Era Of Women Research Articles

Complicated Instructions: Exploring Antagonisms in Woman's Era

How are the everyday practices, interests, beliefs, aspirations, and desires of “Indian women” discursively constructed through the representational codes of recent editions of the magazine Woman's Era? Some older studies of the by now forty-year-old fortnightly magazine need to be complemented to understand the changes in content now observable in it. For instance, there might be a greater degree of ambivalence and apparent inconsistency than noted before in what is valued or devalued by Woman's Era as “western,” “traditional,” and “modern.” This essay outlines some antagonisms manifested in Woman's Era to clarify the scope of its changing representations of “Indian women.”

“The Clothes I Wear Help Me to Know My Own Power”: The Politics of Gender Presentation in the Era of Women’s Liberation

“The Clothes I Wear Help Me to Know My Own Power”The Politics of Gender Presentation in the Era of Women’s Liberation Betty Luther Hillman (bio) In 1971 a woman writing in the Iowa City feminist journal Ain’t I a Woman? described her decision to cut her hair as the definitive experience of women’s liberation. Previously, her hair “grew down to [her] waist,” and thinking of cutting it made her stomach “contract in terror.” After she cut it extremely short, however, she discovered a newfound self-confidence and independence. “In classes I didn’t have to bother about how I was coming across,” she explained. “When I walk through the commons, I feel much less on display.” Refusing to look like, in her words, “an attractive female,” she no longer had to worry about men’s unwanted stares and advances. Most of all, by cutting her hair, she rejected the notion that her identity was tied to femininity: “So now when I look in the mirror I see a person who really doesn’t look like a girl. She doesn’t look like a boy. Really, what she looks like hasn’t been labeled yet. She looks like ME.”1 Cutting one’s hair was just one example of how some feminists in the 1960s and 1970s rejected traditional standards of feminine beauty as oppressive and objectifying of women. Feminist criticisms of makeup, high heels, and miniskirts have been well documented by scholars, and nearly every history of the so-called second-wave feminist movement recounts the protest at the 1968 Miss America Pageant as the epitome of feminist critiques of fashion and beauty culture.2 But this Iowa City feminist illustrated how the self-fashioning techniques of women’s liberationists were also, in some cases, part of the feminist quest to reject gender binaries that strictly separated masculine and feminine roles. By failing to “look like” a traditional woman, this activist challenged the notion that men and women were as different as socially constructed roles of gender made them out to be. While not all feminists cut their hair or rejected feminine beauty culture, the politicization of hairstyles, dress, and self- presentation became central to the cultural politics of the second-wave feminist movement, widely discussed [End Page 155] in feminist and mainstream periodicals alike. Indeed, self-presentation remains a contested topic among feminists today, as activists continue to debate the implications of fashion and beauty culture for women. This article analyzes the politics of gender presentation—defined in this paper as one’s choice of dress, hairstyles, and self-fashioning as part of one’s display of gender to the outside world—as it was debated by feminists and their observers during the movement’s early years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Women’s dress, hair, and fashion styles became the sites of cultural battles over the meanings of feminism and womanhood. Feminists were not the only ones in the 1960s and 1970s to challenge what it meant to “look like” a man or a woman. Fashion trends such as long hair on men, jeans and pants on women, and unisex clothing also challenged previously established norms of gendered dress. Nor was women’s liberation the first social movement of the era to politicize self-presentation; hippies, student and anti–Vietnam War activists, and Black Power advocates all appropriated self-fashioning styles as part of their political activism.3 During these years the public hotly debated these broader changes in gendered self-presentation, as well as activists’ hair and dress styles. Feminists, however, were the first 1960s activists to connect gender-bending dress and hairstyles to an explicit politics of gender that challenged broader conceptions of sex roles and femininity. This case study of self-presentation as a political tactic of women’s liberation thus highlights some of the successes, challenges, and divisions within second-wave feminism. On the one hand feminists who promoted the concept of freedom of choice in dress pushed American society to accept changing fashion styles for women. Many American women, inspired in part by the rhetoric of the women’s movement, fought for the freedom to wear pantsuits...

