White Middle-class Women Research Articles

Predicting Prenatal Depression and Assessing Model Bias Using Machine Learning Models

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

The Politics of Menstruation

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

The Spartan mother in America: 1865–1900

ABSTRACT This essay shows how newspapers in the postbellum United States invoked the memory of the ancient Spartan woman to express visions of women's place in the emergent American republic that deviated from the Victorian ideal. Journalists and social commentators from the Western, Southern, and Northern United States found in the fit, patriotic, and stoic demeanor of Spartan women, a model for the politically active and publicly involved the “new woman” that they increasingly desired. While primarily targeting middle-class white women, these newspapers and commentators hinted that one could venerate these qualities in females of other classes and social groups.

Moving forward while staying in the middle : Betty Friedan’s feminist narrative of women’s progress

ABSTRACT This article examines Betty Friedan’s political narrative of women’s progress, which I argue to be essential to her liberal feminist politics of gender equality and mainstreaming of women. Through a close reading of The Feminine Mystique, a cultural exposé and work of social movement literature, I draw critical attention to the narrative construction of women’s progress, which Friedan equated with women’s full integration into mainstream American society through productivity, individuality, and growth. At the same time, I note that such a narrative of women’s progress, though enthusiastically embraced by white middle-class suburban housewives in the 1960s, simultaneously marginalized women of colour, working-class women, and lesbians. Furthermore, Friedan’s narrative of women’s progress and mainstreaming, threatened by the rise of the conservative antifeminist backlash and the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980s, was reconfigured into a conservative narrative of pro-family and postfeminism while celebrating white middle-class women’s ascendance to neoliberal capitalism. In lieu of a conclusion, I propose a cautionary tale of the rise of the neoliberal discourse of postfeminism to which Friedan’s narrative of women’s progress and mainstreaming has been conducive, if not integral.

My Debt to Slavery

Abstract This autobiographical essay sets up a white middle-class young woman’s emergence as a rights-bearing, choice-making exemplar of sexual freedom and as a holder of intimate racial capital in the 1970s. At the same time, elites and various professional authorities were re-stamping this young woman’s Black peers with slavery- and Jim Crow–era tropes, as sexual criminals, bad choice-makers, producers of worthless and expensive children, not citizens. The essay considers the roles played by Roe v. Wade, the availability of contraception, “modern” midwifery services, the “sexual revolution,” welfare policy, public rhetoric, and public policies in locking in new iterations of racism and racial difference in the post–civil rights era, and the importance of female sexuality, pregnancy, and maternity in constructing arenas for deploying these developments.

A Narrative of Crisis: Nancy Emerson's Diary and Healing through Writing

ABSTRACT: Nancy Emerson, a middle-class white woman who lived with her brother's family in Augusta County, Virginia, kept a diary intermittently between May 1862 and November 1864. Emerson's diary can be defined as a narrative of crisis, generated to respond to, reduce, contain, and mitigate trauma due to the potential physical and psychological threat of the American Civil War. The narrative construction of traumatic experiences is a form of purification and catharsis, allowing Emerson to experience the stages of recovery by regaining a sense of community and establishing safety through writing, attending prayer meetings, reporting news, remembrance of and mourning for the dead, and Christian resignation. By combining psychiatric, literary, and historical approaches, this study offers contextualization of Emerson's narration, representation, and writing about physical and psychological crisis as a process of working through and recovery.

TRANSCENDING THE LIMITATIONS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN’S DOMESTIC SPHERE AND FICTION: ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS’S CONTRIBUTION

Nineteenth-century literature written by women has traditionally been associated exclusively with the domestic space. Most upper middle-class white women of that period were similarly confined within the limits of their home environments. However, this article critically examines and questions the sometimes too hermetic interpretations of the role that the domestic realm played in the lives and literary works of nineteenth-century women writers. Specifically, it portrays how Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911), instead of assuming submissively those domestic restrictions, strove to transcend them and shared her innovative initiatives with her contemporary women through her writings. To achieve this objective, this work analyses new female attitudes and the actual houses and domestic environments inhabited by Phelps and some of her female characters. It focuses on how they endeavoured to escape from these settings or to transform them into contexts that might favour their professional lives, instead of passively accepting them as inevitable obstacles to their true vocations.

