Middle-class Women Research Articles

Confidence as capital: pageantry and social reproduction

Pageantry has historically rewarded women who pursue normative standards of beauty. With neoliberal feminism focusing on women’s empowerment, United States pageantry is marketed to women as a space that awards well-rounded competitors with scholarships and other monetary rewards. Using the frameworks of neoliberalism and embodied capital, we investigate how pageant participants conceptualize confidence in the pageant context. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with pageant stakeholders, we conclude that participants perceive confidence as a resource gained from competing on the pageant stage and a trait that is necessary for competing in pageants. Confidence is embodied capital obtained through self-investment that helps women construct and maintain the ideal pageant femininity. However, confidence is mostly available to middle-class and wealthy women, resulting in reproduction of the class and gender systems. These findings also reveal that pageantry instills and rewards neoliberal principles and postfeminist sensibility, specifically the notion that women’s social mobility in the U.S. is connected to individual effort and investment through capitalism. As such, the values of pageantry overlook systemic barriers to achievement for marginalized women.

“We Were Put Out of Good Jobs”: Women Night Workers in New York and the Origins of the Women’s Equal Opportunity League

Abstract In the 1910s, U.S. social reformers advocated for labor laws to protect women who worked in factories. The laws included bans on women working at night. In New York, a small contingent of night-working women who had lost their jobs objected. Arguing that the laws were paternalistic and harmful, they formed the Women’s Equal Opportunity League. The group opposed all single-sex laws and ultimately won repeal of New York’s night work ban for printers, elevator operators, and transit workers. Night work was the stage on which reformers’ ideas about the greater good conflicted with arguments for women’s autonomy. Whether and what kind of work women should do at night was a conflict about class, motherhood, and self-determination. This article profiles three leaders of the Women’s Equal Opportunity League—printer Ella M. Sherwin, transit guard Margaret Hinchey, and streetcar ticket agent Mary A. Murray. All three were devoted union members whose opposition to women-only laws made them dissidents within their unions. They remained shift workers their entire lives while lobbying state legislatures and Congress to demand formal legal equality for women. Histories of the early Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) have emphasized the support of upper- and middle-class women. These working-class women, who had long opposed protective legislation, later demanded the ERA—not in spite of the prospect that it would nullify single-sex labor laws, but because they hoped it would. Theirs was a minority position, and paying attention to it reveals the complexity of class conflict at the root of a feminist dispute which persisted long into the twentieth century.

In the Grip of Traditionalism? How Nigerian Middle-Class Working Mothers Navigate Normative Ideals of Femininity

Changing socioeconomic conditions are enticing more and more Nigerian mothers to work and pursue careers. This article explores how middle-class professional women navigate working mother subjectivities in the context of Nigeria’s strong patriarchal culture, where traditional notions of maternal femininity prevail. We argue that the working mother’s subjectivity is a key site where the struggle over gendered cultural meanings takes place. Drawing on 32 qualitative interviews, we demonstrate how a small group of women refused traditional feminine subject positions; however, most mothers either embraced or reluctantly acquiesced to traditional femininity, despite having access to broader cultural repertoires and material resources. By unveiling the complexities of the cultural appeal of traditional femininity and social penalties for breaching it, the article extends our understanding of how patriarchal cultures resist gendered change and the nuances and limits of individual patterns of resistance.

How social class shapes breast cancer risk perspectives and prevention practices of Australian midlife women: a qualitative study using the concept of ‘breast cancer candidacy’