“The Clothes I Wear Help Me to Know My Own Power”: The Politics of Gender Presentation in the Era of Women's Liberation

“The Clothes I Wear Help Me to Know My Own Power”: The Politics of Gender Presentation in the Era of Women's Liberation

‘Let there be a Balance’: Women in African Parliaments

It has been 25 years since the National Resistance Movement took power in Uganda and ushered in an era of women's increased presence in African legislatures – at first in east and southern Africa and eventually beyond. In 2008, Uganda's neighbor Rwanda became the first country in the world to have more women than men in a chamber of parliament. In mid-2012, eight African countries were among the top 30 countries worldwide in terms of women's presence in a single or lower house of parliament. Across the continent one country after another has taken measures to increase women's presence in the national legislature. This article provides an update on these developments within sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, the article seeks to evaluate women's descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation in African parliaments in the last quarter-century by reviewing a growing literature. Despite the remarkable gains that have been made by women in national legislatures across the continent, Africa's accomplishments in this arena are little known – in contrast to those from other parts of the world. This article, in surveying and synthesizing the literature, seeks also to make those accomplishments better known.

Ryōsai-kembo, Liberal Education and Maternal Feminism under Fascism: Women and Sport in Modern Japan

Following the Second World War, Japanese women have gained greater equality in terms of their legal status, career opportunities and general personal freedom. However, cultural inequalities remain, and this is no less so than in sport. Access to job opportunities in the sports media, for example, has been restricted, while participation in sport overall and in some sports in particular has been subject to sexist attitudes. The development of women's sport in Japan has been uneven. Women's physical education was first introduced after the 1895 Sino-Japanese War to support the Japanese State's notions of ‘ryōsai-kembo’, Liberal Education and Maternal Feminism. During the Taisho era, prior to the Second World War, women achieved a measure of freedom in sport through the development of ‘liberal education’ in which the physical education curriculum was modernized by Western-influenced educationalists. During the war, however, this was replaced by a militaristic sports curriculum. In wartime Japan, feminism was influenced by a grass-roots fascism that promoted the idea of ‘the nation’, which justified the central existence of the Emperor and emphasized the importance of a physically robust maternity. Women's physical education and sports has therefore followed at least three phases: the first was based on the idea of ryōsai-kembo and made possible the first stage of secondary education for women (after the Sino Japanese War, 1894–95); the second, the Taisho era (1912–26) of ‘liberal education’, produced many haikara (high-collar; middle class) women and increased their participation in organized competitive sports. The third phase that witnessed the era of maternal feminism and the resurrection of traditional budo in which the importance of physical education for women was emphasized more than ever (especially 1936–45). The end of the Second World War became the starting point for a new era of women's education. In most narratives of Japanese women in sport, the gains made in wartime Japan were seen in post-war Japan as being evil and so, the previously improved status of women in sport is as seen has having reverted to its traditional, conservative condition. This paper argues that the histories of the concepts of ‘ryōsai-kembo’ and ‘haikara’ reflect the wider social history of Japan. Both concepts possessed similar characteristics, highlighting both change and continuity through the modern period. It is important to examine the context in which these concepts first appeared as an ‘invented tradition’. In particular the inheritance of pre-war culture before the nationalization and modernization of the nation state is especially relevant.

White lies: Amelia E. Johnson's Sunday School fiction and the politics of racelessness

This article reevaluates the cultural significance and literary complexity of the Sunday School novels published by Amelia E. Johnson during the 'Black Woman's Era'. The critical recovery of this lesser-known African American woman writer and editor focuses on her cultural activism and on the fictional strategies she deployed to challenge the limitations imposed by a white-dominated audience and publishing industry, as well as by the religious orthodoxy promoted by her denominational publishers. Problematizing the critical discourse that opposes her confrontational non-fiction writing to her racially indeterminate fiction, the article foregrounds Johnson's critique of gender, class and racial inequalities, her experimentation with narrative conventions, and her growing sense of disillusionment in the face of unrelenting discrimination, showing how Johnson's writing career illuminates the broader trends of African American women's literature at the turn into the 20th century.

