Shifting Gender Roles Research Articles

Worth a dozen men: women and nursing in the Civil War South

In antebellum society, women were regarded as ideal nurses because of their sympathetic natures. However, they were expected to exercise their talents only in the home; nursing strange men in hospitals was considered inappropriate, if not indecent. Nevertheless, in defiance of tradition, Confederate women set up hospitals early in the Civil War and organised volunteers to care for the increasing number of sick and wounded soldiers. As a fledgling government engaged in a long and bloody war, the Confederacy relied on this female labour, which prompted a new understanding of women's place in public life and a shift in gender roles. Challenging the assumption that Southern women's contributions to the war effort were less systematic and organised than those of Union women, Worth a Dozen Men looks at the Civil War as a watershed moment for Southern women. Female nurses in the South played a critical role in raising army and civilian morale and reducing mortality rates, thus allowing the South to continue fighting. They embodied a new model of heroic energy and nationalism, and came to be seen as the female equivalent of soldiers. Moreover, nursing provided them with a foundation for pro-Confederate political activity, both during and after the war, when gender roles and race relations underwent dramatic changes. Worth a Dozen Men chronicles the Southern wartime nursing experience, tracking the course of the conflict from the initial burst of Confederate nationalism to the shock and sorrow of losing the war. Through newspapers and official records, as well as letters, diaries, and memoirs--not only those of the remarkable and dedicated women who participated, but also of the doctors with whom they served, their soldier patients, and the patients' families--a comprehensive picture of what it was like to be a nurse in the South during the Civil War emerges.

"Between Death and Life": Mobility, War, and Marshallese Women's Songs of Survival

Q: Can you tell me about Marshallese music before the missionaries? A: I'm not sure about music before the missionaries, but I know that the women always made battle songs. --Bikinian councilman Majuro, interview by the author, 2009 In 2006 Women United Together in the Marshall Islands (WUTMI), the nongovernmental umbrella women's organization from the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), released video intended to address the pervasive domestic violence severely compromising the lives of women throughout the developing island nation. (1) WUTMI translated the title of the film from Marshallese, Ekakwikwi Jinen Emmaan, to English, A Call to Arms. (2) The longer, more accurate translation, a call to sons to become angry through jealousy and avenge the injuries that have been done to their mothers, echoes the mother son relationship central to Marshallese cosmology. The film draws on traditional narrative and the rhetoric of warfare that reveal the customary power of women in Marshallese society to secure resolution following conflict. The film also evidences shifting gender roles as women have expanded their traditional vocal and musical roles intimes of conflict to include sounding symbolic and literal ekakwikwi (call to arms). Framed by modern ideological terrain, the film self-reflexively locates in global context where male-dominated hegemonic warfare as source of power is normalized. As the film progresses, domestic violente becomes the intelligible analogue for imperial violence, and the women call on their sons to confront the damages done by both the legacies of colonial involvement and current US militarism and neocolonialism. (3) The destabilization of women is presented as the destabilization of Marshallese culture in its entirety. (4) And what we hear are women assuming the responsibility to sound battle calls amidst unceasing violente with no end in sight. Cultural productions such as A Call to Arms participate in the complex processes of Marshallese indigenous identity construction by emphasizing the stability of traditional gender relations as an extension of the stability of the traditional Marshallese woman. When the viewer becomes attuned to the significations, many of which are referenced through sound-symbolism associated with traditional instruments that are rarely used today, she can then understand stability as host of multivalent mobilities afforded to women through their customary attributes that create and maintain affective alliances. Academic literature has, however, reproduced dichotomous gender associations, depicting the women as in opposition to the mobility of men, at times positing the complementarity of this gender relation and at other times failing to address the distinction between relational versus oppositional identities. (5) While there is historical and evidence to connect women to stability (and social efficacy in doing so), I argue that by examining women's traditional musical and vocal gender roles, specifically during warfare, we can better explore how women have regenerated culture as mechanism of stability during times of instability by maintaining situational flexibility, or the ability to maneuver and negotiate between multiple identities and identifications. (6) I suggest that this reading of women's traditional roles breaks from Western conceptualizations of bounded identities replete with polarized binaries, such as mobile and immobile or stable and unstable. Failing to address, in Joshua Tucker's terms, how cultural performances can clarify the ongoing resignification of indigeneity itself runs the risk of marking political projects of indigeneity as dictated solely by the conditions that have necessitated such projects rather than understanding the projects in, or on, indigenous terms, as negotiations of these conditions within spaces that archive the unique traditions and histories of Marshallese and other indigenous populations more broadly. …