BackgroundThe increasing incidence of breast cancer and disease burden is a significant public health concern. While 30% of breast cancers could be prevented through addressing modifiable risk factors, misconceptions among women about breast cancer risks hamper primary prevention. In the absence of primary prevention, secondary prevention such as mammography increases the early detection of breast cancer and improves health outcomes. However, current population-level screening rates indicate secondary prevention is suboptimal. More effective public health efforts to improve breast cancer prevention are required. Given breast cancer is socially patterned, this work explores how social class impacts women’s breast cancer prevention practices. This study uses the concepts of lay epidemiology and candidacy as a mechanism to understand women’s breast cancer risk perspectives. It engages Bourdieu’s relational social class theory to unpack how women’s social, cultural, and structured life contexts shape these perspectives and their considerations regarding primary and secondary prevention.MethodsIn this qualitative study 43 Australian midlife women (aged 45–64 years), were interviewed to explore their understandings of breast cancer risks, how they perceived their own risk, and how this shaped their prevention behaviours. A theory-informed thematic analysis applying Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital, and fields to understand how women’s social class positions shapes risk perspectives and prevention practices was conducted.ResultsThis social class analysis showed differences in how women engage in breast cancer discourse, consider risks, and participate in breast cancer prevention. Middle-class women prioritise health promoting practices and were more likely than working-class and affluent women to attend mammography screening. Working-class women experience structural factors, like low income, stress and difficult life circumstances, which hamper primary prevention practices and for some screening is not considered or prioritised, and their decisions not to screen are less active. Affluent women often do not consider themselves at-risk due to their healthier ‘lifestyles. ’They suggest that this, and their knowledge of screening benefits and harms allows them to make informed decisions not to screen.ConclusionsWomen interpret and understand breast cancer risks differently and enact prevention practices within the parameters afforded by their social class positions. These findings are useful to inform improved public health approaches regarding both modifiable breast cancer risks and increasing mammography screening. To improve equity in breast cancer prevention efforts, such approaches must respond to limitations based on social class and address structural factors that impact prevention practices.

Kitchen Hinduism: Food politics and Hindi cookbooks in colonial North India

Abstract This article deliberates on the entanglements between politics and the history of food, health, and gender in Hindu middle-class households of early twentieth-century North India, through the genre of printed cookbooks in Hindi. While cookbooks became important nodes through which to construct an ideal Hindu housewife and kitchen, they were also a place where educated, middle-class women’s voices came to be heard, recorded, and published. The article shows how and why cookbooks are an important source for writing gendered social histories of the Hindu middle classes in modern India. Simultaneously, reflecting on the larger politics of food, the article focuses on the social identities embedded in these culinary texts, and the multiple meanings they embodied, as they strengthened gender, caste, and religious boundaries, constructed a past golden culinary age, upheld ayurvedic knowledge, bemoaned the present state of culinary sciences, used food to overcome the malaise of the middle classes, fashioned an ideal Hindu upper-caste palate as synonymous with a vegetarian diet, and imagined a healthy family and a strong Hindu nation through culinary idioms.

Women Education under the Reign of the Mughal Empire

In this communication, the education system of women during Mughal reign is presented. Throughout the Mughal era, women's status was tiered. In the Mughal era, women's education was regarded as less significant than that of males by both Muslims and Hindus. Studying Literature and Education was only available to women from royal class and noble class. Getting education for middle class and lower class women was very stringent due to Purdah System, Early marriage, social taboos and many more reasons. Many Mughal Princess such as Gulbadan Begum, Mumtaz Mahal, Noor Jahan, Jahan Ara, Roshan Ara, Sati al-Nisa Khanam and many more were taught literature and language. Many of them were well versed in poetry. During the Mughal era, women also made significant contributions to education through the establishment of institutions, in addition to their literary works. Some princess and women belonged to noble families had constructed mosque and attached Madrasas to it for imparting education.

„O Kinder, möchtet Ihr dergleichen nie erfahren“

Abstract The autobiography of Margarethe Elisabeth Milow, a merchant’s daughter from Hamburg, is not only a precious source for the living conditions of protestant middle-class women in the 18th century, but it also illustrates that writing was practised as one habit among many others. The paper shows that the formally heterogeneous text owes its existence to strict routines, which Milow carried out conscientiously until her death. As she addresses her report to her children, it can also be read as an educational text: Fulfilling the demand of the admired theologian Julius Gustav Alberti for a progressive religious education centred on the life of the individual, Milow places herself as a narrator matured by female experience who finds instructive exempla in her own life story. Finally, the paper reveals a tension in Milow’s writing: On the one hand, she writes (family) history out of a strong sense of duty, on the other hand, she writes for the pleasure of exploring her talent to tell effectively constructed stories.