IT Education and Workforce Participation: A New Era for Women in Kenya?

While Sub-Saharan African women have historically assumed the roles of both housewives and subsistence farmers, they have had few opportunities to participate in the modern economies of the region. However, this trend is changing with the exponential growth of information and communications technologies (ICT), giving many Sub-Sahara African women access to computers, the Internet, and other related technologies. Based on the work of a four-member research team from Kenya and the United States, this article examines the integration of female college students into the formal ICT work sector in Kenya. We do so by examining major bottlenecks and enablers to such integration from historical and contemporary perspectives. Using an interpretive approach, we conducted 32 interviews with women in an ICT program offered by a university in Kenya. Our findings indicate that women were highly optimistic, embracing ICT as a practical mechanism for achieving entry into the labor market. However, they perceived significant structural barriers, such as public policies that failed to facilitate the development of the ICT sector, gender discrimination by employers, and training that provided them with insufficient technical skills to enable them to effectively perform in the workplace. These findings largely confirm the gendered perspectives found in similar studies conducted in other countries. However, what appear as global perspectives are informed by the local causes.

Reading/Photographs: Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins's Four Girls at Cottage City, Victoria Earle Matthews, and The Woman's Era

Once exposed as a fraud ... you can never regain your legitimacy. For the violated criterion of legitimacy implicitly presumes an absolute incompatibility between the person you appeared to be and the person you are now revealed to be. Adrian Piper, for White, Passing for What, in fact, does it mean to rely on evidence when discussing blackness? Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent This essay focuses on late-nineteenth-century photography, and reform, as well as on re-forming contemporary interpretative practices that frame visual, racial, and historical evidence. Here I address the ways in which reading race and assimilating iconographic representation became increasingly central to late-nineteenth-century reading culture, bringing into view the emphasis on interpretation that is posed as critical to women's development. In her 1864 essay, Originality of Ideas, Julia C. Collins counsels female of the African American newspaper the Christian Recorder to sharpen their analytical skills, averring, It is good to read, but better to think. It is best to spend only half that time in reading, she exhorts, and advises her to use the remaining time in interpretative practice (127). (1) Collins anticipates the advice of subsequent Black thinkers, such as Anna Julia Cooper and Victoria Earle Matthews, and reflects the counsel expressed in the columns of the Woman's Era, the official news organ of the Black women's club movement. (2) As I will explore here, these principles are in nearly perfect alignment with those undergirding female development in Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins's novel Four Girls at Cottage City. The novel takes up the mutually constitutive relation between women's development and reform in ways that mirror the arc described in the pages of the Woman's Era and that are expressed throughout the Black clubwomen's movement. I frame this essay with a consideration of the twists and turns in Kelley-Hawkins's taxonomic history and with an examination of the politics of her recent reclassification as a white woman writer after decades of being categorized as Black. Through my critical lens, the recent discovery does not illustrate historical and interpretative mistakes African American(ist) archivists and critics have made; rather, it illuminates how Kelley-Hawkins is embedded in a cultural and iconographic archive that speaks to the multiple, conflicting, and multivalent investments in reading individual bodies and texts in relationship to sociocultural bodies of racial knowledge. I close by examining Four Girls and its lead heroine, Vera Earle, in the context of the contemporaneous prominence of journalist and activist Victoria Earle (Matthews) and what I call the photographic bylines in the Woman's Era. Frances E. W. Harper's choice of her heroine's name in Iola Leroy recalls Ida B. Wells's pen name, an echo that supports Frances Smith Foster's assertion that Harper was careful to select figures who were familiar to and instructive for the greatest number of readers (141). (3) Kelley-Hawkins's Vera Earle and Victoria Earle share closely coupled homonymic and phenotypic features. Additionally, in relation to many of the values Four Girls espouses, Vera Earle serves as a double of Victoria Earle, the journalistic name Matthews used. The connections between Vera Earle and Victoria Earle likewise augment the emphasis in Four Girls on education, and club work and further connect the novel to a broader overlapping circle of Black literary and political exchange. In this--and in its new--context, Vera Earle familiarly repeats the ways Iola functions as a narratively budding character planted in ground tended by an accomplished and actual writer, thinker, and activist. This histotextual link simultaneously re- and de-familiarizes readers' social understanding of cross-racial tropes, conjoinings, and cultural exchanges. (4) In the recent and broad publicity about Kelley-Hawkins's identity, her case has often been covered much as one might handle a nineteenth-century topsy-turvy doll: (5) flip her upside down, and the Black doll becomes white. …

Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins 1863–1938

world may take your reputation from you, but it cannot take your character. Dunham Kelley, Megda During the early 1970s, American academics strove to build new literary canons, unearthing the writings of individuals whose work previously had been ignored because of the author's race or gender. Often, little was known about these authors and their race was guessed at or surmised from scant clues. One such case is that of Dunham Kelley-Hawkins. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the African American literary canon, Dunham Kelley-Hawkins has been studied as one of the earliest published African American women novelists (McCaskill 239; Schwartz 240). Despite this status, little was known about her until 2003. All that existed were her two novels, Megda and Four Girls at City, first published in 1891 and 1895, respectively. An original copy of either commanded over $5500 at auction (Between the Covers). Both novels were coveted items in any major collection of African American literature, since they contributed substantively to our understanding of fiction written during Black Woman's Era, from 1890 to 1910 (Gates xvi). The frontispiece of Megda is a signed photograph of Dunham Kelley that has repeatedly been cited as unquestionable evidence that Kelley-Hawkins was Black (Hite xxviii; Peterson 113). When Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., edited the landmark Schomburg Collection of African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth-Century, published in 1988 by Oxford University Press, both of Kelley-Hawkins's novels were included--although no details of her life had been uncovered. (1) Scholars have noted that Kelley-Hawkins's novels are devoid of any Black characters, but this has been explained as the author's desire to seek commonality with the dominant white society by writing solely of religious themes and ignoring her heritage and divisive racial issues (Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels 22-46). While there was a diversity of opinion as to whether her characters were actually white or very light mulattoes (Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire 120, 258), until 2003, no one had published any doubts about Kelley-Hawkins's presumed African heritage. To me, the photograph of Kelley-Hawkins was inconclusive at best. The subject was shot almost in profile. She faces away from the light source and her face is mostly in shadow. Her cheek nearest the light is white. Her hair is wavy and her lips are medium full, but these features are not the purview of a single race. Moreover, I was intrigued by the mystery of how a New England writer who had lived to at least marriageable age and who had published two novels--both of which had appeared in second editions in the 1890s--could have escaped detection, especially given the wealth of records from that period. Assuming nothing about race, I examined all Emma census entries from 1900 onward. I had immediate success in the 1910, 1920, and 1930 census records for Rhode Island. All three records listed an Emma whose daughter was named Megda! In all the records, this Hawkins was noted as white. However, I found this evidence to be insufficient to support any firm conclusions about Kelley-Hawkins, much less to call for a revision of the then-current understandings. To the contrary, the evidence raised more questions than it answered. The first unequivocal answer I found was through matching Hawkins's signature on her will with the signature on the frontispiece portrait of Megda. To me, this proved that this Hawkins was the author of Megda and Four Girls at City. I then made contact with Kelley-Hawkins's great-nephew, E. Butler Moulton, who showed me a necklace with a mother-of-pearl pendant engraved Cottage City that had been owned by Kelley-Hawkins. He kindly provided me with another photograph. The family had been completely unaware of Kelley-Hawkins's status within the African American literary canon (Moulton). …

Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (review)