Evolving Illustrations: Louis A. Godey and the Home Library in Godey's Lady's Book

abstract: Godey's Lady's Book illustrations regularly depicted women in direct relation to books in the nineteenth century. For the first two and a half decades, images with women and bookcases also included a male presence. Female education was seen as necessary in order to create generations of good citizens, but the idea that women could be too educated also persisted. However, by the late 1850s, Godey's Lady's Book began to feature pictures of middle-class white women and a bookcase (or home library), without men. When the debate over what women should read had begun to diminish, Godey 's popular fashion plates began in 1859 to include bookcases for the first time. The addition of the bookcase motif demonstrates how the magazine visually engaged with the debate over women's education and also implies a change in Louis A. Godey's personal views as he was directly involved in the production of the magazine's artwork.

Greta Gerwig’s Girlhood Trilogy

On the occasion of Barbie’s blockbuster summer, FQ columnist Caetlin Benson-Allott situates director Greta Gerwig’s latest success in relation to her previous two films, Little Women (2019) and Lady Bird (2017). All three films are female-centered coming-of-age stories, prompting Benson-Allott to read them as a trilogy. Doing so not only honors Gerwig’s achievement as an auteur, Benson-Allott suggests, but also generates important questions about what these films say about girlhood and middle-class white American women’s quest for autonomy and self-determination. Gerwig’s trilogy reveals an artist struggling to make sense of girl culture and the societal paradigms that impact it.

Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America by Xine Yao

Reviewed by: Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America by Xine Yao Denise Wong (bio) Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, by Xine Yao. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Ix + 291 pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-1483-6. Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America marks an exciting turn in affect studies towards the radical affordances of unfeeling as a tactic of resistance. Xine Yao's debut monograph moves critical discussion beyond "the stifling imperatives of the political stakes of sympathy" to uncover "what we can apprehend" by "stay[ing] with the negativity of unfeeling and [End Page 105] suspend[ing] its rehabilitation" (3). Disaffection is both negative feeling and the negation of feeling as resistance but neither resolved nor subsumed by discourses of overcoming. It is a mode for understanding the extent to which cultural fantasies of justice and social change are contingent upon a politics of recognition and sympathy. Yao contends that the Western liberal project of inclusion demands sympathetic recognition and, though seemingly innocuous, presumes a false universality masking an insidious disparity between who gets to retain their subject status while refusing to feel. One of Yao's most generative provocations is her reading of sympathetic recognition as a colonial legacy originating in the culture of sentiment advanced by Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). She identifies four modes of disaffected unfeeling "in the cultural imagination deployed to flatten out and invalidate individual and collective subtleties" (6): unsympathetic Blackness, queer frigidity, Black objective passionlessness, and Oriental inscrutability. Although Disaffected is concerned with how American literature and culture understands affect and politics, a paradigm with a disproportionately global impact, the scope of Yao's framework extends far beyond the geographic and historical specificity of her corpus which focuses on nineteenth-century fiction that "question[s] the politics of sympathetic identification in the cultural imagination informed by sentimentalism" (21). The primary texts include Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1855), Martin R. Delany's Blake; or the Huts of America (1861), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1882), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), and Edith Maude Eaton's Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). These writers "use the space of fiction to question the politics of sympathetic identification in the cultural imagination informed by sentimentalism" (21). The first two chapters explore unsympathetic Blackness as a mode of dissent from two contexts. In the first, the novella Benito Cereno illustrates how the false universality of white sentimentalism ensures that Babo, Melville's Senegalese slave-turned-rebel leader, remains an illegible and thus contemptible subject. Following philosophers Denise Ferreira da Silva and Sylvia Wynter, Yao argues this falsely universal discourse of sentimentality is predicated upon racialised politics of recognition. In the second, Martin R. Delany's eponymous protagonist Blake rejects dominant white modes of feeling but, instead of being executed as an act of justice, he forms an alliance with the Indigenous community "to unmake the structural conditions of Black enslavement and Indigenous dispossession that produce the modern world" (23). Borrowing Tiffany King's formulation, Yao reads "convergence without conflation" (73) in the way Blake "disrupt[s] the colonial dichotomization of Blackness and Indigeneity as antagonistic to each other" (77) by thinking through the historical and theoretical intersections of Black emancipation and Indigenous sovereignty. [End Page 106] The third chapter reads queer frigidity as a consequence of white middleclass women's entry into the medical profession. Yao takes Phelps's Doctor Zay as an example amidst a cluster of late nineteenth-century American novels which use the marriage plot to stage debates about the correlation between love and political desire for suffrage and other rights. The expectation for women to reappropriate "the masculinized authority of medical science's disciplinary detachment" (112) juxtaposes "the coercive affective imperatives of marriage and family" (25). Yao focuses compellingly on the homology between the invention of anaesthesia and the pathologisation and queering of female frigidity (diagnosed by sexologist Havelock Ellis as "a medical condition prevalent among women" [114]). Anaesthesia as a mechanism of controlled unfeeling for professional advancement parallels "the alleged abnormality of frigidity" (115) in the way detachment signifies agency...

