White Middle-class Women Research Articles

Educated To Death? Women’s Higher Education, Reproductive Health, And The Scientific Method In The United States, 1870-1900

From 1870-1890, American gynecologists positioned themselves at the center of debates about women’s education. Gynecologists manipulated social anxiety about shifting demographics and falling birthrates among white middle class women in order to legitimate their emerging discipline. In doing so, they couched American understandings of infertility in a politics of blame and demonized women for their inability to reproduce. Although doctors’ conversations about “sterility” primarily took place within the pages of journals published by all-male medical associations, many women engaged in this debate and challenged medical authority in the pages of popular magazines and newspapers. Female doctors, teachers, scholars, women’s college administrators, and their male allies employed a wide range of rhetorical strategies in their responses to male doctors’ theories. They reframed the debate over higher education and sterility into a discussion of the failings of patriarchal gender norms and the importance of objective scientific inquiry. They did so as the medical profession’s commitment to anecdotal evidence and individual treatment faced pressure from the emerging fields of quantitative studies, epidemiology, and medical statistics. A debate that began with a few vocal doctors with passionate but largely unsubstantiated claims had grown to incorporate discussions about scientific method, women’s rights, and female autonomy.

The personal motif in naturalistic case study research: developing “innerstandings” in woman’s compulsive behaviour

ABSTRACT Purpose: The purpose of this article is to show case study research focused on persons as a case and our personal engagement with the case can improve our innerstandings and understanding of person-centred care. Method: We present the methodology and epistemology of naturalistic case study research and illuminate this approach with the case study of Ellen, a young, Dutch, white-middle class woman with a compulsive disorder. We combine naturalistic case study research with the personal narratives of those involved in the research, including ourselves, and interpreted through a feminist and gender lens. Results: The case study research enhanced the personal and mutual understanding of all involved, including the researchers. Feminist and gender theory revealed the hidden personal motif for the choice of the case, and led to a re-viewing of the original story, offering a re-storying. Conclusion: We conclude that the personal motif as well as the use of our personal experiences to understand the case deserve more attention in case study research to address the complex interplay of social and intrapsychic dimensions, and develop more in-depth innerstandings for all engaged.

The work-life experiences of an invisible workforce

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the work-life (WL) experiences of live-in women migrant domestic workers (MDWs), who represent a significant proportion of migrant workers globally. MDWs play a key role in enabling the work-life balance (WLB) of others, namely the middle-class households that employ them. Yet, their experiences have largely been invisible in mainstream WL literature. The authors draw on an intersectional approach to frame the WL experiences of this marginalized group of women at the intersection of being secondary labour segment workers, with significant legal and employment restrictions as migrant workers, who work and live in the same place as their employers. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative interviews were conducted with 13 women MDWs from Indonesia and the Philippines working in Malaysia. The women talked about the meaning of work as MDWs, how they maintain familial connections whilst working abroad, and how they negotiate their WLB as live-in workers. Thematic analysis of the interviews focused on the intersection of the women’s multiple dimensions of disadvantage, including gender, class and temporary migrant-foreigner status, in shaping their accounts of the WL interface. Findings Three thematic narratives highlight that any semblance of WLB in the MDWs’ lived experience has given way to the needs of their employers and to the imperative to earn an income for their families back home. The themes are: working as MDWs enables the women and their families back home to have a life; the co-existence of WL boundary segmentation and integration in relation to “real” and “temporary” families; and the notion of WLB being centred around the women’s ability to fulfil their multiple duties as MDWs and absent mothers/sisters/daughters. Research limitations/implications The study is based on a small sample of live-in women MDWs in Malaysia, intended to promote typically excluded voices and not to provide generalizable findings. Accessing potential participants was a considerable challenge, given the vulnerable positions of women MDWs and the invisible nature of their work. Practical implications Future research should adopt a multi-stakeholder approach to studying the WL experiences of women MDWs. In particular, links with non-governmental organizations who work directly with women MDWs should be established as a way of improving future participant access. Social implications The study underscores the existence of policies and regulations that tolerate and uphold social inequalities that benefit primary labour segment workers to the detriment of secondary labour segment workers, including women MDWs. Originality/value Extant WL literature is dominated by the experiences of “the ideal work-life balancers”, who tend to be white middle-class women, engaged in professional work. This study offers original contribution by giving voice to a taken-for-granted group of women migrant workers who make other people’s WLB possible. Moreover, the study challenges WL research by underscoring the power inequities that shape the participants’ marginal and disadvantaged lived experience of work, life, family and WLB.

Introduction. Harriet Prescott Spofford: The Home, the Nation, and the Wilderness

Throughout the nineteenth century, as underlined by Nancy Cott in The Bonds of Womanhood, “the central convention of domesticity was the contrast between the home and the world” (64). The tension between private and public no doubt informs most of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s work and will be addressed from many different angles by the contributors to this special issue. As a middle-class white woman who lived with her husband and extended family on the beautiful premises of Deer Island, Massa...

