their womanhood, to have more freedom in expressing their views without having to be personally connected to them or to defer to the bigger, shadowy authority of the journal's voice. Wilkes draws out the tensions created as the freedom of anonymity is mitigated by having to walk the party lines of the periodicals. In this case, the boundaries of expectation are blurred according to editorial authority rather than gender. Chapter 2, "Maria Jane Jewsbury and Sara Coleridge," centers on the woman writer's awareness of her position within the context of nineteenth-century social expectations. Both Jewsbury's and Coleridge's struggles with reconciling their writing careers with their private lives are explored, along with their consciousness of the practical limitations placed on the women they were reviewing. The key aspect of this chapter, though, is their awareness that as reviewers they were able to shape the public reception of the texts they dealt with and the authors ' public images. Furthermore, the performative nature of gender in writing is revealed, with female critics ventriloquizing masculine voices in their writing style. This thread runs throughout Wilkes's work, informing both the reviewers' responses to fiction and the novelists' response to the reviewers. The following chapter, "Writing Women's History," turns from the context in which nineteenth-century women were writing to examine the ways in which they bolstered their sense of a literary heritage through writing histories and comparative studies of women's intellectual achievements. The women discussed in this chapterHannah Lawrance, Jane Williams, and Julia Kavanagh—worked as reviewers but had significant literary achievements of their own in writing histories, poetry, and novels respectively. Wilkes emphasizes their conscious act of "rescuing notable women from oblivion, neglect or misrepresentation" (57), likening them to late-twentieth-century [End Page 492] feminist historians. The section on Lawrance focuses on her extensive knowledge of languages and the research of primary texts in her histories, which Wilkes places in the broader context of assumptions about what kinds of history men and women could write. She argues that while women were not seen as able to write real history about wider socio-political events, and were to be restricted to the detail of memoirs, Lawrance was able to achieve both in her writing. The section on lane Williams plays a crucial part in...

Reviews: The Victorian Clown., Early American Women Critics: Performance, Religion, Race., Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism., Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History., Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U. S. Study of Film

Reviews: The Victorian Clown., Early American Women Critics: Performance, Religion, Race., Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism., Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History., Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U. S. Study of Film

Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France (review)

Reviewed by: Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France Gay L. Gullickson Elinor Accampo . Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. xii + 312 pp. Ill. $50.00 (ISBN: 0-8018-8404-7). Alone among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French feminists, Nelly Roussel (1878–1922) advocated women's right to determine the size of their families through the use of birth control and to avoid pain in childbirth. In turn-of-the-century France, where bourgeois thinkers identified femininity with self-sacrifice and believed that the use of mechanical means to prevent conception (e.g., sponges, spermicides, condoms) was unnatural, these neo-Malthusian views were both heretical and threatening, as Elinor Accampo demonstrates in this meticulously researched and carefully argued book. In school, Roussel was taught, as all girls were, to serve others and to bear hardship with "joyous resignation" (p. 19). It was a message she would spend her life resisting, although she would marry and bear two children. She married very well, and her husband—the sculptor, Freemason, and political radical Henri Godet—became her soul mate, business manager, confidant, political consultant, and strongest supporter. Godet made no demands that she spend her time at home as a self-sacrificing wife and mother; he organized her speaking tours, endured her many absences without complaint, and was bereft when she died at age forty-four. Roussel's commitment to feminism, neo-Malthusianism, and a woman's right to bear children without pain was partially rooted in her personality and experiences. [End Page 216] She was not what we would identify as a deeply maternal woman—her children grew up in the nearby households of relatives (her mother and her sister), where she visited them. She suffered greatly during the birth of her first child in1899, and was filled with dread when she found she was pregnant again four years later. Always an activist, Roussel sought out information about doctors and put herself under the care of a Dr. Lucas who was experimenting with anesthesia in childbirth. His experiments resulted in the deaths of many women, but that was unknown to Roussel and Godet at the time, and she was delighted to have found a way to give birth without the pain of her first experience. Roussel's political positions were founded on more than personal experience, however. Her critique of women's lives was multifaceted: she did not believe that pain was a natural component of womanhood; she attacked the church's belief in female martyrdom; she argued that motherhood was a kind of animal slavery rather than a source of human joy; and she believed that science could free women from repeated pregnancies and the pain of childbirth. She was widely liked and admired by both men and women, including feminists, but found little support for her positions: feminists believed that their quest for political rights would be harmed if they spoke publicly about such a taboo subject as childbirth; the Catholic Church believed that pain in childbirth was a means of salvation for women; and doctors believed that the use of anesthesia would interfere with labor. As was unfortunately common, Roussel's life was hampered and shortened by chronic and untreatable illnesses. In the long run, her faith in the ability of science to improve women's lives was well founded—but in the short run, science could do nothing for her. Using the correspondence between Roussel and other members of her family, Accampo chronicles her long and losing struggle against acute intestinal pain and pulmonary tuberculosis. Roussel and Godet borrowed money (mainly from Roussel's wealthy stepfather) for increasingly frequent and costly treatments at clinics and spas. In keeping with gender convictions, some believed that her frequent travels and lectures were the source of her intestinal illness—but Roussel knew she felt better when she was on a speaking tour than she did at any other time, and resumed her travels whenever she could. There is no way to analyze her illnesses unequivocably. Accampo suggests that she may have suffered from abdominal...

Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans; Early American Women Critics: Performance, Religion, Race; Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature

Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans; Early American Women Critics: Performance, Religion, Race; Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature

Book Review: Early American Women Critics: Performance, Religion, Race

Book Review: Early American Women Critics: Performance, Religion, Race

Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain, 1880–1905 (review)

Reviewed by: Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain, 1880-1905 Julie F. Codell (bio) Meaghan Clarke, Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain, 1880-1905 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. xi + 214 , 37 illus.,$99.95/£55.00 cloth. Meaghan Clarke's groundbreaking study of Victorian women art writers examines their writing from different aesthetic and institutional frameworks and across all levels of periodicals-art journals, women's magazine, quarterlies, monthlies and newspapers-and reveals a female presence in art criticism more active than Victorians and subsequent scholars have recognized. "Both visually and textually, art was crucial to the market of journals, but simultaneously journals were crucial to the art market" (2), Clarke observes, succinctly articulating a vital relationship that embraced class, symbolic capital, and cultural nationalism. Furthermore, Clarke's explorations of the intersections among Victorian feminisms, art writing, and periodicals reveal women critics' elastic views about gender, itself ever-changing during the period. Positioned within and outside institutional loci (Royal Academy, other artists' professional organizations, journalism, individual periodicals' cultural authority), women art critics occupied diverse positions and used their writing about art as a vehicle for social and political, as well as aesthetic, agendas. Clarke deploys a notion of "tactic" as a planned means of intervening without having authority to do so (from Michel de Certeau), often from a border or "para-site" that is marginal yet subversive (from Rey Chow). Chapter 2 surveys Victorian art journalism, several women critics' careers, books for women on professions, editors' attitudes, women in public spaces, the role of university education as journalism became professionalized, and how women negotiated low pay, marriage [End Page 256] (their names were trademarks), and New Journalism. Clarke explores women's criticism in relation to institutions like salons and socio-professional networks both mixed in gender and all-female, to underscore the irony that women "were establishing the field and marginalized within it" (18-19) in "a complexity of masculine and feminine performances, concealing and revealing named identities, a tactic which enabled women to claim discursive authority in a variety of contexts" (23). Here Clarke conveys women's unstable positions on several fronts (femininity, journalism). Chapter 3 focuses on Alice Meynell's prolific career. Meynell and husband Wilfrid wrote under the pseudonyms Alice and John Oldcastle, which disguised them when promoting Wilfrid's work and that of their artist friends. Meynell also wrote anonymously for many different periodicals, including the Pen, the Weekly Register, Merry England, the Magazine of Art, the Pall Mall Gazette, the National Observer, and the World. Her growing reputation assisted that of her popular painter-sister Elizabeth Thompson Butler. (Such puffing was so widespread that Meynell's was hardly unusual.) Meynell contributed to popular artists' biographies and studio interviews by writing on male academicians and women artists. She championed the Royal Academy and was engaged in debates over the nude which, as Clarke notes, were often about women seeing or painting nudes, not nudes per se. Meynell argued that women were not morally compromised by seeing nudes. Admiring the Pre-Raphaelites, Meynell also appreciated impressionism and French-influenced Newlyn painters. She later devoted herself exclusively to suffrage. Chapter 4 is on Florence Fenwick Miller, who wrote in over a dozen periodicals between the 1870s and the 1910s. From a less cultured family than Meynell's, she received a medical degree from the Ladies' Medical College, ran for the London School Board, and became a "platform" woman. She focused on women artists' biographies, which Meynell did not, promoting those she considered "great" (her A-list included Rosa Bonheur, Louise Jopling, Henrietta Rae, Henrietta Ward). Writing a women's column in the London Illustrated News, she "conjoined dress and art, slipping between the two discourses" (94). As editor of the Woman's Signal (1895-99), she wrote to promote feminism through biographies and reviews of women's art in international exhibitions, largely ignored or denigrated by male critics. Through art, she promoted women's equality to a broad readership. Chapter 5 focuses on American Elizabeth Robins Pennell, who, like Meynell, worked in collaboration with her British husband. Clarke offers new archival information about Pennell's authorship, information badly needed for many women journalists. Unlike...

