The reader’s companion to U.S. women’s history

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The R EA D ER ’S COMPANION to U.S. WOMEN’S H ISTORY

Copyright © 1998 by Houghton Mifflin Company All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The reader's companion to U.S. women’s history, p. cm. Edited by Wilma Mankiller and others. Includes index. ISBN 0-395-67173-6 1. Women—United States—History—Sources. 2.Women —United States—Social conditions. 3. Feminism —United States—History. I. Mankiller, Wilma Pearl, 1945- .

H21410.R43 1998 3° 5.4'°973—den 97-39923 CIP

Printed in the United States of America q u m 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Title page illustration: Cherokee Young Ladies’ Seminary, Denver Public Library, Western History Collection

CONTENTS Contributors

vii

Editors’ Note

xvii

ENTRIES

1-657

Index of Contributors General Index

661

665

Illustration Credits

696

ADVISORY BOARD E dna Acosta-Belen Barbara Haber E velynn M . H am m onds D arlene C lark Hine Elizabeth Lapovsky K ennedy C lara Sue Kidwell Valerie M atsum oto T h e H onorable Patsy T . M ink Robin M organ M ary Beth Norton V icki Ruiz

CONTRIBUTORS Stephanie Aaronson Washington, D.C.

Bettina Aptheker University of California, Santa Cruz

Mimi Abramovitz City University of New York

Jeannette C . Armstrong Eriowkin Centre

Bella Abzug Women’s Environment and Development Organization

Betsy Aron Cambridge, Massachusetts

Martha Ackelsberg Smith College Ally Acker Reel Women Trust Foundation Edna Acosta-Belen State University of New York at Albany Margot Adler New York, New York Sara Alpern Texas A & M University Nawal H. Ammar Kent State University Teresa L. Amott Bucknell University Margo A. Anderson University ofWisconsin at Milwaukee Joyce Antler Brandeis University Linda Apodaca California State University, Stanislaus

Marilou Awiakta Memphis, Tennessee Judith A. Baer Texas A & M University Barbara Bair Santa Cruz, California Lois W. Banner University of Southern California Kathleen Barry Pennsylvania State University Bess Beatty Oregon State University Evelyn Torton Beck University of Maryland at College Park Martha N. Beck Phoenix, Arizona Susan E. Bell Bowdoin College Janet Benshoof Center for Reproductive Law and Policy Claudia Bepko Brunswick, Maine

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Jane Bernard-Powers S cot Francisco State University

Julie Burton Voters for Choice

Alma R. Berson Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts

Susan K. Cahn State University of New York at Buffalo

Caroline Bird Palmetto, Florida

Em ily Card Santa Monica, California

Joan E. Biren Takoma Park, Maryland

Mina Carson Oregon State University

Karen J. Blair Central Washington University

Antonia I. Castaneda S cot Antonio, Texas

Kathleen M. Blee University of Kentucky

Lucie Cheng University of California, Los Angeles

Linda M. Blum University of Michigan

Brenda Child University of Minnesota

Janet K. Boles Marquette University

Sally Cline University of Cambridge

Patricia Bonica The Union Institute

Catherine Clinton Harvard University

Eileen Boris Howard University

Johnnetta B. Cole Spelman College

Nan Alamilla Boyd University of Colorado at Boulder

Sophia Collier Citizens’ Trust

Ellen Bravo Nine to Five

Bettye Collier-Thomas Temple University

Wini Breines Northeastern University

Blanche Wiesen Cook East Hampton, New York

Janet Farrell Brodie Claremont Graduate School

Katsi Cook Cornell University

Rita Mae Brown Charlottesville, Virginia

Clare Coss East Hampton, New York

Jean Gould Bryant Florida State University

Anne N. Costain University of Colorado at Boulder

Charlotte Bunch Center for Womens Global Leadership

Vicki Crawford University of North Carolina at Charlotte

C O N TRIBU TO RS

Elizabeth C . Cromley State University of New York at Buffalo

Zillah Eisenstein Ithaca College

Helen Damon-Moore Cornell College

Cynthia Enloe Clark University

Patricia D ’Antonio University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing

Sara M. Evans University of Minnesota

Nora Marks Dauenhauer Sealaska Heritage Foundation Angela Y. Davis San Francisco, California Martha F. Davis National Organization for Women Legal Defense and Education Fund Martha L. Deed State University of New York at Buffalo Anselnra Dell’Olio Rome, Italy Ileen A. DeVault Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations Janice L. Dewey University of Arizona

Candace Falk University of California, Berkeley Elizabeth Feder Colorado College Peggy A. Feerick Takoma Park, Maryland Roslyn L. Feldberg Massachusetts Nurses’ Association Martha Albertson Fineman Columbia University School o f Law Maureen Fitzgerald University o f Arizona Yvette G . Flores-Ortiz University of California, Davis Dana Frank University of California, Santa Cruz

Jane Dolkart Southern Methodist University Law School

Marge Frantz University of California, Santa Cruz

Carol Downer Los Angeles, California

Carla Freccero University of California, Santa Cruz

Virginia G. Drachman Tufts University

Estelle B. Freedman Stanford University

Ellen Carol DuBois University of California, Los Angeles

Jo Freeman Brooklyn, New York

Roxanne Dunbar San Francisco, California

Marilyn French New York, New York

Andrea Dworkin Brooklyn, New York

Adriane Fugh-Berman Washington, D.C.

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X

Theresa Funiciello Woodstock, New York

Barbara Haber The Schlesinger Library

Nancy F. Gabin Purdue University

Elizabeth Amelia Hadley Freydberg Simmons College

Alma M. Garcia Santa Clara University

Kay Leigh Hagan Santa Fe, New Mexico

Linda J. Gesling Evanston, Illinois

Shirlee Taylor Haizlip Los Angeles, California

Marcia Gillespie Ms. Magazine

Shelley P. Haley Hamilton College

Leslie Friedman Goldstein University of Delaware

Jean A. Hamilton Duke University

Linda Gordon University ofWisconsin, Madison

Evelynn M. Hammonds Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology

Lynn D. Gordon University of Rochester Janice Gould University of Colorado, Greeley Sara K. Gould Ms. Foundation for Women Jaime M. Grant The Union Institute

Susan Harding University of California, Santa Cruz JeanV . Hardisty Political Research Associates, Cambridge, Massachsetts Joy Harjo Albuquerque, New Mexico Maxine Harris Community Connections, Washington, D.C.

Carol Green-Devens Central Michigan University

Cynthia Harrison George Washington University

Rita M. Gross University ofWisconsin—Eau Claire

Daphne Duval Harrison Columbia, Maryland

Cam ille Guerin-Gonzales University of California, Los Angeles

Holly Hartman Boston, Massachusetts

Beverly Guy-Sheftall Spelman College

Heidi Hartmann Washington, D.C.

Pamela Haag Yale University

Leah Haus New York University

Lisbeth Haas University of California, Santa Cruz

Lois Rita Helmbold San Jose State University

C O N TRIBU TO RS

Karen Henry Middle East Education Project

Naomi Jaffe Troy, New York

Susannah Heschel Case Western Reserve University

Gladys M. Jimenez-Munoz State University of New York at Oneonta

Nancy A. Hewitt Duke University

Susan Lee Johnson University of Colorado at Boulder

Lisa Beth Hill The American University

Adrienne Lash Jones Oberlin College

Darlene Clark Hine Michigan State University

Ann Jones New York, New York

Martha Hodes New York University

Teresa Jordan Deeth, Nevada

Beatrix Hoffman Rutgers University

Suad Joseph University o f California, Davis

Judith Hole CBS News Helen Bequaert Holmes Center for Genetics, Ethics, and Women, Amherst, Masssachusetts Akasha (Gloria) Hull University of California, Santa Cruz Tera W. Hunter University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Lani Ka’ahumanu San Francisco, California Peggy Kahn University o f Michigan—Flint Wendy Kaminer Radcliffe Public Policy Institute Temma Kaplan State University of New York at Stony Brook

Aida Hurtado University of California, Santa Cruz

Debra Renee Kaufman Northeastern University

H. Patricia Hynes Boston University School of Public Health

M im Kelber Womens Environment and Development Organization

Patricia Ireland National Organization for Women Janice M. Irvine University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy State University of New York at Buffalo Madhulika S. Khandelwal Queens College

Ruth Harriet Jacobs Wellesley College Center for Research on Women

Nazli Kibria Boston University

Sylvia M. Jacobs North Carolina Central University

Clara Sue Kidwell National Museum of the American Indian

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Wilma King Michigan State University

Catharine A. MacKinnon University of Michigan

Ynestra King New York, New York

Patricia Mainardi City University of New York

Frances Kissling Catholics for a Free Choice

Irena S. M. Makarushka Bowdoin College

Rebecca E. Klatch University of California, San Diego

Wilma Mankiller Park Hill, Oklahoma

Kathryn Kolbert

Henrietta Mann Haskell Indian Nations University

Center for Reproductive Rights

Anne Kornhauser New York, New York Virginia Sanchez Korrol City University of New York Jo-Ann Krestan Brunswick, Maine Molly Ladd-Taylor York University Robin Tolmach Lakoff University of California, Berkeley

Isabel Marcus State University of New York at Buffalo School o f Law Valerie Matsumoto University of California, Los Angeles Julie Matthaei Wellesley College Glenna Matthews Berkeley, California Sucheta Mazumdar Duke University

Joan B. Landes Pennsylvania State University

Carole R. M cCann University o f Maryland

Cassandra Langer New York, New York

Kathleen D. M cCarthy City University of New York

Sylvia A. Law New York University School of Law

Carolyn D. M cCreesh Powder Springs, Georgia

Laura J. Lederer University of Minnesota Law School

Davianna Pomaika’i M cGregor University of Hawaii

Charlotte Libov Bethlehem, Connecticut

Nellie Y. McKay University ofWisconsin—Madison

Marilee Lindemann Takoma Park, Maryland

Beatrice Medicine Wakpala, South Dakota

Susan Lynn Portland Community College

Suzanne B. Mettler Syracuse University

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Ruth Meyerowitz State University of New York at Buffalo

Mary Beth Norton Cornell University

Sonya Michel University of Illinois, Urbana —Champaign

Karen Nussbaum Washington, D.C.

Ruth Milkman University of California, Los Angeles

Bernadette Nye Union College

Andrea Miller Center for Reproductive Rights

Karen O ’Connor The American University

Kay Mills Santa Monica, California

Ann Shola Orloff University ofWisconsin —Madison

Gwendolyn Mink University of California, Santa Cruz

Cynthia E. Orozco University of Texas

Patsy T. Mink U. S. Congress

Grey Osterud San ]ose State University

Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich The Union School Regina Morantz-Sanchez University of Michigan Priscilla Murolo Sarah Lawrence College

Sharon Parker The Union Institute Kathy Peiss University of Massachusetts at Amherst Kathy A. Perkins University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign

Nancy A. Naples University of California, Irvine

Susan L. Phillips United Food and Commercial Workers International Union

Vasudha Narayanan University of Florida

Letty Cottin Pogrebin New York, New York

Marysa Navarro Dartmouth College

Valerie Polakow Eastern Michigan University

Cynthia Neverdon-Morton Coppin State College

Barbara M. Posadas Northern Illinois University

Carolyn Moore Newberger Harvard Medical School

Marie Luise Proeller New York, New York

Vivien W. Ng State Univeristy of New York at Albany

Laura M. Purdy Wells College

Gail M. Nomura University of Michigan

Jill Quadagno Florida State University

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Margaret Randall Albuquerque, New Mexico

Judith M. Roy Century College

Gerda W. Ray University o f Missouri—St. Louis

Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein San Diego, California

Maureen T. Reddy Providence, Rhode Island

Rosemary Radford Ruether Garrett Theological Seminary

Linda Reed University of Houston

Vicki L. Ruiz Arizona State University

Melissa Riley San Francisco Public Library

Leila J. Rupp Ohio State University

Trina Robbins San Francisco, California Belinda Robnett University of California, Davis

Diana E. H. Russell Mills College Dalee Sambo Dorough Vancouver, British Columbia

Ruthann Robson City University of New York School of Law

Judith Schwarz Wynnewood, Pennsylvania

Helen Rodriguez-Trias Brookdale, California

Anne Firor Scott Duke University

Jessie M. Rodrique Boston, Massachusetts

Carol Seajay Feminist Bookstore News

Mary Romero Arizona State University

Barbara Seaman New York, New York

Margaret Rose California State University, Bakersfield

Mab Segrest Durham, North Carolina

Phyllis Rosser Holmdel, New Jersey

Stephanie J. Shaw Ohio State University

Rachel Roth Yale University

Christine Marie Sierra University o f New Mexico

Barbara Katz Rothman City University o f New York

Helene Silverberg University o f California, Santa Barbara

Kate Rounds Ms. Magazine

Kathryn Kish Sklar State University o f New York at Binghamton

Harilyn Rousso Disabilities Unlimited Counseling Service, New York, New York

Margaret Sloan-Hunter Oakland, California

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Barbara Smith Albany, New York

Dana Y. Takagi University o f California, Santa Cruz

Martha Nell Smith Takoma Park, Maryland

Tani Takagi Ms. Foundation for Women

Nancy B. Smith Ms. Magazine

Gayle T. Tate Rutgers University

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg University of Pennsylvania

Verta Taylor Ohio State University

Geneva Smitherman Michigan State University

Mary Thom New York, New York

Rickie Solinger Boulder, Colorado

Sue Thomas Georgetown University

Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell University of California, Davis

Becky W. Thompson Middletown, Connecticut

Judith Stacey University of California, Davis

Barrie Thorne University of Southern California

Amy Dru Stanley University of Chicago

Rochella Thorpe Binghamton University

Gloria Steinem Ms. Magazine

Veronica E. Velarde Tiller Albuquerque, New Mexico

Catharine R. Stimpson MacArthur Foundation

Sheila Tobias Tucson, Arizona

Wendy Stock Pacific Graduate School of Psychology

Andrea Tone Georgia Institute of Technology

Nancy E. Stoller University of California, Santa Cruz

Em ily Toth Louisiana State University

Sharon Hartman Strom University of Rhode Island

E. Kay Trimberger Sonoma State University

Nadine Strossen American Civil Liberties Union

Denise Troutman-Robinson Michigan State University

Norma Swenson Newton Centre, Massachusetts

Kathleen Underwood University of Texas at Arlington

Amy Swerdlow Sarah Lawrence College

Antonia Villasenor Los Angeles, California

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Mary Jo Wagner Denver, Colorado

Marie Wilson Ms. Foundation for Women

Helen Walker-Hill Laramie, Wyoming

Deborah Woo University of California, Santa Cruz

Skye Ward Berkeley, California

Jennifer Wriggins University of Maine School of Law

Naomi Weisstein New York, New York

Lynn Yaeger The Village Voice

Dorothy Wertz The Shriver Center

Alice Yang Murray University of California, Santa Cruz

Candace West University of California, Santa Cruz

Shirley J. Yee University of Washington—Seattle

Marilyn J. Westerkamp University of California, Santa Cruz

Susan M. Yohn Hofstra University

Julie Wheelwright University of London

Tricia Henry Young Florida State University

Deborah Gray White Rutgers University

Judy Yung University of California, Santa Cruz

Katie Kinnard White Tennessee State University

Beth Zemsky University of Minnesota

Lillian Serece Williams State University of New York at Albany

M in Zhou University of California, Los Angeles

Susan M. Williams Albuquerque, New Mexico

Helen Zia Oakland, California

EDITORS’ NOTE

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W

il m a

M

a n k il l e r

When Gloria Steinem called to ask if I would join her and Marysa Navarro as a coeditor of a women’s history reference book, I did not hesitate to accept this honor. It had been part of Gloria’s original discussions with Houghton Mifflin that at least four other contributing editors would partic­ ipate, representing diverse strands of women’s ex­ perience; later we welcomed Wendy Mink and Barbara Smith. Indeed, it has been an honor to work with this wonderfully strong team of women. From the outset we felt connected to one another by our friendship and by our individual and col­ lective commitment to produce a volume that would provide the reader with new and compre­ hensive information about women’s history. I once participated in a tribal ceremony (not Cherokee) in which I was doctored by a tradi­ tional medicine man to “speak for those who can­ not speak for themselves.” In the course of review­ ing dozens of pieces for the book, I tried to uphold this principle. As The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Womens History evolved, it became clear that even the most committed feminist scholars knew little about contemporary Native American women or our history. But then who can blame them when Native American people, women in particular, are not even a blip on the national screen? Be­ cause there is so little accurate information about Native American women in either educational in­ stitutions or the popular culture, stereotypes are pervasive. Most people are genuinely surprised to learn that in some tribes women have held and

still hold powerful leadership positions. The edi­ tors were dedicated to working with the writers to do as much as possible to eliminate stereotypes about all women. I hope the reader will be as inspired as I was by these pieces. Most of all I hope The Reader’s Com­ panion is useful and will encourage the reader to learn more about women’s history. Working on this book was kind of like sitting with four other women to weave a basket over a long period of time. During that time all of our lives changed, some profoundly. We shared our stories with one another, drew strength from en­ couraging other women to tell their stories, and stayed focused on the weaving. In the end, like a communal basket, the book is the product of many hours of labor by a great many people. It will now take on a life of its own. The spirits of all the women who contributed and all the women for whom they speak will be with it wherever it goes.

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w en d o lyn

M

in k

The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History is a part of women’s history as much as it presents the history of U.S. women. It is the first reference work to provide information and interpretation to a wide audience about women’s diverse experi­ ences across the centuries. It is the first such work devoted to exploring moments, topics, and events in U.S. history as they affected, and were affected by, women. It is the only work I know of that lets women who have made history showcase their own ideas, accomplishments, and expertise:

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scholars who have blazed trails constituting and reconstituting the field of women’s history; ac­ tivists who have generated agendas and strategies for social change; practitioners who have exposed problems o f race, class, and gender inequality to better view. The Reader’s Companion also makes history in the way that it asks readers to think about the his­ tory of U.S. women. The articles invite readers to ask “which women?” whenever “women” are re­ ferred to in the text; to wonder how claims and gains made by middle-class white wom en—so often the feminist subject—affected women of other classes and races; to view the lives and strug­ gles of less visible or less powerful women as foun­ dational to U.S. history; and to consider the ways in which differences among women have inter­ acted with differences between the genders to complicate and enrich women’s varied contribu­ tions to the development of U.S. society. M y hope for The Reader’s Companion was that it would follow the best work in women’s history to make race, class, and sexuality analytically piv­ otal to how we understand our gendered past. Women’s history—and feminism —have come a long way in thirty years: it is a rare scholar or ac­ tivist who consciously insists that the experiences of middle-class white women stand for the experi­ ences of all. However, in women’s history and across feminism, the goal of inclusion often has been forwarded by purely additive means. The addition of different groups’ stories to the tableau of women’s history has been tremen­ dously important, for it has broadened the very category “ U.S. women” to include women whose identities have been erased by the dominant cul­ ture or whose communities have been treated as irrelevant to the central plot o f U.S. history. Still, the incorporation of more women’s stories has not always altered the way we think. The in­ corporation o f untold histories has not immu­ nized us from exoticizing, “othering,” these histo­ ries, for example. Nor has it necessarily moved us beyond a mere enumeration of diversity to recon­

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struct visions and agendas because of that diver­ sity. Taken together, the articles in this volume com­ plicate what we mean by “women’s history” and so advance approaches that make differences the starting point of historical analysis rather than the afterthought to white women’s stories. The ar­ ticles do much more than give less privileged women an equal but separate place on the stage of U.S. history. They suggest that women’s diversity runs to the core o f U.S. women’s collective his­ tory. Each article bears the imprint of its author, of course, so none fits a singular mold or speaks from a singular perspective. However, I think most authors honored our mission and have helped to construct a pathbreaking narrative. Inventing The Reader’s Companion and shep­ herding it to its final form has been a labor-inten­ sive, sometimes frustration-filled, endeavor: thou­ sands of manuscript pages to review, hundreds of galleys to proof and edit, my own essays to write, and sticky issues to settle. But every aspect of our work and collaboration has been instructive and rewarding to me. Some of our knottiest disagree­ ments have been about lived differences—un­ derscoring the importance of foregrounding dis­ tinctions o f privilege and experience even as we commonly celebrate the history of U.S. women. All of our work gave me opportunities to learn for which I will always be grateful—about painting, dance, Woodlands Indians, and other subjects about which I know far less than I should. I only wish that readers could read each article as many times as I have! I am indebted to the many authors who changed their schedules and personal agendas to develop the several hundred articles contained in The Reader’s Companion. They make this volume —and it is one of which they, and I, can be proud. I am particularly indebted to Dana Frank, whose own contributions to the volume improved its quality and upon whose encyclopedic knowledge of women’s history and labor history I have come to depend. M y mother, Patsy Takemoto Mink, let

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me rant and moan about the various obstacles I encountered along the way and always gave judi­ cious advice. Although Theodore }. Lowi did not choose this role, he provided sage feminist coun­ sel when I was unsure of how to proceed and showed me how political science (after all) could offer solutions to dilemmas of both history and feminism.

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avarro

The idea of participating in The Reader’s Com ­ panion to U.S. Women’s History was irresistible from the first moment Gloria Steinem mentioned it to me. We were going to be working together in a project that would involve the widest possible array of feminists—Native Americans, Latinas, African Americans, Asian Americans, old, young, early visionaries, guerrilla actresses, labor organiz­ ers, lesbian and gay leaders, activists of all kinds, and scholars. Our purpose would be to write a book that would tell the different histories of U.S. women, histories shaped by their race and ethnic origin, sexual orientation, and class. It would also include the history of ideas about women at pre­ sent and in the past. It would encompass the his­ tory of Cherokee and Pueblo women, Kongo- and Yoruba-speaking slaves, English-speaking inden­ tured servants and mill workers, Spanish-speaking Hispanas, and young brides in Chinatown. I have never regretted saying yes, despite the mountain of articles piled on my desk every so often, the endless conference calls, and at times tense discussions. M y enthusiasm for this project was generously nurtured by the people at Houghton Mifflin, by my fellow editors, and by the ex­ traordinary commitment of the writers who be­ lieved in the effort as much as we did. We were inclusive, but this does not mean we were able to do everything. Very early on, for example, we agreed that we would exclude bi­ ographies and that certain subjects would re­ ceive greater emphasis than others. The women’s health movement has been an important compo­

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nent of the women’s movement, so this book con­ tains many entries covering health issues. Readers are directed to such subjects as birth control, breast cancer, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, and mental health. The knowledge, activism, and information pro­ duced by U.S. women and represented in The Reader’s Companion are truly dazzling. The Read­ er’s Companion has nineteen different articles on feminism—twenty, when we include the piece on womanism. There are more than a dozen entries on specific labor unions, numerous articles on immigration, legislation, and religion, with en­ tries on Buddhism, fundamentalism, and Wicca, among others. Some articles provide information about sub­ jects where the research is limited or where the cross-cultural perspective has been lacking or is dispersed among various scholarly articles. The essay “ Images of Women,” for example, required the culling of information from multiple sources. There are long interpretive essays written by scholars, practitioners, or activists. Some topics are traditional, but the interpretation is new. The general overview article on literature does not simply provide information about women’s con­ tribution to this field, although it does mention the names of women who have distinguished themselves in particular genres. It also discusses how literature has been defined and, from a crosscultural perspective, it seeks to explain what liter­ ature has meant in the lives of women, how it has been affected by their writing, and its relationship to the women’s movement. The Reader’s Com­ panion is a unique reference work because it rep­ resents much o f what U.S. women have written about themselves at the close of the twentieth century.

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B arbara S

m it h

When I was invited in 1992 to be one of the five general editors of The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History, I was of course intrigued,

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but I also had serious questions. Because I was aware of significant political differences among the potential editors, I wondered if it would be possible for us to work together and to shape a vol­ ume that would be true to each of our visions of feminist activism, theory, and scholarship. After much soul-searching and stimulating, productive discussions at our first meeting in January 1993 , 1 decided to commit to the project. All of my previous work as a writer and editor has been shaped by my various identities and by my political activism in liberation movements that I see as fundamentally connected to one another. I am an African American woman from a working-class family, born into segregation in 1946 . 1 am a Black feminist, socialist, and lesbian, and it is these perspectives that I have tried to bring to this book. When I was still in graduate school in the early 1970s and teaching courses in African Ameri­ can literature and Black women writers, I often thought how fascinating and useful it would be to teach so-called American literature (that is Euro­ pean American authors) from a Black and femi­ nist perspective. Such a course would not merely add a few token people of color and women to the syllabus, but would actually interrogate the white male literary canon, which would inevitably re­ veal oppressive ironies that are as integral to the formation of “American” literature as themes such as the quest for identity, autonomy, and free­ dom in a “new” land. I never had the opportunity to teach this course, but I was excited that work on The Reader’s Companion would be an opportu­ nity to do something similar, to redefine an area of knowledge. It was not enough to have specific entries about women of color, lesbians, and working-class women, but material about women o f color, les­ bians, and working-class women needed to be addressed in every article whose subject matter would logically encompass their experiences. I think that attempting this level of inclusiveness was the most difficult challenge of the project and

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also what makes this history of U.S. women so unique. In our guidelines for contributors we gave the following instructions: “The scope of each article should provide a multicultural and inclusive per­ spective, including information on race, ethnicity, class, social status, sexuality, religion, and politics as relevant to the understanding of the subject matter.” I regret that this statement did not also mention disability and age. Those omissions indi­ cate that working toward inclusiveness has been a challenge for us as editors as well. Some of the contributors were already used to thinking about the implications of their subject areas for all women, but for many more our expectations were quite new. In one case a historian was assigned to write specifically about a group o f European American women but refused to discuss their race and class privilege, instead treating European American women’s experience as generic. We reassigned the entry. In contrast, Ruth Harriet Jacobs points out in her article, “Aging,” how race, class, and sexual orientation affect different women’s experiences of growing older. Ellen Bravo’s entry, “Clerical Work,” describes how racism excluded women of color from this pre­ dominantly female occupation until the civil rights era. Although I participated in countless hours of telephone conference calls to arrive at our entries and assignments and read and edited thousands of pages of manuscripts and galleys, the most ardu­ ous task by far was trying to make sure that no racism, elitism, or heterosexism either by exclu­ sion or by factual or interpretive distortion ap­ peared in this book. Fortunately, the majority of contributors were open to expanding the coverage in their articles. As comprehensive as we have tried to be, which to me is one of the book’s most appealing strengths, some gaps remain. Early on, we chose to exclude biographical entries because of space limitations. There are entries that we tried very hard to obtain but frustratingly could not. The po-

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litical differences that had concerned me at the outset did not, for the most part, prevent our ef­ fectively working together. Not surprisingly, the article on capitalism and socialism and what de­ veloped into two different articles on feminism were focal points for significant disagreement. Despite these many challenges, I am very glad that I signed on to the project. I hope that The Reader’s Companion will make a unique and use­ ful contribution for years to come to our under­ standings of the diverse communities of women who have shaped the history of this land.

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S t e in

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This book has many mothers, but the first was Liz Kubik, who believed that readers deserved a guide to the newly emerging history of the female half of the country. As editorial director of reference at Houghton Mifflin, she had seen the old definition of an encyclopedia—a reference work with alpha­ betically arranged articles on a variety of topics — expand to encompass good writing, conceptual thinking, and new popularity. She decided to create The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History. When Liz suggested that I become the outside editor that each such Companion has had, her en­ thusiasm was contagious. For one thing, I, too, love the format o f short descriptive entries and longer evaluative essays. It rewards the researcher, invites the reader, and offers all of us the serendip­ itous pleasure of discovering unexpected treasures on the way to whatever we started out to find. For another, I had been hoping to find ways of getting women’s history out of the classroom and into everyday life. As someone from the days before Women’s History, African American History, and other courses best described as Remedial History, I was painfully aware of how difficult it was to find this knowledge off campus, and how crucial to a view of the country as i f women mattered. In other words, I wanted The Reader’s Compan­

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ion to exist. I just couldn’t imagine trying it by my­ self. Secure in my knowledge that my suggestion wasn’t possible within the Companion format, I said I couldn’t imagine attempting such a task as an individual. One of the few advantages o f ex­ clusion from history is the determination to end exclusion; thus women’s history has tended to be more inclusive by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, ability, and region that other histories. Even to symbolize the diversity of women’s expe­ rience on this subcontinent would take a group of editors. “All right,” Liz said gamely. “We can have a group of editors.” Still looking for an out, I added that such a Companion would have to begin with the first na­ tions on this land, not with the arrival of the first Europeans. After all, many Native American cul­ tures were based on the idea of balance between males and females, a prepatriarchal past that could help give us faith in the possibility of a postpatriarchal future. Though the political limits of scholarship would make this enlarging of the American canvas difficult, it also would make us conscious of blank spaces and perhaps turn up new parts o f the big picture. Liz agreed. I got to musing about the redefinition of cate­ gories—for example, expanding “work” to in­ clude the labor o f homemakers, or “art” to in­ clude what has been called “ crafts” if created by women. I knew I was hooked; there was no way I could resist this adventure. After that first meeting in early 1993, Wilma Mankiller, Wendy M ink, Marysa Navarro, Bar­ bara Smith, and I formed the editorial group. You are meeting each one in her own words here, but all said yes with courage and generosity. Together, I think we’ve disproved the theory that “there has to be one boss.” We’ve done collectively what none of us could have done alone. There were many moments when I wondered what I had got myself into. Computer printouts of entries and essays could have felled a small forest.

XXI

XXII

e d it o r s

Telephone conferences went on for so long that separating the phone from my ear seemed to require surgery. Reading and commenting on manuscripts took unexpected amounts of time, and scheduling meetings of busy women required almost as much energy—especially on the part of the Houghton Mifflin staff—as did the meet­ ings themselves. When different experiences and viewpoints created tension, I had to have faith that encompassing difference would create a broader viewpoint and benefit readers. There have been epiphanies of learning from our group of editors, advisers, and more than three hundred contributors. Each has been part of the labor of birth. I doubt that such a diverse col­ lection of scholars, activists, and writers has ever tried to cover so much new territory in such a con­ centrated form. As a wider view of history began to emerge, I remembered the breadth of Liz’s early instruction to “redirect history.” But like all moth­ ers who watch their young one go off into the world, I know this is a beginning, not an end. Be­ cause the message of this project goes beyond the past: We are all forces of history.

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Acknowledgments Many people were involved in the creation of The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Womens History. In the editorial department at Houghton Mifflin, ed­ itorial director Elizabeth Kubik’s bold vision and generous support got the project off the ground. With Elizabeth Kubik, assistant editor Amy Smith Bell coordinated the early and formative work among the coeditors, facilitating editorial deci­ sions and communications with the contributors. Senior editor Borgna Brunner saw the project through some critical transitions. Assistant editor Holly Hartman, who also researched and selected the illustrations, guided the volume through its demanding final stages. Her erudition and atten­ tion to detail eased the coeditors’ burdens and un­ questionably improved the book. Special thanks are extended to designer Melodie Wertelet, proof­ readers Kathleen Roos and Susan Innes, and manuscript editor Deborah Sosin, who, for the project’s duration, edited hundreds of articles with great care and intelligence.

§ Abolitionist Movement n 1852 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825— 1911), a Black abolitionist, teacher, and poet, wrote: “The conditions of our people, the wants of our children, and the welfare of our race demand the aid of every helping hand.” Several years later, Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793-1880), a white aboli­ tionist, emphasized that the ultimate focus of the abolitionist movement was to destroy slavery “ root and branch.” The U.S. abolitionist movement, led by both Black and white men and women, fought for the immediate end of slavery and racism. Ef­ forts to end racial oppression, begun through the resistance of slaves themselves since the beginning ofbondage in the seventeenth century, found or­ ganized voices among free-born and freed Blacks in the North as well as among sympathetic whites by the late eighteenth century. The visions of “abolition” by Harper and Mott, two dedicated activists, illuminate the existence of diverging definitions of the movement to abolish slavery between 1817 and i860. Women, across racial and class lines, had participated in orga­ nized abolition since 1817, when Black women and men met in Philadelphia to lodge a formal, public protest against the white-led colonization movement, which proposed to send Blacks “back” to Africa. Black women abolitionists and Black men shared the view that abolition meant more than simply eliminating the institution of slavery but required obtaining political, social, and economic equality as well. Many Black women abolitionists were also teachers and com­ munity activists. Black women’s participation in this expanded notion of abolition illustrates that the immediate end of slavery was only one goal of the movement. The continuous participation of Black women and men since the eighteenth cen­ tury also belies the assumption that “ radical” abo­ lition began with the appearance in 1831 of white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and his news­ paper, The Liberator.

I

Abolitionist women formed both formal and in­ formal networks that sometimes crossed gender, race, and class boundaries. Perhaps the bestknown woman abolitionist was Harriet Tubman (i82o?-i9ri), an escaped slave from a Maryland plantation who returned to the South at least nineteen times to rescue approximately three hundred slaves. Black abolitionist Sarah Douglass (1806-82), whose mother, Grace Bustill Douglass (1782-1842), helped organize the Philadelphia Fe­ male Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS), devoted forty years to Black education. Early in her teaching ca­ reer, Douglass operated a school for Black chil­ dren and adults through PFASS, from which she derived both spiritual and financial support. Al­ though she eventually ran her school indepen­ dently of the organization, she built and main­ tained important personal and professional ties with the women of the Philadelphia abolitionist community. Female abolitionists also routinely worked with male colleagues. Lucretia and James Mott, for instance, were active in antislavery orga­ nizations and helped lead the Free Produce Movement, which boycotted slave-produced goods from the South, particularly cotton. The organization of female antislavery soci­ eties reflected the conventional organizational structure present in social reform organizations, in which men formed the leadership and headed the state and national societies, while women were expected to form separate, auxiliary soci­ eties. The function of female antislavery societies was similar to that of other female reform organi­ zations of the period, namely, to raise money to support the movement’s lecturers and its official newspapers. The composition of the female societies varied. In some cases women followed prevailing social conventions of racial separation by forming segre­ gated antislavery societies. Others, such as the women in Boston and Philadelphia, struggled to break down racial barriers by organizing racially integrated societies. Historians believe that these societies were biracial as opposed to multiracial.

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A B O L ITIO N IST M O VEM ENT

Harriet Tubman (far left), with former slaves she helped to freedom via the Underground Railroad. The best known o f the Railroad’s “conductors,” Tubman made an estimated nineteen trips to the South to free family members and hundreds o f other slaves.

The issue of challenging the custom of race seg­ regation sometimes erupted into heated public de­ bates among men and women in the movement. In Fall River, Massachusetts, for instance, the pre­ dominantly white female antislavery society nearly disbanded when white abolitionist sisters Eliza­ beth Buffum Chace (1809-99) and Lucy Buffum Lovell (n.d.) invited “a few very respectable young colored women” to join as members. A number of white members threatened to quit, arguing that while the Black women could sit in on meetings, to offer them membership implied that they were the social equals of white women in the society. The debates among white women about ad­ mitting Black women into the female antislavery

societies illustrated that discourses on racial equal­ ity within the movement also implicated gen­ der. Northern abolitionist women constructed a rhetoric of sisterhood that placed Black women, especially slaves, into abolitionist discourse by em­ phasizing the common bonds o f womanhood, particularly motherhood, in order to gain the sym­ pathies of Southern white women. The slogan “Am 1 Not a Woman and a Sister?” which paral­ leled the earlier antislavery rallying cry “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” became the rhetorical link between slave women o f the South and free women of the North. Unlike other reform movements of the time, in­ cluding temperance and antiprostitution groups,

3

A BO R TIO N

in which such questions rarely arose, by the mid1830s abolitionist men and women furiously de­ bated the “proper” role of women in public re­ form movements. The fact that abolitionists were already wrestling with the issue of racial equality as a goal of the movement created a climate ripe for discussions about equality between the sexes. During the 1830s a few women abolitionists began to step outside the boundaries of “proper” female activities by engaging in traditionally male do­ mains, such as political writing and public speak­ ing. Maria M iller Stewart, a free-born Black from New England, delivered public speeches in Boston between 1831 and 1833 on antislavery and the improvement of economic and educational opportunities for Black women and men. An­ gelina and Sarah Grim ke, white sisters from South Carolina, traveled throughout the North­ east, delivering public addresses condemning slavery. Both Stewart and the Grim ke sisters re­ ceived mixed responses from those who ques­ tioned the propriety of women taking the podium and assuming a position of authority. A “ Pastoral Letter,” circulated by a group of New England ministers, condemned the Grimkes’ actions. The “Woman Question” contributed to a for­ mal split in the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS) in 1841 after Abigail Kelley Foster, a white abolitionist from Massachusetts, was elected as the first woman to sit on the executive board. Gar­ rison, the acknowledged leader of the AAS, was a vocal supporter of women’s rights and had backed the election of Kelley Foster. Those who had op­ posed her election to the executive board de­ fected from the AAS to form the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFAS). Some women abolitionists pushed the bound­ aries of acceptable behavior in public reform by stepping into male domains and expanding dis­ cussions about “equality” in the movement. In so doing, this generation of women activists forged a collective legacy for subsequent movements for sexual and racial equality in U.S. society. More important, however, their participation in aboli­

tion and women’s rights also foretold the continu­ ing struggle over racism, classism, and sexism both within the movements themselves and in so­ ciety at large. Blanch Glassman Hersh, Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Aboli­ tionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1978); Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Ac­ tivism, 1828-60 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); Jean Fagan Yell in, Women and Sisters: The Anti­ slavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). ■ S H I R L E Y J. Y E E S e e a l s o Constitution and Amendments: Emanci­ pation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment; Slavery.

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Abortion

bortion refers to the purposeful termination of a pregnancy. Millions of girls and women have sought and received abortions during the two eras when the procedure was legal (eigh­ teenth century to mid-nineteenth century, and 1973 to the present), and during the criminal era (mid-nineteenth century to 1973). Legislative, medical, judicial, religious, political, and popular responses to abortion have constrained or enabled access to abortion services in both legal and crim­ inal eras. Across the history of the United States, females have obtained abortions in very large numbers, no matter what the prevailing legal sta­ tus and public attitudes toward the procedure. For example, during the 1950s, when abortion was il­ legal, U.S. public-health experts estimated that as many as one million criminal abortions were per­ formed each year. In the first decades of nationhood, the legal sta­ tus of the procedure was governed by British com­ mon law that viewed abortion before quickening as a legal act. (“Quickening” referred to the sensa­ tion of fetal movement felt and reported by the

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ABO RTIO N

pregnant woman.) After quickening, destruction of the fetus without cause was considered a crime. Many women of that era were aware of and em­ ployed herbal and other remedies that caused abortion, sometimes with the assistance of mid­ wives or physicians who consented to remove “menstrual blockages.” Enslaved African Ameri­ can women used abortion to resist coerced repro­ duction and slavery itself, employing the knowl­ edge of African-based midwifery culture and folk medicine. Connecticut was the first state to criminalize abortion, in 1821. This legislation was apparently concerned in part with protecting women from dangerous substances and techniques associated with pregnancy termination. The early state laws were not enacted in response to popular objec­ tions to abortion. Rather, they were expressions of an innovative collaboration between legislators and physicians interested in consolidating the au­ thority of university-trained medical doctors (“reg­ ulars” ) in the area of obstetrics. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as women’s lives were shaped by urbanization, in­ dustrialization, and the experiences of migration and immigration, abortion became more com­ mon and more visible. By midcentury, observers estimated that 20 to 25 percent of all pregnancies ended in abortion. The combined growth of ur­ ban newspapers and advertising enabled broad dissemination of information about abortion pro­ viders and abortifacients. Young white women be­ ginning to enter the work force and married women concerned about adjusting family size to urban settings took advantage o f this information. While leaders of the emergent women’s rights movement publicly expressed negative views of abortion, it is likely that the new visibility of abor­ tion, combined with the feminists’ goal of con­ trolled conception (through “voluntary mother­ hood,” or sexual abstinence), encouraged many white, native-born women to use abortion to resist traditional reproductive experiences, including serial childbearing.

Having worked successfully with a number of state legislatures to enact antiabortion laws, med­ ical doctors intensified their campaign after the founding of the American Medical Association in 1847. Dr. Horatio Robinson Storer led efforts that resulted in antiabortion statutes in every state by the end of the nineteenth century. The new laws were a triumph for physicians now fully invested with scientific authority; midwives and “ irregular” doctors were excluded as legitimate abortion practitioners, and the women-centered “ quicken­ ing” doctrine was abandoned. The new laws were sharply moralistic; for example, they deepened the stigma attached to abortion by associating it with “obscenity.” In addition, the laws reflected a triumph for sexual conservatism and medical doc­ tors’ determination to block middle-class women from employing abortion as a tool for resisting tra­ ditional roles and facilitating new ones. Despite the criminalization o f abortion, however, many women of every class and race, married and un­ married, continued to use abortion to limit their childbearing. In the early twentieth century, women found midwives, physicians, and various lay practition­ ers to perform illegal abortions. Increasingly, cities and towns were home to abortion providers who had full-time abortion practices, worked semi-openly, and were highly proficient. These practitioners probably rarely caused complica­ tions or deaths, which usually occurred in the case o f self-induced abortions or abortions per­ formed by the relatively small number o f un­ trained lay practitioners who exploited some preg­ nant women’s desperation. Periodically, journalists and police forces in this era, often in league with politicians and medical doctors, orchestrated local exposes of abortion practices. The exposes typically targeted and tainted midwives—who chiefly served immigrant women and women of color—but not physicians. Antiabortion campaigns combined a mix o f agen­ das, all of which were incorporated into antiabor­ tion rhetoric. They championed medical prerog-

A BO R TIO N

atives, demanded female sexual purity and con­ formity, opposed women’s rights, and enforced eugenic and demographic goals. Many contemporary observers and historians have noted that these campaigns did not halt the practice of abortion, nor did they stir public indif­ ference to the crime of abortion, although the salacious content of raids and trials did engage the newspaper-buying public. Nevertheless, the cam­ paigns effectively promoted the agendas noted above and successfully warned all women of the dangers that could beset any woman who tried with abortion to control her own fertility. Interestingly, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, a massive number of women who could not afford babies obtained abortions, but the number of exposes and prosecutions o f abortion providers declined. In this era, doctors spent more time debating which conditions warranted thera­ peutic abortions than they spent collaborating with police and politicians to stamp out abortion. Poor women and women without information or other resources continued to resort to self-induced abortions. One study in the early 1930s showed that 76 percent of these involved complications. The response to abortion changed in tire World War II and postwar era. After some years of unofficial tolerance, in which most law enforce­ ment entities employed the principle of “ no death, no prosecution,” politicians and police forces once again engaged in exposes, arrests, and trials more frequently than before, even in cases where there was no evidence of abortion-related damage or death. Historians have argued that this crackdown was similar to, or a feature of, the post­ war anti-Communist fervor. It aimed to eradicate “the enemy within,” to demonstrate that the United States was a vigilant, virtuous country, and to enforce a conforming, conservative code o f fe­ male sexual behavior, just as the seeds of “the sex­ ual revolution” and the women’s liberation move­ ment were beginning to sprout. At the same time, medical doctors began to construct hospital abortion boards charged with

implementing group decision making regarding which women applying to the boards to end their pregnancies would be granted permission and on the basis of which physical symptoms. These committees were antithetical to women’s inter­ ests. They reinforced medical authority and forged a protective, fraternal relationship between doc­ tors and a legal system that acknowledged only board-sanctioned abortions as legitimate. They also significantly reduced the number of inhospital abortions. This situation, coupled with the effects o f the antiabortion crackdown, in­ creased many pregnant women’s desperation. M any women without the resources to leave the country to obtain an abortion or to pay a private U.S. physician willing to perform an illegal proce­ dure resorted to self-abortion. Not surprisingly, this era saw a rise in abortion complications and death, particularly among poor women and women of color. Abortion boards did permit some women to ob­ tain an abortion. For example, women seeking abortions, together with psychiatrists, constructed the “psychiatric indication” for abortion, which forced some women to define themselves as sui­ cide-prone or unfit to be a mother in order to get board permission. By the 1960s, many observers acknowledged that antiabortion statutes could not be enforced. Moreover, the conditions of women’s lives were changing in ways that intensified their need for fertility control, including access to safe and legal abortion. For example, female labor-force partici­ pation and college attendance rates were increas­ ing; age at first marriage was rising. Many liberal physicians, clergy, academics, and others, recog­ nizing the inevitability of abortion, began to ad­ vocate abortion reform. In addition, politicians concerned about wel­ fare expenditures and “ghetto unrest,” and popu­ lation controllers worried about the “population bomb,” spoke out in favor of abortion reform. The American Law Institute published guidelines for reform in i960, and the American Medical Asso-

5

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ABO RTIO N

ciation endorsed reform in 1967, a year in which one study indicated that 87 percent of physicians favored liberalization. The National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws was formed in !

969-

Some leading African American activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s opposed abortion reform, associating abortion with other whitesponsored attempts to limit or otherwise control the fertility of African American women. Over time, as African American women used abortion in their own interests, and Black feminists sup­ ported reproductive rights, their outspoken oppo­ sition abated. Small groups around the country formed, each with a specific focus: The Society for Humane Abortion, in California, claimed that abortion was a woman’s right, fought for the repeal of antiabor­ tion statutes, and educated women about their bodies and abortion. Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman’s project in Los Angeles taught women how to perform “menstrual extraction.” The jane Collective, in Chicago, helped women contract with doctors to provide illegal abortions and later to perform abortions on their own. Some “ doctors of conscience” around the country performed abortions and referred patients to others because they were convinced that women should have ac­ cess to this service. By the mid- to late 1960s, national feminist lead­ ers and grassroots feminist organizations were fo­ cusing on abortion as the key to women’s libera­ tion. The Redstockings, a feminist group in New York City, held the country’s first “speak out” on abortion in 1969, during which women publicly described their experiences obtaining illegal abor­ tions. In following years, several state legisla­ tures, including those of New York, Colorado, and North Carolina, liberalized their abortion statutes. These developments—demographic trends, the rise of the population-control movement, the emergence of feminism and grassroots support of abortion reform, the persistence of abortion, the

actions of a few state legislatures, and the climate of the era that supported “ rights” claim s—pushed the medical and legal communities to support for­ mal legalization. Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, was, in part, a pragmatic response to this complex range of de­ velopments. The years since legalization have been marked by millions of women obtaining safe abortions. These years have also been marked by unemploy­ ment, a rise in female labor-force participation and wages, changes in family composition, and other economic and cultural shifts that sparked the rise o f the New Right and the antiabortion movement. Using demonstrations, clinic block­ ades, legislative strategies, judicial appointments and legal challenges, and violent tactics such as clinic bombings and even murder of abortion practitioners and their colleagues, various seg­ ments o f the antiabortion movement have sig­ nificantly reshaped the abortion arena. At the end of the century, abortion is still legal, but access to services is more limited than in the 1970s as a result of such legislated obstacles as the Hyde Amendment, which denies Medicaid fund­ ing for abortion, and parental notification provi­ sions for teenagers, and because the number of practitioners has dwindled. The successes of the antiabortion movement have sharply constrained access of poor women and young women to safe abortion. Middle-class women are still able to ex­ ercise “ choice” relatively unimpeded, although abortion rights proponents have had to assume a defensive stance. The Supreme Court seems committed at this time to sustaining legal abor­ tion, but significant numbers in the U.S. C on­ gress and state legislatures are determined to pass laws further reducing access and constraining rights, despite the fact that a majority of Ameri­ cans support “a woman’s right to choose.” Marlene G. Fried, ed. From Abortion to Reproductive Freedom: Transforming a Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1990); Laura Kaplan, The Story of Jane: The le g ­ endary Underground Feminist Abortion Service (New York:

A B O RTIO N S E L F - H E L P M O V E M E N T

Pantheon, 1995); Rickie Solinger, The Abortionist: A Woman Against the Law (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Rickie Solinger, ed. Abortion Wars: Fifty Years of Struggle, 1950-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). . R I C K I E S O L IN G E R S ee also Abortion Self-Help Movement; ProChoice and Antiabortion Movements; Reproductive Rights; Roe v. Wade.

§

Abortion Self-Help Movement

he abortion self-help movement has spanned more than twenty-five years. Its early perspec­ tive was influenced heavily by repressive abortion laws, in particular the 1967 California Therapeu­ tic Abortion Act, which stated that abortion was available only in an accredited hospital, only up to twenty weeks, and was subject to approval by a panel of doctors. Women’s access to abortion was also severely limited by class, race, and age. Al­ though adult white women with money could ob­ tain abortion (the painful dilation and curettage), young women, poor women, and women of color—those women with least access to institu­ tional medical care—were often forced to turn to illegal abortionists or self-induced abortions. California women suffered under the restric­ tions of the Therapeutic Abortion Act. After ob­ serving abortions being performed at a local ille­ gal clinic that used a new, less traumatic method utilizing suction to extract the contents of the uterus through a plastic tube attached to a sy­ ringe, some decided to learn to do abortions themselves. The first “self-help clinic” meeting took place in Los Angeles on April 7 ,19 7 1. The leaders, in­ cluding this author, shared information about nontraumatic suction abortion and self-abortion methods and also demonstrated vaginal self-ex­

T

amination using a speculum, mirror, and light. One attendee, Lorraine Rothman, returned to the next meeting with the prototype of a device called the D el’em that made it possible for women with minimal training to perform either menstrual ex­ traction or early abortion. After observation, train­ ing, and improvements in the D el’em, the small group successfully performed early abortions and menstrual extractions in private homes. Starting in 1970, these women traveled around the country to hold “self-help clinic” meetings, sharing information about vaginal self-examina­ tion, menstrual extraction, and improved abor­ tion methods. The response was overwhelming. Self-help clinic groups sprung up in their wake. When abortion became legal in January, 1973, some of these groups formed the nuclei of women-controlled abortion clinics. The collective, which became formally orga­ nized as the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers, studied the history of abortion and birth control and learned about population control. The philosophy of the population control movement rested on three assumptions. First, rapid population growth in developing countries is the cause of hunger, disease, and underdevel­ opment. Second, women cannot be trusted to use birth control and abortion and so should be steril­ ized, whether or not they want to be. Third, with­ out Western intervention, the Third World will not be able to stabilize its birthrate. At first the population control movement took approving notice of the self-help movement. The Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers was tentatively approached by founda­ tions about grants for research into menstrual extraction. But women in the self-help move­ ment refused to participate in any program that forced sterilization on women of color while si­ multaneously espousing support of women’s re­ productive rights. ■ CAROL DOWNER S ee

also

Abortion; Women’s Health Movement.

A D V ERTISIN G

8

M

Advertising

n 1886 Ladies’ Home Journal editor Louisa Knapp complained about men teasing women who read advertisements. Knapp’s complaint re­ flected the special relationship between advertis­ ing and femininity that had developed in the United States by the late 1880s, was consolidated at the turn of the last century, and has persisted with some variations until the present day. The nineteenth-century United States saw the Industrial Revolution paralleled by a consumer revolution, which coalesced in the 1880s when mass production expanded rapidly, transportation networks improved, and national markets grew. A number of the earliest mass-produced items, such as cereals, canned goods, and cleaning powders, were assumed to be of interest to women because of their domestic role, and therefore a significant proportion of early advertising was targeted spe­ cifically to women. As markets became national, gender-related assumptions provided a language through which advertisers could reach a specific yet sizable audience. Thus, advertisers sacrificed a potentially broader audience—both women and m en—for the narrower gender-targeted audi­ ence. In the 1880s magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal replaced newspapers as the primary forum for commercial messages. These maga­ zines sold for as little as a nickel, supplementing their rock-bottom subscription prices with adver­ tisements that filled one-quarter to one-third of their pages. The magazines promoted advertise­ ments by placing them in careful proximity to rel­ evant editorial copy; by “ad-stripping,” where edi­ torial copy was continued to the back of the magazine and surrounded by advertisements; and by leaving editorial pages uncut (the reader had to detach each page from the next) but carefully cut­ ting those pages featuring the most advertising. Magazine editors believed that reading and at­ tending to commercial messages would benefit women, since increased consuming would be a

I

legitimate route to power and autonomy within marriage. This belief fueled the evolution in these years from advocating that women could be con­ sumers to identifying women as properly, and even primarily, consumers. The first products advertised to women were household items. Beauty products entered the market and proliferated in the early twentieth century. Women from this point on were often objectified in and targeted by advertising. The changing portrayal of women in beauty adver­ tising paralleled the evolution in the image of women as consumers, moving from the position that women can be beautiful to the message that women must be beautiful. The solution again, ac­ cording to the commercial media, was for women to buy more products. However, women did not blindly or unthink­ ingly buy all the products pitched to them. They supported some commercial messages, for main­ stream products like Pearline Washing Powder, and not others, like the more risque Rose Blush (which was “guaranteed to draw the m en” ), and they enjoyed purchasing particular goods when they had the means. They actively confronted the commercialized media, deciding what to read, lis­ ten to, and watch, and whether to purchase a given product. In addition, women did not make choices uni­ formly as a gender group. Historically, advertis­ ing has been targeted to segmented audiences, known variously as “class,” “mass,” or “ethnic” au­ diences. The class market represented higherpriced lines sold to wealthy white women in department stores and salons and advertised in fashion magazines such as Vogue. “Mass” cosmet­ ics were sold in pharmacies and discount stores and marketed in women’s magazines catering mainly to white middle-class and upwardly mo­ bile working-class women. T he ethnic market consisted primarily of the African American beauty industry, although it also included His­ panic Americans, Asian Americans, and other women of color. Advertisers created desires across the economic spectrum from the turn of the

9

A D V ERTISIN G

century until after World War I, although some women were better positioned to satisfy those de­ sires. Some advertisers focused their energies in a dif­ ferent direction in the 1940s, working with media producers and the government to create an elabo­ rate propaganda campaign aimed at convincing women to support the war effort. Advertising mes­ sages again targeted different classes and ethnici­ ties. White, middle-class women were pictured and addressed as people in control of their destiny who could triumph over obstacles to fulfill their wartime role of self-sacrificing martyr. Workingclass white women, in contrast, were portrayed as highly dependent upon male authority, respond­ ing to the call to work because they lacked other options. Images of women of color were virtually nonexistent in advertisements, despite the fact that women of color were breaking barriers in some areas of the United States to perform criti­ cally needed war work. Whatever the nature o f their portrayal in war­ time commercial propaganda, all women were treated similarly as the war drew to a close. Their contributions to the war effort were downplayed, and many women’s interest in and need to con­ tinue working were summarily dismissed in the media. Some women did remain in the work force, but they disappeared from public view and were replaced almost completely in advertising and the commercial media by images of happy homemakers and sexy seductresses. Advertising previously limited to the print media profoundly affected the new media, first radio and then tele­ vision. Critics, from Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963) to Erving Goffman, pioneer of analyzing advertisements for stereotyping and sex­ ism (1970s), to Gloria Steinem (“ Sex, Lies and Advertising,” 1990), have protested advertising’s power to shape as well as to embody gender con­ struction ever since. Attending to such critics and becoming critics ourselves is central to strengthening women’s po­ sition vis-a-vis commercial media. It is critical that we teach media literacy; boycott offensive materi-

THIS SJnURDAX EVENING POST

Women sense it immediately ED N A A C O S T A - B E L E N Se e

also

Feminism, Latina; Puerto Rican Women.

Radical Feminism adical feminism confronts women’s oppres­ sion with a revolutionary analysis (as distin­ guished from reform) that goes to the root causes of male domination, defines men as responsible for and gaining from women’s subordination, and focuses on sisterhood and women’s bonding. The personal politics of radical feminism, which em­

R

phasizes sexual and reproductive exploitation of women, focuses on the commonality of women’s condition across class and race as well as cultures and national boundaries. In the beginning it was criticized for making women’s issues a priority over all other issues. Later in the movement, racism took the form of theories that did not effec­ tively address different racial conditions of women and practices that subordinated or excluded women of color. In the United States in 1967, radical feminism launched the “Women’s Liberation Movement” through consciousness-raising groups (CR). In small group meetings women found commonal­ ity in their experiences of subordination; and from a feminist critique of power, they produced the critical awareness that “the personal is political.” Radical feminism championed controversial or si­ lenced issues, such as women’s experiences of botched or denied abortions, rape, and wife abuse, which newly organized commissions for women’s economic and political equality would not address. Lesbian feminism helped to deepen the radical feminist critique. Women’s health or­ ganizing efforts added control of one’s body to the issues that feminists prioritized. Guerrilla theater, zap-action protests, wet-ins for child care, demon­ strations at the Miss America Pageant, and disrup­ tion of bridal parties were among the early forms o f conveying the message and politics of radical feminism. Speakouts on rape and testimony on forced pregnancy enabled women to give public voice and political context to those experiences that had been treated as only individual. These ac­ tions led to demands for changes in law and law enforcement. Radical (autonomous) feminism, based on the commonality of women’s oppression, spans the globe, arising from its own indigenous conditions in one country after another. In the United States women came to the movement out of the “ maledominated Left,” the civil rights movement, acad­ emia, their homes, and declared autonomy and self-determination. Groups like Redstockings;

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W IT C H (Women’s International Terrorist C on­ spiracy from Hell); Th e Feminists; and C ell 16, which published “No More Fun and Games,” were identified particularly with women’s auton­ omy. Many women who remained in the New Left challenged radical feminism’s prioritization of women’s issues across classes and founded their own movement of socialist feminism. Shulamith Firestone turned Marxism on its head in 1970 with her analysis of historical mate­ rialism in The Dialectics o f Sex. Kate Millett’s Sex­ ual Politics, also from 1970, critiqued the patriar­ chal family as an institutional foundation of male domination. Both authors simultaneously re­ flected and advanced the critique of the grow­ ing radical feminist movement, which pushed women’s oppression, and consequently a woman’s revolution, to the top of any agenda for social change. Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness turned Freudian psychology of women into a po­ litical analysis of personal exploitation. Ti Grace Atkinson, among others, challenged Freud’s de­ termination that “anatomy is destiny.” Valerie Solanos’s notable essay that fired the anger if not the politics of radical feminists in the S C U M (So­ ciety for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto satirically observed that while it takes two X chromosomes to produce a female, the X-Y male combination is flawed because the Y is an incomplete X, making men incomplete females or “a biological acci­ dent.” The Fourth World Manifesto, published by a C R group o f radical feminists in Detroit, de­ nounced the male Left for its attempts to co-opt the women’s movement and set out the theory that women are the first colonized class—the ter­ ritory colonized is women’s bodies and proposed feminist solidarity and female culture are its anti­ dote. Radical in its analysis, revolutionary in its poli­ tics, radical feminism, still the target of attacks from an increasingly conservative society since the 1970s, continues to be reflected in current the­ ory, politics, and action in the women’s move­ ment, global feminism, the reproductive rights

movements, and the feminist confrontation of sexual exploitation in prostitution, pornography, and marriage. ■ K A T H L E E N BARRY See

also

Radicalism.