"For Women Only!": A Radical Message of the Black Middle Class in Kansas City

"For Women Only!"A Radical Message of the Black Middle Class in Kansas City Elyssa Ford (bio) The Kansas City [Missouri] Call, published from 1919 to the present, has been one of the largest and most successful Black newspapers in the country. This article examines the depiction of Black women in the Call in the 1950s, a decade of significant change in Kansas City. As a midwestern crossroads, Kansas City had seen its Black population grow substantially in the previous decade as rural African Americans arrived seeking new urban opportunities. Some of these new Kansas City residents came from the Missouri countryside or from surrounding midwestern states. Others were part of the Great Migration out of the South and either planned to make Kansas City their permanent home or saw it as simply a temporary stop before moving northward to Chicago or Detroit. Regardless of their origins, the increased Black population of 1950s Kansas City read the Call at a key time in the publication's history. The civil rights movement was ramping up, and the newspaper was changing editors for the first time. Under these circumstances, the paper's depiction of Black women relied significantly on the politics of respectability.1 While the Call sometimes presented women as activists, it more frequently paralleled White newspapers in its presentation of women in more traditional roles. Stories discussed women as college students, often as beauty contest winners; featured female musicians and actresses in the entertainment section; and included women in the society and wedding pages. While these articles did not differ significantly from those in White newspapers, to present Black women as models of success and beauty was inherently radical. The Call also included the weekly feature "For Women Only!," which focused on women as wives and mothers and included recipes and cleaning tips. This corresponded with the prescribed 1950s model of womanhood and mirrored the presentation [End Page 77] of ideal womanhood that also appeared in White newspapers. Yet to present Black women and Black families as middle class challenged popular conceptions of Blackness in the era. By depicting the typical Black woman as the counterpart to a White middle-class woman, the Kansas City Call aligned with an activist agenda of civil rights and social change based on racial uplift and made a gender- and socioeconomic-based argument that was revolutionary. In the 1950s, reformers' depictions of Black women as middle class, respectable wives, mothers, and daughters was nothing new. Booker T. Washington had promoted the idea of racial uplift in the late nineteenth century. For him, a focus by African Americans on thrift, industry, hard work, and education would raise up the race and eventually lead to an expansion of their civil rights.2 Though men were often the focus of these efforts, Black women soon became leaders of the racial uplift movement, and they formed their own organizations to support this race work. Black women founded the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896, and the organization focused primarily on the uplift of the Black race. After seeing Black men fail to achieve racial equality and because the voices of Black men were more limited by Jim Crow-era violence, Black women believed that it was up to them to improve the stature of all African Americans. As historian Deborah Gray White has explained, "To build the black home was to build the black nation. At the center of it all was the woman." The association believed that Black women were responsible for uplifting the race through "intellectual development and cultural refinement." By the 1940s, club women began to adjust their focus from using the moral purity of Black women to uplift the race to helping uplift the race to improve their rights as women.3 Despite this evolution, the Missouri branch of the NACW still followed the earlier tenets of the national motto, "Lifting as We Climb," by continuing to emphasize intellectual development. In 1954 the Missouri group promoted three main goals: the integration of Missouri public schools, strengthening and improving family life, and building a student aid and scholarship fund.4 Founded in 1919 by Chester A. Franklin, the Kansas City Call had likewise...