Voices Unheard: An Intersectional Approach to Understanding Depression among Middle-Class Black Women

There is little empirical or conceptual literature about depression among middle-class Black women, as the majority of the depression research focuses on low-income Black women or middle-class White women. While some work has been done to explore the ways in which race, class, and gender intersect to influence depression among Black women in general, more scholarship that puts forth an intersectional, cultural, and person-in-environment frame to contextualize the experiences of depression among middle-class Black women is needed. In this article, the authors provide a brief overview of the empirical literature on depression among middle-class Black women, present data from 30 in-depth and semistructured interviews with middle-class Black women to explore how race, class, gender, and culture intersect in these women’s lives, and put forth recommendations for clinicians and suggestions for interventions.

Feminist Theory: A Research Agenda for HRD

The Problem Limited research representing the field of human resource development (HRD) has challenged the masculine rationality in organizational culture, processes, and discourse; questioned power or gender hegemony within organizations; or examined how oppression and hegemony are manifested in the lives of different groups of women in a variety of work contexts. This limited scope of research has resulted in a lack of consideration and application of feminist theory, a valuable framework for examining issues relating to inequity and the subjugation of women. Compared with related fields, studies applying feminist theory in HRD research are fewer in number and less robust in terms of issues explored, research design, and target groups examined. The Solution A deeper examination of (a) populations beyond White middle class women, (b) the lives and experiences of women from varying backgrounds, (c) asymmetrical power relationships, (d) opportunities for women to gain knowledge and power, (e) the use of language and power to silence women, (f) gender as a social construct and essential category of analysis, and (g) ways to promote social change are presented along with recommendations to broaden the scope of research that applies feminist theory in HRD research and practice. The Key Stakeholders The examination of feminist theory is expected to benefit HRD researchers, practitioners, scholars, and women in the workforce.

“Sometimes Things Get Worse Before They Get Better”: A Counter-Narrative of White Suburban School Leadership for Racial Equity

ABSTRACTElizabeth is a middle-class white woman and principal of Eagle Wings High School, a large, well-resourced, high-performing suburban high school. This manuscript uses a Critical Race Theory composite counterstory to analyze Elizabeth’s experiences of racial conflict that resulted after she enacted equity reforms to address her school’s history of racial inequity. We examine the manner in which Elizabeth’s decision-making for students of color related to her racial meaning-making and identities and how the resistance Elizabeth faced was not merely from teachers or white parents, but also from within herself.

Taking Responsibility in Desire and Domestic Fiction

Abstract Nancy Armstrong famously identifies middle-class white Victorian women writers not just as passive victims of ideology but as possessors of relative privilege in relation to power. Even more radically, she identifies herself as possessing analogous forms of power as a woman writer and a feminist critic.

Exemplary Entrepreneurs? The Public Image of Two of New York State’s Female Business Leaders, 1915–1935

Exemplary Entrepreneurs? The Public Image of Two of New York State’s Female Business Leaders, 1915–1935 Rachel Greenfield (bio) In March 1920, a “small, modishly dressed, delicately groomed” woman with a “smart hat sat on top of her correctly arranged grey hair” walked into the luxurious parlor of the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. She “harmonized so completely . . . that one might have imagined her graciously stepping from the elevator to greet a tea guest.”1 This woman, Mrs. Charles B. (Rose) Knox, was the hands-on president of the Charles B. Knox Company, the largest plain gelatine corporation in the United States, based in Johnstown, New York. She had travelled west for a working vacation, visiting food brokers and jobbers and giving interviews as she went. Characterized by newspapers across the country as “a successful woman in the fullest sense of the word,” Knox’s image contrasted with the “mannish ways and clumpy shoes”the newspaper usually associated with successful businesswomen.2 Knox portrayed a life that combined devotion to business with an equal devotion to her domestic realm. She became a nationwide exemplar—a feminine woman, dedicated to family while highly successful in business. Her particular synthesis was an important forerunner of expectations for many American working women today. In 1927 a syndicated columnist inspired “all ambitious girls” by recounting the “simple” life story of another New York female industrialist, Mary E. Dillon, the president of Brooklyn Boro Gas Company.3 Dillon was described as a “‘two-job wife,’ who by daytime is [End Page 228] executive of a public service corporation with a capitalization of $12,000,000, and by night is the charming, unaffected mistress of a delightful home and a gracious consort.”4 In 1935 Eleanor Roosevelt called Dillon one of the women she most admired in America for her “well-rounded life.”5 Dillon and Knox—two leading New York State female business leaders of the 1920s and 1930s—ran companies that were industrial rather than beauty or apparel oriented. What was it about Knox and Dillon that made national columnists hold them up as paragons to be admired? These two women portrayed a new type of white female leader of the interwar period. Each was a corporate president of a multimillion-dollar New York State industrial corporation, married, and involved in her community. While they reached their positions via different paths, both shared critical similarities. Both had married, though only Knox raised children. Both were Republicans and steadfast believers in individual effort and capitalism. They both came from the working class, as did many of their customers. Neither attended college. And most importantly, both concurred with the traditional domestic role played by white middle-class women while at the same time believing women had equal abilities to men in the workplace. Before World War I, women such as Knox and Dillon concealed their gender from others in the manufacturing world.6 High-profile, locally active, married white women were more likely to devote themselves to women’s clubs, social welfare work, philanthropy, or suffrage than to business.7 After World War I, Knox and Dillon came out of the shadows and publicly embraced the idea that middle-class white women could combine husband [End Page 229] and home with paid employment and community activities.8 Knox and Dillon were lauded by national press syndicates and women’s magazines for their apparent ability to simultaneously manage home and corporation. This article argues that these two New York businesswomen displayed an early version of what we now call “doing it all” by modeling a life in which they were equally accomplished at home and in business.9 Mrs. Charles B. (Rose M.) Knox Rose Knox provided one of the first twentieth-century examples of a female industrialist. She was approachable and cared for her home. She believed women needed to know how to work. American women, newly interested in the business world, responded to Knox’s perspective on domesticity and business and to the story the press told of her journey from traditional wife and mother to widow and business leader.10 Knox’s early life resembled that of many late nineteenth-century upstate New...

