Women's Pursuit Research Articles

August Wilson's Fences: The African-American Women's Pursuit Of Dreams Seen From The Perspectives Of Rose Maxson

This paper portrays the struggle of people of color to reach their dreams as reflected in August Wilson's "Fences". In his work, he described vividly how African-American men force themselves to be successful in reaching their dreams. However, he did not give a large portion of discussion about women and their dreams. His female characters' dreams are remain unspoken. Moreover there is only one woman, named Rose Maxson, who stands as his female protagonist, while the other female characters are only exist in term of names that are mentioned by the other characters involved in the play. It seems that he only gives chance to Rose to speak up her mind as one of the African-American women. Therefore, she is a source full character that can be used as the media to learn about the way women see the importance of having and reaching their dreams.This paper is based on a library research. The primary data used in the analysis were taken from August Wilson's play, entitled "Fences". The secondary data were collected from articles and historical documents such as autobiographies and notes. Through the use of Liberal Feminist approach and the discussion of the character of Rose (along with her characterization) and the connection between the writer and the history of African-American women, this paper wants to reveal Wilson's point of view on how African- American women see the importance-of having dreams and what they, mostly, do to reach those dreams. Furthermore, the readers will also be able to know what challenges faced by those women in their struggle to gain equal rights and acceptance in the society.Based on the analysis, it can be concluded that Wilson uses Rose, who takes the ideas of reaching dreams as her self-fulfillment into a new direction with less focus on financial gain and put more emphasis on what some people believe as living a simple, fulfilling life, as the agent to open the eyes of (especially) the African American women to think and struggle to reach their dreams, although those dreams are still closely connected to the ideas of fulfilling their roles as the heart of the family.

‘I'll Give You Something to Cry About’: The Intraracial Violence of Uplift Feminism in the Carnegie Poor White Study Volume, The Mother and Daughter of the Poor Family

ABSTRACT Feminist literary critics and historians have examined the role of a triad of social locations that are also recognisable as psychological conditions, structures of feeling and motivations for action: guilt, innocence and culpability. Feminist literary critics and historians have examined this triad guilt/innocence/culpability in cultural representations of white femininity in the post-apartheid era, because they are trying to write white women into the history of apartheid not simply as zombified non-actors. The attention to white women as perpetrators of anti-black and other forms of racialised violence has been critical for excavating the many forms of domination that constituted apartheid in the period prior to 1994 and in the political project of re-making a post-apartheid society. Thus, they wish to place white women into the history of apartheid as perpetrators of anti-black violence. I am concerned with this, but also with white women as perpetrators of racialised anti-white violence, because intra-racial violence is so intimately connected to the creation of inter-racial violence and the maintenance of white supremacy. Thus, while white women's pursuit of status as caretakers and social guides for blacks has been unmasked as a feature of domination and white supremacy, white women's relationships to poor white women have not been critiqued with the same robustness. This article utilises Marie Elizabeth Rothmann's (1875–1975) volume for The Poor White Study on The Mother and Daughter of the Poor Family (1932) to consider this subject in the vignettes, oral histories and life histories collected for inclusion in the Poor White Study, and in order to urge greater attention to the Poor White Study as a data set for re-thinking guilt, innocence and culpability. I discuss the race, class and gender dynamics of the racialisation of poverty among poor whites, because poor whites were an essential racial formation in the manufacture of Afrikaner nationalism as a gendered national project, and because the institutions and practices of rehabilitation of poor whites participated in a colonial logic of demonisation. I argue that Marie Elizabeth Rothmann's report for the Poor White study provides a cartography of how the history of philanthropy and welfarism bound poor white women and upper-class white women together in a dynamic of intra-racial violence which profoundly illuminates theories about white female guilt and culpability.

Feminist Discourse In The Muslim Societies

The present commentary is an attempt to trace the history of feminism in the Muslims countries and see how far the western feminist frameworks has influenced or provided impetus to the benchmarks, debates and struggles. Women rights agenda any where in the world can not be decontextualized from its history, politics, economy, customs, religion, traditions and geographical location. In the Muslim countries the discourse of women activism against the societal oppression and exploitation has been linked with colonization and state power as well as. Any Study of feminism shows that its meaning changes overtime and place and therefore, diverse nature of feminism in Muslim countries. Muslim women in pursuit of their rights have distanced themselves from many aspects of western feminism. They have faced fieree opposition within their societies. As in Muslim societies feminist agendas are considered as a challenge to Islam and Islamic culture. As elaborated in the article it is seen there is not one "Islamic" position in cultural practices and the contradictory practices are the issue not the Sharia Laws in itself. The women rights agenda are not against Islam rather un- Islamic practices in the societies such as basic rights to health, education, property rights, polygamy, marital status etc.