Integrating American Violence

Integrating American Violence David Grimsted (bio) Rachel Hope Cleves. The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xvi + 296 pp. Figures, notes and index. $82.00. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel. Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. xi + 198 pp. Figures, map, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.50. The Reign of Terror in America and Bleeding Borders suggest how studies of American social violence have moved from counting and analyzing incidents of murder, mayhem, and mobbing as aberrant forms of human action to seeing turbulence as an ordinary tactic of personal and social jockeying. Neither book deals deeply with incidents of social violence. Borders brings to the 1850s Kansas conflict a focus on several current scholarly concerns: Native Americans, gender roles, Southern honor, and “whiteness” studies. Reign explores how Federalists’ reactions to French Jacobin violence after 1792 developed into political, peace, and antislavery positions. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel and Rachel Hope Cleves also share personal experiences that influenced their accounts, quick and acceptable confessionals that suggest some of their books’ strengths and limitations. Oertel’s epilogue talks of her pilgrimage from Kansas-born naiveté to deeper South wisdom. She “grew up hating the state of Missouri,” Oertel writes, and was taught that Northerners “were wholly different from those prejudiced backward southerners.” Through her studies and project, she found Kansas racism “a rude awakening,” though it was “liberating and enlightening” to learn that “the seeds of racism planted themselves throughout the country” (p.143). Oertel’s truths about the faults of Kansas and the country are self-evident, but her conviction of equal guilt blurs a bit the Kansas conflict she discusses. Oertel integrates her reasonably rich materials with much of today’s conventional academic wisdom. To remind people that Native Americans and women lived in “bleeding Kansas” is worthwhile, but little deepens the contours of the conflict. To add Indians to the hungry maw of “whiteness” scholarship, [End Page 617] where ethnics and poor whites have already been digested, is reasonable; at least they were commonly considered a racial group. Yet the general attitudes toward the two groups, Oertel suggests, were antithetical. For most white Kansans, equality or amalgamation with blacks was the epitome of social horror; for most concerned about Indians, sexual-social integration was the praised solution. Oertel points out the tidy irony that, by the time war-freed blacks came to Kansas in some numbers, the better regarded Indians were being pushed out. Women were more involved with the conflict, overwhelmingly in support of the same positions as their menfolk. Oertel claims proslavery women were contented with “the comfort of traditional patriarchal relations” (p.74). Her evidence comes from proslavery men; one Southern woman enters, to complain of having to work and comb her own hair when slavery ended. Oertel pays more useful attention to abolitionist women, a half a dozen of them wives who wrote and spoke to Northern audiences about proslavery and Democratic dishonesty and brutalism. She also chronicles uniform- and munitions-making and acts of family protection by Free State women. Oertel repeats some tales of “secret” female military units and heavy traffic on the underground railroad that one suspects were fables designed to sell books or remembrances much enhanced over time. We learn of one Mrs. Mandell, prepared to defend Lawrence with a pitchfork, standing with John Brown (who wasn’t there), and an armed Charles Robinson (who devised the nonresistance policy). By accepting extreme versions of docile “true womanhood” and “Victorian notions of feminine delicacy,” Oertel argues that abolitionist women “bled” or changed their gender roles in Kansas (pp. 58–60). Certainly this conflict-ridden frontier gave women new duties—and a few new opportunities. Yet there’s no evidence of a shift in gender roles; the activists already had been strongly in support of their moral/social causes before they came. Oertel’s discussion of masculinity centers on an alleged victory for the South in “the rhetorical battle over the meaning of manliness.” Southern manhood, she claims, glorified “aggression and violence,” while Northerners championed “self-restraint and moral rectitude”—until...

Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France (review)

Reviewed by: Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France Aurora Wolfgang (bio) Chris Roulston. Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2010. xii+240pp. US $99.95. ISBN 978-0-7546-6839-8. Most eighteenth-century novelists considered married life a topic unworthy of narration because of its stasis and perceived tedium, devoid of climactic narrative energy. Few eighteenth-century novels engage the new bourgeois model of companionate marriage advocated in the advice literature of the day. Chris Roulston seeks to demonstrate how some English and French novels actually did attempt to go beyond the seduction plot in order to engage the topic of marital life. She argues that the topic challenged authors to find new, less climax-driven forms of narrative, and concomitantly forced the marriage narrative into the old novelistic patterns of “conflict, disruption, and reconciliation,” thus interjecting instability into the depiction of the institution charged with societal permanence (6). Roulston asks whether the novel served to [End Page 383] bolster the institution of the bourgeois marriage or helped to destabilize it; her analyses clearly point to the latter. In her first chapter, “Advice Literature and the Meaning of Marriage,” Roulston examines the changing definition of marriage. While advice literature generally upheld the traditional values of the institution, it is nonetheless difficult to distinguish a clear chronological development of social attitudes towards marriage over the century. This is due, in part, Roulston argues, to the tendency of publishers to reprint or plagiarize the same material. Roulston seeks to bring out important debates surrounding eighteenth-century marriage by drawing on a wide array of critics. She addresses the move from wifely obedience to spousal mutuality; the relationship between the private and public space of the home; the debates around divorce; the male fear of effeminacy within the home; the shift from a passionate relationship to an amicable one in marriage; and general anxieties about shifting gender roles. Ultimately, Roulston finds that both the English and French, even with their differing emphases on the sentimental and sexual aspects of marriage, began to engage the topic of marital life in all its messy complexities in the eighteenth century. In chapter 2, “Accounting for Marriage,” Roulston examines two idealized representations of marriage—Samuel Richardson’s Pamela 2 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The New Heloise—to explore how the novel attempts to persuade readers of the advantages of matrimony in a narrative that lacks the momentum of the seduction plot since these novels “tell a story that has no endpoint” (57). Both novels promote a bourgeois ideal of marriage that depicts the virtuous wife as the moral compass of the family who, Roulston adds, bears the burden of rendering the marital narrative worthwhile within its daily repetitiveness and stability. Both fictional heroines exist within an “ideal of accountability” in which they must perform their exemplariness as wives; Pamela displays her virtue to justify Mr B’s unconventional choice of her, and Julie must redirect the passion of her past indiscretion with St Preux to embrace the political ideal of a stable, orderly, and productive married life. Paradoxically, the claim to personal fulfillment in these ideal fictional marriages for women is belied by the heroines’ ultimate discontent as they sacrifice their individual subjectivities to a social institution. In chapter 3, “Marriage and the Colonial Imagination,” Roulston builds on the critical insights of Felicity Nussbaum, Lisa Moore, Rachel Bowlby, Anne McClintock, and others, to examine how the marriage narratives of Sarah Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison and Isabelle de Charrière’s Letters of Mistress Henley incorporate the imagined threat of colonial empire (as the exotic other) to the circumscribed domestic spaces at home increasingly charged with embodying national identity. These colonial lands, she argues, “both enable and destabilize domestic ideology, and ... affect the process of narration” (96). While the colonial “other” posed an external threat to the notion of marriage, in chapter 4 it [End Page 384] is the disruptive wife who may undermine the stability of the bourgeois family. Roulston analyzes the figures of rebellious or destructive wives in Samuel Constant’s Le Mari sentimental, Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of...