The “Shop Girl” and White Nationalism: White Working-class Women and Femininity in Johannesburg Department Stores, 1930s–1970s

AbstractBased on media stories and union campaigns, this paper tracks the discourses from the 1930s to the 1970s around the ‘shop girl’ in Johannesburg. It argues that the shop girl was a figure of white femininity that complicates the now extensive literature on white women in South Africa through its reproduction of the enduring tension of class difference. Through archival research and interviews, the paper shows how the ‘shop girl’ contributed to an ideology of white nationalism, focused more traditionally around motherhood and domesticity. The embodied labor of white women workers in Johannesburg both relied on their femininity and ensured that the affective labor of service work was a site of contradiction and contestation with white middle class women consumers. Class difference could therefore be contained within the semiotics of white nationhood through the site of consumption and retailing.

The “White middle-class farming woman”: Instagram and settler colonialism in contemporary rural Australia

In nations where colonialism persists such as Australia, scholars have identified the hegemony of a morally infused white farming imaginary. While this construction has traditionally been invested in heteropatriarchal ideologies our aim in this paper is to demonstrate how, in recent years, white middle-class farming women have been woven into this narrative through settler colonial logics. We take up this contention in the Australian context examining 100 posts to two major institutional Instagram accounts that feature farming women: @invisfarmer and @agrifuturesau. Using the lens of settler colonialism, and a visual and textual analysis, we identify how the “white middle-class woman farmer” is framed by discourses of white feminism and invisibility/visibility. We reveal the emergence of a narrow farming woman aesthetic which is bolstered by narratives which celebrate the “successful female farmer” and the “successful female farm leader”. In concluding the paper, we discuss the implications of the gendering of the white farming imaginary, and make a call for gender and rural studies scholars to de-centre and disaggregate the “white middle-class settler farming woman” subject position, through attending to settler colonialism and Indigenous scholarship in understandings of Australian rurality.