Erinnerungen an meinen Porsche by Bodo Kirchhoff

1^1 I > I I * I I * I I ^ I I < I I * I HH l 0 I I * I Bodo Kirch hoff. Erinnerungen anmei nen Porsche. Hamburg. Hoffmann & Campe. 2009. 223 pages. 17.95. isbn 978-3-455-40184-4 Daniel Deserno, Bodo Kirchhoff's narrator, is one of the investment bankers who made a fortune in the overblown bubble we have just seen burst so loudly. He was lucky enough to have stashed his cash in various safe havens just before the financial collapse. But his prema ture retirement,and his writing of these recollections from a luxuri ous clinic-cum-resort on the edge of the Black Forest,was prompted by something else altogether. This was a little sex game with his last girl friend,Selma, thatgot out of hand and allowed his figurative Porsche (his actual one is safely garaged) to get seriously injured with a cork screw (Alessi design, of course). The psychic impact has also lefthis legs paralyzed, hence theneed forphysi cal aswell as psychological therapy. He also treats us tomore pleas ant recollections of his Porsche's sex capades, though he's less explicit about these than the debilitating corkscrew encounter. In the pursuit of women, as in investment banking at this level, it is all about the score, not aboutmaking a livingor having a life.Selma seemed tohave wanted a normal version of the latter, com plete with child. His rejection of her desires, and his approach to life generally, may be a reaction to the radical feministcommune inwhich hismother brought him up, in which the sole man around served only to produce Daniel and todo the cook ing forthegroup. Such a reaction to one's child hood circumstances would corre spond somewhat to the purpose the narrator of Charlotte Roche's Feuchtstellen?the book that these Bodo Kirchhoff Erinnerungen an meinen Porsche Roman i Hoffmann undCampei Erinnerungen are something of a response to?claims for her hospital ization owing to severe self-inflicted hemorrhoid problems. This corre spondence might be corroborated by the fact that a fictiveRoche named Helene shows up inDaniel's clinic as well and tells our narrator that in her book, "all she was trying to tellwas the tragedy of a child of divorce," which isof course true ina superficial sense. Given his experience with the world of high finance, everyone of course asks him about the cur rent chaos, and he says that any one could have predicted it?a cab ride through a couple ofAmerican suburbs would have told you. He had done business inChicago before returning to his (and the author's) hometown, the money mecca on the Main (Frankfurt).He had studied economics, though he thought he would give itan ethical edge with a few semesters of philosophy. When the resort's gardener tells him he lostall his retirementsavings in this latest collapse, Daniel simply gives him a check for the total, a small ^^^H sum for him but perhaps a little ^^^H ethical redemption or at least a guilt ^^^H payment. ^^^H Kirchhoff has a lotof fun with ^^^H all the fashionable brand names, ^^^H fromDaniel's Porsche (the garaged ^^^H one) to his watches and his ward- ^^^H robe,which bespeak life in this "fast ^^^B lane." But he seems himself, with ^^^H thisbook, tobe trading, on the one ^^^H hand, on the obvious currency of ^^^B the financial crisis and, on theother, ^^^H on the stillpersisting bestsellerdom ^^^H of Roche's book. But who's to com- ^^^H plain? Sex and money, money and ^^^H sex,what else is there?Oh, writing ^^^H entertainingly about it.And consid- ^^^H eringthespeedwithwhichhe got ^^^H this book out,BodoKirchhoff has ^^^H donea pretty good jobofthat. ^^^H UlfZimmermann ^^^H Kennesaw State University ^^^H Alain Mabanckou. Black Bazar. Paris. ^^^H Seuil. 2009. 247 pages. 18. isbn978 Alain Mabanckou's narrators (here ^^^H as in his recent Verre Casse and ^^^H Memoires de Pore-Epic) recount their ^^^H experiences with little self-aware- ^^^H ness. In Black Bazar, the narrator is ^^^H Fessologue; as an illegal immigrant ^^^H to France he cannot reveal his real ^^^H name. He is a "bottomologist," a ^^^H specialist of women's bottoms (fes- ^^^H ses). His woman leaves him to go ^^^H with their child and her lover back ^^^H toCongo (not thegrandCongo, ^^^H but the littleCongo, as Fessologue ^^^H explains in a tirade against Zaire for ^^^H having reclaimed thename Congo). ^^^H He calls herCouleur d'Origine since, ^^^H although born in France, she has ^^^H thevery dark skin of her Congolese origins. Naive in his relationship ^^^H with hiswoman, he says thatat least ^^^H he is not a cuckold, since he never ^^^H married her. ^^^H IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM 66 i World Literature Today ^^^H ...

