Lower-class Women Research Articles

Margaret Sanger in Translation: Gender, Class, and Birth Control in 1920s China

During her first and only successful lecture tour in China in 1922, Margaret Sanger set out to enlighten Chinese audiences by sharing information from the West about the modern, scientific practice of birth control. But the lines of communication were not so transparent, and her Chinese interlocutors were not only passive recipients in the process. This article highlights how gender and class identities critically affected the translation of Sanger’s message about birth control, through an analysis of Sanger’s autobiographical writings and coverage of her visit in Chinese periodicals. Although Sanger was keen to limit the fertility of lower-class Chinese women, for the most part her contraceptive message resonated among educated, middle-class Chinese men. Focusing on the influence of these varied gender and class identities allows us to delimit the boundaries of birth control discourse for educated Chinese women, who are otherwise largely absent from the historical record.

Paternalism and Imprisonment at Castle Thunder: Reinforcing Gender Norms in the Confederate Capital

Paternalism and Imprisonment at Castle ThunderReinforcing Gender Norms in the Confederate Capital Angela M. Zombek (bio) Castle Thunder’s inmates were a hard lot. In 1863, members of a special congressional investigative committee derided them as “desperate and abandoned characters,” mainly murderers, thieves, deserters, substitutes, forgers, and “all manner of villains.” Commandant George Alexander’s harshness inspired the Confederate Congress to investigate the legality of his favored punishments, which included whipping, bucking and gagging, and solitary confinement. Ultimately, the committee, and Alexander’s subordinates—like warden Baldwin T. Allen, who testified on his behalf—condoned his conduct, and emphasized the necessity of rigid rules, since anything less would hinder officers’ ability to control the motley crew of inmates.1 Scholars’ focus on military prisons has painstakingly chronicled inmates’ suffering and intentional maltreatment.2 But Castle Thunder had a broader function: the Confederate government consolidated power through establishment and control of military prisons. National control over prisons was radical, especially since antebellum southern civilians remained skeptical of state-controlled [End Page 221] penitentiaries and Americans generally believed that the national government should be restrained in criminal matters. But Confederate political and military officials eschewed antebellum disdain for institutions of confinement. They instead believed that military prisons should punish enemies, suppress dissent, and promote Confederate ideology.3 Click for larger view View full resolution Castle Thunder Prison, Petersburg (Richmond), April 1865, photograph by Andrew J. Russell. (Library of Congress.) Confederate military officials used Castle Thunder to create a gendered definition [End Page 222] of nationalism, exalted its commanders as prime examples of southern manhood, and castigated white male and female inmates as deviants whose recalcitrant gendered behavior threatened the cause. Prison officials exercised paternalism by using imprisonment to supervise civilians who betrayed the cause. Meanwhile, journalists crafted messages about prison officers and inmates that showed the southern public how to behave. Confederate officials like Castle Thunder commandant George Alexander and Richmond’s Provost Marshal John Winder used the prison to imbue gendered behavior with meaning, and the Richmond press helped southern civilians envision how proper southern men and women should support the national project.4 Click for larger view View full resolution General John N. Winder, C.S.A, before 1861. (Library of Congress.) Castle Thunder’s history points to how the Civil War disrupted gender norms [End Page 223] and exacerbated social anxieties, which Winder and Alexander corrected and controlled through imprisonment. They used the prison to guard white women in the absence of men, reprimand women who exhibited masculine behavior, and judge how men should balance their duties as heads of household with their obligations to defend the state. Castle Thunder provided a concrete reminder that southern nationalism required proper male and female behavior and that defiance warranted imprisonment.5 The Confederacy’s gendered version of nationalism remained engrained in southerners after war’s end. In postwar Richmond, Union victors maintained the prison for several months to bring order to the city, but southern inmates petitioned for release based on gender expectations that the vanquished Confederates promoted throughout the war. Many Castle Thunder inmates illuminate a paradox in gender dynamics that disturbed the southern social order, as many white and lower-class women assumed traditionally male roles, and imprisonment either emasculated men, or restrained hypermasculine enemies. White southerners had long prided themselves on maintaining a stable gender consensus in their slaveholding society. Under this construct, patriarchal white male heads of household wielded authority over dependents—wives, children, and slaves—and patriarchal power guided social, political, and economic relationships beyond the home. War, however, inspired Confederate officials to scrutinize the behavior of a wide range of “suspicious” characters of both genders, ultimately revealing that the South’s longstanding gender conventions did not command the loyalty necessary to sustain the war effort. Lower-class men and, perhaps more importantly, women who defied gender conventions rejected antebellum norms and took advantage of war’s chaos to create new opportunities. Conservative officials, like Winder and Alexander, made themselves the arbiters of female virtue and male honor to a degree unheard of in the antebellum period and used Castle Thunder to force compliance with Confederate nationalism, which depended on perpetuating the familiar, patriarchal social...