Socialist Feminism ocialist feminism criticizes the system of capi­ talism for being exploitive of women. Socialist feminists use and critique traditional Marxism to uncover the complex nature o f women’s oppres­ sion, especially as it relates to economics. Socialist feminism focuses on the economic class aspects of women’s oppression. M uch de­ bate has occurred within socialist feminist circles about the exact relationship between sexual, eco­ nomic class, and racial oppression. Some, usually termed Marxist-feminists, claim that economic class causes oppression. Although they recognize women’s oppression as part of a complicated nexus of male dominance, they view it always through its capitalist foundations. Other feminists see patriarchy and capitalism as mutually dependent systems, interwoven, with no single core. Women are recognized as both mother and worker, reproducer and producer, homemaker and wage earner, consumer and em­ ployee. Some socialist feminists name society’s system of male privilege “masculinist” ; others term it pa­ triarchy. Whatever the nuances, all socialist femi­ nists recognize that capitalism—the exchange of one’s labor for wages to create someone else’s profit—is particularly problematic for women. However, the particular relationship between pa­ triarchy as a semi-independent system of mas­ culinist privilege and capitalism remains contro­ versial. Early forms of twentieth-century Western as well as third-world socialist feminism grew out of

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traditional Marxist theory. Women’s oppression was equated with their position in the economic class structure: working-class women were op­ pressed by their exploitation; that is, their labor was not paid for in wages equal to the value of their work. Few people recognized that women were exploited at a higher rate than men (e.g., women are paid a smaller percentage than men for doing the same work) simply because they were women. There was, and sometimes still is, little recognition that women, despite class differ­ ences, have common interests (abortion, day care, maternity leave). During the second wave of the U.S. women’s movement, which began around 1969, socialist feminist ideology began to shift. From the mid1970s through the mid-1980s more acknowledg­ ment was given to the semiautonomy of patriar­ chal privilege by socialist feminists such as Sheila Rowbotham, Zillah Eisenstein, Heidi Hartmann, and Juliet Mitchell. They argued that the system of capitalist patriarchy, not just capitalism, de­ fined the problem of women’s oppression; that pa­ triarchal privilege was as central to society as its economic structure. They also viewed capitalist patriarchy as fundamentally racist in its treatment of women of color. In this period socialist feminism focused on the ways the patriarchal organization of traditional heterosexual families institutionalized sexual hi­ erarchy between men and women. Women were defined as mothers and wives and therefore were primarily responsible for the domestic labor of the home and child rearing. Women were either ex­ cluded from the marketplace as full-time, unpaid housewives or hired at lower wages than men be­ cause their primary responsibility was considered to be home and family. Socialist feminists, along with feminist women of color, criticized the even greater exploitation of women of color, who were usually paid less than white women in the labor force although they worked in greater numbers as domestics, maids, and the like—often for white women.

Today, socialist feminists give priority to the economic side of women’s oppression. They be­ lieve that the economic class aspects of women’s lives define their life choices and that these dif­ ferences between women must be addressed be­ fore women can understand one another’s needs. This understanding led to abortion-rights work, which demanded access for poor women, not just for middle-class women who could afford to pay for it. Events of the 1980s, the Reagan-Bush decade, had a great impact on the U.S. women’s move­ ment. Its posture became defensive against an in­ creasing right-wing, antifeminist onslaught. U.S. leftist and socialist feminists had less of a forum. The language of socialism seemed more and more foreign. Then came the anti-Communist Eastern European revolutions of 1989. By the early 1990s socialist feminism had become a prob­ lematic political identity in most Western soci­ eties. Communist statism, and socialism along with it, became discredited ideologies throughout eastern and central Europe. Feminism seemed better served by an independent and autonomous discourse. How will socialist feminism develop in the twenty-first century? As the global capitalist web develops and new forms of women’s exploitation are institutionalized in first-world nations as well as in factories throughout the world, there may be a new focus on the need for an anticapitalist, fem­ inist politics. Whether those politics are named socialist feminism remains to be seen. Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979); Sonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp, and Marilyn Young, eds., Promissory Notes, Women in the Transition to Social­ ism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989); Lydia Sar­ gent, ed., Women and Revolution, A Discussion of the Un­ happy Marriage o f Marxism and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981). ■ Z IL L A H E I S E N S T E I N

See

also

Feminism, Marxist; Socialism.

F E M I N I S M AND F E M I N I S M S

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Working-Class Feminism orking-class feminism has not been a for­ mally articulated ideology or a clearly marked social movement. Instead, it has most often emerged through working-class women’s practical struggles to combat gender inequality as it has been interlaced with class and racial oppres­ sion. Understanding working-class feminism thus involves more than identifying working-class women’s “special burdens,” it also includes ac­ knowledging that it is an entirely different ap­ proach to feminism. Historically, working-class women—both wage earners and the wives o f working-class m en— have not had to worry about expectations for them to be homebound shrinking violets; they have had little choice but to be strong. They have struggled individually with patriarchal expectations in their families and in balancing the demands of the dou­ ble day of housework and waged work. Whereas many women of higher class backgrounds have eschewed full-time work in the home, many working-class women have viewed it as a desirable ideal that they cannot afford, preferable to the dead-end, dangerous, monotonous, and ill-paid waged work to which they have been limited. Re­ stricted to the bottom of the employment ladder, they have challenged gender barriers in employ­ ment by knocking on doors; filing legal suits; cross-dressing; or hiding their marital status, sex­ ual orientation, or pregnancies. By the 1970s, working-class women had breached gender walls in a range of traditionally all-male lucrative trades such as coal mining, plumbing, or aircraft me­ chanics. Often, though, their goal was not con­ sciously to tear down gender barriers but, rather, to survive. As Evelyn Luna, a Navajo miner, put it: “Women on the reservation want jobs [as miners] not to be equal with men but just to have enough money to live.” When they have organized collectively, work­ ing-class women have framed their politics less in terms of equal rights for individuals than in terms

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of collective advancement for working-class women and men both. Since the 1830s, wage­ earning women have founded and joined a vari­ ety of trade unions through which to combat women’s exploitation in employment. Through these unions they have fought for feminist de­ mands such as equal pay for equal work, child care, or an end to sexual harassment. Usually it has been necessary to struggle with men within the movement to achieve equal ac­ cess to union power and to define the labor move­ ment in terms that address women’s concerns. Working-class women have formed women’s soli­ darity groups within the labor movement, such as the Coalition o f Labor Union Women (CLUW ) in the 1970, or formed their own, independent unions such as African American women’s locals of the Knights of Labor in the 1880s. Trade unions have not been the only form, however, of work­ ing-class women’s collective action that merges feminism and class concerns. Welfare rights ac­ tivists in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, orga­ nized to force the federal government to validate poor women’s unwaged labor in the home. Historically, most women of color have been working-class, and both racism and class oppres­ sion have shaped their struggles against gender in­ equality. In the strike made famous in the 1950s film Salt o f the Earth, for example, Chicana wives of copper miners had to fight mine owners’ un­ equal treatment of Chicano miners as well as their general exploitation of Anglo and Chicano min­ ers. At the same time, the women had to battle with their menfolk over equal rights to fight the owners and over the inclusion of women’s de­ mand that sanitation be upgraded. Working-class feminists have had to defend themselves against charges, often racialized, that because o f their activism they weren’t “re­ spectable,” that they were “bad girls” or pros­ titutes. African American laundry workers in Chicago in the 1930s, for example, had to defend their moral integrity simply to protest; white women textile organizers in North Carolina in

F E M IN IS T JU R ISPR U D EN C E

the 1920s had to defend themselves against accu­ sations that they were sleeping around. Both les­ bians and straight women have had to confront the homophobia with which men have greeted women’s forays into nontraditional employment. Working-class feminism is distinct, therefore, from white middle-class feminism. Less individu­ alistic in some ways, it embeds struggles for gen­ der equality in larger struggles against racism and economic exploitation. As Dorothy Sue Cobble described waitresses’ union activism in the 1940s, “Upward mobility for the few did not seem as im­ portant as the economic advancement of the many.” Working-class women have not necessarily op­ posed middle-class women’s access to high-pow­ ered professional jobs, political office, or public visibility. Rather, they haven’t had the luxury of expecting they could leap alone over the barriers of class and race as well as gender. Instead, they have tried either to join hands with their workingclass sisters—and sometimes brothers—to climb over such barriers together or, sometimes, tried to tear them down altogether. ■ DANA FR ANK a l s o Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW); Labor Movement; Labor Unions; National Welfare Rights Organization.

Se e

§ Feminist Jurisprudence omen were not present or represented when the U.S. laws were written and the le­ gal institutions designed under which women as well as men live. To Abigail Adams’s plea to John Adams to “remember the ladies” in founding the United States, for example, he replied, “We know better than to repeal our M asculine sys­ tems.” With the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, U.S. women were granted

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the right to vote, but full citizenship and equal rights have continued to be withheld. Women from every walk of life have resisted and dis­ sented from law’s collaboration in women’s sub­ jection, but nothing has changed it. The task of the legal arm of the women’s movement from 1970 to the present has been to change it. As a term for this aspiration, feminist jurispru­ dence first appeared in print in 1978 in the inau­ gural issue of the Harvard Womens Law journal. Since then, women’s organizing and activism for social equality through legal equality have pro­ duced substantial initiatives in political activism, legislation and case law, theoretical and practical literature, law journals in the United States and abroad, legal associations, litigating organizations, policy foundations, judicial education drives, casebooks, courses, and clinics. Since the late 1970s women went from being a tiny percentage of law students to nearly half, yet remain a far smaller percentage of the legal profession as a whole. The increase in women’s presence in elite positions as partners in firms, law professors, legis­ lators, and judges has also been significant, al­ though still falling far short of substantial repre­ sentation. But while there is no substitute for women being everywhere, shifting gender demo­ graphics among elites does not change women’s status as such. Jurisprudence refers to the relation between life and law, as well as a body of particular judicial in­ terpretation and application of law. Feminism seeks to end the subordination of women. Femi­ nist jurisprudence thus pioneers a relation be­ tween life and law through which women’s un­ equal social reality will be legally confronted and transformed. To reframe women’s exclusion from, and subor­ dination within, life and law, a new, larger picture has to be drawn. Rather than do this in the abstract, feminist projects have been grounded in the con­ creteness of particular women’s experiences, em­ bracing women’s diversity and specificity, and stressing actual outcomes over theoretical ones.

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For example, in the law of equality, substantive equality has been stressed over the abstraction of equal treatment, producing a new vision of equal protection of the laws; in the law o f rape, the real rape rate, and the comparatively tiny percentage of rape convictions, have impelled critical examina­ tion of the law against rape, as has its use for racist ends; race, class, age, and sexual orientation have been included with gender as inequalities that must be addressed if sex equality is to have any real meaning. All areas of law, from tort, contract, and corporate law to criminal, constitutional, and in­ ternational law, have been interrogated. Direct accountability to victims and survivors—often clients who seek rights in hostile situations—has been the basic principle of this work. Crisis intervention, policy formation, legisla­ tion, litigation, and scholarship have flourished, expanding women’s rights. Subjects of particularly creative scrutiny include pregnancy, wife beating, rape (including rape in marriage), athletics, abor­ tion, incest, gay and lesbian rights, prostitution, and pornography. Legal doctrines of equality, obscenity, privacy, self-defense, education, hate crime, even justice itself have been reenvisioned. Whole new legal doctrines, such as sexual ha­ rassment, have been invented. Global organizing and international conventions against trafficking women as sex-based exploitation, transnational lit­ igation against genocide and war crimes as sex and ethnic violation, and new policy approaches to economic development have emerged. This movement in the practice of law for women has always been diverse, drawing on the insights and energies of activists, organizers, advo­ cates, legal workers, and grassroots lawyers of every race and class, infusing work for all women with a clear awareness of hierarchy among women. The academic theory of this movement, by contrast, has often lagged behind, reflecting neither the diversity o f practice, the subtlety of in­ novations, nor the understanding of power and the necessity o f its redistribution that those who work hands-on have made routine, if not solved.

Academic writings by women of color in the past decade have done much to rectify this situation. Can law be remade in the image of women’s perspectives and experiences? Can it see women’s human face? Perhaps law itself will need to be re­ made in new, nonhierarchical forms. So long as law is a form social power takes, an avenue for re­ lief of injury, a right of citizenship, a lever for so­ cial legitimacy, and a force in women’s lives, fem­ inist jurisprudence will seek to make law respond to women as well as to men. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1989); Mari Matsuda, “When the First Quail Calls: Multiple Consciousness as Jurisprudential Method," ii, Women’s Rights Law Reporter 7 (1987). ■ C A T H A R IN E A. MACKINNON See

M

a l s o

Legal Status.

Feminist Literary Criticism

eminist literary criticism can be defined as the study of literature by women, or the interpre­ tation of any text written with an attention to gen­ der dynamics or a focus on female characters. Many would date the beginnings of U.S. feminist literary criticism to the 1929 work of British writer Virginia W oolf in A Room o f O n e’s Own. Woolf was white, economically privileged, and married (though bisexual); she celebrated a European lit­ erary tradition and high cultural aesthetic values. One of her concepts, however, “a room of one’s own” —the necessary material precondition for a woman’s creativity—has been used by feminist lit­ erary critics across the spectrum to describe the material obstacles to women’s literary aspirations. Author and critic Alice Walker, who coined the term womanist to describe the specificity of African American women’s feminism, rewrote

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F E M IN IS T LITERARY C R IT IC IS M

Woolf’s exclusive focus on gender in the 1983 book In Search o f Our Mothers’ Gardens. Walker emphasizes both race and gender as determinants of women’s achievement. She also revises the fe­ male literary tradition celebrated by Woolf, cen­ tering her discussion instead on women artists of the past who were African American, such as the eighteenth-century poet and emancipated slave Phillis Wheatley and the early-twentieth-century anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston. Many of the histories of feminist literary criticism by womanist or feminist critics of color are often less individualist in their focus. They argue for communal continuity across time. Some stress oral traditions of storytelling transmitted from mother to daughter as the point of origin for a woman-centered perspective on the world and its fictions. Feminist literary criticism depends on universi­ ties and publishing houses for its existence. Thus feminist literary criticism typically has been prac­ ticed by educated women with rooms of their own, recent and hard won though they be. Dur­ ing World War II, women of all races entered the wage-labor force in unprecedented numbers, a move that brought with it upheavals in the social relations of gender and, later (as a result in part of mass migrations of African Americans to the North and the burgeoning civil rights move­ ment), of race. With the demographic expansion of colleges and universities after World War II (spurred on in part by cold-war competitiveness) and the modest gains in educational opportunity produced by the civil rights movement, workingand middle-class women began entering graduate schools. Feminism’s second wave in the United States— initially a reflection of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the subsequent women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s—is primarily responsible for spawning fem­ inist literary criticism. The economic and racial privilege that permitted some women to attain in­ stitutional footholds during these years marked

the divisions that came to characterize debates in feminist literary criticism in the late 1970s and 1980s, when numerous anthologies appeared defining a feminist literary criticism of color criti­ cal of and sometimes in opposition to Anglo-cen­ tered feminist literary criticism. At the same time, in response to the political pressures of identity politics (as the new struggles for civil rights by the disenfranchised in the United States have come to be known), women writers of color in the United States—at first African American women, later Chicanas, Asian American women, Latinas, and Native American wom en—began to receive unprecedented na­ tional attention. Many of these creative writers be­ came what Cornel West, following Gramsci, termed the new “ organic intellectuals,” using their prominent roles as distinguished writers of fiction to write criticism and to facilitate the growth of feminist literary criticism by and about women of color within the academy. Indeed, un­ til recently one of the differences between Anglocentered feminist literary criticism and feminist literary criticism by women of color in the United States was that while many practitioners of the for­ mer were most often university professors in liter­ ature departments, many womanist/feminist-ofcolor literary critics were often published creative writers themselves, such as Paula Gunn Allen, Al­ ice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldua, and Cherrfe Moraga. Academic women-of-color liter­ ary critics, such as Barbara Christian, Deborah M acDowell, Norma Alarcon, Gloria T. Hull, Mary Helen Washington, and Barbara Smith, were also defining the field. Some of these women also played a major role in shaping the field of lesbian feminist literary criticism. The enormous growth of feminist literary criti­ cism in the 1980s and its current multiracial char­ acter coincide ironically with a decade of govern­ mental rollbacks in progressive social policy that arose in the 1960s and 1970s. Although this devel­ opment might be viewed as a “ retreat” from frus­ trating political arenas of social change to the less

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resistant domain of culture, cultural movements nevertheless often, if not always, accompany struggles for social and political change. Feminist and womanist literary criticism provides critiques of gender, racial, sexual, and class domination in the United States. They have also begun to alter the canon of literature and literary history to in­ clude not only a significant number of female fic­ tion writers and poets whose works will be read by future generations of students but also female lit­ erary traditions whose roots extend backward in time and across continents. Gloria Anzaldua, ed., Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women o f Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, 1990); Jane Gallop, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Liter­ ary Theory (New York: Routledge, 1992); Alice Walker, In Search o f Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Flarcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984). ■ C AR LA F R E C C E R O S ee

M

also

Literature.

Feminist Presses, Publications, and Bookstores

he second wave of the women’s movement burst into public consciousness at the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s. It was accompanied by, and propelled by, an enormous need to know: to know what other women were discovering, thinking, doing. Following in the footsteps of the anti- (Viet Nam) war movement and the civil rights move­ ment, as well as the earlier women’s movement and the abolition movement and social move­ ments since the invention of the printing press, feminists of the 1970s wrote and published pam­ phlets and started newspapers and magazines defining, debating, clarifying and inventing their ideas. Organizations such as KNO W and the al­

T

ready-existing New England Free Press published and circulated thousands of copies of one-article pamphlets. Publications such as Notes from the First (Second, and Third) Year(s) collected these articles into staple-bound, newsprint anthologies. Women in Montreal published The Birth Control Handbook and the Boston Women’s Health Col­ lective published Our Bodies, Ourselves (named for the popular abortion-rights slogan, “ Our bod­ ies, our selves, our right to decide.” ). O BO S ini­ tially sold for thirty-five cents per copy. The price was later reduced to twenty-five cents because of their political conviction that it was wrong to make a profit off women. Women’s newsletters, newspapers, magazines, and journals sprang up in hundreds o f cities. Publications ranged from brief calendars of lo­ cal events to full-fledged newspapers and jour­ nals with national and international circulations. Women’s liberationists got articles in publications, published special issues of magazines (Motive), took over entire magazines and turned them into feminist publications (LibeRATion), and started their own magazines with names such as The Fu­ ries, It A in’t M e Babe, A in’t I A Woman, Lavender Woman, and o ff our backs. Journals such as The Second Wave, Women: A Journal o f Liberation, Amazon Quarterly, and Lesbian Tide sprang up na­ tionwide. Ms. magazine, founded in 1972, el­ bowed its way into the nation’s magazine racks and became a household word virtually overnight. Consciousness demanded action and women organized women’s liberation conferences and women’s centers in towns and universities across the country. Information tables featuring pam­ phlets and anthologies published by women’s lib­ eration groups and the small handful of relevant books from mainstream publishers (Sisterhood Is Powerful, Sexual Politics, Lesbian/Woman) were a vital part of every feminist conference. Between conferences the book and information tables moved into corners of women’s centers. As fund­ ing for women’s centers diminished, women in many parts of the country realized that sell-

F E M I N I S T P R E S S E S , P U B L I C A T I O N S , AN D B O O K S T O R E S

ing hard-to-find books and pamphlets from the emerging feminist publishers (and some main­ stream publishers) could help pay the rent. Women’s bookstores, a wonderfully contagious idea, emerged as quickly as women could orga­ nize them: IC I (Information Center Incorpo­ rated)^ Woman’s Place (Oakland, California); Amazon (Minneapolis); Labyris and Womanbooks (New York City); First Things First and Lammas (Washington, D .C .); Charis (Atlanta); and Sisterhood (Los Angeles). These bookstores usually also functioned as women’s centers, com­ plete with bulletin boards, housing referrals, and support for battered women. Initially, stores were run on volunteer labor, donations, and fundrais­ ers. Many stores opened and closed over the years but eventually the demand for books by and about women as well as the increase in the number of books available made it possible for feminist book­ stores to become self-supporting. There are, or have been, women’s bookstores in all but five U.S. states. At the time of this writing, approximately one hundred twenty feminist bookstores provide books for women in the United States and Canada and challenge mainstream publishers and the aggressively competing chain stores to provide a decent selection of women’s books. Feminist bookstores and feminist publishers were supported at their beginnings with volunteer labor, political passion, fundraising, and the belief that the information they could provide would rad­ ically change women’s lives. Many of these early bookstores and publishers closed because of the burnout or disillusionment that often accompa­ nies this kind of organizing. Nevertheless, they helped to create and sustain a vision of feminist publishing and book distribution until enough books and magazines could be published and sold so that the stores could survive financially and make that vision a reality. Achieving financial via­ bility has been a long process that faces new chal­ lenges today as national chain stores and multi-na­ tional corporations begin to dominate mainstream bookselling and publishing industries and to com­

pete with even specialty stores such as feminist and other politically-based bookstores. Feminist publishing started with pamphlets and periodicals. The Women’s Press Collective pub­ lished an anthology ofwomen’s poetry; a collection of poetry, prose, and art, Lesbians Speak Out; and work by women of colorand working-class women. Diana Press published two sets ofthree anthologies, each consisting of articles and fiction originally published by The Furies and The Ladder, as well as other books, including early poetry by Rita Mae Brown, while functioning as a job shop (printing as needed for a wide variety of customers). Seal Press started as a women’s letter press and became one of the strongest and most diverse of today’s feminist publishers. New Victoria Press also started as a job shop and initially published books as a sideline. Daughters took the New York publishing world by surprise with their experimental women’s fiction, including Rubyfruit Jungle. The Feminist Press was organized to reclaim and republish works by lost women writers for both classroom use and a general readership. Naiad’s initial goal remains the sam e—publishing lesbian fiction. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was the first U.S. publisher run by and for women o f color. Many early publishers such as Long Haul and Shameless Hussy have long since recycled into other endeavors. Some were simply one-book or one-author publishers. Some focused on poetry in an era when many feminist ideas first were ex­ pressed by the movement’s poets. Some survived a shift to nonfiction and novels. Feminist publishers challenged the book world by inventing and pop­ ularizing anthologies o f previously unpublished and largely political works. Printers such as the Iowa City Women’s Press (which also published books as well as printing them for other publishers) were founded when male-owned/controlled printers and publishers refused to print feminist publications and called them “ indecent” or “pornographic.” The Iowa City Women’s Press, in its heyday, shared a build­ ing with a woman-run bindery and a woman-run

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typesetting shop, so that women could control the entire means of production, in association with women’s distribution companies (such as Women in Distribution and Old Lady Blue Jeans) and women’s bookstores. This was an era when men could not tell women that their ideas and work were unpublishable and silence them by refusing to print (or bind or typeset) it. The second wave of the women’s movement blossomed into book publishing—forty-six femi­ nist publishers published 129 books in the fall 1993 publishing season alone, almost all focusing on areas underserved by mainstream publishing— lesbian, women of color, older women, cuttingedge and not-yet-popular theory and ideas. Women also took the idea o f distributing the books ourselves to new heights by establishing a network of feminist bookstores that sell books from feminist presses as well as the best of what is published by mainstream, university, and inde­ pendent small presses. These women’s bookstores fuel mainstream feminist publishing by proving, with their sales, that the interest in women’s books is not a “fad,” it’s not “over,” and that it is, in fact, growing both in terms o f the dollar value of the books sold and in terms of the interest in new (and more familiar) ideas and directions. Women’s bookstores and feminist publishers have kept the women’s movement visible and accessible through shifting political climates for twenty-five years. ■ CAROL SE AJAY See

M

also

Magazines; Newspapers.

Feminist Theology

eminist theology is a recently recognized type of theological reflection whose major develop­ ment has taken place in the United States, al­ though it is becoming increasingly global and multifaith. Feminist theology is not primarily re­

F

flection on special “feminine” themes in theology and does not intend to create a special subcate­ gory of theology relevant primarily to women. Rather, feminist theology arises from a recogni­ tion that traditional theology in Christianity (and other major religions) has been created almost ex­ clusively by males. Women, until recently, have been excluded from theological study and ordained ministry. Theology has functioned in a way that has justi­ fied this exclusion and subordination of women. Males have been assumed to be the normative hu­ mans and representatives of God. Women have been defined as both inferior by nature and more prone to evil. Christianity particularly has scape­ goated women, blaming them for the origin of sin. These teachings reinforce women’s social subordination by claiming that this is the way women must pay for having caused evil to come into the world. Feminist theology arises as a critical response to these male-centered and antiwoman biases in classical theology. These biases are recognized as systemic, pervading the tradition during its whole development, not just the odd views of a few indi­ viduals. Thus feminist theology calls for a thor­ oughgoing revision of all the symbols and pre­ cepts of the tradition. Feminist theology develops through a threestage dialectic. First, women recognize the malecentered and antiwoman biases in the tradition and begin to analyze these patterns throughout its history. They develop articles and books docu­ menting this bias, showing how extensive it is, re­ vealing its underlying assumptions, and denounc­ ing it as wrong. In short they identify this bias as a serious ethical and theological error, not a verity to be accepted. Mary Daly’s 1968 book, The Church and the Second Sex, is an example of this first stage o f feminist theology. In the second stage o f feminist theology women search for alternative traditions that provide posi­ tive symbols to affirm women. The quest for alter­ natives draws feminist theologians in different di­ rections. Some feminists interested in theology

FEM IN IST THEOLOGY

conclude that the classical tradition of Christian­ ity (or Judaism or Islam) is incapable of affirming women as equals of men. The tradition itself is a religious reflection of patriarchy and cannot be significantly reformed. Mary Daly came to this conclusion in her thought, beginning with B e­ yond God the Father, in 1973. Other feminists remain committed to their his­ torical religious communities and believe that the original or essential message of the religion af­ firms women as equals of men, but the message has been distorted by its social context in patriar­ chal societies. These feminist theologians engage in a historical quest to surface the alternative tra­ ditions within the early beginnings and the wider development of the tradition to show these affir­ mative themes. T he 1982 book by New Testament scholar Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction o f Christian Origins, belongs in this second stage of feminist theology. Having searched out what they see as the au­ thentic teachings of the tradition, separate from the cultural misogyny, feminist theologians begin a third stage of constructing a new theological sys­ tem, reinterpreting the theological symbols of di­ vinity, human nature, the origins of the world, good and evil, revelation, salvation, and redemp­ tive community in ways that not only affirm women’s full participation but also call for a trans­ formation of the religion and society as integral to the redemptive mission of the religious faith. This author’s 1983 book, Sexism and God-talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, reflects this third stage of feminist theology. Other feminist theologians who may have left Christianity or Judaism in search of more feminist religions also move toward a presentation of their options for new communities o f faith and prac­ tice. Rita Gross, who moved from Christianity to Judaism to Buddhism in search of a more woman­ positive religion, has presented her reconstruction of Buddhism in 1993 in Buddhism After Patri­ archy. Starhawk, of Jewish background, has been a leader in developing Goddess religion, begin­

227

ning with her 1979 work, The Spiral Dance: A Re­ birth o f the Ancient Religion o f the Great Goddess. Although feminist theology has developed its major work since the late 1960s, efforts of women to critique and revise religious teachings to be more affirmative of women can be found in ear­ lier centuries, such as the seventeenth-century writing by the woman cofounder of the Society of Friends, Margaret Fell. But it has only been since the 1960s, as more and more women could be or­ dained and began to teach in theological schools in the Christian or Jewish traditions, that there has been a large enough number of theologically trained woman able to find not only an audience for their writings but also to incorporate feminist theology into theological education. In addition to the increasing feminist reflection across traditional religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, and new alternatives to his­ toric religions in Goddess worship, Black, Latina, Native American, and Asian American women are also contextualizing feminist theology in their racial/ethnic community’s experience. African American women speak of their distinct feminism as “womanist theology,” while Latinas speak of “ Mujerista theology.” Asian American women are finding their distinct voice, apart from their par­ ticular national communities. Native American women also are reclaiming women-centered tra­ ditions within their communal religious world­ views and practices. Thus feminist theology is no longer only white and Christian; it is reflecting the increasing plu­ ralism of U.S. religiosity, as well as ethnic cul­ tures. Ada Maria Isaisi-Diaz, E nLa Lucha: A Hispanic Womans Liberation Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990); Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge ofWomanist God-talk (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Press, 1993). ■ R O S EM A R Y RADFO RD R U E T H E R

See

also

Religion.

228

FETA L RIG H TS

M

Fetal Rights

he notion of fetal rights is most familiar in the context of abortion debates, where opponents of legal abortion assert the fetus’s absolute right to life. However, in the years since the Supreme Court recognized women’s constitutional right to have an abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973), the concept of fetal rights has gained currency outside the abor­ tion context. Women who will continue their preg­ nancies and give birth and women who are not pregnant but merely fertile both become objects of regulation when they engage in actions that might harm an actual or potential fetus. In a backlash against women’s increasing independence, propo­ nents of fetal rights have successfully restricted women’s access to jobs, autonomy in medical de­ cisions, and justice in the courts, undermining women’s prospects for self-determination. Until recently, the legal system has considered the fetus to be part of the pregnant woman her­ self. The concept of “fetal rights” provides new grounds for the old practice of treating all women as potential mothers and subordinating women’s interests and needs to those attributed to unborn children or society. In the 1908 case M uller v. Ore­ gon, the Supreme Court upheld a law limiting the number of hours women could work each day because, the Court claimed, women are the guardians of the race and must protect their health, rather than because workers are entitled to occupational safety. Throughout U.S. history and culture, women have been assigned this role o f guardian over the well-being of fetuses and children. When women violate this norm, however, society’s enforcement of the responsibility is quite selective. Race, class, and religion help determine which women will be punished for failing to live up to their assigned duties, and poor women of color are the most fre­ quent targets. Conflicts over women’s reproductive self-deter­ mination and fetal rights are played out daily

T

in legislatures, courts, welfare offices, factories, hospitals, bars, and television shows. Pregnant women endure harassment ranging from a wait­ er’s admonition against drinking alcohol to the vi­ olence of caesarean sections performed against their will. Typically, the justification for treating women in these ways is that fetuses have rights that conflict with the woman’s and somehow a balance must be struck. For instance, since the 1970s many compa­ nies have barred all women of childbearing age from jobs exposing them to toxins that might harm a fetus, keeping women out of relatively high-pay­ ing blue-collar jobs. A conflict is posed between a fetus’s right to health and a woman’s right to em­ ployment opportunity—despite the fact that no fe­ tus need exist since fertility, not actual pregnancy, is the factor that excludes women. Instead of cleaning up the workplace or provid­ ing alternative work for women (and men) plan­ ning to have children, companies burden women with concerns about fetal safety (and about liabil­ ity from workers’ lawsuits). The Supreme Court invalidated one of the most egregious of these “fe­ tal protection policies” in United Auto Workers v. Johnson Controls (1991), in which a group of work­ ers and their union challenged a company policy keeping all women up to age seventy out of jobs working with lead (as well as jobs from which women could be promoted to one involving lead) unless they could provide medical proof that they could not become pregnant. The Court ruled that the way Johnson Controls singled out women workers for exclusion violated their civil rights. Other companies may still use less sweeping poli­ cies that could gain judicial approval, jeopardiz­ ing women’s access to some fifteen to twenty mil­ lion industrial jobs. During the 1980s a second fetal rights trend emerged. In at least twenty-five states across the na­ tion, women have been arrested, prosecuted, and jailed for using drugs or alcohol while pregnant. Here, the conflict is cast as a fetus’s right to health versus a woman’s right to pleasure, engendering lit-

THE F IF T IE S

tie sympathy for a pregnant woman’s addiction problems and little tolerance for a woman’s occa­ sional drug use, which may not impair the fetus. This conflictual model results in women facing criminal penalties for using drugs that men and other women never face. In addition, women might lose their children without the benefit o f a proper investigation into their actual parenting abilities. These events happen in a context of inad­ equate government services in which the vast ma­ jority of pregnant women cannot get drug treat­ ment or sometimes even basic prenatal care. The women punished for substance use during pregnancy are disproportionately poor Black and Latina women, those who have the fewest re­ sources to sustain a healthy pregnancy in the first place. Native American women living on reserva­ tions also experience unusual penalties. Some women have been “ detained” during their preg­ nancies by tribal authorities to try to prevent Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Not surprisingly, jail is a terri­ ble place to be pregnant and doesn’t guarantee that a healthy baby will be born. As with employ­ ment discrimination, society’s solution is to bur­ den women with all the concerns about fetal safety, locking them away from potential hazards rather than providing resources that can address the roots of their problems. Cynthia Daniels, At Womens Expense: State Power and the Politics of Fetal Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Janna Merrick and Robert Blank, eds., The Politics o f Pregnancy: Policy Dilemmas in the Maternal-Fetal Relationship (New York: Haworth Press, 1993); Katha Pollitt, “ ‘Fetal Rights’: A New Assault on Feminism,” The Nation Vol. 250 (March 1990): 409-18. ■ R A C H E L ROTH See

also

Muller v. Oregon; Reproductive Rights.

§ Fifteenth Amendment S e e Constitution and Amendments.

U

The Fifties

B

etty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique became a bestseller in 1963. She argued that in the postwar period, rigid gender norms restricted mid­ dle-class, suburban white women’s options and as­ pirations to full-time wifedom and motherhood. The roles of women were contradictory: more middle-class white women than ever before had opportunities for education, work, and autonomy, but the culture punished the women who pur­ sued them. Discrimination, scorn, and character­ izations of professional women as old maids, un­ feminine, or negligent mothers, functioned to keep women in the home, literally and psycho­ logically. The 1950s are best known as a time of prosperity and optimism; obsessive anticommunism, which led to the cold war; narrow gender expectations for women; and a glorification of the “normal” nuclear family. In fact the 1950s are an aberrant decade in the twentieth century in that after the Great Depression and World War II, most Ameri­ cans wanted to settle down. The number of young people who married rose precipitously; age at the time of marriage and childbearing dropped; and the birthrate increased significantly, a trend termed the baby boom. Premarital virginity for white women and traditionally male-dominant heterosexual families (with men as the breadwin­ ner and head of the household and women at home) were universally promoted. Institutions and goods expanded rapidly in postwar America: corporations; the military; advertising and media; suburbs; highways; and consumerism and con­ sumer products, particularly housing, automo­ biles, household appliances, and televisions. The decade is often remembered fondly as a time of abundance, optimism, and safety. At the same time currents o f discontent and anxiety arose. Black people, especially in the South, were angry and the national struggle for civil rights intensified. The 1950s are punctuated

230

F ILIPIN A S

with important race-related events, such as the 1954 Supreme Court decision against segregated schools, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Em ­ mett Till case, and the Little Rock Central High School integration struggle. Many of the heroes of these events were Black women. Black music (and its imitators) was popular among teenagers, who formed a demographic cat­ egory unto themselves, especially from a market perspective. Thousands of teenagers had money and time to spend on records, magazines, clothes, and makeup—they created a new youth culture. Parents worried about losing control of young people, most visible in the national concern over juvenile delinquency. The Beat writers, known for their rejection of mainstream American values and their embrace of bohemian existence, at­ tracted many young whites. Homophobia was ap­ parent in the glorification of the “nuclear” family and in the campaigns against lesbians and gays that linked them to crime and communist activi­ ties. In addition, anxiety over the atom bomb and nuclear war permeated the culture. Unknown to most suburban whites, there were many poor people in this country. In fact the United States was deeply divided by race and class, a realization that galvanized young Blacks and whites in the 1960s. The cities were becoming underfunded sites of Black and Latino/Latina neighborhoods as whites moved to the segregated suburbs. The migration of Blacks out of the South, and the influx of people from Puerto Rico and Mexico into the United States, changed racial and ethnic urban demographics. For Native American women and communities, the 1950s saw the emergence o f two very damaging federal policies —the era of termination of tribal life and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Relocation Pro­ gram. These policies were designed to “main­ stream” Native Americans so they could be “ just like everyone else” in the 1950s. The policies added to Native American urban migration. In contrast to the upward mobility of many white women, women of color struggled to survive.

The 1950s were a paradoxical time, then, when American society seemed stable and contained. Underneath the facade, however, African Ameri­ cans and other people of color, youth, women, lesbians, and gays were gathering force to expose its contradictions. ■ W INI B R E IN E S

M

Filipinas

omen of Filipino heritage have likely been present in what is now the United States since the last decades of the eighteenth century, when the Philippines, their fathers’ homeland, was a Spanish colony and Filipino seamen manned the galleon trade between the Islands and Mexico. Some jumped ship in Mexican ports and ultimately settled in Louisiana, where their anonymous daughters by women of other ethnicities became the first Filipina Americans, part of a relatively small community that took shape during the nineteenth century in New Or­ leans and in several southeastern Louisiana fish­ ing villages. Shortly after 1900, following U.S. acquisition of the Islands, Philippine-born women began to ar­ rive. As U.S. nationals, they were permitted unre­ stricted entry into the States before 1935. But Fil­ ipinas made the voyage across the Pacific less frequently than did men. Although married Fili­ pinas traditionally exercised considerable power within their own households, social mores dic­ tated strict supervision of unmarried Filipinas, thus precluding their independent travel. Addi­ tionally, because Filipino men usually intended a temporary stay, wives and sweethearts did not typ­ ically join them abroad. Nonetheless a daring few did venture to the United States, their motives similar to those of men in their socioeconomic class. Prosperous and aspiring Filipinos viewed education in the United

W

F ILIPIN A S

States as a sure route to success in the Philippines. By 1904 five Filipinas were among approximately one hundred fifty pensionados sent at government expense to U.S. schools. Other Filipinas came to U.S. universities with family funds, under the aus­ pices of later pensionado programs, or on private scholarships, such as the University of M ichigan’s Barbour Scholarship for “deserving Oriental women.” Unlike the many self-supporting F il­ ipinos who ultimately failed in the attempt to combine school and work in the 1920s and early 1930s and remained in the United States, Fili­ pinas, who enjoyed the financial support neces­ sary to achieve their academic goals, usually re­ turned to the Philippines after graduation. Poorer Filipinos, and some Filipinas, came to earn money. The Hawaiian Sugar Planters Asso­ ciation recruited Filipino contract laborers and, especially in the aftermath of labor unrest among the bachelors, financed the importation of Fili­ pinas. Nonetheless, of 103,544 Filipinos who en­ tered Hawaii between 1909 and 1934, only 8,952 were women. These Filipinas were eagerly sought as marriage partners, as were their daughters, who frequently became the young wives of much older Filipinos. On the mainland, the sex ratio was even more skewed. By 1930 in California, where 67.4 percent of Filipinos in the continental United States lived, men numbered 28,625; women, 1,845,or 6-1 percent. Little additional immigration from the Philip­ pines took place between passage of the TydingsMcDuffie Act (1934), which limited Filipino im­ migration to a fifty-per-year quota, and the end of World War II. Yet, during these years, Filipina American girls —citizens all, unlike their Philippine-born parents—were born to Filipina women or to women of other groups who had married Fil­ ipino men. Although they shared a visible pres­ ence as non-Caucasian, the extent of their ethnic consciousness remains unclear, likely dependent upon the importance of Filipino heritage and identity to their parents and to the communities where they grew to maturity.

After World War II the Philippines gained inde­ pendence and a one-hundred-per-year quota. Yet Filipino immigration accelerated. After unmar­ ried Filipinos already in the United States won the right to naturalization in 1946, many returned temporarily to the Philippines to find wives. Other Filipinas who came as students or visitors remained permanently. Newly formed families added second-generation Filipino Americans. The i960 census recorded 67,435 Filipinas—37.1 percent of the Filipino population in the United States. In 1965 immigration law changed drastically. Quotas were scrapped in favor of preferences based largely on two goals: achieving family re­ unification and relieving occupational shortages. Dominated most visibly by health professionals, Filipino immigration surged. By 1984 approxi­ mately 26,000 Philippine-trained nurses had ar­ rived. As the numbers grew, the sex ratio evened: in 1970, Filipinas totaled 153,556, or 45.6 percent; in 1980,400,461, or 51.7 percent; in 1990, 762,946, or 53.7 percent, of whom 67.8 percent were for­ eign born. Educationally, Filipinas constitute a diverse group today. Among those over twenty-five in 1990, 18.6 percent had not completed high school; 15.6 percent held a high school diploma; 24.2 percent had done some college work; 34.6 percent held a bachelor’s degree; and 7 percent held postgraduate degrees. Filipinas have also achieved distinction in the United States, in­ cluding 1948 Olympic springboard and platform­ diving gold medalist Victoria Manalo Draves; Dorothy Laigo Cordova, cofounder of the F il­ ipino American National Historical Society; fash­ ion designer Josefina Cruz Natori; novelist Jes­ sica Hagedorn; actress Lea Salonga; and classical pianist C ecile Licad. As individuals, partners, wives, and mothers, as paid and unpaid workers, as entrepreneurs and businesswomen, and as community participants and leaders, Filipinas contribute daily in an increasingly diverse na­ tion.

231

FILM

Fred Cordova, Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans, A Pictorial Essay/iy6^-circa 1963 (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/ Hunt, 1983); Marina E. Espina, Filipinos in Louisiana (New Orleans: A. F. Laborde & Sons, 1988); Harry H. L. Kitano and Roger Daniels, Asian Americans: Emerg­ ing Minorities (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1988). ■ BARBARA M. POSADAS See

m

also

Asian Pacific Women.

Film

B

ette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Gloria Swan­ son, and countless famous on-screen women all had the upper hand in creating their movies. If they didn’t think it would ruin their public image (as with Mary Pickford, whose public refused to accept her as anyone other than the twelve-yearold “ Little Mary” ), these actresses would also have taken the on-screen credit of “producer.” Powerful actors forming their own production firms in or­ der to gain control over their careers is among cin­ ema’s oldest traditions. More women worked in influential positions behind the scenes in motion pictures before 1920 than at any other time in history. Scores of female filmmakers who were not established actresses played vital roles as directors, producers, screen­ writers, editors, and studio owners in the industry’s formative years. Lois Weber became the highestpaid director of the silent era. Screen comedienne Mabel Normand taught Charlie Chaplin many of his early routines and directed without credit many of the “ Keystone” comedies. Helen Keller produced and starred in a 1919 docudrama about her life. Before film became big business, anyone who had energy, desire, and enthusiasm could partici­ pate. The more people to churn out the hundreds o f one-reelers produced each week, the better. “The most exciting place to be on a Sunday was

the studio,” said actress Lillian Gish, who directed her own feature in 1921. “You didn’t care if you were getting paid or not.” This attitude of tremu­ lous excitement for the new medium of celluloid drew people from all walks of life, regardless of their sex. In 1896, when Alice Guy Blache, a secretary to photo-equipment salesman Leon Gaumont, sug­ gested they shoot a film sample that would demonstrate how the new motion-picture projec­ tor worked, his response was, “ Knock yourself out. It’s only a toy.” That weekend, G uy Blache shot La Fee aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy), the first narrative film ever created. G uy Blache’s experi­ ment proved so successful, Gaumont created a production arm for the company and put Guy Blache in charge. By the end of her career she had directed over three hundred films. It wasn’t until the emergence of the studio sys­ tem in the 1920s, when film became big business, that women were no longer welcome. The new all-male, nepotistic unions quickly ousted women from the top ranks. Female producers and direc­ tors who did not have the additional skill of acting were suddenly out of a job. By the 1940s the once-powerful women were no longer in the forefront and were often forgotten. However, the facts reveal a proud heritage of women participating in every cinematic craft. Be­ tween 1913 and 1927, twenty-six women directed in Hollywood; between 1949 and 1979 that num­ ber had dropped to seven. But even in these slower eras, the assumption that Hollywood’s glamor divas were the only women calling the shots was simply a myth. Frances Marion won the second and third Os­ cars ever awarded for screenwriting. Both Marion and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes author Anita Loos have many screen credits in their fifty-year ca­ reers. Dorothy Arzner, the only woman directing in the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s (and with a strong, distinctively female eye), also invented the boom microphone and the movie crane. She was

233

FILM

the only director of the day to work with all the major female stars: Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, Rosalind Russell, Clara Bow, Claudette C ol­ bert, and Joan Crawford. Mae West, the show-stopping queen of sexual innuendo, is less well remembered as the genius comedy writer who penned all of her own mater­ ial. Few are aware that British screen star Ida Lupino was also a prolific director, with seven fea­ tures and hundreds of television episodes filmed before her 1995 death. In the mid-i940s, screenwriter Virginia Van Upp catapulted the career of Rita Hayworth by placing her in a daring striptease scene (Hayworth essentially removed her gloves) in Gilda. The risk won Van Upp the vice presidency of Columbia Pictures (over nine male producers) in 1945. Characteristic of Van Upp’s screenplays were women portrayed in positions of social power, in­ cluding Irene Dunne as a mayor of a small town (Together Again, 1944) and Rosalind Russell as a successful psychiatrist (She Wouldn’t Say Yes, 1945). Yet by the end of these two films, each woman marries, retreating forever from public life. It is both fascinating and sadly typical of the times that the industry did not accept the portrayal of successful women on the screen. Van Upp was unable to pen a story such as the one she was liv­ ing unless her characters saw the “ error of their ways” and went back to a “ more fulfilling” life of children and anonymity. By the mid-1970s the film world was chang­ ing. Female filmmakers no longer waited to be granted entrance to Hollywood’s court before making celluloid statements about the truth of their lives. Now they raised money and did inde­ pendent films. In 1978, with Girlfriends, Claudia Weill dared to make friendships among women a crucial topic for the big screen. Directors of color, such as Euzhan Palcy (A Dry White Season, 1989) and Julie Dash (Daughters o f the Dust, 1992), challenged the rules of an all-white industry. Their films debunked false stereotypes, creating

Famous as “America’s sweetheart,” Mary Pickford was also a director, shown here behind the camera in 1920.

new cinematic truths for people of color. They followed the courageous lead of Kathleen Collins Prettyman (1942-1988), the first Black woman to direct feature films. Dede Allen, one of the industry’s top-paid film editors, is also the first editor to have achieved solo screen credit for editing. Elaine May also helped open the doors for women to direct, with A New L e a f (1971). In 1980 Sherry Lansing became the first woman since Mary Pickford (1921) to be named president of a major studio. And in 1987 Dawn Steel rose in rank at Colum bia Pictures Corporation, where she was not only responsible for production but for distribution and marketing as well.

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F R E E BLACK W OM EN

Although by 1995 only 10 percent o f Holly­ wood’s Directors Guild of America members were women, evidence is clear that the numbers will steadily increase. The result of both the inde­ pendents as well as the women entering a pre­ dominantly patriarchal Hollywood is the transfor­ mation of all people on the screen. From Dorothy Arzner’s bold female aviator (Christopher Strong, 1933) to Ida Lupino’s novel vision o f male bond­ ing (The Hitchhiker, 1953) to Margarethe von Trotta’s revolutionary view of child care (The Sec­ ond Awakening o f Christa Klagas, 1977) to Donna Deitch’s fulfulling tale of lesbian love (Desert Hearts, 1985), women filmmakers have perma­ nently and undeniably transformed the stereo­ types of their sisters behind and in front of the camera forever. Ally Acker, Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present, (New York: Continuum, 1993); also see Film­ makers on Film, ten-part video documentary series on women filmmakers, directed by Ally Acker, distributed by Reel Women Videos, 8 Hayloft Lane, Roslyn Heights, NY 11577; Premiere, “Women in Hollywood” (special issue,

1993)■ ALLY ACKER See

also

Art and Crafts.

§ Fourteenth Amendment S e e Constitution and Amendments.

§ Free Black Women omen made up a large percentage o f “freedpersons” o f African ancestry—individuals free born, or who purchased their liberty, or gained it through private and public manumis­ sions—in antebellum America. The 1790 census

W

listed the free Black population as 59,466, con­ centrated primarily in the urban North and South. Subsequently, the growth rate declined. Whites abhorred the unsettling idea of freedpersons living among the bondservants because the slaveholders believed the presence of freedpersons raised the slaves’ aspirations of also gaining their freedom. An increasingly systematic defense o f bondage persuaded many whites that slavery was positive. Nevertheless, between 1820 and i860 the number o f free Black women grew from 120,790 to 253,951. A woman’s legal status determined that of her offspring; however, increases in births account for only part of the growth. At the Revolutionary War’s end, northern states had either abolished slavery or provided for gradual emancipation. In­ dividual owners’ wills and deeds manumitted oth­ ers. Some women bought their liberty, but they had fewer opportunities than men to become arti­ sans and earn money through extra work. In all probability, childbearing prevented access to trades for female slaves since it would interrupt work that could not be completed by unskilled substitute workers. Runaways also boosted the free population; however, women appeared infrequently in adver­ tisements for fugitives. When traveling alone, they attracted more attention and were captured more quickly. Slave mothers were not likely to run away because of the extra hazards of taking along children, and because they were unwilling to leave their children behind. Maryland-born slave Harriet Tubman freed herself by running away in 1849. Afterwards, she repeatedly returned to the South and brought hundreds of others out of bondage. She fi­ nanced the trips, in part, with money earned as a domestic. By contrast, Polly Crockett, a kid­ napped free-born woman, removed herself from slavery by suing for her freedom and that of her daughter, Lucy Delaney. Crockett had spared no opportunity to tell her children to seek lib­ erty. Delaney chronicles their fight for freedom

F R E E BLACK W OM EN

in a narrative. Despite the obstacles, women were among the runaways who gained their freedom. Society’s rigid gender roles limited women’s du­ ties to those of wife and mother. Economic depri­ vation forced most free Black women to work out­ side the home; yet most occupations were closed to them because of race and gender bias. Some did earn meager wages for long hours of toil as do­ mestics, cooks, peddlers, shopkeepers, teachers, and nurses. When circumstances demanded, they worked at home as laundresses, seamstresses, and hairdressers. Still others turned their humble abodes into boardinghouses. As a last resort, some women became prostitutes. All free Black women did not live in dire eco­ nomic circumstances. Many in the lower South were more likely to enjoy economic advantages than their northern counterparts. Among the free property owners in Savannah, Georgia, women commonly dominated in the category of assessed values at $1,000 or more in 1820. O f the freedwomen in the planter class, most benefited from direct association with whites. A few southern freedwomen owned slaves. Some state laws required freedpersons to relocate or risk reenslavement; therefore, relatives some­ times held title to their kin to prevent separations. Persons held by their kin enjoyed “virtual” free­ dom in the sense that they did not have the legal documentation declaring their freedom, yet they were unfettered by bondage and at liberty to make decisions for themselves and their children. Oth­ erwise, free Black women did not differ from other slaveholders, some of whom were brutal while others were benevolent. Regardless o f their role or level of income, free Black women also were caregivers and helpmates. During their leisure time, they en­ joyed social activities and devoted attention to improving their lives and those of others. Benev­ olent organizations and literary societies among freedwomen date back to the early nineteenth century. Monies collected by the Afric-Ameri-

can Female Intelligence Society of Boston ben­ efited sick members and defrayed the cost of books. The founding of schools and the dedication of their teachers, including Maria W. Stewart, Margaretta Forten, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, re­ flect a keen interest in the intellectual develop­ ment of African Americans. After the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion, some southern states forbade teaching Blacks to read and write. Mary Peake, a Black resident of Hampton, Virginia, ignored prohibitions and continued teaching in Tidewa­ ter, Virginia, until her death in 1862. Peake was not alone in such efforts. As a result, an esti­ mated 5 percent of the Black population was lit­ erate by i860. The Normal School for Colored Girls, in Washington, D .C ., and O hio’s Wilberforce Uni­ versity and Oberlin College, were among the in­ stitutions where free Black women could receive higher education. Most women at Oberlin en­ rolled in the “Ladies’ Course,” which, unlike the college department, did not require courses in Latin, Greek, or higher mathematics. Female ed­ ucation in the nineteenth century often empha­ sized moral and religious education, domestic sci­ ence, and teacher training. Lucy Stanton, the first Black woman to complete the program, gradu­ ated in 1850. Between 1851 and 1861, ten more Black women graduated. They, like Stanton, be­ came teachers. Women rarely sought professional training in law or medicine because of racism and gender bias. Similarly, few women sought leadership roles in organized churches. The spiritual autobi­ ographies of Jarena Lee, Julia A. J. Foote, and Zilpah Elaw reveal their struggles for entry and ac­ ceptance in a career ordinarily closed to women. Among female abolitionist lecturers were the free-born Sarah Remond, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and the ex-slave Sojourner Truth. Truth’s wellknown May 1851 “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” speech linked the abolitionist cause to the women’s rights issue. The address presented a clear challenge to

235

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white women and men both for their racism and their sexism. Frances E. W. Harper, a regular contributor to abolitionist newspapers, employed poetry in Po­ ems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) to protest slavery. Sarah Forten’s essays and poems also in­ dicted bondage. Harriet Jacobs wrote Incidents in the Life o f a Slave G irl (1861), a chronicle other resistance to and triumph over enslavement, to sway Northern women against chattel slavery and white racism. Aside from speeches and publications, free Black women fought slavery in other ways. For example, the wife of William Parker, an ex-slave, helped defy the stringent 1850 fugitive slave act by protecting four alleged runaways from slave catchers. Such actions suggest that the women would not be content with their own liberty until all African Americans were freed. The Thirteenth Amend­ ment (1865), which erased legal distinctions be­ tween slaves and freedpersons, emancipated nearly four million bondservants. Many women from the antebellum free class continued working for the social and economic improvement o f all African Americans. Adele Logan Alexander, Ambiguous Lives: Free Women o f Color in Rural Georgia, 1789-1879 (Fayetteville: Uni­ versity of Arkansas Press, 1991); Nell Irvin Painter, “So­ journer Truth in Life and Memory: Writing the Biogra­ phy of an American Exotic,” Gender & History Vol. 2 (Spring 1990): 3-16; Loren Schweninger, “Property-Own­ ing Free African-American Women in the South, 18001870,” journal o f Women’s History Vol. 1 (Winter 1990): 14-44. ■ W ILM A K ING S

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a l s o

Abolitionist Movement; African American

Women.

0 Fundamentalism ertain conservative Protestants, predomi­ nantly Calvinists, began to call themselves “ fundamentalists” in the 1920s to describe their adherence to “fundamental” doctrines thatsupernaturalize the Bible and the life and death of Je­ sus Christ. This group protested early feminist re­ forms as well as the teaching of evolution and modern Biblical criticism. After the 1925 Scopes Trial, they largely withdrew from the public arena until the lale 1970s. Then, allied with other conservative Protestants and Catholics, they launched a “pro-family” political and cultural movement. The movement has not succeeded in passing its major legislative reforms, but it has blocked many others and established itself as a powerful voice in the public arena. Fundamentalists oppose affirmative action, wel­ fare, “secular humanism,” sex education, feminist reforms, and lesbian and gay rights. They support school prayer, a constitutional amendment that would criminalize abortion, censorship in the arts and literature, and the teaching of creationism in the public schools. These positions are justified by “pro-family” rhetorics that divinely sanction gen­ der stratification (“ male headship” and “female submission” ), proscribe all sex outside marriage, and render pregnancy an act of God. “ Fundamentalist” is most often applied to politically active evangelical (or “born-again”) Protestants. Since 1979 (the Iranian Revolution and the founding of the Moral Majority), the term is commonly used by secular observers to include politically mobilized orthodox Muslims and Jews as well as Christians. The rhetoric traditionalizing family relations is as strong in these communities as it is among U.S. fundamentalist Protestants.

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■ SUSAN HARDING

0

Freedom Summer S e e Mississippi Freedom Summer.

S e e a l s o Conservatism and the Right Wing; Evan­ gelicalism; Religion.

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§ Garveyism arveyism, a Black nationalist social and politi­ cal movement and Pan-African philosophy that emerged through Marcus Garvey’s Univer­ sal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) be­ tween the world wars, is often viewed as part of the “New Negro” manhood politics that transfused Black radical culture and intellectual life in that period. Garveyism was equally a new woman­ hood movement. Structures of leadership and membership activity in the UNIA mirrored those of the Black church: women formed the back­ bone of the benevolent and community service functions of the organization and of its female auxiliaries, including the Black Cross Nurses corps, and men dominated the status roles and policy-making aspects of UNIA affairs. Women also held key positions as organizers, orators, editors, and writers. An exceptional few women gained access to top power and policy po­ sitions typically reserved for men. These included African American actress Henrietta Vinton Davis; Nicaraguan-born M .L.T. De M ena; and the pri­ mary propagandist of the movement and editor of the UNIA newspaper’s women’s page, Jamaicanborn Amy Jacques Garvey. These outstanding women were joined on the local level by scores of women activists who were leaders in their com­ munities, delegates to UNIA conventions, and contributors to ongoing internal debates about gender and the roles of women and men within the nationalist cause. Jacques Garvey’s women’s page served as a fo­ rum for news and discussion on wom en’s issues, including women in revolutionary movements and party politics, businesses and the professions, relationships and the family. The page repre­ sented a .range of political positions, from advo­ cacy of equity feminism—or the argument that women have the same abilities as men and should have access to the same opportunities for develop­ ment and expression—to domestic feminism, to

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special protection or cultural difference stand­ points, in which women’s entry into greater polit­ ical influence was seen as a method of purifying and reforming the public sphere. The “race-first” platform of the UNIA also emphasized women’s roles as protectors of Black children and support­ ers of Black men in the face o f continued white racism and oppression. The UNIA was important as a training ground for young women, who were politicized by their membership. W hen the U N IA dwindled in the late 1920s, those women went on to apply the principles of Garveyism to other causes. While many leaders in the UNIA were profes­ sionals and members of the middle class, the ma­ jority of Garveyites were working- and lower-class people, members of the migrations from the Caribbean and Central America and from the rural south to industrial and urban centers of the north. Little overlap existed between women in the UNIA and in the more elite Black women’s club movement. Garveyite women embraced a radical vision of society, including separatist eco­ nomic and cultural development, pride in being Black, and the liberation of Africa from white colonial rule. ■ BARBARA BAIR S ee

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Black Nationalism.

Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Organizations

ational political advocacy organizations serv­ ing the lesbian and gay community have sprung up in great numbers since the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, widely acknowledged as the starting point of the modern gay rights movement. After Stonewall a new gay and lesbian conscious­ ness o f resistance moved beyond the acceptance-

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seeking character of the earliest gay organizations, the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, which courageously grew up in the hidden, isolated gay life of the virulently homophobic 1950s. Beyond acceptance, these new organiza­ tions moved to secure civil rights protections for its members, drawing upon the strategies and suc­ cesses o f the Black civil rights and women’s liber­ ation movements of the 1960s and 70s. Three organizations claim to be the oldest na­ tional lesbian and gay political advocacy organi­ zations in the United States: Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund (L L D E F ), the Na­ tional Gay and Lesbian Task Force (N G L T F — founded as the National Gay Task Force), and the National Center for Lesbian Rights (N C LR ), all founded in 1973. L L D E F was founded in the tra­ dition of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educa­ tion Fund and other movement-based legal de­ fense funds. Their mission is to undertake definitive legal battles to build a positive legal his­ tory for lesbians and gays in civil rights and family law. N G L T F at first focused on operating a na­ tional hotline and on depathologizing homosexu­ ality in the medical and psychological establish­ ments. In the 1980s the group served as the movement’s key lobbyist on A ID S issues and a de­ finitive voice on antigay violence. Today, N G L T F stands as the movement’s premier grassroots orga­ nizing and media advocacy group. N C L R , like L L D E F , undertakes precedent-setting legal cases but focuses on lesbians, with particular attention to reproductive and adoption rights, and employ­ ment and benefits discrimination. Other key national groups from the late 1970s include the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which be­ gan in 1974. The Archives, housed in Brooklyn, New York, serve as the national repository of les­ bian social, cultural, and political life in the United States and beyond. The Seattle-based Mothers’ National Defense Fund also began in 1974. Now the Lavender Families Resource Net­ work, its mission was to provide advocacy, infor­ mation, and referrals for lesbian and bisexual

women around custody, visitation, child-rearing, donor insemination, and adoption issues. Gay American Indians, an all-volunteer, national net­ work of gay and lesbian Native activists, emerged in 1975. Known today as G ay American Indians, Indian A ID S Project, GAIIAP offers educational, social, and cultural programming for the Native lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender community in San Francisco. GAIIAP also advocates on tribal is­ sues affecting its members. The National Coali­ tion of Black Lesbians and Gays (originally the National Coalition of Black Gays) was founded in 1978 and drew to its ranks and nurtured some of the most significant African American lesbian and gay activists of the post-Stonewall era. N C B L G had chapters nationwide and was at the forefront of Black and other people-of-color organizing for more than ten years. Following the 1979 march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, the movement’s first such national mobilization, a number of new groups formed. National Gay Rights Advocates (NGRA) was founded in Los Angeles in 1979 and, like L L D E F , took up legal causes, specifi­ cally around immigration issues for lesbians and gay men, until its closing in 1991. In 1979, the D.C.-based G ay and Lesbian Parents Coalition was founded to provide support, education, and advocacy to gay and lesbian parents, prospective parents, and those functioning in a parental role. Today, G L P C has one-hundred chapters internationally. In addition, the Human Rights Campaign Fund was established in 1980 and funds gay and pro-gay candidates for office and mobilizes grass­ roots responses to federal initiatives. The National Association of Black and White M en Together, founded in 1980, is the oldest mul­ tiracial U.S. gay organization. The organization has grown from its early social focus into a chap­ ter-based advocacy and educational group built on crosscultural alliances. M en of All Colors To­ gether has expanded work to include men of all racial and ethnic groups.

GAY, L E S B I A N , AND B I S E X U A L O R G A N I Z A T I O N S

Further, the Gay and Lesbian Medical Associa­ tion (GLMA) was founded as the American Asso­ ciation of Physicians for Human Rights (AAPHR) in 1981. Its two-pronged mission is to combat ho­ mophobia in the medical profession while pro­ moting the best possible care for lesbian/gay/ bisexual/transgendered patients. The National Coalition o f Lesbian and Feminist C ancer Proj­ ects was founded in 1991 to bring attention to les­ bian-specific risks around cancer. Kitchen Table: Women of C olor Press was founded in 1981 by leading lesbian feminists of color to disseminate through its books the analyses and vision of women of color. The press has re­ mained this country’s only national advocacy or­ ganization founded and led by lesbians of color. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defama­ tion was founded in 1985 in the tradition of other national media watchdog groups to protest media coverage of the AID S crisis by the New York Post. Recently, its members have intensified their ef­ forts, working in Los Angeles, targeting the film and television industry’s representation of gay and lesbian people. The A ID S Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP) was founded in early 1987 to take action against massive government indifference to the deaths of thousands of gay men (and others) as a result of AIDS. ACT-UP became the vanguard of gay activism in the late 1980s, drawing upon a his­ tory of lesbian feminist direct action among key members and utilizing extensive gay male media contacts to publicize well-organized actions. National organizing among transgendered ac­ tivists came to fruition in the 1987 founding of Re­ naissance, a national educational organization on transgender issues. Renaissance’s chapters are based largely in Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. The 1987 march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights marked the largest political mobi­ lization o f gay, lesbian, and bisexual people in U.S. history. A groundswell of grassroots activism followed, and an enormous number of new na­

tional organizations emerged. Many of them fo­ cused upon workplace organizing, including, to mention a few, a national gay and lesbian teach­ ers’ organization, a national lawyers’ association, and the Association for Lesbian and Gay Jour­ nalists. Generally, these organizations have advo­ cated for equity for their gay, bisexual, and les­ bian members, while pushing their respective disciplines to take pro-gay stances on federal, state, and local initiatives affecting gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. October 11 was designated as National Coming Out Day (N C O D ), an annual date for members of the community to “take the next step” in com­ ing out. The largest organization formed after the march was L L E G O , the National Latino/a Les­ bian and G ay Organization, which works to strengthen the Latino/a gay and lesbian commu­ nities through local grassroots projects and by pro­ viding a national lesbian/gay Latino/a voice in Washington. In addition, BiNet USA: National Bisexual Network represents and supports bisex­ ual activists and organizations nationally. The Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Fo­ rum, founded in 1988, is supported by the Black gay leadership of the A ID S service movement in Los Angeles. B G L L F produces an annual na­ tional conference for African American lesbians and gays. In 1991 the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund was created as a political action committee geared to funding openly gay candidates. It already has raised over $1 million to fund directly over twenty successful gay or lesbian candidates for state and local offices. In 1992 several lesbians from ACT-UP formed the Lesbian Avengers, which immediately spread out in several major cities. The group is commit­ ted to expanding activism and visibility concern­ ing lesbian issues. TransSisters, founded in 1993, was established to provide information, education, and a national journal addressing transsexuality from a feminist perspective.

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In 1994 the National Advocacy Coalition on Youth and Sexual Orientation (NACYSO ) was founded after two years of meetings by youth advo­ cates from across the country. N A C YSO works as an advocacy voice for queer youth in Washington, D .C . and as an educator about queer youth issues. ■ JA IM E M. GRANT with PA T R IC IA B O N ICA S

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Lesbian Organizations.

Gay Women’s Alternative

ay Women’s Alternative (GWA), founded in 1973, was originally conceived as a congenial place for lesbians to meet as an alternative to the bars they frequented in New York City. The founders who included Batya Bauman, Jean Pow­ ers, and Roz Lipps, at first had difficulty finding a location. The homophobia of that time slammed all the doors shut. Jean Powers, a member of the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Manhattan, prevailed upon her congregation to take a princi­ pled stand. The church provided space for weekly meetings at a reduced fee and has continued to be supportive. Until her death in 1985, Isaaca Siegel headed the steering committee and devoted herself full­ time to GWA. She is considered the guiding light and nurturer of the organization. In the past ten years Marge Barton, active with GWA since its in­ ception, has run the organization with Vivian Clemmons and Pat Woods, keeping it a vital and vibrant part of the ever growing lesbian commu­ nity. G ay Women’s Alternative presents a speaker at each meeting, followed by discussion and social hour. The founders wanted a place just for women that wouldn’t be eclipsed, co-opted, or taken over by men. For a nominal charge that

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helps pay for rent and nonalcoholic refreshments, all women are welcome to enter a consistently warm social atmosphere. Surplus income is con­ tributed to organizations such as the Lesbian Switchboard, Senior Action in a Gay Environ­ ment (SA GE), Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa (SISA), and the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA). Since its inception thousands of women have enjoyed a wide range o f cultural and political programs that inform, entertain, and enrich the lives of all present. Speakers, who generously do­ nate their time, include women on the cutting edge of lesbian, lesbian-feminist, and feminist ac­ tivity. Gay Women’s Alternative met weekly until 1991, when the number of meetings was reduced to once a month because of the vast number of or­ ganizations now serving the lesbian community. T he founders chose to meet on Thursdays be­ cause in the days of the closet, gay girls wore green on Thursdays. ■ C L A R E COSS S

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Lesbian Organizations.

Gender

ender, according to the 1993 American Her­ itage College Dictionary, is “sexual identity, especially] in relation to society or culture.” This entry, hinting at the distinction between biologi­ cal “sex” and socially constructed “gender,” rec­ ognizes a neologism and thereby expresses the in­ fluence and transformation in social thought generated by the women’s movement of the last two decades. Some first-wave feminists, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Charlotte Perkins Gilm an, distin­ guished between biological and “ secondary” sex

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G E N D E R GAP

characteristics in order to challenge conventional norms about what women were “naturally” suited for. But they did not name this distinction and it was not universally accepted — indeed, some fem­ inists opposed it because they sought advance­ ment for women on the basis of uniquely femi­ nine qualities they did not wish to challenge. Only second-wave feminism succeeded in com­ municating broadly the notion that masculinity and femininity are largely created by culture, not by biology. The new feminist definition of “gender,” now part of the vernacular, derives from the work of anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, who de­ scribed socially constructed masculine and femi­ nine patterns of behavior, emotion, and intellect as distinct from biological characteristics. Yet lack of clarity in usage and disagreements about goals continue to divide feminists. First, “gender” and “sex” can never be definitively separated because we do not know all the biological components of male/female differentiation and because “gen­ der” is not an arbitrary construct but a set of mean­ ings given to sex. Second, “gender” has developed in the context of dominant heterosexuality, which is being challenged now as never before. Third, feminists remain deeply divided about what the future of gender should be: one stream calls for the transcendence of gender entirely and aspires to androgyny; another celebrates female/male dif­ ference and emphasizes the value, even superior­ ity, of female patterns. Moreover just as some firstwave feminists challenged assumptions about universal sex differences, so some second-wave feminists now challenge the class and racial biases in the assumption that there are universal, transhistorical gender patterns and emphasize instead multiple gender systems in different cultures and historical periods. ■ LIN D A GORDON See

a l s o

Sexuality.

s Gender Gap he “gender gap” refers to the differences in voting patterns of U.S. women and men, which first emerged in the 1980 presidential elec­ tion. While 54 percent of all male voters chose Re­ publican Ronald Reagan over Democrat Jimmy Carter, only 46 percent of women voters did. This gender gap of 8 percent was the largest difference between male and female voters since the Gallup organization began compiling such data in 1952. Only 37 percent of men voted for Carter, com­ pared with 45 percent of women. Third-party can­ didate John Anderson received 7 percent of the vote from each sex. The electoral gender gap narrowed slightly in 1984, when Reagan won reelection with 62 per­ cent of the male vote and 56 percent of the female vote. In the 1988 Bush-Dukakis contest, men voted 57 percent for the Republican and 41 per­ cent for the Democrat, with women splitting 50 percent for Bush and 49 percent for Dukakis. Male-female voting patterns differed in the 1992 presidential race. Bill Clinton received 45 percent of the overall vote, incumbent George Bush re­ ceived 38 percent, and Ross Perot 19 percent. Clinton won 46 percent of the women’s vote and 41 percent of the male vote. Clinton led Bush among women in every age and educational cate­ gory except among homemakers, who favored Bush by 45 percent to 36 percent. Clinton’s high­ est percentage of support (86 percent) came from African American women. There was also a 7 per­ cent gender gap in party identification: 41 percent of women identified themselves as Democrats, compared with 34 percent of men; 34 percent of women and 36 percent of men identified them­ selves as Republicans, and 26 percent of women and 30 percent of men called themselves inde­ pendents. The gender gap reappeared in the 1994 con­ gressional elections, but a reduced turnout of women voters contributed to the G O P ’s electoral

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sweep. In the 1996 presidential race, Bill Clinton won 49 percent of the overall vote and Bob Dole won 41 percent. Although Clinton and Dole each received 44 percent of the male vote, Clinton won 54 percent of the female vote while Dole won 38 percent of the female vote. These and other polling data sustain the view that a majority of women’s votes provide core support for policies and candidates committed to preserving peace, attending to the needs of oth­ ers, promoting the economic and social well-be­ ing of their families, and protecting the environ­ ment. ■ MIM K E L B E R See

%

also

Electoral Politics; Political Parties.

General Federation of Women’s Clubs

he General Federation of Women’s Clubs, an alliance of women’s literary clubs and civic reform societies, was formed in 1890. It quickly grew to become one of the largest and most in­ fluential women’s organizations in turn-of-thecentury America. Established in New York City at the instigation of Sorosis, an early women’s cultural association, it united forward-thinking women who met regularly in small towns and major cities to discuss history, literature, and cur­ rent events. Although there were a few exceptions, mem­ bers tended to be white, middle-class Protestant wives of business and professional men, whose children were in school. The first clubwomen sometimes were criticized for diverting attention from their domestic responsibilities, but club ac­ tivity grew respectable and members used the clubs to exercise a strong voice regarding public affairs.

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The federation’s founder was journalist Jane Cunningham Croly and its first president was Charlotte Emerson Brown. The organization grew from an initial meeting of delegates from sixty-one clubs to 475,000 U.S. women from 2,865 clubs in the mid-i920s to a peak of 830,000 women in 1955. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs supplied its members with news­ letters, study guides, bibliographies, speakers, touring collections of art pottery, and conven­ tions. It united members behind a broad range of municipal reforms designed to improve the qual­ ity of life for women, children, and for the com­ munity. Among the reform issues members ad­ dressed were child labor, clean milk, recreation, public libraries, sanitation and street lighting, conservation, and maternal and infant health care. In wartime members dedicated themselves to relief programs, and in 1914 the organization endorsed women’s suffrage. In the early 1920s the group’s leadership ac­ quired a national headquarters in Washington, D .C ., where it is still located. Today the organiza­ tion has declined in size and influence, but it con­ tinues to alert its membership to vital social prob­ lems and invite study, discussion, and lobbying on local, state, and national levels to support a variety of civic reforms. ■ KAREN J. B LAIR

§ Girls’ Socialization ollowing a decade o f women’s political ac­ tivism, the 1980s finally produced a sustained scientific inquiry into girls’ social and psychologi­ cal development. Before this time, all major theo­ ries of development were based on samples of men and boys—women were considered deviant from a male norm. Researchers in girls’ develop­ ment found that, in a paradox o f progress, just as

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they are perceived to be entering a world filled with opportunities, adolescent girls as a group suf­ fer more psychological distress than do their male peers. In a rush to deal with the girls’ problems, re­ searchers’ most promising new data have been largely ignored—data that describe girls’ preado­ lescent health and resilience and point toward ways to bolster that resilience. Confidence, directness, and power character­ ize girls’ early and middle childhood. Sigmund Freud was so struck by how different young girls were from the feminine ideal of his time that he thought of them as little men. Indeed, between the ages of three and five, little girls are “princesses of power," potent creatures, eager to explore the world around them. Even as they dress and coif the current feminine ideal represented by the Bar­ bie doll, studies indicate that they are actually playing “power Barbie” —games in which the long-legged beauty is in control and victorious in her domestic encounters with Ken. Girls are also fascinated with Barbie because she accentuates gender differences—breasts, long hair, shapely legs—areas of their femininity that they are just beginning to explore. When they are between three and five, girls begin to understand that gen­ der is a constant factor and that they will grow up to be women. Consequently, they are curious about the women in their lives—particularly their mothers—and about male-female differences. During this period girls identify with their mother and (usually) her role as primary care­ taker, learning that nurturing activities often are essentially female work. Girls actually get a devel­ opmental boost since they don’t have to discon­ nect from M ommy or her role to realize their fe­ maleness as little boys have had to do in early childhood to discover their maleness. This fierce connection to mother and to the women who predominate their childhood world provides a psychological safety net. Even in homes where gender dynamics are traditional and girls are exposed to the power compromises the world demands of women, young girls (who have

not been abused) are secure during these early years. Buoyed by these connections, girls enter grade school ahead of or equal to boys on almost every standardized measure of achievement and psychological well-being. By the age of eight, girls become keen observers o f gender and confidently question the imbalance of power between men and women that they ob­ serve: “Why did you give in to Daddy about din­ ner when it wasn’t what you wanted?” “Why didn’t you keep your own name?” These questions often make adult women uncomfortable and tempt them to silence girls. Little by little, girls are shocked as the women they saw as all-powerful sometimes behave in ways they perceive to be subservient and weak. But the very passivity girls question in adult women is now often reinforced in their own daily encounters with teachers and in texts that show boys in action while girls watch. In classroom in­ teractions boys call out and are called on with greater frequency than girls. Research conducted in over one hundred classrooms found that boys are more likely to be praised, corrected, helped, and constructively criticized by teachers. Eventu­ ally, girls’ early show of independence and selfworth erodes and their grade-school promise is short-circuited. And to make matters worse, since girls get better grades by being quieter and more conforming, their actual decline is masked by the general impression that they are doing well. By the end of elementary school, at the edge of ado­ lescence, little girls who have been silenced now know to silence themselves or to discount institu­ tions that demand their silence. Not speaking, not knowing, not feeling seem safer than raising open disagreements that might lead to isolation or vio­ lence. At adolescence, girls begin to perceive the dif­ ferences in ideals, standards, and expectations for each gender, as well as for different races, ethnic groups, and social classes. Sexual com­ ments, jokes, and threats become more intimi­ dating as girls develop an understanding of sex-

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uality and as boys, on average, become physi­ cally bigger and stronger than girls. From the media and advertising, girls learn how women’s looks are used to market products. As girls’ minds and bodies develop, they begin to recog­ nize that good looks are necessary for certain kinds of success, and that good looks lead to be­ ing looked at, which for young adolescent girls can seem threatening. Adolescent girls realize the role that boys and men will play in their lives and recognize the tightrope of sexuality that they must walk. As a re­ sult, girls often have difficulty creating an identity because of the varied demands different groups make on their loyalty and love. Far from complete, current research neverthe­ less offers clues as to how various demands and loyalties shape this developmental crossroad for girls: In order to be loved, white, middle-class girls try in vain to become the “perfect girl.” They suppress bad thoughts or feelings from themselves. Increasingly, they stop trusting what they know, and the phrase “ I don’t know” gluts their language. These girls suffer a dramatic dip (33 percent) in real self-esteem as compared to boys. Latinas tend to hold on to their sense of self longer, but once their self-esteem drops, the drop is greater (38 percent) than in any other group. During the year in which the American Associa­ tion of University Women (AAUW) conducted its survey Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America, urban Latinas left school at a greater rate than any other group, male or female. African American girls don’t suffer the dramatic drops in self-esteem (7 percent) but are more likely to be pessimistic about their teachers and their schoolwork than are other girls, or they sim­ ply give up on the institutions they sense have given up on them. Asian American girls may struggle to cope with traditional, male-oriented Asian cultures as well as the stereotype of the “model minority.” Research from the University of Minnesota finds that Na­ tive American female adolescents exhibit a pro­

gressive increase of self-injurious behaviors from seventh to twelfth grade. Girls with disabilities contend with the punishment inflicted on any person whose characteristics are likely to place them outside society’s standards of perfection. At a time when opportunities to explore competence and sexuality are essential, these girls are often de­ nied both. Young lesbians identify themselves only at risk of losing their family and freedom, and are more likely to attempt suicide than are hetero­ sexual girls. Researchers and practitioners are beginning to examine the factors that could prevent some of the unnecessary losses of adolescence and sustain girls’ resilience. Some are exploring the powerful relationships girls have had with mothers, fami­ lies, and other caring adults as sources for contin­ ued psychological health. Transforming the powerful relationships be­ tween daughters and mothers offers one opportu­ nity for building girls’ preadolescent resilience and for sustaining their self-esteem into woman­ hood. The strategy is to enlist women in general, and mothers in particular, to support young girls in what Carol Gilligan and her team at Harvard have observed as the “healthy resistance” girls put up to the losses of adolescence. In this context, re­ sistance refers to what the Ms. Foundation has called “an ability to take action, to mobilize one­ self—and potentially others—against physical or psychological threat to one’s well-being, integrity and relationships, even when doing so risks con­ flict.” For instance, rather than silencing them, adult women could help girls explore truthfully and assess realistically their behavioral options when faced with injustice. This would empower girls and forge a better alliance between adult women and girls and in girls’ relationships to themselves. Adults can also be all ies to girls by assisting them in developing certain competencies, a known aid to loss of self-esteem. For instance, studies show that girls who excel in math and science are less concerned with their appearance. Participation in

sports has also been proven to shore up self-esteem among certain groups of girls. In research conducted at the University of M in­ nesota, increased “family connectedness,” which is usually sustained with sons more than with daughters at adolescence, acts as a positive factor in retaining self-esteem. Practitioners are explor­ ing ways in which other institutions can supply this connection. Schools where faculty and staff take on aspects of the parental role may offer pos­ sible ways to boost self-esteem and functioning. Engaging in action within one’s community in a “resistance for liberation” is a strategy that has particular salience for girls o f color. This resis­ tance builds on collective history as a context for current action. For instance, a girl could be en­ couraged to respond to racism in the school’s cur­ riculum by taking action that challenges the school or offers a remedy for other students of color. Signithia Fordham found that African Ameri­ can girls in a Washington, D .C ., high school took on the achievement standards of white society and exhibited the conforming characteristics as­ sociated with middle-class white girls. For the African American girls, Fordham posits this as a “resistance by conforming” adopted by girls who refuse to recognize their “ designated place” in a predominantly white world. Each of these strategies comes with a cost, and most of them cost the resister. As girls resist the pressure to conform to narrow definitions of femi­ ninity and to question injustice, adults have a re­ sponsibility to stand beside them and work to change schools, workplaces, and government. Finally, the recent emphasis on the value of “emotional intelligence,” which relies on the relational skills that girls learn (and then come to devalue), could offer an instant dose of selfworth to girls. If adolescent girls’ knowledge can be generalized to the society and commu­ nity, then girls, who are the little justice seekers of the universe, may attain justice and thrive after all.

t the nadir of the depression in 1933, one-third of the nation’s people were “ ill-housed, illclad, and ill-nourished,” in the words o f President Roosevelt. The worst economic crisis that the country ever experienced elicited women’s re­ sourcefulness and creativity to ensure that they and their loved ones survived. Women held on to jobs or found paid employment for the first time, expanded their housework and caregiving, and volunteered in union struggles and community organizations. But their efforts were not uniformly successful—long-standing racism and sexism in­ fluenced their strategies, their triumphs, and their defeats. Sex segregation o f the labor force both pro­ tected and harmed women workers. Unemploy­ ment decimated the jobs of men in the skilled trades, in manufacturing, and at unskilled labor, while women clerical workers lost comparatively fewer jobs, because paperwork continued when production ceased. Female employees in res­ taurants, hotels, laundries, and other women’s homes, on the other hand, suffered enormous joblessness, because consumers could not afford these services; women industrial workers also sus­ tained high unemployment. If they lost their jobs, women scrambled to stay employed and moved

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GREAT D E P R E SSIO N

down the ladder of desirable occupations in order to find work. Elementary school teachers became secretaries, secretaries took jobs as waitresses, waitresses moved into laundries, and laundry op­ eratives became domestic workers. Some wives and mothers sought jobs for the first time, and women of every occupational background took domestic jobs. Fewer jobs, increased competition, and downward mobility ensured that young, white, single, attractive, Christian women had the best opportunities for employment, while older, Black women were the most likely to be pushed out of the work force. The women on the bottom rung of the ladder of job desirability lost the most. In their homes, urban women compensated for lost wages by returning to subsistence production when they lacked cash to consume goods and ser­ vices. They planted gardens, canned fruits and vegetables, sewed and repaired clothing, and cre­ ated comfort and cleanliness. They built wood fires and heated water for bathing and laundry when they moved into poorer housing that lacked modern conveniences. Many rural women never knew the luxury of electricity or indoor plumbing, and migrant women did housework under the sun and stars. Women sacrificed their possessions and security for the future: furniture, life insurance, and even their homes. To comfort unemployed men and to keep their families intact, women took on greater emotional burdens as well. Relatives and friends doubled up, while young women postponed marriage and the birthrate dropped precipitously. Cooperation surged and conflict swelled as lack of money, sag­ ging hopes, and overcrowded living conditions sparked tensions between parents and children, wives and husbands, and among relatives. Out­ side their families, women relied on female friends for meals, loans of clothing, and a place to stay when they were evicted. Women on their own frequently shared rented rooms just as fami­ lies doubled up. When their employment, subsistence, familial, and friendship strategies proved inadequate,

women reluctantly considered accepting govern­ ment relief. So severe was the stigma that women literally died of hunger and cold to avoid asking for help. If they did apply, they received grocery vouchers, used clothing, or a small amount of coal in the early 1930s. After the inauguration of the New Deal (1933), direct cash payments pro­ vided the margin for survival, but usually only heads of families were eligible and the amounts remained inadequate. Women were required to meet both means and motherhood tests to receive assistance. New Deal opportunities disproportionately ben­ efited white men, and political tensions reflected white male dominance of the social fabric. Newly legislated minimum wage and maximum hour protections in the National Industrial Recovery Act excluded domestic and agricultural workers, among them most Black women and many Black men. Public works projects hired men in far larger proportions than women. Local adminis­ tration of federal programs allowed white south­ erners to maintain racial segregation and wage differentials. Scapegoating resulted in mass de­ portation and repatriation of roughly one-third of the Mexican American population. Public senti­ ment blamed the depression on married women’s employment and sometimes excluded wives from jobs. Despite the harshness o f unemployment, pov­ erty, and fear, women created hope through their community activities. Chicana cannery workers in Los Angeles, for example, provided union leadership. Black and white wives of au­ toworkers and women operatives militantly sup­ ported sit-down strikes, like the one in Flint, Michigan. Southern women struck textile mills throughout the Piedmont region. Women joined political organizations such as the Communist Party and its affiliates, marched in unemploy­ ment demonstrations, moved evicted families back into their homes, boycotted grocers, and supported the Scottsboro boys. Charitable and religious organizations relied on women’s volun-

GREAT D E P R E SSIO N

Migrant family, November 1940. Photograph by Dorothea Lange, whose images o f agricultural workers during the Great Depression documented these fam ilies’ plight and helped gam er support for the N ew Deal.

teer labor to feed the hungry and distribute clothing. A small number of elite women, many with roots in the suffrage movement of the 1910s, forged gov­ ernment policy to right the wrongs o f the depres­ sion. Eleanor Roosevelt captured the nation with her activist outlook and actions, and lesser-known women organized within the Democratic Party and in New Deal agencies. Frances Perkins, secre­ tary of labor, led the effort to pass the Social Secu­ rity Act in 1935, which inaugurated unemploy­ ment insurance, aid to dependent children, and

old-age insurance. Mary M cLeod Bethune, a Black educator, clubwoman, and activist, di­ rected minority affairs in the National Youth Ad­ ministration and led Roosevelt’s unofficial Black cabinet. Artists such as photographer Dorothea Lange, working for the Farm Security Administra­ tion, shaped our visual images of the era. People often mistakenly believe that the de­ pression had little effect on women because they were housewives. Not all women were house­ wives; those who were expanded their daily labor, practically and emotionally, and some entered

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the labor force. Racial and class discrimination disproportionately harmed women o f color in em­ ployment and eligibility for government-spon­ sored work and relief. Almost all women suffered emotional and economic depression, but they ex­ ercised their ingenuity in their homes, jobs, and communities to create the best possible lives they could imagine. Lois Rita Helmbold, Making Choices, Making Do: Sur­ vival Strategies of Black and White Working-Class Women during the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illi­ nois Press, 1997); Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley, eds., One Third o f a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz, eds., Writ­ ing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940 (New York: Feminist Press, 1987). ■ LO IS RITA H E L M B O L D

See

also

New Deal; Welfare and Public Relief.

§ Great Society/War on Poverty he Great Society is a term used to describe antipoverty legislation passed during Presi­ dent Lyndon Johnson’s administration. John­ son’s Great Society extended President John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier initiatives, which oper­ ated under the assumption that by expanding ac­ cess to health care, education, employment, and training opportunities, the poor could benefit from the then-projected growth of the U.S. econ­ omy. Michael Harrington’s influential book The Other America (1962), the civil rights movement, and urban unrest of the 1960s exposed the need for legislation to address economic and social problems faced by the elderly, unemployed, and others living in poverty, as well as to protect the

T

civil rights of women and racial minorities. Great Society legislation targeted poor communities and individuals living in poverty as well as educa­ tional and employment practices. One of the most significant pieces of legislation to pass during this period was Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in employment on the basis of race and sex. Pro­ grams that targeted poor communities included the Area Redevelopment Act o f 1961 and the Eco­ nomic Development Act of 1965, both designed to encourage new industries to move into economi­ cally depressed areas. Housing and community development programs included the 1965 rent supplement program and the 1966 Demonstra­ tion (Model) Cities and Metropolitan Develop­ ment Act. The 1962 Manpower Development and Training Act offered retraining for displaced work­ ers, and the Food Stamp Act of 1964 provided eli­ gible individuals and families with cash vouchers to purchase basic food and related items. Educa­ tion measures included the Elementary and Sec­ ondary Education Act of 1965 and the Higher Ed­ ucation Act of 1965. Among other key programs associated with the Great Society were the 1965 Title XVIII (Med­ icare) and Title XIX (Medicaid) amendments to the Social Security Act. Because Medicare was provided as a universal health care program for the elderly, it did not carry the stigma that was at­ tached to Medicaid, which was designated for those who met the low-income requirements. However, since women were overrepresented among the elderly and among the poor generally, they benefited from both programs. In his 1964 State of the Union Address, Presi­ dent Johnson called for a “War on Poverty.” The resulting legislation, the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), became one of the most hotly con­ tested legislative innovations of the Great Society. The EO A offered the first government-sponsored attempt to involve the poor directly and formally in decision making, advocacy, and service provi­ sion in their own communities.

■

G R E A T S O C I E T Y / W A R ON P O V E R T Y

Early reports on the War on Poverty ignored women’s contributions as paid workers, despite the fact that the majority of positions such as com­ munity aide, community worker, and parent aide were filled by women. In keeping with the tradi­ tional view of women’s work as unpaid, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), established by the EOA, defined women’s role in the War on Poverty as that of volunteer. Strategies for prevent­ ing poverty emphasized expanding employment opportunities for poor men; this marginalized women’s employment needs as well as their ac­ tual contributions as staff members and adminis­ trators of antipoverty programs. Policymakers, along with African American male and Latino community leaders who par­ layed antipoverty experiences into political ca­ reers or built large welfare bureaucracies, are treated in most written accounts as the primary beneficiaries of the War on Poverty. Although many of the extensive reports on the Community Action Programs (CAPs) mentioned that women were in the majority at the lower-level positions, few detailed the important leadership roles that women played in these programs. EOA’s framers and implementers were unpre­ pared for the challenge the CAPs in low-income communities of color posed to the political estab­ lishments in different locales. In less than two years, political pressures from mayors, other local officials, and traditional social service organiza­ tions had already circumscribed the federal gov­ ernment’s commitment to maximum feasible participation of the poor. Furthermore, funds available for the War on Poverty quickly subsided as costs for the Vietnam War escalated. Funding was initially provided in a lump sum with specific programmatic decisions to be made atthe local level. To circumscribe local discretion over program design, the 1968 amendments tar­ geted specific programs to be funded such as Head Start, legal services, and emergency food and medical services. As funds were cut back, lo­ cal communities had little money remaining for

other program initiatives. The comprehensive, multiservice approach to fighting poverty that marked the initial efforts was further undermined as the specific programs were delegated to other government agencies. By 1970, community action and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) were the only programs operated by O EO . Under pressure from President Nixon, O EO was disbanded, and the remaining CAPs were co­ ordinated by the newly established Community Services Administration (CSA) of the Depart­ ment of Health and Human Services. C SA re­ ceived little support from President Carter and was finally dismantled by the Reagan administra­ tion in 1981. The classification of community action posi­ tions as paraprofessional helped expand jobs in health and social welfare organizations but has­ tened the deskilling of certain forms of work in the health, legal, and social work professions. Many of these positions were filled by women, so this deskilling process also furthered the gender segregation in these occupations. Women of color were disproportionately represented in these posi­ tions and therefore disproportionately affected by the cutbacks in social services. Many observers point out that the War on Poverty’s attention to Black America created the grounds for the backlash that began in the 1970s. The perception by the white middle class that it was footing the bill for ever-increasing services to the poor led to diminished support for welfare state programs, especially those that targeted spe­ cific groups and neighborhoods. Many whites viewed Great Society programs as supporting the economic and social needs of low-income urban minorities; they lost sympathy, especially as the economy declined during the 1970s. O f the many Great Society programs, more support remains for Medicare, which serves the elderly, and for Head Start, which serves the youngest of the poor, than for housing subsidies and other transfer payments for families living in poverty or low-income communities. T he basic

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assumption of the Great Society, that government must take an active role to reduce poverty, has been replaced by the 1990s assertion that govern­ ment support for the poor leads to dependency and undermines the work ethic. Whereas the Great Society emphasized the structural roots of poverty, contemporary poverty' policy focuses on the individual behaviors and choices of people who are poor. Numerous critics of the War on Poverty, rep­ resenting a range of political perspectives, em­ phasized the limits of maximum feasible par­ ticipation as a strategy to enhance democratic practice. Others criticized the programs for un­ dermining progressive efforts to develop a na­ tional unemployment policy and for increas­ ing local infighting among people of color in poor communities. Many also argued that in­ experienced and greedy program administrators misspent and misappropriated funds. However, from the vantage point of women hired by an­ tipoverty programs, the War on Poverty con­ tributed to their personal and political empow­ erment. It also transformed the unpaid work they were already performing for their com­ munities into paid work. The skills they gained in struggling against insensitive and ineffective public agencies in efforts to address the eco­ nomic and social needs o f their communities enhanced their political efficacy on behalf of themselves, their families, and their community. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Nancy A. Naples, Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothers, Community Work, and the War on Poverty (New York: Routledge, forthcoming); Jill Quadagno and Catherine Fobes. “The Welfare State and the Cultural Reproduction of Gender: Making Good Girls and Boys in the Job Corps,” Social Problems, 42 no. 2 (1995): 171-90. ■ NANCY A. N A P L E S

S ee

also

State.

Civil Rights Act of 1964; Poverty; Welfare

U

Guerrilla Girls

he Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of women who work to expose and challenge the sexism and racism in the art world, while wearing gorilla masks to hide their identities. Angered into action by the Museum of Modern Art’s 1985 “ International Survey of Contemporary Art,” which included only nineteen works by women and none by people of color among its 165 artists, the Guerrilla Girls first gained attention for the posters they plastered around New York City. Beautifully simple, the posters listed statistics on discrimination in New York galleries and muse­ ums along with witty, often sarcastic commentary. “ Do women have to be naked to get into the Met­ ropolitan Museum?” read a typical headline, fol­ lowed by the percentages of women artists (5) and female nudes (85) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s modern art sections. Not surprisingly, the press tuned in to these mysterious masked women and the group members soon became spokes­ wom en—lecturing, appearing on talk shows, and exhibiting their posters internationally. The Guerrilla Girls also have pursued other forms of publishing. In 1992 they received an N E A grant to produce four single-subject issues of a journal, Hotflashes, and in 1995 published Con­ fessions o f the Guerrilla Girls, a “how-to” book for women on organizing and activism. The Guerrilla Girls maintain anonymity to fo­ cus attention on facts instead of personalities. Some admit to being involved in the New York City art scene as curators, directors, and visual and performance artists. The Guerrilla Girls’ identi­ ties are the subject o f endless speculation within the art world.

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■ NANCY B. SMITH Se e

also

Art Criticism.

251

H A R L E M REN A ISSA N CE

% Harlem

Renaissance

uring the Harlem Renaissance—that fabled outpouring of artistic creativity sandwiched between World War I and the Great Depres­ sion—African American women became more visible to themselves and to the larger world. C en­ tered in the flourishing Black community of New York City, the movement was fueled by migra­ tions from other parts of the United States and from the Caribbean. It embodied a “new negro” mood of racial assertiveness, pan-Africanist con­ sciousness, greater participation in electoral poli­ tics, increased publication o f newspapers and magazines for Blacks, and the liberal and expan­ sive atmosphere of the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties. Despite gender discrimination, Black women achieved representation and status that they would not enjoy again until the 1980s. These relatively flamboyant cultural occurrences took place at a time when a foundation of “ordinary” women—single mothers, small-business owners, teachers, cooks, nurses, domestics, housewives, church sisters, and clubwomen —lived away from the teeming in-group center. The women who participated most directly in the Renaissance were salon keepers, promoters, writers, and performers. Ethel Ray Nance was Charles Johnson’s influ­ ential secretary at the Urban League’s Opportu­ nity magazine. Regina Anderson was assistant li­ brarian at the Harlem branch library; she read new books by Black writers and wrote helpful di­ gests of them. The two shared quarters in Sugar Hill, an area that became a gathering center for Zora Neale Hurston, Eric Walrond, and others. Dorothy Peterson, teacher and cultural activist, turned her father’s Brooklyn home into a literary salon. Later, with her brother, she kept an apart­ ment haven on the East Side for budding writers. Jessie Fauset’s more pervasive influence gave her an impresario status equal to that of Renaissance “midwife” Alain Locke. As literary editor of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, Fauset first published

D

Langston Hughes’s work and encouraged Countee Cullen and Jean Toomer. She also wrote stan­ dard-setting articles and four well-received novels and presided over intellectual soirees at her home. As writers, women contributed in all genres, sometimes fettered by literary and social conven­ tions but often forging, like their male counter­ parts, new forms and idioms. The most famous, Zora Neale Hurston, devised a participant-ob­ server narrative for her folklore collections and, in her stories and later signature novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, depicted earthy, ultimately independent heroines. Nella Larsen’s two psy­ chological novels, Quicksand and Passing (1928, 1929), feature mixed-blood, middle-class women who struggle unsuccessfully to navigate gender and racial turbulence. Poets abounded, the most prominent being Georgia Douglas Johnson, An­ gelina Weld Grimke, Anne Spencer, and Helene Johnson. G . D. Johnson sang “the heart of a woman” and penned prize-winning folk plays; Grim ke’s output was compromised by her need to cloak lesbian longing; Spencer wrote about beloved nature but had “no civilized articulation” for racist horrors; and H. Johnson wrote boldly in the fresh, popular slang. Poet-journalist-diarist Al­ ice Dunbar-Nelson and newspaperwoman Geraldyn Dismond arbitered the era. Along with the tan, high-brown, and yellow chorus girls who startled Broadway by simultane­ ously dancing and singing, the likes of Florence Mills and Ethel Waters entertained audiences on stage and in fashionable nightclubs. Blues singers such as Bessie and Clara Smith, Ida Cox, and Gladys Bentley freely expressed themes of sexual­ ity, including lesbian and bisexual, in their pun­ ning, explicit lyrics, and unabashed female pres­ ence. For many, they typify the era, but it was all of the women, in their many lines of creativity, who asserted their genius to make up the Harlem Renaissance glory. • AKASHA ( g l o S ee

also

Literature.

r ia

) H U LL

252

HEART D ISE A SE

M

Health S e e Alternative Healing; Medical Research; Wom­ en’s Health Movement.

M

Heart Disease

t is well known that coronary heart disease is the biggest killer of American men, but the fact that it is the greatest disease cause of death in women was ignored by the medical profession, public ed­ ucation campaigns, and the media for most of this century. The myth that “women don’t get heart disease” has prevailed even though, in 1908, heart disease surpassed childbirth as the biggest health hazard faced by women. In tire early 1990s, studies demonstrated that men were twice as likely as women to receive state-of-the-art cardiac treat­ ment. The problem that many doctors, mostly women, had fought to bring to the forefront for years finally gained more widespread attention. Cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke) results in about 479,000 female deaths annually, nearly double the number who die from all forms of cancer combined. Cardiovascular disease is also the leading disease cause of death for women of color, causing 42.5 percent of the deaths for Blacks, 34 percent for Latinas, 39.7 percent for Asian and Pacific Islanders, and 31.7 percent for Native American women. Despite these grim sta­ tistics, a 1995 Gallup survey found that four out of five women, and one in three of their doctors, do not perceive heart disease as a threat to women. There is little research regarding the difference in heart disease rates among women of color; there is little research on women in general. The myth that “women don’t get heart disease” became rooted for three reasons. First, the vast majority of medical research was performed using men. Second, early results of the Framingham Heart Study, which included women and shaped many of society’s views on heart disease, were mis­

I

interpreted. Initially, this study looked at middleaged people and found heart disease common in men but not women. As the years passed and the participants aged, more women did become ill, but the earlier results had already shaped medical opinion. Third, women tend to be stricken later in life, when they are more socially isolated, less economically visible, and, as a group, easier for so­ ciety' to ignore. The result? Too often women were misdiagnosed, their cardiac symptoms ascribed to “ nerves” or “hysteria,” sometimes with tragic re­ sults. Furthermore, while women were instructed to make their husbands’ lifestyles more hearthealthy, they weren’t alerted to the importance of caring for themselves, too. The definitive cause of atherosclerosis, the dis­ ease process that results in coronary heart disease, is not known, but several risk factors are associ­ ated. Since less research has been done with women, whether they have other risk factors is un­ known. There is evidence that the same risk fac­ tors that affect men play a role, including family medical history, high blood pressure, obesity, ab­ normal cholesterol patterns, diabetes, smoking, and a sedentary lifestyle. Therefore, controlling blood pressure and diabetes, quitting smoking, and exercising regularly are believed protective for women as well. Some also believe that hor­ mone replacement therapy (HRT) may reduce heart disease risk. In studies of subgroups of women of color, African American women have been the research subjects in most of the few studies conducted. Re­ search shows that African American women are more likely to have some of the risk factors at early ages, most notably high blood pressure, diabetes, and high cholesterol level. In addition, they have the lowest reported rates of exercise. It is not known how sociological factors, including lack of access to medical care, influence the cardiac risks for African American women. Stress is thought to have an impact but stu­ dies conflict. The assumption is often made that women are at increased risk as a result of their

253

HETERODOXY

growing role in the corporate workplace. Not only is there no evidence to support this, but the re­ search to date shows the opposite—women em­ ployed in high-level, satisfying jobs are at less risk than their counterparts who hold low-level jobs with little autonomy. Among the important differences in how heart disease affects men and women is age. Usually, women develop heart disease ten to fifteen years later than men, a benefit generally ascribed to the estrogen women’s bodies naturally produce be­ fore menopause. Such factors as a strong family history of heart disease, diabetes, and/or smoking can erase this “gender protection.” Furthermore, smokers who take oral contraceptives have a higher risk of heart disease. Heart disease is more difficult to diagnose in women. Symptoms typically associated with heart disease in men, such as severe chest pain, can occur, but manifest themselves more subtly in women, who tend to complain of difficulty breathing, nausea, or fatigue. Another problem is that cardiac tests and treat­ ments were designed for men. The commonly done exercise stress test, in which a treadmill or stationary bicycle is used to put stress on the heart, is less accurate in women. Testing can be im­ proved if this test is performed in conjunction with a technique known as “cardiac perfusion imaging.” A “stress echo,” which is a combination of an exercise stress test and an echocardiogram, also improves results in women. Cardiac treatments, developed and tested on men, are generally effective on women, but they can pose some problems. Cardiac drugs prescribed for women were largely tested among male re­ search subjects. Although the mortality rate for coronary bypass surgery is tiny, the death rate is higher for women. When balloon angioplasty, a surgical alternative, was first developed, the female death rate was higher because the balloon used in the procedure was too large for a woman’s smaller arteries. This technique has since improved. Car­ diac rehabilitation programs, designed to meet the

needs of middle-aged men, often fail to take into account the needs of older women. More research is needed in the future. Because heart disease is often diagnosed later in women, they are likely to be sicker, require more emer­ gency surgery, and suffer a higher death rate. Techniques are needed to diagnose heart disease earlier in women. There is little understanding about the role that hormones play in heart dis­ ease, or whether more appropriate treatments can be developed. More education and awareness campaigns are needed to underscore the impor­ tance of this health problem in women. Bernadine Healy, M.D., A New Prescription for Women’s Health: Getting the Best Medical Care in a Man’s World (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995); Leslie Laurence and Beth Weinhouse, Outrageous Practices: The Alarming Truth About How Medicine Mistreats Women (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994); Fredric J. Pashkow, M.D., and Charlotte Libov, The Woman’s Heart Book: The Complete Guide to Keeping a Healthy Heart and What to Do I f Things Go Wrong (New York: Plume, 1994). • C H A R L O T T E L IB O V

M

Heterodoxy

here was a club called Heterodoxy for unI orthodox women, women who did things and did them openly,” wrote Mabel Dodge Luhan. Founded in 1912 by Unitarian minister Marie Jenney Howe in New York City’s Green­ wich Village, Heterodoxy was a unique gathering place for feminists, radicals, labor organizers, and professional women. Thirty to fifty women of the one hundred twenty known members usually met every other Saturday from September to May at Village restaurants until 1940 to debate such is­ sues as women’s rights, pacifism, birth control, revolutionary politics, and civil rights. Historian Nancy Cott reported that meetings focused on “themes of deprivations and rebellions felt in common by women of various sorts.”

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H ET ER O SE X ISM

Members ranged in age from their twenties to their early sixties. Most were Anglo-Americans; one member was African American, and several members were Jewish or Irish. The women ranged from nudists and free-love advocates to les­ bian couples, from oft-married heterosexuals to monogamous wives in lifelong relationships. What held this “little band o f willful women, the most unruly and individualistic females” to­ gether for thirty years was their pride in the group’s enormous range of personalities, interests, and occupations, and their common belief in suf­ frage. As Inez Haynes Irwin noted, the members “possessed minds startlingly free of prejudice. They were at home with ideas. All could talk; all could argue; all could listen.” Rose Young said, “To me feminism means that woman wants. . . to push on to the finest, fullest, freest expression of herself. . . . It means the finding of her own soul.” ■ JU D IT H SCHWARZ

M

Heterosexism

eterosexism is a term adopted by feminists in the early 1970s to describe the institutional and ideological domination of heterosexuality as the only “legitimate” expression of sexuality and familial partnership. Modeled after the concepts of racism and sexism, the term does not imply that heterosexuality is innately bad (as white racism does not mean the white race is inherently evil). Rather, it refers to the structural and attitudinal ways in which one form of sexuality has domi­ nated and distorted others (as the domination of one race or sex has oppressed others). The primary victims of heterosexism are les­ bians and gay men, who suffer innumerable types of discrimination in everyday life, from social os­ tracism to hate violence to job discrimination. Heterosexism takes both attitudinal forms—ex­ pressions of bigotry or homophobia—and struc­ tural forms, such as exclusion from the partner­

H

ship rights of marriage, inheritance, health insur­ ance, immigration status, and so on. Feminist analysis of heterosexism shows that it also maintains male supremacy and works against the freedom of all women. Society’s institutions are based on the heterosexist assumption that every woman either is or wants to be individually bonded to one man both economically and emo­ tionally. Discrimination against a woman in the workplace, then, is justified by the rationale that her job is not a primary vocation since she can os­ tensibly rely on a male as the primary bread­ winner in the family. Heterosexism also promotes the idea that sexuality is “either/or” —lesbian or straight, perverse or normal—and thereby con­ strains women’s sexual freedom. Heterosexism is maintained by compulsory het­ erosexuality and the punishment not only of les­ bians but also of any woman or man who departs from assigned gender roles. Witness the most common slurs used against gender-role deviation: sissy, faggot, butch, dyke. If anyone—gay or straight—fails to take action or say something out of fear of these homophobic labels, heterosexism has prevailed. Such labels are not just name-call­ ing. Behind each label is the implicit threat of so­ cial, economic, or physical reprisal—the denial of life-supporting systems or even life itself if one steps too far out of line. Heterosexism thus works to keep women subor­ dinate; it seeks to deny straight women their inde­ pendence and strength and to keep lesbians in the closet. T he power of heterosexism as a tool to con­ trol women will be defused only when women refuse to fear the lesbian label and defend the rights of those outside heterosexism’s approved territory: lesbians, gay men, transsexuals, and bi­ sexuals. Understanding the importance of heterosexism to the oppression of women was pioneered by les­ bian feminists in the 1970s. When the women’s movement was lesbian-baited and some leaders sought to purge open lesbians, lesbian feminist groups began to form, such as Radicalesbians in New York, The Lesbian Tide in Los Angeles, and

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The Furies in Washington, D .C . Although their politics varied, the groups’ demands for open dis­ cussion of lesbianism and heterosexism as politi­ cal issues led over time to growing acceptance of lesbian rights. This culminated in 1977 at the Na­ tional Women’s Conference in Houston, when a prolesbian sexual preference plank was accepted as part of the twenty-five agreed-upon points in the national women’s platform. Since the 1970s more analysis of heterosexism and the construction o f sexuality has developed, including significant work regarding the interface among race, class, culture, and sexuality. Women from diverse cultures internationally also are be­ ginning to break the silence of how heterosexism functions in their lives. ■ C H A R L O T T E B UNCH S e e ALSO

Thus sexuality is not private, but is political and related to power. “ Compulsory heterosexuality” is part of a power structure benefiting heterosexual males at the expense of women and homosexuals. This inequity is justified by an ideology that sees heterosexuality as natural, universal, and biologi­ cally necessary, and homosexuality as the opposite. The system also is reinforced by legal sanctions and violence against women (rape, battering, incest, and murder) and against lesbians, gays, and transgendered persons (verbal harassment, physical as­ sault, and murder). If our sexuality is socially constructed it can also be de- and reconstructed. In theory, postmod­ ernists fight against binary labels for gender and for sexuality. In practice, many seek to separate sexual choice and pleasure from sexism and op­ pression.

Homophobia.

■ E. KAY T R I M B E R G E R See

%

also

Heterosexism; Sexuality.

Heterosexuality

uring more than 350 years of U.S. history, the meaning and place of heterosexuality have changed from family-oriented reproduction in the colonies, to a romantic and conflicted sexual­ ity in nineteenth-century marriage, and to a more public and commercialized twentieth-century sexuality, the supposed source of personal identity and individual happiness. The concept of heterosexuality is a historical creation, first articulated in the United States in the 1890s in medical books and journals as a re­ sponse to the conceptualization of homosexuality. Hetero- and homo- sexuality are thus interdepen­ dent, “unnatural” cultural creations linking gen­ der to sexuality and connecting both to one’s per­ sonal and social identity. Although various acts, feelings, and relationships that are now labeled “heterosexual” or “homosexual” existed earlier, they likely did not carry the same meaning to the participants or to other members of society as they do in the twentieth century.

D

%

Hinduism

woman’s fertility is usually celebrated by the Hindu tradition, but her ascetic practices, scholarship, and patronage of temple rituals have largely been ignored both by androcentric San­ skrit texts as well as by two centuries of Western scholarship that has relied on these texts for infor­ mation on Hindu culture. Classical Hindu litera­ ture portrays women as servants and goddesses, strumpets and saints, protected daughters and powerful matriarchs, shunned widows and wor­ shiped wives. The ideal woman in androcentric literature is a woman whose husband is alive—a sumangali or “ auspicious.” This ideal has been weakened considerably for Hindu women in the diaspora. Hindu women have been both empowered and subjugated by religious tradition over the cen­ turies. The Brahminical Hindu tradition has been marked by sanctions against women and the so-

A

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called lower castes. Power is not based on gender alone; caste, age, and economic status are equally important in determining hierarchies. Caste is a prominent factor, and historically child mar­ riages, abuses against widows, prohibition against divorce, and sanctions against widow remarriage were predominant in the “higher” castes. Lowercaste women had greater freedom in many areas but were discriminated against by the higher-caste men and women. Traditional stigmas associated with divorce and widowhood have been declining among Hindu women in the United States, but vestiges of caste consciousness linger among the Indians. Discrimination against women within the Hindu tradition in India exists in many domains, including cultural norms, received ideologies, and texts of religious law. Many Hindu women in the diaspora still refrain from worship at the fam­ ily shrine and at the temple during their menstru­ ation, even though notions of pollution and social isolation have almost completely disappeared in the West. Conservative Hindu women from parts of northern India perform the rituals of karva chauth and hoi ashtami (October-November) at home for the welfare o f husbands and sons, al­ though not for daughters. Women also play im­ portant roles in creating and managing Hindu temples in the United States; the president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America in Queens, New York, is female. There are women poets in the Vedas (1500 B.C.), theoretically the most important scriptures of Brahminical Hinduism, but the most promi­ nent ones came after the seventh century. In India and North America, women sing and choreo­ graph the songs of Antal and Mira. Through the words and passion o f such poets, women ap­ proach God directly, rather than through the in­ termediary (male) priests. The opportunities that some women created for themselves in the twentieth century straddle do­ mains not traditionally considered to be religion in Western cultures. For example, acting, music, and. dance are ways to achieve salvation within Hin­

duism. Despite this religious connection, for sev­ eral centuries high-class and caste women were prevented from public performance. Only in this century have women o f all castes appropriated Bharata Natyam dancing. Women play a promi­ nent part in musical performances in the United States and dominate the arena of dance. Schools of classical dance are popular in all major U.S. met­ ropolitan areas; devotional dances are prominent. ■ VASUDHA NARAYANAN S ee

M

also

Religion.

Hispanic Women S e e Latinas.

M

History and Historians

he history of the Americas is a product of Eu­ ropeans’ intrigue with the unknown and re­ flects their intellectual heritage—logic, skepti­ cism, and belief in the primacy of a particular view of reality. Intrigue led historians to begin de­ scribing the people of the New World. By the sec­ ond half of the nineteenth century; the profes­ sionalization of history and its establishment as an academic discipline emerged with the work of Leopold von Ranke. Von Ranke initiated the process of defining an absolute historical reality that could be uncovered by careful, methodical research—the gathering and assembling of facts. History thus acquired the trappings of scientific objectivity, assuming that cause-and-effect rela­ tionships held true in both natural processes and human affairs. The development of historical thinking also co­ incided with the rise of nationalism throughout Europe and America, focusing on the affairs of states and the motives of the men who carried them out. History has thus been concerned pri­ marily with public events; and human action, pri-

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H I S T O R Y AND H I S T O R I A N S

marily white male action, has been perceived as the driving force in political change. Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, for instance, pos­ tulated that the response of men to the challenges of environment and hostile Indians shaped a pe­ culiarly American civilization. In the first quarter o f the twentieth century, Carl Becker and Charles and Mary Beard chal­ lenged the absolutism inspired by von Ranke. Becker’s “ Everyman His Own Historian” was a statement of historical relativism that asserted that history was a creation of time and place, based upon men’s perceptions of events. The term Everyman was apt, since history remained a maledominated profession. While Becker and others thought about history as influenced by social forces rather than strictly by the record of those forces, Marxist historians in­ terjected theory into history by using class struggle as an analytic framework. White women could be included in studies of labor because they had en­ tered the labor force during the early years of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution as fac­ tory girls in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachu­ setts, and in the garment industry. During the Civil War, they represented a significant propor­ tion of the national labor force. Most U.S. history texts, however, continued to ignore women. In 1922 Arthur Schlesinger noted that historians’ silence about women made it ap­ pear that half of the U.S. population had played no role in the country’s history. “Any consideration of woman’s part in American history must include the protracted struggle of the sex for larger rights and opportunities, a story that in itself is one of the noblest chapters in the history of American democracy,” wrote Schlesinger in 1935. Women’s place in history became a struggle for acceptance by a male-dominated society. Women’s history, in Schlesinger’s view, focused on legal and political issues of rights and their attempts to gain entry into male realms. Feminist historians found new ways of examin­ ing social relationships, the condition o f women workers to public attention during the first decade

of the twentieth century. Mary Van Kleek, Sophonisba Breckinridge, and Josephine Goldmark contributed to investigations of women’s status in the labor force, giving visibility to women in the public sphere. The history of women emerged as a distinctive area of the discipline during the late 1960s. Much of women’s history began in order to tell “women’s stories.” One of the pioneers of women’s history is Abbie Graham, whose Ladies in Revolt, published in 1934, chronicles the women’s rights movement. Rose Schneiderman, in A ll for One, published in 1967, wrote about the early history of the Women’s Trade Union League as well as her own experi­ ences. Gerda Lerner’s The Grimke Sisters o f South Carolina, published in 1967, established the place of women in the Civil War era and her own posi­ tion as a founder of women’s history. Caroll Smith-Rosenberg made explicit the place of sexu­ ality in women’s history in Disorderly Conduct: Visions o f Gender in Victorian America, published in 1985. Feminist scholarship contributed to and was fostered by the emergence of an important new interest in social history. The universalist ideal that historians could determine the true cause of events that affected all people changed to empha­ size the importance of classes of people who had thus far been overlooked in historical narrative. During the 1960s historians turned their attention increasingly toward the study of social groups out­ side the mainstream—people of color, workingclass people, and wom en—and explored the ac­ tivities of everyday life. Historians used anthropological and sociologi­ cal methods to analyze data from court records and studied census data to supplement other evi­ dence. This interdisciplinary approach was used to understand the larger scale of human actions in history. Studies of populations, rather than battles and elections, became a way to learn about largescale changes in society. The roles o f women, Blacks, Native Americans, and people of Hispanic and Asian origin were finally recognized as factors that shaped U.S. history.

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Family historians approached the study o f so­ cial change through examining the lives o f or­ dinary families. Demography played an impor­ tant role in analyzing patterns of birth, death, marriage, and divorce. “ Ordinary” people were viewed as actors in as well as subjects o f social change. Feminist critiques—as well as theories such as deconstructionism—that question the meaning of language have also influenced historical inquiry. The analysis of women’s roles by Marxist histori­ ans presaged the discussion of women’s roles in re­ lationships of power. By the late 1960s M ichel Foucault was attempting to destabilize notions of historical truth. Foucault, as Becker had done be­ fore, stressed the discontinuities o f history, but Foucault moved the analysis of those discontinu­ ities into the realm of language and discourse. He called for a total reconceptualization of knowl­ edge as relationships of power between those who control information and those who depend upon it. Hayden White took the analysis of historical discourse into the literary realm to attempt a re­ construction o f knowledge based on similarities of linguistic structure. Beginning in the early 1960s historians and an­ thropologists explored the meaning of relations between the scholarly inquirer and “ the other,” the culturally different subject of study. Ethnohistory emerged as a field of study that explicitly ad­ dressed issues of culture in different historical contexts. Using anthropological methods to ana­ lyze historical meaning, ethnohistorians exam­ ined the relationships between native people in the Americas and the European conquerors and colonists who met them there. They also chal­ lenged U.S. historians to confront the idea that the European colonizers of the eighteenth cen­ tury were as culturally different from contempo­ rary Americans as they were from Native people. Ethnohistorians contributed to the discussion of meaning and intent in human action. The idea of history as linear progress is a pecu­ liar product of Western civilization. Various schol­ ars claim to have absolute, universal knowledge,

but they have been questioned by other scholars on many grounds. As the discipline of history has focused on social and cultural factors rather than on politics and war, women of various social groups and ethnic identities have gained promi­ nence. The subjects of historical study have come to include prostitutes on the Western frontier, women moving west across the continent, women in public life, and women in science. Family his­ tory deals with the demographics of family rela­ tionships and how women’s roles establish the structure of social relations. As in other disciplines that impact historical inquiry, literary theory ques­ tions the meaning of written language and autho­ rial intent—the basis o f historical inquiry—and gives voice to women and people of different cultures. Anthropologists examine the nature of meaning, and thus ideas of history, among people of different cultural backgrounds. The discipline o f history is changing, and women’s voices have been an important force in that change. History becomes “herstory,” questioning the male domi­ nation of language in historical studies. Although the number of women historians de­ clined dramatically after the Second World War, it rose substantially during the 1960s. The civil rights movement of the 1960s, like the earlier women’s rights movement in the 1850s, has given women opportunities and voices previously de­ nied them. Women have become subjects of, ac­ tors in, and writers of history as part of the growth of the discipline. The Berkshire conferences of women historians, begun in the 1930s and revived in the 1970s, provide a new forum for women scholars. Although women have felt constrained to establish their own forums within the profes­ sion, they are increasingly taking leadership roles. As the scholarly debate within the history profes­ sion continues, women’s voices are now essential. Mabel E. Deutrich and Virginia C. Purdy, eds., Clio Was a Woman: Studies in the History o f American Women (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980) [Na­ tional Archives Conference, April 22-23, 1976]; Eleanor Flexner, Century o f Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Move­ ment in the United States (New York: Atheneum, 1970);

H O M O PH O BIA

Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Role of Women in Ameri­ can History,” in New Viewpoints in American History (New York: Macmillan, 1935). ■ CLA R A SU E K ID W E LL See

a l s o

Education; Women’s Studies.