McHenry, Elizabeth. 2002. Forgotten Headers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham and London: Duke University Press. $59.95 hc. $18.95 sc. 423 pp.Elizabeth McHenry's Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies does exactly what literary and historical scholarship should do: it draws upon foundational scholarship, redresses limitations of current scholarship, explores vital new questions within the field, and opens up fascinating new terrain for scholarly inquiry. In this compelling work, McHenry seeks out the certain absences within discussions of African American and deftly makes visible the heretofore historically marginalized black readers of 1830-1940 (4).While there has been considerable attention to the legacy of legally enforced illiteracy of enslaved African Americans, McHenry examines the literate and literary activities of free blacks in the antebellum North and black Americans after the Civil War. The recurrent scholarly focus upon black illiteracy, she writes, has prevented us from seeing what is also undeniable- [African Americans'] literate practices (4). Her carefully researched and meticulously crafted study shows the range, complexity, and diversity of African Americans' and literary practices.The impulse behind McHenry's five chapters is, in part, to make visible the multiple forms and sites of African American and literary practices: she has chapters on the origins and rise of African American literary societies, the cultural work of the black press, literary coalitions in the age of BookerT.Washington, literary activities in the women's era, Georgia Douglas Johnson and the Saturday Nighters, and the building of community in contemporary reading groups. Each of these chapters is informed by McHenry's belief that scholars need to dispense with the idea of a monolithic black community and replace it with a more accurate and historically informed understanding of a complex and differentiated black population (14). Moreover, each chapter contributes to redressing what she regards as another scholarly limitation: What is called for at this critical juncture in the development of African American historical, cultural, and literary studies is a greater understanding of the common forms of oppression faced by black Americans, as well as a more complex vision of what constitutes (17). African American literary societies, she argues, were formed not only as places of refuge for the self-improvement of their members but as acts of resistance to the hostile racial climate of the United States (17). While McHenry ostensibly sets out to examine African American and literary between 1830 and 1940, she also chronicles a compelling history of resistance; in so doing, she reclaims a vital part of American history.What is perhaps most incisive about McHenry's study is her attention to the multiple and nuanced ways in which and literary were used as multi-layered forms of resistance. Many African American literary societies worked under the assumption that African Americans' future in the United States depended upon creating for themselves the educational and cultural opportunities that would prepare them to understand the demands of democracy (19). Because literacy was closely linked with the ideals of 'citizenry,' many literary societies attempted to help members develop skills that were essential to fulfilling the responsibilities of citizenship and achieving the promise of American democracy (19). …

Forgetting Futures: On Memory, Trauma and Identity , and: Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (review)

Studies in American Fiction251 many other major figures of the period, as well as lesser known artists, convened in her living room for weekly sessions of "contactual inspiration " or informal professional development. McHenry also notes the phenomenal affect that Terry McMillan and the popularity ofOprah Winfrey's Book Club have had on the publishing industry. In many ways, their accomplishments ironically show how a history of black literacy in which the "consumption of literature" as well as "the production of literature" was always visibly present though often ignored by the general public. Though the politics of respectability appears as a theme for most of the literary societies McHenry profiles, her thesis permeates this veneer to reveal the inclusivity of such groups rather than accentuating elitist aspirations. She creates an interesting narrative that judiciously intertwines cultural criticism with historical facts, all while remaining unbiased towards her middle- and upper-class subjects. We see how class-consciousness is overruled by common concerns for the intellectual growth of the entire black community. An added bonus for me (and possibly other regionalists ) is how McHenry at times positions members of early literary societies as dislocated regional subjects; when their northern home was just as hostile as the slave South, they became a race united. Likewise, by the turn of the century, black southern women became icons of the "Woman's Era," spreading literacy throughout the region during the birth of Jim Crow. I highly recommend Elizabeth McHenry's Forgotten Readersbecause it illuminates the innovation it took to "uplift the race" through informal basic literacy instruction. University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignSherita Johnson Ramadanovic, Petar. Forgetting Futures: On Memory, Trauma and Identity. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2001. 171 pp. Cloth: $70.00. Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: Univ. ofVirginia Press, 2002. 266 pp. Cloth: $49.50. Paper: $18.50. The early and mid-1990s saw an enormous amount ofscholarly analysis directed towards depictions of trauma in literature. The work of scholars such as Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, and Shoshana Felman inaugurated a field that was soon dubbed trauma theory. Since that time, trauma theory has evolved from a potentially evanescent academic vogue to a 252Reviews productive and durable interdisciplinary field of inquiry. In the wake of Bosnia, Kosovo, 9/11, and Iraq, trauma theory seems more immediately relevant than ever. Two recent books—Petar Ramadanovic's Forgetting Futures: On Memory, Trauma and Identity and Laurie Vickroy's Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction—each continue the development of this field in the new century by plotting different, but fruitful, courses in investigating the subject of literary trauma. Ramadanovic, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, divides his study into two sections: "Forgetting" and "Futures." The first of these sections lays the theoretical groundwork for the second by discussing Western conceptions of memory as articulated by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Hegel, and Nietszche. Against the Aristotelean notion of memory as a "presentation of the past in the present," Ramadanovic argues that memory "is irreducible to one temporal location . It is of the not yet, not only of the past" (3). The Platonic and Nietzschean conceptions of memory and forgetting particularly interest Ramadanovic, as he employs them to contest what he perceives to be an Aristotelean-derived conception of forgetting as the oppositional act to remembering. For Ramadanovic, forgetting is not simply the mere absence of memory but rather a distinct element of its own, a signifying interstice that marks an event as traumatic precisely because the traumatic event cannot be contained within the linear frameworks ofmemory and history. His readings of these major figures are brief but commendably insightful, and, in a genre that often considers Freud as the first intellectual to ever consider the question, it is highly refreshing to read a deeper archaeology of Western conceptions of memory. However, the study of trauma often sits uncomfortably alongside abstract theorizing, and when Ramadanovic moves from a discussion of Cicero to a review of the Bosnian conflict and the Dayton peace accords in but a few pages, the change in gears is jarringly abrupt. The strongest part ofthe book is Ramadanovic's discussion ofCicero's story of the poet...