Class Advantage, Commitment Penalty

Research on the mechanisms that reproduce social class advantages in the United States focuses primarily on formal schooling and pays less attention to social class discrimination in labor markets. We conducted a résumé audit study to examine the effect of social class signals on entry into large U.S. law firms. We sent applications from fictitious students at selective but non-elite law schools to 316 law firm offices in 14 cities, randomly assigning signals of social class background and gender to otherwise identical résumés. Higher-class male applicants received significantly more callbacks than did higher-class women, lower-class women, and lower-class men. A survey experiment and interviews with lawyers at large firms suggest that, relative to lower-class applicants, higher-class candidates are seen as better fits with the elite culture and clientele of large law firms. But, although higher-class men receive a corresponding overall boost in evaluations, higher-class women do not, because they face a competing, negative stereotype that portrays them as less committed to full-time, intensive careers. This commitment penalty faced by higher-class women offsets class-based advantages these applicants may receive in evaluations. Consequently, signals of higher-class origin provide an advantage for men but not for women in this elite labor market.

Development and Welfare Discourses, Marginality and Cultural Interventions in Mahasweta Devi’s <i> Aajir<i>

This essay is an attempt to study the position of the marginalised communities in India caught in the web of the politics of development and welfare programmes, through a reading of the cultural and political ramifications of Mahasweta Devi’s Aajir (Devi’s dramatisation of her short fiction of this title in Bengali). The objective is to show how the text is a kind of cultural intervention with political implications in favour of the marginalised – low class caste people, untouchables, bonded labourers, tribals and women. It is to demonstrate not only how the context gets embedded in the text but also how the text participates in the context in reflecting on and influencing the context, revealing the text-context reciprocity.

Violência de gênero, desigualdade social e sexualidade: as experiências de mulheres jovens em Belo Horizonte

In this article we analyze how gender violence and social class inequalities intersect in the experiences of young women from different social classes with their sexuality. Departing from an analysis using both quantitative and qualitative data collected among young women who lived in middle-class neighborhoods and in poor communities (favelas) located in the central-south region of Belo Horizonte, we investigated the impact of gender violence on these young women’s sexuality. Our results showed how a partner’s violent and controlling behavior reduces young woman’s autonomy in this area, affecting her capacity of negotiating condom use, exposing her to unplanned pregnancies and STI’s, although this influence is moderated by social class. We also observed how the strong presence of traditional stereotypes of gender roles in the discourse of young women from both social classes contributed to naturalize gender violence, especially among young women of lower class.

Leisure-time physical activity and licit substance use in a population sample of young adults

The scope of this study was to assess the prevalence and factors associated with leisure-time physical activity, as well as to verify its association with licit substance use in a population sample of young adults. It is a cross-sectional population-based study with young adults aged between 18 and 35 years old, living in the urban area of the city of Pelotas in the Brazilian State of Rio Grande do Sul. Sample selection was performed by clusters, being composed of 1953 individuals, among the 82 selected census tracts. The practice of physical activity was evaluated using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ). The chi-square and Poisson regression tests were used for statistical analysis. The prevalence of young adults active in leisure-time physical activity was 25.3%; most were single males between 18 and 23 years, belonging to the people in the highest economic bracket and not smoking on a daily basis. Specific strategies should be developed to promote an active and healthy lifestyle, focusing on incentives for older, lower income class women who smoke.