% Homophobia omophobia is defined as the irrational fear and hatred of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and of homosexuality in general. The term homopho­ bia has its roots in Wainright C hurchill’s 1967 study of attitudes toward homosexuals, in which “homoerotophobia” was used to describe a per­ vasive cultural fear of erotic or sexual contact be­ tween members of the same sex. In 1971 Kenneth Smith used the term homophobia in the devel­ opment of a personality profile of individuals who had negative or fearful reactions to homosex­ uals. The term homophobia was popularized by George Weinberg in his 1972 book Society and the Healthy Homosexual, which played a signifi­ cant role in shifting the focus from studying homo­ sexuality as a deviancy to examining homophobia as a social issue. Weinberg is often credited with developing the concept of homophobia. Homophobia is a complex prejudice with three components: First, homophobia, much like other forms of oppression, has xenophobic qualities (that is, it reflects a deep-seated fear of people who are perceived to be different from the dominant culture). Second, erotophobia, or the fear of excessive sexuality, is also important in relation to homo­ phobia. Erotophobia reinforces stereotypes of gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals as hypersexual or as sexual predators. Hypersexuality is a common stereotypical representation of many marginal­ ized groups, such as people of color, ethnic mi­ norities, women, religious minorities, poor or working-class people, and sexual minorities. In addition, erotophobia contributes to a profound

H

aversion to homoerotic feelings. The Kinsey re­ port revealed that approximately half of the gen­ eral population experiences some same-sex sexual feelings or fantasies. However, cultural negativity about sexuality has led many to despise homo­ erotic sexuality despite its prevalence. Third, research on homophobia has consis­ tently revealed that an aversion to perceived viola­ tions of sex-role stereotypes underlies much of people’s hatred toward gay men, lesbians, and bi­ sexuals. Gay men are stereotypically perceived as effeminate and female sex-role typed, while les­ bians are thought to be “butch” and male sex-role typed. Conversely, anyone who acts in these cross­ gender typed ways is thought to be gay or lesbian regardless of their sexual behavior. Thus, homo­ phobia serves to reinforce the entrenched sexism of our culture by labeling any men or women who deviate from rigidly defined traditional sex roles as “queer.” Lesbian baiting, a particular manifestation of homophobia, is often used in an effort to discredit individual women or the feminist movement in general. By attempting to stigmatize indepen­ dent, assertive, and self-determined women as “lesbian,” lesbian baiting has been utilized to con­ trol women, regardless of their sexual orientation. In addition, lesbian baiting has led to divisiveness within feminist organizations as some women have tried to distance themselves from the taint of “ queerness.” The institutionalization of homophobia in social, religious, legal, and medical systems is known as heterosexism. Heterosexism is the belief in the superiority of heterosexuality and hetero­ sexual relationships. Heterosexism creates the conditions for homophobia by institutionally re­ inforcing the power and privilege of heterosexual­ ity as the norm. Together, homophobia and heterosexism often produce devastating political, social, and legal consequences for gay men, lesbians, and bisexu­ als. For instance, in all but eight states in 1995, there is no legal protection against discrimination associated with sexual orientation in housing, em-

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ployment, and public accommodations. In ad­ dition, numerous antigay initiatives have been placed on ballots in jurisdictions across the coun­ try to legalize differential and discriminatory treatment of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. Sodomy laws, used selectively to stigmatize and criminalize same-sex sexual behavior, still exist in twenty-four states. These laws are often used to justify denying lesbian, gay, and bisexual parents custody of their children. Hate crimes, harass­ ment, and violence against persons perceived to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual have been increasing. The U.S. Justice Department now identifies these groups as the most likely victims of hate crimes. ■ B E T H Z E M SK Y See

M

also

Heterosexism.

Household Workers

Paid Household Workers he occupation of domestic service has roots in both slave and feudal economies. Under feu­ dalism, the aristocracy developed elaborate divi­ sions of household labor, including coachmen, cooks, bakers, butlers, nursemaids, chamber­ maids, scullery maids, valets, gardeners, and laun­ dresses. Although they were based on specialized household tasks, the various divisions of domestic labor reproduced gender divisions in society. The traditional paternalistic relationships between masters and servants were exported from Europe to the colonies. Indentured servants, male and fe­ male, first dominated the ranks o f domestic ser­ vice in the U.S. colonies, but in the South, Black slaves eventually replaced the indenture system. Before the Civil War unpaid domestic service was a major occupation for both male and female slaves in the South. House servants were com­ monly isolated from their family and the commu­ nity of other slaves and subjected to two degrada­ tions: domination by the male head of household

T

in a form of feudalistic paternalism and the bru­ talities of chattel slavery. Racial and gendered stratification in domestic service continued long after emancipation, trans­ forming Black women from domestic slaves to low-wage servants and marking Black women as analogous to maids. Following the American Rev­ olution, native-born white women were frequently hired as “ help” or “hired girls” to work side by side with housewives. Here, as on the continent, “feminization” of domestic service occurred as women were hired to fill gaps created when men turned to other occupations during transitional phases of industrialization, while free white labor­ ers replaced indentured servants in the North. A household industrial revolution of sorts be­ gan in the mid-nineteenth century. Middle-class women professionalized homemaking activity under the ideology of the “cult of domesticity.” Acting as employers, mistresses applied princi­ ples of scientific management to the home and adopted the modern employer-employee relation­ ship, which emphasized both benevolent and en­ trepreneurial versions of supervision. Unlike the aristocracy, the middle class hired fewer workers and most domestics eventually became “maids-ofall-work,” who toiled alone in the employers’ homes. The change resulted in deskilling house­ hold labor and the allocation of the most menial and physical tasks to the worker. After the Civil War, as the first wave of massive immigration began, household service developed a reputation as a beneficial apprenticeship for young immigrants or rural women migrating to urban areas. By 1900 60 percent o f Irish-born, 62 percent of Scandinavian-born, and 43 percent of German-born women were employed as domes­ tic servants. Combining the influences of domes­ tic science and the cult of domesticity, the super­ vision of immigrant women became a form of moral entrepreneurship for employers, a reform­ ing vocation aimed at changing morals and im­ posing middle-class standards of cleanliness. Ef­ forts to induce immigrant and rural women to conform to middle-class culture, develop work

H OUSEH OLD WORKERS

The workers o f a single household in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, circa 1890, hold props that indicate their individual responsibilities.

habits similar to those demanded at factories, in­ culcate proper feminine deportment, and aspire to middle-class consumption patterns resulted in restrictions for the servants that governed even such things as their choice of clothes and leisure activities. Domestic service was held out to North­ ern or Western European immigrants as a “bridg­ ing" occupation to assist them in the adjustment to U.S. life and to learn skills for social mobility. Movement toward the professionalization of homemaking and the elevation of supervision to a vocation occurred simultaneously with the short­ age of household workers brought about by the in­ dustrial expansion of the late nineteenth century. At this time domestic science was also intro­ ducing new standards of cleanliness that replaced regular maintenance with labor-intensive “ ritual cleaning.” The magnitude of the servant shortage can be seen in the fact that in 1870, half of em­ ployed women were servants and washerwomen. By the turn of the century only a third of working women were in the servant category. During peri­

ods of labor shortage, training and certification were frequently offered as incentives and solu­ tions to the low status ascribed to the occupation. As part of the professionalization movement, and unlike previous generations of Anglo-Saxon na­ tive-born “help,” European immigrant household workers were increasingly treated separately from the employer’s family and community. The use of the livery became more common, and separate living quarters were arranged within the house. Attempts at professionalizing domestic service have seldom been successful, in part because the “ personalism” of the mistress-maid relation is seen by workers as a mark of servitude and a major drawback. Workers instead argue for the establish­ ment of formal contractual relations resembling other paid work in society. In the nineteenth century, patterns of employ­ ment in the North revolved around seasonal needs (harvest) or household crises (illness or child­ birth), but in the twentieth century labor arrange­ ments throughout the country increasingly were

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made on the basis of time rather than task. After the turn of the century, immigration from southern or eastern Europe predominated and many women moved directly into factory work. The percentage of Black women in domestic service increased in northern households, from 9 percent in 1910 to 19 percent in 1920. By 1930 Black women dominated the occupation in northern cities. A similar pattern was reproduced in the West and Southwest, with different people of color forced into structurally equivalent positions. Racial discrimination against Mexicans and Mexican Americans throughout the West and Southwest, and Asians in California and the Pacific Northwest, left the most vulnerable workers no other options. Dual wage systems and racial stratification were enforced further by im­ posing school curricula and creating vocational and training programs in home economics. Again, domestic service figured in Americanization cam­ paigns and job opportunities created by the New Deal. In 1930 45 percent of all employed Mexican women were domestics, and they dominated the occupation in Southwestern cities like E l Paso. In the Southwest, Mexican American and Mexican immigrants gained access to higher-paying and higher-status domestic jobs only when native-born white women moved on to clerical, sales, and teaching positions. Domestic service attracted, and continues to at­ tract, women with few other employment options. People of color and immigrants have dominated domestic service since the colonial period. Since the 1980s Latina immigrant women have consti­ tuted the largest category of women entering the occupation. Prior to the turn of the century, live-in situa­ tions dominated the occupation and U.S. homes were built with spatial deference separating the domestics’ working and living quarters from the employers’ family areas. The use of separate en­ trances, passageways, and rooms allowed the em­ ployee to move “ invisibly” around the house. The kitchen was usually the only room where the employee sat. Live-in working conditions were marked by long hours, extreme isolation and

loneliness, and the most severe cases of exploita­ tion (rape, withholding pay). Traditionally Sun­ day was assigned as the day off, along with one af­ ternoon during the week. Live-in situations today are increasingly common among Latina or other immigrant women who are undocumented work­ ers or are applying for residency. W hile live-in working conditions have re­ mained the same, labor shortages have resulted in a significant change in the occupation: the shift to day work. Day work changed the structure of do­ mestic service by eliminating employee depen­ dency on working for room and board, increasing autonomy and opportunities to leave jobs with op­ pressive employers, and establishing a trend to­ ward an eight-hour day. Day work for a single em­ ployer eventually gave way to the practice of workers dividing their work week among numer­ ous employers. In some cases smaller homes and apartments have even made it possible to clean more than one place a day. Nonetheless, domes­ tic service retains many undesirable aspects, not the least of which is that the occupation is seen as a low-status occupation carrying the mark of servi­ tude. Most of the work is physically demanding, pay and labor arrangements are irregular and of­ ten unpredictable, and domestic workers are al­ most universally expected to perform curious kinds of emotional labor, for example, ritual def­ erence to affirm and enhance the employer’s sense of self-worth. Domestics are often required to do a wide range of tasks outside the sphere of housecleaning, including laundry, child care, cooking, nursing, running errands, and garden­ ing. Despite the attempts to commercialize the occupation through agencies acting as intermedi­ aries, domestic service operates increasingly in the underground economy, ignoring minimumwage and social security legislation. Large num­ bers of undocumented immigrants continue to work in domestic jobs. In 1993 “ Nannygate” represented the first na­ tional scandal over household labor. Zoe Baird, a corporate lawyer with Aetna Life and Casualty Company, was nominated by President Clinton

H OUSEH OLD W ORKERS

for U.S. attorney general. She was forced to with­ draw from consideration because of the contro­ versy that emerged over the fact that she had hired an undocumented Peruvian housekeeper and for failing to pay the woman’s social security tax or unemployment insurance. Since then, federal nominees are questioned about their employment of household workers. Nannygate involved two issues: r) the hiring of an undocumented worker during a period when it was illegal for an em­ ployer to do so, and 2) the failure to pay social security and taxes. These issues remain in the po­ litical arena. In the 1994 elections candidates smeared one another with accusations of hiring undocumented immigrants. T he scandal served to expose routine practices of the middle classes who hire undocumented household workers at the lowest possible wage scale. Unfortunately, the issue is increasingly framed as an immigration is­ sue rather than as a work issue. Although social scientists a generation ago fore­ cast the disappearance of domestic service from the modern economy, the demand for household workers continues to increase in response to mid­ dle- and upper-class women working outside the home. Ironically their entry into the work force as a result of the second wave of feminism has been made possible by the exploitation of poor women of color. Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women, Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wes­ leyan University Press, 1983); David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A. (New York: Routledge, 1992). ■ MARY ROM ERO S ee

also

Work.

Unpaid Household Workers he view of child care and housework as unpaid work arose with the rise of paid work, which ac­ companied the development of a capitalist, market

T

economy. In most societies, a sexual division of la­ bor generally has assigned females to intrahouse­ hold, reproductive, familial activities, while giving males a greater role in interhousehold and politi­ cal activities. This separation of spheres has con­ tributed to the construction of separate “gen­ ders” —feminine, family-centered women, and masculine, public-oriented m en—who need one another to be complete. Hence, it helps to provide an imperative for heterosexual marriage. The distinction between unpaid and paid home and market work arose gradually over the course of U.S. history and across racial-ethnic and class groups. The Native American nations who inhab­ ited this continent before Europeans arrived lived in subsistence economies; in many of these, women’s assignment to the reproductive work did not confer an inferior social status. However, when colonists journeyed from Europe, where private property and markets were developing, to the New World, they brought with them these fledgling in­ stitutions and the associated striving for income and wealth. They viewed the accumulation of wealth as masculine and denied the married women among them (as well as the peoples they displaced or used as slaves) property rights. In spite o f this market focus among the Euro­ pean colonists, wage labor—what we view as “paid work” —was scarce. Property-owning Euro­ pean families set up family businesses or farms, using the labor of family members, indentured servants, slaves, or, occasionally, hired hands. All o f these individuals’ efforts contributed to the pro­ duction of goods and services for the market and hence to earning incom e— including, for exam­ ple, women’s work of feeding and caring for the household’s “workers.” However, no one other than the hired hands was actually paid a wage for working—the others simply received their subsis­ tence. Thus, although white, male property own­ ers had power over their wives, children, and workers, wives’ and homemakers’ work did not, then, stand out as “ unpaid.” It was with the rise of wage labor and capitalist production that women’s household work began

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to be clearly differentiated from market-oriented work, because the latter gradually moved out of the household domain into that of the capitalist firm. Those who produced commodities for sale in the market were no longer family members, or unfree laborers, but rather wage earners. By 1890 there were twice as many people working for wages or salaries as there were self-employed workers; by 1970 there were nine times as many. The movement of commodity production out of the household did not empty the home and family of their content. Rather, women’s traditional re­ productive work—childbearing, child rearing, feeding, clothing, and caring for family mem­ bers—stayed within the sphere of the family, and women as wives and mothers retained the primary responsibility for those tasks. A division between husband as wage earner or “breadwinner” and the wife as homemaker emerged as households were unevenly drawn into the capitalist economy. In this process, family life began to emerge as a distinct arena of social relationships, one assigned specifically to women, and one whose relation­ ships of sharing, nurturing, and love stood in stark contrast to the competitive self-seeking of the economy. In the nineteenth century a “cult of do­ mesticity” arose among the upper and middle classes, particularly but not exclusively among European Americans, which elaborated and glo­ rified women’s family responsibilities. The “cult” argued that women’s traditional reproductive work was a “career” equally important to men’s workplace careers. Mothering, it proposed, was not simply physical drudgery, just as easily done by a wet nurse or slave. On the contrary, it was a supremely social task that shaped the character of the child and determined his or her future success. Further, women as homemakers were viewed as possessing a special, caring morality—a necessary, humanizing complement to men’s in­ dividualistic and aggressive natures. This homemaking career, as elaborated by the cult of domesticity, was seen to be a full-time one that precluded labor-force participation. Married

women were, if at all possible, to eschew participa­ tion in gainful employment so as to dedicate them­ selves to their domestic duties. If additional in­ come was needed to make ends meet, families usually sent their children into the labor force; conversely, young women and men postponed marriage until the prospective husband earned enough to support a full-time homemaker. Thus, in 1890, only 4.5 percent of all married women were “gainfully employed,” compared with 40.5 percent of single women. Many employers ad­ hered to the cult of domesticity by establishing “marriage bars,” implicit or explicit policies that barred married women from employment (and re­ quired firing single women employees once they married). The cult also helped to justify sex-typing of jobs, in which women’s jobs were paid much less than men’s, given that men had families to support. The prevalence of domesticity among married women varied according to class: the higher the husband’s income, the more the family could af­ ford the wife’s domesticity. Further, there were sig­ nificant differences in the extent of domesticity among racial-ethnic groups; whereas only 6.5 per­ cent of married European American women were gainfully employed in 1920,18.5 percent of married Asian American women and 32.5 percent of mar­ ried African American women were so employed. The actual content of women’s domestic work also varied greatly across class. Among the middle and upper classes, proper homemaking was thought to require the aid of one or more paid do­ mestic servants (usually women, but sometimes men of color). Such privileged homemakers spent their time supervising their servants and children, arid they often also entered the public sphere to do “social homemaking” for the needy. In sharp contrast, poor and working-class wives could not afford domestic servants. For them, homemaking involved a good deal of arduous physical work, such as carting water and scrub­ bing clothing, as well as efforts to “make ends meet” by bargain shopping, scavenging, taking in boarders, or doing odd jobs in their homes.

H OUSEH OLD WORKERS

The cult of domesticity’s confinement of women to unpaid domestic work imposed high economic costs on women. The ideal marital di­ vision of labor between full-time homemaker and breadwinning husband created a clear power in­ equality between the two. Women were totally fi­ nancially dependent upon their husbands for their survival, and, indeed, their job was to serve their husbands. This specialization in domestic work proved economically disastrous when full­ time homemakers lost their husbands through death or desertion and were forced to fend for themselves and their children. The flip side of the primacy of women’s domestic careers was the view that, for women, wage earning was at most an adolescent stage that ended at the time of marriage. Thus, employed women were either adolescents (immature women) or “spinsters” (un­ married and hence failed women). This view then translated into the segregation of employed women and girls into jobs that did not pay living wages. Even though women of color exhibited a greater labor-force commitment than did white women, they were restricted as women to jobs that fit the white-defined “ cult of domesticity,” and as people of color to jobs that were lower paid and lower status than those to which white women had access. In the twentieth century there have been some major changes in the organization of women’s un­ paid household work. First, technological and product innovation have changed the face of household work for all U. S . citizens. Between 1880 and 1930 a number of new, household labor-saving goods and services appeared on the market: elec­ tricity, furnaces, running water, running hot water, plumbing, electric appliances (including toasters, irons, vacuum cleaners, washing machines), tele­ phones, refrigerators, automobiles, and more. Ris­ ing real wages for workers allowed the rapid diffu­ sion of these products among households, and the drudgery work involved in homemaking was re­ duced substantially. However, homemaking re­ mained time-consuming, as standards of cleanli­

ness rose, the availability and use of domestic ser­ vants fell, and the focus on mothering responsibil­ ities intensified; as a result, homemaking responsi­ bilities expanded to fill the time available. A second and crucial influence on married women’s unpaid work has been their growing en­ trance into the labor force. Ironically, much of the impetus behind this movement out of the domes­ tic sphere seems to have come from the cult of do­ mesticity itself. First, numbers of middle- and up­ per-class women pursued higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the goal of becoming better mothers; how­ ever, achieving this goal backfired as, once edu­ cated, growing numbers of women decided to utilize their skills in labor-force careers and, increasingly, tried to combine their careers with marriage. Second, as the homemaker’s job of fill­ ing her family’s needs became increasingly one of purchasing and using store-bought goods, enter­ ing the labor force became a more common and accepted way of doing women’s work of filling family needs. These trends combined with the rapid growth of women’s jobs, particularly office work, to produce a dramatic increase in married women’s labor-force participation rates from 5.6 percent in 1900, to 23 percent in 1950, to 59.2 per­ cent in 1992. While this increase was most pro­ nounced among European American women, it was significant for all racial-ethnic groups. The growing labor-force participation rates of women o f all classes, including the pressuring of privileged and educated women for entrance into the top, male-dominated jobs, have changed the face of women’s unpaid work. Employed married women, especially those who are mothers, are now working a “double day” of paid and unpaid work. While growing numbers of women in dual­ career couples have begun to pressure their hus­ bands to take on a greater share of the unpaid do­ mestic work, studies still show that employed women, on average, do two to three times more unpaid work than do their husbands. Families have responded to women’s double day by in-

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creasing the use of household labor-saving goods and services, including child care, restaurant or prepared meals, and elderly care. Now that most women, including the most class-privileged, are participating in the paid labor force, and some in high-powered, prestigious jobs, full-time homemakers find themselves and their work increasingly devalued. Rather than rep­ resenting the ideal career for a woman, full-time homemaking is viewed more as simply work, and unpaid work at that. The full-time homemaker is now “ just a housewife.” Thus, the mothering and caretaking activities that are crucial to social sur­ vival have not only been squeezed into less time but have also been devalued. Teresa Amott and Julie Matthaei, Race, Gender & Work: A Multicultural Economic History o f Women in the United States (Boston: South End, 1991); Julie Matthaei, An Eco­ nomic History o f Women in America: Women’s Work, the Sexual Division of Labor, and the Development o f Capi­ talism (New York: Schocken Books, 1982); U.S. Depart­ ment of Commerce, Bureau of tire Census, Statistical Ab­ stract of the United States, 1993. • J U L I E M ATTH AEI S e e a l s o Cult of Domesticity; Domestic Science; Double-Day.

M

House of Representatives S e e Congress.

s

Housing

he term housing has two connotations in the United States. Housing can mean all the dwellings—both publicly and privately initi­ ated—which, taken together, provide shelter for people of all classes. More often housing refers to all dwellings built by state, federal, and charitable

T

agencies to house people who cannot afford mar­ ket-rate shelter. Women are generally assigned the responsibilities of nurturing, feeding, and cloth­ ing their children, and need a safe and healthy en­ vironment; therefore housing is a primary con­ cern for women. The normal market-rate private house may have been paid for by men historically but has long been the province of women. In the nine­ teenth century, bourgeois women undertook to domesticate their houses with interior decoration and by acquiring utilities to keep their families comfortable. Middle-class houses in the Victorian era contained numerous rooms on several floors; housekeeping was strenuous work for women both as servants and as mistresses of households. Although women were not often granted mort­ gages to purchase such houses independently from men until the 1970s, they maintained the value of their husbands’ houses through keeping the home in good repair. When banks finally changed mortgage policies to include women, their redlining practices excluded African Ameri­ cans. In the late nineteenth century, specialized housing appeared for women. In New York, de­ partment-store magnate A. T. Stewart built the Home for Working Women, where his store em­ ployees could rent a private room, dine in a com­ munal dining room, and sign up to use a limited number of private parlors to entertain guests. The YW C A followed this model in the early twentieth century, offering safe and respectable rooms for white women to rent. Families of the working class, often immigrants and people of color, found shelter in the tene­ ments of nineteenth-century cities. “Tenements” implied all that was bad in housing: cramped rooms, no corridors, little ventilation or sunlight, no running water, and no bathtubs or indoor toilets. Tenement districts gained a deserved repu­ tation for breeding diseases. By the turn of the century, new forms of housing remedied some of these problems. Testimony from tenement

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dwellers along with reforms proposed by design­ ers helped to formulate legislation in U.S. cities that guaranteed minimum room sizes, private toi­ lets and water supply, external windows in each room, and separate hallways. Tenements with siz­ able courtyards and modern kitchens, developed first by charitable organizations and later by trade unions, were available at affordable rents for the working class. Middle-class women’s abilities to keep house in the twentieth century were improved by living in smaller, compact homes. Usually one-floor designs, the houses reduced distances between rooms and cut down on stair climbing. Electricity finally enabled women to use small household machines, such as vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and washers, to mechanize the house. Public housing built by government agencies occasionally in the early twentieth century and widely after World War II has also been of partic­ ular concern to women. Housing activists Edith Elmer Wood and Catherine Bauer Wurster pro­ moted public involvement in housing reforms in the 1920s and 1930s. Today women are often heads of households, but many are unable to meet market-rate rents or mortgage payments due to poverty, so they turn to public housing. Because of racism, the poor are disproportionately people of color. High-rise towers favored by 1960s plan­ ners become barriers to women’s family caretak­ ing. Mothers, separated in the upper-floor apart­ ments from their children playing below, cannot oversee their activities or get to know their neigh­ bors, which impedes the formation of communi­ ties. However, women in low-rise housing form support networks because residents close to the ground can communicate easily, help one an­ other, and keep an eye on community space. Suburban single-family housing has been criti­ cized by Susan Saegert, Marsha Ritzdorf, and oth­ ers because of the way it segregates women. Sub­ urban spatial structures can isolate women and children who are located far from public trans­ portation, day-care centers, and workplaces.

Housing for groups with special needs arose in the late twentieth century, including group homes created for women addicted to drugs, young single mothers, the elderly, or women bat­ tling mental illness. The fact that a multiple dwelling collects many persons under one roof al­ lows group services to develop, such as a resident social worker or a day-care center—an advantage unavailable to people in single-family houses. While neighbors often resist such special housing in the planning stages, once in place these hous­ ing complexes have been quite successful. Inadequate housing has often placed con­ straints on women’s abilities to shelter and nur­ ture their families, but women have also been active in articulating and exposing problems. Women’s needs have helped to shape the interior spaces, the locations, and the special services available in a variety of current housing types. Karen Franck and Sherry Ahrentzen, eds., New House­ holds, New Housing (New York: Van Nostrand-Reinhold, 1989); Joan Forrester Sprague, More Than Housing: Lifeboats for Women and Children (Boston: Butterworth Architecture, 1991). ■ E L IZ A B E T H C. C R O M L E Y See

also

Architecture; Suburbanization; Urbaniza­

tion.

s Hull House S e e Settlement House Movement.

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Humor

an women be great comedians? Many believe they can’t. A group of male comics recently watched in stony silence as their aspiring female counterparts tried, first cheerfully, then tearfully, to get them to laugh. “ Bitches ain’t funny,” they sneered.

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HUMOR

Funny women performers, with endlessly in­ ventive schtick, have romped through all types of media, from standup and sketch comics to comic actresses and singers, including vaude­ ville’s Fanny Brice; radio’s Gracie Allen; televi­ sion’s Lucille Ball, Imogene Coca, and Lily Tom­ lin; cinema’s Mabel Normand and Bette Midler; and nightclubs’ Joan Rivers and Marsha Warheld. “Bimbos” often have been played with grace, wit, and intelligence. One recalls Marilyn M on­ roe’s airhead bombshell in Some Like It Hot and The Seven Year Itch, or Goldie Hawn’s endearing character in Cactus Flower. Why then are women considered not funny? Is it because, until recently, comic actresses usually have played culturally stereotyped bubbleheads? Or is it because women comics so frequently have played the straight “man” to the presumably funnier male and thus aren’t recognized for their humor? Professional comedy imitates life. Women set up the comedy and keep it going. M en get the payoffs. Little girls are known to giggle incessantly among themselves. When girls are socialized into becoming “little women,” their laughter becomes more covert, more pointed. Erma Bombeck’s accommodationist sniping, M olly Ivins’s cheerful obscenity—their followers quip, laugh, and smile both to avert male rage and to survive what fre­ quently are unbearable situations. The belief that bitches ain’t funny is not en­ tirely explained by women being cast in ditsy or subordinate roles. Many great female comics have overwhelmed their male partners. In She Done Him Wrong, Mae West upended the funny man/ straight woman routine. “C om e up and see me sometime,” she insinuates at Cary Grant. “Wednesday night is amateur night.” “ I can’t, Mae, it’s Lent,” says Cary. M ae gives him a cool, diagnostic glance. Pause. “Well, when you get it back, come up and see me.” Society’s expanded notions of women’s work, endless permutations of family structures, open­

ness about sexual preference, the mainstreaming of profanity, and, most important, women’s resis­ tance to being typecast have produced a diversity of female comics. Breaking the iron lock (with a few exceptions) of straight nice gorgeous white bimbo, women now can be fat (Carrie Snow), plain (Roseanne), Black (Whoopi Goldberg, Thea Vidale, and Simply Marvelous), nerdy (Margaret Smith), or lesbian (Kate Clinton, Lea DeLaria, and Marga Gomez). Have these developments smashed the idea that women are humorless? No and yes. No, because patriarchal beliefs in the ubiquitous inferiority of women border on the religious and generally do not vanish with evidence. Each counterexample is treated as an exception. According to the sex­ ist world-view, M ae West was a female imper­ sonator. One also could argue yes, because the same forces that have led to so many changes in the contemporary world may finally make it possible to acknowledge the comic genius of women. What has made this possible is—here’s the “ F ” word—feminism. One cannot account for the de­ mographic and cultural changes mentioned above without recognizing the sea change brought about by thirty years of second-wave fem­ inism. Feminism opened up the workplace and challenged the patriarchal family. It ridiculed the notion that women should be sweet, submissive, and decorous. Feminism changed society’s con­ sciousness about who women are and what they can do and wiped clear the lenses through which women have been viewed. If feminism survives, women will be known as great comics. If feminism fails, the standing pa­ triarchal order will again deny female humor, courage, brilliance, and creativity. With femi­ nism, women are great comics. Without femi­ nism, bitches ain’t funny. ■ NAOMI W E IS S T E IN

I L L E G I T I M A C Y ” /S I N G L E P R E G N A N C Y

§ “Illegitimacy” /Single Pregnancy n the United States, the term “ illegitimacy” his­ torically has referred to children born to un­ married females; single pregnancy refers to un­ married, pregnant girls and women. T he social, cultural, and political significance of these terms has varied in this country according to the race (and often the class) of the women and children involved. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, il­ legitimacy rates among white colonists varied over time and among colonies but generally remained low, reflecting the strength of community and reli­ gious control over sexual and marital norms. D e­ spite civil and religious punishment of fornicators, evidence from New England colonies at least shows that females who became pregnant outside mar­ riage, and their children, stayed within their fami­ lies of origin, and the women eventually married. In the early nineteenth century, illegitimacy rates remained low as emergent norms of Victo­ rian womanhood were strictly enforced. In these same decades, laws in slave-holding states pro­ scribed marriage for African Americans, and slave owners regularly mandated and coerced female slaves to procreate in order to increase owners’ in­ vestments. Slave owners frequently accomplished this end by impregnating their female slaves by rape. According to civil and church law, then, all slave children were “ illegitimate,” yet they were recognized and valued within their own commu­ nities. After the Civil War, white rates of illegiti­ macy began to rise partly due to urbanization and industrialization, both of which often caused women to live outside of the family and commu­ nity sphere. Among the white poor and working class the incidence of illegitimacy was similar to African American rates. In r88o, between 66 and 75 percent of Black children lived with both a mother and a father. Despite this similarity and the fact that most Black women eventually married, African Ameri­

I

can unmarried motherhood became a symbol of Black degeneracy to white politicians and so­ cial commentators. Moreover, contrary to white myths, definitive data indicate that northern mi­ gration between 1880 and 1920 did not shatter the Black family; four out of five African American children in northern urban communities lived in households where the father was present. In the early decades of the twentieth century, single pregnancy gradually became a public pol­ icy obsession. As the family, not the community, became the locus of social and sexual control, the newly atomized family was regularly accused of policing its daughters poorly. Also in these decades, public policy experts and “ reformers” used Euro-American, Victorian definitions of “family” in support of their efforts to undermine Native American tribal integrity. Thus, the chil­ dren of unmarried mothers, for example, were tar­ geted for removal to schools off the reservations, where they could be “Americanized.” In sum, sin­ gle pregnancy became a proxy for anxiety about urbanization, immigration, and industrialization. Single pregnancy and illegitimacy were cast as en­ vironmental diseases. Beginning in the late r930s, Black and white single pregnancy were treated as two distinct phe­ nomena. As the children of some African Amer­ ican women became eligible for Aid to De­ pendent Children grants, the white tax-paying public’s attitude toward these expenditures be­ came increasingly hostile. In succeeding decades, with the emergence of the civil rights movement, politicians and others in every region mounted campaigns of resistance against unmarried Black childbearing women and their children. The at­ tacks cited “suitable hom e” laws, which estab­ lished that unmarried women could not, by defi­ nition, provide such an environment for their children. In those same years, white, unmarried preg­ nancy was redefined as proof of the mother’s neu­ rosis. The psychological explanation moved the “cause” from the mother’s body to her mind and

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claimed that the neurosis could be cured. This in­ novative perspective allowed unmarried pregnant women to resume “ normal” lives after the “cure,” which mandated relinquishment of the child. By midcentury, it was more important for a white woman to appear sexually pure, whatever her real history, than to be so. The white illegitimate baby was redefined as well, cleared of the biologically based taint associated with the bastard child, and thus rendered a valuable commodity on the emer­ gent adoption market. The political perception of illegitimacy re­ mained racialized for the remainder of the twen­ tieth century, even though substantial data exist demonstrating that class is more closely associated than race in the case of out-of-wedlock births. The endurance of race-based political responses to sin­ gle pregnancy shows that politicians and others in the United States have been using women’s bod­ ies and their reproductive capacity for the better part of the century to promote political agendas hostile to female autonomy and racial equality. By the end of the century less than 3 percent of white unwed mothers were giving up their babies for adoption, a dramatic decrease from midcen­ tury. The change revealed that white unwed mothers were determined to define for themselves who was a legitimate mother and what was a legit­ imate mother-child dyad. Unmarried pregnant women of color, who had usually kept their chil­ dren, continued to be the target of politicians ex­ plicitly engaged since 1980 in developing policy to erode gains in the areas of civil rights, welfare, taxes, education, contraception, abortion, health care, job training, and housing. Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Free­ dom, 1750-1925 (New York: Vintage, 1976); Regina Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization o f Social Work, 1890-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (New York: Routledge, 1992). • R IC K IE S O L IN G E R S e e ALSO Single Motherhood.

0

Images of Women

wo images of women have been dominant throughout U.S. history. The first is one of in­ nocence and spirituality, in line with the “Virgin Mary” or madonna figure of Christian belief. The second is one o f sexuality and evil, in line with the “ Eve” figure of Judeo-Christian belief or the Pan­ dora of classical mythology. (In the Garden of Eden story, Eve took the apple from the serpent and persuaded Adam to eat it. In the Pandora tale, Pandora opened the jar that unleashed evil upon the world.) A third image is one of women as de­ voted wives and housekeepers, in keeping with the medieval “patient Griselda,” who endured an abusive husband without complaint, or the more active “ Betsy Ross” of the American Revolution, who demonstrated loyalty to home and country by sewing the nation’s flag. The virgin/whore dichotomy is an example of the tendency of Euro-American thought toward dualistic categorization (good/evil, beauty/ugliness, man/woman, black/white). The spirituality/sexuality dualism also reflects Western hierar­ chies of class, race, and gender, which have been connected with the venerable “double standard” of sexual behavior. (Under the “double standard,” men are allowed a sexual freedom denied “proper” women.) This gender differentiation has often linked female purity to male honor as the primary guarantee of patrimony, while until the late nine­ teenth century, women were catalogued as the property of fathers and husbands. Thus the “fallen woman” historically was beyond respectability, women were held responsible for rapes perpe­ trated on them, and prostitution was considered necessary to service male sexual needs. Nineteenth-century Victorianism reversed pre­ vailing belief to designate women as asexual. Its corresponding image of heightened spirituality for mainstream women undergirded an ethic o f infe­ riority, dependency, and femininity. These quali­ ties were reflected in the period’s cult of thinness for women and its confining dress, which included

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IM A G ES O F W O M EN

long skirts, tightly bound waists, and a bell-shaped body outline. But stigmatizing sexuality only pro­ voked its return sub rosa. Thus prostitution flour­ ished, while burlesque and music-hall actresses with large hips and bosoms became symbols of ideal beauty. The preference among immigrant and upwardly mobile groups for plumpness in women as an indication of prosperity combined with the campaign of doctors against extreme thin­ ness and tight-lacing corsets to make weight fash­ ionable among women by the mid-nineteenth century. For a time, fat was considered beautiful. By 1920 women’s increasing participation in ed­ ucation, the professions, and sports undermined Victorianism, creating both new freedoms and restrictions. Sexuality became more open and clothing more comfortable; the virgin/whore dichotomy blurred somewhat. Concurrently, ad­ vertising and the consumer culture replaced V ic­ torianism as a primary means of control. The ad­ vertising industry found avenues for female ob­ jectification through images in magazines, the movies, and other media. It created public de­ mand through arousing both sexual desires for products and personal insecurities about such matters as status and appearance. Thus thinness came back in vogue, and women took up wearing cosmetics, previously associated with prostitution. Social class played a role in defining the image of beauty for women in the 1920s, especially with the vogue for tanned skin. For centuries darkened skin had been negatively associated with laborers and peasants working out of doors. In the eigh­ teenth century fashionable European women painted their skin white, while in the nineteenth century they wore bonnets and carried parasols to avoid the sun. The pallor representative of those who worked in mines, factories, and office build­ ings undermined the association between dark­ ened skin and low social rank. Widely publicized accounts of well-to-do people tanning themselves on beaches delivered the final blow. Yet some his­ torians contend that the trend of tanning resulted from the popularity of Black entertainer Josephine Baker and the general fascination with Blacks en­

gendered by the popularity of Harlem nightclubs and jazz joints during the 1920s. Despite the tanning vogue, “black” and “white” designations of skin color were sharply dichot­ omized. This continues to be the case even though the sexual exploitation of Black women in the South produced a large mulatto population, as did that o f Spaniards with Indians as a result of the con­ quest of Latin America. In Hawaii, where whites are a minority, distinctions based on skin color have been reduced. In Puerto Rico, with a large mixed population, categories of browns and Indi­ ans also exist. In terms of image, the dominant culture has of­ ten sexualized the “ other,” seeing a perverse exoti­ cism in persons o f differing classes, nationalities, and races. In addition, the stringent work ethic of middle-class capitalism, with its implicit disap­ proval of pleasure, contributed to redefining those outside its confines as possessed by an appeal­ ing—or appalling—freedom in lifestyle. This sex­ ual stereotyping has been applied to ethnic and racial minorities primarily as a means of denigra­ tion and control. Thus Black women were cata­ logued as Sapphires, as slavewomen consumed by lust, even after the Civil War brought emancipa­ tion. Asian women have been viewed in terms of “Tokyo Rose,” the shadowy figure who broadcast undermining sexual innuendos to U.S. troops during the Second World War. For Latin Ameri­ can and Mexican women, the figure of the danc­ ing “ C arm en” flinging her body as the prostitute/bar girl with hot “Latin” blood was the degraded sexualized image. The image for Native American women was the “squaw,” a woman so driven by her sexuality that she freely cohabited with white men. The obverse of these sexualized images has not been one of spirituality: the virgin/whore dichot­ omy breaks down when applied to women of color. The absence of the claim to spirituality has caused problems for women attempting to assert respectability in a middle-class world where mo­ rality matters. Rather, the spiritual side of the di­ vide has been replaced by an image of submis-

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sion. For Black women, beside Sapphire stands the “ mammy” of Southern slavery and the Aunt Jemima figure of the modern age. These rotund, simple, and motherly images have greater loyalty to the white families they serve than to their own race. Recent historians contend that the slave mammy was a fiction invented by the white South to justify slavery. Aunt Jemima was an advertiser’s creation to sell a pancake mix. All historical stud­ ies of domestic servants, Southern or Northern, conclude that they were grossly exploited. Among women of color, the image of Native American women has upon occasion involved spirituality, in an extension of the eighteenth-cen­ tury “ noble savage” typology. This image emerged when Northern Europeans first encountered the North American continent and visualized its In­ dian inhabitants as exemplars of the purity of the natural man, untouched by the corruptions of civ­ ilization. This image was perpetuated by the story of Pocahontas, the noble Native American woman who supposedly rescued John Smith from death in colonial Virginia. Correspondingly, Native Amer­ ican tribal groups hold to a more spiritualized concept of beauty in women, in line with their con­ nection to the natural world. Mexican and Latin American women, predom­ inantly Catholic, had their own virgin/whore di­ chotomy in the Virgin of Guadalupe, the mother protector and symbol of female virtue, and La Malinche, the Aztec noblewoman who was given to Cortes as a slave and who became his lover. Al­ though La Malinche has traditionally been deni­ grated as the mother-whore who created a mixed Spanish race, Latina and Mexican feminist revi­ sionists are redefining her as a woman who sur­ vived through using her strength and cunning. Throughout U.S. history, the idealized main­ stream images of women have often been young, representing the stage of life associated with pu­ rity, innocence, and sexuality. In the twentieth century, the young woman has been a symbol used by advertisers to promote cosmetic products that have no intrinsic value aside from adornment

and to create consumer identifications with brand names of otherwise indistinguishable products. Correspondingly, aging women have been de­ monized as witches and menopausal hags, trivial­ ized as grandmothers baking cookies and crochet­ ing, and stylized as laughable figures clutching to lost youth. By the early twentieth century, how­ ever, such overriding images of aging women were contested because women were living longer and were healthier than men. Advances in life ex­ pectancy, in addition to women’s movement into public and reform activity, contributed to what was widely viewed by the second decade of the twenti­ eth century as a “ renaissance” of aging women. Public individuals such as Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Margaret Mead, whose vigor and achievements in later life were praised and publi­ cized, also helped to undermine the negative ste­ reotype. Still, the wisdom of aging women, prized in tra­ ditional cultures, has historically been dismissed as “ old wives’ tales.” It is still not widely known that women and men in both Asian and Native American cultures will add years to their life span when asked their age, so prized is the wisdom and strength of age in these cultures. Images of women also reflect homophobia. Un­ til the late nineteenth century, no category o f gen­ der identification named “ lesbian” existed, since before then, sex was considered impossible withouta phallic component. Late-nineteenth-century sexologists refuted this view but defined lesbians as men in women’s bodies. This contributed to the common stereotyping of lesbians as “dykes,” creatures with no claim to femininity or spiritual­ ity. Still, lesbians themselves often took on the identity of a masculinized “butch” or a feminized “femme” —whether to mimic or to satirize domi­ nant cultural attitudes. More recent generations of lesbians, living in a less repressive climate, have tended toward less stylized behaviors. The radical movements of the 1960s, explicitly countercultural in dress and behavior, contested many stereotypes of women. In response, recycled

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images of women that drew from old categor­ izations resurfaced. The emaciated, childlike “Twiggy” was the 1960s supermodel, and her ap­ pearance created a fad of extreme thinness that has lasted to the present. It has brought in its wake an epidemic o f anorexia nervosa and bu­ limia, as young women strive to be ever thinner. Moreover, as much as women may exercise to achieve strong bodies, in line with feminist ideals of appearance, they also reshape those bodies sur­ gically to achieve large bosoms and thin waists. In the process they resort to such medical procedures as breast implants and liposuction (the removal of fatty deposits by a vacuum suction surgical method). What has this meant for physically challenged women, a group historically shunned by main­ stream culture as outside normal womanhood? Vigorous lobbying on their part has brought laws according them equal access to public space. Through athletic contests and some sympathetic television portrayals, they have gained public recognition. But these successes have not trans­ lated into public acceptance as personal and sex­ ual equals. Among Western binary categorizations of women, a primary one has been between beauty (associated with youth, innocence, and perfec­ tion) and ugliness (associated with what is dif­ ferent and “ imperfect” ). The recent trend toward reshaping bodies according to an image of “perfection” not only reinforces the “beauty/ugliness” duality but also poses a special threat to physically challenged women and to all women who choose to retain their natural appearance. The old dichotomy between women as madon­ nas or whores may have broken down, only to be replaced by a new one directly based on physical appearance. This new dualism is furthered not only by advertisers but also by doctors seeking profits in the consumer-oriented culture of the United States in the late 1990s. Generational con­ flict has also surfaced, as young women define themselves as “postfeminist” and exert the right to

define their own appearance, even if the media both manipulate and control it. What do we make of a youth icon such as the singer-actress Madonna? On the one hand, by flaunting her sexuality in the context o f lesbian and interracial images, she seems to defy cen­ turies of sexist stereotyping and to validate trends affirming positive images of all women. On the other hand, defining freedom as primarily sexual hardly addresses issues of race, class, and eco­ nomic oppression for women that are still en­ demic in the United States today. ■ LO IS W. B ANNER

See

%

a l s o

Stereotypes.

Immigration

ther than Native American Indians, Mexi­ cans, and Hawaiians, whose land was incor­ porated into the United States as the result of U.S. military expansion or annexation, and Blacks who were brought forcibly to serve as slaves, the entire population of the United States consists of immi­ grants or their descendants. Since Jamestown in 1607, U.S. history has been one of relations be­ tween established peoples and newcomers. Atti­ tudes toward immigrants have varied from enthu­ siastic welcoming to indifferent tolerance to strong opposition and exclusion, on the basis of race or national origin, class, and gender of both immigrants and the established peoples. Europeans dominated the first one hundred years of immigration. Escaping from economic deprivation as well as religious and political per­ secution, white men and women came as colo­ nizers and free workers. Africans were brought by slave traders and eventually were forced to care for their masters’ land and children. Latinos and Asians first came to labor in the mines, fields, and railway construction projects and later to work in occupations that ranged from unskilled to profes-

O

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IM M IGRA TIO N

sional and technical. The Chinese experienced an erratic pattern of growth and decline because of exclusionary and severely restrictive immigra­ tion policies. Others, including refugees such as the Vietnamese and Hmongs, are recent mi­ grants, with no history of immigration to the United States. These groups have been sorted into a racial ethnic hierarchy that has only recently be­ gun to show signs of crumbling. The British government maintained an Anglo­ centric immigration policy for its colony. In the nineteenth century the newly independent United States generally favored immigrants from Europe, especially Western Europe. Before 1881 U.S. immigration policies were left up to individ­ ual states. The new federal government expressed faith that out of diversity would emerge a national unity and identity but assumed such diversity would be confined to “free white persons.” Although the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred the entry of Chinese laborers, is com­ monly regarded as the first major shift in immigra­ tion policy from decentralization to centralization and from unrestrictive to restrictive, it was actually Chinese women who were the firsttarget of federal discriminatory legislation. The Page Law of 1875 singled out potential Chinese women immigrants and discouraged their coming. Policies discrimi­ nating against Chinese women from the 1870s to the early 1940s postponed the emergence of a na­ tive-born Chinese American generation. Even though Chinese, and later other Asians, were declared “ ineligible for citizenship” and their laboring class was refused entry, the influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans regarded as “ in­ capable of becoming Americans” by Anglo-Amer­ icans was the impetus for the Immigration Acts of 1917,19 21, and 1924. These policies rank ordered eligible immigrants, favoring national groups thought to be most assimilable. The 1917 literacy test was especially unfavorable to both working peasants and women, who were educationally dis­ advantaged. It was not until 1965 that numerical quotas based on national origin were removed. Subse­

quently, a preference and a point system were adopted that emphasized personal characteristics of potential immigrants, including, among others, family ties and specific occupational skills. The former resulted in a change of the sex ratio of im­ migrants in favor o f women, while the latter gave employers an opportunity to bring relatively cheap immigrant women labor to fill specific la­ bor-market needs. U.S. participation in World War II and the cold war led to many special acts and provisions that brought refugees from many countries. However, not all refugees were welcome. Those displaced by communist revolutions fared best. The differ­ ential treatment of refugees from Haiti and Cuba is perhaps the most glaring example of discrimi­ nation. The War Brides Act of 1945 facilitated ex­ clusively the immigration of women. Males outnumbered females in legal immigra­ tion before 1930. Between 1930 and the 1980s, the number o f females arriving each year exceeded that of males, in some years reaching 60 percent of the total. The proportion offemale immigrants de­ clined somewhat in the early 1980s but has since remained about half of all immigrants, except in 1990 and 1991, when the percentage dropped to 47 and then to a low of 34, respectively. By 1992 immi­ grants of both sexes were about equal in propor­ tion. Women dominated most immigration from Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and nearly all countries in the Western Hemi­ sphere. Although the specific reasons for this varia­ tion may differ, in general, the overall increase of female immigration since the 1930s has been at­ tributed to four major factors. First, U.S. males have been far more likely than females to marry abroad. With more people, mostly men, traveling and working in foreign countries, their wives gained the right to entry un­ der family reunification provisions. In addition, the resurgence of “picture brides” and its com­ modified equivalent, “mail-order brides,” has con­ tributed to the increase of women immigrants. Second, U.S. military involvement abroad clearly contributed to the increase in female im-

IM M IG R A TIO N

Immigrants in a naturalization class, 1924.

migrants. Countless young servicemen assigned to Europe and Asia married foreign brides. The War Brides Act of 1945 and the family reunifica­ tion policy brought them to the United States. Third, the adoption of family reunification as a principle in immigration policy also corrected the predominance of males in earlier immigration streams. Women now were able to join their hus­ bands who had migrated years ago. This policy re­ sulted in more female immigration for several rea­ sons: the relative longevity of women compared with men; the fact that widows were more inclined than widowers to join their children andgrandchildren; and the fact that female babies were more available and preferred as adoptees by U. S . parents. Finally, the almost universal increase in wom­ en’s education and relaxation of patriarchal con­ trol, combined with the changing human re­ source needs of the United States and increasing global inequality, made it possible and often de­ sirable for women to immigrate independent of men. The influxes of foreign female nurses, med­ ical technicians, and domestics are examples. Among the immigrants were also women, includ­ ing lesbians, who sought individual freedom from family and community control. The tremendous disparity in the sex ratio dur­ ing the early years of immigrant settlement has led

to its characterization as a “bachelor society,” and among the few women who came regardless of national origin, many worked as prostitutes to serve immigrant men. Although many immigrants came to the United States to escape economic, political, and religious oppression at home, women also came to escape from oppression unique to them, such as sexual harassment and other discriminatory treatment. Euro-American women, despite great hardships, had a smoother transition than did women of color. The latter suffered not only from U.S. dis­ criminatory treatment but their governments of origin also participated in discrimination against them. For example, the Japanese government pro­ hibited male Japanese immigrant laborers in the United States from sending for their wives before 1915 if they could not prove their ability to support a family. The prolonged shortage of women among cer­ tain non-European immigrant groups as a result of discriminatory practices postponed family for­ mation and the emergence of a native-born gen­ eration. So too did antimiscegenation laws in many states, which prohibited interracial mar­ riages, as well as the policy depriving U.S.-born women of their citizenship when they married Asians who were “ ineligible for citizenship.”

275

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IN D E N T U R E D SE R V IT U D E

Most immigrant women became wives and mothers. Burdened with housework, pregnancy, childbirth, and child-care responsibilities in an alien environment, they formed networks to share their work with other women and often were the first to establish interethnic social ties. They had a stabilizing effect on the family, played an impor­ tant consolidating role, and provided an anchor for the group. Married immigrant women often were re­ quired to produce income to make ends meet. Unequal access to education between immigrant men and women and gender discrimination in employment limited the channels o f mobility for women immigrants in general, but the fact that few women of color were found in higher status and better-paid “feminine” occupations such as teaching underlined the effect of race. Educated immigrant women of color, unable to obtain suit­ able work outside, carved out a niche in their own ethnic communities, often as employees in white businesses. Two exceptions worth noting are the deliberate recruitment of immigrant women to fill specific temporary shortages (such as nursing in the 1970s), and the availability of jobs in regions where there is no visible concentration of a par­ ticular ethnic group. Most immigrant women, however, have always been unskilled or semiskilled workers found in the more labor-intensive and backward sectors of industries or domestic services. Faced with lan­ guage barriers, racism, nativism, class prejudice, and sexism, these immigrant women are similar to their male counterparts and are often trapped in low-wage, undesirable jobs. Some research studies have focused on the pain and hardship suffered by immigrant women, but recent ethnic and feminist movements since the 1960s have produced new scholarship that em­ phasizes their resourcefulness, adaptability, and activism. Immigrant women’s participation in so­ cial movements and labor strikes only recently has become known. The names of Em m a Goldman, Mother Jones, and Amy Jacques Garvey, among others, are now familiar.

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gendered Transitions: Mex­ ican Experiences of Immigration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Karen Hossfeld, Small, Foreign, and Female: Immigrant Women Workers in Silicon Valley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Maxine Schwartz Seller, ed., Immigrant Women 2d ed. (Philadel­ phia: Temple University Press, 1995). ■ LU C IE CHENG S e e a l s o Chinese Exclusion Act; Citizenship and Nationality; Indentured Servitude; Latina/Chicana Migration; National Origins Act; Nativism.

§ Incest S e e Violence Against Women.

M

Indentured Servitude

ndentured servitude was a form of bound labor common in British North America. Although all of the British colonies, including those in the Caribbean, employed indentured servants at one time or another, these laborers were particularly numerous in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland during the seventeenth century and the middle colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York during the eighteenth. In exchange for paid passage to the colonies, a ser­ vant would bind him or herself to an indenture, or labor contract, of four to seven years. Some labor­ ers negotiated directly with potential masters or their agents, but many seeking transport to the colonies negotiated with a ship’s captain who would, upon arrival, sell the contracts. Servants were recruited from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. M ale servants outnumbered females by approx­ imately three to one. Most men worked as agri­ cultural laborers and women as household ser­ vants. Freed servants hoped for quick upward mobility. M en became wage laborers, tenants,

I

IN D U STRIA L H O M EW O RK

could be bought, sold, and traded without the consent of servants. Some historians see this com­ modification of labor as an early step toward the institution o f chattel slavery. ■ M ARILYN J. W EST E R K A M P S ee

%

also

Colonial Period.

Indian Women S e e Native American Women.

E L I Z A B E T H

Li A IN IN 1 IN U ,

Drawn from die Life, as (he flood at the Bar to receive her Sentence, in the Scfiion’s-Houfe, in the OM-Baiiey.

U

ndustrial homework, or waged labor performed at home, emerged at the time of industrializa­ tion in the late eighteenth century and came to characterize the garment industry and other un­ dercapitalized, seasonal trades well into the twen­ tieth century. Under the homework system, man­ ufacturers and contractors paid by the number of pieces finished and saved on overhead and mate­ rials by requiring the maker to supply her own tools and workroom. Without permanent work­ ers, employers gained greater flexibility. They de­ pended upon the sexual division of labor within the household and between the household and the larger community to obtain cheap labor. Homeworkers were married women with small children, whose husbands earned inadequate wages and whose cultural traditions or family re­ sponsibilities kept them homebound. Such moth­ ers contributed a fourth of the family income, while squeezing household labor and child care into days—and nights—dominated by piecework. The elderly, disabled, children, and older daugh­ ters in rural regions, without other employment, also became homeworkers. Industrial homework grew among the people 1iving in urban tenements during the massive emigra­ tion from eastern and southern Europe in the late

I

Convicted o f perjury, Elizabeth C anning re­ ceives her sentence o f indentured servitude. She embarked for Philadelphia on the Myrtilda on August 7,1754.

and sometimes landowners. Women looked to­ ward marriage, and until the eighteenth century, the poorest o f female servants could marry well. Although British laborers had known servitude in England, the colonial system was particularly exploitive. M any servants experienced excessive brutality and found little protection under the law. Female servants were particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation, and a female servant who became pregnant was required to compensate her master for work time lost. Labor contracts were no longer personal agreements but commodities that

Industrial Homework

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IN D U ST R IA L R EV O LU TIO N

nineteenth century. The location ofthe labor, its in­ termittent quality, and often illegal status ham­ pered adequate remuneration. In 1910 at least 250,000 New York C ity homeworkers werelicensed to manufacture one hundred items. Seventy per­ cent of home finishers in major cities earned $3.49 or less a week, whereas over 75 percent o f compa­ rable shop workers earned more. Piece rates re­ mained arbitrary, with contractors assigning the same kind o f work at varying rates. In 1925 homeworkapparently increased in the Northeast, spread­ ing to small towns and suburbs. It also existed in Ap­ palachia, Puerto Rico, and southern mill towns. Fashion and mechanization changed which items were produced; slack times eliminated homework because growth depended on the overall health of the garment trades. But the economic collapse of 1929 intensified the exploitation of homeworkers. The median hourly wage of Chicago homework­ ers in 1934 was nine cents; nearly a quarter of workers were forced to resort to relief. The exis­ tence of homeworkers also undermined labor standards and hampered unionization. Since the 1890s states had regulated the sanitary conditions of tenement homework, but courts blocked outright bans as interference with the right to contract. Women reformers attacked homework for mocking motherhood and destroy­ ing children’s lives, offering the family wage, moth­ ers’ pensions, and minimum wages for women as alternatives. While the federal government pro­ hibited homework on army uniforms during World War I, not until the New Deal did it institute broader restrictions, initially through the National Recovery Administration and then through the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) o f 1937. During World War II the wage and hour administrator ended homework in seven garment industries in order to sustain FLSA. In the 1980s the Reagan ad­ ministration lifted most of these bans. Though New York City had over fifty thousand under­ ground garment workers in 1982, the woman at the keyboard replaced the tenement mother as the new icon of homework. W hile some found home­ work a solution to the work and family dilemma of

the time, others thought homework encouraged a return to the era of the sweatshop. • E I L E E N BORIS See

M

also

Industrial Revolution; Needle Trades.