Black Bazar by Alain Mabanckou

Black Bazar by Alain Mabanckou

Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing: The Impossible Act (review)

Reviewed by: Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing: The Impossible Act Julie Koser Wendy Arons , Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing: The Impossible Act (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Pp. x, 270. $69.95. Over the last several decades scholarly efforts to draw attention to women's writings and their contribution to the German literary tradition have resulted in the publication of multivolume collections of works by authors such as Therese Huber, Caroline Auguste Fischer, and Friederike Helene Unger as well as in significant new scholarship ranging from biographies of women writers to the exploration of female authors' challenges to social and political discourses. Wendy Arons takes up the latter project in her book Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing: The Impossible Act, in which she investigates how eighteenth-century German women writers challenged the social discourse of ideal femininity by employing the theater and the notion of performance "as an activity and an abstract idea" (2) in their literary works. Arons's study expands on the works of German scholars who have examined the ways in which eighteenth-century women sought to transcend the boundary between the public and private spheres. She lays the foundation for her analysis by retracing the development of "antitheatrical subjectivity" (4), which she defines as the notion that the individual, and woman in particular, is "naturally" sincere, naive, and authentic, a concept associated with the Enlightenment's growing middle class. Antitheatricality, she argues, emerged alongside bourgeois culture's increasing desire to distinguish itself and its values from those of the aristocratic class of the Baroque and early modern periods. Arons opens her study with a focus on the impact of mid- to late-eighteenth-century gender debates and theater reforms that presented the image of ideal femininity as "naturally" antitheatrical. She briefly addresses the evolution of gender debates within the German context, a subject explored more extensively by Claudia Honegger in Die Ordnung der Geschlechter (1991), and concentrates specifically on Rousseau's concept of ideal womanhood embodied by his literary figure Sophie. Arons convincingly argues that Rousseau's image of the naive, sincere woman had a profound impact on how German social theorists and female authors conceptualized and defined ideal femininity. Characteristics such as passivity, virtue, and emotionality became synonymous with femininity and were used by German intellectuals in order to justify women's exclusion from the traditionally masculine public sphere. Yet Arons distances herself from the "separate spheres" approach to eighteenth-century literature by rejecting the assertion that women were entirely absent [End Page 128] from the public sphere and instead suggests that women's pursuit of writing and theatrical performance on stage made them participants in the public sphere; female authors used the theatrical public realm in order to explore feminine subjectivity at a time when bourgeois society privileged an image of ideal femininity that was antitheatrical and private. Arons employs an interdisciplinary approach to reconstruct not only the context within which women wrote but also the means by which they reaffirmed and contested dominant social views of ideal femininity. She draws on Judith Butler's theory of "gender subjectivity" and "performed acts" (5) and Joan Riviere's concept of "femininity as masquerade" (6) to demonstrate female authors' awareness of antitheatrical femininity as constructed and performed, and the consequent insights constitute Arons's most significant contribution. Arons chooses to investigate a handful of works by female authors in which theater and performance figure prominently in the lives of their female characters: Sophie La Roche's epistolary novel The History of Lady von Sternheim (1771); Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld's memoirs "The Whole History of My Life" and "True History of My Theatrical Life" (written 1782 and 1793 respectively and first published posthumously); Marianne Ehrmann's epistolary novel Amalie: A True Story in Letters (1788); Elise Bürger's story "Aglaja" (1799); Friederike Helene Unger's Melanie, the Foundling (1804); and finally Sophie Mereau's "Marie" (1798) and "Flight to the City" (written 1796, published 1806). Arons reads each of these works as revealing the paradox of the antitheatrical, sincere female subject in the personal lives and practices of the authors and...