Global reproductive inequalities, neo-eugenics and commercial surrogacy in India

India’s commercial surrogacy market literally produces humans and human relationships while sustaining global racial reproductive hierarchies. The post-colonial state’s aggressive anti-natalism echoes the broader global population control agenda framing the global South’s high fertility rates as a ‘global danger’ to be controlled at whatever cost, but is at odds with the neoliberal imperative of unrestrained global fertility tourism. Womb mothers (surrogates) subvert hegemonic discourses by taking control over their bodies and using their fertile bodies ‘productively’. But in controlling their own reproduction through decisions about fertility, sterilization and abortion in order to (re)produce children of higher classes and privileged nations, they ultimately conform to global neo-eugenic imperatives to reduce the fertility of lower class women in the global South. Surrogates creatively construct cross-class, -caste, -religion, -race and -nation kinship ties with the baby and the intended mother, disrupting hegemonic genetic and patriarchal bases of kinship, but fundamentally reify structural inequality.

Między ładem a chaosem: przygoda marszałka de Bassompierre w ujęciu Goethego i Hofmannsthala

de Bassompierre who lived at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. In his memoirs, Bassompierre describes an affair with a beautiful lower-class woman. Goethe, who anxiously watched the course of events during the French Revolution and was an eyewitness of the Napoleonic wars, includes his version of Bassompierre’s “adventure” in the cycle modeled on Decameron , entitled Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten . The work is mostly a praise of the idea of order and self-restraint. Using Goethe’s text, Hofmannsthal – one of the leading representatives of Vienna modernism – creates a kind of palimpsest and deprives the story of its didactic context. Focusing in his version on aestheticism, Hofmannsthal emphasizes inexpressibility of sensations and celebration of sensuous experiences. As a result, he creates a polemic version of Goethe’s work.

If Orange Is the New Black, I Must Be Color Blind: Comic Framings of Post-Racism in the Prison-Industrial Complex

The acclaimed Netflix original series, Orange Is the New Black (OITNB) assembles a cast of characters representing a large swath of the population normally excluded from popular, mainstream television, including women of color, lower-class women, and queer/trans* women. Within the “tribal” organization of the fictitious Litchfield prison, the show's protagonist, Piper Chapman, naively struggles to understand the overt racialization of her new surroundings. Deploying a Burkean understanding of the comic frame, we argue that the first season of OITNB encourages audience identification primarily through the show's white, educated, upper-class central figure. Specifically, through Piper's animation of a comic corrective, OITNB enables poignant but limited critiques of U.S. post-racial fantasies (including myths of color blindness and racial equality) that so powerfully buttress the Prison-Industrial Complex.

조선시대 여성의 일상용 머리쓰개에 관한 연구

This article studied women's headdresses that appeared in the paintings of Joseon Dynasty. This examined the shapes of women's headdresses painted in genre paintings, record paintings and nectar ritual paintings from Joseon Dynasty and compared them to literatures and relics in order to analyze their types and characteristics. Headdress can be categorized into three types: (1) square cloth worn on the top of the head; (2) a kind of small cap; (3) Cloth that completely covers the head. The first type of headdress resembles the shape of Garima. In the early period of Joseon Dynasty, it was worn not only by Gisaeng, but also by both upper and lower class women. The second type of headdress includes a cap made by connecting several cloths, round cap, and cone-shaped cap. These two types are worn on top of the head. However, sometimes these were worn between the head and the chignon to fix the chignon. Also, these were used as hair accessories for decorative purposes. In particular, old women wore these headdresses and braided their white hair around them to fix the chignon. This way, the headdress not only kept the head warm, but also hid the old women's scanty hair. Headdress was usually made of black fabric and it was a simple hair accessory that replaced the wig. The third type of headdress was widely worn among lower class women. The cloth completely covered the head so that the hair would not fall when working. It also provided protection from cold and hot weather. According to paintings, there were many ways of wearing the cloth around the head.