Industrial Revolution

he Industrial Revolution transformed wom­ en’s lives. A worldwide economic and social revolution, industrialization in the United States began in New England in the 1790s and inte­ grated women into an emergent industrial capi­ talist society. Industrialization in the antebellum era oc­ curred as the result of two distinct processes. The first, the rise of the factory system, had its greatest impact on northern textile manufacture. The sec­ ond, the development of the more labor-intensive sweating system, which kept production decen­ tralized in households and small shops, was vital to the growth of the garment, hat, box, glove, and flower industries. In preindustrial America, women and girls per­ formed much of the labor necessary for family sur­ vival, including the household manufacture of yarn, cloth, candles, and food. By 1790 the avail­ ability of water-powered machinery such as spin­ ning frames and carding machines enabled busi­ nessmen to substitute power tools for women’s hand labor in the manufacture of cloth. In De­ cember 1790 the first water-powered spinning mill opened its doors in Pawtucket, Rhode Island; by 1813, 175 other cotton and wool spinning mills, employing entire families, punctuated the riverrich New England landscape. Ironically, early mills increased the market value of women’s household labor. Mechanizing only some of the most labor-intensive steps of tex­ tile production, spinning mills paid women at home to weave factory-manufactured yarn into marketable cloth. (The arrangement whereby la­ bor was contracted out to women by local mer-

T

IN D U ST R IA L R EV O LU TIO N

chants, manufacturers, or middlemen was, and continues to be, known as “ outwork” or the “putting out system.” ) As late as 1820, two-thirds of all cloth manufactured in the United States was produced by women working at home. The importance of outwork to textile manufac­ ture declined after the first fully integrated textile factory began operations in Waltham, Massachu­ setts, in 1814. The success of the Waltham model, which centralized under one roof all of the steps necessary for producing cloth, facilitated the rise of both an urban working class and a network of sin­ gle-industry textile towns. The most famous of these was Lowell, Massachusetts, by i860 the lead­ ing textile center in the nation. In the 1830s and 1840s Lowell attracted international attention as an industrial utopia that had dodged the hazards of English industrialization, particularly the creation of a permanent, “ debased” working class. Until the immigration wave of the 1840s, Lowell’s factory workers were single, white, native-born women re­ cruited from middle-class New England farms. Symbolically virtuous because of theiryouth, class background, and race, Lowell workers ostensibly remained pure because of the mills’ stringent be­ havioral rules and the expectation that women workers would leave after a brief period of employ­ ment. The reality was less glamorous than propa­ gandists claimed. Lowell’s female factory hands worked over seventy hours a week at substandard wages. In 1834 and 1836 they went on strike, chal­ lenging the depiction of female fulfillment and passivity in this “model” factory town. Women’s experiences as factory workers varied according to ethnicity, race, and class, and dif­ fered from those of men. An occupational hierar­ chy among women prevailed in which Yankee women enjoyed greatest access to the best-paying women’s jobs; daughters of immigrants concen­ trated in semiskilled positions; and immigrant women worked in the least skilled, most poorly re­ munerated occupations. As a rule, free African American women were excluded from factory employment. The cleavages that distinguished women's work from men’s were equal in impor­

tance to those existing among women. Rigid gen­ der-based occupational segregation ensured that even the highest-paid, most senior female factory worker could expect to receive less than a man employed in the same establishment. Although by the 1840s women represented 50 percent of fac­ tory workers in the shoe and textile industries, they rarely worked alongside men. Instead, they held jobs reserved exclusively for women, jobs whose low wages affirmed the belief that women’s work was less skilled than men’s and less impor­ tant to family survival. Most women holding factory jobs in the first decades o f industrialization were single. Immi­ grant and working-class wives and mothers were more likely to participate in the wage-based labor market as outworkers. In New York City, the fore­ most manufacturing center of the antebellum pe­ riod, outwork was the dominant form o f female employment. It was also one of the most ex­ ploitive. Outwork enabled women confined to their homes to contribute to the family economy while still performing tasks as wives and mothers. But merchants took advantage o f women’s limited mobility and bargaining power by withholding and cutting wages. Already doubly burdened by society’s expectations of them as wives and wage earners, female outworkers coped with their pre­ carious financial status by accepting more con­ tracted jobs to make ends meet. Converting households into workshops, outwork meshed gen­ der roles with the most exploitive features of in­ dustrial capitalism. Although upper- and middle-class white wom­ en were typically spared the long hours and low wages that characterized both factory labor and outwork, they were nevertheless forced to con­ tend with the ideological devaluation of home­ work that industrialization spawned. As “real” la­ bor became more closely identified with work that had a concrete market value, women lost out. Childbearing, child rearing, cooking, cleaning, and other traditionally female tasks, whether per­ formed by elite women, working-class women, or a growing number of domestic servants, were de-

279

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IN F E R T IL IT Y

meaned. The household, increasingly perceived in opposition to a male-dominated market as a feminized space, came to be viewed as a site of leisure and consumption rather than labor and production. Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New Eng­ land Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor­ nell University Press, 1994); Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Noonday Press, 1989); Christine Stansell, “The Ori­ gins of the Sweatshop: Women and Early Industrializa­ tion in New York City,” Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society, edited by Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz (Urbana: Uni­ versity of Illinois Press, 1983). ■ A N D R EA TO N E S e e a l s o Industrial Homework; Labor Movement; Needle Trades; Sweatshops.

§ Industrial Workers of the World S e e Labor Unions.

§ Infertility 66/ T ive me children or I die,” the words of V F Rachel in the Old Testament, remind us that infertility has been a source of anguish for women through the ages. Until the technological advances of the late 1970s and early 1980s, med­ ical treatment was practically nonexistent and adoption provided the only possibility of parent­ hood. For most of the twentieth century in the United States, the prevailing assumption was that female intrapsychic conflict caused infertility, and thus women routinely were referred to psy­ chiatrists. The development of the laparoscope made possible the identification of biological problems, such as endometriosis, a problem lo­ cated in the reproductive tract rather than in the

psyche. Ensuing diagnostic advances have al­ lowed us to identify a still growing number of ob­ stacles to fertility. In addition to proving that in­ fertility is rarely, if ever, a byproduct of neurosis, science has shown that men are just as likely as women to have a physical problem that makes them unable to produce offspring. Though the assisted reproductive technologies now offer realistic hope to the infertile, success rates are only 15 to 20 percent for the most com­ mon high-tech treatment, in vitro fertilization, which costs as much as ten thousand dollars per attempt. Such state-of-the-art medical treatments, while within reach of wealthier Americans, are usually unattainable for the rest. The threat to biological parenthood strikes at the core of a woman’s inner assumptive life. Fan­ tasies of motherhood and the pregnancy experi­ ence are common for girls, who assume that they will be able to choose whether to have children in adulthood. Later, vital decisions about careers and partners are often linked with the wish for and expectation of motherhood. Fulfilling her repro­ ductive potential—and the roles of mother and provider of grandchildren —is integral to most heterosexual women’s lives. Nature and nurture conspire to make feminin­ ity and reproductive capacity virtually inextrica­ ble. The diagnosis of infertility can precipitate a major crisis. A woman’s sense of self is rocked at its foundation, and every aspect of her life can be af­ fected. Her relationships with family and friends become stressed by a variety of factors including feelings of being damaged goods due to her in­ ability to procreate and feelings of guilt about not being able to provide a child for her husband or grandchildren for her parents. If she pursues treat­ ment, her body can feel like a battleground on which the war for a baby is fought, even if it is her partner who has the medical problem. She may have exploratory surgery, routine biopsies, daily injections, extreme hormonal fluctuations, and worries about the largely unknown long-term ef­ fects of infertility drugs, some of which have been

281

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linked to ovarian cancer. The harsh realities of the biological clock push women to take serious and often inadvisable risks in order to achieve preg­ nancy before time and money run out. Women also must take into account available insurance coverage as well as anticipated treatment impera­ tives when making career choices and employ­ ment decisions. It comes as no surprise that infer­ tile women can become isolated and withdrawn and are at increased risk for emotional depression. When infertility is protracted, young women are catapulted into dealing with developmental tasks of midlife before they have had the opportu­ nity to master the tasks of their own life stage. The threat to genetic continuity ends the illusion of a timeless future far earlier than it does for fertile women and sets into motion heightened concerns about mortality, legacies, and meaning. Like many “empty-nest” middle-aged women, the in­ fertile young adult may feel socially invisible. Like her midlife counterpart, she may be preoccupied with the variety of feelings and social stigma re­ lated to reproductive loss. Cultural factors make the infertility experience far worse for some women than for others. In a number of contemporary cultures, a man may leave his wife if she cannot bear children. People around the world—from C zech and Polish peas­ ants to Oceanic Islanders—still believe women are responsible for infertility. This persistent no­ tion has a primitive logic: indeed it is always the woman who fails to get pregnant. Americans, many of whose standard of living allows them ac­ cess to cutting-edge science and technology, often view infertility as a woman’s fault also. Even as the infertile face immense social pres­ sure to reproduce, they are often confronted with equally strong pressure to forego using assisted re­ productive technologies (ARTs), which provide their best and often only hope of biological par­ enthood. Religion is one common source o f con­ flict. For example, Catholic and Orthodox Jewish women face doctrinal opposition to the ARTs even as they cope with the mandate to “be fruitful

and multiply.” Some feminists object to what they see as the shifting of control over conception and birth from the bodies of women to the hands of doctors, scientists, and the state. For many, the ARTs are a sign of a fearsome “brave new world” in which people are dehumanized; for others, they symbolize struggles over sexuality, reproduc­ tion, gender, and family that lie at the center of contemporary society. For the infertile, the ARTs are simply the best chance of having children. The late twentieth century has yielded repro­ ductive options—and ethical and moral ques­ tions—that were, not long ago, almost beyond imagination. Social questions about economic barriers to equality of access sit alongside others such as whether sixty-year-old women should be enabled to produce babies using the new tech­ nologies. At least temporarily, the lightning speed of science has outstripped our ability to keep up with the many emotional, social, and financial dilemmas that infertility poses. Susan L. Cooper and Ellen S. Glazer, Beyond Infertility: The New Paths to Parenthood (New York: Lexington Books, 1994); Arthur L. Griel, Not Yet Pregnant: Infertile Couples in Contemporary America (New Brunswick, N.).: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Barbara Eck Menning, In­ fertility: A Guide for the Childless Couple, 2d ed. (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1988). ■ ALMA R. B E R S O N See

§

also

Reproductive Technology.

International Women’s Day

lara Zetkin, longtime German socialist leader andadvocateforworkingwomen,firstproposed a holiday honoring working women in 1907. Be­ cause of her efforts, socialists throughout Europe began holding symbolic, day-long general strikes for women’s economic equality in 1911, calling the celebration International Woman’s Day (IWD). In the United States socialist women declared Febru-

C

IN TERRA CIAL CO O PE R A T IO N M O V E M E N T

ary 23,1909, as the first National Woman’s Day. At lectures and demonstrations they focused on win­ ning women’s suffrage as well as improving working conditions for women and children. Under Zetkin’s direction the holiday became linked with issues o f peace. On International Woman’s Day in 1915 she led women from oppos­ ing sides of World War I to demonstrate in Bern, Switzerland, for world peace. The war had al­ ready claimed over one million lives in Russia alone; Russian women decided to organize a gen­ eral strike calling for “ Bread and Peace” on the date of IWD, thus launching the February Revo­ lution in 1917. When Lenin organized the Third International in 1922, Zetkin persuaded him to es­ tablish M arch 8, the day the Russian women struck, as an official holiday. By the 1930s the celebration had died out in the United States, though it provided an occasion for women to oppose fascism and authoritarianism in Europe, China, and Latin America. After 1955 women around the world demonstrated on Inter­ national Woman’s Day against open-air nuclear testing. Since 1967 feminists in the United States have revived the celebration as International Women’s Day, demonstrating for peace and jus­ tice as well as fighting to achieve improved health care, education, and human rights for women. ■ T E M M A KAPLAN See

also

Feminism, International.

professional white m en—white women joined as central committee members in 1920—C IC spent its first decade informing the public o f Black achievements, opposing the Ku Klux Klan, and denouncing lynching. In 1920 the female leadership of C IC and the National Association of Colored Women met to discuss Black women’s issues and concerns, in­ cluding lynching, suffrage, child welfare, educa­ tion, and protection of Black girls. At subsequent meetings and in publications, the women focused on lynching. C IC established the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching in 1930. Jessie Daniel Ames, director of the C IC Woman’s Department, established the Association o f Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) in 1932. By 1939 forty thousand women and men were re­ ported as members. Because Ames did not en­ courage passage of the 1940 federal antilynching bill, A SW PL lost support from both African Americans and C IC leadership. Disenchanted with selected programs and what some labeled as the paternalistic approach of C IC toward African Americans, in 1944 leading citi­ zens established a new interracial activist organi­ zation, the Southern Regional Council (SRC). C IC merged with S R C , losing its identity as the South’s premier interracial organization. Never­ theless, C IC is credited with formulating public policy and programs that enabled whites and African Americans to effect positive change col­ lectively in the south. ■ C Y N T H IA N EV ER D O N -M O R T O N

§ Interracial Cooperation Movement he Commission on Interracial Cooperation (C IC ) was founded in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1918, to study and develop programs to address the “Negro problem.” During the summer of 1920, male staff organized eight hundred state and local interracial committees throughout the south. With a membership of largely reform-minded

T

S ee

also

Lynching.

§ Iroquois Confederacy he seed for the Iroquois Confederacy was planted long before European contact when five nations of Iroquoian-speaking people formed an alliance to prevent feuding among the Cayuga,

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ISLA M

Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca. The Five Nations were joined by the Tuscarora in the 1700s. The Mohawks, Senecas, and Onondagas are referred to as the elder brothers of the Con­ federacy. The Iroquois, or People of the Long House, are noted for many accomplishments, in particular their democratic system of government and egali­ tarian treatment of women, children, and elders. One early historian referred to the Iroquois as the “Romans of the Western World.” This is an inter­ esting analogy in view of the fact that Iroquois democracy was more advanced than that of the Romans. The laws of the Iroquois Confederacy spoke to issues of sharing of resources among the people; the rights of all people; unity; and the im­ portance of alliances between nations. The Iro­ quois system of governance deeply influenced the founders of the U.S. Constitution, but unfortu­ nately not when it came to women’s rights. In the matrilineal system of Iroquois govern­ ment, the clan mother played an important role in the political and social life o f each of the Six Nations. Clan mothers selected the representa­ tives to speak at tribal meetings. The Iroquois women nominated the Chiefs and removed them if they failed to perform their duties. They also controlled food production and the land, and decided the fate of captives. Women participated in discussions at tribal meetings and were consulted in all matters of importance to the community and the Confederacy. Iroquois women enjoyed a relatively higher sta­ tus than their newly arrived European sisters. One criminal law of the Iroquois Confederacy is in­ dicative of the value of women. When a murder was committed, the family of the murderer was re­ quired to give twenty strings of shells to the vic­ tim’s family. But if the victim was a woman, the family of the murderer was required to give thirty strings of shells to the victim’s family. As we approach the twenty-first century, the Iro­ quois Confederacy continues its historical al­ liance. Women play a significant role in all as­ pects of Iroquois life, such as teaching humane

values to the young and speaking out on Iroquois sovereignty in global political forums. Oren Lyons, et al., Exiled in the Land o f the Free (Santa Fe, N.M.: Clear Light Publishers, 1994); Lillian Acker­ man and Laura Klein, Women and Power in Native North America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995). ■ W ILM A M A N K IL L E R See

also

Native American Women, Northeast.

g Islam lthough Islam began in 610 a . d . in M ecca, Muslims and Arabs are not one and the same. It is estimated that only 18 percent of Muslims are Arabic-speaking people living in the Arab world. The other 82 percent live in areas ranging from the southern Philippines to Nigeria; the world’s largest Muslim community is in Indonesia. In the United States, scholars agree that by the year 2015, Islam will be the second-largest religion in the country after Christianity. The growing presence of Islam in the United States requires that any se­ rious look at the history of U.S. religion must in­ clude an understanding of Islam and Muslims, not as a group foreign to the U.S. culture but as part and parcel of its diversity. The Arabic word “Islam” means submission— in a religious context, it means the submission to the will o f God. Islam’s prophet is Muhammed, who received his first revelation from God through the angel Gabriel in about 610 C.E. Mus­ lim beliefs include the oneness of God; the angels created by Him; the prophets through whom His revelations were brought to humankind; the Day of Judgment and individual accountability; G od’s complete authority over human destiny in life and in death; the directives of the Quran; and the devotional services of prayer, fasting, alms giving, and making a pilgrimage to Mecca. Islam in the United States is divided mainly be­ tween Muslim immigrants, who make up twothirds of the Muslim population, and African

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American Muslims. Muslim women are part of the Islamic creed and have religious duties and re­ sponsibilities. The Quran addresses them some­ times specifically as women believers, mo’minat, and other times includes them with gender-neu­ tral terms such as insan, human, and nas, people. Islam as a religion views both men and women as equal creatures of God. The Quran states “O hu­ mankind! We created you from a single soul, male and female.” (49:13) The idea ofthe same soul is re­ peated elsewhere in the Quran. Islam preaches not a sameness between women and men, but rather that they are equal but different. This “difference” has been subject to debate and interpretation. Some traditional patriarchal practices have been justified on the basis of an Islamic directive that women and men are different: men are allotted economic responsibilities and women are ex­ pected to play a primary role in childbearing and rearing. Thus women have been relegated to sec­ ondary positions. Quranic verses that proclaim women’s rights to buy and sell, contract and earn, inherit, seek education, and manage their own property are often silenced or reinterpreted. Nu­ merous Quranic verses justify asymmetrical sex roles and include directives on polygamy, divorce, veiling, birth control, and abortion. For example, Islam permits men to marry two, three, or four women, “but if you fear that ye shall not deal justly [with them] then only one” (4:3). T he issue of polygamy is resolved later in the Quran by stating that men will not be able to be just with co-wives, even if they tried (4:119). Only the first part o f the verse is repeated, however, to establish Islam as a religion that permits polygamy. A debate about the dress of Muslim women also exists. The Quran mentions the notion of “cover­ ing” in three instances (2:53; 24:31; 33:59). Cover­ ing refers either to the prophet’s wives or the calling for Muslim converts to use their dress (a scarf) to mark such conversion. Covering the head and wearing the black garb (known as the Shador) is the law in some Islamic countries and is now more common in places such as Egypt and Jordan.

Regarding abortion, which became an explo­ sive issue at the 1994 U.N. Population Conference held in Cairo, Islam clearly informs the practice o f first- and second-trimester abortions. The Quran dictates that life—or the soul—does not begin until the noth day of gestation. As a result, abortion to ensure the well-being of the mother, or to enable her to care for elderly parents or other children, is permitted. U.S. Muslim women, like all U.S. women, struggle to achieve in patriarchal institutions such as academia, law offices, research institutions, and so on. In addition, U.S. Muslim women face two other dilemmas. The first is a mainstream society that is hostile to Islam and Muslims. Islam is gen­ erally portrayed in the media as a bloodthirsty, sex­ ually obsessed culture in which women are no more than cheap objects of trade. Such portrayals create defensive and antagonistic reactions from Muslim women who abide by stringent Quranic interpretations in response to society’s hostility. The second dilemma, faced by two-thirds of the Muslim women in the United States, is the need to preserve one’s heritage as an immigrant community. Immigrant populations often isolate themselves from the larger society to preserve their identity. Such isolation leads to perpetuating practices and traditions that mother cultures have long abandoned. Thus Muslim American women in some communities still practice local traditions simply as a result of their isolation. Said Ashmawi, “Al-Hijab lays farida Islamia” (Arabic text) (Trans: Al-Hijab is not an Islamic duty.) Rose E l Youssef June 1994: 22-25; Yvonne Y. Haddad, “A Century of Islam in America,” The Muslim World Today, Occasional paper no. 4(1986), Washington, D.C.: Islamic Affairs Programs, The Middle East Institute; Jack G. Shaheen, The T.V. Arab (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State Uni­ versity Popular Press, 1984). ■ NAWAL H. AMMAR S ee

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Religion.

JA P A N ESE AM ER IC AN C I T IZ E N S LE A G U E

§ Jacksonian Period he Jacksonian period (1820-40) saw impor­ tant changes in the status and perceptions of women. The prevailing rhetoric —celebra­ ting democracy, mobility, and the attainability of economic independence for the “com mon” man —encouraged a restructuring and redefini­ tion of political citizenship. By the 1830s, suf­ frage reforms first achieved universal white male suffrage by systematically disfranchising free Blacks and extending a formal political voice to unpropertied white men by abolishing property requirements for voting and holding office. The resulting increase in the size of the electorate, the rise of the two-party system, and the political culture that followed gave white men in the Jacksonian era a common identity as political actors and citizens. “ M anly democracy” incor­ porated the belief that politics was best left to the economically self-reliant and independ­ ent, traits that women and Blacks purportedly lacked. The exclusion of women from electoral politics helped cement an ideological demarcation be­ tween a public, political “ m ale” world and a pri­ vate, domestic “female” realm. In practice, a sep­ arate female sphere disconnected from public and political life was more of an illusion than a reality: female slaves and Northern factory hands did not have the luxury of domestic confinement; immigrant outworkers participated in the market economy from within their homes; and middleclass women reformers, although shunned at the ballot box, found other avenues for articulating their views. Women’s political engagement dur­ ing the Jacksonian period can be seen in the example of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, the first women’s rights conference in the United States, which met to demand measures that would secure equal economic, social, and polit­ ical equality for women, including female suf­ frage.

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Although the latter demand would not bear fruit until 1920, the Jacksonian period included significant strides in the improvement of Euro­ pean American women’s property rights. Stric­ tures of common law had long discriminated against married women, requiring women to transfer ownership of real and private property to their husbands upon marriage, among other re­ strictions. By i860 fourteen states had passed some type of Married Women’s Property Act, which gave married women a measure of eco­ nomic independence. Significantly, legislative reforms did not always reflect a newfound respect for married women or women’s rights. A chief impetus for change was the desire to protect men’s estates from determined creditors and am­ bitious sons-in-law. Indeed, the Mississippi Act, the first in the nation, protected a married woman’s property from seizure for the purpose of repaying her husband’s debt but did not give her the power to manage or sell her property inde­ pendently. Nevertheless, the property acts, like the burgeoning women’s rights movement, es­ tablished an important foundation for future ini­ tiatives. ■ AN DREA TO NE See

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Republicanism; Seneca Falls.

Japanese American Citizens League

he largest and most influential Japanese American civil rights organization, the Jap­ anese American Citizens League (JACL) had twenty-four thousand members and one hun­ dred fourteen chapters in 1994. Founded in 1930 by second-generation professionals to promote Americanization, JA C L cooperated with World War II internment policies. After the war JA C L

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leaders successfully campaigned against alien land laws, immigration restrictions, the denial of naturalization rights for immigrants, and antimis­ cegenation laws. The JA C L led lobbying efforts for the ig88 Civil Liberties Act, which provided surviving internees with a public apology and a re­ dress payment of $ 20,000. Since the 1970s women activists have urged the organization to combat gender as well as race discrimination. In the 1980s women activists criticized sexism within the JA C L , denounced Asian mail-order-bride catalogues, and con­ demned JA C L ’s endorsement of beauty pageants. In 1992 the JA C L elected Lillian Kimura as its first female national president and passed resolutions condemning sexual harassment, supporting fam­ ily leave legislation, and affirming women’s abor­ tion rights. In 1993 and 1994 the organization supported gay and lesbian individuals’ right to military service and opposed antigay initiatives in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. Despite opposition from members who declared homosex­ uality immoral, the 1994 national council voted fifty to thirty-eight to endorse same-sex marriages. The vote was influenced by Congressman Nor­ man M ineta’s tribute to Barney Frank, a gay con­ gressman who fought for redress for internees, and an account by Lia Shigemura, a former JA C L pro­ gram director, of the discrimination she faced as a lesbian. The JA C L thus became the first nongay national civil rights organization to officially sup­ port same-sex marriage as a constitutional right. « A L IC E YANG M URRAY See

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Japanese American Internment.

Japanese American Internment

uring World War II, 120,000 Japanese Ameri­ cans—two-thirds of them U.S. citizens by birth—were uprooted from communities in the

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U.S. West and interned in concentration camps. In the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese Americans mounted a political movement seeking a govern­ mental apology and reparations. The Congres­ sional Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded in 1981 that the incarceration was “ not justified by mili­ tary necessity” and had instead resulted from “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of po­ litical leadership.” The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1988 authorized the issuing of a formal apology and monetary compensation to the sur­ vivors of the camps. The bombing o f Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, unleashed war between the United States and Japan and triggered a wave of hostility against Japanese Americans. On December 8, the finan­ cial assets of the Issei (immigrant Japanese) were frozen and the Federal Bureau of Investigation began to seize community leaders suspected of pro-Japanese sentiments. The press, politicians, and some military heads called for restrictions on the Japanese Americans. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Ex­ ecutive Order 9066, arbitrarily suspending the civil rights of American citizens by authorizing the removal of the Japanese and their Americanborn (Nisei) children from the western half of the Pacific coastal states and the southern third of Ari­ zona. The euphemistically termed “evacuation” was a time of chaos and trauma for Japanese Ameri­ cans. Families had scant time to dispose of homes, businesses, pets, and belongings before they were taken to one of sixteen makeshift detention camps, called “assembly centers.” They were told to furnish bedding, clothes, eating utensils, and toilet articles, but were allowed to bring with them only what they could carry. The internees endured primitive living condi­ tions at the assembly centers, hastily established at fairgrounds, racetracks, and Civilian Conserva­ tion Corps camps. They lived in tar-papered bar­ racks; some families moved into stalls that had

JA P A N ESE AM ER IC A N IN T E R N M E N T

Japanese Americans arrive at the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Arcadia, California, on April 5, 1942, before being sent to internment camps inland.

been recently vacated by horses. Life in the as­ sembly centers, run first by the army and then by a civilian agency, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), required adjustment to mess-hall dining, long lines for the latrines and laundry facilities, and no privacy. By November 10,1942, the Japanese Americans were interned at ten permanent concentration camps, called “relocation centers,” in desolate ar­ eas and usually ringed by barbed wire and sentry towers manned by armed guards. The camps in­ cluded Manzanar and Tule Lake in California; Minidoka in Idaho; Topaz in Utah; Poston and

G ila River in Arizona; Heart Mountain in Wy­ oming; Granada (Amache) in Colorado; and Rohwer and Jerome in Arkansas. As in the assem­ bly centers, life was communal. Families resided in crudely constructed barracks; because of the cramped quarters and the disruption of previous routines, family members spent more and more time in the company of their peers, according to gender and age. The W RA ran each camp through a series o f departments headed by Euro­ pean American administrators and staffed by the Japanese Americans. Most adults worked, earning meager wages.

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In spite of the trauma of their uprooting and losses, as well as the unpredictable duration of their stay, these Japanese Americans hied to make life bearable, organizing religious services, adult education classes, recreational activities, and cul­ tural events. And, as soon as possible, they sought to leave the stifling, artificial world o f the camps. Despite the W RA’s unwieldy and problematic leave-clearance process, by the end of 1942, women and men departed for work and higher education in the Midwest and East, and for mili­ tary service. As American men went off to war, Black, white, and Mexican American women moved from domestic work into more lucrative jobs in industry; consequently, many of the posi­ tions initially available to Nisei women were in domestic service. As the Japanese Americans set­ tled in unfamiliar regions of the country, many re­ lied on networks of friends and kin for support. And, though far from home, most continued to contribute to the family economy. In 1945, with the end of their exclusion from the West Coast, the majority of the lssei and Nisei be­ gan to return. Like the initial uprooting, the re­ building of community was an arduous process marked by fear and uncertainty, requiring sacri­ fice and strength. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied: Report o f the Commis­ sion on Wartime Relocation and Internment o f Civilians (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982); Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps: North America, Japanese in the United States and Canada During World WarII (Malabar, Fla.: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Com­ pany, Inc., 1981); Michi Weglyn, Years o f Infamy: The Un­ told Story o f America’s Concentration Camps (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1976). ■ V A L E R IE MATSUMOTO S e e a l s o Japanese American Citizens League; World War II Period.

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Japanese American Women

he first Japanese women to immigrate to the United States in the late nineteenth century called themselves lssei, the “first generation,” for they envisioned themselves as the first generation of many Japanese Americans in the United States. They called their U.S.-born citizen children N i­ sei, the second generation. Subsequent genera­ tions are called Sansei, Yonsei, and Gosei, respec­ tively. The immigration of Japanese women to Hawaii and the mainland United States started in 1885 with the beginning of government con­ tract labor importation from Japan to the king­ dom o f Hawaii, later annexed by the United States in 1898. These women were married and accompanied or joined their husbands who worked on the Hawaiian sugar plantations. With­ in five years of their arrival, lssei women com­ prised the majority of wage-earning women in Hawaii, where most worked as field hands in the sugar industry. Although the sugar industry re­ mained the most important employer for Japa­ nese women until 1920, lssei women gradually moved into other occupations. They played a major role in such fields as domestic and personal service, clothing trades, and the new pineapple industry. Many developed incomeproducing jobs in their homes, using their skills of cooking, washing, and sewing. lssei women who first labored in Hawaii often lived in rural, isolated areas with few Japanese, helping their husbands till the soil. In urban areas, they worked in small businesses operated by their husbands, such as boardinghouses, stores, restau­ rants, and laundries, or became domestic servants, seamstresses, or cannery workers. Many of the women cooked for the workers employed by their labor contractor husbands, who worked for rail­ roads, lumber mills and camps, and in agriculture. The entry of lssei women into Japanese immi­ grant society was an integral part of the process

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The Kubota family, Mountain View, California, in 1940 or 1941.

by which Japanese immigrant society sank its roots into U.S. soil. The arrival of women guar­ anteed that community and family life could be established. With the birth of the second genera­ tion, Issei began to identify their children’s future in the United States. The Japanese American community developed a family orientation fo­ cused on schools, churches, clubs, and associa­ tions. But with the start of families, child care was also a critical issue for Issei working mothers, whose labor was vital to supplement their hus­ bands’ incomes. Exclusion was a central force in the early his­ tory of Japanese American women. In 1907-08, under pressure by the United States and hoping to halt anti-Japanese agitation in the United States, the Japanese government agreed to pro­ hibit the immigration of Japanese laborers to the United States. This was called the Gentlem en’s

Agreement. However, the Japanese government continued to allow wives, children, and parents of Japanese settled in the United States to emi­ grate. After 1908, many were “ picture brides,” whose marriages had been arranged by their families through the exchange of pictures with Japanese male immigrants, and married through proxy. After 1921, most grooms returned to Japan to marry and brought their wives back with them. Between 1924 and the post-World War II pe­ riod, restrictive legislation precluded further Jap­ anese immigration. Following the war, however, women married to U.S. servicemen, known as “war brides” or shin Issei (new Issei), began to arrive. Still, because the Japanese males had been able to send for wives from 1908 to 1924, the Japanese community continued to grow as a generation of Japanese American citizens, Ni-

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sei, were born in this country. Clearly defined generation and gender cohorts developed as a result of discriminatory U.S. immigration laws that halted new Japanese immigration early in the century. The denial of naturalization rights led to the political weakness of the Japanese immigrant community during the first half of this century. Japanese immigrants were permanently disen­ franchised in the United States by their status as “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” This also served as the basis for further discriminatory laws, such as the anti-alien land laws passed in various West Coast states, which prohibited ownership, leas­ ing, renting, or sharecropping of land. Further­ more, discriminatory legislation and social prac­ tices limited job opportunities for Nisei women before World War II. The culmination of a century of racist discrimi­ natory public policy came on December 7,1941. Japanese immigrants, who had been denied the right of naturalization, suddenly were enemy aliens. They and their citizen children were sub­ ject to a myriad of restrictions, following Ex­ ecutive Order 9066, issued February 19,1942, by President Roosevelt. More than 110,000 Japa­ nese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast and interned in inland concentration camps. Two-thirds o f them were U.S.-born. After the war, there had been a dispersal of Japanese Americans on the mainland and many moved to more urban jobs and residences. Issei women, now nearing retirement age, with all their prewar assets and capital taken from them by internment, had to begin their lives over again as seamstresses in garment factories or as domestic servants. But their Nisei daughters were able to get higher education and better jobs in the postwar years. There were many postwar reforms of discrimi­ natory immigration and naturalization legislation. “War brides” marked the first significant number of Japanese women immigrating to the United

States since 1924, a fact made possible by their marriages to U.S. servicemen. In 1952, Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act, which ended the total exclusion of Asian immigration to the United States by giving every country a quota and made all races eligible for naturalization. How­ ever, this act still perpetuated a discriminatory barrier to Asian immigration by giving only a to­ ken quota to Asian countries (for example, Japan had an annual quota of 185). It was only after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Naturaliza­ tion Act that Asian countries were given quotas equal to those of other nations. Partly as a result of the strength of the Japanese economy since 1965, few Japanese immigrants, shin Issei, have come to the United States. With little new immigration, low birthrate, and increasing outmarriage, some observers question the viability of the Japanese American ethnic group. But Japanese American ethnic and community identity persists, despite predictions o f its demise that date back to the 1920s. In the postwar years, Japanese American women have succeeded in an array of fields, in­ cluding Sansei Patsy Takemoto M ink, the first woman of color in Congress, and Yonsei Kristi Yamaguchi, the 1992 Olympic gold medalist in ice skating. . G A IL M. NOMURA S e e a l s o Asian Pacific Women; Japanese American Citizens League; Japanese American Internment.

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Jazz and Blues

amie Smith, in February 1920, was the first woman to record the blues. She set into mo­ tion a partnership between blues and jazz that continues today. That collaboration altered for all time the vocal and instrumental styles of the blues and jazz artists as they experimented with new

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JAZZ AND B L U E S

and innovative ways of using the voice and the in­ strument, sometimes effortlessly interchanging musical lines and roles. Thus began the era of wailing trombones, mournful cornets, and shrill clarinets keening like high voices in the wind. The inimitable Bessie Smith slid into phrases and attacked her lines at times as if they were too heavy for her to lift, adding tension to the lyrics and emotional content. Edith Wilson and Ivy An­ derson took their soprano voices into the clarinet’s range with the tremulous quality of nervous, flut­ tering birds. Later, Billie Holiday, with her un­ canny sensibility, blended blues and jazz into a melange of sensuous and sometimes painful artistry. In their own way the blues queens of the 1920s established an approach to singing and perform­ ing that influenced Holiday and nearly every other singer who succeeded them. Their theatri­ cality, sense of audience, recognition of their ties to their listeners, and respect for the music are evident in the quality and emotional power of their recordings. These artists and the venues where they garnered fame and popularity illus­ trate how they became influential prototypes in U.S. popular music. When Bessie sang “Any Woman’s Blues” she tapped into the reality of many women who suffered from the ambiva­ lence of a relationship that had a powerful but distressing hold on them. What made Bessie and other blues singers unique was their superb mu­ sicianship, which matched the artistry of rising and already-arrived instrumentalists of the 1920s. The power of the word juxtaposed with the in­ struments’ imitative sounds of nature, trains, fu­ neral dirges, knocks on doors, and so on, created a visual image for the listener that was elaborated upon by the dramatics of the women singers. Words were infused with additional expressivity when they entered the stage from victrolas, clung to the stage curtains, or moaned and wailed in deep despair, emoting like the actresses of stage and screen. Singers carried the blues into jazz and formed

an entirely new approach to vocal performance, raising the question, What is singing? For the jazz singer, just as for the instrumentalist, there were no rules that were sacred. Bend a note, extend a phrase, insert an obbligato, employ a vocalise, throw away the words and scat in any nonlexical mode that suited the mood of the moment and the flavor of the piece. Ella Fitzger­ ald, Sarah Vaughan, and Sheila Jordan represent the finest performers of this art form. Bessie Smith’s incredible timing and phrasing gave her melodic lines a tension that heightened the in­ terplay between her vocals and the solo cornet or piano. She influenced singers—male and fe­ m ale—and instrumentalists in jazz, swing, and gospel. For example, Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and Mahalia Jackson each acknowledged her impact on their perfor­ mance styles. The epitome of the jazz woman was reflected in the astounding International Sweethearts of Rhythm, led by Anna Mae Winburn. This group proved that jazz or, for that matter, music in gen­ eral was not only a male bastion. Yet, the Sweet­ hearts’ success and popularity were based more on the fact that it was an all-female band. Interest­ ingly, it was not the only all-female group operat­ ing during those or subsequent years. Ina Ray Hutton distinguished herself with a fine group of women musicians, as did Vi Burnside, Edythe Turnham, and, for a short while, Lil Armstrong. Other all-female groups performed throughout the 1930s and early-i94os, but few of the women, Black or white, were accepted as sidepersons in the swing bands that proliferated during that era. Although there were women bandleaders, arrangers, and composers, such as Lovie Austin and Her Blue Serenaders, as early as the 1920s, they constantly struggled to prove to the men in their ensembles or in the studios that they were “good enough.” Being a pianist or singer was and remains acceptable as a woman’s role although women have excelled as drummers and as string and horn players. Additionally, from the turn of

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the century until after World War II, women on stage, especially traveling groups, were consid­ ered outside the mainstream of social norms. Nevertheless, they endured racial and sexual hos­ tilities because they had to sing, perform, and compose the music they loved. This tenacity in­ formed their music in subtle and not so subtle ways, for example, Smith’s “ Poor Man Blues,” which addresses poverty and racism, and Holi­ day’s rendition of “ Strange Fruit,” a commentary on lynching. Mary Lou Williams was one of sev­ eral pianists from Kansas City who played with jazz groups before going solo. Melba Liston also had a successful career as a horn player and arranger-composer. Women contributed to the enhancement, de­ velopment, and creation of jazz and blues in the United States. Their participation and presence were not as mere decorative appendages but as ac­ tive innovators and creators of new approaches to sound, melody, rhythm, text, and performance style. They brought a voice that was not previously heard and presented a different perspective and posture when they addressed the stuff that makes blues and jazz. They employed intelligence, wit, intense sexuality, and expressivity. The women’s collaboration and interaction with their male counterparts changed the music for the better, de­ spite the social and sexual politics that prevailed. Women jazz and blues singers loved the music and its people too much to shut up and go away quietly. ■ D APH NE DUVAL HARRISON See

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a l s o

Music.

Jewish Women

rom the time of Jewish settlement in the Americas more than 350 years ago, women have played a vital role in the maintenance of

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Jewish tradition and have helped other immigrant Jews accommodate to the United States. Through their economic, philanthropic, political, and cul­ tural contributions, they helped shape Jewish communal life as well as emerging patterns of U.S. womanhood. In every epoch, Jewish women’s economic ac­ tivities have been central to family survival. In the Sephardic era (1654-1820) and the period of Germanic and central European emigration (1820-1880), Jewish women helped run shops and family businesses, peddled door to door, and took in boarders. From 1880 to 1920, when nearly three million Eastern European Jews immigrated to the United States (over 40 per­ cent of them women), most Jewish women who worked outside the home were employed in fac­ tories or sweatshops. Clara Lemlich sparked the 1909 “ Shirtwaist Strike,” which unionized the garment industry and helped shape the course of the modern labor movement. Although marriage ended the labor-force participation of most im­ migrant daughters, many remained union loyal­ ists and became active in housewives’ consumer struggles and political actions. From their base in immigrant unionism, Jewish women labor lead­ ers, including Rose Schneiderman and Pauline Newman, joined U.S.-born feminists in leading the campaign for social welfare legislation. While Jewish families traditionally encouraged the education of sons, immigrant daughters took advantage o f educational opportunities in public schools, evening schools, and settlement houses. Increasing numbers went on to college, particu­ larly to tuition-free city universities. As the num­ bers of Jewish women and men at private colleges also increased, many colleges instituted discrimi­ natory quotas to deal with their “Jewish problem.” Even at Barnard College, founded by Annie Nathan Meyer, a Jew, admission of Jewish women was restricted. Jewish women attending Seven Sis­ ter schools experienced opportunities to widen their horizons coupled with pressures to assimi­ late.

JEW ISH W OMEN

Jewish women immi­ grants at E llis Island, 1890s, part o f the wave of nearly 3 million Jews who immigrated to the United States from the 1880s until legal quotas were imposed in 1924.

For second-generation college-educated daugh­ ters, schoolteaching supplanted factory and cleri­ cal work as a route to economic security and inde­ pendence. Despite the oral exams often used to deny teaching licenses to those with unsatisfac­ tory “foreign” pronunciation, Jewish women com­ posed nearly half of all new teachers in New York public schools by 1930; schoolteaching became known as “the Jewish profession.” Although Jewish tradition emphasized women’s responsibilities to family and home, Jewish wom­ en’s extensive organizational networks brought their influence into the public arena. Nineteenthcentury Jewish American women established societies to aid the poor, orphan asylums, hospitals, homes for the aged, Sabbath schools, and Hebrew Women’s Benevolent Societies. The National Council of Jewish Women, formed in 1893, em­ phasized aid to immigrant women and children, and social services and legislative reform. The N C JW was only one of a number of Jewish women’s groups concerned with religious, civic, or political issues; by 1910 so many Jewish wom­ en’s organizations had formed that a conference

of Jewish women’s organizations was created to coordinate them. In 1912 Henrietta Szold estab­ lished Hadassah, a women’s Zionist organization, to promote health and welfare services for women in Palestine and to provide a special home for U.S. women that did not exist in general Zionist organizations. Hadassah became the largest Jew­ ish women’s group in the United States. Other Jewish women’s groups that provided support for the Jewish homeland were Pioneer Women (Na’amat) and Women’s American ORT. Several Jewish women’s groups were formed in response to the Holocaust, including the left-wing Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Groups, once affiliated with the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order of the International Workers Or­ der. This group, like the more centrist Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress, de­ voted itself to fighting anti-Semitism and securing civil rights and social justice for all Americans. W hile Jewish women were excluded from the rabbinate and positions of lay leadership, they played active roles in congregational life through the Sunday-school movement, founded by Re-

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becca Gratz in 1838, and later, through temple sis­ terhoods. The National Federation ofTemple Sis­ terhoods, affiliated with the Reform movement, was established in 1913; the Women’s League of United Synagogues, a branch of Conservative Ju­ daism, in 1918; and the Women’s Branch of the Union of Orthodox Congregations in 1923. Public activism of Jewish women has been reflected in their contributions to many social movements, including the international peace movement, socialism, and feminism. Among the most influential activists and rebels were Maud Nathan, a New York-born Orthodox Jew, who ini­ tiated suffrage campaign tactics; Eastern Euro­ pean immigrant Rose Pastor Stokes, a founder of the American Communist Party; and Russianborn anarchist Emma Goldman, who pioneered the American birth-control movement and led the call for greater sexual freedom for women. Nearly six decades later, Betty Friedan helped in­ augurate the contemporary women’s movement with her groundbreaking examination of the “feminine mystique.” While neither Goldman nor Friedan maintained religious traditions, both acknowledged that their social visions were influ­ enced by Jewish values and by their personal ex­ periences of anti-Semitism. Jewish women have played active roles within the contemporary U.S. feminist movement and have pioneered many areas of women’s stud­ ies’ scholarship. Although most secular femin­ ists who were Jewish initially did not identify themselves as “Jewish” feminists, for many, a newfound Jewish identity came in response to anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic resolutions that emerged at the United Nations International Women’s Conferences in M exico City and C op­ enhagen in 1975 and 1980. In addition to orga­ nizing caucuses to protest anti-Semitism within the international women’s movement, Jewish feminists have targeted the continued represen­ tation of Jewish women as self-centered “prin­ cesses” or as manipulative, monster mothers. Lilith, an independent Jewish women’s maga­

zine that began in 1976, has played a leading role in raising awareness of such issues and charting the growth of Jewish feminism. Since the 1970s a vigorous Jewish feminist movement aimed at developing more egalitarian practices within religious life has effected numer­ ous changes. The Reform movement ordained its first female rabbi, Sally Preisand, in 1972. Sandy Sasso later became the first Reconstruction rabbi and Amy Eilberg received Conservative ordina­ tion; change within the Orthodox community is reflected in increased opportunities for women to study Torah. Women within all branches of Ju­ daism have engaged in revisions of liturgy and ritual. Another strand of contemporary Jewish wom­ en’s rights is represented by lesbian feminism. Refusing to remain invisible within the majority culture, these women have forcefully acknowl­ edged their compound identities and created a powerful voice in literature, the arts, and commu­ nity and religious affairs. Numerous Jewish women have achieved prominence in professional and political life. In 1993 Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the second woman, and first Jewish woman, justice of the Supreme Court. In 1994 California elected two Jewish women, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, to the U.S. Senate. Jewish women have also made notable contri­ butions in the areas of fiction, poetry, drama, film, and other popular arts. From the ghetto stories of Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska to the pioneering modernism of Gertrude Stein, from the romances of Edna Ferber and Fannie Hurst to the biting cri­ tiques of Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley, from the intense spirituality of Cynthia Ozick to the secu­ lar feminism of E. M. Broner and Kim Chernin, Jewish women novelists and short-story writers have probed the changing meanings of the Jewish female experience in this country. Their linguis­ tic inventiveness is paralleled in the poetry of M uriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, and Irene Klepfisz; the plays of Lillian Heilman

JU D A ISM

and Wendy Wasserstein; the radio scripts of Fan­ nie Brice and Gertrude Berg; and the song lyrics and performances of Sophie Tucker and Barbra Streisand. In each of these endeavors, Jewish American women blended elements of their heritage with specifically U.S. influences. Although they share many attributes with Jewish men and their nonJewish U.S. sisters, Jewish women’s historical pat­ terns of engagement and achievement reflect a distinctive merger of gender-based and ethnic identities. ■ JO Y C E A N T L E R a l s o Feminism, Jewish; Judaism; Lesbians, Jew­ ish; National Council of Jewish Women.

Se e

§ Journalism S e e Magazines; Newspapers.

§ Judaism udaism is traditionally defined as a religion based on divinely prescribed beliefs and rituals composed and interpreted almost exclusively by men, beginning with the Bible and Talmud, an extensive and wide-ranging discussion by rabbis of Jewish law and theology composed in Babylonia during late antiquity, and extending to medieval law codes and commentaries. These texts have not retained the memory of women’s experiences and viewpoints. With the modern pressure to re­ shape gender roles, Jewish women have increased opportunities to express their identity as Jews in­ side and outside the religious framework. The women’s movement has challenged the sexism of

J

Jewish texts and institutions and led to defining a feminist Judaism. Since women traditionally have been excluded from the central components of Jewish life, their experience of Jewish identity differs sharply from that of men. As secularism grew, new educational and professional opportunities arose for women, and women demanded comparable opportunities within Jewish life, in both religious and political spheres. By the beginning of this century schools opened to instruct women in Hebrew Bible and medieval commentaries, as well as limited in­ struction in Mishnah, a compilation from the first and second centuries of laws regulating Jewish re­ ligious practice, and Talmud, areas previously re­ stricted to men. Beginning in the nineteenth century women took a leading role in U.S. Jewish life, organizing the Sunday-school movement and a wide range of community-based charitable and social service organizations, many of which played a crucial role in settling vast numbers of new immigrants (about two million Jews arrived in this country between 1881 and 1914). Their philanthropic net­ work was significant, but major control of the Jewish community’s funds still remained in the hands of men. At the turn of the century women played signif­ icant roles in U.S. political life, including the la­ bor movement and various forms of socialism. Jewish women in the United States had not been particularly involved in the general suffrage movement during the nineteenth and early twen­ tieth centuries for a variety of reasons, including anti-Semitism in the women’s movement, the small number of Jewish women in the United States prior to the 1880s, and the concern of East European immigrant women with basic family and economic survival. Since the 1960s Jewish women have been ac­ tive in die women’s movement and have created an important body of Jewish American literature reflecting their experiences. Jewish lesbians have created an especially important movement, ques-

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tioning not only Jewish sexual ethics but also the motif of polar differences that marks many Jewish theological assumptions. Women with doctorates in Jewish studies have opened new areas of feminist studies in Judaism since the 1970s. The most dramatic change in Judaism for many centuries is reflected in the increasing equality of women in synagogue worship, a movement led by U.S. Jewish feminists that has extended to Jewish communities around the world. Separate seating for women began to be abolished in non-Orthodox U.S. synagogues in the late nineteenth cen­ tury and integrated seating was standard by this century. The public honoring of young women in the synagogue, the Bat Mitzvah, was widespread by the late 1960s, followed by decisions by Re­ form, Reconstructionist, and Conservative de­ nominations of Judaism to include women in the prayer quorum, call women to the Torah (the scroll of the Pentateuch), and allow women to lead worship services. Ordination of women as rabbis and cantors be­ gan in the United States in the 1970s and quickly was adopted by the non-Orthodox branches of Judaism. Over two hundred women rabbis and cantors have been ordained since 1972. Commis­ sions within the Reform and Reconstructionist movements are currently revising the prayer books to use inclusive or gender-neutral lan­ guage. New feminist rituals to mark occasions in women’s lives have developed, including femi­ nist Passover liturgies, ceremonies for naming baby girls (previously a male ritual only), and egalitarian wedding services for hetero- and ho­ mosexual couples. Within the Orthodox community, women have called for changes in the traditional system of Jewish law and have won limited success. In recent years Orthodox women have established women-only prayer groups, institutions for study, and options for changing the religious marriage document to provide recourse for a woman whose husband refuses to grant her a Jewish di­

vorce; without it, she is not permitted to re­ marry. Efforts began in earnest during the 1970s to ex­ pose the sexism inherent in Judaism’s exclusively male-authored texts and to reconstruct the lost voices of women. Jewish feminist theologians are redefining these texts and analyzing the male-cen­ tered Jewish understandings of God, as well as concepts such as revelation, evil, and the nature of prayer. Jewish feminism is resulting not merely in the inclusion of women in Jewish life but also in the ultimate creation of a new, feminist Ju­ daism. Judith Baskin, ed., Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991); Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel, The Jewish Woman in America (New York: Dial Press, 1976); Susan­ nah Heschel, ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader (New York: Schocken Books, 1983). ■ SUSANNAH H E S C H E L See

M

also

Jewish Women; Religion.

Knights of Labor S e e Labor Unions.

M

Korean American Women

B

efore the 1960s few Koreans immigrated to the United States. Only eight thousand Koreans sailed to Hawaii and the mainland before the Im­ migration Act of 1924 terminated Asian immigra­ tion to the United States. More than six hundred women first arrived as part of a group of seven thousand Korean laborers recruited by Hawaiian sugar planters between 1903 and 1905. After mak­ ing Korea a “protectorate” in 1905, Japan barred male emigrants but allowed almost one thousand

KOREAN AM ERICAN W O M EN

“picture brides” to leave for the United States be­ fore 1924. Nine-tenths of these women joined hus­ bands in Hawaii while the rest went to the Pacific Coast. They fled Korea to seek economic, educa­ tional, and religious opportunities and to escape poverty, famine, heavy taxation, and Japanese colonial oppression. A few “warrior” women re­ belled against husbands who had concubines and Confucian patriarchal ideals limiting women to the domestic sphere and a life spent serving male family members. Envisioning the United States as a land paved with gold, many picture brides were shocked to discover they had married poor laborers who were often twenty years their senior. A few returned to Korea or ran off with other men, but most of the women toiled beside their husbands as they raised the second genera­ tion. By 1945 sixty-five hundred Korean Ameri­ cans lived in Hawaii and three thousand were scattered throughout the mainland. Expanding slightly after the 1952 M cCarranWalter Act assigned Korea an annual immigration quota o f one hundred, the Korean American pop­ ulation then grew rapidly after the 1965 Immigra­ tion Act, which granted Koreans twenty thousand annual visas and removed limits on the entry of immediate family members—spouses, minor children, and parents—of U.S. citizens. Only sev­ enteen thousand immigrants arrived between 1952 and 1965, but more than six hundred twenty thousand Koreans arrived between 1966 and 1990. Seventy percent of all immigrants who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s were female. The percentage of women gradually leveled off in the 1970s and 1980s to approximately 55 percent by 1989. Before 1965 most female immigrants were “war brides” married to U.S. servicemen or children adopted by U.S. families. After 1965 many women left Ko­ rea to escape Park C hung Hee’s military dictator­ ship and the economic instability produced by rapid industrialization and urbanization. Al­ though a large number came as professional work­ ers in the late 1960s, many women who immi­ grated between 1970 and the early 1990s were

working-class family members o f citizens and permanent residents. These female immigrants helped the Korean American community grow from only forty-five thousand in 1965 to almost eight hundred thousand in 1990. In 1990 the me­ dian age of the more than four hundred fortyfive thousand women of Korean ancestry in the United States was 30.3 years. Korean American women have made vital con­ tributions to the economic, social, and political development of the ethnic community. Denied naturalization rights until 1952, Korean Ameri­ cans were excluded from white-collar and profes­ sional occupations before World War II. Rele­ gated to low-paying jobs, women worked as agricultural laborers, cooks, laundresses, and boardinghouse keepers. Women’s paid and un­ paid labor helped families finance restaurants, laundries, retail groceries, and other small busi­ nesses. Women from the same village, province, and church also pooled their resources in kyes, traditional Korean mutual financing associations, to fund ethnic businesses and their children’s ed­ ucation. Despite working ten hours a day and seven days a week, women still found time to serve as Christian deaconesses, Sunday-school teachers, Korean language instructors, and activists in the campaign to liberate Korea from Japanese colonial rule. Between 1919 and 1945 separate women’s groups, such as the Korean Women’s Relief Society in Hawaii and the Korean Women’s Patriotic Society on the mainland, or­ ganized protest rallies, trained emergency nurses, and raised funds for independence fighters in Korea. Illustrating how domestic roles can be politicized, women activists argued that they could not fulfill the Confucian ideal of the “good wife” and “wise mother” without fighting Japan’s oppression of families in Korea. They urged pa­ triotic women to raise independence funds by forgoing meat and soy sauce and by selling Ko­ rean foods and crafts. Before Korea was liberated from Japanese rule in 1945, women activists

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helped convince Korean Americans, most of whom were barely subsisting, to donate one month’s wages every year to support the national­ ist movement. Women also assumed important economic, so­ cial, and political roles in the post-World War II community. Even immigrants who came after 1965 with advanced educations and professional training often started small businesses because of strict licensing requirements and because they lacked fluency in English and familiarity with American customs. In 1980 there were ninety Ko­ rean-owned businesses for every thousand Korean Americans. Many of these businesses were fi­ nanced by women’s kyes organized by female coworkers, neighbors, alumnae, and church members. Women also have maintained a tradi­ tion of serving multiple roles as wage earners or entrepreneurs, domestic caretakers, and commu­ nity activists. Immigrant organizations, especially business and political groups, have tended to ex­ clude women from leadership positions. Es­ tablishing their own organizations, immigrant women dominate nurses’ associations, Christian deacon and missionary service, educational pro­ grams for immigrant children and adults, so­ cial service agencies, and the English-language sections of community newspapers. Numerous women mobilized to support the more than two thousand Korean small businesses that suffered losses of $350 million during the ^ 9 2 Los Angeles uprising. For example, women in the Association of Korean American Victims of the L.A. Riot helped stage midday marches at the Los Angeles city hall demanding that the government provide reparations for riot damage attributed to police negligence. Almost fifty years separate the end of the move­ ment to liberate Korea from Japanese rule and the campaign for victims of the 1992 Los Angeles up­ rising. Both groups of activists urged women to as­ sume prominent roles in the public sphere to pro­ tect their families and the ethnic community. As women activists acquired political experience,

some increasingly demanded recognition of women’s leadership abilities and criticized gender discrimination in the ethnic and mainstream community. More recent activists, such as Angela Oh, president of the Korean American Bar Asso­ ciation, have been hailed as community spokesper­ sons; these activists have maintained a long his­ tory of Korean American women’s activism and assertiveness. Haeyun Juliana Kim, “Voices from the Shadows: The Lives of Korean War Brides,” Amerasia Journal, 17, no. 1 (1991): 15-30; Mary Paik Lee, Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Ko­ rean Woman in America, edited and with an introduction by Sucheng Chan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990); Young Yu and Earl H. Phillips, eds., Korean American Women in Transition: At Home and Abroad (Los Angeles: Center for Korean-American and Korean Stud­ ies, California State University, 1987). . A L I C E YANG MURRAY See

also

Asian Pacific Women; Picture Brides.

§ Ku Klux Klan omen have been central in defining suc­ cessive waves o f the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) throughout its history. Women of color, Jewish women, and immigrant women have been partic­ ular targets of the Klan’s brutality. White Protes­ tant women have been important symbols—and at times activists—in the Klan’s racist, nativist, and anti-Semitic doctrines. The first K K K was organized in the South after the Civil War. Although the Klan did not include women as members at that time, it used images of white womanhood that were critical to its efforts to rally the defeated sons of the Confederacy. Charging that white widows living on isolated plantations were vulnerable to retaliation by their former slaves, the Klan used this as a rationale to threaten, flog, and murder countless African American men and women. Gangs of Klansmen

W

KU K L U X KLAN

Klan members in Hartford City, Indiana, in the early 1920s.

also raped and sexually tortured numerous Af­ rican American women as well as white women who were suspected of having had sexual relations with African American men. Federal intervention and internal dissension caused the first Klan to collapse in the 1870s. But it reemerged in 1915 in response to massive immigra­ tion and grew rapidly in the northern and midwestern states. Within a decade it claimed approx­ imately four million members, including women and children. Women’s entry into the male bastion of the Klan, however, created a dilemma for the or­ ganization. Earlier, the Klan’s identity had been that of a fraternity of “ real m en” in which women were only symbols for the men. The women who

joined the Klan’s crusade of white Protestant su­ premacy in the 1920s, however, often had had prior experience in the women’s suffrage, temperance, or morality movements. The Klan provided a way to safeguard these women’s racial and religious privileges while also supporting the rights of white Protestant women. The Women’s Klan thus used an agenda ofwom en’s rights to justify—even to re­ quire — vicious actions against African Americans, Catholics, Jews, immigrants, labor radicals, and others. As with its predecessor, internal scandal and external pressure undermined this second Klan and it virtually disappeared by 1930. Between 1930 and 1980, the KKK emerged again and was based primarily in the South.

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Women played no visible part in this Klan, which engaged in terroristic actions against organized la­ bor, New Deal agents, Communist Party organiz­ ers, proponents of racial integration, and African Americans from the South. This KKK, like the first Klan, relied on images of white women’s vul­ nerability and white male supremacy. The fourth and current Klan arose in the early 1980s. Although small in number, this Klan has augmented its strength through alliances with other terrorist and paramilitary groups, including self-proclaimed Nazis and white-power survivalists. Women belong to these groups but, with the exception of some white-power Nazi groups, they play primarily supporting roles. Women’s rights and lesbian and gay rights are antithetical to the agenda of most Klan groups, which affirm tradi­ tional gender roles, denounce affirmative action as curbing the rights of white men, and increasingly target lesbians and gay men for violent attack. ■ K A T H L E E N M. B L E E S e e ALSO C ivil Rights M ovem ent; Lynching; Recon­

struction.