Turkish Women in Academia: Problems of Legitimacy in Trans/National Perspective

Turkish Women in Academia:Problems of Legitimacy in Trans/National Perspective Arzu Öztürkmen (bio) The study of women and history stands at the crossroad of a variety of directions. Writing the "history of women" in a particular country vis-à-vis their relation to state and society is one genre. Constructing the history of how women's studies emerged is another. There may also be feminist attempts to rewrite national historiographies in order to incorporate gender into them. Following that framework, one can state that there is substantial work on the first genre, where Ottoman and Turkish women's history has been analyzed.1 Turkish scholars have also broadly covered the history of the feminist movement within the last two decades.2 What is lacking in Turkish studies now is a feminist critique of national historiography, as was tried in Creating a Nation, where an accepted Australian national historiography was challenged through a reconsideration of colonialism and gender relations.3 Having stated these directions, this essay will focus on a different dimension of women's studies in Turkey—that of the multisited positions contemporary Turkish women academicians face in their encounters with national and international academic circles. It will try to highlight two main positions vis-à-vis Turkish women scholars: first, the discrepancy between national academics trained abroad and in national universities, and second, the problems of legitimacy in international context. Leaving aside the sporadic curiosities and nationalist publications about women's emancipation,4 scholarly interest in rethinking women's history in Turkey emerged in full force during the 1980s with the newly rising women's movement.5 This movement created its own academic programs, a women's library, social help shelters and centers, and political organizations to support women in politics. With this wave came an amount of research, which gradually led scholars toward a critique of women's status in national historiography. The Republican concept of women's emancipation apparently was not as progressive as Turkish women had so far been indoctrinated to believe; instead, this concept of emancipation was a regression from the demands and thematic richness expressed by Ottoman feminists. That such nineteenth-century Ottoman publications were in Arabic script, illegible to the Republican generation, had long postponed a thorough analysis of the Ottoman women's movement. This movement was fully aware of the rise of Western feminism and had already begun negotiating their roles and status in domestic space.6 Ottoman women debated their rights in education and political spheres, and adopted a more [End Page 173] assertive discourse than their successive Republican generations. With all its conservatism, Turkish women cherished more access to education and professional life under the Republic. Many studied abroad in different fields to return to teach in Republican universities.7 They acquired high-status jobs as the first generation of women teachers, doctors, judges, and pilots, accepting to a great extent their role as emancipated women in the public sphere. The Republican regime had also granted Turkish women their voting rights in 1934, before many European countries, a matter which had long been part of a proud national discourse. The state-controlled women's emancipation model survived until the 1970s, a period when Marxism dominated the public sphere, generating clashes between left- and right-wing groups. A group of women who questioned their position and status within the leftist movement broadened their critique towards a more gendered analysis: the wind of a general critique to the political order also brought a critique of gender.8 The women's movement accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, with the growth of many women's nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the establishment of a Directorate General on the Status and the Problems of Women in 1990, and various campaigns on a variety of issues ranging from violence to citizenship rights. The movement created its own publications with more impact on general public debates. With the opening of thirteen research centers for women's issues and four women's studies departments since 1989, many young students also took part in research and writing, contributing to the development of an academic community. With the emergence of new power domains and relations, there soon appeared a tension between...

Modestly staffed and modestly resourced: An exploratory critique of women’s entry to rural and regional governance

In Australia, a significant shift has occurred in regional governance arrangements with the emergence of new forums for the practising of regional leadership. In this paper we provide a critical reading of a recent report on the representation of women in governance in rural and regional Australia as well as a textual analysis of the language in use around the entities reviewed in the report. We first consider women’s representation in regional local government. While women have increased their representation in elected positions in this sphere of governance, we argue they continue to occupy a marginal position. We then consider a range of institutions identified as making up the new regional governance arrangements. Our analysis suggests that many of these new governance bodies are modestly staffed and modestly resourced and are expected to facilitate/ coordinate networking activities. We conclude with a caution against viewing women’s involvement in new forms of nonmetropolitan governance as symptomatic of a shift in rural and regional gendered power relations.