African Women Attending an American University: Culture Shock and Institutional Implications

AbstractAmericans face a multitude of challenges as they pursue their educational goals. However, these appear to diminish when examining the unique and seemingly insurmountable challenges which greet African women in pursuit of an American higher education. The results of a qualitative examination of six African women who attended a Midwestern-regional university verified the cultural shock, common problems and challenges these women experienced as a result of realities of life in Africa and the transition into the American educational system as well as the American culture. The results of this study, which confirmed previous research, suggest faculty, who work with and are sensitive to the plight of these women, need strategies as well as resources to facilitate the educational success of these African women attending higher education institutions in America. In light of these realities, the institution itself is encumbered to examine its policies to serve this unique student population in a way to promote completion of degrees that are of value to our global society.

Butter not Bombs: A Short History of the Union of Australian Women

The Union of Australian Women occupies a curious space in the histories of Australian feminism and communism. Formed in 1950, the UAW acknowledged debts to both communist and feminist politics. Anti- feminism and anti-communism flourished in the 1950s but, despite these pressures, the UAW maintained a commitment to appealing to their constituency of working women and mothers through the use of the discourse of peaceful motherhood. This discourse allowed the UAW to work with international socialism in the name of peace and local feminist groups in the pursuit of women’s equality. The emergence of Women’s Liberation signaled the final decline of such strategies, rendering the UAW a casualty in the revised history of Australian radical politics. This article has been peer-reviewed.

The Perceived Importance of Developmental Relationships on Women Undergraduates' Pursuit of Science

Using a survey of women science majors, we tested the assumption that women mentors and other women guides help women students pursue the sciences. The survey explicitly distinguished among three types of guides: mentors (who provide psychosocial support), sponsors (who provide instrumental support), and role models (who act as examples) encountered before and during college. We found that over 90% of the women had a guide of one type or another, that mentors were most influential to women's pursuit of science, and that guides during college were more influential than guides prior to college. Participants reported having more female than male guides overall, but that some of the most influential guides were men.

Specialization of the rural: Reinterpreting the labor mobility of rural young women in post‐Mao China

In this article I examine rural Chinese women's migration to the cities before and after the post‐Mao reform. I argue that rural young women's pursuit of a modern identity during the more recent migration has to be understood in the context of a changed rural‐urban relationship resulting from China's postsocialist development in an era of flexible accumulation. I analyze how a contradiction between freedom and violence dialectically constitutes the search for a new, modern subjectivity by rural young women in China today.

Spirituality and Ten False Beliefs and Pursuits of Women With Eating Disorders: Implications for Counselors

Women with eating disorders often struggle with deep spiritual conflicts that can be a major impediment to their recovery. On the basis of clinical experience with more than 350 women in an inpatient eating disorder treatment facility, the authors describe 10 false beliefs that women with eating disorders may hold; the authors explain how the pursuit of these beliefs can prevent the women from connecting with God and with others in genuine ways. The authors also suggest some therapeutic strategies that may help women with eating disorders find a healing and helpful spiritual perspective.

Unions and Pay Equity Bargaining in Canada

Provincial government pay equity policies require the negotiation of pay equity in unionized workplaces. The methodology is complex and unions have to be knowledgeable and committed to rectifying discriminatory wages. According to the literature, Canadian unions have shown varied levels of effectiveness regarding their pursuit of women’s equality, and this article explores how well these unions represent women’s interests during pay equity bargaining. Based on case studies of the Ontario public service and health care in Newfoundland, the article concludes that the most effective unions supplemented their conventional negotiating techniques with gender analysis and pay equity expertise. These tools were developed primarily through negotiators’ formal links with internal equality structures and their knowledge of equality policies, together with women’s networking inside and outside the labour movement.

Extramarital Love in Shanghai

This paper describes ordinary peoples accounts of how they deal with extramarital affairs. By looking at such personal accounts we hope to better understand the workings of moral discourse in everyday life. Rather than searching for an underlying system of consistent values or a domineering public voice we will investigate how people use competing discourses of motive to make sense of extramarital love in the contexts of their own lives and those of people around them. In doing this we also hope to provide a description of changes in Chinese moral codes and the factors that shape their use. While we must emphasize that our interviewees are special cases as all of our interviewees are or were dealing with extramarital sexuality in their own lives we also wish to emphasize that the moral discourses these individuals employed are almost all common in contemporary Chinese society. That is the personal stories people told us were not amoral accounts but rather deviant or sub- cultural uses of dominant moral discourses. We must understand how such moral values play a role in enabling deviant behaviour. (excerpt)