§

Labor Movement

omen have contributed to the U.S. labor movement in a variety of ways. Like their male counterparts, they have participated in unions as members and leaders. But women have also engaged in many gender-specific labor-move­ ment activities rooted in their distinctively female life experience. Among the organizational forms such efforts have produced are women’s laborunion auxiliaries, which have played crucial roles in many key strikes; cross-class alliances like the Women’s Trade Union League (W TUL); um­ brella groups like the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW ); and “pre-unions” like Nine to Five and other working women’s associations that

W

function outside of the formal collective bargain­ ing system. In addition, the feminist movement has worked frequently in coalition with organized labor on mutual concerns. The first factory workers in the United States were female, and women were also among the na­ tion’s earliest labor militants. But male workers’ unions, especially in skilled craft occupations, of­ ten excluded women from membership. Most nineteenth-century unions stood for a “family wage,” or pay sufficient to support a family, for male workers, and hoped that attaining this goal would allow working-class women to withdraw entirely from paid work. However, broader labor movement organizations like the Knights of La­ bor, which flourished in the 1880s, or the In­ dustrial Workers of the World a few decades later, actively recruited women members. These orga­ nizations were short-lived. As long as craft unions dominated the labor movement, women re­ mained a tiny minority of its members, despite ongoing efforts at self-organization. As more in­ clusive forms of unionism became the norm, be­ ginning in the clothing industry in the 1910s, and growing more broad in the 1930s, women’s in­ volvement in unions increased dramatically. To­ day two out of every five union members are fe­ male. Women’s networks outside the workplace, rooted in family and community, have often helped galvanize women’s labor activism. Nativeborn white women, women of color, and immi­ grant women have all participated in the labor movement, and indeed it has frequently brought together women workers from diverse ethnic and racial groups on the basis of shared employment conditions. Unions with strong grassroots com­ munity ties have generally had greater success in mobilizing women workers than more bureau­ cratic forms o f labor organization. And women’s union auxiliaries, comprised of the wives and other female kin of male workers, have recruited women into labor-movement struggles by appeal­ ing to their domestic roles as guardians of family

LABOR M OVEM ENT

welfare. The Women’s Emergency Brigade, which was critical to the success of the United Auto Workers’ 1936-37 strike against General M o­ tors in Flint, Michigan, is the best-known case. Women’s auxiliaries have played a major role in many other strikes as well, especially in commu­ nities dominated by a single industry, where the links between family welfare, community solidar­ ity, and workers’ rights tend to be most clear. Although women’s auxiliaries have been less im­ portant in the post-World War II era, this organ­ izational form persists to the present day—as illustrated by the 1983-85 Arizona copper miners’ strike. Women’s community-based networks also have been central to another type of labor-movement organization predicated on alliances between elite and working-class women. In the early part of the twentieth century, the W T U L was the most important cross-class organization of this type, bringing upper-class maternalistic women into active support of poor immigrant factory women’s struggles for improved wages and con­ ditions and of union-building efforts among women workers. The W T U L’s influence waned over the interwar period and then disappeared entirely in the aftermath of World War II. More recently, however, middle-class feminists and female professionals have allied with women clerical and service workers in the campaign for comparable worth. Here gender solidarity is as central as class solidarity in galvanizing labormovement activity. Starting in the 1970s, under the impetus of the second wave of feminism, a variety of women’s or­ ganizations emerged that were devoted to advanc­ ing the specific interests of women workers within the labor movement. The most successful of such groups were C L U W and Nine to Five, each of which pursued a different strategy. C L U W took the existing structure of organized labor as a given and directed itself toward enhancing the power and status of women within that structure. Nine to Five sought instead to develop an alternative

type of organization for women workers, implic­ itly challenging male-centered labor-movement traditions while working to expand the options for women within existing labor movement organiza­ tions. Unlike CLU W , the working women’s move­ ment, of which Nine to Five is the best-known ex­ ample, originated outside the established unions. In the 1970s young activists with roots in the women’s liberation movement began to organize previously unorganized office workers into inde­ pendent associations. At first, these groups delib­ erately avoided any formal links to established unions. Their founders believed that women cler­ ical workers, unaccustomed to viewing them­ selves as powerful, would perceive unions as male-oriented and culturally alien. Instead the working women’s movement concentrated on consciousness raising and other relatively un­ structured, participatory organizational forms and on public dramatizations of specific issues affect­ ing women clerical workers. To a degree, Nine to Five and similar groups functioned as “pre­ unions,” and over time they moved closer to the union model, devoting an increasing amount of their energy to unionization drives. Indeed, in the 1980s the highly democratic, bottom-up model of union organizing they developed was imitated by mainstream unions in efforts to recruit women clerical workers, most notably on university cam­ puses. Finally, the feminist movement itself has worked in coalition with organized labor on a va­ riety of issues. Campaigns for pay equity, parental leave, child care, protection from sexual harass­ ment, and other issues affecting working women have become a joint focus of lobbying, legal strategies, and grassroots organizing for both the feminist and labor movements, spilling over the traditional boundaries of union activity. More generally, feminist efforts to improve the pay, sta­ tus, and working conditions of women have be­ come an integral part of the contemporary labor movement.

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L A B O R UN IO N S

Dorothy Sue Cobble, ed., Women and Unions: Forging a Partnership (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 1993); Ruth Milk­ man, ed., Women, Work and Protest: A Century ofU .S. Women’s Labor History (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); Nancy Seifer and Barbara Wertheimer, “New Approaches to Collective Power: Four Working Women’s Organizations,” in Women Organizing: An Anthology, edited by Bernice Cummings and Victoria Schuck, 152-83. (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1979). ■ RUTH M ILKM AN a l s o Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW); Protective Labor Legislation; Labor Un­ ions; Women’s Trade Union League.

S ee

M

Labor Unions

omen workers have been consistently active in labor unions; but until the mid-twentieth century, relatively few women were in the work force, and unionism was concentrated in predom­ inantly male industries and occupations. In re­ cent years, that pattern has changed dramatically, so that many more women workers enjoy the higher pay, increased job security, and other ben­ efits of union membership. Although overall union membership in the United States has de­ clined, its composition has become increasingly female. In 1993 41 percent of all workers repre­ sented by unions were wom en—a record high. As recently as 1970, the figure was only 24 percent. And, in sharp contrast to earlier in this century, when women of color were underrepresented, to­ day women of color are more likely than their white sisters to be unionized. In 1993 22 percent of African American and 15 percent of Latina women were represented by unions, compared with 14 percent of white women workers. Partly as a result of the growing presence of women within their ranks, labor unions have recently begun to embrace major feminist issues such as compara­ ble worth and parental leave. Historically, how­

W

ever, women workers’ concerns have been mar­ ginal to the agenda of labor unions. Over the past two centuries, the steady femi­ nization of the U.S. labor force has been ac­ companied by a parallel feminization of union membership, although the latter trend is less continuous. Organized labor today is the product of four major historical waves o f unionization, each in a different sector of the economy and with a distinct relationship to women workers: the craft unionism of the nineteenth century, the “new unionism” of the 1910s, the industrial unionism of the 1930s and 1940s, and the public-sector and ser­ vice unionism that began in the 1960s. Craft unionism, which burgeoned in the late nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, involved primarily skilled workers and produced only minimal organization among women. Except in such female-dominated trades as waiting tables, craft union members were over­ whelmingly males who typically viewed women’s labor as a threat to skill and wage levels. These unions, which banded together to form the Amer­ ican Federation of Labor (AFL) in the 1880s, often excluded women (as well as Blacks and many im­ migrants) from membership outright—until as late as the 1940s in some cases, though to this day informal exclusion sometimes occurs in these same unions. The craft unions that still exist— such as the construction trades “brotherhoods” and the machinists’ union —are among those least receptive to women workers and their specific concerns and most faithful to their own past. A second wave of unionism emerged in the 1910s, centered in the predominantly female gar­ ment industry. By 1920,43 percent of the nation’s women union members were clothing workers. This “new unionism” was both an outgrowth of craft unionism and a forerunner of the industrial unions of the 1930s. It generated a fivefold in­ crease in the number of women union members between 1910 and 1920. While clothing union membership was almost entirely female, the lead­ ers of these unions remained overwhelmingly

L A B O R U N IO N S

Women delegates to the 1886 Knights o f Labor convention. At the time o f this photograph, the Knights had an estimated female membership o f 65,000.

male, and many viewed their women members paternalistically—as weak workers in need of spe­ cial protection, not equal partners in the labor struggle. The 1920s and early 1930s was an era o f deunion­ ization when the number of both female and male union members fell. Massive organizing drives of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) unions in the late 1930s recruited both unskilled and skilled workers, bringing the number of women union members in the 1940s to twice the 1920 level. By 1944, the peak of the wartime eco­ nomic boom, three million women were union members—nearly eight times the 1920 figure.

The new C IO unions targeted mainly maledominated industries and had an almost exclu­ sively male leadership, but their stance toward women workers was different from that of earlier unions. A shift in the larger political culture away from the former emphasis on gender difference (explicit in both patriarchal craft unionism and paternalistic “new unionism” ) and toward a new vision of gender equality followed the suffrage vic­ tory and the growth of women’s employment in the 1920s and 1930s. The C IO unions embraced this change, explicitly opposing discrimination on the basis of sex, color, and creed, in a self-con­ scious break with craft union tradition. Theirs was

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a limited notion of gender equality, however, rooted in broader principles of class solidarity and opposition to employer efforts to divide workers by gender, race, or ethnicity. The C IO unions main­ tained their commitment to the abstract principle of equality in later years, and some were leading supporters of legislation against sex discrimination in the 1960s and 1970s. With the exception of the World War II era, however, women remained un­ derrepresented in most of these unions, which were based in such heavily male industries as auto, steel, and other basic manufacturing. Starting in the 1960s —precisely when overall unionization levels in the United States began to fall—a fourth group of unions emerged, mainly in the public sector but also in private-sector service industries such as health care. Now the gap be­ tween women’s representation among union members and in the larger work force narrowed significantly. Indeed, almost all the growth in union membership in this period was among women workers. But it was rare for these publicand service-sector unions to organize women “as women.” Rather, the feminization o f their mem­ bership was an unintended consequence of orga­ nizing in occupations where women are particu­ larly well represented: at one point, teaching; later, health care; and most recently, public-sector clerical and service work. Because this organizing occurred in a period of feminist resurgence and of broad changes in gender relations in the wider so­ ciety, these unions have recruited women not only as members but also as leaders to an un­ precedented extent. And the unions that emerged in the most recent wave of labor organizing have been particularly active in reformulating tradi­ tional labor issues to address better the concerns of women workers, most notably in the campaign for “comparable worth” in the 1980s. This offers a basis for optimism about the future if organized labor ever overcomes its present crisis and begins to grow in size and influence once again. Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Ruth Milkman, ed., Women, Work and Protest: A

Century o f U.S. Women’s Labor History (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); Ruth Milkman, “Gen­ der and Trade Unionism in Historical Perspective,” in Women, Politics and Change, edited by Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin, 87-107. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990). ■ RUTH MILKMAN S e e a l s o Comparable Worth; Labor Movement; Needle Trades; Sweatshops; Women’s Trade Union League.

Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) he A C T W U was formed in 1976 through the merger of two large garment unions, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the Textile Workers Union. In the 1970s the union came to national prominence through its campaign to or­ ganize workers at J. P. Stevens, then the secondlargest textile manufacturer in the United States. The A C T W U publicized the harsh working con­ ditions of the mostly female and heavily African American labor force in the southern garment industry through a nationwide boycott of J. P. Stevens’ products. The consumer boycott, an ex­ ample of the creative organizing strategies often employed by woman-dominated unions, fostered the cross-class participation o f feminist, civil rights, and labor groups from both the North and South, in the J. P. Stevens organizing campaign. Triumphing over company efforts to divide Black and white workers, in 1980 the A C T W U won its seventeen-year battle when Stevens ratified a col­ lective bargaining agreement. During the 1980s the A C T W U continued to focus on unorganized workers despite the negative impact of widespread plant closings and capital flight in the apparel, textile, and shoe industries. The union has estab­ lished highly successful medical care and social welfare programs. Active in the Coalition of La­ bor Union Women, the A C T W U established its own civil rights department to address women's

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LA BO R UNIO NS

Rally o f the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union.

rights and racial justice. In 1995, A C T W U joined forces with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union to found U N IT E !, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees. ■ B E A T R IX H O FFM AN See

also

Needle Trades; Textile/Apparel Workers.

American Federation o f State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) he American Federation of State, County, and M unicipal Employees (A F S C M E ), a public sector union, originated in the Midwest during

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the 1930s. Its emergence was part of the move­ ment against patronage in government employ­ ment. Both growth in government employment and the extension of collective bargaining rights to those in public sector jobs boosted the union’s membership. By the mid-1990s A F S C M E , with over 1.3 million members, had become the largest public sector union and the second largest union in the AFL-CIO . A F S C M E has long been active on behalf of men and women o f color. The union organized African American sanitation workers in M em ­ phis, Tennessee. Their 1968 strike brought Mar­ tin Luther King, Jr., to the city, where he was then assassinated. African American women working in hospitals and as home health atten-

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dants also organized. By the end of the 1960s the composition o f many A F S C M E locals had shifted from predominantly white male workers to women of all races and men of color em­ ployed in hospital, school, and clerical jobs. A F S C M E now organizes a large and growing number of Latinos/as in the Southwest, and Puerto Ricans are a significant proportion of members in New York City. Union policies favor a decentralized and democratic unionism that speaks to the working conditions as well as the family and community needs of these workers. In the late 1960s A F S C M E District Council 37 in New York City launched a pioneering careerladder program for women in dead-end jobs, and other locals followed suit. In 1972 A F S C M E was among the first unions to support the Equal Rights Amendment. The national union vigor­ ously pursued pay equity in the 1980s. A F S C M E locals actively negotiate work/family issues; and on the national level the union presses for legisla­ tion such as the Family and Medical Leave Act. By the 1990s half the membership and local lead­ ership were women. Some consider A F S C M E a model for a “new unionism” needed to revive the entire U.S. labor movement.

ficult working conditions. Union officials in­ creasingly realized that, in order to address these concerns, they also had to attack the airlines’ —and society’s—assumptions about women. Fe­ male airline workers achieved a significant vic­ tory in 1968, when the Equal Employment Op­ portunity Commission told the airlines to stop forcing stewardesses to retire upon marriage or at age thirty or thirty-five. During the 1970s, when the A LSA was renamed the AFA, the union fought for maternity leave from airlines that had traditionally fired flight attendants upon learning of their pregnancy. In the face of arguments that being female was a “bona fide occupational qual­ ification” for the job of flight attendant because of women’s superior ability to comfort passen­ gers, the unions won a sex-discrimination case that compelled airlines to begin hiring male flight attendants in 1972. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the AFA has fought, with increasing success, the airlines’ imposition of age, weight, and appearance requirements for flight atten­ dants. ■ B E A T R IX HOFFMAN

■ LIN D A M. B LUM and P E G G Y KAHN

Association o f Flight Attendants merging from an almost exclusively female profession, the Association of Flight Atten­ dants (AFA) is one o f the few woman-led trade unions in the United States. From its beginnings as the Air Line Stewardesses Association (ALSA) in 1945, the AFA, along with other flight atten­ dants’ unions, has been a leader in the fight against sex discrimination. “ Stewardesses,” re­ quired to serve meals, calm passengers, master safety procedures, and project flawless femininity, were also faced with low pay, long hours, and dif­

E

Hospital Unions

B

etween 1920 and 1940, as the number of hos­ pitals in the United States grew rapidly, changes in medical technology and practice transformed hospital care from the work of physi­ cians assisted by nurse “hands,” who were of­ ten student nurses, to work that required a large and specialized staff. This expansion of the la­ bor force led to a hierarchy of workers, mostly women, who were subject to demanding work, low wages, long hours, and sometimes unreason­ able conditions. The first major hospital union drive occurred in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1930s, bringing together engine room, dietary, and laundry employees as well as nurses’ aides and

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orderlies. But the movement failed to spread. The 1947 Taff-Hartley Act exempted private hos­ pitals from the requirement to recognize unions among their workers. This exemption —which was not removed until 1974—stymied organizing among all categories of hospital workers. By 1961, only 3 percent of hospitals had at least one labor contract. Obstacles to unionization existed beyond the legal system. Hospital employers often had a near monopoly on jobs for nurses and other health care workers and set wages and working conditions so that few alternatives existed. Also, there were perennial questions o f the appropriateness of unions for women. Hospital workers organized throughout the 1960s, mostly in public sector hos­ pitals, which did little to prevent unionization. Beginning in New York City, links between unions and the civil rights movement facilitated organizing. The union 1199 and civil rights lead­ ers worked together to unionize the mainly African American and Puerto Rican women working as aides, orderlies, and dietary staff in many major urban hospitals. Organizing efforts slowed in the 1980s. Since 1990, changes in health care financing, cost con­ tainment, the growth of for-profit hospital chains, and the spread of managed care models of health insurance have resulted in hospital closings and downsizing. Women, who make up more than 80 percent of hospital workers, have been most af­ fected. Job security and standards of care have been undermined, while families —often a eu­ phemism for wom en—are expected to provide care at home. Pressure is building once again for a fundamental change in the health care system, accompanied by consumer demands for safe, af­ fordable care. ■ ROSLYN L. F E L D B E R G Se e

also

Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Union

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ince 1890 the Hotel Employees and Restau­ rant Employees Union (H ERE) has repre­ sented workers in high-turnover jobs that are typically sex- and race-segregated, casual, and low-wage. Bartenders and waiters founded H E R E as an affiliate union of the A F L in 1891; waitresses joined after 1900, the majority of them in separate, autonomously run, and remarkably resilient lo­ cals. Craft or occupational identity was the prime element of their work culture and overall world­ view. Some craft locals enabled union members to govern their otherwise chaotic industry. Both male (waiters and bartenders) locals and female (waitress) locals limited membership to white workers, who performed only “skilled” jobs. “Menial”-labor jobs that they refused were fit for those racial and ethnic groups—African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Jews — excluded from the union. Thus, occupational unionism unified workers across the hospitality industry at the same time as it deepened racial, ethnic, and gender divisions. With the rise of mass-production unionism in the 1930s and 1940s, H E R E organizers enrolled all classifications —including the hotel maids and kitchen workers formerly excluded from the craft locals—into mixed-sex and mixed-craft organiza­ tions that concentrated on providing worksitecentered protections and rights. In the 1970s legis­ lation mandated the amalgamation of all the locals into industrial locals, in which, for the first time, the “ menial” workers were in the majority. In their quest for leadership, they have launched a civil rights movement within H E R E that is trans­ forming anew the shape and meaning of U.S. trade unionism. ■ B E T S Y ARON

Labor Unions: Nurses’ Unions.

See

also

Waitresses.

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L A B O R UN IO N S

Industrial Workers o f the World (IWW)

International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU)

he IWW (or “Wobblies” ), founded in 1905 by socialists and anarcho-syndicalists (including a lone woman, Mother Jones), envisioned organizing the U.S. working class, industry by industry, into “ one big union” for a militant assault on capitalism. Unlike the A FL, the IWW welcomed women, Blacks, immigrants, and the unskilled. The IWW had few women members, but it mo­ bilized many working-class women in two major strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts (1912), and in Paterson, New Jersey (1913). The Lawrence strike, precipitated by a cut in wages already wretchedly low, involved twenty thousand textile workers, half of them women and children. The IWW dispatched its best organiz­ ers, including the young passionate orator Eliza­ beth Gurley Flynn, known as “the rebel girl.” Po­ lice violence ensued and led to a woman striker’s death and clubbing o f women and children; the city became a scene of class warfare and labor sol­ idarity, and produced the feminist anthem “ Bread and Roses.” National publicity forced the mill owners to grant all the strikers’ demands, but the victory was short-lived; the next major strike in Pa­ terson was defeated. At its peak in 1912 the IWW’s strength (ca. 150,000) was among western migra­ tory workers, miners, and loggers. It shunned la­ bor contracts and, after 1908, all political action (including the struggle for women’s suffrage), re­ lying instead on strikes, slowdowns, and direct ac­ tion, plus the revolutionary zeal of its crusading members. By 1920, after World War I repression, vigilante attacks, federal and state prosecutions, and internal dissension, the IWW was all but de­ stroyed. Although the IWW was a pioneer for birth con­ trol as a “working class necessity,” women’s issues were seen as disrupting class unity, to be addressed only “after the revolution.”

n 1900 male cloak makers organized the In­ ternational Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGW U) to improve working conditions for em­ ployees manufacturing women’s clothing. The founders promoted the union label, discouraged strikes, and endorsed socialism. Union leaders re­ cruited the young -immigrant women who com­ posed 70 percent of the industry’s work force, but did not trust women’s ability to sustain construc­ tive union membership. The 1909 “uprising o f the twenty thousand” among New York’s female shirtwaist makers in­ vigorated the union. This strike dramatized the plight of young Eastern European Jewish and Ital­ ian workers who received a meager three dollars for a fifty-four-hour work week. By withstanding freezing temperatures, strikebreakers’ assaults, po­ lice brutality, arrests, and imprisonment, these women demonstrated their ability to act collec­ tively to win improved working conditions and partial union recognition. Inspired by the uprising, the ILG W U hired women organizers to convert picket-line heroics into union solidarity, including Rose Schneiderman, a Polish cap maker; Gertrude Barnum, a set­ tlement-house resident who organized dressmak­ ers; and Lithuanian-born Pauline Newman, a socialist. Several locals pioneered educational and social programs for their female members. By 1916 women composed 50 percent of the ILG W U ’s members, including eight women organizers and the educational director position. After passage o f the Wagner Act in 1935, the ILG W U recovered ground lost in the anti­ union 1920s. After i960 Latina and Asian women entered the industry in significant numbers, re­ cruited by Katie Quan and other ILG W U orga­ nizers in California and New York. The ILG W U utilized the courts to enforce health and safety regulations. Although some workers complained that the male-dominated

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■ M AR GE FR A N T Z

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leadership of the 90-percent female ILG W U ne­ glected crucial “women’s issues,” union members receive health benefits, social and educational programs, paid vacations, and relative job secu­ rity. In 1995, ILG W U merged with the Amal­ gamated Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (ACTW U) to form U N IT E !, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees.

Chinese, however, were specifically banned. Membership in the Knights peaked in the spring and summer of 1886. By that fall member­ ship began to decline, partly because of competi­ tion with the trade unions, which eventually formed the American Federation of Labor. ■ I L E E N A. D EVAULT

■ CAROLYN D. M C C R E E S H See

also

Textile/Apparel Workers.

Knights o f Labor he Noble and Holy Order o f the Knights of Labor, formed in 1869, sought to organize all members of the “producing class” into a single or­ ganization, rendering it broader than many other labor organizations, though it essentially per­ formed the economic functions of a labor union federation. The first women to join the organiza­ tion were Philadelphia shoe workers in 1881, who created the first known all-female Local Assembly of the Knights. The 1881 General Assembly of the Knights voted formally to admit women mem­ bers. By 1886 approximately one hundred thou­ sand women belonged to the Knights o f Labor. Many women joined the Knights of Labor, some as wage earners. As in other sex-segregated labor organizations, numerous women formed women-only local assemblies. Other local assem­ blies, especially in smaller towns, included both women and men. The Knights encouraged work­ ing-class women to join as housewives, since membership was based not on an individual’s paid or unpaid status but on the usefulness of a person’s work. Although the Knights’ attention to women’s domestic roles attracted many women to join, it also limited their participation by defining their “proper” role as being in the family. Un­ like most organizations of the time, the Knights of Labor also included African Americans. The

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Nine to Five (District 925 o f SEIU) or many working women, there comes a defin­ ing moment when they recognize the obsta­ cles to fair treatment, decent pay, and respect on the job. As a clerical worker at Harvard in 1973, this author was asked by a student who poked his head in the door, “ Isn’t anybody here?” As a re­ sult, a number of fellow clerical workers in Boston built a new organization to change workplace conditions for women, called 9 to 5. From that grassroots experience emerged sev­ eral lessons: It is not enough to win power in the workplace over a specific issue; women must find ways to institutionalize and protect all changes, especially through unionizing. In 1975 9 to 5 formed a sister organization to help office workers achieve economic gains and improved working conditions. This organization, District 925, joined the Service Employees Inter­ national Union (SEIU ), which represents about one million U.S. workers. The benefits of unionization for women work­ ers have been well documented. In 1992 union women earned an average of $3.07 more per hour than did nonunion wom en—a bigger differential than for men ($2.73). Unions have also decreased the wage gap between men and women. Union women earn an average of 82 cents for every dollar earned by union men, while nonunion women earn only 75 cents for every dollar earned by nonunion men. Since 1975 District 925 of SE IU has helped more than ten thousand women and men win

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higher wages and improved working conditions— all as a result of the leadership and democratic participation of working women.

ways will need diverse organizing alternatives, whether through unions or specialized practice associations.

. K AREN NUSSBAUM

■ PAT R IC IA D ’ANTONIO

S e e a l s o Clerical Work; Labor Unions: Service Em­ ployees International Union.

S e e ALSO Nursing Profession.

Service Employees International Union Nurses’ Unions he leadership of formal nursing organizations historically has regarded labor unions and la­ bor legislation with suspicion, if not outright dis­ taste. During the early twentieth century, the American Nurses Association (ANA) stood firmly behind its vision of the discipline as a profession and its practitioners as professionals. By contrast, practicing clinical nurses were somewhat more receptive to the idea of unions. During the 1920s and 1930s more and more nurses left the private-duty labor market to work in hos­ pitals. They found the rhetoric of professionaliza­ tion did not forward their struggle to control both the quality and the conditions of their day-to-day work. Gradually the idea o f unionization made inroads among some hospitals’ nursing staffs and helped nurses to secure contracts that improved wages and hours worked. In the early 1940s state nurses’ associations, frus­ trated by the A NA’s opposition to formal organiz­ ing, began their own collective bargaining units. Finally, in 1946, the ANA formally sanctioned the idea of “professional” collective bargaining by its constituent state nurses’ associations. By the late 1960s the trade union movement had again resurfaced as a strategy for professional autonomy and economic security. Unions such as Local 1199 of the Hospital Workers Union reorga­ nized to allow nurses separate guilds; and strikes, although deeply regretted, were no longer un­ thinkable tactics. Still, unionism remains only one of several options to ensure nurses’ control over their practice. For nursing always has and al­

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he Service Employees International Union (SEIU ) is unusual because it has always in­ cluded some women among its ranks. Only in the 1960s, however, after SEIU began aggressively or­ ganizing public employees—many of whom were wom en—did women form a substantial portion of the union’s membership. This influx of women recast the union into an important force on behalf o f female workers. S E IU began as the Building Service Employees International Union (BSEIU ), which was char­ tered by the American Federation of Labor in 1921. It consisted largely of Chicago “ flat janitors,” build­ ing service workers who lived for free in the base­ ments o f the apartment buildings where they worked. Mostly immigrants and African Ameri­ cans, flat janitors and other building service em­ ployees, such as office janitors, elevator operators, and window washers, were among the worst-treated workers, and B S E IU sought to represent them all. Some of these workers were women. Among the B S E IU ’s seven founding locals was the Chicago School Janitresses, begun by Elizabeth Grady, who became the union’s trustee. As a re­ sult, B SE IU can rightfully claim to be the first union to organize public employees. Throughout the early decades, women were a minority in B SE IU , often organized in separate lo­ cals and barely represented among the union’s lead­ ership. But they were included in strike activities and their cases were pleaded at bargaining time. In the mid-1950s, New York’s Local 32B launched huge strikes that resulted in pay increases for build­ ing service workers, including cleaning women.

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During World War II, B SE IU janitors successfully fought against unequal pay for women janitors who performed the same work as men. Although B SE IU did not set out in the 1960s to organize women per se, women became more prominent in the union when B SE IU stepped up its efforts to organize public employees, adding to its groundbreaking organization of health care workers. In 1968, the union dropped the word “building” from its name in recognition of the fastest-growing sector of the union, public work­ ers. Despite the lack of a conscious strategy to fight for women workers, women employees ben­ efited from the union’s actions. In 1974, for exam­ ple, SE IU won protection for nonprofit hospital workers, many of whom were women. The increase in female participation in the union and the resurgence of the feminist move­ ment transformed SE IU into a service-sector union with a special concern for women’s issues. Women were targeted for organization just be­ cause they were women and SEIU activists joined in major fights for women’s equality. In 1974, SEIU helped found the Coalition of Labor Union Women, an advocacy group for women unionists. The following year, SEIU chartered 9 to 5, an in­ dependent organization for working women. To­ gether, SEIU and 9 to 5 started District 925, a na­ tionwide local aimed at organizing clerical workers across the country. The structure o f the new union was innovative as well; it was part of SEIU, but it was staffed by 9 to 5 members and had some autonomy. It was to be a union “for women and by women,” in the words of SEIU president John Sweeney. In the 1990s, SEIU con­ tinued to organize nonunion women, focusing on home health care workers. By this time women made up a near majority of S E IU ’s one million members and were well-represented among the national leadership. ■ AN N E KO RN H AU SER S

e e

also

SEIU).

Labor Unions: Nine to Five (District 9 2 5 of

United Auto Workers (UAW)

S

ince its inception in 1936, the United Automo­ bile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW) has enjoyed a reputa­ tion as one of the most liberal and egalitarian la­ bor organizations in the United States. Women historically have composed only a small propor­ tion of the labor force in the automotive and aero­ space industries—about 15 percent of UAW mem­ bership, except during World War II. Union efforts by and for women, however, have long been hallmarks of UAW’s history. UAW’s Women’s Department, established in 1944, was the first of its kind. UAW began in the 1940s to compile a re­ spectable record of collective bargaining in the interest of gender equity and has strongly sup­ ported federal legislation to eliminate sex dis­ crimination in employment. Two UAW leaders were founders of the National Organization for Women, and Olga Madar, the first female vice president of the UAW, served as the first president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women. In 1970 UAW became the first U.S. union to endorse the Equal Rights Amendment. To diversify its mem­ bership and improve its prospects among pre­ dominantly female clerical workers, the UAW ad­ mitted District 65 as an affiliate in 1981 and gave it departmental status in 1987. Started in 1933 by dry-goods workers, District 65 has been a leader in organizing workers in technical, office, and pro­ fessional fields. By integrating District 65 into its organization, UAW increased its strength and scope. The greater presence of women in the UAW has also prompted recent attention by the union to issues of sexual harassment and compa­ rable worth. ■ NANCY F. GABIN

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L A B O R UN IO N S

United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers o f America/ Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers o f America (UCAPAWA/FTA)

United Electrical Workers (UE)

ounded in 1937, UCAPAWA represented a model of democratic trade unionism and of­ fered unprecedented opportunities for local lead­ ership. The union made its greatest gains among Mexican cannery and African American tobacco workers. In 1939, led by veteran organizer and Communist Party activist Dorothy Ray Healey, over four hundred cannery operatives, the major­ ity Mexican and Russian Jewish women, staged a successful strike at the California Sanitary C an­ ning Company. Two years later, UCAPAWA’s vice president, Luisa Moreno, expanded organizing campaigns throughout southern California. Los Angeles rank and file formed Local 3, the secondlargest UCAPAWA affiliate. In 1943 twelve of the fifteen elected positions in Local 3 were held by women, eight by Mexicanas. They negotiated in­ novative benefits, such as a hospitalization plan, free legal advice, and at one plant, managementfinanced day care. In 1944 UCAPAWA became the Food, To­ bacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers of Amer­ ica (FTA). In many respects, UCAPAWA/FTA was a woman’s union. By 1946 66 percent of its contracts nationwide had equal pay for equal work clauses and 75 percent provided for leaves of absence without loss of seniority (e.g., maternity leave). Nationally, women held 44 percent of elected union posts in food-processing locals and 71 percent in tobacco units. After World War II, virulent red-baiting by rival unions, management, and politicians eviscerated the union. In 1950 UCAPAWA/FTA was one of ten unions expelled from the C IO for alleged Communist dom­ ination. UCAPAWA/FTA, however, has left a legacy of unwavering commitment to demo­ cratic trade unionism for people of color and for women.

he United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), chartered by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1936, drew its membership from machine and manufacturing workers in the electric light bulb, home-appliance, and automotive industries. Nearly 27 percent of electrical workers were women by 1940, but they were concentrated in the lowest-paying jobs and routinely made about half as much as men, who dominated the skilled and supervisory positions. Influenced by the Communist Party, U E con­ ducted a vigorous campaign to organize women and encourage them to lead union locals. Early U E contract agreements raised wages but contin­ ued to sanction different job and pay scales based on sex and to exclude married women from em­ ployment. During World War II, women entered new kinds of jobs and began to demand wages comparable to those of men. U E was one of the first large U.S. unions to advocate “ equal pay for equal work,” and in the late 1940s U E condemned the marriage bar and upheld women’s rights to se­ niority and maternity leave. U E leadership at­ tempted but failed to establish affirmative action policies to open more jobs to African Americans. Among the radical unions expelled from the CIO in 1949, U E lost many members to its rival, the more conservative International Union of Electri­ cal Workers (IUE). It never regained its domi­ nance in the electrical industry. Still, U E pioneered feminist issues within the labor movement and produced an influential “ Support Full Equality for Women” resolution at its 1979 convention, which endorsed reproductive rights, federally subsidized day care, the passage of ERA, and the national Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW ). With a membership in 1994 of forty thousand, o f whom about 35 percent are women, U E continues to advocate for what it calls rank-and-file unionism.

■ VICKI L. RUIZ

■ SHARON HARTMAN STROM

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United Farm Workers (UFW) n 1962 in Delano, California, Cesar Chavez, Delores Huerta, and Helen Chavez cofounded the Farm Workers Association, the precursor to the United Farm Workers Union (UFW). After nearly one hundred years of agrarian protests from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, “Okie,” and Mexican-heritage farm workers, postwar laborers mounted a sustained unionization drive. Women and families were central to this grass­ roots struggle for justice, dignity, equal wages, and a decent standard o f living. Reflecting a gendered social activism, Mexican-heritage male workers joined strikes and picket lines for higher wages, while M exicana and Chicana female workers supported strikes to improve opportunities for their children. M ale laborers dominated ranch committees (union locals), but female union vol­ unteers predominated in the campesino centers (social services offices). As men spoke at rallies, women cooked food for fundraisers. Entire farm­ worker families moved from California to major cities across the nation to pursue the grape, let­ tuce, and Gallo boycotts, the U FW ’s nonviolent tactic to pressure growers to sign union contracts. The boycotts of the late 1960s and 1970s were among the most successful cross-class and crosscultural movements of the era. They united ex­ ploited Mexican-heritage, Filipino, Black, and white farm workers with middle-class support­ ers—religious groups, students, antiwar protest­ ers, political and civil rights activists, labor unions, environmentalists, and consumer and women’s organizations. Eventually, growers signed the his­ toric 1970 grape contracts. In 1975 the Agricultural Labor Relations Act passed the first law to recog­ nize the collective bargaining rights of farm work­ ers in California. Farm laborers allied with female consumers distinguished this campaign from pre­ vious organizing attempts. This movement brought together disparate groups and united Mexican-heritage peoples in support of their economic, social, and civil rights.

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Experience in and exposure to the farm workers movement spurred parents and children to de­ mand better educational opportunities and served as a training ground for many Mexican Americans to seek political empowerment and office. ■ M A R G A R ET ROSE See

also

Agriculture.

United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) he United Food and Commercial Workers Union (U FCW ) has 1.4 million members in the United States and Canada. U F C W members, half of whom are women, work primarily in gro­ cery stores, meat and food processing plants, de­ partment stores, and hospitals. The U F C W maintains thirteen thousand col­ lective bargaining agreements with employers that govern wages, working conditions, and work­ place rights. All contracts guarantee equal pay for equal work, seniority rights, promotion opportu­ nities, and dispute resolution procedures. The U F C W was created in 1979 when the Re­ tail Clerks (founded 1888) and Amalgamated Meat Cutters (founded 1897) merged. The Bar­ bers and Cosmetologists, Boot and Shoe Workers, Packinghouse Workers, Fur and Leather Workers, National Agricultural Workers, Insurance Work­ ers—and even Sheep Shearers—are among the unions that had previously merged into tire Clerks and Meat Cutters. There were no exclusionary policies regarding women’s membership in these unions, although some of the unions had few fe­ male members because of occupational segrega­ tion. Women have influenced the union signifi­ cantly and continue to shape policies as elected officials and through rank-and-file activism. No­ table women include Mary Burke, elected first vice president, Retail Clerks (1888); Mary Ander-

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son, Boot and Shoe Workers Union, named first head of the U.S. Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau (1920); and Addie Wyatt, first woman elected president of a Packinghouse Workers local union (1954), civil rights activist, and national of­ ficer. The U F C W has six hundred local unions and supports an aggressive affirmative action policy that encourages women to seek leadership roles at all levels. The Women’s Affairs Department edu­ cates members on sexual harassment, domestic vi­ olence, and other women’s concerns. In 1988 the U F C W Women’s Network was founded to assist local unions in political action, organizing, and community service activities. ■ SUSAN L. P H I L L I P S

§

Language and Power

omen have historically been excluded from participation in the communications of pub­ lic institutions (e.g., universities, churches, medi­ cine, government, and law). As a result, the forms of language found in the discourse of public insti­ tutions tend to be extreme versions of male com­ municative patterns. Women and men engage in private communi­ cation for different reasons. M en tend to see com­ munication as extrinsically useful for problem solving, while women see it as intrinsically valu­ able. Additionally, women and men come into conversations with differing amounts of power. Often men interpret conversational interactions in terms of hierarchy and competition, while women view their roles collaboratively. And fi­ nally, people enter conversations with stereotypes of how women and men typically engage in con­ versation. These implicit assumptions might be­ come problematic in a scenario such as the fol­ lowing (loosely adapted from Deborah Tannen’s You Just D on’t Understand):

W

A woman tells her male partner of a disagree­ ment with her boss at work, in the hope of getting sympathy from him (“Yeah, your boss is a jerk”) and thus achieving solidarity in one relationship where it has failed in the other. But the man sees her story as a request for advice from someone wiser and more experienced in the ways of the outside world (that is, he perceives the situation hierarchically whereas she sees it as a move to­ ward collaboration). She is hurt, feeling both put down and separated. She thinks: “Just like a man not to be caring!” Fie thinks, “Just like a woman to get hysterical over nothing!” Thus, the stereotypes about the communicative patterns of the opposite sex that each partner assumes play into their mis­ interpretations of each other’s meanings and in­ tentions. These differences create divergences in male and female communication. Women seem more tentative, asking open-ended questions, and using hedges (“I guess” “maybe” ), which to men suggest indecisiveness or illogic, but are intended to en­ courage the participation of others. Women find it easier to ask directions of strangers, as they are less apt than men to see this action as putting them in a “one-down” position. In informal conversation, power tends to be as­ sociated with “holding the floor” and choosing a successful topic. In mixed-gender groups, men tend to have more and longer conversational turns than women. Many studies have found that men interrupt women more than women do men, for reasons that are unclear. The suggestion that women “invite” interruption is not empiri­ cally supported. The habits of the private sphere transfer into the public. M en’s private language becomes pub­ lic discourse. Both are nonemotional, formal, hi­ erarchical, and dependent on the verbal channel (versus gestures or vocal inflection) to carry mean­ ing. Until recently, women entering public dis­ course could either learn men’s speech patterns or risk not being taken seriously. But even when women become adept at public discourse, they

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LA RAZA

La Raza members in Houston during the 1972 presidential elections.

are not unequivocally rewarded. Often their com­ petence in male speech is interpreted as “aggres­ sive” or unfeminine. School is the first public institution in which most people participate, and the message of the educational system about who may participate ac­ tively in communication carries over into later public encounters. Women are communicatively disadvantaged throughout their educational ca­ reers. Despite these difficulties, women continue to work toward public communicative equality. Many professions, such as law and medicine, are increasingly aware of the ways in which they have excluded both women themselves and women’s styles of communicating, and they are making changes. In business, women’s communicative strategies (listening to the interlocutor; asking for suggestions) have proven effective. In medicine, both the form and content of women’s communi­ cations (as doctor and patient) are being taken more seriously.

As women continue to gain in influence and numbers in public institutions, their styles will in­ creasingly be integrated with traditional male pat­ terns. ■ R O B IN T O LM ACH LAK O F F

S

e e

a l s o

Public Speaking.

§ La Raza he National Council of La Raza (N C LR ) is one of the leading national Latino/a civil rights organizations in the country. The Council engages in policy analysis and advocacy for Latinos/as on national issues such as education, hous­ ing, immigration, and free trade. The Council also provides technical assistance and support to nearly 200 community-based affiliate organiza­ tions in the United States. Established in 1968,

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/c h i c a n a

the Southwest Council of La Raza, as it was origi­ nally called, promoted community development projects in Mexican American barrios across the Southwest. Today the Council serves Latinos/as from all nationality groups in all regions of the country. Women have played important roles in the Council’s development, but their initial inclusion in the Council involved a political struggle. In 1968, the original board of directors included only one woman among its twenty-five members. At the same time, only one of the Council’s seven af­ filiate organizations was headed by a woman. Three years later, only three women served on the twenty-six member board. The few but outspoken women in the Council pushed for what became a controversial but ulti­ mately successful cause: equal representation of women and men on the board. They adopted this policy in 1973 and it is still in effect. In the late 1970s, the first woman was elected chair o f the board of directors. Since that time, three o f six board chairpersons have been women. N C L R ’s 1996 staff roster shows women to be well represented throughout the organization’s corporate structure. Women in the Council have called for increasing attention to women’s con­ cerns. As a result, N C L R has sponsored work­ shops on Latina empowerment at its annual con­ ferences and in 1995 issued its first publication on the status ofLatinas. No doubt future changes are ahead for the N C L R as women exert their influ­ ence in executive and policy-making positions within the organization. ■ C H R IS T IN E M ARIE S IE R R A

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Latina/Chicana Migration

rom Chilean and Sonoran women migrating between mining camps during the California gold rush, to Mexicana farm workers crisscrossing the country harvesting crops, to Puerto Rican gar­

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m ig r a t io n

ment workers traveling between New York City and San Juan, Latinas responded to political and economic conquest by moving. The confiscation of the northern half of M exico by the United States following the Mexican War of 1846-48 transformed and degraded the political, social, and economic status of Mexican women who re­ mained in the region and became subject to U.S. law. The 1848 discovery of gold in California drew some Mexican women to the mining camps. Women from the M exican state of Sonora and from as far away as C hile also joined the rush to seek their fortune as sex workers, cooks, laun­ dresses, and gambling house operators. When the mining boom ended, many of these women mi­ grated throughout the region in search o f work, while others returned to their homeland. Meanwhile, Mexican women and men in the former northern frontier of M exico lost millions o f acres o f land to Anglos in a few decades. De­ prived of enough land to subsist, many entered the wage labor force as seasonal workers. Al­ though men dominated the migrant work force in the second half of the nineteenth century, women too left their homes in search of work. Migration altered social and familial relations, while post­ poning ethnic Mexicans’ complete dependence upon wage labor: families could send away young men and women to earn wages to supplement farming, ranching, and shepherding, allowing them to hang on to what was left of their land. Puerto Rican and Cuban women and men joined the migrant work force in the United States as a consequence of U.S. imperial expansion into the Caribbean in the 1890s. Millions of Puerto Ri­ cans lost their land, and many migrated from countryside to urban areas and from Puerto Rico to the United States in search of wage labor. U.S. employers transported thousands to the North­ east, the Midwest, and Hawaii in the early twenti­ eth century. Following a similar pattern, most Cuban workers migrated to Florida. Latinas of this era worked for low wages on a seasonal basis in sweatshops and tobacco factories

LA TI NAS

and on farms. They also labored in laundries and as domestic workers in the houses of mostly white, middle-class women. Latina workers responded to their status as cultural outsiders and to low wages and harsh conditions by organizing mutualistas, mutual aid societies, which provided them with death benefits, as well as an organizational base for a variety of activist projects, including educa­ tional reform and labor unions. Central and South American immigrant women, who came in large numbers in the 1980s and 1990s to escape political oppression, joined a Latina labor force characterized by low wages and seasonal employment. Yet, some second- and later-generation Latinas have avoided migrant la­ bor and moved into the primary labor market, along with numerous Latina immigrants who mi­ grated in order to escape land-reform policies of revolutionary governments in Cuba and Nicaragua. Nevertheless, the pattern of low-wage labor and seasonal migration that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has continued to characterize the working lives of most Latinas in the United States. ■ C A M IL L E G U E R IN -G O N Z A L E S S e e a l s o Chicanas and Mexican American Women; Immigration; Latinas.

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Latinas

rom the East Coast to the West Coast, being Latina means coming from the racially mixed populations of North America, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. That is, Latinas are a product of the cultures that un­ evenly combined as a result of the Iberian colo­ nization of indigenous and African populations. This mixture suggests a racial designation differ­ ent from — and much narrower than—merely having a Spanish surname. The latter is what the

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L A T IN A S

For more on the history of Latinas in the United States, see the following entries: El Barrio Chicana Civil Rights Organizations Chicanas and Mexican American Women Community Service Organization El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Espanola Feminism, Chicana Feminism, Latina Feminism, Puerto Rican La Raza Latina/Chicana Migration League of United Latin American Citizens Lesbians, Latina

Maquiladora Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS) Newyorican Women Puerto Rican Women Witchcraft on the Spanish-American Borderlands

U.S. Bureau of the Census officially terms “His­ panic.” Significant demarcations, painful histori­ cal realities, and persistent racial inequalities are glossed over when European and European American women are included with Latinas or “hispanas” (from hispanoparlante, or Spanish speaker) under the sanitized and deceptively sim­ ple rubric of “ Hispanic.” Latinas come in different races, classes, sexual identities, ages, levels of edu­ cation, and nationalities. Despite differences in specific origin, social po­ sition, and perception, racial mixture denotes a fundamental characteristic that historically has defined U.S. Latinas, that is, the common iden­ tity, burden, and condition of being racially op­ pressed women. Any claims to a European her­ itage and identity remain suspect for Latina women, no matter how fair their skin, how Castillian their Spanish, or how “American" their Eng­ lish. It is one of the ever present contradictions in how the national-cultural identity intersects with gender identity.

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LA TI NA S

This tension not only unfolds against Latinas, oppressing them by constituting the group as racially subordinate women. It can also be mobi­ lized in their favor as one of the ways to come to­ gether as Latina women, and as women of color— by structuring specific collective identities that will help them resist both racial domination and gender subordination. As women of color, Latinas share the common condition of racism, which brings together all women of Latin American and Caribbean descent, along with African American, Native American, and Asian American women in the United States. However, merely sharing the condition of oppression does not, in and of itself, guarantee the political consciousness o f promot­ ing common resistance, unity, and cooperation. This is evident in terms of racial categories, social classes, sexual identities, levels of education, po­ litical ideologies, age, physical ability, mother­ hood status, and/or national background and citi­ zenship. Such differences partially stem from how these populations were incorporated within U.S. con­ trol. Being occupied as part of mid-nineteenthcentury land-grabs to secure the Pacific coast of North America (Tejanos, Californios, and Hispanos from Nuevo Mexico after the Mexican War) was not the same as being occupied as part of turnof-the-century land-grabs to secure the Panama Canal project (Puerto Ricans and Cubans after the Spanish-American War). After 1847 the United States territorially absorbed significant portions of M exico’s old rural aristocracy and middle classes and, since the 1940s, opened its doors to their Cuban counterparts. In contrast, the U.S. main­ land has attracted mainly poor and unemployed Puerto Ricans. Some Latinas arrived on U.S. shores to work as domestic servants, as field hands, and/or as cheap “sweatshop” laborers (Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Central Americans from the 1890s to the present). Others came as profession­ als and middle-class entrepreneurs (most Cubans before the M ariel exodus). Chicanas/Chicanos and Puerto Ricans (since 1917) are the only groups

of Latin American descent under U.S. jurisdic­ tion whose entire populations automatically are recognized as U.S. citizens. Most U.S. Latinas/Latinos share a history of in­ vasions and military occupation, the vagaries and needs o f U.S. markets, and interimperial rival­ ries—with women among the most vulnerable to social and demographic dislocations. Perhaps for these same reasons, such women also have been in the forefront o f struggles for political democ­ racy and economic justice within U.S. jurisdic­ tion and in the rest of the Americas. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the poverty levels of the Latina/Latino families in this country have been invariably higher than most o f the U.S. population except for African Americans, who, as a group, are slightly poorer than Latinos. In 1974, for example, 10.5 percent of the entire population in this country lived below poverty level; specifically, 8.2 percent of whites, 28.6 percent of Blacks, and 21.9 percent of Lati­ nas/Latinos. By 1992 11.7 percent of all U.S. fami­ lies were below the poverty level: 8.9 percent of whites, 30.9 percent of Blacks, and 26.2 percent of Latinas/Latinos. Further analysis of the “ Hispanic” category by ethnic origin reveals stark contrasts among the people who are lumped together in this fashion. For the past three decades the largest groups are Mexican Americans (about two-thirds), Puerto Ricans (8 to 11 percent), and Cubans (4 to 5 per­ cent). In a 1981 study spanning the 1950-80 pe­ riod, Marta Tienda and others found that Puerto Ricans who had come to the U.S. mainland be­ tween 1950 and 1969 were not better off than those who had arrived during the 1970s. Cubans who had migrated to the United States between 1965 and 1970 had incomes that were 17 percent higher than those Cubans migrating between 1970 and 1979, while those who left for the United States between i960 and 1965 had income levels that were 33 percent higher. The disparities among income levels and, hence, among the various characteristics of each migration and the corresponding postwar Latina/

LA TI NA S

Latino populations, were later confirmed by the U.S. Bureau o f the Census. In a 1990 study, this agency discovered that although U.S. Mexican and Puerto Rican families had similar average income levels, Puerto Ricans had the lowest incomes within the entire Latina/Latino popula­ tion. The report indicated that Puerto Rican fam­ ilies in the United States had poverty levels comparable to those of African Americans (29 per­ cent of all U.S. Puerto Rican families have in­ comes below $10,000), whereas Cubans had the largest ratio o f families (25 percent) with incomes of $50,000 or more. Historically, as in the present, the majority of Latina mothers have not fared very well. Latina­ headed households constitute the demographic categories with the greatest economic need and the lowest income. During the past decade, Latina women under the age of eighteen have tended to be more than four times as likely to have children as are white women, and twice as likely as Black women. For this same period, the num­ ber of Latina female-headed households has in­ creased twice as much as the number of Black and white female-headed households. Several studies have established that the percentage of female­ headed households within the two largest Latina categories (U.S. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans) has been consistently rising over the past three dec­ ades. For Mexican American families headed by females, these figures changed from 11.9 percent in i960 and 13.4 percent in 1970 to 19 percent in 1989. Puerto Rican families headed by females increased even more dramatically: from 15.3 per­ cent in i960 and 24.1 percent in 1970 to 39.6 per­ cent in 1989. Other indicators of the deteriorating economic conditions affecting most U.S. Latinas are the in­ terrelated proportions of labor participation, oc­ cupational access, and education levels. A 1981 study by Marta Tienda and others reported that the labor participation rates of Mexican American and Puerto Rican females (legally employed and/ or registered as searching for employment) were consistently at least 20 percent below those of

Mexican and Puerto Rican males between 1970 and 1992. During the past decade, the position of Latinas within the job hierarchy has not changed meaningfully vis-a-vis the general U.S. female population. For instance, in 1983, women o f all races constituted 40.9 percent of the man­ agerial and professional occupations, 2.6 percent of whom were Latinas; whereas, in 1992, women in general made up 47.3 percent of such occu­ pations, 3.9 percent of whom were Latinas. As recently as 1992, only 10 percent of Latinas be­ tween the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four had attended four-year-plus colleges, as compared to 24 percent of white women of the same age group. There is a third aspect that is usually avoided when constructing a profile of U.S. Latinas, namely, sexual identity, including the ways in which their individual and collective identities— desire, affection, and sensuality—have been his­ torically and culturally constructed, as well as the institutionalization of compulsory heterosexual­ ity. Latina sexual identities can bring women to­ gether as Latinas but also tear them apart. This is­ sue needs to be discussed, problematized, and studied further to promote the emancipation of women of color. Latina lesbians are among the most sexually oppressed, but they are still Latina. Since these forms of sexual oppression are predicated on the basis o f socially enforced anonymity, there is a dearth of data on this matter. Nevertheless, some Latina lesbians have been in the forefront of much of the reconceptualization and problematization of identity politics within the struggles against sexism, racism, and colonialism in this country (e.g., Gloria Anzaldua). Latina lesbians have taken a leading role in building bridges across national-cultural lines among women of color regarding scholarship and literary production. Here the role of women such as Cherrie Moraga, who helped to form the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, is impor­ tant as is her role in putting together, with Gloria Anzaldua, one of the first anthologies o f writings

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by women of color, This Bridge C alled M y Back, published in 1981. Another recent example of this kind of work is the 1990 anthology Making Face, Making Soul, Haciendo Caras, edited by Gloria Anzaldua. These women have contributed signif­ icantly to rethinking and critiquing the histori­ cally and still hegemonically white/Anglo founda­ tions of what is popularly known as the “women’s movement” in the United States. During the past decade, Latinas have organized around issues such as homelessness, A ID S, do­ mestic violence, popular education, improving working conditions for farm workers, child care, gay and lesbian rights, and feminism. Some ex­ amples of organizations in which this work has been carried out are the Escuela Popular Nortefia, the Center for Immigrant Rights, the Centro para el desarrollo de la mujer dominicana, and Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cam bio So­ cial. A number of Latinas have risen to prominence within these groups. Maria Lugones, Argen­ tinean, became an important activist and co­ founded the Escuela Popular Nortena. A founder and principal leader of the most important radi­ cal, Puerto Rican community-based organization, the Young Lords Party (during the late 1960s and early 1970s), was Denise Oliver, who is now a writer and social activist. Clara Rodriguez et at, The Puerto Rican Struggle (New York: Puerto Rican Migration Research Consortium, Inc., 1980) ; Marta Tienda et ah, Hispanic Origin Workers in the U.S. Labor Market (Washington, D.C.: Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor, 1981) . ■ G LA D YS M. JIM E N E Z -M U N O Z

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Latter-Day Saints S e e Mormons.

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Lavender Menace

he “ Lavender M enace” was coined in 1969 by members of the National Organization for Women (NOW) to describe what they felt was a public relations threat to the emerging women’s movement: lesbians. Betty Friedan may have ut­ tered “lavender m enace” first although she may not wish to take credit for it. Purged from NO W and banned from other feminist groups, lesbians by 1970 also understood that gay men didn’t want them in their groups ei­ ther. Deciding to use the term as a source of pride rather than a badge of shame, lesbians wore laven­ der T-shirts emblazoned with “ Lavender Men­ ace” across the chest to the Second Congress to Unite Women held in New York City in 1970. Filling the aisles and the stage, they spoke of their negative experiences with their straight sis­ ters. This simple act of telling the truth as op­ posed to pointing the finger was one of the pivotal moments in the feminist movement. Women began to realize that they could not claim exclusion and mistreatment from men and then turn around and hand out the same to other women.

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■ RITA M AE BROWN

§ Lawyers n 1869 Arabella Mansfield was admitted to the Iowa state bar, becoming the first woman in U.S. history to gain admission to practice law. In 1873 the Supreme Court declared women unfit for the law but naturally suited for the home. Between 1869 and 1872 white women were re­ jected from a number of elite law schools. Yet, in 1870 Ada Kepley graduated from Union College of Law (later Northwestern) to become the first woman to earn a law degree in the United States.

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LAWYERS

White women were also admitted to the Univer­ sity of Iowa, University of Michigan, and Boston University. African American women, as well as white women, could study at Howard University in Washington, D .C ., where, in 1872, Charlotte Ray became the first African American woman to graduate from law school. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, women were a distinct minor­ ity at sexually integrated law schools. Only seven­ teen women and over nine hundred men gradu­ ated from Boston University in the late nineteenth century, while, as late as 1910, barely forty women had graduated from the University of Michigan among thousands of men. To overcome their iso­ lation and loneliness, six white female students and graduates of the law school at Michigan orga­ nized the Equity C lub in 1887, a correspondence club open to all women lawyers and law students in the country and the first national organization of women lawyers in U.S. history. Though the Equity C lub had only thirty-two members and lasted just four years, its members identified the professional issues for women lawyers of their era. For the Equity C lub members the dilemma of balancing the notion of “femininity” with their new professional identity shaped every aspect of their lives, including whether to practice in the courtroom with men or remain in the privacy of an office, how to dress, and whether working for profit was “ ladylike.” The tension between femi­ ninity and professional identity also affected women lawyers’ personal lives as they struggled with the question of whether to marry and, if so, how to balance work and family. By 1920 the legal profession was significantly more open to women. Every state bar and most law schools admitted women. Two women’s law schools, Washington College of Law (1898) and Portia Law School (1907), provided legal educa­ tion to immigrant, working-class, and middleclass women. In the 1920s a number of African American

women attended some of the most elite law schools in the country, gained admission to state bars, and practiced law nationwide. During this era Jane Bolin was the first African American woman to graduate from Yale Law School, in 1931, and became the first African American woman judge in the country. However, by 1940 only thirty-nine African American women were lawyers, compared with 4,146 white women lawyers. Women gained admission into the American Bar Association in 1917 and joined all areas of le­ gal practice, including the courts, especially the newly founded juvenile courts. Some women lawyers, such as Florence Allen, appointed in 1934 as the first woman judge on the United States Court of Appeals, and Mabel Walker Willebrandt, assistant United States attorney general in the 1920s, surpassed the accomplishments of all but the most successful male attorneys. At the same time, women lawyers still encoun­ tered severe sexual discrimination following grad­ uation from law school. Elite corporate and fi­ nancial institutions were closed to them. Many went into general office practice, focusing on do­ mestic relations and real estate. Often they tried solo practice or found positions in banks, real es­ tate offices, and insurance agencies. Some con­ sidered themselves lucky if they found a job as a stenographer, while others were unable to find le­ gal work at all. Women lawyers continued to find the task of balancing work and family extremely challenging. Solidly in place by 1920, this profile of women lawyers remained unchanged for the next fifty years and confronted a new generation of women lawyers in the 1970s. Virginia G. Drachman, Women Lawyers and the Origins o f Professional Identity in America: The Letters of the Eq­ uity Club, 1887 to 1890 (Ann Arbor: University of Michi­ gan Press, 1993); Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Women in Law (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Karen Berger Morello, The Invisible Bar: The Woman Lawyer in America: 1638 to the Present (New York: Random House, 1986). ■ V IR G IN IA G . DRACHM AN

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L E A G U E O F U N IT E D LATIN A M ERIC A N C IT IZ E N S (L U L A C )

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League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)

he League of United Latin American Citizens (LU LA C) was the first national Mexican American civil rights organization, founded in 1929. Cuban Americans, Puertorriquenos, and Filipinos joined in the 1980s and 1990s. Since 1929 LU LA C has been a major desegregationist force in southwestern and midwestern schools, public housing, and employment. Ladies’ LU LA C chapters were founded in 1933. By 1940 more than twenty ladies’ chapters existed in Texas and New Mexico. Before 1965 LU L A C women were typically Mexican Americans, U.S. citizens, middle class, and often worked as teach­ ers or clerks. Some single women and widows be­ longed. Women founded Junior L U L A C (youth chap­ ters) in the 1930s, a protective service program for the elderly, and the LU LA C Information and Re­ ferral Center. They helped Mexican immigrants and the poor and sold poll taxes, registered voters, raised funds, organized women’s leadership con­ ferences, sponsored L U L A C News, and fought for social change. LU LA C women have experienced sexism and heterosexism. In the 1930s Alice Dickerson Montemayor of Laredo, Texas, condemned sexism in her writings in L U L A C News. From the 1960s to the 1980s men formed voting blocs to prevent the election of women to LU LA C offices. Although LU LA C does not officially exclude lesbians and gay men, like much of U.S. and Latino society, LU LA C is homophobic. Women were barred from Texas state director­ ship until 1969 because of a male bloc vote. Do­ lores Adame Guerrerro, Rosa Rosales, and Angie Garcia served as the only Texas state directors, in 1969,1990, and 1995. In 1994 feminist Belen Ro­ bles was elected national president.