Reply to Responses

Reply to Responses Gerda Lerner (bio) I greatly appreciate the four respondents' thoughtful and challenging re-actions to my article. I hope other readers will be stimulated to join in this discussion with comments and criticism. To start such a discussion and to stimulate some introspection about what we, as practitioners in the field, are doing for the future of Women's History was the primary purpose of my undertaking this survey of the field. I should, perhaps, have stated more clearly at the outset that mine was not a historiographic article nor was it a review of outstanding works of particular interest. What I was trying to do was to get an overview of where the field is and where it seems to be going. The method I selected was to take a three year period and look at everything that was being done under the heading of Women's History. It was a labor-intensive method and one that has many pitfalls. I discuss some of these in my article. My method, like all such methods, had a certain arbitrariness to it. Why select those three years and not others? Why accept the JAH selections and not others? The respondents all pointed out my many omissions and criticized the criteria of selection. All I can say about that is that any method selected would have had some arbitrariness and some shortcomings. My method forced me, for example, to leave out of the discussion the outstanding work of several of my students and colleagues, simply because it was not published in the time frame I had selected. My respondents selected for their discussion books and articles that illustrated their argument, regardless of when they were published. I deliberately avoided doing that in order to consider a true cross section of work being done during a given period. Jennifer Spear, Kathi Kern, and Leslie Alexander offer valuable historiographic essays, which counter-balance or contradict some of my concerns. By ignoring the statistics I present, they feature mainly the positive examples of a minority of practitioners. My point is that while the positive examples are there and are fine, there should be concern about the major trends that seem to point in the opposite direction of the positive examples. Jennifer Spear endorses my concern with the modern bias of Women's History practitioners and offers a sophisticated and persuasive survey of excellent work and new trends in colonial women's and gender history. She suggests many useful approaches for future work and stresses the need for more work on African American and Native American women. [End Page 61] Her arguments for comparative history and cross-ethnic studies are persuasive. Kathi Kern makes a strong case for the relevance, vibrancy, and social connectedness of studies of cultural representation and cites several fine examples that support her point. These would all fall within my definition of works that contextualize the study of representation within socially lived experiences and which, therefore, "can offer valuable insights into the female past." I mention this as a generalization in my article and also in the discussion of the prize-winning books. Kern and I agree on this, but I see as exceptions what she sees as a dominant trend. Kimberly Springer in characterizing my "segregating" African American women's history as "akin to 'positive stereotyping'" misunderstands my intent and distorts my meaning. All I did was to observe a different pattern in works dealing with African American themes and call attention to that fact. Had I not done that I could have been justly accused of insensitivity to the factor of "race." I fully agree with Springer on rejecting the dichotomy of representation/culture and social/political history. Her observation that "the social, political, and organizational histories of women shaped their representations, identities, and cultures and vice versa" is right on target. I said the same thing several times in my article. Leslie Alexander offers a brief historiography of African American scholars' critique of Women's History and two challenges: 1) " . . . although feminism is a useful paradigm for White women, the attempt to force Black women into the same interpretive model is not applicable" and 2) " . . . women...

Revised key messages for hormone replacement therapy from the New Zealand Guidelines Group.

The publication of the Women's Health Initiative Study in 2002 has led to changes in the advice for women considering hormone replacement therapy (HRT) use. Along with other organisations worldwide, the New Zealand Guidelines Group (NZGG) revised their key messages for the appropriate prescribing of HRT. Long-term HRT use was not recommended, nor was the use of HRT for the prevention of coronary heart disease and stroke. While acknowledging the effectiveness of HRT for relief of menopausal symptoms, the group felt that women needed to be informed of the potential risks. Methodological criticisms of Women's Health Initiative (WHI) are discussed along with suggestions of how the study findings may be used for individual decision-making. In addition to presenting the new advice from the NZGG, the present paper compares these findings with other international bodies and seeks to present some consensus that may help decision-making for women who are symptomatic at menopause.

Integrating feminist theory and women's studies into the women's health nursing curriculum: special topics in women's health.