Bulilima's "Look-South" Policy: Gender and Socio-Economic Implications

People in the southern and western border districts of Zimbabwe have always looked South (Botswana and South Africa) for economic prosperity. Reasons for this include proximity, common languages, as well as historical and cultural ties with ethnic groups in the two neighbouring countries. This trend, herein referred to as 'Bulilima's look-south policy' continues to flourish despite the recently declared official national 'Look-east policy' by government in response to Western-imposed 'targeted' economic sanctions over the land seizures from former white commercial farmers in 2000. Although the country has experienced significant increase in cross-border trade as well as brain and brawn (muscle) drain, significant in Bulilima District is brawn drain. In fact, it would appear a man in Bulilima is not yet a man unless and until he has gone to settle and work either in South Africa or Botswana. This southward drift has actually become an initiation ceremony for the district's youth and has reduced it into a district of children, women and the elderly. This study sought to assess the nature, socio-economic and gender implications of this southward flow for the south-western district of Bulilima near the border town of Plumtree. It also sought to identify the most mobile groups as well as specific reasons for migrating down south. The research applies a case study approach. Questionnaires, in-depth interviews, informal discussions as well as observations were used to solicit information from respondents. Systematic sampling was used to select questionnaire respondents while chiefs, school heads and nursing sisters at clinics /hospitals were subjects for interviews. Results show that males migrate more than women and that there was even a marked increase in the number of emigrants in the first decade of 2000 because of the dire socio-economic conditions prevalent in the country then. This southward migration has resulted in both negative and positive socioeconomic implications in the district. It has also seen a shift in gender roles whereby some roles, traditionally identified with a specific sex, are now done by both sexes. The study recommends that the export processing zone status of Plumtree town as well as the dollarization of the economy be used to harness this labour flight. It also recommends that a Bulilima District Association be formed by the emigrants (njivas) to help develop their district, and sensitization programmes on issues of health, children and women's rights be initiated.

Wall Street Women: Engendering Global Finance in the Manhattan Landscape

AbstractThe first generation of women on Wall Street has negotiated shifting gender roles from the fifties to the present, a period of transformation in global financial markets and business as well. Over much of this period, these women increasingly used city places—federal buildings, the stock exchange—to promote women's upward mobility on Wall Street. In this article, I focus on how two women's networks—The Financial Women's Association and the Women's Campaign Fund (now Forum)—deployed many tactics of visibility, including organizing events celebrating women's accomplishments in male dominated industries, using the press, and more recently incorporating feminist performance artist's autobiographical storytelling. The article traces the ways the women's networks shifted the sites of their spatial tactics in the eighties, from downtown financial spaces to more “democratic” professional‐managerial spaces throughout Manhattan. It also illuminates the ways the networks have increasingly incorporated tenets of liberal feminism into their events.

Decreasing Birth Rates in Europe: Reasons and Remedies

This article provides an overall survey of Europe's demographic patterns and statistics. It identifies economic progress, institutional modernisation, and development of the welfare state as factors contributing to fertility shifts and particularly to postponement of childbearing. The authors suggest Europe needs policies aimed at demographic renewal which focus first on diminishing direct costs borne by both parents and second, on diminishing indirect costs born predominantly by women. If Europe can effect the necessary paradigm shifts in gender roles and society it will prepare the way for holistic solutions.

Covenant Marriage and the Sanctification of Gendered Marital Roles

This study contributes to research on the deinstitutionalization of marriage and changing gender ideologies by focusing on a unique group of marriage innovators. With quantitative and qualitative data from the Marriage Matters project (1997-2004), this study used a symbolic interactionist perspective to compare covenant- and standard-married couples. Findings reveal that covenants are more traditional than standards across religious, marital, and gender attitude indices. Qualitative analyses suggest that covenants see their marital status as a powerful symbol to publicly display their beliefs about the benefits and necessity of traditional religious marriage. Covenant-married couples defuse the stigma of gender subordination by casting it as a service to God and by crafting a hybrid form of gender traditionalism that incorporates emotional ethics of egalitarianism. Conversely, standard-married couples view gender, marriage, and religion as diffuse, privatized, individualized matters. Implications are discussed in light of further research on contemporary marriage and shifting gender roles.

Gender, Power and Resistance to Change among Two Communities in the Western Cape, South Africa

This study investigates how women and men in the Western Cape, South Africa, construct their gender identities and roles. As part of the development of an HIV prevention intervention for men, key informant interviews and focus group discussions were conducted. Several themes regarding the construction of gender were identified. First, participants reported that traditional gender relations of male dominance and female subservience were still in evidence, along with traditional gender roles that mandated a division of labour between the household and paid workforce. Second, participants reported a shift in gender roles and relations in the direction of increased power for women. Last, hostile resistance to changes in gender power relations was evident in the discussions. Redefining masculinity and femininity and shifting gender relations in the direction of `power with' instead of `power over' is perhaps a necessary prelude to lasting social change and curbing the HIV epidemic in South Africa.