‘In Cuba I began my career as a cook’: the intersection between food, class and the German-Jewish female experience of prewar emigration

ABSTRACT This article investigates the relationship between middle-class German Jewish women and food in the context of prewar emigration. Often these women were leaving culturally, economically, and materially rich lives, yet arrived in Britain, America, and other shorelines with very little. Rationing and cultural differences added complex layers to their experience of hosts’ foodscapes. The paper argues that food and its material culture were key parts of German Jewish women’s toolkits for negotiating emigration. Additionally, the article argues that the loss of middle-classness was a defining and enduring feature of their emigratory experience, which is revealed in their relationship to food.

Predicting Prenatal Depression and Assessing Model Bias Using Machine Learning Models

BackgroundPerinatal depression is one of the most common medical complications during pregnancy and postpartum period, affecting 10% to 20% of pregnant individuals, with higher rates among Black and Latina women who are also less likely to be diagnosed and treated. Machine learning (ML) models based on electronic medical records (EMRs) have effectively predicted postpartum depression in middle-class White women but have rarely included sufficient proportions of racial/ethnic minorities, which has contributed to biases in ML models. Our goal is to determine whether ML models could predict depression in early pregnancy in racial/ethnic minority women by leveraging EMR data. MethodsWe extracted EMRs from a large U.S. urban hospital serving mostly low-income Black and Hispanic women (n = 5875). Depressive symptom severity was assessed using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 self-report questionnaire. We investigated multiple ML classifiers using Shapley additive explanations for model interpretation and determined prediction bias with 4 metrics: disparate impact, equal opportunity difference, and equalized odds (standard deviations of true positives and false positives). ResultsAlthough the best-performing ML model's (elastic net) performance was low (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve = 0.61), we identified known perinatal depression risk factors such as unplanned pregnancy and being single and underexplored factors such as self-reported pain, lower prenatal vitamin intake, asthma, carrying a male fetus, and lower platelet levels. Despite the sample comprising mostly low-income minority women (54% Black, 27% Latina), the model performed worse for these communities (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve: 57% Black, 59% Latina women vs. 64% White women). ConclusionsEMR-based ML models could moderately predict early pregnancy depression but exhibited biased performance against low-income minority women.

Feminism, reproductive labour and the gendered welfare state in Britain’s National Insurance Act of 1911

Abstract In 1911, numerous women’s organizations, of varying political interests, mounted a campaign against the National Insurance Bill. Such opposition emerged despite feminist support for increased welfare provision in general and especially for the maternity benefit that the Bill proposed to introduce. Feminists criticized National Insurance for discriminating against women, especially its failure to recognize the economic contribution of women’s unwaged reproductive labour. They lobbied and campaigned for a series of amendments, some of which were successful. Feminist opposition to National Insurance sheds new light on an ongoing historiographical debate over the degree to which women were able to influence early welfare states prior to enfranchisement. Their activities cannot be easily contained within a framework of ‘maternalist feminism’, and call into question distinctions between ‘maternalist’/‘social’ feminism and ‘equality’ feminism, and middle-class and working-class women’s agendas. Instead, feminist campaigns around National Insurance reveal an early analysis of ‘social reproduction’ (the origins of which are usually traced back only to ‘second wave’ feminism) whereby British feminists participated in international conversations contesting the gendered definitions of work that went on to inform insurance-based welfare states across Europe.

Embodied Suzhi: Constituting Middle-Class Subjectivity in Post-Socialist China

Suzhi has grown into a key bio-policy that is crucial to governance and individual life in post-socialist China. Drawing upon Bourdieusian habitus, this article examines how millennial middle-class women live the class-based suzhi on a daily basis in the fields of education, marriage and real estate. Class divisions configure women’s habitual pursuit of cultural suzhi, and their embodied capital is reflected in practical situations. Women embody cultural suzhi and specific life experiences as middle-class daughters. They are inclined to have matched marriages to ensure personal happiness. But middle-class women demonstrate high neoliberal reflexivity in performing civil suzhi in the field of real estate. Neoliberal feminism is materialised through suzhi: Women exhibit reflexivity in their embodied experiences of suzhi while also internalising class structures and state power, thus reinforcing the insidious reproduction of social inequality.