The Women of Smeltertown ed. by Marcia Hatfield Daudistel, Mimi R. Gladstein

Reviewed by: The Women of Smeltertown ed. by Marcia Hatfield Daudistel, Mimi R. Gladstein Tiffany Jasmin González The Women of Smeltertown. Edited by Marcia Hatfield Daudistel and Mimi R. Gladstein. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2018. Pp. 112. Illustrations, notes.) Over the years, studies on West Texas have grown to examine how identity, memory, and labor shape place and community in connection with gender identities. The Women of Smeltertown is a welcome addition to these studies. The book complements Monica Perales’s highly recognized Smeltertown: The Making and Remaking of a Southwest Border Community (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), which integrates Latina/o history, environmental history, borderlands history, and historical memory. Taken together, these two books illustrate the implications that community memory, generational conversations, and family connection make in preserving the past. In particular, The Women of Smeltertown opens a window to the ways women understood their relationship to a West Texas town and, conversely, produces a narrative to explain the impact that industry and environment make on the human experience. Although Smeltertown itself no longer exists, it does remain ingrained in the spirit of many who have created a generational bond. Smeltertown developed around the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) and was known for the large population of Mexican residents who worked at the company. Located east of the Rio Grande in El Paso County, Smeltertown was a vibrant community that encapsulated Mexican culture, religion, and a sense of belonging. Although living with limited resources, its residents—especially the women—shaped its development. Daudistel and Gladstein incorporate oral histories and visual images to untangle a rich narrative that centers on women’s lives. The stories give credence to the diverse social, cultural, economic, and political relationship that formed between the town’s people and the company. What makes this book stand out is the diversity of voices, especially the experiences of both working-class Mexican women and middle-class white women. The authors are careful to illustrate the different ways women [End Page 254] came to understand the environment within their socio-economic class status. In chapter 2, for example, readers are introduced to the multiple, segregated communities in Smeltertown: Smelter Terrace, El Alto, El Bajo, and La Calavera. Oral histories shed light on white women’s views about people living outside their community, Smelter Terrace. Chapter 3 investigates the daily lives of women, focusing on the different forms of labor that Mexican women engaged in. While the men worked at ASARCO, Mexican women worked in the food industry, as laundresses and seam-stresses, or traveled to El Paso for work. The editors overlook one opportunity. Established in the late 1800s, Smeltertown’s growth later faced difficult transitions. A lawsuit filed by the City of El Paso charged ASARCO with violating the 1967 Air Safety Code, and reports on the company’s environmental impact listed high levels of lithium in El Paso’s water. These conditions and government interference led to the demise of Smelterown by 1972. An analysis of the effects of industrial pollution in connection to women’s health could have added to the history of women’s health care rights. The Women of Smeltertown examines other ways to commemorate Smeltertown today. As public history has grown over the years, positioning Smeltertown to remain part of public memory through a photograph exhibit or digital humanities project would generate an extensive collective memory. The book’s contribution to both written knowledge and a wider public audience should be well received. Tiffany Jasmin González Texas A&M University Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association

Opulent Servitude: Shoplifting in a Culture of Material Excess and Systemic Racism