Self-education, class and gender in Edwardian Britain: women in lower middle class families

Once societies embarked on programmes of mass education home schooling became essentially a middle-class project and remains so. This paper looks at the educational experiences of some lower middle class women at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for whom the resources of the middle-class home were simply not available. It explores both their experiences of formal schooling and of the educational provision they chose to seek and found among other groups and institutional frameworks in their society. The range and extended chronology of their educational experiences highlight the need to reconceptualise education as extended processes of physical, intellectual and moral socialisation not necessarily limited to the years of childhood and/or adolescence or time-stopped in any way.

A Flâneur in Philly: Class, Gender, Race, and All That Jazz

Between 1793 and 1797, a British musician who fancied himself a flâneur—a stroller, idler, time waster—moved to the United States to earn his living and travel around the country. William Priest’s letters to England contain insightful comments about urban life in the new nation, observations that the authors amplify and analyze using both newer GIS technology and good, old-fashioned techniques of labor historians. Although he arrived in 1793 in the midst of a severe yellow fever epidemic, Billy Priest, undeterred, walked through Philadelphia, noting a host of details about the nation’s capital, ranging from the conditions of daily life to the consequences of so many deaths caused by the disease. Using city directories, censuses, and tax lists, the essay maps a pre-industrial city in more detail than has ever previously been possible. Neighborhoods are recreated by occupation, race, gender, and commercial development. In addition, the authors examine the beginnings of one of the earliest organized labor movements by shoemakers, the transition in the work lives of middle- and lower-class women, and the struggles of ex-slaves to free themselves and create a vibrant free black urban community.

Low Class Women’s Recognition on ‘Yeol’ and its Meaning in Pansori Novels

Low Class Women’s Recognition on ‘Yeol’ and its Meaning in Pansori Novels

Love and Sexual Relationships in a Globalized World

With the development of globalized exchanges, sexual and/or sentimental relationships between developed and developing countries are becoming more and more frequent. Through the comparative study of relationships between and Thai or Malay people, we will see how and Oriental actors use hierarchies of gender, class and race to try to valorise their economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital. In Thailand, lower-class women seek access to financial stability while in the neighbouring country, upper-class women aspire to freedom from local culture. For men, what hides behind their desire of the “other” is a rejection of Occidental values, especially sexual equality, and a return to values considered more stable, traditional, and hierarchical. We will see how love interactions in a globalized context are an instrument to valorise the different forms of capital, in Bourdieu’s sense, and a way to redefine social hierarchies.

Female Labor in the Bible: Recognizing its Value While Exposing Reader Assumptions