Unveiling women’s ventilation practices and comfort in Jordan: video diaries as method for post-occupancy evaluation

ABSTRACT Understanding occupants’ behaviour and thermal preferences is key to designing less energy-intensive buildings. However, qualitative research methods to understand behaviour can be time-consuming and limited by participants’ recall bias and interpretations. This paper introduces a participatory method of ‘video diaries’ for interrogating occupants’ post-occupancy behaviour and energy use with their own mobile phones. The method is applied to understand middleclass women’s domestic and comfort practices in Amman, Jordan, focusing on their use of windows, fans and air-conditioning (AC). The study demonstrates the method’s effectiveness in capturing interrelated domestic energy-dependent practices, adaptive comfort and the materiality of homes. In particular, the video diaries reveal: (1) overlapping and ‘messy’ practices tied to the use of domestic technologies (e.g. AC and fans) in unexpected ways (e.g. always ventilating while cooking or exercising) that challenge conventional building simulation approaches that account for only thermally motivated actions; (2) diverse perceptions of comfort negotiated through gendered bodies and practices; and (3) the usefulness of video dairies as a form of self-reflection and increased awareness that may result in behavioural change. The study argues for using video diaries to supplement methods such as surveys and field measurements, particularly in post-occupancy evaluations or simulations for domestic energy use.

Unpacking women’s work during the COVID-19 pandemic in India: a feminist analysis of mainstream print media

ABSTRACT This paper explores mainstream print media depictions of women’s work during COVID-19 and associated lockdowns in India. Specifically, it aims to understand perceptions of educated upper- and middle-class women regarding remote working arrangements during the pandemic. It delineates two broad themes that emerge from an analysis of selected articles in four national dailies; first, many women regarded these arrangements as mutually beneficial for women employees as well as their workplaces, and its counternarrative characterised by women having to juggle paid and care work with little support from the family, market or state. The paper then unpacks the arrangement of work from home that emerges in the media analysis and offers a critique of the simplistic and binary understanding of flexibility, choice, and agency sustained by the neoliberal and postfeminist framing of pandemic work arrangements. Our analysis provides a feminist critique of these dominant perceptions that invisibilise the complexity and heterogeneity embedded within women’s experiences. Finally, the paper reiterates the urgent need to consider the structural factors that undermine gender equality across work and home; and pushes for a rethink of neoliberal and postfeminist notions of ‘flexibility’, ‘choice’ and ‘agency’ through the intersecting lenses of gender, labour, care work, and time.

The Politics of Menstruation

Menstrual blood is still regarded as embarrassing and taboo in many places all over the world. This article focuses on the study of the Red Tent as an example of feminist-spiritual menstrual activism established in 2007 in the US because it represents an important form of breaking the menstrual taboo. Although contemporary spiritualities present themselves as nonhierarchical and gender equal, spirituality and well-being in the women's circles is predominantly practiced by cisgender, heterosexual, and white middle-class women, excluding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and others (LGBTQ+). Constructs around the sacredness of female experiences (menstruation, menopause) are problematic for transgender women who do not share these experiences, and a lack of diversity may perpetuate systematic inequities and discrimination. This article discusses whether the Red Tent in Slovenia is open to include transgender and nonbinary people. By creating alternative domains of representation in which nonnormative bodies can exist, we disrupt the sex/gender system and dismantle normative femininity and masculinity. The article argues that in this way the Red Tent has the potential to subvert the dominant ideology of gender binary construction by providing alternative models for the embodiment of gender to challenge traditional conservative gender essentialisms in society. The methodology employed consists of ethnographic fieldwork, which was performed in the Red Tent gatherings and semistructured in-depth interviews with participants who host or participate in them. Because a part of the scope of the research “lives” in the cyber world, the ethnographic research methodology was integrated with the phenomena and data obtained from the internet in the form of netnography.

Feeling social change in the gut: gyāstrik and the problematisation of domestic roles among Newar women in contemporary Nepal

Drawing upon 15 months of research conducted in 2018–2019 in Bhaktapur, Nepal, this paper examines how middle-class women experience and make sense of gyāstrik (an umbrella term for multiple gut disorders) as an embodiment of social change. Enumerating dietary injustices and distress following unmet middle-class expectations of well-being and domestic intimacy as a primary cause of the condition, these women narratively problematised social norms and found ways out through the concomitant vocalisation of physical pain and social discontent. While illness epistemologies differ (with the persistence of mind-body dichotomies on the one hand and the centrality of notions of well-being and ideals of self-care on the other), these accounts demonstrate both a passive and active role of the gut in the social change experience, inviting to take the gut as the site where somatic modes of ‘attention’ and ‘action’ enable the navigation of personal life trajectories and the negotiation of social change itself.