'This is the Time to Get in Front': Changing Roles and Opportunities for Women in Liberia

Most research on women in war focuses on female losses. This article demonstrates that wars may also bring gains. The scope of political and economic roles that Liberian women perform today appears to be larger than before the war. Both individually and collectively certain women have gainfully used openings the war provided them. The article discusses the historicity of Liberian gender roles examining the social subgroups of politicians businesswomen womens organizations employees and school girls. Changes have also been fostered by the international peace-building and development business. Although the realization of female ambitions seems to be constrained by various institutional and economic factors Liberia may harbour a unique potential for sustainable shifts in gender roles. (authors)

From spontaneous play and hanging out to out‐of‐school time programming: An American perspective

Two-parent working families, safety factors, shifts in gender roles, and many other factors have led to rapid development of out-of-school-time programming to provide youngsters with the kinds of experiences they might have historically received at home and in the neighborhood. This article elaborates on key issues in quality, the quality of relationships with both peers and staff, opportunity for youth voice, and the activities provided.

Semen Anxiety: Materiality, Agency and the Internet

Semen is a potent cultural symbol of masculinity. The social life of semen is poorly understood because of the intensely personal nature of its being. But the Internet has opened up new avenues for people to explore sensitive issues without disclosing their identity. This paper examines a set of questions submitted anonymously for answering by a medical team over a three month period to a UK-based consumer health website. The questions are analysed for emergent themes and these are divided into three groups: those concerning the material quality of semen; semen relating to masturbation; and those that concern semen and potency. It argues that far from being a phenomenon isolated to non-western cultures, semen anxiety is present in the UK in the twenty-first century and is the expression of anxieties surrounding shifting gender roles and masculine identities.

White Masculinity in Barbershop Quartet Singing

AbstractThis article explores the cultural work of white masculinity in barbershop quartet singing in two historical contexts: the barbershop revival of the 1920s and 1930s and barbershop's struggle for survival in twenty-first century Philadelphia. It first details how revivalists attempted to re-create Victorian white masculinity by codifying and promoting a barbershop musical style and repertory that fostered closeness between men. By performing their musical style in public, masculine spaces, and admitting only white men to their gatherings, the organizers of the Barbershop Harmony Society opposed a number of contemporary social changes in the United States, including shifting gender roles, a rise in immigration, the economic instability of the Great Depression, and New Deal liberalism. The article then documents how and why barbershoppers in Philadelphia at the turn of the twenty-first century still perform this “close,” neo-Victorian mode of white masculinity. In this new context, barbershop whiteness enabled a group of white men to claim belonging in their racially divided city despite years of migration and displacement caused by deindustrialization and urban decay. In both historical moments, barbershoppers used whiteness to challenge social and economic change and to assert the continued relevance of their musical style.

The Role of Gender in Civil – Military Cooperation: A Unique Opportunity for Change

Post-conflict reconstruction provides a unique opportunity to redress the experience of women during war and capitalize on the shifting gender roles prompted by conflict to advance a more equitable female citizenship. However, most post-conflict initiatives have not incorporated a gender-based action plan, impeded by a disparate prioritization of gender by civil and military actors. In order to ensure equitable post conflict outcomes, gender representation and mainstreaming must be comparably prioritized by civil and military engagement in peace building. This paper explores Bosnia as a case study to highlight the necessary role of civil-military cooperation in gender-based peace building.