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■ C YN TH IA E . OROZCO

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League of Women Voters

he League o f Women Voters (LWV) of the United States was founded in 1919 as the Na­ tional League of Women Voters, a successor orga­ nization to the National American Woman Suf­ frage Association. The LW V had dual goals of preparing enfranchised women for their new re­ sponsibilities and of working for social legislation that suffragists had long supported. The first goal was called “Voters Service,” still one o f the princi­ pal activities of LW V’s local and state branches. Voters Service disseminates nonpartisan informa­ tion to help citizens make up their minds about candidates or issues and sponsors public forums in which candidates can present themselves to vot­ ers. The goal of supporting legislation has also continued to shape the league’s activities; its members have taken stands on local, state, and national issues ranging from sewage systems to in­ ternational peace. The LW V has never been a mass organization. Its membership reached one hundred fifty thou­ sand in the years just after the Second World War, and there are now fewer than one hundred thou­ sand members nationwide. On M ay 6 ,19 74, the biennial convention voted to change the bylaws to permit men to join the league. Its influence has been much greater than its numbers would sug­ gest. In many communities the league is the most trusted source for objective data on voter registra­ tion, candidates’ views, and on the structure of lo­ cal government. Nationally, LW V has been cho­ sen to sponsor presidential debates. Two defining characteristics of the league have been its con­ stant emphasis, from the beginning, on research as a basis for action and its effort to develop policy positions from the grassroots level rather than im­ posing them from the top. The structure of local, state, and national boards permits a variety of adaptations to fit local and regional conditions. The national office pro­ vides information and guidance to local and state

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L E G A L STATUS

leagues, but in the end these groups make their own choices about where to focus their energies. Over the years the league has remained princi­ pally a white, middle-class organization. Repeated efforts to broaden the membership to include working-class women and women of color have not had much success. Since the 1950s member­ ship has been racially integrated; early conflicts over integration in southern leagues faded during the civil rights movement. Like most women’s voluntary associations the league has changed with changing times. In its first four decades its white, middle-class members were not working for pay and formed the backbone of its leadership. In recent years more white, middle-class women are becoming professionals in the work force, and the changing nature of “women’s issues” has forced the league to rethink issues of program and structure. The league has managed to adapt to so­ cial and political change and to fill a niche in many communities not filled by any other group. However, the future is not necessarily bright. It is difficult to find women with the time and abil­ ity to devote to the league’s demanding work. Re­ cently an excellent branch of the league in North Carolina had to shut down when no one was available to be president. And like nearly every other voluntary association with a national office, the league has become increasingly bureaucratic over the years. Despite these difficulties, the value of the league’s local work will probably keep the organization active for many years. ■ AN N E F IR O R SC O TT Se e

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Suffrage Movement.

Legal Status

rom the Constitutional Founding to the late twentieth century, the legal status of women has been inferior to that of free men. Until the

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1970s women constituted a distinct legal caste: laws subordinated women to men in the family, restricted women’s access to public life, attached women’s obligations to the domestic sphere, and denied women independent personhood. Although all women have been legally inferior to free men throughout much of U.S. history, women’s inequality has not been uniform. Even today, class and race inflect gender inequality. For example, middle-class white women fare better under rape laws than do women of color, and het­ erosexual women are recognized under family law while lesbians are not. During the first half of the nineteenth century, married women could not own property. However, not all women could even marry; enslaved women could not enter legally recognized marriages—they also could not own property because they were themselves prop­ erty. Nor were the marriages of all free women honored under law: into the 1950s, most states prohibited marriages between whites and nonCaucasians; sixteen states did so until 1967 (Lov­ ing v. Virginia). Meanwhile, under nativist im­ migration laws of the early twentieth century, U.S.-born women who married foreign nationals lost their citizenship. So did American women who married “aliens ineligible to citizenship” —a status inflicted on Asian immigrants until mid­ twentieth-century naturalization reforms. The original Constitution did not speak of women at all, leaving it to the states to prescribe and adjudicate gender relations. The states accu­ mulated this power from the Tenth Amendment. Its “reserve clause” gave authority to the states over matters not specifically assigned to the fed­ eral government. The claim of “states’ rights” flows from the Tenth Amendment, which also permitted states to order communities through property law (including slave law), family law, and criminal law, as well as through electoral law that deprived women of suffrage. Hence, women’s specific legal disadvantages depended on where they resided. Only Native American women were excepted from the absolute rule of states’ rights —

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but only because their tribes were the objects of both federal and local terror and because their sta­ tus was mediated by tribal governments and fed­ eral Indian laws. Although gender-based laws varied across states, the English common law supplied many basic principles for civil codes. The most signi­ ficant inheritance from the common law for women was the concept o f coverture, in which married women were held to be represented in civil affairs by their husbands. Coverture assumed “spousal unity,” meaning that legally, partners in marriage became united in the husband: wives could not execute wills, enter into contracts, or control their own wages. During the 1830s and 1840s state legislatures be­ gan to chip away at the fiction of marital unity. Wives were permitted to be property holders in some states. However, especially in southern states, reformed property laws were not designed to give wives proprietary independence but rather to protect family property—especially slaves— from creditors. Reforms in northern states did give married women some redress but did not yield an inexorable flow o f rights to women. Early victories remained incomplete and the federal govern­ ment reinforced the subordination of women un­ der state laws with constitutional principles. Latenineteenth-century judicial interpretations of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments gave na­ tional legitimacy to women’s inferior legal status. The Fourteenth Amendment brought gender explicitly into the Constitution for the first time by specifically tying the number of male inhabi­ tants to the apportionment of congressional dis­ tricts in its enforcement clause. The Fourteenth Amendment also changed the constitutional ar­ rangement, giving the federal government the power to prohibit state-level actions that violated equality, liberty, and due process principles. The federal government began to nationalize some rights and curtail states’ control over social rela­ tions during the late nineteenth century. How­ ever, the rights singled out for protection by the

Supreme Court before the 1930s were the liberty and property rights of business rather than the equality and due process rights o f persons. More­ over, the Court refused to extend Fourteenth Amendment rights to women. The Fourteenth Amendment spoke o f “per­ sons” when it spoke of rights. So when she was barred from practicing law by the state of Illinois in 1869 because she was a woman, Myra Bradwell appealed to the Supreme Court to restore her vo­ cational “ privileges and immunities” of citizen­ ship. The Court rejected her claim, holding that the states retained the authority to determine who could practice law. Still more damaging, a con­ curring opinion argued that women were “ unfit” for many occupations, that they “properly” be­ longed in the domestic sphere, and that it was the right of states to regulate women’s vocational choices (Bradwell v. Illinois, 1873). The Fifteenth Amendment failed to extend the franchise to women, but it did not explicitly deny women the vote, either, for it guaranteed the right to vote to all citizens. Several suffragists attempted to exercise voting rights in the elections of 1872. Barred from voting by the state of Missouri, Vir­ ginia Minor took her case to the Supreme Court, which rejected her claim. The Court effectively formalized women’s secondary status as the law of the land. Conceding that women are citizens, the Court argued that not all citizens have the right to vote. The Court explained that the suffrage ques­ tion had been settled by state electoral laws de­ priving women o f the ballot; notwithstanding the Fifteenth Amendment, national citizenship did not necessarily confer the right of suffrage, and states retained the power to withhold voting rights from women. The Court’s refusal to extend Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment rights to women anchored the prevailing “separate spheres” gender ideology in constitutional jurisprudence, reserved national citizenship for men, and fixed women’s citizen­ ship at the state level. The Court reasserted its view of women’s different and lesser citizenship in

LE G A L STATUS

1908. M uller v. Oregon involved a state labor pol­ icy limiting the length of women’s work day to ten hours. Defending the Oregon law, the Court rea­ soned that “the physical well-being of women” is “an object of public interest” and that woman “ is properly placed in a class by herself.” Validating Oregon’s power to regulate women’s working con­ ditions in the name of motherhood, this decision subjected women to a separate system of labor law and reserved the fundamental, national contract rights announced by the Court three years earlier (Lochner v. New York) to men. Women remained the wards of state gov­ ernments for the next seventy years. Women did win one national right of citizenship with the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted them suffrage (1920). However, racial laws and practices in southern states deprived African American women of access to the ballot box. Equally important, the Nineteenth Amend­ ment theoretically conferred formal political citi­ zenship on women, but it did not guarantee women formal political equality. For example, jury rights and obligations contained in the Sixth Amendment continued to be withheld from women in many states until 1976 (Billy Taylor v. Louisiana). As recently as 1961 the Supreme Court upheld a Florida statute exempting women from jury duty unless they explicitly volunteered (Hoyt v. Florida). Federal deference to the states made onerous the work of improving women’s legal status. Patri­ archal biases had to be challenged on a stateby-state basis either through new legislation or through amendments to state constitutions. Even in states that improved women’s legal status, women’s citizenship would remain inferior to men’s because it was still fixed at the state level. Only federal legislation and constitutional recog­ nition could win full national legal equality for women. Beginning with the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the federal government began to nationalize key rights for women. The most significant legislative

initiative was the Civil Rights Act o f 1964, which included in its employment provision a ban on sex discrimination targeted at the private sector. During the 1970s legislative initiatives ended many other private sector practices—in banking, credit, and housing—that limited women’s par­ ticipation in economic life. But these statutory changes did not resolve the problem o f women’s constitutional status, and therefore did not break the patriarchal control of state governments over women’s lives. Although the national government, too, is in­ scribed with patriarchal gender ideology, the equality clause of the Fourteenth Amendment suggested a means to combat the effects o f that ideology. Once the Court revived the equal pro­ tection clause and deployed it against racist laws and practices beginning in the 1950s, feminists urged the Court to apply equality principles to women. This gave rise to two strategies: one, a re­ vived Equal Rights Amendment, which would have added a gender equality guarantee to the Constitution; and the other, litigation based on the Fourteenth Amendment, which, if successful, would extend the equal protection clause to women. Either strategy would open the way to contesting the myriad state laws that treated women differently from men. As the E RA movement mobilized to amend the Constitution during the 1970s, feminist lawyers — most notably future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—brought cases before the Supreme Court claiming rights for women on equal protection grounds. Although the ERA was never ratified, litigation secured several path­ breaking decisions that reverberated across lower courts and legislatures to change many laws that harmed women. By the late 1970s the Court had announced new constitutional principles to bring gender discrimination by federal and state gov­ ernments under equal protection scrutiny (Reed v. Reed, Frontiero v. Richardson, Craig v. Boren). As a result, for example, women can now manage estates and cannot be excluded from governmen-

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tal jobs merely because they are women. Still, the Court has never read the Fourteenth Amendment to forbid all sex-based classifications. Meanwhile, state laws and practices continue to govern impor­ tant aspects of women’s lives, such as who may be sexually intimate, who may marry, and who may raise children, as well as whose rape “matters” and how it will be prosecuted. The Court has often declined to find discrimi­ nation in laws it explains by “real differences” (linked to biology) rather than by stereotypes (based on social roles). It also has not understood that women experience inequality differently, sometimes uniquely, depending on race, culture, class, or sexuality. Generally, the Court notices discrimination only when it affects (or could af­ fect) all women. Thus, it has been difficult to se­ cure judicial redress for practices that harm dis­ tinct groups of women —Black women, Latinas, Asian women, and lesbians—who endure differ­ ential treatment based on stereotypes and biases against them as simultaneously raced, sexualized, and gendered people. If Fourteenth Amendment litigation won con­ stitutional standing for gender equality claims, that standing is precarious. Although even the conservative Court remains suspicious of laws that single out women for distinctive treatment be­ cause they are women, it is less suspicious o f neu­ tral practices that have unequal gender effects (Personnel Administrator o f Mass. v. Feeney, 1979). The Court also refuses to see that if women’s rights are to have real meaning, they must be available to all women. Hence, even though it now understands the connection between repro­ ductive choices and gender equality (Planned Par­ enthood o f Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 1992), it sus­ tains policies that restrict many women’s exercise of those choices. For example, the Court upheld the Hyde Amendment’s ban on most Medicaid fi­ nancing for abortion (Flarris v. M cRae, 1980), sus­ tained parental notification requirements (Hodgson v. Minnesota, 1990), and permitted waiting periods and mandatory counseling (Casey).

Where the meaning of the Fourteenth Amend­ ment is at issue, the Court has the last word. Nei­ ther Congress nor the president can direct the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution. Nor, had the ER A prevailed, would it have yielded pre­ dictable and secure outcomes, as the Court would have adjudicated its meaning in relevant cases. Statutory innovations, although subject to judicial review, can give firmer guidance to the Court about how the legal aspects o f gender relations should proceed. Well-defined legislation can rein in judicial discretion; Congress and the president can correct the judicial misapplication of statutes by amending them; and federal laws can counter the prerogatives of states. Thus, for example, the Congress enacted the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978 to check the Court’s unwillingness to extend to pregnant women workers the protection o f employment discrimination law. So too did Congress amend the Civil Rights Act in 1991 to re­ verse the Court’s erosion of antidiscrimination principles during the 1980s. Further, the Con­ gress enacted the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, offering incentives to states to take rape and domestic violence and their effects more seri­ ously. But just as the point of view of judges guides their decisions affecting women, the point of view o f elected officials determines their willingness to legislate gender equality: a conservative Congress can undo many of the legislated improvements in women’s legal status. The 1970s supplied women with legal weap­ ons to combat discrimination. So, even though women are still subordinated by the law and though the law still tolerates society’s subordina­ tion of women, the law also now supplies tools for helping women. Women’s legal agenda remains full: reproduc­ tive choices—both to control and to enjoy fertil­ ity—are not available to all women; poor women and women o f color are burdened by economic and welfare policies that deprive them of options, opportunities, and dignity; pregnant women are often subject to invasive scrutiny and regulation

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when they come into contact with criminal jus­ tice systems; raped or sexually harassed women are often not believed, especially when they are women of color; welfare laws intervene in wom­ en’s intimate relationships, requiring recipients to identify their children’s father; custody and adop­ tion laws in most states measure a parent’s fitness by her sexual orientation. We are each differently positioned in the law, but the promise of equality still commonly eludes us. ■ GW EN D O LYN M IN K S e e ALSO Citizenship; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Con­ stitution; Coverture; Equal Credit Opportunity Act; Equal Pay Act; Equal Rights Amendment (ERA); Muller v. Oregon; Roe v. Wade; Title VII.

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the world dedicated to the history of lesbians. C o­ founders Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel were joined by Judith Schwarz in 1978 who, along with a coordinating committee and countless volun­ teers, work to collect, maintain, and preserve over ten thousand books, twelve thousand photo­ graphs, two hundred special collections, fourteen hundred periodical titles, one thousand organiza­ tional and subject files, film, video, art and arti­ facts, musical scores, records and tapes, posters, Tshirts, buttons, and personal memorabilia. The LH A is a library and research center, museum, and cultural center. All women are welcome to use the collections at no charge, with the promise that the archives will never be sold or become a part of either a public or private mainstream insti­ tution. As Joan Nestle confirms on a videotape distributed to raise monies for the current build­ ing, “The Archives transform a people’s secret into a people’s herstory, which is for us a life-sav­ ing act o f self-inheritance.” ■ JA N IC E L . D EW EY

S e e Congress. See

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Lesbian Herstory Archives

he Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) was founded in New York City in 1974 and since 1993 is housed in a three-story townhouse in Brooklyn’s Park Slope district. The LHA is part of a grassroots lesbian and gay history movement and was one of its earliest manifestations. The LHA is defined on its newsletter masthead as archives that exist “to gather and preserve records of lesbian lives and activities so that future gener­ ations of lesbians will have ready access to materi­ als relevant to their lives. The process of gathering this material will also serve to uncover and collect our herstory. These materials will enable us to an­ alyze and re-evaluate the Lesbian experience.” The LH A is the oldest and largest archives in

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Lesbians.

§ Lesbianism hroughout history some women have engaged in sexual acts with other women and/or de­ sired other women, but only since the late nine­ teenth century have such women been catego­ rized as a distinct type of person, a lesbian, by virtue of their sexual interests. The evidence sug­ gests that emotional/sexual life has taken various forms in different periods of history and in differ­ ent cultures. For example, in some societies women have erotic relationships with other women while living a married life with men. Such women are not labeled as lesbian or differ­ ent. Their desire is accepted as part of the normal range of human intimacy. It is not easy to define

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who is a lesbian or what is lesbianism or to deter­ mine its etiology. Whether there is a biological determinant to lesbianism is fiercely debated by scholars. Those who assume the constants in all historical mani­ festations of woman’s desire for another woman, tracing them to biology or nature, are called essentialists, while those who see the dissimilarities in cultural forms of lesbianism and heterosexual­ ity are called social constructionists. Like all de­ bates between nature and nurture the two are not mutually exclusive. Information on sex or desire between women in the colonial period of North America is scant. The traditions of Native American nations were at­ tacked and disrupted by colonization and are be­ ing reclaimed by Native Americans in the late twentieth century. Paula Gunn Allen suggests that Native society had at least two types of relationships between women, neither of which was stigma­ tized. One was spirit-directed in the sense that a woman was summoned by the spirits to take on a male role. She also may have developed relation­ ships with women; however, she was characterized as different not on the basis of her sexual relation­ ships but on her spiritual powers. The other form of lesbianism grew out of the deep attachments that self-reliant women developed with one another. In many instances, such relationships did not inter­ fere with heterosexual marriages. Among European settlers, colonial court cases indicate that some women had sexual relations with other women. The evidence suggests that such women were not labeled as distinct kinds of people because of their sexual interests, but rather as sinners, along with all other sinners who could not control their appetites. Women’s sexual rela­ tions with women were not classed as sodomy and therefore not punishable by death. The serious breach of conduct occurred in challenging wom­ en’s appropriate role in marriage and procrea­ tion. Such transgression might, in the extreme, lead to a trial for heresy, which was a crime pun­ ishable by death.

Throughout U.S. history some women have passed as men, particularly to join the army. Ac­ cording to Jonathan Katz, in nineteenth-century United States an increasing number of women did so to improve their lives in a gender-polarized society that prevented women from adequately supporting themselves outside of marriage. Some “passing” women developed sexual and emo­ tional intimacy with other women, and in a few cases they even married women. In no case did “passing” women see themselves as a distinct kind of person, nor did they congregate together. Many, such as Murray Hall, were not discovered to be women until their death. Some were discov­ ered during their lifetime —Milton B. Matson, Cora Anderson —and were not criticized for be­ ing deviant sexually but for transgressing gender roles and taking on male privilege. Intense romantic friendship developed be­ tween middle-class women in the homosocial en­ vironments created by the gendered division be­ tween home and work in the nineteenth century. Marriage did not disrupt these ties because hus­ band and wife spent little time together. We know o f these friendships from the passionate letters friends and family members wrote to one another as analyzed by the historian Caroll Smith-Rosenberg. In most cases female friends did not eschew marriage and live with one another. History shows that similar romantic friendships existed in Eu­ rope from the sixteenth century on. The preva­ lence of romantic friendship among women raises questions about what lesbianism is. Al­ though these relationships were unquestionably intimate and erotic, were the romantic friend­ ships genital as well? Do relationships have to be genital to be lesbian? The period between 1880 and 1920 was one of significant transition in sexual relations in the United States. The early women’s movement had made it possible for women to hold jobs and act autonomously. The developing consumer society promoted sexual pleasure and leisure to sell prod­ ucts and created a culture that separated sex from

L E SBIA N ISM

reproduction and valued the pursuit of sexual in­ terests. Intellectuals of this period also made sex basic to their interpretive and artistic frameworks, as exemplified by Freud’s claim that erotic inter­ est was central to a person’s being. At that time the cultural categories of heterosexuality and homo­ sexuality were born in the United States, and soon came to name particular kinds of people accord­ ing to their sexual dispositions. In this context women’s emotional/sexual lives were transformed. In large industrial centers, many European American working-class families “lost control” o f their daughters’ sexuality. After work and on weekends, working girls adorned themselves for fun in dance halls, movie houses, and amusement parks. Their social life created the prototype for twentieth-century heterosexual dating. Some bourgeois European American women also pursued sexual independence, aim­ ing to form enduring, close, intimate sexual rela­ tionships with men. Th e popular image of this new woman was the flapper. Many of these sexu­ ally radical women were part o f the bohemian movement in Greenwich Village, New York. Some of these “sex-radical” women continued the nineteenth-century tradition of friendships among women as well, while others, particularly in the 1920s, took on the designation of “bisex­ ual” through entering physical relationships with women and men. Certain “new women,” as the European Amer­ ican bourgeois women were known, chose not to marry. They developed strong supportive com­ munities of women defined by work, politics, or school. Their relationships with women were in­ tensely passionate but not consciously sexual. Some women lived together for life in what were called Boston marriages. These independent women, such as Mary Woolley, president of Mt. Holyoke College, or Jane Addams, the famous set­ tlement-house worker, did not label themselves and were not labeled by society as lesbian or de­ viant because of their emotional attachments with other women. They saw themselves as women

who lived outside of marriage, not as women who had a different form of sexuality. Because of the stigmatization of lesbianism in the later twentieth century, biographers and historians have over­ looked or in some cases even hidden these women’s deep attachments to other women. The lack of economic resources in the African American community as a result of slavery and Reconstruction, combined with white society’s stigmatization of African American women as sex­ ually loose, made marriage and moral character important to African American women at the turn of the century. They already carried the burden of proving the respectability of their race. Neverthe­ less bourgeois African American women who were respectably married also developed deep at­ tachments to other women in the context of their civic work. Alice Dunbar-Nelson, for instance, recorded in her diary several significant romantic/erotic attachments with women with whom she worked in the Black Women’s C lub Move­ ment. Another manifestation of the “ new woman” was the mannish lesbian, a woman who took on masculine attributes in part to break through the Victorian assumption of the sexless nature of women. She became the “ modern” lesbian in that she identified herself as “different” because of her erotic, sexual interest in women. In literature she is immortalized by Stephen Gordon in Radcliffe Hall’s The Well o f Loneliness, and in the blues, by Lucille Bogan’s “ B.D. [bull dagger] Women Blues.” The masculine lesbian was stig­ matized as abnormal both by the medical profes­ sion and by popular culture. Her difference often led her to look for others like herself. She was key in building working-class lesbian communities in most racial/ethnic groups in the United States. The meaning o f lesbian and lesbianism has changed quite dramatically during the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth and early twenti­ eth century the mark of a lesbian was gender in­ version, that is, a woman who had male inclina­ tions for dress and behavior and an interest in

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women. Feminine women of the time who were interested in “masculine” women were not con­ sidered lesbians. Gender was such a powerful de­ terminant of behavior that they were considered normal by most sexologists because of their femi­ nine attraction for a more masculine being, or in some cases they were defined as bisexual. In the first half of the twentieth century there was a grad­ ual and uneven shift in the definition of lesbian­ ism, from gender inversion to object choice, that is, to the idea that a homosexual is a person who is attracted to someone of the same sex. By the 1950s Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female unequivocally assumed homosexuality to be a sex­ ual relationship between people of the same sex. Buoyed by a new understanding of women’s oppression, lesbian feminists o f the late 1970s attempted to redefine lesbianism. Their new def­ inition emphasized passionate and loving con­ nections over specifically sexual relationships and explicitly separated lesbian history from gay male history. Adrienne Rich established a “les­ bian continuum” that included woman-identified resistance to patriarchal oppression throughout history. The lesbian, thus understood, transcends time periods and cultures in her common links to all women who have dared to affirm themselves as activists, warriors, or passionate friends. The place of sexuality in this construction was not specified. In the 1980s a feminist, sex-radical position reemerged that validated sex as a source of plea­ sure as well as danger for women and identified sexuality as central to women’s entrance into modernity. Those who have adopted this theory interpret the masculine lesbians of the turn of the century and the working-class butch-femme les­ bians of the midcentury as key players in having shaped lesbian consciousness and identity, which eventually made lesbian feminism and gay libera­ tion possible. In the late twentieth century some scholars and activists have taken this position to its extreme and linked women’s sexual history com­ pletely with men’s, categorizing lesbians, gay men, and all other outsiders to heterosexual

norms as “ queer.” The study of lesbianism has yet to settle upon a single appropriate framework that acknowledges women’s repression by male supremacy and at the same time recognizes wom­ en’s agency in expanding and controlling their own lives. Harry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993); Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestizo (San Francisco: Spinster’s/ Aunt Lute, 1987); Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Hidden from History: Re­ claiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: New American Library, 1989). > E L IZ A B E T H LAPO V SK Y K EN N ED Y S e e ALSO Lesbians; Sexuality.

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Lesbian Organizations

he first lesbian organization in the United States, the Daughters of Bilitis (DO B), was founded in San Francisco in 1955 as an alternative to the multiracial, predominantly working-class world of the bars. The very existence of lesbian or­ ganizations depended on the growth of a lesbian subculture, which had taken root during the Sec­ ond World War. D OB originated as a social group and developed into a primarily white and middleclass political organization devoted to winning acceptance within U.S. society. By sponsoring discussion groups, publishing a magazine, The Ladder, and supporting research on lesbians, D O B sought to show that what they called the “sex variant” was no different from anyone else ex­ cept in the choice of a sex partner. D O B, like the mixed-gender but mostly male Mattachine Soci­ ety, and O N E , Incorporated —the other major or­ ganizations that composed what was known as the homophile movement—took a cautious ap­ proach to political organizing. D O B was never

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able to mobilize large numbers of women in the hostile climate of the 1950s. T he resurgence of the women’s movement and the flowering of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s created a radically transformed con­ text for lesbian organizations. Although D OB be­ came increasingly feminist and responded to the new militance of the 1960s, by the 1970s white, middle-class lesbians flocked instead either to women’s movement organizations, where they were welcome as women but often invisible as les­ bians, or to the burgeoning gay movement, where they often found themselves subordinated to men and male interests. As a result lesbian feminist groups such as Radicalesbians and The Furies sprang up in the early 1970s to represent the inter­ ests of radical, militant, and young white lesbians. These new lesbian organizations shared politi­ cal perspectives and tactics with the radical or women’s liberation branch of the women’s move­ ment and embraced consciousness raising and dramatic “zap actions” designed to expose prac­ tices oppressive to lesbians. In one of the most fa­ mous actions, lesbian participants in the 1970 Congress to Unite Women in New York reacted to National Organization for Women founder Betty Friedan’s characterization of lesbianism as a “lavender m enace” by taking over the stage, bar­ ing their Lavender Menace T-shirts, and artic­ ulating their demands that the women’s move­ ment affirm lesbians and accept the notion that “Women’s Liberation is a lesbian plot.” By this they meant that lesbianism, redefined as a politi­ cal choice to be “woman-identified,” was central to feminism. As more women came out within the predomi­ nantly white radical branch of the women’s move­ ment, by the 1980s groups comprised primarily of lesbians formed in a variety of communities, in­ cluding small towns with major colleges and uni­ versities. These local lesbian organizations in­ cluded groups organized to support women coming out, to fight rape and domestic violence, to publish newspapers and books, to record and

distribute women’s music, to support women in recovery from substance abuse, to explore wom­ en’s spirituality, and to run restaurants, coffee houses, and other women’s businesses. Groups such as the Lesbian Mothers National Defense Fund, founded in 1974, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which originated in 1977 as the Lesbian Rights Project, fought for ba­ sic civil rights for lesbians. The National Organi­ zation for Women, which had played such a cru­ cial, if negative, role in the emergence of the early radical groups, became increasingly supportive of lesbian rights in the 1970s and by the 1990s had earned the designation of a “gay front group.” In different lesbian organizations, criticism of the dominance of white and middle-class individ­ uals and values evolved with increasing urgency by the late 1970s. Sparked by criticism from women of color, working-class women, and Jew­ ish women, primarily white, middle-class lesbian organizations attempted to confront their racist, elitist, and other exclusionary attitudes and prac­ tices. By recognizing the theoretical linkages among different forms of oppression, expanding “women’s culture” beyond its original white and middle-class character, and addressing issues of access for women with disabilities, lesbian organi­ zations struggled, not always successfully, to shed their own oppressive ideologies and procedures. At the same time, new organizations represent­ ing diverse constituencies formed, including the Combahee River Collective (1974), Senior Action in a G ay Environment (1977), the National Coali­ tion of Black Lesbians and Gays (1978), African American Lesbian and Gay Alliance (1986), Edu­ cation in a Disabled Gay Environment (1986), and the National Latino/a Lesbian and G ay Orga­ nization (1987). In the 1980s and 1990s, the outbreak of A ID S and frustration over the conservative political tide gave birth to direct-action groups that engaged in what came to be known as “ in-your-face” tactics. ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), founded in 1987, consists o f largely autonomous

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local chapters that engage in “ die-ins,” in which members lie down in the streets to represent those who have died of A ID S, and other dramatic con­ frontations designed to call attention to the AID S crisis. In 1990 members o f New York’s ACT-UP chapter formed Queer Nation; local Queer Na­ tion groups staged “kiss-ins,” plastered neighbor­ hoods with confrontational stickers, and advo­ cated a strategy of physical response to violence against lesbians and gay men, billed as “Queers Bash Back.” Women members of the male-domi­ nated ACT-UP and Queer Nation formed sepa­ rate women's caucuses. Along the same lines, the Lesbian Avengers formed in New York in 1992 and committed themselves to “creative activism: loud, bold, sexy, silly, fierce, tasty and dramatic,” ac­ cording to their 1993 “ Dyke Manifesto.” In their first action, they marched into a Queens, N.Y., school and handed first graders lavender balloons inscribed with the words “Ask about Lesbian Lives” to protest the board’s refusal to allow a mul­ ticultural curriculum that included discussion of lesbians and gay men. Lesbian Avengers groups quickly popped up around the world. Through forty years of history, lesbian organiza­ tions have ranged from mainstream to radical, moderate to militant, national to local, general to special interest, and they have grown out of and worked in conjunction with both the women’s movement and the gay and lesbian movement. Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967—1975 (Minneapolis: University of Min­ nesota Press, 1989); Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twi­ light Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Cen­ tury America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp, “Women’s Culture and Lesbian Feminist Activism: A Reconsideration of Cultural Feminism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (Autumn 1993): 32—61. « V ERTA TAYLOR and L E I L A J. RUPP S e e a l s o Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Organizations; Gay Women’s Alternative; Lesbian Herstory Archives; National Center for Lesbian Rights.

s Lesbians \ T e are everywhere” was a popular slogan T T used by lesbians to boost pride and chal­ lenge invisibility at 1970s marches. Research has since confirmed that indeed lesbians are om­ nipresent in the twentieth-century United States. Women who had sexual relations with other women and/or had masculine interests and incli­ nations have been called lesbians or female homo­ sexuals in the medical literature since the late nineteenth century; however, different class and ethnic/racial cultures also have developed their own terms: for example, butch, fem, stud, gay girls, bull dagger, dyke, koskalaka, entendida, loca, marimacha. Since, for most cultures, except Native American ones, women loving women was an anathema, many of these terms are derogatory. As part of the process of claiming power, lesbians have positively redefined many o f these epithets. In the early twentieth century, lesbian commu­ nities existed in the major metropolitan centers of Western culture, including New York, Chicago, Paris, and Berlin. These communities primarily formed around bars, salons, and/or house parties. For most of the twentieth century, bars were the only public places where lesbians could congre­ gate. Stigmatized as degenerates, the women met in the seedier parts of towns, where other “ sexual deviants” such as gay men and prostitutes (many of whom were lesbians) were also welcome. Despite the difficulties, lesbians attained some visibility in U.S. culture. Expatriate U.S. writers and artists in Paris, such as Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein, and Margaret Anderson, explored in their lives and art what it meant to be erotically attracted to women and began to develop a les­ bian consciousness. During the Harlem Renais­ sance—1920 to 1935—Black artists and workingclass Black lesbians and gay men socialized at house parties, speakeasies, drag balls, and enter­ tainment clubs. The relative visibility of lesbians in Black culture at the time is indicated by refer­ ences to them in popular blues songs.

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“The Darned C lu b,” by lesbian photographer E. Alice Austen, October 29,1891.

In the 1930s lesbians had less of a public pres­ ence than in the Roaring Twenties. Most lesbians lived private lives; however, they were no longer limited to metropolitan centers. Lesbians were now in small cities and towns throughout the country. In rural western New York a group of les­ bian friends socialized together on weekends. In the world of women’s sports during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, lesbians formed hidden net­ works. World War II had profound effects on lesbians. Increasing numbers risked socializing in bars and house parties, for a variety of reasons. First, more work was available to women, affording them more opportunities for independence. Second, the Women’s Army Corps openly discussed the undesirability of lesbians in the armed services, making lesbians a common subject of conversa­

tion. Third, and by far the most important reason, was the absence of men on the home front, mak­ ing it easier for women to socialize together in public. Risking exposure, lesbians in the bars and at house parties served as a beacon for those mi­ grating to cities from rural America. But there were many others who continued to live dis­ creetly. They could not take the risk of associating publicly with other lesbians because they antici­ pated negative repercussions at work, within the family, or in their neighborhoods. The thriving public communities in bars and house parties were primarily working class and racially segregated. They were characterized by butch-fem culture in which the butch projected the masculine image of her particular time pe­ riod—at least regarding dress and mannerisms— and the fern, the feminine image. Almost all mem-

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bers of the culture were exclusively one or the other. Although on the surface butch-fem roles ap­ pear to be simply an imitation of heterosexual roles, in fact they have been transformed by les­ bians into a method for resisting oppression. Be­ fore the gay liberation movement, the only way that lesbians could announce themselves to the public was by a butch appearance, or by the butchfem couple. Butch-fem roles not only shaped the lesbian image but also lesbian sexuality: the butch was the more active partner, the pleaser of the fern, and the fern was the more receptive partner. Despite the M cCarthy era witch-hunts of les­ bians and gays, the 1950s was a pivotal time for emerging lesbian politics. The homophile move­ ment began with the predominantly male Mattachine Society in 1951, and Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon founded the all-lesbian Daughters of Bilitis in 1955. Their primary concerns were to educate the public that lesbians and gays were no different from other people and to help homosexuals adjust to mainstream society. These groups specifically tried to dissociate themselves from bar culture. During the 1950s bar lesbians became more ex­ plicitly defiant; butches wore butch clothes in as many situations as possible and fought back when attacked. These acts of resistance, although very different from those advocated by the homophile movement, also challenged the repressive social order. Throughout the twentieth century lesbian cul­ ture has manifested a national dimension as well as marked regional and ethnic/racial variations. There is remarkable similarity among bar cultures in cities such as New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Denver, and Buffalo, and between ho­ mophile organizations in different cities as well. Yet at the same time there is unquestionably sig­ nificant regional and ethnic/racial variation in les­ bian culture. Lesbians of color document that the meaning o f lesbianism and the way it is expressed vary from culture to culture. Their lesbianism can’t be separated from their ethnic/racial identi­ ties and the ongoing reality of racism affects their experience of lesbianism. Southerners argue that

their lesbian culture is different from that of the Northeast or the West on the basis of religion, race, and the proportion of rural inhabitants. During the 1960s lesbians increased their pub­ lic presence either through participation in bar culture or in homophile organizations. Mythol­ ogy has it that in June 1969, a butch lesbian started the Stonewall rebellion, the event that marks the beginning o f the gay liberation movement, by swinging at the police. Lesbians have been active in all the gay liberation and lesbian feminist orga­ nizing that has followed. Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History o f Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers o f Gold: The History o f Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993); Barbara Smith, ed. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table/ Women of Color Press, 1983). ■ E L I Z A B E T H LAPOVSKY K E N N E D Y S e e a l s o Lesbianism; Lesbian Organizations; Marches, Lesbian and Gay.

Asian American Lesbians he 1987 M arch on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights was a watershed event in the political history of Asian American lesbians. For those who lived outside large urban centers on the East and West coasts, where support groups such as Asian Lesbians of the East Coast (New York City) and Asian Women United (San Francisco Bay Area) had been active since the late 1970s and early 1980s, the moment was especially poignant and empowering because it was the first time that they met other women like themselves; their isolation was lifted forever. T he following year, aided by a grant from the M arch on Washington Committee, the Asian Pacific Lesbian Network (APLN) was formed. In 1989 A PLN organized the first-ever national retreat for Asian Pacific Islander (API) lesbians, bringing together over 140 women from different

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parts of the United States and Canada. The retreat was a lesson in coalition and community building for the participants; it embodied not only the power of identity politics but also the dangerous consequence of ignoring difference within com­ monality. Many participants voiced their anger at their marginalization by organizers of the retreat. Recalling her experience at the retreat, Ann Uri Uyeda wrote, “In essence, we created ourselves as queer API women in a culture that otherwise would ignore or erase our contributions, identities, and our very presence. We were also angry. Women who felt excluded—bisexuals, those from Canada and Hawaii, foreign-born and immigrant, South Asian, those with mixed heritage—said so.” This struggle was perhaps inevitable, given the invisibility of bisexual women within the lesbian community and the convention of lumping all Asians in this country together into one undiffer­ entiated group, thus denying the diverse histories and experiences of “Asia” and “Asians.” This twin historical burden took time to shed, and it was only in 1993, at a West Coast retreat, that Asian Pa­ cific Lesbian Network was renamed Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women’s Network. At the same retreat, women of native Hawaiian descent and their allies challenged par­ ticipants to reexamine and reaffirm their com­ mitment to the struggles of “ Pacific Islanders” and educated them about the realities of coalition politics. In the words of J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Ju Hui “Judy” Han, “ ‘A PI’ must be based on coali­ tion politics, not identity politics.. . . We must re­ open, redefine, and continuously question the boundaries of ‘Asian Pacific Islander’ because a coalition is a temporary unity. And ‘A PI’ can work only as a coalition.” The issue of marginalization is not strange to Asian and Pacific Islander lesbians and bisexual women because of their experience with the larger lesbian community'. As Jee Yeun Lee, a graduate student, put it bluntly, “ [We] often find ourselves marginalized, tokenized, and/or exoticized. .. . When white women make a serious ef­ fort to work through issues of racism and cultural

sensitivity, it is usually a precarious balancing act between inclusion and tokenism.” Insensitivity to racism and ethnocentrism in the gay and lesbian community allowed Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a national lesbian and gay rights organization, and the New York City-based Les­ bian and Gay Community Services Center to choose Miss Saigon, a racist and misogynist Broadway musical, for their fundraiser in 1991. When members of Asian Lesbians of the East Coast and Gay Asian and Pacific Islander M en of New York and their allies protested the choice and urged the two organizations to drop Miss Saigon, the Community Services Center canceled their fundraiser, but Lambda Legal Defense and Edu­ cation Fund did not. T he struggle against Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund over Miss Saigon mobilized antiracist lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men around the twin issues of Orientalism and sexism. In speeches and press releases, protesters educated the public about the insidious tradition of Orien­ talist representations of Asian women in operas such as M adame Butterfly, in films such as The World o f Suzie Wong, and in other Broadway mu­ sicals. On April 11,19 9 1, a second protest was orga­ nized against the official opening of Miss Saigon. This time, API lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men organized coalitions with the larger Asian and Pa­ cific Islander community. Given the commercial success of Miss Saigon and the continued indifference of Broadway and Hollywood producers to the issues raised by the protesters, it is clear that the demonstration had had very little impact on American mass cultural production. On the other hand, although the sec­ ond protest was smaller than the first and attracted less attention, it was an important development because it signaled the possibility of a significant collaboration of Asians and Pacific Islanders—re­ gardless of sexual orientation—working together for a common political cause. ■ V IV IE N W. NG S ee

also

Asian Pacific Women.

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Black Lesbians ocumenting the history of Black lesbian, bi­ sexual, and transidentified women in the United States poses a particular set of challenges. The most significant is that women (and men) whose sexual orientations or sexual practices dif­ fered from mainstream heterosexuals often took great pains to hide their sexual, emotional, and so­ cial lives. The survival strategy of the closet, espe­ cially before the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, dis­ couraged visibility and the preservation of useful evidence. European Americans’ sexual exploitation and sexual stereotyping of Blacks, especially Black women, which originated in slavery, is another factor that makes the expression and revelation of same-gender desire a volatile act within the Black community. Because racist whites have viewed the range of Black sexuality as deviant and patho­ logical, some Blacks have made great efforts to censure and repress any but the most conven­ tional sexual mores and behavior. The problems of naming and definition chal­ lenge all historians of sexuality, because currently used identifiers became widespread only in the twentieth century and do not necessarily mirror how women would have conceptualized their sex­ ual orientation in earlier eras. For example, Mary Fields (18327-1914), a former slave and frontierswoman, wore men’s attire and could fight and shoot like a man. She devoted herself to working for an order of Catholic nuns in Montana and as a stagecoach driver was the second woman to drive a U.S. mail route. She is sometimes included in discussions of Black lesbians because she never married and did not fit gender stereotypes, but her actual sexual orientation is not known. Despite these challenges, by the early twentieth century there are specific examples of Black women who did not conform to heterosexist ex­ pectations. The Great Migration created vital centers of Black populations in northern cities. By the 1920s, Harlem, especially, had become a focal point for Black culture, politics, and social life.

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Black gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals played im­ portant roles in the intellectual and artistic move­ ment known as the Harlem Renaissance as well as in the popular entertainments and nightlife that characterized the Jazz Age. Heiress A’Lelia Walker (1885-1931), daughter o f cosmetics mil­ lionaire Madame C . J. Walker, held salons and parties attended by major figures o f the Harlem Renaissance, many of whom were gay or bisexual. Some neighborhood clubs and speakeasies were known as places where same-gender couples could socialize and dance. Private parties and “buffet flats,” where customers paid to watch or participate in a variety of sexual exhibitions, pro­ vided settings with even more freedom for les­ bians and gay men to interact. Blues songs of the period, such as Lucille Bo­ gan’s “B. D. (bull dagger) Women Blues,” Bessie Smith’s “ Foolish Man Blues,” and Ma Rainey’s “ Prove It on M e Blues,” made specific refer­ ences to “ mannish” women who went with other women. These songs indicate that lesbians and gay men were a visible part o f the urban Black scene. Gladys Bentley (1907-60), one of the most popular entertainers o f the period, dressed in men’s suits both on and off stage and married another woman in a well-publicized ceremony. The playwright, poet, and teacher Angelina Weld Grimke (1880-1958) wrote love poems to women which were never published. Writer and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875— 1935) documented her relationships with women as well as men in her diaries written from 1921 to 1931. Although most Black lesbians during the first half o f the twentieth century were not public fig­ ures, oral histories confirm that Black lesbians formed their own social networks in which house parties played a vital role; established families with partners and friends; sometimes raised chil­ dren; maintained ties with their birth families; and actively participated in the civic and social life of Black communities. Since the growth of lesbian and gay liberation in the early 1970s, Black lesbian lives have be-

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Marchers for lesbian and gay rights demonstrate in Washington, D .C ., 1979. PoetAudre horde (center, wearing hat) helps hold the banner.

come much more visible and Black lesbians have made significant contributions to the lesbian, gay, women’s, and Black feminist movements. Black lesbians were among the first African American women to critique the sexual oppression of Black women. They played major roles in building Black feminist organizations in the early 1970s such as the National Black Feminist Organization and Boston’s Combahee River Collective. Black lesbian organizations also formed during this pe­ riod, most notably New York’s Salsa Soul Sisters (now African Ancestral Lesbians United for Soci­ etal Change), the oldest ongoing Black lesbian group in the United States. Black lesbian feminist writers and activists have done crucial work to challenge Black les­ bians’ isolation and to build community. Authors Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, Cheryl Clarke, Jewelle Gomez, and Barbara Smith, and organizers Tania Abdulahad, Mandy Carter, Pat Hussain, and

Kathleen Saadat, among others, have done groundbreaking work to make links among multi­ ple oppressions and to bring together various con­ stituencies to struggle for progressive political and economic change. In the 1990s, however, many Black lesbians still do not come out for fear of the very real homophobic reprisals they might face. Ironically, the pseudo-Christian right wing has targeted homophobic hate campaigns at churchgoing Blacks and other people of color, communities they pre­ viously had attacked. The mainstream whitedominated gay movement has been ill equipped to counter the Right’s race-specific attacks. The closet, especially in the case of Black women who are highly visible public figures, continues to hamper historical accuracy. Nevertheless, more research is being done in this challenging and ex­ citing field. . BARBARA SM ITH

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European American Lesbians he history of European American lesbians is many histories, united by the privilege of race but divided by class and region. The result is a past whose shape is far from being defined, but whose boundaries have overlapped with the history of heterosexual and bisexual women, other Euro­ pean Americans, working-class people, gay men, lesbians o f color, and others. In colonial America females brought to trial for sexual acts with other women received punish­ ment far less harsh than did men under similar circumstances, who were regularly sentenced to death. Lesbian behavior was prosecuted under laws forbidding adultery and sex outside marriage. Women o f the servant class reportedly received harsher penalties—beating and fines—than did women of higher status, who were made to ac­ knowledge their transgressions publicly. During the Victorian era middle-class women gained increased freedom in expressing romantic devotion to other women. As the century ended, relationships between “romantic friends” were in­ stitutionalized and formed the basis for political networks and close-knit female communities. Were these relationships sexual and therefore “lesbian” as it would come to be defined (and pathologized) by doctors and later defended by a political movement? This question has been de­ bated by historians. Though these women may or may not have been sexual with each other, they lived openly as partners. Working-class white women of the nineteenth century faced other choices. What contemporary society would call “lesbian” behavior was ex­ hibited through the phenomenon of the “pass­ ing” or “crossing” woman. Numerous workingclass white women and women of color chose to pass as men; for some, their gender was discov­ ered only upon death. They tried to obtain bet­ ter-paying jobs, to serve in the military, to vote, to travel safely, and, undoubtedly, to marry other women. Their actions challenged the under­

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standing of gender and sexuality at the time. As the emerging field of sexology began to de­ scribe lesbians, pathologizing theories of gender and sexuality emerged. Thepunishmentforfemale or male “homosexual behavior” shifted from pris­ ons to mental institutions. Thestigma of illness and depravity affected European American lesbians re­ gardless of their economic and social status. World War II was a turning point for white les­ bians. The war provided job opportunities for sin­ gle, self-supporting women. The sex segregation of the war and the first women’s branches of the military provided environments where lesbians could meet. Lesbians developed institutions and norms that weathered cultural emphasis on strict gender roles and traditional family life that began during the cold war era. Lesbian bars appeared in urban areas and near military bases. The Daugh­ ters of Bilitis, the first lesbian organization, formed in 1955, reflected the class and race of its middle-class white founders just as the bars re­ flected their working-women clientele. T he women’s movement of the 1960s and the gay liberation movement of the early 1970s greatly catalyzed European American lesbians to orga­ nize. By the early 1980s communities of lesbians, some inspired by back-to-the-land and separatist beliefs, developed lesbian-feminist politics. These communities nurtured a culture with its own mu­ sic, art, publications, and other institutions dedi­ cated to living outside a patriarchal, capitalist so­ ciety. Splits within the lesbian-feminist movement around class, race, and sexual politics, along with the difficulty of creating an entirely woman-cen­ tered society, caused the movement to wane in the mid-1980s. Lesbians of color were the most vo­ cal critics of this movement. They pointed to the reluctance of the movement to address, or to rec­ ognize, the racial privilege enjoyed by white women. They also criticized the basic tenets of lesbian feminism, especially separatism. Never­ theless, many lesbian-feminist communities still thrive. A new wave of lesbians, including young

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women who became activists as a result of the AIDS crisis, challenged this vision and reclaimed their ties with gay men and the butch-femme roles of the earlier lesbian bars, both of which had been rejected by lesbian feminists. Media exposure increased in the 1990s. Some was sympathetic; some was part of a right-wing on­ slaught against homosexuals. Rising numbers of women lived openly lesbian lives. The question remains: W ill the movement bridge the gap be­ tween those who have been its chief beneficia­ ries—educated, white, middle-class, urban les­ bians and gay m en—and those whose lives more closely resemble those of their predecessors? Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A His­ tory of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (New York: Harper and Row/Colophon, 1983); Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots o f Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993). ■ R O C H E L L A TH O R PE

Jewish Lesbians Hey look at me, do you know who I am? Look at all o f me, I ’m a Jewish lesbian . . . Two hands pulling me in different directions But you cannot tear me apart I am one woman. Abbe Lyons, “Jewish Lesbian”

his song was performed at a 1982 program en­ titled “Jewish Lesbians: A Cultural Celebra­ tion,” one of many celebrations that marked the publication of Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian A n­ thology. Nice Jewish Girls was the first full-length book to document the voices and experiences of Jewish lesbians. Its publication was experienced as a profound relief, for it broke the silence of les­ bians within Jewish communities and created a space for Jewish lesbians to speak freely as Jews

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among lesbians. The title’s juxtaposition of nice Jewish girls with lesbians challenged the tradition­ ally restrictive definitions of Jewish womanhood and stimulated Jewish lesbian creativity, as evi­ denced by the publication of Tribe o f Dinah and the founding of Bridges, both of which provided significant outlets for Jewish lesbian material. Jew­ ish lesbian work is marked by its broad range of in­ terests, which is Jewish and lesbian even when not focused directly on lesbian experience. “We are not wholly like other Jews. Our experience as les­ bians makes our expression of Jewish identity dis­ tinctive, just as our experience as Jews influences our feminist visions,” wrote Faith Rogow. Although Jewish lesbians had been extremely active in the creation of all aspects of feminist (and lesbian feminist) institutions in the early years of the second wave, most were not “out” as Jews in these movements, possibly because they feared being overly visible and subject to stereo­ typing as Jews. As a result, their contributions as Jewish lesbians were often not recognized, much as lesbians’ contributions to feminism frequently have remained unnamed. For example, lesbian visibility in the Jewish community was a major theme of the Jewish Feminist Conference held in San Francisco in 1982. Although nine of the ten organizers of that conference were lesbians, in the press and in the public eye, their lesbianism was subsumed under Jewish feminism (presumed to be heterosexual). Before 1982 only a few lesbians had written as Jews in small-circulation lesbian publications, and considerably fewer had written as lesbians in Jewish publications. As a result, the pioneering work of these women did not gain recognition un­ til after the publication of Evelyn Torton Beck’s Nice Jewish Girls, a culmination o f work done in the 1970s and a beginning for grassroots organiz­ ing. New groups took names that had Jewish meanings, such as D i vilde chayes (Yiddish for “the wild beasts” ), the Balebustehs (Yiddish for “the perfect housewives” ), and D i yiddishe shvestem (Yiddish for “the Jewish sisters” ). These

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groups focused on topics ranging from Israelirelated politics, transformations of religious prac­ tices, issues of socioeconomic class, the meaning of conversion (a number of Jewish lesbians were converts to Judaism), relationships among Jewish women and women of color, and parenting chil­ dren as Jews in a lesbian feminist context. Over time, common themes have remained central to Jewish lesbian writings in all genres: foremost, the desire to be whole—to bring all the disparate parts of oneself together; to fight homo­ phobia in Jewish institutions and families; to fight anti-Semitism in lesbian communities and per­ sonal relationships; to understand the meanings of the Holocaust; to grapple with the complexity of supporting Israel’s right to exist while struggling with the painful realities of Israeli foreign and do­ mestic policies, especially the treatment and land rights of Palestinians; to recognize differences among Jews, especially between Ashkenazi Jews (of European origin) and Sephardic Jews (de­ scendants of Jews who lived in Spain or Portugal until their expulsion in 1492). The same forces that have kept lesbians hidden in Western historiography have affected their visi­ bility and inclusion in research on Jewish history, but in recent years the work of writers such as Muriel Rukeyser and Jo Sinclair (a pseudonym for Ruth Seid) has been newly understood as the work of Jewish lesbians. However, it is in the con­ temporary period that Jewish lesbian creativity has fully flowered in the arenas of poetry (Irena Klepfisz and Adrienne Rich); fiction (Elana Dykewoman, Jyl Lynn Fellman, Ruth Geller, Ju­ dith Katz, Sarah Shulman, and Nancy Toder); essays (Irena Klepfisz, Elly Bulkin, Melanie Kaye/ Kantrowitz, and Alice Bloch); films (Chicks in White Satin, When Shirley M et Florence, and Complaints o f a Dutiful Daughterj; music (Linda Shear, Alix Dobkin, and Lynn Lavner); comedy (Robin Tyler and Maxine Feldman); cultural his­ tory and the reclaiming of Yiddish (Sarah Shul­ man and Irena Klepfisz). Jewish lesbians have also been involved in political activism, organiz­

ing for the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Marches on Washington, and launching protests against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. They have reinterpreted biblical narratives and created new rituals and ceremonies. Such awareness has been central to Jewish lesbian feminist work through the 1990s. Evelyn Torton Beck, Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthol­ ogy (1982. Revised edition, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Evelyn Torton Beck, “Naming is not a Simple Act: Jewish Lesbian Community in the 1980s,” in Twice Blessed: On Being Lesbian, Gay and Jewish, 171—81. (Boston: Beacon Press); Faith Rogow, “The Rise of Jewish Lesbian Femi­ nism,” Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends, 1, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 67-79. ■ E V E L Y N TO RTON B E C K See

also

Jewish Women.

Latina Lesbians atina lesbians are those lesbians whose ances­ tors come from Latin America. In their efforts to identify themselves, Latina lesbians utilize a di­ versity of terms regarding both their ethnicity and their sexuality. Latina is a general term that in­ cludes women from the Caribbean, Central America, South America, as well as Mexican/Chicana women from both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. Women from Puerto Rico often identify not as Latinas but as Puertorriquenas (Puerto Ri­ cans). Yolanda Leyva asserts in her research that Latina lesbians refer to their sexuality in various ways depending on such variables as geography, age, economic status, and immigration status. Be­ cause of the negative stigma attached to the word “lesbian” many Latinas will use alternate terms such as amigas (friends), compaheras (compan­ ions), or tortilleras (a derogative Spanish slang term for lesbian, which is sometimes reclaimed as a positive self-identification). Historically, many races and ethnicities mixed

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in Latin America, and Latina lesbians reflect this diversity. A Latina lesbian might be light-skinned, blonde with blue eyes, as dark as her African an­ cestors, or a mixture of these, along with indige­ nous features. Latina lesbians in the United States might be fourth-generation Mexican Americans or recent refugees from Central America or Cuba, or they might be undocumented. Class differ­ ences vary from poor to working-class to well-edu­ cated entrepreneurs. Consequently, their politics vary as do their religious backgrounds. Since de­ grees of patriarchy vary from country to country as well as regions, historians must be cautious about categorizing Latinas as being “traditionally” fam­ ily-oriented or Catholic. They share the experi­ ence of being transcultural in the United States and they encounter the sexism, racism, and ho­ mophobia of not one but two cultures. History has largely neglected the subject of Latina lesbians. One might find it challenging to isolate historical texts referring specifically to Latina lesbians. Scholars such as Yolanda Retter and Yolanda Leyva are presently working on stud­ ies on the subject. With the advent of the civil rights movement, the growth of feminist research, and the increas­ ing participation of women o f color in academia, issues related to lesbians of color began to emerge in the mid- to late 1970s. As a result of the growing visibility of this population, by the mid-1980s, in­ terest and research on the subject appeared in var­ ious fields such as social work and psychology. In this period o f activism, Latina lesbians created networks and organizations such as Lesbianas Latinas Americanas (LLA) in Los Angeles, in 1978; lesbians joined Gay Latinos Unidos (GLU ) in Los Angeles, in 1984, forming the lesbian task force that became Lesbianas Unidas; Las Buenas Amigas in New York, in 1986; and Ellas of Texas; Latina Lesbianas de Tucson, in Arizona; and E l­ las en Accion in San Francisco. Members of these groups and other U.S. Latina lesbians participated in organizing on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. It is im­

portant to note that the feminism that influences these groups is from Latin America as well as the United States. In the mid-1980s lesbians from the United States and Latin America met in a series of conferences. According to Mariana RomoCarmona, the First Encuentro de Lesbianas de Latino America y E l Caribe was held in Cuer­ navaca, Mexico, in 1987. In 1990, the second En­ cuentro occurred in Costa Rica, and the third in Puerto Rico, in 1992. At these conferences, les­ bians from throughout Latin America and the United States celebrated one another, hotly de­ bated issues of class and diversity within their in­ ternational community, and held workshops on issues such as leadership and culture. In 1987, during the weekend of the second Gay and Lesbian March on Washington, activists formed the first gay, lesbian, bi, and transgender Latino/a organization, National L L E G O , head­ quartered in Washington, D .C . In 1994, L L E G O funded Latina Lesbianas de Tucson to hold the first national leadership conference, where writer Cherrie Moraga gave the keynote address. Partic­ ipants attended workshops on community orga­ nizing, spirituality, sexuality, lesbian health, cre­ ative writing, and continued establishing national networks. These organizations exist to promote positive images of Latina lesbians and to provide cultur­ ally affirming environments. They have funded projects and events toward this objective. The groups have participated in local and national marches, organized workshops, conferences, rap or support sessions, held retreats, and published newsletters. As a result, Latina lesbian organiza­ tions have created vehicles for their members to be politically active in their communities. They have developed relationships with many politi­ cians and educated them to recognize issues of homophobia, sexism, and racism in society. As a result, some politicians now advocate on their be­ half at the local, state, and federal levels. Individ­ uals and groups have participated in policy­ making and service delivery on A ID S issues and

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Latina lesbians have been involved in the area of immigration policy for persons with AID S. They have also worked in coalition with non-gay-specific Latino organizations and issues, such as im­ migrant rights, labor, human rights, education, and housing. Researchers in this subject area need to look in a variety of sources including and beyond the field of history. Resources for primary documents can be found in the lesbian archives in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tucson, and New York. Located at the Latina Lesbian Archive in Tucson, historian Yolanda Leyva has compiled numerous inter­ views with Latina lesbians from throughout the United States. Leyva’s interviews include wom­ en’s life stories and issues of race and gender in the late twentieth century. The archives are a crucial resource for historians as well as for back­ ground information for magazine articles, art, po­ etry, and newsletters produced by regionally based Latina lesbian organizations, and for pho­ tographs, personal, and professional papers. Another crucial resource is the substantial body of literature and theory produced by Latina les­ bians, beginning with the 1981 publication of This Bridge C alled M y Back: Writings by Radical Women o f Color, edited by Cherrfe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. The first-person narratives in this anthology and in later anthologies such as Juanita Ramos’s Companeras and Carla Trujillo’s Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About provide an important context for historical research and offer personal descriptions that chal­ lenge traditional historical analysis. Through their work, Moraga and Anzaldua relate experi­ ences of family, politics, sexuality, and gender roles in a manner that illustrates not only the complexi­ ties of being a woman of color but also of being a lesbian in the late twentieth century. Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrfe Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women o f Color (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981; Rpt. New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983); Juanita Ramos, ed. Companeras: Latina Lesbians, An An­

thology (New York: Latina Lesbian History Project, 1987. Rpt. New York: Routledge, 1994); Carla Trujillo, ed. Chi­ cane Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1991). ■ AN TO N IA V IL L A S E N O R See

also

Latinas.

Native American Lesbians eference to lesbianism among American In­ dian women in historical and anthropologi­ cal literature is almost nonexistent. Because of nineteenth-century taboos against speaking about sexuality, Victorian notions of “proper” sexual behavior, and an androcentric bias, little informa­ tion is available about women’s roles among Indian tribes. Where information exists, it must still be recontextualized to eliminate misconcep­ tions and erroneous beliefs about Native women. Can we equate a Western cultural category, such as lesbian, with any o f the numerous roles prac­ ticed by preconquest indigenous women? This remains a question. Nevertheless, the Native world seems to offer to women, in pre- and post­ contact times, roles that resemble modern-day lesbianism. Lesbian is defined here as a woman who forms affectional and/or erotic bonds with another woman or women. From the information available, it seems lesbianism probably occurred in indigenous America in specific and socially sanctioned ways. Some have conjectured that lesbianism was practiced through female cross-gender identifica­ tion. Cross-gender females, while biologically fe­ male, behaved like men in their actions, dress, talk, work, and so on. Girls who became crossgendered often showed this proclivity as children. They chose to play with boys, learned male activ­ ities such as hunting, and refused to perform fe­ male tasks or engage in female play. Indian par­ ents did not discourage this behavior. Although their daughter was “ different,” this was not cause for denigration or shame.