A new dawn? french women and the liberation

This article draws on extensive archival and oral sources from Britanny, Toulouse, and Paris. It will discuss a number of aspects of the Occupation and Liberation experience for French women. It will first explore the importance attributed to the fact that women eventually gained their political rights in 1944, a measure that also saw an end to the “first wave” feminist movement that had believed that suffrage would resolve the “women's condition” and herald the start of a new era for women. This article will then move into an analysis of women and Collaboration during the Occupation offering a new approach to women's political involvement during the war. It finishes by presenting an overview of women's relationship to paid employment, the area where there was perhaps the greatest unfulfilled potential for women to experience a new beginning in the post-war period.

Book Review: Reviews: The Changing Same: Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory

What a pleasure! Deborah McDowell is good indeed. This is more than just a miscellany of occasional critical writings here she looks at defining moments in African-American women's fiction and its reception including the 'Woman's Era of the 1890s', the 1920s and 1930s Harlem Renaissance and the new Black Renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s. All these essays were composed during the 1980s when African-American women's writing was subject to intense debate both within the academy and further afield. In representing these excursions into that debate, McDowell has also critiqued her earlier positions, commenting on feedback from other critics, and sometimes modifying and updating her own opinions in the light of new work. The original essays themselves contain much that is insightful and theoretically engaging, but it is the italicized inserts that hold the real guts and force.

Reconstructing Motherhood: Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces

In his foreword to the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. names Phillis Wheatley the symbolic mother of the black female literary tradition and suggests that all subsequent black writers have evolved in a matrilinear line of descent.(1) The forty-volume Schomburg collection does much to flesh out this genealogy, for it includes several volumes of fiction and nonfiction from the era, the period between 1890 and 1910 that saw an unprecedented flowering of African American women's writing.(2) Contemporary black feminist critics have identified the political concerns motivating this generation of writers who, as Hazel Carby demonstrates, saw the novel as a form of cultural and political intervention in the struggle for black liberation from oppression. Central to this struggle, Carby suggests, was the project of reconstructing womanhood, for black women's public voice depended upon confronting and revising dominant domestic ideologies and literary conventions of womanhood.(3) But how was black motherhood reconstructed in the fiction and feminism of the woman's era? Given the historical erasure of black mothers as speaking subjects, how could maternity be claimed as a site of literary intervention at the beginning of the twentieth century?(4) Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900) provides fertile ground for exploring such questions, for her romance functions in large part as a revisionary history of black motherhood; spanning from 1790 to 1900 and from Bermuda to Boston, Contending Forces juxtaposes the stories of slave mothers with those of early twentieth-century black mothers. While the novel's plot revolves as much around the reconciliation of a mother and her child as the union of star-crossed lovers, critics of Contending Forces have not examined in any detail its complicated representation of maternity.(5) Yet Hopkins' ambivalent, and sometimes contradictory, portrayal of motherhood could contribute much to our understanding of early black women's writing about motherhood, from the vilification of white mothers in Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) to the valorization of black mothers in Frances E.W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892).(6) Contending Forces could serve, as well, as a benchmark for examining twentieth-century depictions of black maternity, for it reflects the contested meanings of black motherhood at the turn of the century, when white theorists attributed the degeneracy of the black to the maternal failings of black women, while black intellectuals lauded the mother's vital role in progress. Hopkins' representation of maternity necessarily draws on ideologies of womanhood and motherhood current in the post-Reconstruction era: nineteenth-century, white notions of True Womanhood, which emphasized piety, purity, and domesticity, as well as early twentieth-century definitions of the black mother, which echoed the tenets of True Womanhood to extol the virtuous mother's role in racial uplift.(7) Yet as Hopkins shows, neither of these maternal ideals took into account the common experience of black mothers, who were victims of racially-motivated sexual violence both before and after Emancipation. Her intervention in these ideologies thus involves not only telling the real story of black mothers (she claims that incidents portrayed in the early chapters of the book actually occurred) but also interrogating contemporary racial and sexual discourses that contributed to black women's subjugation and limited their efficacy as mothers.(8) After a brief summary of the novel's rather complicated plot and a preliminary analysis of one paradigmatic scene, I will examine the ways Contending Forces as a whole employs racialized constructions of maternity--of white true mothers and black race mothers--even as it disrupts notions of racial determinism and gender essentialism on which these constructions depended. …

Gertrude Bustill Mossell: Guiding voice for newly freed blacks

This article illuminates the life and work of Gertrude Bustill Mossell (1855–1948), a 19th‐century journalist who served as a guiding voice to newly freed African Americans. From the early 1870s until the turn of the century, Mossell a member of Philadelphia's African American aristocracy, wrote a women's column and news articles for a variety of newspapers and magazines, including the New York Freeman, New York Age, Indianapolis World, Woman's Era, and Colored American Magazine. Using some 50 extant articles from these publications, this study identifies the major themes in her work. It demonstrates that she wrote the first family advice column in the history of the African American press. In addition, it shows that she provided moral guidance and advocated racial reform and expanded rights for women. Finally, it considers Mossell as a case study of a 19th‐century African American woman journalist, identifying themes in her work that cohere with themes of other African American women journalists of the p...

Curtain calls: British and American women and the theater, 1660-1820

“I here and there o'heard a Coxcomb cry, Ah, rot-'tis a Woman's Comedy.” Thus Aphra Behn ushers in a new era for women in the British Theatre (Sir Patient Fancy, 1678). In the hundred years that were to follow - and exactly those years that Curtain Calls examines - women truly took the theater world by storm. For each woman who chose a career in the theater world of the eighteenth century, there is a unique tale of struggle, insult, success, good or bad fortune, disaster, seduction, or fame. Whether acting, writing, reviewing, or stage managing, women played a major, if frequently unacknowledged, role in the history of the theater from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. From Alpha Behn's earliest plays through the glorious celebrity of Sara Siddons, women molded the taste of the age and carved out in the theater one of the few available opportunities for independence and renown. Not all the women who tried succeeded, of course, and even the best faced opposition as they challenged the male stronghold of playwriting and theater managing. Curtain Calls maps the new territory as these pioneering women staked it for their own; it chronicles their lives, their triumphs, and their losses. We begin with Aphra Behn, whose first play was staged in 1670, and conclude in the early decades of the nineteenth century with Inchbald and Siddons. The one hundred and fifty years encompassed by their lives contain the careers of dozens of lesser-known women, a network, as Dr. Johnson would have it, encompassing both talent and tribulation. Contributors include: Edward Langhans, Linda R. Payne, Pat Rogers, Maureen e. Mulvihill, Deborah Payne, Betty Rizzo, Ellen Donkin, Frances M. Kavenik, Jessica Munns, nancy Cotton, Edna L. Steevs, Doreen Saar, Jean B. Kern, Katherine M. Rogers, Constance Clark, William J. Burling, Judith Phillips Stanton, Douglas Butler, Rose Zimbardo, and the editors.