The Digital City: The American Metropolis and Information Technology (review)

Reviewed by Sharon L. Irish The Digital City: The American Metropolis and Information Technology. By Michel S. Laguerre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xiv+211. $75. In the July 2005 issue of Technology and Culture, in his article titled "Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy," Fred Turner wrote about "the origins of virtual community." Turner cited Manuel Castells's observation that "the electronics industry and its geographical hubs, including the [San Francisco] Bay Area, were among the industries and regions most dependent on network patterns of organization" (p. 505). Michel Laguerre, in The Digital City, also focuses on the Bay Area in his study of "the ways in which the city has expanded and transformed as a result of digitization" (p. xii). Concisely summarizing literature on digital, virtual, wired, and techno-cities, including early work from the 1970s, Laguerre asserts that "the continuum approach reveals the proper relations of the virtual to the real. These entities are co-produced by human actors who participate in both, . . . each one permeates the life of the other" (p. 15). Further, these relations are uneven and segmented, even within one location. The Digital City is relevant to historians of technology because of Laguerre's concise analyses of complex systems, the spatial and temporal [End Page 850] overlaps that characterize the virtual world, and the hybrid nature of human interactions. Laguerre describes the modern city as consisting of poles that affect its functioning: besides virtuality, there are formal and informal poles. "The process of digitization transforms aspects of the physical city," he notes, "adding a new dimension to the city as a whole, one that connects the practices carried out in the real and virtual worlds along a continuum between those two poles" (p. 8). The burgeoning of information technologies (IT) has drawn some regions together, but it has also socially fragmented the city, promoted telecommuting, displaced people because of rising housing costs, and globalized the local. People cross borders virtually while actually remaining in one place. Laguerre's emphasis in his approach to IT and to globalization is on human agency, focusing on the microcomputer and its networked systems. Two case studies—that of the second election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 2001, and "the democracy movement that culminated in the events of Tiananmen Square [Beijing, 1989]"—provide examples of "how the internal politics of many nations is becoming globalized in ways that transform the national into the transnational" (pp. 126, 125). Laguerre notes that "[a]dding history to the dynamics of virtual diasporic spaces allows us to see the processes by which they are assembled and by which they change" (p. 134). Because of IT, immigrants can "intervene directly and immediately in the politics" of their homeland as well as of their host country, and indeed did so in Haiti and China. Because of Laguerre's focus on people, readers learn about labor practices, social and temporal stratification, shifting gender roles and power relationships, the unequal distribution of resources, repurposing of systems, and policy decisions in the globalized city. Another of his case studies concerns a virtual city hall, showing how its digitization was "in synergy with the history of the microcomputer itself, as least the history of its availability to the public." In this regard, the IT team members "have become important players in the organizational politics of the city hall" (p. 99). The practice of democratic politics via the web is limited by, among other factors, what the IT team chooses to present and the public's ability to connect to the virtual city hall. Laguerre's clear assessment of the roles of IT in urban areas in the United States is particularly valuable because he introduces useful (though sometimes awkward) terminology and critiques the web of interrelationships. For scholars constructing histories of human–computer interactions, Laguerre's small volume ought to be a helpful companion. Dr. Irish chaired a session at the 2006 meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians focusing...