Why did the latter part of the nineteenth century witness a sudden growth of white, middle class female shoplifters? Psychology tells us that shoplifting is a mental deficiency manifested in women as “kleptomania” (Abelson 4). Given the subsequent international growth of shoplifting, we argue instead that shoplifting is in many ways condoned in contemporary culture: used as a form of social and political control in a late capitalist society. This article first turns to female consumers as shoplifters in the late nineteenth century, alongside the growth of mass production, large-scale department stores, and visually spectacular forms of display. In line with feminist critiques of Marx’s Capital, we uphold the conditions prescribed to women under capitalism and extend this argument to newer forms of systemic racism in the consumer sphere, which ensure that women of colour and of lower economic standing face even greater obstacles to success. Using a broad historical view, we analyze the act of shoplifting in two forms of cultural media, both set in Paris. The first is Émile Zola’s novel The Ladies’ Paradise (1883), based on Paris’s first department store, Le Bon Marché. Due to Zola’s commitment to verisimilitude, we argue, his work offers the strongest corroboration of the ways in which new forms of visual display and a new class of psychologically-entitled females worked together to generate astounding accounts of theft. Our analysis then turns to a work of cinema produced nearly a century and a half later, Céline Sciamma’s 2014 Girlhood. Sciamma portrays a group of young French African girls who navigate their paths into adulthood from the vantage of Bagnolet, a lower income immigrant suburb over four kilometers from Paris’s city centre. The girls experience racial profiling and demonstrate varying forms of resistance, one of them shoplifting. While shoplifting then appears to be an enduring weapon of the weak and strategy of resistance by the dispossessed, leading to, not surprisingly, tacitly permissibility for white middle class women and harsher consequences for women of colour, we conclude that the activity is leveraged to perpetuate pre-existent forms of gendered social control and cultural stereotyping.

Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man by Nieves Pascual Soler

Reviewed by: Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man by Nieves Pascual Soler Alice L. McLean (bio) Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man Nieves Pascual Soler Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, ix + 126 pp. ISBN 978-3319709222, $54.99 hardcover. Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies explores men's life writing, focusing on works penned by celebrity chefs. The book begins with a cursory overview of the secondary role food plays in nineteenth-century canonical "narratives of masculinity" by Henry Adams, Henry James, and Benjamin Franklin before diving into contemporary life writing by seven men—namely, Michael Ruhlman, Bill Buford, Grant Achatz, Marco Pierre White, Randy King, Steven Rinella, and Hank Shaw. According to Nieves Pascual Soler, the type of autobiography crafted by these chefs enables them to script a performance that works to mask—yet ultimately belies—a deep anxiety about cooking as an ideologically effeminate task. To aid in his performance, each chef-author draws on various forms of hyper-masculine life writing, casting himself as a hero, a criminal, or a hunter. As Pascual Soler acknowledges, the role of cooking has long been split along gender lines, with men serving as professional chefs and women as home cooks. Although not explicitly articulated in Food and Masculinity, this split likewise manifests within the cookbook genre—Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) trained generations of middle-class white women how to rule the home kitchen, while Auguste Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire (1903) served as the canonical text for twentieth-century professional chefs. Not surprisingly, the trajectory of men's and women's food writing has been significantly impacted by the rigidly gendered nature of cooking, a rigidity that becomes especially manifest in the culinary autobiographies explored in Chapter 3. Pascual Soler argues that chefs are driven to depict themselves as heroes or anti-heroes in order to compensate for the "feminizing power of cooking" (49). The drive to jettison femininity from the professional kitchen, as Pascual Soler shows, finds its most powerful exemplar in the work of Marco Pierre White, whose Devil in the Kitchen (first published as White Slave in England but renamed when reprinted for an American audience) showcases the "badass" celebrity chef who initiated a wave of "criminal confessionals," a genre that includes Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Gordon Ramsay's Roasting in Hell's Kitchen, and Jason Sheehan's Cooking Dirty. This genre of food writing, according to Pascual Soler, presents a persona that draws inspiration from detective fiction and criminal autobiography. As it does in Chapter 3, the book situates men's culinary autobiographies within various genres of fiction and autobiography. It does not, however, seriously ponder how life writing blends into food writing or examine in detail the gender ideologies that bifurcate men's and women's culinary autobiographies. It reviews only cursorily Traci Marie Kelly's "'If I Were a Voodoo Priestess': Women's Culinary Autobiographies," Denise Gigante's Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century [End Page 924] Gastronomy, and my own Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century American Women's Food Writing. The book would benefit from a more sustained engagement with the historical context laid out by these three works of literary food studies, a context that clearly establishes a history of gendered autobiographical food writing dating back to the early 1800s, and underscores that genre and gender within culinary literature have long been mutually constitutive. In particular, the autobiographies explored in Food and Masculinity are directly descended from the two most masculine forms of culinary literature—professional cookbooks and gastronomic essays, the latter of which "worked in many ways against the feminized aesthetic of the novel, founded on ideals of bourgeois domesticity" (Gigante xxxv). Rather than contextualizing the chefs' narratives within the tradition of food writing, Pascual Soler places them into the historical context of the heroic journey, criminal writing, and the hunting autobiography in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Using Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the foundation for her second chapter, Pascual Soler argues that the autobiographies by Michael Ruhlman, Bill Buford, and Grant Achatz construct narratives in which the author transforms...