Cather Among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout

Reviewed by: Cather Among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout Richard Millington Janis P. Stout, Cather Among the Moderns. U of Alabama P, 2019. ix + 265 pp. In Cather Among the Moderns, Janis Stout sets out to answer a question that has exercised scholars for decades: how should we see Cather in relation to the group of writers, all her contemporaries, whom we call modernists? Briefly put, Stout answers this question by expanding the kind of attentiveness that we bring to it. She does so by focusing not simply on the expressive strategies that may or may not have affiliated Cather with her innovation-seeking contemporaries but also on the contexts—the communities, the friendships, the antipathies, the affinities—through which Cather encountered the cultural transformations of the earlier twentieth century. In a sense, then, the most important word in Stout's title is among, and the book's prevailing spirit is exploratory, as Stout interrogates the relation between the early twentieth-century worlds in which Cather found herself and the writing that she produced. In taking this contextual approach, Stout joins a scholarly tradition, memorably codified by Daniel Joseph Singal, that she calls "cultural modernism" (xii)—one that thinks of modernism not as a set of artistic practices (though such practices may well be revealing and significant) but as a distinctive historical culture, the successor to the American Victorian culture that preceded it. In doing so, she is less interested in rendering a verdict on Cather as modernist—though she will supply one—than in setting in motion an inquiry that gives us a newly vivid, intellectually compelling sense of Cather's life and work and delivers a welcome jolt of energy and expansiveness to biographical thinking within Cather studies. Once she has established this intellectual orientation, Stout launches her biographical narrative by identifying and unpacking a moment of inception: the 1896 train journey that brought Cather [End Page 386] from Red Cloud, Nebraska to Pittsburgh, where she took up a post at the Home Monthly. Stout begins, this is to say, not with the writing but with the context—with the ingredients, both cultural and personal, that affiliated Cather to the transition from a Victorian America to a modernist one: mobility, urbanization, and the unmooring of the coordinates of identity, especially for young white middle-class women who had access to careers within an expanding consumer economy. Cather's story starts with a young person becoming modern by navigating modernity. In the chapters that follow, a pattern emerges. As in the opening chapter, they start with context, and the organization of Stout's account, though inflected by chronology, is fundamentally locational. In each chapter, Stout places Cather in American modernity's definitive terroirs: Cather is shown inhabiting the Greenwich Village of the 1910s, encountering the gender-role-redefining world of early twentieth-century female friendships, and absorbing the dismantling of hierarchical conceptions of race in the wake of Franz Boas's new anthropology, to take a few examples. In each of these chapters, the contextual work leads to a consideration of the complex relationship between particular contexts and the shaping of Cather's fiction. Thus, chapter 2's evocation of the talkative, experimental culture of Greenwich Village generates a discussion of the emphatic urbanity of "Coming, Aphrodite" and other early stories. Chapter 3's recovery of the world of female friendships that Cather and Edith Lewis together inhabited informs a survey of the strong women who populate Cather's fiction. In chapter 4, an account of the Great War's emergence as a topos of modernist sensibility yields a rich discussion of the reputation-shaping dissonances between One of Ours and the prevailing, mostly male treatments of the war and its attendant disillusionment. Chapter 5, discussed more fully below, hears the echoes of the Taos-based counterculture presided over by Mabel Dodge Luhan in Cather's Southwestern fiction. In "Democratic Vistas," chapter 6, Stout explores the interplay between democratic and elitist elements in Cather's relation to her readers and her conception of artistic authenticity, as Cather advocates for her own novelistic innovation against the dismissals of a critical establishment oblivious to her originality. Perhaps the book's...

Monument Public Address System AR

Monument Public Address System AR is an interactive augmented reality (AR) documentary revolving around an expanding collection of audio interviews about the past, present, and future of confederate and colonial monuments across the United States. The interviewees include activists, scholars, students, planners, community organizers, and other artists. Some have discussed feelings of exclusion when they see confederate and colonial imagery. Others have evaluated the symbolic violence of the monuments in relation to ongoing racist systems. And others have described potential liberatory sculptural works as replacements. The main goal of the project is to engender thoughtful individual and collective experiences and to support critical and ongoing engagement with public memory and the political, social, and cultural processes responsible for public spaces. As Ana Lucia Araujo, historian and professor at Howard University, writes, “All monuments emerge and disappear because of political battles that take place in the public arena. Likewise, public memory is always political” (Lucia Araujo, 2020). In terms of a participant’s experience of the AR media, once they download and open Monument Public Address System AR on their mobile devices, they will discover 3D virtual objects and animations superimposed on the world around them. When they interact with these objects, short sections of the audio interviews are triggered and play. As they listen to the interviewee’s narratives, participants can explore the virtual animations in relation to the surrounding physical space. It is important to the author-artist that the app is accessible to as many people as possible. While the augmentations are geo-located, and the intention is for participants to circumnavigate confederate and colonial monuments – and the empty spaces where they once stood – while experiencing the AR, the app can be opened anywhere. Moreover, the app is mobile AR, released on both Google Play and the Apple App Store, so that it can be used on a large variety of hand-held devices. It is not dependent on expensive technology. As a cis-gendered middle-class white woman from the southeast of the United States, the author-artist recognizes that her perspective regarding the racist history carried by these monuments is limited. She has initiated the project as a way of discovering, and undoing, her blindspots. The author-artist sets out to support critical thinking about the future of public monuments and spark conversations on the history of slavery and racism in the United States. Monument Public Address System AR is offered as a platform for visual and aural expressions of frustration, anger, sadness, fear, and confusion regarding the racist, unjust and violent narratives that have shaped, and continue to shape, our present and future. It is also built for the enunciation of anti-racist hopes, activities and initiatives.