Saying "Nothin'": Pachucas and the Languages of Resistance

Saying "Nothin'" Pachucas and the Languages of Resistance Catherine S. Ramírec On June 9 and 10, 1943, in the midst of the Zoot Suit Riots, Los Angeles newspapers announced the arrest of a "pachuco woman." According to the press, twenty-two-year-old Amelia Venegas, mother of a toddler and wife of a sailor, had incited violence by urging a gang of pachucos to attack sheriff's deputies in her East Los Angeles neighborhood. "I no like thees daputy sheriffs [sic.]," the Herald-Express quoted her. Additionally, newspapers reported that she attempted to smuggle a pair of brass knuckles to "zoot suit hoodlums" to assist them in their street brawls with sailors. Venegas was arrested and jailed for disturbing the peace.1 Click for larger view Figure 1 Amelia Venegas, "Pachuco woman." Los Angeles Her-ald-Examiner Collection. Los Angeles Public Library. [End Page 1] Although newspaper photographs do not show her wearing a "finger-tip" coat or short, full skirt—identifying features of the pachuca look in wartime Los Angeles—Venegas was nonetheless described as a "lady zoot suiter, or at least a sympathizer with the zoot suit fraternity."2 As various scholars have shown, the zoot suit, which generally consisted of a long coat and skirt or pair of billowing trousers, signified difference and defiance in the United States during World War II, a moment of heightened jingoism, xenophobia, and concern over shifting gender roles.3 Both the ensemble and, more often than not, its Mexican-American wearer were deemed unpatriotic and un-American and were even directly linked to the Axis. In Venegas's case, the incorrect grammar and caricature Mexican accent attributed to her emphasized that her transgression was two-fold: she was not only un-American but unladylike as well. Many studies of pachuquismo—the Mexican-American pachuca/o subculture—have stressed the symbolic economy of style: clothes, hair, and, to a lesser extent, makeup.4 This essay seeks to add to this exciting body of work by focusing on another important—albeit literally unspectacular—stylistic element of wartime pachuquismo: language and speech. Like their African-American counterparts who spoke jive, many pachucas and pachucos (that is, Mexican-American zooters) spoke pachuco slang (also known as caló). Additionally, many used pochismos (lexical borrowings) and a working-class-inflected form of American English. During the Chicano movement of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, these linguistic varieties, like zoot suits, became signs both of difference and of opposition for a number of Chicana and Chicano writers. They signified a refusal to conform to the status quo and a distinctly racialized, working-class, urban youth style. In short, many of the utterances of Mexican-American zooters came to signify resistance, style, and style as resistance. The concept of resistance has had an indelible effect on the study of popular culture in the United States as well as on Chicano studies (and cultural and ethnic studies more broadly). Drawing from James C. Scott's metaphor of the "hidden transcript," Robin D. G. Kelley, for example, argues that the "veiled social and cultural worlds of oppressed people frequently surface in everyday forms of resistance—theft, footdragging, the destruction of property."5 Within African-American and Chicano studies, the zoot subculture of the World War II period is often looked to as an example of a "hidden transcript." As Kelley notes, "The language and culture of zoot suiters represented a subversive refusal to be subservient."6 By focusing on women speakers of pachuco slang, this essay explores the relationship of resistance—what Kelley describes as the "subversive refusal to be subservient"—to gender and style, specifically coolness and hipness. "Coolness" refers to self-control; "hipness" to knowledge and sophistication. [End Page 2] Both terms connote style and, as I argue below, social marginalization. This essay examines the gendering of Chicano resistance and style and Chicano resistance as style. It asks, "What is the gender of Chicano resistance and does...

Adolescent Time Use Trends: France 1986 to 1998

This paper examines changing patterns of adolescent time use in France from 1986 to 1998. It focuses on adolescents’ aged 15 to 19, living at home with their parents, and attending school. It analyzes how the allocation of adolescent daily time is affected by respondents’ gender, age, and by their parents’ educational background and income. Data are taken from two national time use surveys conducted by INSEE (Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques, Paris) in 1985–1986 (n = 16,046, including 559 adolescents) and in 1998–1999 (n = 15,435, including 1,193 adolescents). One of the main trends in the observed period is the shift in gender roles. In 1986, girls and boys spent the same amount of time in school-related activities, in 1998, this length was higher for girls. The gender gap in domestic work has slightly narrowed. All in all, girls’ total work overload has increased. The allocation of time to work, personal needs and leisure remained similar, regardless of the educational level of parents. The allocation of free time to its various subcomponents is, however, affected by parents’ education: children born in highly educated families spend more time reading, going to the movies, to the theatre or to shows, less time watching TV, walking, or socializing. Parents’ income level is less influential. Adolescents with middle-income parents work harder at school than those from lower or upper income families.

Engendering discourses of displacement

In Northeast Thailand gendered patterns of labor migration insert rural residents into privileged sites of national and international progress; yet, migrants and their families remain marginalized within dominant constructions of contemporary Thai modernity and development. This article explores these lived contradictions of labor mobility through the ethnographic analysis of one sending community, focusing on local discourses of, and about, the gendered disruptions of migration. Struggles over shifting gender roles and meanings refigure the social displacements and economic disparities surrounding labor mobility in ways that tend to highlight individual problems rather than collective concerns or structural inequalities. Consequently, while labor mobility offers some valued avenues for contesting rural residents' exclusion from the benefits modelled by Thai ideologies of modernity, its accompanying gendered discourses reinforce as much as challenge existing patterns of marginalization.

Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions (review)

Reviewed by: Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions Bruce D. Rogers Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions, Daniel Maguire, Fortress Press, 2001 Sacred Choices is a volume in Daniel Maguire's Sacred Energies' series. Dr. Maguire is a professor of moral theological ethics at Marquette University, a Jesuit institution. He earned a degree in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, a leading conservative Catholic university. The author's philosophical understandings have been discussed in over 200 articles and demonstrate a radical departure from traditional published Catholic positions on contraception and the right to an abortion. This book is one of many that considers the rising world population and the ensuing stress that that population growth puts on governments and communities to feed, provide for health care and to educate a growing population. Because larger populations create more poverty - indeed Maguire points out that over forty million people a year die from hunger and other diseases created because of poverty - the issue of controlling population is a life and death issue. The issue has been politically and socially framed worldwide, with the greatest effects in developing areas, as one of religious restrictions on contraception and abortion. It is difficult to review this book without talking about the author, a laicized priest who is on his second marriage. Maguire was called "an outspoken dissenter from (Catholic) church teaching on sexual morality and abortion," by Patrick Riley, President of the Cardinal Newman Society, in the Catholic publication Life News (March 2004). Riley went on to say in the article that "Maguire contradicts everything inherent to an authentic Catholic University: fidelity to Church teachings, respect for human dignity...." But do critics of his personal life and his professional writings diminish the contributions of his book in a general sense? Maguire argues in Sacred Choices"although many people believe that contraception is forbidden by their religion ... the world's religions are open to family planning, including contraception and also abortion as a backup when necessary." Further, Maguire contends that only the anti-contraception and anti-abortion positions of world religions have been selectively presented. Ten scholars, representing major religions, gathered to demonstrate that pro-choice, pro-contraception positions existed alongside the anti-choice positions. Maguire's major contribution is to outline these pro-choice, pro-contraception religious positions in a short volume based on discussions with the gathered scholars. Relying upon Christine Gudorf a professor at Florida International University, Maguire contends that there is no coherent Catholic teaching on abortion basing his contention on an early church father, Tertullian, who taught that abortion was a "crudelitas necessaria", a necessary cruelty. St. Augustine was also referenced, as a pro-choice voice, as having said that fetuses would not rise at the end of the world. Gudorf anticipates that Catholic teaching, within a generation or so, will encourage contraception within marriage and permit early abortions. The author reviews basic teachings in each of the religious traditions presented and then relates the basic teachings to issues regarding abortion and contraception. Referring to Jewish theologian Laurie Zoloth, the argument is that limiting births might be necessary to do [End Page 222] justice to the children that we already have. Similarly, Maguire refers to Riffat Hassan, an Islamic theologian, to suggest that it would be foolish for one to argue for unlimited population growth out of proportion to economic resources. Beverly Harrison, a Protestant theologian, believes that the political and religious right's interests in abortion are a reaction to women's rights and shifts in gender roles. Maguire's discussion about other religious traditions also provides a brief for contraception and abortion. Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Native religions are also included in the book. In seeking out the disparate pro-choice viewpoints Maguire contrasts those voices in each tradition with the more prevalent anti-choice viewpoints. How individual societies interpret their traditions, as a guide for the future will have an enormous impact on the future of developing areas. Bruce D. Rogers Tennessee State University Nashville, TN Copyright © 2004 Tennesse State University

The Transmigration of Rights: Women, Movement and the Grassroots in Latin American and Caribbean Communities

AbstractIn order to better understand both the global and local contours and impact of transnationalism as a political and cultural force, this article suggests the need for an exploration of shifting gender roles and expectations as they are becoming manifest in situated arenas. The awkwardness of transposing an international rights discourse into local communities and settings deeply infused with tradition, or onto grassroots nationalist movements that work to resist foreign impositions is a widely recognized concern. At the same time, the influence of diaspora populations is seen to leaven and situate global discourse for local movements in a sending country and translates more local interests into global concerns in important and effective ways. Transnational feminist discourse now often concerns itself with the different strategies employed by diasporas, the strategic uses of global discourse, and the meaningful efforts to resist it. Through illustrations drawn from a study of women refugees in El Salvador, the Haitian democracy movement, and a rural Brazilian women's organization, this article links the experience of transmigration to women's mobilizing efforts and the proliferation of rights discourses.