Benazir Bhutto and the Future of Women in Pakistan

By a slim margin, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) was successful in the November 1988 elections, more than 11 years after its founder, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, had been overthrown by General Zia ulHaq in a military coup d'etat. Those ensuing years had witnessed much social confusion and antagonism within the country, much of it focused on the place of women in society. The lifting of martial law on December 31, 1985, did little to alleviate the existing scenario, as repressive laws continued to be passed right up to the end of Zia's tenure. State policy under Zia ul-Haq was pursued in a rather complicated ideological framework. His stance contradicted popular culture in which most people are personally very religious but not publicly religious. An untoward outcome was that by relying on an Islamic-based policy, the state fomented factionalism; by legislating what is Islamic and what is not, Islam itself could no longer provide unity as it was now defined to exclude previously included groups. Shi'a-Sunni disputes, ethnic disturbances in Karachi between Pathans and muhajirs (migrants from India), increased animosity toward Ahmediyyas, and the revival of Punjab-Sind tensions can be traced to Pakistan having lost the ability to use Islam as a common moral vocabulary. Most importantly, the state had attempted to dictate a specific ideal image of women that was largely antithetical to that existing in popular sentiment and in everyday life. Following the August 1988 plane crash in which Zia ul-Haq and a number of other high-ranking generals died, many people considered that the era of women's suppression in Pakistan had come to a close. Benazir Bhutto had led her party to victory, and had been invited by President

Female delinquency in the emancipation era: A review of the literature

By the mid-1970s studies began to indicate that the era of women's emancipation had been accompanied by changes in the volume and character of female lawbreaking. In this paper, I critically review the growing literature that has attempted to measure and explain the alleged changes in female delinquency. I examine whether females have remained traditional in their delinquency patterns, whether the observed changes (if they exist at all) are real or the result of changing societal reactions, and whether female delinquents have been “masculinized” or in other ways influenced by the women's liberation movement or changing gender roles. I also review explanations of female delinquency that are derived from social control, power-control, strain, and subcultural theories. Finally, I argue that more attention needs to be given to understanding the “role strain” inherent in females' attempts to negotiate ambiguous or contradictory gender roles, and that the concept of role strain offers a promising explanation of contemporary patterns of female delinquency.

Policy reform and women's health in New Zealand.

In this paper we take as a premise that women are among those least well served by current health services and policies. We look specifically at the situation of women in New Zealand, tracing how the legacy of the past has both encouraged a narrow chemicophysically biased view of people and their health and tended, because of the earlier “populate or perish”; philosophy, to equate women's health with maternity and infant health services. This history has ensured a secondary status for women's health issues through government funding that favors an illness service (public hospital system) and designates the private general medical practitioner as gatekeeper to all health services. As an alternative we propose a new era for women's health and argue the need for nurses and nursing to be more involved in the radical changes that are necessary.

"On the Threshold of Woman's Era": Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory

If the fifteenth century discovered America to the Old World, the nineteenth is discovering woman to herself.... Not the opportunity of discovering new worlds, but that of filling this old world with fairer and higher aims than the greed of gold and the lust of power, is hers. Through weary, wasting years men have destroyed, dashed in pieces, and overthrown, but to-day we stand on the threshold of woman's era, and woman's work is grandly constructive. In her hand are possibilities whose use or abuse must tell upon the political life of the nation, and send their influence for good or evil across the track of unborn ages. -FRANCES E. W. HARPER, Woman's Political Future