"I keep it to myself": A qualitative meta-interpretive synthesis of experiences of postpartum depression among marginalised women.

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a significant public health concern due to the physical, emotional, economic, and life course outcomes. Rates of PPD are significantly higher for marginalised populations and can impact low-income, minority, and/or immigrant women differently when compared to white middle-class women. Commonly studied negative effects of PPD include poor health outcomes, mother-child bonding challenges, and negative child educational outcomes. However, research surveying the postpartum experience and negative outcomes among marginalised women is sparse. This study implemented a qualitative meta-interpretive synthesis (QIMS) methodology to synthesise themes across 12 qualitative research articles surveying postpartum experiences of marginalised women in North American countries. Articles included in the QIMS were extracted from online databases from a 10-year window spanning January 2008-2018. The guiding research question was "What are the PPD experiences of women belonging to marginalized populations?" Constant comparative analysis was used with coding in atlas.ti and themes were synthesised with input of all three authors. Five main themes emerged. The themes are (a) intersections of PPD and poverty, (b) culture and PPD, (c) pressures of mothering, (d) strengths and coping, and (e) abuse affects my PPD experience. Subthemes such as "I keep it to myself" relating to cultural response to PPD and idealised mothering were also discovered. Implications for social workers, nurses, and future research are discussed.

Women in the World of Frederick Douglass by Leigh Fought

Reviewed by: Women in the World of Frederick Douglass by Leigh Fought Carol Faulkner (bio) Women in the World of Frederick Douglass. By Leigh Fought. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 401. Cloth, $29.95.) In this original and engaging interpretation of the life of Frederick Douglass, Leigh Fought argues that black and white women were essential to his career as an abolitionist and civil rights activist. But what did women want from Frederick Douglass? They wanted a husband, father, friend, or cause, competing roles that Douglass did not fulfill to anyone's satisfaction. In her intricate analysis of his relationships with different women, Fought illuminates the fundamental tensions between Douglass's private and public worlds, between his African American family and the white female abolitionists who encouraged his activism. In doing so, she also challenges the racial and class assumptions that have informed previous interpretations of Douglass's intimate and interracial relationships. The most important woman in Douglass's life was Anna Murray, a free woman whom he met in Baltimore when he was still enslaved. Their marriage lasted for forty-four years, yet scholars have struggled to understand Anna's continued illiteracy, and they have relied on critical outsiders for comments on her housekeeping skills as well as her unfriendliness, ignorance, and dark coloring. Behind these earlier analyses of the Douglass [End Page 543] marriage was the implication of Frederick's dissatisfaction or unhappiness. Instead, Fought shows that the domesticity of Anna Douglass was a deliberate strategy to counter racism. She saw her role as wife, mother, and homemaker as a privilege and a necessity. In contrast to white assumptions of inferiority or dysfunction, the Douglasses proved they could create an enduring family. Their shared project was not easy. Neither Anna nor Frederick predicted his success as a writer and speaker, which took him away from Anna and their children and moved his family from Massachusetts to New York to Washington, D.C. His career also brought educated, middle-class white women into their lives, destabilizing Anna's authority in her own home. Though she acknowledges Frederick Douglass's charisma, Fought believes that historians have been too quick to accept rumors of his infidelity with white women such as Julia Griffiths, a British abolitionist, and Ottilie Assing, a German journalist. Both women sought Douglass's friendship, supported his public career, and lived in his home for extended periods of time. While he appreciated their companionship and professional assistance, Anna Douglass viewed them as intruders who monopolized her husband. She also believed their presence attracted unwanted attention to his family life. Some white abolitionists, who worried that Frederick Douglass was garnering financial support from British abolitionists that rightfully belonged to the American Anti-Slavery Society, called Julia Griffiths a "jezebel" to undermine her alliance with Douglass (96). In addition, rather than the reciprocal intimacy portrayed in Maria Diedrich's Love across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (1999), Fought argues that Assing's emotional attachment to Douglass reveals her own dependence on their friendship. As products of a famous and model African American family, Douglass's children came under special scrutiny. Rosetta, his oldest child, was caught between the domestic sphere of her mother and the activist sphere of her father. Her parents prioritized and politicized her education, sending her to Albany to be educated by abolitionist sisters Lydia and Abigail Mott when Rochester schools proved unwelcoming. For a time, Rosetta worked as a teacher, living with black families in Philadelphia and Salem, New Jersey, but she believed her every move and action came under judgment. Rather than pursue the public career of her father, she chose to create her own family by marrying a former slave named Nathan Sprague. Sprague struggled to find steady work, and Frederick Douglass was critical of his inability to support Rosetta and their children. Rosetta did not abandon her husband and worked to support the family, at times taking in sewing or working for her father in the Recorder of Deeds office. When Douglass [End Page 544] remarried, she was critical, viewing this act as a betrayal of her mother and other African American women. After the Civil War, women became...