Race, class, gender and social entrepreneurship: extending the positionality of icons

PurposeThis paper aims to add information on how women's voices enriched American social entrepreneurship in the Progressive era. While most discussions of women as social entrepreneurs have centered on white middle class women, this article profiles two female agents for change and innovation who came out of the white working class and Boston's Black elite, respectively. These additions provide an analysis of female participation that takes account of issues of intersectionality and positionality, important concepts in contemporary critical theory.Design/methodology/approachThis article extends our understanding of women's role as social entrepreneurs in the early twentieth century by offering biographies of Rose Schneiderman and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin based on extensive examination of sources from Progressive era documents to contemporary scholarly analyses. Inclusion of Progressive era sources enables the narrative to suggest how these social entrepreneurs were viewed in their own day.FindingsBiographies of Rose Schneiderman and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin indicate the broad range of women who developed new organizations to serve traditionally marginalized populations in the Progressive era. The article shows the types of obstacles each woman faced; it enumerates strategies they used to further their aims as well as recording some of the times they could not surmount class- or race-based obstacles placed in their paths.Originality/valueAt a time when issues of intersectionality and positionality have become more prominent in management discourse, this article expands the class and race backgrounds of women specifically proposed as icons of social entrepreneurship. It represents an early attempt to link these concepts with the study of entrepreneurship.

“It reeks of first-wave whiteness”: a reimagined critical whiteness studies and feminist of color teacher education

In this article, we offer the perspective of a feminist of Color analysis on how teaching has been constructed into a race, gender, and class mold that purposely includes certain bodies—namely white middle-class women—while excluding anyone who does not fit the mold. More specifically, we use intersectionality to analyze the interplay between teachers and the structuring of teaching. In doing so, we respond to the recent compartmentalization of the critical whiteness studies (CWS) field by putting CWS in conversations with feminist of Color perspectives. We also provide take away points for why a cohesive CWS field, in dialogue with other critical conversations, is essential in making visible the larger social landscape of power in education, a landscape in which we, as scholars and educators, are all embedded.