WHERE IS THE WOMAN IN THIS TEXT? FRANCES POWER COBBE'S VOICES IN BROKEN LIGHTS

IN 1864 FRANCES POWER COBBE jumped into the still-churning waters of Essays and Reviews (1860) and Colenso's Pentateuch (1862) with a book that put the case against an infallible Revelation even more frankly than these men had liked or dared. Broken Lights, her main contribution to the mid-Victorian Bible wars, went through at least eight editions and, next to her Duties of Women (1881), was the “most successful” of her books (Life 2: 370). Identifying “Frances Power Cobbe” on the title page as the “Author of an ‘Essay on Intuitive Morals,’ ‘The Pursuits of Women,’ etc.,“ the material object in a stranger's hands left no doubt that here was a work by a woman who had written on likely female subjects. Yet the table of contents, which lays out a schema of Churchmen's positions on the Bible questions of the hour, yields no clue that a feminist advocate wrote this book. Even in perusing its discussions of high theological matters, most readers would not have suspected, as I will argue, that the analyses of these men's positions are colored by Cobbe's distinctive “woman's perspective” (Caine 147), and that public and personal gender issues are being negotiated through its modes of discourse and argument.

The Network ‘Women Living Under Muslim Laws’: Strengthening local struggles through cross-boundary networking

Cassandra Balchin argues that globalization has facilitated the growth of identity politics as well as a transnational feminist response. The international network of information, solidarity and support, Women Living Under Muslim Laws, links groups and individuals in Muslim countries and communities in order to strengthen their local struggles and individual women's pursuit of autonomy. Its cross-boundary sharing of the lived experience of women, and the diversities and similarities of these experiences, has crystallized new ways of thinking around culture, identity and women's rights among networkers and their allies beyond Muslim countries and communities.

Bird Watching with Honest Jim

Genes, Girls and Gamow . James D. Watson. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001. 303 pp. £18.99. ISBN 0-19-850976-6. Knopf, New York, 2002. 333 pp. $26. ISBN 0-375-41283-2. Picking up his autobiography where The Double Helix concluded, Watson offers a detailed narrative of his activities from April 1953 though the summer of 1956. Prominent strands in the account follow his adjustment to fame, research on the structure of RNA, pursuit of women, and the founding of the RNA Tie Club.

Women's pursuit of personal goals in daily life with fibromyalgia: A value-expectancy analysis.

Women's pursuit of personal goals in daily life with fibromyalgia: A value-expectancy analysis.

Women's pursuit of personal goals in daily life with fibromyalgia: a value-expectancy analysis.

Eighty-nine women with fibromyalgia completed the Life Orientation Test, identified health and social goals, and answered questions from the Goal Systems Assessment Battery (P. Karoly & L. Ruehlman, 1995) about their valuation of, and self-efficiency in attaining, each goal. For 30 days, they responded to palm-top computer interviews about their pain and fatigue and rated their goal effort, goal progress, and pain- and fatigue-related goal barriers. Goal barriers increased and goal efforts and progress decreased on days with greater pain and fatigue; goals valued more highly were pursued more effortfully and successfully; more optimistic individuals were less likely to perceive goal barriers and, on days that were more fatiguing than usual, were less likely to reduce their effort and to retreat from progress in achieving their health goal; and more pessimistic individuals perceived greater goal barriers on days that were less painful than usual.

Cooperative Reproduction in Ituri Forest Hunter-Gatherers: Who Cares for Efe Infants?

Cooperative Reproduction in Ituri Forest Hunter-Gatherers: Who Cares for Efe Infants?

The new veiling phenomenon—is it an anorexic equivalent? A polemic

The paper deals with the new veiling phenomenon that initially began two decades ago in countries like Egypt and was taken up in increasing numbers by young educated and working women. The new veiling, however, is no longer restricted to the Middle East. This form of dress is now being adopted by many young Moslem women of various national backgrounds all over the world. The new veiling is an individual choice made by those women and therefore requires a deeper analysis beyond the apparent Islamic revival or the simple re-activation of tradition. An analogy is drawn here between the Western anorexic position and this new veiling. The psychological similarities between both situations are illustrated using the social predicament model. The paper argues that both respond to a number of pressures that are now placed upon women globally including conflicting cultural messages and contradictory cultural expectations. These global social changes have their impact on women's sense of their ‘self’ and ‘body’ and therefore need to be seen in terms of women's pursuit of self-definition, development and power negotiations within the progressive differentiation of society under change. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.