Special Topics in Women’s Health, are offered in conjunction with two clinical practica (12 credits). Clinical seminars reinforce theory and clinical practice issues. Perinatal Zsstles in Primary Cure includes all the obstetric and newborn content. Special Topics in Women’s Health covers advanced nursing assessment and management of high-incidence health problems in women. Feminist theories are used as the conceptual framework in the critique of women’s health care and are the foundation for clinical practice. This article describes how feminist theories and concepts from women’s studies are integrated to create a feminist approach to women’s health care. Course content is outlined here and detailed content is presented for selected classes to illustrate how this is accomplished

Family Status and Criticism of Gender Inequality at Home and at Work

The literature on gender attitudes indicates that acceptance of women's involvement in the laborforce is greater than acceptance of changes in the domestic division of labor. We argue that this difference exists because challenges to inequality in the home are especially threatening to men's interests and that women's dependence on men plays a role in shaping interpretations of gender inequality. To test these claims, we explore the relationship between family status and criticism of gender inequality in the home and at work. Family ties discourage criticism: marital status is particularly important in predicting women's criticism, while parental status is especially important for men. Therefore, we conclude that interests play a part in shaping men's gender-related attitudes and that dependence on men is a factor in shaping women's attitudes. The complex interplay between gender inequality in the home and in the workplace has been of great interest to feminist scholars. In this article, we address Americans' perceptions of gender inequality in these two spheres and the impact of marital status, parental status, employment status, and women's economic dependence on such perceptions. We focus particularly on criticism of gender inequality at home and at work, considering both men's and women's levels of criticism using recently collected data from a national probability sample of adult Americans. We argue that men's social dominance, women's dependence, and men's and women's interests relative to gender stratification are all central to shaping perceptions of gender inequality. As an institution, the family has tended to foster men's dominance and women's dependence. As Lerner (1986) notes in her historical analysis of gender relations, women's subordination has been

Repackaging Rousseau: Femininity and Fashion in Old Regime France

Joan Landes's important interpretation of the role of gender in the construction of citizenship in the French Revolution finds its inspiration in Michel de Certeau's observation that theorizing always needs a Savage. ' For Landes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a perfect example of a theorist whose thought required a savage other-in Rousseau's case, woman. In her chapter on Rousseau's reply to public women, Landes explores Rousseau's condemnation of the public roles of aristocratic and bourgeois women in the courts and salons of the ancien regime. In his critique of women, as in his political theory generally, Rousseau becomes, for Landes, the spokesman for his age who best articulated the new separation of the public realm of male virtue from the private realm of female domesticity.2 Landes is not alone in privileging the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the main site where new attitudes toward womanhood and the gendering of politics were developed and transmitted in the

Women and Politics in the Era before Seneca Falls

To most Americans of the early nineteenth century, and were mutually exclusive categories. Politics was a public endeavor and as such belonged to the world of men. Women's world, or sphere, to use the widely employed term, was to revolve around the private arena of home and family. Home is [woman's] appropriate sphere of action, wrote Mrs. A. J. Graves in 1841; and whenever she neglects these duties, or goes out of this sphere of action to in any of the great public movements of the day, she is deserting the station which God and nature have assigned to her. If man's duties lie abroad, she reasoned, woman's duties are within the quiet seclusion of the home.' Such sentiments were part of the accepted wisdom of early nineteenth-century life. Even as Graves wrote, the conventional wisdom was under challenge by abolitionists and moral reformers. Indeed, her critique of women who mingle in any of the great public movements of the day clearly referred to them. By speaking out on issues such as slavery, by mobilizing women to lobby for specific legislation, and by engaging in petition campaigns to Congress, activist women had already defied accepted conventions. They had also begun to reconceptualize women's relationship to politics and to question exclusion from voting, which emerged in the 1840s as a key symbol of male political privilege. The debate at the Seneca Falls Convention (1848) over whether women should exercise their sacred right to the elective

Contemporary Chinese femininity—post 1949 critiques of women inHonglou Meng

(1989). Contemporary Chinese femininity—post 1949 critiques of women in Honglou Meng. Asian Studies Association of Australia. Review: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 12-14.

Criticism of Women's Poetry: An Addendum to Elaine Showalter's "Review Essay: Literary Criticism" (Vol. 1, No. 2) and Annette Kolodny's "Review Essay: Literary Criticism" (Vol. 2, No. 2)

Previous articleNext article No AccessLetters/CommentsCriticism of Women's Poetry: An Addendum to Elaine Showalter's "Review Essay: Literary Criticism" (Vol. 1, No. 2) and Annette Kolodny's "Review Essay: Literary Criticism" (Vol. 2, No. 2)Gloria BowlesGloria Bowles Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 3, Number 3Spring, 1978 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/493522 Views: 4Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1978 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Sydney Janet Kaplan Literary Criticism, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4, no.33 (Oct 2015): 514–527.https://doi.org/10.1086/493635