Reorienting “Lost” Time: Reading Godey’s Lady’s Book in the American Civil War

Reorienting “Lost” Time: Reading Godey’s Lady’s Book in the American Civil War Charlotte Hand (bio) Since Frank Luther Mott disparaged Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most influential women’s magazine of the American antebellum period, for being “absolutely untouched by the great conflict” that was the American Civil War, scholars have often claimed that the publication was apolitical during the sectional crisis.1 Susan Belasco, for one, argues that Sarah Hale, Godey’s editor from 1837 to 1877, “made no reference to the Civil War throughout the years of the conflict.”2 Scholars who have acknowledged the political impulse of Godey’s during the sectional tensions nonetheless suggest that the magazine only responded indirectly to them, never actually addressing partisan politics. Joseph Michael Sommers claims that in the years before the Civil War. Hale “appropriated seemingly innocuous sentimental modes and devices already present in the magazine” to rally her female readers against the secession of the southern states from the Republic.3 Despite recognizing Hale’s obvious call for national unity in her promotion of Thanksgiving in Godey’s, Patricia Okker writes off this effort for political peace as “idealistic and naïve.”4 It should be noted, too, that neither of these scholars examined Godey’s political effort during the Civil War. Yet the studies of Sommers and Okker demonstrate that Godey’s was very much concerned with the sectional tensions. It is high time, then, to re-examine Mott’s influential claim. These scholars’ dismissal of Godey’s participation in the partisan politics of the Civil War, whether as a refusal or as an oblique and thus politically ineffectual campaign, may be traced to two intersecting critical inclinations. First, an understanding of the Civil War as a battle between Union and Confederate forces over ideological differences and, eventually, slavery. Second, a rigid interpretation of the ideology of separate spheres as a spatial phenomenon. A predominant framework in criticism of nineteenth-century American literature during the mid-1960s, the ideology of separate spheres, [End Page 172] which determined that the proper roles of women and men were within the private and public domains respectively, has retained a spatial focus despite extensive revisions since. The metaphor of the separate spheres has also continued to occupy discussions on the ideology’s counterpart, the Cult of True Womanhood, an idealized image of the wife and mother as a domestic Madonna, and which set the social, aesthetic and political terms for the definition and performance of white middle-class womanhood. Indeed, modern scholars who have argued that the reality of white middle-class American women was vastly different from these ideologies that they themselves subscribed to—that the private sphere of white middle-class womanhood often converged with the public realm—relied on a spatial conception of these ideologies to demonstrate their claim.5 The spatial focus of their critique of these gender ideologies has led scholars to overlook Godey’s political attempt to ease sectional tensions. According to these strands of scholarship, Godey’s had refused to let its female readers venture into the male sphere of partisan politics and war—in other words, to keep the respective spheres of men and women separate, Godey’s had remained spatially removed from the Civil War. The current trajectory of nineteenth-century American studies does little to promote a re-examination of this assessment. Rightly recognizing that issues of race, sexuality, class, religion and other variables complicate the paradigm of the separate spheres, scholars of American studies have sought to move beyond a binary understanding of nineteenth-century America, rendering the ideology of separate spheres and True Womanhood obsolete concepts in the process. Consequently, publications like Godey’s that appear to promote the rigid gender demarcation of nineteenth-century American society that were aimed at white middle-class and elite women have garnered little critical interest from modern scholars. Yet Godey’s popularity demonstrates that the concept of separate spheres was influential in nineteenth-century middle-class society, even if it did not effectively condition gendered behaviors. It seems premature, then, to disregard these gender ideologies. As this essay will show, revisiting these ideologies sheds light on a critical battle that...

For the Love of Pleasure: Mary Ann Temple and American Erotic Fiction

This essay discusses Mary Ann Temple, a rare example of domestically-produced pornographic fiction from the mid-nineteenth century. As an erotic sentimental novel, Mary Ann Temple promotes the active sexuality of a white middle-class young woman. Told from Mary Ann's point of view, the female narrative voice articulates erotic desire and demonstrates how a young woman expresses sexual agency and achieve a happy ending. Most surprisingly, Mary Ann Temple cultivates same-sex desire between women. The plot uses voyeurism to represent feminine desire for women's erotic bodies, and it renders salacious female desire for another woman's erotic submission through a whipping scene. Furthermore, the narrative arc creates episodic sexual encounters that focus on kissing, breasts, and fondling while simultaneously refusing men's sexual satisfaction and ignoring male anatomy. This structure creates space for depictions of desire between women as well as lesbian-like identification within the heterosexual pornographic scenes. As a result, Mary Ann Temple represents queer female sexuality not as part of a lurid, subterranean erotic, but rather lodged in the heart of bourgeois femininity and the mainstream form of the sentimental novel.

Reading hieroglyphs behind glass: A glimpse of reparative feminism in Riddles of the Sphinx (1977)

This article examines Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s 1977 avant-garde essay film Riddles of the Sphinx as a cinematic text that makes the museum a site for imagining psychoanalytic feminism as a reparative reading practice. I argue that the film questions gender and race as “musealized” images that make predetermined essences present, and offers instead images of working through the damages of sexism and racism that erode the familiar poles of idealization and denigration. Focused on the psychic life of a middle-class white woman as she begins extricating herself from the narrow confines that white patriarchal culture has allotted her, Riddles revises the visual logics of castration, which opens the possibility that white women can, instead of defending themselves against shame, respond to the forms of sexism and racism that write Black women’s lives.