Race, Gender, and Leadership

The preface to Race, Gender, and Leadership boldly declares that "this book takes up the charge putforth by cutting edge leadership scholars to envision new forms of leadership for the 21st century" (p. ix). Akey point of the book is that in criticizing traditional "masculine" forms of leadership and arguing insteadfor an alleged "female advantage" or "feminine leadership" style, feminist scholars have done little morethan perpetuate notions of dualism. Furthermore, the model of feminine leadership portrayed in the popularmedia is based on the experiences of a "select few" predominately white middle-class women. As a result,"The female advantage perspective excludes the experiences of African-American women as well as otherwomen of color and of different class statuses" (p. xv). Most important, it ignores the multiculturalperspective that is essential to understanding and advancing leadership development in an age ofglobalization.

"Choosing" Wisely: Paralleling Food Sovereignty and Reproductive Justice

"Choosing" WiselyParalleling Food Sovereignty and Reproductive Justice Rachel A. Vaughn (bio) outlining the parallel I recently came across a reusable cloth shopping bag in the window of a local storefront in Kansas. The bag sported an image of a tree followed by the phrase "I'm saving plastic and the planet. What are you doing?" I chuckled to myself, recalling activist Derrick Jensen's "Forget Shorter Showers," in which he argues, "Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance."1 My thoughts were torn by a classic environmental conundrum. On the one hand, greater education and awareness are central to efforts toward justice and change. On the other hand, given my research in waste politics and industrialized commodity flows, I couldn't help but view the message as another extension of ethical consumerist trends in environmental activism, wherein individual consumption remains at the center of popular environmentalisms, while systemic, highly profitable industrial models go unquestioned, even protected, by the state.2 In like manner, questions of food politics, sustainability and healthier diet currently at the forefront of popular food politics endeavors are often portrayed as matters of good, or more ethical, lifestyle "choices" that people consciously make daily. This embeds what scholar Abby Ferber refers to as a form of color-blind, post-feminist, abstract liberalist discourse rooted in an absence of intersectionality and premised upon right choice making; or, as the title of this article suggests, presumptions of "choosing wisely."3 Similarly, tempestuous political debates over reproductive health in the United States are often couched in rhetoric pertaining to good or bad, right or wrong "choices" rather than as extensions of environmental and socioeconomic constraint or healthcare limitations, including accessible, reliable, or even simply available resources.4 Such matters are constructed through the prism of the "right" kinds of lifestyle shifts, or a bootstrap lens of individual purchasing power, rather than as systemic and systematic environmental [End Page 22] inequities. No comparative icon embodies my point more than the welfare queen stereotype born from President Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign, an icon persistently shamed as a system cheat and public burden and utilized as a straw-person for rationalizing funding cuts to robust public services. As a legacy of the Reagan campaign trail, reproductive historian Ricki Solinger references the term welfare queen to discuss how the icon absorbs and reflects social, cultural, and political ambivalence "toward women in trouble [and] poor mothers receiving public assistance money from the mid-1960s onward." The racialized icon of the assistance-needy WQ centers upon hostility over the inability to pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps to become "legitimate consumers" and "blocks our ability to imagine the social and economic forces that have created hardship, especially intractable poverty for millions of women and children in the United States."5 Reproductive justice (RJ) activists have long worked to highlight tensions between rights-based versus justice-centric understandings, drawing attention to the underlying racial, ethnic, class, and nation-based inequities that mainstream reproductive rights movements at times failed to incorporate, on topics ranging from birth control access to eugenics, sexuality education, adoption, childcare, medical informed consent, and more. Sociologist Zakiya Luna underscores such tensions in public shaming via her analysis of rights versus justice frameworks in social organizing: "While abortion was a concern, another part of [Sistersong] members' experiences not felt by middle-class white women was that the media has continually represented their choices to become mothers as irresponsible and pathological, as seen in debates around welfare reform and other controversial issues."6 Similarly, scholar Andrea Smith critically examines gaps in pro-choice/pro-life rhetoric to engage other intersecting needs in indigenous communities, like "Fighting for life and self-determination of their communities. The criminalization of abortion may or may not be a strategy for pursuing that goal."7 Thus reproductive justice exposes the ways in which choice rhetoric fails to encompass the intersecting issues affecting communities with less class, racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality, or national privilege. The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy's 2012 Draft Principles for Food Justice similarly underscores the right "to produce...

Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement by Premilla Nadasen

Reviewed by: Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement by Premilla Nadasen Simon Black Premilla Nadasen, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015) Within a short period of time, Premilla Nadasen has established herself as one of the most important historians of the US labour movement writing today. In Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement and her previous book Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005), Nadasen explores how class, race, gender, culture, and the law constitute the meanings of the work [End Page 285] of social reproduction and the ways in which working-class women of colour have disrupted these meanings, defining this labour as work, the home as a workplace, and in the case of domestic workers, claiming a right to organize as workers. In doing so, Nadasen's scholarship centres a working-class Black feminism long marginalized in male-centric histories of the civil rights and labour movements, and in middle-class white women's histories of the women's movement. Household Workers Unite is a narrative history of African-American domestic-worker organizing and activism. The book focuses in on the period between the early 1950s and late 1970s when "domestic workers established a national movement to transform the occupation." (3) While Nadasen draws on a range of sources, including government reports and journalistic exposes, it is the oral histories of African American women activists – brilliant organizers like Geraldine Roberts, Dorothy Bolden, and Josephine Hulett – that anchor the book. These women tell their own stories about the meaning of their labour, their desire to be viewed as a worker, and the fight to transform their occupation. As working-class African American women, their stories connect to the broader struggle for Black liberation, highlighting the racial exploitation of domestic labour, and are a form of activism, "a strategic way to make sense of the past as well as the present and to overturn assumptions about domestic workers." (3) Anchoring the book in stories "not told about domestic workers, but stories that domestic workers articulated themselves" (3) serves a political purpose. As Nadasen notes in the book's introduction, mainstream media narratives around domestic work cast these workers as victims, disempowered and without agency. The narrative of victimization denies domestic workers' agency and marginalizes not only contemporary domestic worker organizing but a rich history of collective action stemming all the way back to 1881 when African American laundresses in Atlanta formed a Washing Society and went on strike for better wages and working conditions, effectively shutting down the city. While the 1930s witnessed another wave of domestic worker organizing, New Deal labour legislation failed to treat the home as a workplace and denied household workers coverage under basic labour protections, including the right to a minimum wage and the right to organize and bargain collectively. These gendered and racialized exclusions were mirrored in social policy, as the white male industrial worker and his caregiving wife became the model around which labour law and the welfare state were constructed, denying African American women and other women of colour full citizenship. This is the legal and historical backdrop for the rise of a national domestic workers' rights movement focused on ending the exclusion of domestic workers from employment protections institutionalized in the New Deal. Yet prior to the emergence of a national movement, Nadasen tells us that organizers like Dorothy Bolden in Atlanta and Geraldine Roberts in Cleveland were cutting their political teeth in civil rights struggles. Unlike the middle-class, male leadership of that movement, the likes of Bolden and Roberts were working-class women with little formal education. They experienced the realities of white supremacy not only in public spaces, but also in the homes of their white employers. Yet domestic workers resisted, playing a pivotal role in some of the earliest civil rights campaigns, including the Montgomery bus boycott. They raised money by cooking and selling food, and [End Page 286] mobilized other household workers in support of the campaign. And they stood...

Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women’s Stories ed. by Martha Kohl

Reviewed by: Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women’s Stories ed. by Martha Kohl Victoria Lamont Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women’s Stories. Edited by Martha Kohl. Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2016. xi + 319 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $19.95 paper. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the passage of Montana women’s suffrage, the Montana State Historical society published the blog Women’s History Matters over the course of 2014, a series of short essays that collectively convey the diversity of Montana women’s history in all its surprising and delightful messiness. Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women’s Stories is an anthology of these essays. Readers looking for broad narratives of Montana women’s history should look elsewhere; this collection deliberately resists master narratives through its emphasis on specificity and diversity, signaled in the first two essays, which feature, respectively, Indigenous women warriors and ethnic women’s groups. Indigenous Montana women figure prominently in the collection as activists, witnesses to forced removal from tribal land, practitioners of Indigenous art forms, and professionals in white-dominated occupations such as nursing and journalism. Despite the racism they faced as residents of small-town Montana, black women like healthcare worker Rose Gordon and pioneer Mary Fields not only survived but left lasting marks on their communities. Black women in Montana also worked collectively to advocate black civil rights and support their local black communities. Women on the extreme margins of Montana society, like Chinese immigrant Mrs. Wo Hop, are harder to recover. We know Mrs. Who Hop only from the legal papers she had to carry with her at all times to prove she was in the country legally. Such documents are powerful reminders of just how much of women’s experience is lost to history because their lives were not deemed worthy of remark save by the authorities who sought to control their movements. Records of the Montana Territorial Prison speak cryptically of prostitutes, domestic abuse victims, women with disabilities, and others whose existence would have gone unnoticed by historians were it not for their encounters with the prison system. There are, of course, essays that address more familiar sites of western women’s history: the involvement of predominantly white middle-class women in pursuits such as health care, education, social work, temperance, and midwifery and their presence in traditionally [End Page 243] masculine spaces like rodeos, ranches, and popular novels. Serving as counterpoints to these traditional historical subjects are eclectic figures like new age mystic Elizabeth Clare Prophet, bootlegger Josephine Doody, and poultry specialist Harriette Cushman. Not all the women treated in the volume are the celebrated kind. Essays on women’s involvement in the KKK and eugenics movement are sobering correctives to the celebrity model of women’s history. The essays are all well documented and accessibly written, making this both an interesting read for the nonspecialist and a reliable teaching and reference resource for scholars. Some readers may find the organization frustrating—it jumps around thematically and chronologically in ways that may obscure larger historical patterns. As an attempt to unsettle the “Schoolmarm and Madam” stereotype of western women’s history, though, the collection works admirably. Victoria Lamont Department of English University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Warriors for Lower Prices: The New Orleans Housewives' League and the Consumer Cooperative Movement, 1913–1921