Female Labor in the Bible:Recognizing its Value While Exposing Reader Assumptions Rannfrid Thelle A review of Women at Work in the Deuteronomistic History. By Mercedes L. García Bachmann. Pp. xv + 413. International Voices in Biblical Studies 4. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013. Paper, $54.95. This book is Mercedes García Bachmann’s revised doctoral thesis, which she completed at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (1999). The topic concerns lower class female labor in the Bible, in particular in the Deuteronomistic History (DtrH). This is a timely study on an important topic, which pursues a neglected field of inquiry involving the role and contribution of marginal women characters in the biblical world. The book challenges the conventional portrayals of women in ancient Israel, and ultimately seeks to revise the shame-honor scheme as an analytical model. Bachmann brings a perspective from the global “south,” with a liberation feminist approach that takes as its point of departure the intersection of gender and class. The book consists of nine chapters (an introductory chapter plus chapters 1–8). The introductory chapter is fairly short and functions more as a preface, in that it is a reflection shared with the readers that looks back on the writing process, while providing a rationale for the book’s organization and the use of analytical concepts such as “work,” “slave,” and “free.” Chapters 1–3 are introductory in the more traditional sense and discuss methodological and theoretical issues and history of research impacting the subject of the study. Chapters 4–7 explore women’s occupations and “work,” approached through various designations used to refer to or describe what these women are or do. Chapter 8 presents final reflections. The “Introduction: On Female Labor in the Hebrew Bible” begins by calling attention to the fact that many biblical characters, particularly women, function in narratives by virtue of their place as “dependents” and “expendables.” In fact, although the Bible portrays the ideal society as one which offered individuals socio-economic protections such as land ownership and free status, Israel acknowledged that this was not always the case, and even traced its own beginnings to one of bondage, from which they were delivered by YHWH. This observation sets the tone of the book by highlighting the existence of numerous figures that are overlooked or taken for granted, yet who contribute at key junctures in biblical narratives precisely because of [End Page 403] readers’ assumptions about these characters. After pointing out that the commonly applied shame-honor paradigm is not adequate in accounting for how the biblical texts assess all women, and that the descriptions usually offered of ancient Israelite women are too one-note and in fact resemble the modern middle class, Bachmann sets out to challenge what she refers to as the “dominant view” of what is honorable. The chapter also contains a discussion of the semantic field of “work” and a rationale for why female labor in the realms of religion and politics is not included in this study. Chapter 1, “The Challenge of Studying Working Women,” says Bachmann, “lays bare the main assumptions and choices made in this study in terms of the body of research, methodology, and the lens through which I read,” (p. 5). Presenting her work as an “exegetical study from a liberation feminist perspective,” (p. 17), she discusses a variety of challenges associated with the task of studying lower class women’s labor, and proceeds to account for her methodologies. Bachmann outlines her reasons for choosing to focus on the Deuteronomistic Historian, one of which is that the narrative material “allows for a sample of terms inserted in believable contexts,” (p. 23). Further, she surveys a number of terms describing women’s work and the grammatical features of these, thereby demonstrating the elusive nature of these terms. Her critique of a number of models from social scientific research (the concept of “peasantry” as a social model, the “Mediterranean Basin culture” model) develops into a large section devoted to a discussion of the difficulties involved in applying the shame-honor paradigm if, as she insists, a focus on the categories of gender and class are to be maintained as...

Iran's Changing Gender Dynamics in Light of Demographic, Political, and Technological Transformations

Iranian society is in a period of transformation connected to demographic changes, social forces, politics, economics, and advances in social media. Despite facing on-going obstacles, Iranian women continue to put great effort into gaining equal rights and privileges, a higher level of social and political inclusion, as well as a higher level of gainful employment—with the caveat that lower class women with less education and fewer resources experience more obstacles and injustices than women from the more educated middle and upper classes. However, high unemployment among men and particularly women has exacerbated inequalities in Iranian society despite the country's demographic improvements and other markers of modernization (lowered fertility and mortality, educational attainment, increase in marriage age, etc.). The challenge is: Can Iran diversify its oil-dependent economy to support its youth bulge and how might those changes impact women's status in society? The article also briefly touches on how social media, Tweeting, YouTube, and blogs, coincident with an unusually large and much more educated post-Revolution/post-Iran-Iraq baby boom generation, have contributed to a new generation that questions the status quo. However, only time can tell whether a strong presence in the virtual public space will translate into a stronger presence in the physical public space.

Back to Work? Childcare Negotiations and Intensive Mothering in Santiago de Chile

In this article, I reflect on the negotiations involved in childcare arrangements during the first year of life in two groups of mothers in Santiago. I focus on the ways in which local imageries of motherhood interact with global tendencies in intensive mothering and the current public encouragement of increasing women’s participation in the workforce. In this study, low-income and lower middle class women prioritize staying with the baby over the year, becoming the main caregiver, and opting for giving up work and other relationships. In contrast, middle-class women go back to work by month six and combine different childcare alternatives. I argue that these women embody two ways of being a mother following different kinship expectations, relationship with expert trends, and cosmological aspects of motherhood. Consequently, they follow different paths in childcare decision making and in the management of concomitant emerging feelings such as guilt.