A Critical Engagement with the Conceptualization of Sexual Harassment in International Human Rights Law

ABSTRACT This article discussess the concept of sexual harassment in international human rights law (IHRL). After analysing how sexual harassment emerges in two different legal traditions, I investigate the transformations the concept has undergone. I create an outline of sexual harassment as a concept and of certain contexts in which it is conceptualized in international human rights law. The research is grounded in critical feminist studies and intersectionality theory. I investigated an extensive number of legal texts, including various IHRL treaties, soft law, and interpretations by treaty bodies, with a focus on the concept of a hypothetical ‘victim’ within the sexual harassment narrative. This was done by delving into the linguistic choices present in legal documents that deal with sexual harassment. I conclude that sexual harassment in IHRL is largely constructed around the ‘universal subject’ of the white cisgender middle-class women, with other identities perceived as exceptions. This leads to the exclusion of subjects who are different from the imaginary victim, thus creating people, spaces, and settings in which sexual harassment is neglected by the law.

Awareness, acceptance, and consumption pattern of millets among ever-married women in an urban area of Delhi: A cross-sectional observational study

Background: Millets are a great source of fiber, minerals, and vitamins and are well-known for their excellent nutritional value. They have been part of traditional diets in India. Aims & Objectives: The study was conducted to assess millet awareness, acceptance, and consumption among married women in an urban area of Delhi. Methodology: A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted using a semi-structured questionnaire to collect information on a sample of 262 married women residing in the Tilak Nagar urban area of Delhi. Results: It was found that 78.9% of middle-class women consume millets at least once a month, compared to 64.9% of lower-class women (P value 0.044, ?2 =4.053). 70.9% of the women who were aware of millet significantly consumed it. Conclusion: The findings showed that consuming millet is strongly linked to both socioeconomic status and awareness about millet.

Lin Huiyin, House Beautiful, and women’s place in architectural culture in the United States in the 1920s

Scholarly discussions of the experiences that Lin Huiyin would have had as a student in the United States between 1924 and 1928 have yet to include the experiences she might have had outside the classroom that educated her about contemporary and historic architecture in the country and about the role that women at the time had in understanding and shaping it. The shelter magazine House Beautiful provides an overlooked indication of the exposure to and participation in architectural culture available to middle class and wealthy women in the United States in the years in which Lin Huiyin studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. Understanding how the magazine, which was written largely by and for women, celebrated the architecture of the country’s own past, as well as of China, and the way in which it provided a stepping-stone to either a literary or an architectural career suggests the encouragement Lin may have received from the women she met and how they in turn may have been inspired to take an interest in the field, at a time when there were very few female architects.

Lanka Mahila Samiti, Mary Rutnam and girls’ education

This article engages with the maternal education politics in late colonial Sri Lanka by looking at the implementation of maternal health in the gendered syllabus of middle-class girls’ schools. After...

Maternal early life and prenatal stress in relation to birth outcomes in Argentinian mothers.

Environmental influences before and during pregnancy significantly impact offspring development. This study investigates open research questions regarding the associations between maternal early life stress (ELS), prenatal psychosocial stress, prenatal hair cortisol (HC), and birth outcomes in Argentinian women. Data on ELS, prenatal life events, HC (two samples representing first and second half of pregnancy), and birth outcomes were collected from middle-class Argentinian women (N=69) upon delivery. Linear mixed models indicated that HC increased from the first half to the second half of pregnancy with considerable variability in the starting values and slopes between individuals. Mothers who experienced more ELS, were taller, or more educated, tended to show lower increases in HC. Older age was positively related to HC increases. Our data did not suggest an interaction between ELS and prenatal life events in relation to HC. We found that the change in HC was most likely negatively associated with birth weight. Our data are most compatible with either a weak or the absence of an association between ELS or prenatal life events and absolute values of HC. Mothers with stronger increases in hair cortisol tended to have newborns with slightly lower birth weight. Hence, ELS and birthweight may either have been related to changes in cortisol exposure during pregnancy or to factors that influence accumulation or retention of cortisol in hair.