During the 1914-1915 industrial depression, a harrowing food crisis gripped New Orleans and the nation. The Housewives' League, a local consumer advocacy group composed of white middle-and upper-class women, believed that President Woodrow Wilson's call for the south to feed itself could break the city's dependence on northern and western agriculture. However, the league decried retailers and wholesalers who monopolized regional produce distribution and artificially inflated food costs to the detriment of the family pocketbook. Avowing that an alliance between small farmers and women consumers would ameliorate the high cost of living, the Housewives' League, beginning December 1915, opened several cooperative curb markets across the affluent Uptown New Orleans neighborhood so that Louisiana truck farmers could sell directly to female customers. The Housewives' League thus joined a host of consumer activist groups around the nation operating cooperatives as emergency food distributors for economically precarious families. (1) Ultimately open four days a week, the New Orleans cooperative markets were sites of frenetic activity. Up to twenty-one produce carts jammed together 011 small plots of city land. Desperate for fresh and inexpensive produce, black, Chinese, and white customers arriving by car, by streetcar, and on foot rushed the laden wagons upstretched arms eager for their bargains. Patrons carted away their finds in wheelbarrows pushed by the small boys of the families, or baby perambulators, and gloated over [ljettuce as big and solid as cabbage, [excellent sweet potatoes, [t]he finest and tenderest spinach, and turnips and mustard greens, and endive and shallots. League members arose before daylight, rain or shine, cold or heat, and went to the various market places and sold ... fresh country eggs, homemade breads and jellies, and crafts. Farmers praised the arrangement, citing profits far exceeding those at public markets. (2) While the Housewives' League had yoked white women's cooperative enterprise to evolutionary socialism and social democratic thought since its founding 1913, league president Inez MacMartin Meyers hailed these cooperative curb markets as a revolution egalitarian food distribution. Reflecting the league's blend of socialist and reformist ideology, Meyers declared, think we are all socialistic, or will get there soon, the longer we find that we can't do the things we want to do. (3) To that end, the league's cooperatives provided white middle-class women with money-saving and laborsaving strategies so that they could devote themselves more fully to achieving broader Progressive reforms and women's enfranchisement. League women emulated national consumer cooperative organizations whose member-owners joined retail associations to contract directly with agricultural producers and distributors, circumventing the corrupt wholesalers and retailers whom the public blamed for perennial food supply crises. (4) Between 1913 and 1921, the Housewives' League rolled out several woman-run cooperatives--curbside produce stalls, World War I cooperative kitchens, and a grocery store--each of which connected rural producers to urban consumers. The history of the Housewives' League's cooperative projects deepens our understanding of how white southern progressive women's organizations operated the 1910s and 1920s. Viewing the Housewives' League through the lens of the national cooperative movement positions New Orleans as a cosmopolitan site of intellectual foment, a swiftly modernizing city emboldened by the circulation of international goods, bodies, and political thought. An outgrowth of the nascent women's club and consumer rights movements sweeping the industrializing South, the Housewives' League, whose inner circle consisted of Jews, northerners, and immigrants, believed that New Orleanians should emulate the socialists and Progressives who were erecting egalitarian global economic and political structures rather than kowtowing to the insular planter aristocrats who controlled the city's social life and politics. …

Contextualizing Satyagraha within the Feminist Movement in the US

The author argues that the mainstream US feminist historical documentation framework—the feminist waves—have organized feminist history to primarily record historical events that involve high status women (i.e white middle-class cisgender women). This paper dissects the feminist waves to suggest that their key events and actors represent the centering of a socially privileged group. The author analyzes the framework to understand the ways in which the waves may encourage this privileging—largely through the erasure and exclusion of the personal and political truths of the most vulnerable feminists and their satyagraha against intertwining inequalities at the grassroots.