From Foot Fetish to Hand Fetish: Hygiene, Class, and the New Woman

Through an intertextual reading of Xiao Hong's short story “Hands” and other examples culled from the broader print culture of the Republican period, this article traces the rise of a kind of “hand fetish” in modern China and examines the array of cultural meanings embedded in this particular imagination of modern femininity. The hand fetish came in vogue in a time when the woman's body became the site and symbol of modernization and national rejuvenation in the wake of the antifootbinding movement. To a certain extent, women's hands are elevated to the glamorous status from which their now demonized other, the bound feet, have been eternally banished. As the modern replacement of the stigmatized bound feet, hands now emerge as the female body part associated with civilization, progress, hygienic modernity, and glamour and grace of intelligent and independent women who embody the new universal standard of modern beauty. Despite all the hype about the apparent disparity in meaning attributed to the different parts of the female body, however, I argue that the foot fetish and the hand fetish are related to each other by a hidden continuity or affinity. Women's elegant and dainty hands, much like their bound feet in the past, express an elitist distance from labor and engrave the notion of class within the notion of femininity. But to simply assert that the hand fetish is nothing other than the survival of the old class bias in a new form is to miss the complexity of the picture. What makes the Chinese fetishization of clean and elegant hands particularly fascinating is the extent to which familiar categories of gender and class become “raced” in the process of their rearticulation. Xiao Hong's story alerts us to the operation of what I'd like to call “the logic of internal racialization” in both elite and popular imaginations of modern femininity. While those who want to project an image of being modern are eager to conform to a white ideal of beauty, they fixate their contrastive other in a fragmentary image of blackness. The realization of this logic is partly achieved through frequent invocations of the discourse of hygiene, the scientific arm of racist ideologies, in representations of lower-class women. The discourse of race thus provides the old categories of difference — gender and class — a new language for self-representation, a new aura of legitimacy and respectability, and a new life.

Rethinking Feminism in Colonial Korea: Kang Kyǒngae and 1930s Socialist Women's Literature

In the early 1930s, a new group of women writers with a leftist inclination emerged on the Korean literary scene. Some critics have questioned the feminist commitment of these writers, suggesting that their works may have subordinated the cause of women's liberation to that of a socialist revolution. In critically assessing this view, this article embeds the works of women writers in their contemporary social and cultural context. The focus of discussion throughout are the works of Kang Kyǒngae, perhaps the most prominent and representative writer of the group. Leftist women such as Kang, it is argued, espoused socialism not as an alternative to feminism but as a variant feminist outlook in order to address the interest of lower-class women. Kang's portraits of proletarian women contested from a class perspective the contemporary cult of domesticity, which was promoted by both colonial authorities and Korean nationalists. And while Kang refrained from openly confronting the socialist patriarchy, she criticized it in its quotidian form, the chauvinism of leftist male intellectuals. Alongside a socialist commitment, the suggestion is that leftist women's literature had a genuinely feminist function within the discursive environment of colonial Korea.

Diagnostic diversity: The role of social class in diagnostic experiences of infertility

Research in the area of the sociology of diagnosis has recently expanded. Despite this development, the foundations of the social aspects of diagnoses, including race, class and gender, are relatively unexplored. Understanding such diversity is important, however, as researchers have shown that diagnoses have significant repercussions on the illness experience. This article is an effort to overcome this gap in the literature by examining class diversity in interpretations and understandings of diagnoses. Using the medicalised condition of infertility as a case example of class differences around diagnoses, I conducted 58 in-depth interviews with infertile women of various class backgrounds in the USA. By comparing the lived experiences of infertility between higher and lower class women, I explore differences in the understanding, interpretation and outcomes of diagnoses, specifically. Furthermore, among lower class women, I examine how they understand infertility outside the medical diagnostic framework. The findings reveal how interpretations and experiences of diagnoses vary depending on an individual's social location. In other words, the study demonstrates that class matters in terms of diagnoses and their understanding.