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Parents may have accepted their daughter’s choice to follow cross-gender pursuits because such choices were spiritually sanctioned. Tribal people believe that dreams or visions provided by spirits often direct individuals’ life choices. Among the Mojave, a Southwestern tribe, it was thought that the hwame dreamed of becoming cross-gendered while still in her mother’s womb. The Maricopa believed that a girl became a kwiraxame because as a child she was said to “dream too much.” Among the Mojave, a ceremony was performed when the cross-gender girl reached puberty. She was given a male name and the right to marry an­ other woman. Thus, a cross-gendered woman re­ ceived validation not only within her own ex­ tended family, but from the tribe as well. Among Plains groups, idealized female behav­ ior included modesty, chastity, and marital fidelity. Nevertheless, other socially sanctioned models of behavior allowed women to become self-sufficient and achieve special status. While the aggressive woman was probably more the exception than the rule, it was possible for Plains women to make names for themselves as hunters and warriors. Not all of these women were cross-gendered, nor were they necessarily lesbian. Some women who ac­ companied war parties went only once, usually for the purpose of revenge. Early in the nineteenth century, a young Gros Ventre woman was captured by the Crow. At twelve years o f age, she already showed interest in manly pursuits and so was trained in a number of male skills by her adopted father. Though this woman did not dress in male attire, she seems to have practiced cross-gender be­ havior. She became an accomplished hunter, a brave warrior, and was much respected among the Crow. She eventually married four women, to whose families she gave horses. The number of wives she took indicates this warrior’s high status and shows she was capable of providing for a large and productive household. Many changes took place in indigenous cul­ tures as a result of conquest and colonization. Na­

tive people were seen as savage and immoral. Rather than completely exterminate Indians, white America decided to “assimilate” them. This would be achieved by destroying tribal ties, re­ ducing the Native land base, and forcing Indian children into boarding schools where they would be indoctrinated with Christianity and American patriotism. Indians were expected to embrace the rigid sex- and gender-identifications of white, middle-class America. To an extent, European American sexual ideol­ ogy succeeded in effacing evidence of cross-genderism and any attendant nonheterosexual behav­ iors. But it did not wipe out entirely these cultural variations. Today, Native American lesbians, ho­ mosexuals, cross-gender, and transgendered indi­ viduals exist. Many identify as “two-spirits” whose lives reflect a balance of female and male energies and interests. M any are mixed-bloods with diverse cultural influences, but it is likely there are gay and lesbian full-bloods too. Lesbian Native Americans are active in groups such as Gay American Indians (GAI), an organization cofounded by Barbara Cameron, which has been active in gay history pro­ jects, human rights activism, and AID S education. Other Native American lesbians, such as Chrystos and Beth Brant, are among the foremost poets and writers of Native American literature. Though the record issparse, the lives ofthe extraordinary Indian women who came before serve as poignant and powerful reminders ofthe capacities oftheirhearts. Paula Gunn Allen, “Hwame, Koshkalaka, and the Rest: Lesbians in American Indian Cultures,” in The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Tradi­ tions (Boston: Beacon, 1986); Evelyn Blackwood, “ Sexu­ ality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes: The Case of Cross-Gender Females,” Signs: Journal o f Women in Culture and Society Vol. 10 (1984): 27-42; Beatrice Medicine, ‘“Warrior Women’ —Sex Role Alternatives for Plains Indian Women,” in The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1983). ■ JA N IC E GOULD

See

also

Native American Women.

344

LIBER A LISM

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Liberalism

iberalism is a strange and powerful political term because it is continuously used but rarely defined. In Western societies liberal often con­ notes “open-minded.” It is also used as a synonym for radical. Elsewhere, liberalism is equated with welfare-state politics; that is, the idea that the state has a responsibility for ensuring the social welfare of its people, as in the New Deal or the Great So­ ciety. The actual history of liberalism explains pieces of each conception yet differs somewhat from any of these readings. Liberalism is a theory about individual rights, freedom, choice, and privacy. It articulates the dif­ ferentiation between church and state, family and economy, public and private; it conceptualizes a sphere of separateness for the individual. This new notion of individualism developed with the rise of capitalism and the bourgeois revolution and it was exclusive to white, property-owning men. John Locke (1632-1704) was one of the first the­ orists to embrace the concept of private property. His theory articulated an independent, rational individual with free choice who no longer could be confined by absolutist feudal authority. Locke’s vision of the newly self-contained individual was promissory of a new politics. Mary Wollstonecraff (1759-97) expanded this promissory to include women. She wrote of women’s right to education, which would allow them to take part in the developing bourgeois so­ ciety. The woman she envisioned—the rational mother—was also the middle-class woman, not the wage-laboring woman. Wollstonecraft’s de­ mands for education were later used by liberal feminists who called for the enfranchisement of all women. J. S. M ill and Harriet Taylor discussed equality of opportunity and individual rights and critiqued the “subjection o f women” in nineteenth-century England. They articulated and demanded that women be full citizens and fought for women’s

L

right to vote. Although M ill assumed most women would choose to be wives and mothers, he argued that women should be able to decide for themselves whether they wanted a career. By the end o f the nineteenth century Western liberalism had more fully articulated the auton­ omy of the individual and the importance of free­ dom of choice, equality of opportunity, and equal­ ity before the law. The idea that individualism related to anyone, regardless of sex, race, or eco­ nomic class, brought to light the fact that individ­ ual rights were actually limited to white men. Liberalism promised freedom and equality (of opportunity) to all but gave it to only some. The inherent inequity of liberalism was uncovered and societal debate about the subject began. Liberalism is more a theory about freedom of the individual than it is a theory about equality. The key commitment is to freedom of thought and expression. M uch less is said about equality among individuals. As such, the problem of in­ equality—whether economic, racial, or sexual — is sidestepped. Opportunity, meaning “a chance,” displaces the concept of equity. The promissory aspect of liberalism arose dur­ ing the latter half of the twentieth century. The premise of the civil rights movements in the United States, as well as various dissident move­ ments internationally, supports the Western lib­ eral notion of individual freedom of expression and equality before the law. Worldwide feminist movements are also based on this notion—the right to vote, to abortion, to equal pay, and so on. As we enter the twenty-first century, many peo­ ple are criticizing the supposed excesses of liber­ alism, citing too much freedom, too much equal­ ity, too much identification with the self. These reactions against liberalism, often termed neocon­ servatism, are viewed as an attempt to return liber­ alism to its intended “original” meaning. Neo­ conservatives, who are most often revisionist liberals, argue that liberalism was never meant to guarantee equality; rather, it would offer an op­ portunity to compete.

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LITERA TU RE

According to neoconservatives, competition presumes a system of losers and winners. They de­ clare that liberalism was never meant to provide for everyone and reject the ideals of civil rights and feminist politics of the 1960s and 1970s, which they believe instigated a crisis for liberalism. Neocon­ servatives blame people of color and white women in particular for expecting too much from the gov­ ernment, rather than being “self-sufficient.” The challenge of neoconservatism is still one of the greatest threats to the progressive promises of liberalism today. Liberalism ideally applies to every individual; therefore it remains unclear how its theory and practice will be shaped in twentyfirst-century society. It is clear, however, that lib­ eralism will continue to adapt and change. Zillah Eisenstein, The Radical Future o f Liberal Feminism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981); C. B. MacPherson, The Theory o f Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). ■ Z IL L A H E I S E N S T E I N S e e a l s o Civil Rights Movement; Feminism and Feminisms; Great Society/War on Poverty; Labor Movement; New Deal; Progressive Era.

U

Librarianship

ibrarians acquire, organize, and make perma­ nently accessible the world’s recorded knowl­ edge. The first library school class in the United States (1887) was 85 percent women. Eighty-five percent are still women. Most of the 150,000 li­ brarians are public servants. In 1933 women’s clubs were credited with initiating 75 percent of existing public libraries. Established as standard in 1948, the master’s de­ gree in librarianship still fetches lower wages than masters’ for historically male professions. The pro­ fessional librarian evolved from the male keeper of the scholarly books in a single university room

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(mid-i6oos) to the female instrument of the peo­ ple’s right to know anything public (mid-igoos). Around the turn of the century, librarians rec­ ognized that caging books in closed stacks was counterproductive. They gradually identified and continue to tear down barriers to access: gender, age, religion, nationality, race, ethnicity, sexuality, interests, beliefs, income, disability, region, and various levels of literacy. Equal access to uncen­ sored expressions requires librarians to honor these distinctions in collections that vary in form, content, and sophistication. Since the early 1960s librarians of color have promoted services reflect­ ing the linguistic.and cultural needs of their com­ munities. The first avowedly homosexual group within a profession in the United States formed in 1970 to make gay and lesbian literature accessible. Beginning in the 1970s tax “revolts,” disrespect for feminized professions, and unwarranted faith in technology’s capacity to replace books, librari­ ans, and libraries undermined professional feefree service and library schools. Higher salaries of (mostly male) administrators, computer experts, and those serving prestigious or paying “cus­ tomers” were bolstered, while the number and status of (mostly female) librarians directly serving children and those who lacked information de­ clined. In the 1990s enlightened communities in­ creased support for endangered libraries, valued as commons of knowledge nurtured by librarians who open access to the world of information, whether in high technology or in print. ■ M E L IS S A R I L E Y

§ Literature .S. literature is unimaginable without the con­ tributions of women writers. Though often critically neglected, their work has been strong, original, and diverse. Some of the sources of this literature are this country’s various indigenous cultures, in many of

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LITERATURE

which both women and men were storytellers. Women also had powerful roles in Native myths, legends, songs, chants, and sacred rituals. Settle­ ment of the Americas by Europeans (English, Spanish, French, Dutch) both subordinated these cultures and provided new literary sources. Colo­ nial literature drew from European traditions and models. Colonial women writers—largely from the more affluent and educated families—ex­ plored religious, moral, historical, social, and do­ mestic questions in a variety of genres: poetry, meditations, travel writing and journals, captivity narratives, plays, letters, and autobiography. Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) was known for her charismatic oratory, religious doctrines, and “ready wit and bold spirit.” She was too bold, for the Puritans banished her for heresy from newly settled Boston in 1637. Anne Dudley Bradstreet (1612-72), the daughter and wife of Puritan lead­ ers in the Massachusetts colony, was the first poet published in the British colonies. She was selfconscious about the audacity o f a woman taking up the pen, declaring in the prologue to her The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) that she is “ obnoxious to each carping tongue / Who says [her] hand a needle better fits.” Mary Rowlandson (c. 1636-c. 1678), taken by Indians from her Massachusetts home in 1676, returned to write her story of these events, one of the earliest and most popular examples of the captivity narra­ tive. In the eighteenth century Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820) wrote fiction, plays, and essays on religion, the meaning of the new American nation, and women’s issues. Phillis Wheatley (1753-84), forcibly brought to the colonies as a slave for whom English was a second language, was the first Black person to publish a volume of poems, in which she explored religious, moral, racial, and elegiac themes. In the years between the founding of the United States and the Civil War, some women gained professional success as writers, editors, and jour­ nalists. The scholar Nina Baym estimates that women produced almost half of U.S. literature

between 1812 and i860. From 1826 to 1833 Lydia Maria Child (1802-80), a feminist and abolition­ ist, edited Juvenile Miscellany, the first children’s monthly in the United States. Em ily Dickinson (1830-86) was born during this period, though her poems and letters were not widely pub­ lished until the 1890s. Although their incomes were often precarious, some professional women writers became best-selling authors and celebri­ ties. In 1791 Susanna Haswell Rowson (1762-1824) wrote Charlotte Temple, the first best-selling U.S. novel. Other successful women writers of this period included poet Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791-1865); novelists Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) and Susan Warner (1819-85); colum­ nist Sara Payson Willis Parton (“ Fanny Fern,” 1811-72); and expert domestic adviser Catharine Beecher (1800—78). Didactic and melodramatic as pre-C ivil War literature frequently was, it is also culturally re­ vealing, dramatizing great national issues such as education, abolition, the impending war, wom­ en’s rights, the growth of industrialization, and, to a degree, racial relations. Margaret Fuller (1810-50), a New England transcendentalist, wrote the passionately feminist Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) told the story of the Pequod heroine Magawisca, who challenges her colonial captors, “ I deny your right to judge me . . . not one of my race has ever acknowledged your authority.” In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96) pub­ lished Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the extremely influen­ tial antislavery novel of protest and prophecy. Abraham Lincoln pronounced Stowe “ the little lady who made this big war.” Free Black Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was a lecturer and organizer as well as author of fiction and po­ etry, and Harriet E. Wilson (18077-70) published the first novel by an African American woman, Our Nig. African American women such as Har­ riet Jacobs (“Linda Brent,” 1813-97) wr°te or dic­ tated slave narratives, accounts of the cruelties of the U.S. slave experience that also described the

LITERA TU RE

sexual exploitation of Black women by white men. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (1800-41), of Irish and Ojibwa descent, recorded Ojibwa his­ tory, customs, legends, and speeches. After the Civil War, the United States was trans­ formed into a modern nation. As women such as the reformer Jane Addams (1860-1935) became more acceptable as public figures, some of their books and articles took on the status of public wis­ dom. Social subjects included women’s rights, re­ productive rights, labor, racial justice and civil rights, the poor, the ill, children, peace, and, in­ creasingly, the environment. Reform impulses also motivated women’s utopian writing, a genre exemplified by Herland, an imaginary world of women governed by the principle of cooperation, written in 1915 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). The growth of literacy and the rise of modern popular genres increased wom en’s opportuni­ ties as professional writers. Editor and journal­ ist Louisa May Alcott (1832-88) wrote poetry, thrillers and sensation stories, a novel about work, and, most famously, Little Women (1868). In this era women shaped the genres of mysteries, detec­ tive stories, and private eye novels. In 1866 Metta Victor, writing as Seeley Register, published The Dead Letter in a periodical. In 1878 Anna Kather­ ine Green (1846-1935) became the first woman to publish a best-selling mystery, The Leavenworth Case. Later creating both male and female detec­ tives, Green was a forerunner of today’s popular women mystery writers. Women also excelled in regional or “local-color” writing, a genre popular­ ized after the Civil War by such influential peri­ odicals as The Atlantic Monthly. Sarah Orne Jew­ ett’s (1849-1909) luminous The Country o f the Pointed Firs (1896) is often hailed as the masterwork of the genre. Kate Chopin’s (1851-1904) The Awakening (1899) was for years controversial be­ cause, in addition to its descriptions of Louisiana’s Creole culture, it frankly explored a married woman’s journey of erotic and socially critical self-discovery.

An engraving depicting eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley at her desk. This image originally appeared in the frontispiece o f her book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773).

The plurality of voices among women writers was an emerging force, if grudgingly recognized by men and women alike in the dominant cul­ ture. Native American authors such as Gertrude Bonnin/Zitkala-Sa (1876-1938) helped to estab­ lish a movement that based literature in histories, materials, and cultures that the European inva­ sion had shattered but not erased. In 1927, Mourn­ ing Dove/Christine Quintasket (18847-1936) pub­ lished Cogewea: The Half-Blood, the first known novel by a Native American woman. Its structure and history exhibit the tensions of writing from

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LITERATURE

and about one culture within a dominant, de­ structive younger one. The early twentieth century saw great vitality among African American women writers, espe­ cially during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961) wrote about the emerging Black middle class; Nella Larsen (1891-1964) wrote about women of mixed Black and white heritage. Among the most origi­ nal and versatile was the anthropologist, fiction writer, and autobiographer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). Immigrant women began to tell their stories during these years. Edith Maud Eaton (“ Sui-Sin Far,” 1865-1914) wrote fiction and nonfiction about East-West cultural conflicts and about C hi­ nese immigrants and Eurasians. Central and southern European immigrants, many o f them Jews and Catholics, arrived in great numbers in the 1880s. Their experiences of the journey, dis­ crimination, work, urban life, and assimilation became raw material for such texts as The Prom­ ised Land (1912), by Mary Antin (1881-1949), and Bread Givers (1925), by Anzia Yezierska (1881— 1970). Later in this century, African American authors chronicled the internal migration of Blacks from south to north, and immigrant litera­ ture encompassed the movement of Caribbeans, Mexicans, Central Americans, South Americans, and Asians to the United States. Among the profound changes of the modern era was women’s increased access to higher edu­ cation. College, which usually meant leaving home, supplemented families as a literary wom­ an’s source of education, friendship, and sup­ port. Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), Mary M c­ Carthy (1912-89), Eleanor Clark (1913-96), and M uriel Rukeyser (1913-80)—significant writers a ll—met at Vassar College, which the poet Edna St. Vincent M illay (1892—1950) had earlier at­ tended. The college experience became a central element in the female bildungsroman and in the exploration of the character of the New Woman as women writers grappled with expanded opportu­

nities made possible by education as well as lin­ gering patterns of discrimination and depen­ dence. Inseparable from the rise of educated women was the rise of literary modernism, characterized by bold, experimental styles and audacious sub­ ject matter. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), for in­ stance, radically rewrote every genre; much of her work, including her erotic lesbian writing, was published after her death. Hilda Doolittle (“ H .D .,” 1886-1961), novelist and poet, created fragmented Imagist poems, epics such as Helen in Egypt (1961), and autobiographical fiction. Marianne Moore (1887-1972) wrote intricate, in­ cisive poetry. Other women writers in these years, though not as formally experimental, created complex works that were intellectually challenging, aes­ thetically pleasing, and revisionary in their en­ gagements with society and history. Edith Whar­ ton (1862-1937) wrote devastating critiques of the affluent New York society into which she was born. W illa Cather (1873-1947) combined ele­ ments of the American realistic, regionalist, and romantic traditions. Subsequent generations have drawn from the legacies o f both the avant-garde and the revi­ sionists to create new forms and traditions. Fic­ tion writers Eudora Welty (b. 1909) and Flannery O ’Connor (1925-64) broadened the literary range and accomplishments of the American South. The new formalist Amy Clampitt (1920-94) used thick, precise description to engage the meta­ physics of objects in the world, while the poet Su­ san Howe (b. 1937) has engaged the poem as a vi­ sual and verbal icon. Susan Sontag (b. 1933) has developed a unique body of fiction, film, and cul­ tural criticism that is both intellectual and sen­ sory. Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938) has worked in a host of genres to carry out a searing analysis of the socio- and psychopathologies of American life. World War II irrevocably changed the United States. A greater candor emerged in literature as a result of cultural developments, feminism, and

LITERATURE

the influence of the “confessional poetry” of writ­ ers such as Anne Sexton (1928-74) and Sylvia Plath (1932-63). After World War II, women be­ gan to write openly about sexuality. Today, lesbian writers have proven that lesbian love and sexuality may be the stuff o f prize-winning poetry, while writers such as Erica Jong (b. 1942) and Rita Mae Brown (b. 1944) have gained popular success for their work in liberating the erotic word. With the rising influence of science on modern life, women increasingly wrote modern science fiction and fantasy, though the genre had been initiated long before by the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) with her novel Frankenstein (1818). This genre has benefited from the contributions of women writers born in the mid-twentieth century, including Judith Merril (b. 1923), Ursula L eG u in (b. 1929), Marion Zim mer Bradley (b. 1930), Patricia Haden Elgin (b. 1936), Joanna Russ (b. 1937), and Octavia But­ ler (b. 1947). Often adventurous with form and unafraid of vital women characters, these writers have been architects of new worlds with their own social structures, values, and language. Beginning in the 1960s, two linked develop­ ments influenced U.S. women’s literary history. The first was a renewed interest in gender and the rebirth of feminism. The 1950s had tended to mar­ ginalize women but their voices began to be heard again in the 1960s. In the world of theater, women such as Clare Boothe Luce (1903-87) and Lillian Heilman (1905-84) gained popular and critical acclaim in the 1930s and 1940s. These ac­ colades virtually disappeared for women until the late 1960s and 1970s, when Maria Irene Fornes (b. 1930), Wendy Wasserstein (b. 1950), and Ntozake Shange (b. 1948) proved again that women were vital playwrights. In addition, the growth of mod­ ern media such as film, radio, television, and video created new opportunities for women writ­ ers. The novelist and essayist Joan Didion (b. 1934) has written film scripts; Jane Wagner, per­ haps best known for her work with comedian Lily Tomlin, has written one-woman plays for Broad­

way as well as material for film and television. Beyond theater and film, feminism has deeply influenced the form, the content, and the recep­ tion of women’s writing. Writers, editors, and pub­ lishers such as Betty Friedan (b. i92r), Marilyn French (b. 1929), Gloria Steinem (b. 1934), Kate Millett (b. 1934), Robin Morgan (b. 1941), Barbara Smith (b. 1946), and Gloria Watkins/bell hooks (b. 1952) reenergized the genre of the defense of women as well as feminist theory and feminist polemic. Feminist insights have been interwoven with personal vision by writers such as Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913), essayist, social analyst, novelist; Grace Paley (b. 1922), activist and short story writer; Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), poet, critic, essay­ ist; Audre Lorde (1934-92), poet, essayist, autobi­ ographer; Alix Kates Shulman (b. 1932), novelist, children’s writer, anthologist; Marge Piercy (b. 1936), poet, novelist; June Jordan (b. 1936), poet, essayist; and Marilyn Hacker (b. ^42), poet, edi­ tor. Editors and publishers established feminist magazines, journals, and presses. The develop­ ment of multicultural women’s studies and the ar­ eas of women’s history and feminist criticism of­ fered new methods for reading women writers. Alongside feminism, the second major devel­ opment in U.S. women’s literary history was the increasing acceptance of the pluralism of U.S. writing by both women and men and the growing diversity of their audience. In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917), who first published at the age of eleven, became the first Black person to receive the Pulitzer Prize, for her volume of poetry Annie Allen (1949); by the late 1960s her belief in Black nationalism precipitated a commitment to Black publishing and eventually to the establishment of her own house, The David Company. In 1982 Al­ ice Walker (b. 1944) won the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple. In ^ 9 3 Toni Morrison (b. 1931) be­ came the first African American to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Women of Native American, Asian, and Latina descent are also writing in increasing numbers: Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940), Mitsuye Ya-

349

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LYNCHING

mada (b. 1923), Louise Erdrich (b. 1954), Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948), Chern'e Moraga (b. 1952), Ana Castillo (b. 1953), Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954). They speak at the point where race, ethnic­ ity, and gender meet. Their works are often marked by stylistic and cultural hybridity, min­ gling languages and genres in an effort to negoti­ ate boundaries and to articulate the complex situ­ ation of double and even triple marginality. They ask what it means to be alive and to write in a United States that has not always wanted a woman of color to write or to be alive. In the 1990s many Americans began to describe society as “postmodern” rather than “ modern” and their environment as “ cyberspace” rather than a “landscape” or a “place.” In this United States, the fate of writing by women, men, or computers with artificial intelligence has still to be determined. Yet as long as the human species uses language, it will compose narratives, tell sto­ ries, crack jokes, cast spells, and sing out lyrically. In new genres, through new media, the various voices of literary women in the United States will mingle in what Emily Dickinson called a “Titanic Opera” of language. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Norton Anthol­ ogy o f Literature by Women: The Tradition in English (New York: Norton, 1985); Emory Elliott, ed., The Colum­ bia Literary History o f the United States (New York: Co­ lumbia University Press, 1988); Paul Lauter, ed., The Heath Anthology o f American Literature, 2 vols. (Lexing­ ton, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1990); Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin, eds., The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). ■ C A T H A RIN E R. ST IM P S O N , with M A R IL E E L IN D E M A N N and MARTHA N E L L SM ITH S e e a l s o Autobiography; Feminist Literary Criti­ cism; Feminist Presses, Publications, and Bookstores; Harlem Renaissance; Romance Novels.

§ LULAC S e e League of United Latin American Citizens.

s Lynching ob violence and vigilantism or “establish­ ment violence” are deeply entrenched tradi­ tions that began in the eighteenth-century West­ ern frontier in the United States. Rosenbaum and Sederberg defined the latter as “the use o f vio­ lence by established groups to preserve the status quo at times when the formal system of rule en­ forcement is viewed as ineffective or irrelevant.” Lynch Law was a term used during the Revolu­ tionary War, when Virginian Charles Lynch orga­ nized a group of vigilantes to eliminate invading British from the region. Following the war, Lynch’s extralegal actions were deemed justifi­ able by the Virginia legislature on the grounds that the Tories were a clear and present danger and law and order needed to be restored by any means necessary. During the antebellum era the primary victims of lynching or mob violence were rebellious Black slaves and, to a lesser extent, abolitionist white men. Since lynching records were not kept before 1882, it is difficult to ascertain the inci­ dence of racially motivated violence. Lynching reached its peak, however, in the South between 1880 and 1900, when African American men, stereotyped as savage criminals, became the pri­ mary victims. Southern whites also wanted to halt “negro domination” and intimidate Black men at­ tempting to exercise their newly gained right to vote. Between 1882 and 1923 over five hundred Blacks were lynched in Georgia, the largest num­ ber of lynchings in the United States. The myth of the Black male rapist who harbored an insatiable lust for white women was a contrivance and the most frequently cited reason for lynching, though

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L Y N C H IN G

not the major cause o f the Lynch Law. Lynchings were a public ritual that included men, women, and children as witnesses; they also saw bodies be­ ing burned following a hanging or shooting and the distribution of portions of the body for sou­ venirs among those gathered. Contemporary discussions o f racial violence, particularly lynching, focus primarily on Black men, though individual women and their orga­ nizations were critical in efforts to expose the horrors o f lynching during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Seventy-six Black women were lynched between 1882 and 1927; six­ teen white women were lynching victims during the same period. African American women’s antilynching activ­ ity, largely overlooked by scholars, began with Ida Wells-Barnett, who was motivated to conduct a systematic investigation of the real reasons why Blacks were lynched following the 1892 killings of three innocent businessmen (one of whom was a close friend) by angry white mobs in M em­ phis, Tennessee. The mobs resented the m en’s economic success and whisked them away from jail in the middle of the night. Wells-Barnett de­ scribed the brutal lynchings in her newspaper The Free Speech and urged Blacks to leave M em­ phis and settle in the West. Six thousand people did relocate within two months. One inflamma­ tory editorial suggested that white women en­ gaged in voluntary liaisons with Black men; the article aroused enormous anger and her newspa­ per offices were destroyed as a result. Wells-Bar­ nett was also threatened with lynching if she re­ turned to Memphis from her vacation in the North. In 1893 she chronicled lynchings from January 1882 to January 1892 and identified the charges for which the 728 Black men were killed. She also indicated that women were also victims of mob rule and described the lynching in 1886 of one Black woman in Jackson, Tennessee, ac­ cused o f poisoning her white mistress. The woman was dragged from jail, “ every stitch of clothing tom from her body, and was hung in the

public court house square in sight of everybody,” according to Wells-Barnett. Women played a significant role in the anti­ lynching movement on a number of fronts. The Black women’s club movement, which began in the 1890s, fought against lynching. Clubwomen also supported Wells-Barnett morally and finan­ cially in her efforts to publish two antilynching pamphlets, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in A ll Its Phases (1892) and The Red Record (1895). Anti­ lynching strategies accounted for a major part of the reform work of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW ), founded in 1896; they also worked with other civil rights organizations, such as the National Association for the Advance­ ment of Colored People (NAACP), in support of the 1918 Dwyer Bill, which would have made lynching a federal crime, although the bill never passed the Senate. African American women, as part of their strat­ egy, enlisted and encouraged white women to join the antilynching movement. White U.S. women were slow to respond. Black clubwomen, including Mary Church Terrell, Wells-Barnett, and others, persisted, however. They appealed to Southern white women and accused them of be­ ing complicit in the national crime of lynching for not speaking out against the rape of Black women by white men and for supporting argu­ ments that lynching protected white woman­ hood. In the 1920s and 1930s white women began to heed the call from Black women, initially in or­ ganizations such as the Commission on Interra­ cial Cooperation and the National Council of Women. Perhaps the most well-known public antilynching effort by white women was the white-only Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASW PL), founded in Atlanta in 1930 by Jessie Daniel Ames, who un­ derscored the relationship between lynching and the sexual control of white women. According to Ames’s biography, Ames felt that “lynching was not just a punishment for forcible assault; it was also a severe sanction against voluntary sexual re-

351

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MA GA ZINES

lations” between white women and Black men, and enforced the notion of white supremacy. The definitive narrative of the role of Black and white women in the antilynching movement that spanned half a century remains to be written. Al­ though Black women were important pioneers in one ofthe most importantreform movements in the United States, they have been largely invisible; the men ofthe NAACP and Southern white women re­ ceived greater attention. Until this narrative is rewritten, lynching will continue to be perceived primarily as a crime against Black males and the vi­ olence to which Black women have been sub­ jected—rape and lynching—will remain unseen. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1984); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, ‘“The Mind That Burns in Each Body’: Women, Rape and Racial Violence,” in Powers of Desire, The Poli­ tics o f Sexuality, edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); H. Jon Rosenbaum and Peter C. Sederberg, eds., Vigilante Politics (Philadelphia: University of Penn­ sylvania Press, 1976). ■ B EV ER LY GU Y-SH EFTALL See

also

Interracial Cooperation Movement; Ped­

estal.

M

Magazines

omen in the United States have been val­ ued magazine readers ever since periodicals appeared in this country in 1741. The first pub­ lished specifically for women was the Lady’s M ag­ azine and Repository o f Entertaining Knowledge (1792-93). It sought an elite audience, as did the famous Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830-98), which sold 150,000 copies monthly at its peak in the 1850s. In Godey’s, readers found some discussion of women’s rights and employment amid the sen­ timental fiction and elaborate fashion plates of­ fered by editor Sarah Josepha Hale. For an entirely different readership, Massachu­ setts mill workers presented a sometimes ideal­

W

ized picture of factory life in The Lowell Offering (1840-45), and the Park Hill Female Seminary produced Cherokee Rose Bud (1848). Amelia Bloomer’s The Lily (1849-56) promoted temper­ ance and dress reform and, in 1868, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony founded The Revolution, a sixteen-page weekly that branched out from women’s rights to such top­ ics as land and labor reform. In the 1890s an early magazine published by African American women, The Woman’s Era (1894-1903), appeared, and Rosa Sonnenschein founded The American Jewess (1895-99). O f course, women’s journalistic contributions over the years were not limited to magazines for women. Margaret Fuller, for example, edited the influential transcendentalist journal The D ial (1840-44). Ida Tarbell’s 1903 series on Standard Oil Company abuses helped M cC lure’s M aga­ zine claim its place in muckraking history. Women’s periodicals, however, had led the way when readership began to increase dramatically after the Civil War. Encouraged by the Postal Act of 1879, which facilitated nationwide communi­ cations with low second-class rates, the number of magazine titles grew overall from 700 in 1865 to 4,400 by 1890. In 1904 the Ladies’ Home Journal was the first to reach one million in circulation. Some of the new crop of magazines directed at women were mail-order catalogues that ran barely enough editorial material to qualify for the low postal rates. Others, such as M cC a ll’s (1876) and The Delineator (1873-1937), began as dresspattern books after domestic sewing machines had become available to middle-class women. They offered a democratic alternative to the de­ signs that experienced seamstresses copied from Godey’s cover engravings and plates, hand-col­ ored by a staff of 150 women, and to the fashion shown in the newer Harper’s Bazaar (1867) and Vogue (1892). O f the new magazines, the Ladies’ Home Jour­ nal was poised to take maximum advantage of a confluence of high literacy, increased availability of consumer goods, and a population whose mi-

353

M A G A Z IN E S

grations cut them off from familial sources of in­ formation. Founded in 1893 by Cyrus Curtis as a supplement to his farm journal, it was first edited by his wife, working under her birth name, Louisa Knapp. Knapp’s son-in-law, Edward Bok, later op­ posed woman’s suffrage and wrote disapprovingly of club activity. But most of his audience dis­ agreed with him and did not hesitate to say so, both in reader surveys and in letters to the editor. In the twentieth century, women’s fashion mag­ azines were as innovative visually as Curtis’s Jour­ nal was commercially. In the 1930s Carmel Snow began to edit Harper’s Bazaar, where she worked with brilliant artists and photographers to create a cinematic flow of illustration and words. Her pages accommodated fiction and poetry by C o­ lette, Virginia Woolf, and Marianne Moore. In 1936 Snow hired Diana Vreeland who, at Bazaar and later at Vogue, became a legendary fashion editor. Also in the 1930s Family Circle (1932) and Womans D ay (1937) began as weekly giveaways at food stores. At the end of the decade, the first issue of Glamour appeared, promising the “ Hol­ lywood way to fashion, beauty, charm” for fifteen cents. During World War II the propaganda potential of women’s magazines was well appreciated. Geraldine Rhoads, who edited a number of women’s magazines including Woman’s Day, at­ tended one meeting in which federal officials “literally laid out plots” for magazine fiction to manipulate attitudes toward servicemen and Rosie-the-Riveters on the homefront. Although few new titles appeared in the 1950s and 1960s, women’s magazines were becoming so financially successful that they were derisively re­ ferred to as the “ cash cows” of the industry. Some­ thing of a sea change was prefaced in 1965 when Helen Gurley Brown remade Cosmopolitan after the success of her bestseller Sex and the Single Girl. Essence, founded in 1970 as an alternative for Black women, was implicitly feminist because it spoke to an audience that, for example, found it natural for women to work both inside and out­ side the home. Two years later Ms. magazine

M

I A d u lts Only .5 0

1 TH E

Oct

1965

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IN

HOMOPHILE GROUPS PICKET N A T I O N S C A PI TA L

The October 1965 cover o f T he Ladder, featuring a photograph o f an early march for lesbian and gay rights.

reached out to readers so hungry for an explicitly feminist message that three hundred thousand copies of the preview issue sold out in eight days. In the context o f a vibrant new feminist and les­ bian-feminist press, Gloria Steinem worked col­ lectively with a group of editors who introduced the fiction and poetry o f Alice Walker and Erica Jong and, in language that readers embraced, Jane O’Reilly’s feminist “ clicks.” Other publications sought out women readers who were transforming their lives. In the 1970s the Jewish feminist magazine Lilith began; a quar­ terly newsletter Ohoyo (“woman” in Choctaw) was founded for Native American women and survived for four years; and the progressive Asian

354

M A IL -O R D ER B R ID E S

American magazine Bridge put out a number of special issues by and about women. The Latina community has produced Encuentro Feminil and Revista Mujeres. Working Woman (1976), founded to support women challenging male preserves in the workplace, achieved the fastest-growing ad­ vertising revenues in the entire industry in 1982. Lear’s (1988-93) and M irabella (1989) broke ground by daring to address women older than those presumably coveted by advertisers. Under pressure from feminism, the more tradi­ tional women’s magazines also began to evolve. In 1976 and again in 1979, more than thirty women’s magazines simultaneously published ar­ ticles about the Equal Rights Amendment—most of them positive though some merely informa­ tive—and in 1992 Glamour won a National Mag­ azine Award for its abortion coverage. The fact that Ms. had to stop competing for ads in 1989 and rely only on subscribers indicates how difficult it is to achieve institutional change. In 1994, when Good Housekeeping editor John Mack Carter stepped down, women then held the editor-inchief positions for all the major women’s maga­ zines in the United States. Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gen­ der and Commerce in the “Ladies’ Home loumal" and the “Saturday Evening Post,” 1880-1910 (Albany: State Uni­ versity of New York, 1994); Gloria Steinem, “ Sex, Lies, and Advertising,” in Moving Beyond Words (New York: Si­ mon & Schuster, 1994); Mary Ellen Zuckerman, Women’s Magazines and the American Woman (New York: Colum­ bia University Press, forthcoming).

tries, especially Europe, the United States, Aus­ tralia, and Japan. Men select wives through mail­ order catalogues and videos or they take sex tours that are arranged by mail-order bride agencies. Women in poverty who see no chance to improve their condition within their home country may make themselves available for these arrange­ ments. Mail-order bride buying is both racist and sexist because it is promoted as an “ opportunity” for First World men to find wives in other cul­ tures who are less influenced by the women’s movement, who are less independent, and who will serve their every need. Women who immi­ grate through mail-order arrangements are then trapped in a marriage without their own income and by immigrant laws that require their deporta­ tion if they leave the marriage. Mail-order bride agencies and schemes exploit desperate labor mi­ gration policies in poor countries whose leaders encourage immigration to other countries to find work. Women leaving their native lands for mar­ riage abroad is generally an additional relief to their country’s labor force. Under President Corazon Aquino, the Philippines became the first country to ban mail-order bride buying and sell­ ing as a human rights violation. T he patriarchal culture base for mail-order bride trafficking lies in traditional family-arranged marriages—the trans­ fer of daughters from father to husband, usually involving a payment in the form of dowry by the bride’s family. ■ K A T H L E E N BARRY

■ MARY THOM S e e a l s o Feminist Presses, Publications, and Book­ stores; Newspapers.

M M

Mail-Order Brides

ail-order bride buying and selling usually in­ volves marketing women from underdevel­ oped countries to men in highly developed coun­

M

Manners and Etiquette

entioning “manners and etiquette” to pro­ gressive women of the late twentieth century is a little like yelling “Veal!” in a crowd of vegans. O f all the conventions that helped keep women in their place, etiquette may be the most pro-

M

M A N N E R S AND E T I Q U E T T E

scribed: There were, after all, rules. And these rules placed women in the kitchen and men in the Cabinet. But there are misconceptions as well. One distortion is that women wrote all the rules that imprisoned them. Though women such as Emily and Elizabeth Post, Letitia Baldridge, and Judith Martin have gained fame as arbiters of taste, in the early years of the Republic, the enor­ mous question of what would be appropriate eti­ quette in this new “classless” society was the province of men. In European society men had as great an interest in etiquette as women and this carried over to the colonies. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Ralph Waldo Emerson all wrote about it. It was the scarcity of women and m en’s need to impress them that improved men’s manners. Another misconception is that the rules of eti­ quette encroached on a woman’s freedom, when in fact some were designed to provide them safety. The United States is a country born from conflict, its raucous entry into the community of nations marked by colonial conquest, revolution, domi­ nation, and manifest destiny. And women often were among those most buffeted by the peculiarly violent winds of U.S. expansionism. The written history of U.S. etiquette has virtu­ ally ignored people of color, as well as Jews, les­ bians, and gays, while the operation of etiquette in society has also worked both subtly and overtly to marginalize and exclude. That the rules of eti­ quette may differ among classes and cultures is also largely absent from the written discourse on manners. Etiquette expert Judith Martin, known to her millions of readers as “ Miss Manners,” notes that stringent etiquette may originally have protected white women from rough treatment in the early nineteenth century. Needless to say, the weight of manners has never been enough to stifle brutality toward “the weaker sex.” The rise of the middle class and the Industrial Revolution gave birth to the division of labor be­ tween women and men, thrusting women into

the private realm, not just of child rearing but also of social, cultural, civic, and philanthropic activi­ ties. It was in these areas that women wrote the rules. To a greater or lesser extent the women who created rules abridging their own rights and free­ doms had internalized the misogyny that swirled around them. For example, Mrs. H. O. Ward, whose Sensible Etiquette o f the Best Society was published in 1878, wrote: “What do women want with votes, when they hold the scepter of influ­ ence with which they can control even votes, if they wield it right?” Her little treatise against woman’s suffrage is tucked between a discussion o f “bad society” and instructions on how to pro­ ceed from the drawing room to the dining room for a formal dinner party. In a curious proscription that has been passed down in various forms since the earliest U.S. set­ tlements, “talking” by women was considered im­ polite and in some cases cause for punishment. Gerald Carson in the Polite Americans reported that in seventeenth-century America, “Women in M aine whose tongues wagged maliciously were gagged. In East Hampton, New York, cleft sticks were slipped over too-busy tongues.” This, while men gabbed incessantly in taverns and town halls throughout the colonies. In modern times the talking prohibition has been applied to women activists who are “strident,” women politicians who are “tough,” and feminists who are “shrill” in their efforts to be heard. While etiquette, much like baseball fanaticism and sexual openness, ebbs and flows with the times—waxing in the froufrou 1890s and waning in the turbulent 1960s—a late-twentieth-century phenomenon has again brought etiquette to the fore. That phenomenon is the flood of women who entered the work force in the early 1970s and sent the etiquette gurus racing back to their draw­ ing boards. Elizabeth L. Post, in Business E ti­ quette (1990), offers a chapter, “ Especially for M en,” in which she advises men not to stand up when a woman enters a conference room: “ Only the man seated in the chair next to her should

355

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M A Q U ILA DO RA

rise, to pull out her chair.” Letitia Baldridge’s mas­ sive 1993 tome, New Complete Guide to Executive Manners, features the chapter heading, “The Ex­ ecutive Faces Problems in Today’s Working World W hich Never Existed Before.” Among the prob­ lems addressed: “An older woman who sees a young male executive trying unsuccessfully to hail a cab (because he’s laden with luggage, brief­ cases, and an umbrella) should find and hail the cab for him.” While the history of U.S. etiquette written by whites has virtually ignored Latinas, Asian Ameri­ cans, Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, lesbians, and gays, the modern etiquette experts all devote space in their most recent work to the impolitesse of racism, anti-Semitism, and homo­ phobia. And an issue that many would assume to be a point of law has also been a point of eti­ quette-sexual harassment. “A well-known politi­ cian,” Martin says, “tried to make the claim that the rules kept changing. There didn’t used to be anything wrong with grabbing women by the hair and shoving your tongue in their mouths. But of course there was a rule o f etiquette against it. No decent man would do this.” Martin is o f course talking about Senator Bob Packwood (R., Oreg.) who was accused in 199495 of sexual harassment by some thirty women. These accusations, along with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's alleged sexual harass­ ment of Anita Hill, made the issue a hallmark of the 1990s. “The etiquette we’re working on enforcing now,” writes Martin, “is the one that requires men to treat women respectfully in the workplace. M en shouldn’t be able to use the excuse that women really have no business in certain places when they engage in behavior ranging from the merely rude to the now illegal. A tremendous history of prejudice has hampered professional women.” ■ KATE ROUNDS

g Maquiladora

S

ince 1965, under the Border Industrialization Program (BIP), the Mexican government has granted licenses to foreign companies, mostly U.S.-owned, for the temporary importation of duty-free machinery, raw materials, parts, and components. After being assembled in Mexican plants, they are exported, primarily to the United States. Duties levied for export are based solely on the value added by the actual cost of wages and re­ lated costs in Mexico. Many U.S. companies have not simply opened new facilities in M exico but have also taken ad­ vantage of low costs by relocating. They are at­ tracted by labor costs that in 1990 were one-eighth the U.S. minimum wage, by loose environmental protection laws, by unions that make few de­ mands on companies, and by unenforced safety regulations. The number of these runaway U.S. factories—maquiladoras or maquilas as they are called in M exico—has now risen to an estimated two thousand. They are the fastest-growing sector o f the Mexican economy. Although M exico’s in­ terior is now open to maquiladoras, over 85 per­ cent of these operations remain along the border between Tijuana and Matamoros, employing nearly 500,000 Mexican workers. Seventy percent are young women between the ages o f sixteen and twenty-four. Young women are considered the ideal maqui­ ladora workforce. They can be paid less than men; they are not only outside the labor organiz­ ing tradition because of gender but are often too burdened by home responsibilities to be easily or­ ganized; and as this work is usually a first job they are unlikely to know their own rights. Although the maquiladoras mean new jobs for desperate people, mostly women, they also mean poor working and living conditions. Tens of thou­ sands of workers are now packed into shantytown colonias, living with no electricity, sewers, potable water, or garbage service. ■ TANI TAKAGI

357

MARCHES

s Marches ince the early part of this century, activist U.S. women have used marches to champion im­ portant issues. As early as 1903 labor reformer Mary Harry (“Mother” ) Jones organized children working in factories to parade in front of city hall in Kensington, Pennsylvania, with their maimed fingers and hands held high in the air. A suffrage parade in 1913 helped to integrate the movement; members of the Black sorority Delta Sigma Theta marched as a delegation, while Black activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett marched side by side with white women from Illinois. In 1913 and 1914 African American activist Lucy Parsons led mass demon­ strations of homeless and unemployed people in San Francisco and Chicago. In 1917 Black women in white dresses were prominent in the front lines of a fifteen-thousand-person march in New York protesting lynchings and racial discrimina­ tion. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Latina women in the United Farm Workers Un­ ion movement marched to gain improved work­ ing conditions. Women activists also marched on behalf of tenant farmers. Black women were among the thousands of protesters arrested during civil rights marches throughout the south, and they heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “ I Have a Dream” speech during the enormous August 1963 march on Washington. Women joined in Vietnam-Era antiwar marches and protests. And women participated in Solidarity Day marches with men in the labor movement. On August 26,1970, on the fiftieth anniversary of woman’s suffrage, the National Organization for Women (NOW) organized a “Women’s Strike for Equality.” Hundreds of thousands of women marched or participated in demonstrations and rallies throughout the country. In 1978 feminist activists organized the first “Take Back the Night” marches around the country, protesting sexual as­ sault and other violence against women. Femi­ nists joined in a 1979 antipornography march and

S

helped organize the first national gay and lesbian rights march, which drew one hundred thousand people. Marches on behalf of the Equal Rights Amend­ ment (ERA) began in M ay 1976, when NOW brought sixteen thousand supporters to Springfield, Illinois. In August 1977 four thousand peo­ ple marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to de­ mand that President Carter take a more active role in efforts to ratify the ERA. In 1978 one hun­ dred thousand people again marched on Wash­ ington to press for an extension o f the time limit on ratifying the ERA, and the extension was granted. After the defeat of the E R A in 1982, feminist ac­ tivists did not organize major marches again until the late 1980s and early 1990s. NO W organized a record-breaking crowd of six hundred thousand people for an abortion rights march in 1989, then broke its own record during another march in 1992. Lesbian and gay rights marches on Wash­ ington in 1993 and New York in 1994 each drew crowds estimated at three hundred thousand to one million. A far smaller crowd marched on Washington in 1993 and helped increase appro­ priations for breast cancer research by $100 mil­ lion. Marches have built and rejuvenated various movements for women’s rights. Marches have forced issues into the forefront of political debate and provided strong new networks of activists and contributors. Efforts to mobilize local participants have turned inexperienced activists into commu­ nity leaders working together to wage the ongoing struggle for women’s equality. ■ P A T R IC IA IR E LA N D

Marches, Lesbian and Cay hree lesbians in skirts and seven gay men in suits picketed the White House on April 17, 1965. Those ten lonely protesters never imagined that thirty years later one million people would

T

358

M A RRIAGE

march for lesbian and gay rights. In a society where homosexuals were expected to hide, visi­ bility was strength. “ Out of the closet and into the streets!” became both a chant and a key strategy in the struggle for equality. The first official national March on Washing­ ton for Lesbian and G ay Rights was held on Octo­ ber 14, 1979. The established national organiza­ tions had feared that people would not risk coming out, but over one hundred thousand marchers, “gay and proud,” followed the lesbians of color who carried the lead banner down Penn­ sylvania Avenue. The second national March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights brought out almost six hundred fifty thousand people on October 11, 1987. Chanting “ For love and for life, we’re not going back,” the angry marchers protested the lack of A ID S funding and the Supreme Court’s 1986 Hardwick decision, which criminalized gay sex. Among the eighty events that took place that weekend were the inaugural unfolding of the N A M ES Project Quilt, a morning rally organized by the People o f Color Caucus, and the largest civil disobedience action ever held at the Su­ preme Court. Although the major media ignored the march, the participants went home inspired and empowered. People used this energy to create many new lesbian and gay organizations. The National March on Washington for Les­ bian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation on April 25,1993, attracted some eight hundred thou­ sand people and extraordinary media coverage. The marchers were hopeful and called on Presi­ dent Clinton to keep his promise to lift the ban on gays in the military. Allies from the civil rights and women’s movements joined elected officials and celebrities at the speakers’ podium. T he “ Dyke M arch” for lesbian visibility was one of hundreds of related events. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion was marked on June 26, 1994, when about one million lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their families, friends,

and allies marched in New York City. The Stonewall Rebellion commemorates events that resulted from a routine raid at a gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, on June 28, 1969. Lesbians and drag queens, many of them people of color, led the fight against police. Their resistance sparked a three-day rebellion generally regarded as the birth of the modern lesbian and gay rights movement. By 1995 people in three hundred cities in twenty countries celebrated Stonewalls anniversary with annual Pride Day marches and parades. Marches provide visibility, support, safety in numbers, and a sense of joy and celebration that lesbian and gay people need to continue the fight for justice and equality for all Americans. ■ JOAN E . B IR E N

s Marriage hroughout U.S. history, marriage has been deemed a social good, especially for women. If marriage rates for a specific group of women diminished—as happened for college-educated women in the late 1800s—this was generally treated as cause for concern. Unlike divorce rates, the marriage rates for women have remained fairly consistent. Allowing for some deviations, it has been true since nationhood that less than 10 percent of women eligible to marry never marry during their lifetime. W hile marriage has significant social, psycho­ logical, religious, and cultural dimensions, these have often been overshadowed by legal defini­ tions. The historical trajectory of marriage is of­ ten described as a shift from marriage as a status to the notion of marriage as a contract, but both status and contract coexist in conceptions of mar­ riage. The law has traditionally constructed mar­ riage as limited to two people, one man and one woman, whose marriage creates a legal unity rep­ resented in the public sphere by the male part-

T

MARRIAGE

ner. Thus, until the Married Women’s Property Acts of the 1840s, married women were not able to own property or enter into contracts because their legal existence had been extinguished by the status of marriage. Rooted in the theory of the legal unity of marriage are more recent laws, including state statutes that attempted to require spousal notification before a married woman could obtain an abortion. The Supreme Court has declared that these spousal notification laws violate constitutional privacy (Planned Parent­ hood o f Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey). Per­ haps ironically, the notion of constitutional pri­ vacy itself springs from the notion o f marriage as a legal unity; the first case recognizing a privacy right to obtain contraception identified the right in relation to the sanctity of the marital relation (Griswold v. Connecticut). Whether marriage is viewed as status or con­ tract, it is pervasively regulated by state law. Since colonial times, state laws have governed marriage, including who was qualified to perform the cere­ mony. At first, only justices of the peace were so qualified, but this soon was expanded to include clergy certified by the state, despite objections that such authority violated the separation of church and state. Now most states require some sort of ceremony and the registration of a mar­ riage certificate. A handful of states recognize common-law marriage, meaning that the state will deem a relationship a legal marriage even if there is no ceremony and registration if the cou­ ple can meet certain other requirements, such as living together for a certain period of years and defining themselves as married. In the slave states before the Civil War, slaves could not enter into any contracts, including the marriage contract. After the Civil War, one of the first issues to be considered by legislators in states of the former Confederacy was the legalization of slave unions. W hile this may have partially been a recognition o f the humanity of former slaves, there are some arguments that the state interest in marriage was a mechanism to deem children the

financial responsibility of freedmen rather than of their former masters or of the state itself. A vestige of the slave codes persisted in miscegenation laws, which disqualified and often criminalized mar­ riages between nonwhite persons and white per­ sons. Many states began to repeal their misce­ genation laws after World War II, but it was not until 1967 that the Supreme Court held that mis­ cegenation laws were unconstitutional (Loving v. Virginia). State laws have historically regulated, and con­ tinue to regulate, the degree of permissible rela­ tion between the parties, prohibiting, for exam­ ple, marriages between brothers and sisters or between first cousins. The rationale for such laws is based upon questionable notions of genetics and supports prohibitions of all such marriages, even when the couple would not or could not pro­ create. Although such marriages are usually not criminal, the state generally views such marriages as void and refuses to recognize them. State laws also regulate the minimum age for marriage, usually legislating differently for fe­ males and males. For example, the legal age for marriage with parental consent ranges from twelve years for females and fourteen years for males in some states and without parental con­ sent the ages range from sixteen to twenty-one for females and eighteen to twenty-one for males. The courts have generally rejected arguments that the differential ages for men and women con­ stitute gender discrimination, concluding that the state’s goal of preventing unwed teenage preg­ nancy is a sufficiently important reason for the dif­ ferential. All states now prohibit a person who is already legally married from entering into another mar­ riage; however, this has been a controversial issue in U.S. history because of the Mormons’ accep­ tance of polygamy. Although marriage is sup­ posedly within the province of state rather than federal regulation, the federal government condi­ tioned Utah’s entry into the Union upon abolish­ ment of its laws permitting polygamy, causing the

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delay of Utah’s statehood until 1896, more than forty years after the initial application. Echoes of the federal-state conflict regarding polygamy are found in the contemporary contro­ versy surrounding same-sex marriage. Although during the 1970s many courts had rejected chal­ lenges to the limiting of marriage licenses to cou­ ples consisting of a male and a female, in 1993 the Hawai’i Supreme Court ruled that such treatment might constitute sex discrimination (Baehr v. Levin). The court relied upon its state constitu­ tional provision prohibiting sex discrimination and held that unless the state could demonstrate a compelling interest for the limitation of marriage to male-female couples, the practice must be dis­ continued and same-sex couples must be allowed to avail themselves of legal marriage. When the case was remanded for trial, the trial court found that the state did not satisfy its burden of demon­ strating a compelling reason and most observers expect that the Hawai’i Supreme Court will af­ firm this ruling. Such an affirmation would legal­ ize same-sex marriages in Hawai’i, although op­ ponents plan to amend the state constitution to prevent such a decision from taking effect. Whether same-sex marriages in one state would be valid in other states is unclear. In response to the Hawai’i litigation, in 1996 Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOM A), which at­ tempts to clarify that states need not recognize same-sex marriages. Many states have passed sim­ ilar statutes providing that the state will not recog­ nize same-sex marriages even if such marriages are legally valid in other states. These state laws as well as D O M A contradict the general practice of states recognizing as valid marriages that are valid in other states, a practice that is possibly man­ dated by the full faith and credit clause o f the Constitution. The controversy over same-sex marriage not only implicates laws and legislators but feminist theorists have also divided over the issue. In one feminist view, legalizing same-sex marriage has the potential to erode the gendered configuration

of marriage and to liberalize and perhaps even lib­ erate the institution of marriage from its patriar­ chal roots. In the opposite view, legalizing samesex marriage will mean merely that same-sex couples will be assimilated into the institution of marriage with all its defects, including its current construction as a civil contract among three par­ ties, one of which is always the state. ■ RUTH ANN ROBSON a l s o Coverture; Divorce and Custody; Families; Legal Status.

See

0

Maternity Homes

aternity homes had their origins in the late nineteenth century, when white, middleclass, evangelical Protestant women —many of whom were Woman’s Christian Temperance Un­ ion members, teachers, or missionaries—estab­ lished “rescue homes” in a dual effort to redeem what they saw as desperate, powerless female vic­ tims of urbanization and industrialization, and to assert their own female moral authority, grounded in piety and sexual purity. Rescuers cast them­ selves as doing “women’s work for women,” and believed that their charges, often prostitutes, would embrace the values of late-nineteenthcentury middle-class womanhood after receiving prolonged training in domestic skills and Chris­ tian virtues. Rescue homes were first established in the 1880s, including the first Crittenton homes for prostitutes (1882) and the first Salvation Army Home (1887). By 1909 there were seventy-eight Crittenton homes all over the country, and in that year, Kate Waller Barrett took charge of the Na­ tional Florence Crittenton Mission and began to shift the organization’s mission from rescuing prostitutes to providing refuge for unwed mothers. Over the next twenty years, many rescue homes followed suit, partly because these facilities never

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M A TER N ITY H O M E S

attracted enough prostitutes. Also, in most cities, prostitution had become a criminal offense han­ dled by the police. The women who founded the homes carried their evangelical purposes into their work with the new clientele, mostly working-class unwed moth­ ers with few resources or alternatives. Home ma­ trons and staff generally construed the origins of the pregnant woman’s plight as a matter of seduc­ tion and abandonment. They did not perceive unwed mothers as “bad girls,” exactly; but they believed that the women’s unwed pregnancies proved that they were morally vulnerable as well as untrained in religious and domestic life. Maternity home staffs aimed to ameliorate these deficiencies by keeping unwed mothers in the home for a year or more, imbuing every aspect of life with religious fervor, and training their charges to be domestic servants (considered appropriately submissive and educative employment for ruined but spiritually redeemable daughters of the working class). A key principle in all homes in this era claimed that only by becoming a mother to her child would the unwed mother overcome the degrada­ tions of seduction, abandonment, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy and achieve redemption. The sins of seducers were beyond the province of the homes; unwed mothers alone were expected to bear the consequences of illicit sex and maternity and take full responsibility for the child as well as for their own renewal. Between 1910 and 1930 the authority of the evan­ gelical founders was compromised, first by newly minted “ experts” —academically trained social workers and social scientists who became inter­ ested in the diagnosis and treatment of unwed mothers. These professionals explained female sexual deviance, including illegitimate pregnancy, as the result of the poisonous interaction between negative sociological or environmental condi­ tions —the immigrant urban slum, for example— and negative biological conditions—the innate degeneracy of the lower classes, where illegitimacy was judged to occur frequently. The new experts

prescribed a shortened stay in the home and stressed the importance of learning practical ma­ ternal and vocational skills. The revamped diagno­ sis and program were championed as well by the Community Chest, which began to supplant reli­ gious-based giving as the main source of finan­ cial support for maternity homes. The secular, community-based funders, along with the C h il­ dren’s Bureau, credited their professional peers as modern, credentialed experts and pressured evangelical maternity home matrons to cede au­ thority accordingly. In the 1940s, as the white illegitimacy rate rose sharply, homes continued to professionalize treat­ ment, a process that often involved a struggle between evangelicals and the social work pro­ fessionals. From 1940 to 1970 social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists forcefully insisted that the home resident—now likely after World War II to be a white, middle-class girl—was a mal­ adjusted individual whose out-of-wedlock preg­ nancy was proof of psychological disturbance that could be cured, if and only if she submitted to treatment under the auspices of the home. The experts recommended that first the girl and her family must arrange her disappearance from fam­ ily and community. Then the unwed mother must undergo intensive psychological treatment; and most important, she must agree to relinquish her illegitimate child to a married couple, for without a husband, the young woman was not a mother, according to the ideology of the era. Having cooperated, the unwed mother could ostensibly deny the entire episode and resume de­ velopment toward normative, middle-class wom­ anhood. This program was considered a reform over the days when fallen women were forever stigmatized. The new, professionalized home staff rarely imagined, however, the devastating, life­ long consequences many unwed mothers of that era suffered for having been shamed and coerced into relinquishing their babies. From the advent of the homes in the late nine­ teenth century through the post-World War II pe-

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riod, most homes were for whites only. This prac­ tice reflected segregation policies governing most institutions in the United States until well after midcentury and also reflected the determination of white authorities to treat white unwed mothers differently from unwed mothers of color, whether they were Black, Latina, or Native American. White authorities argued that illegitimate preg­ nancy was not a shameful event in these commu­ nities, so unwed mothers of color needed neither refuge nor relinquishment-oriented services; in fact they supposedly needed no services at all, since the African American community and other communities of color could always absorb an­ other baby. Nevertheless, a handful of Black ur­ ban communities across the country sustained small, Black-only homes for several decades be­ tween the 1920s and 1960s. These homes were es­ tablished and supported variously by coalitions of church and secular leaders. By the early 1960s, unable to support themselves financially, the few that remained were folded into newly integrated Salvation Army or Crittenton homes, all of which received Community Chest backing. In the late twentieth century, maternity homes still exist, but in two radically different forms. Some, like the Florence Crittenton Home in San Francisco, serve a multiracial, multicultural, gen­ erally youthful, indigent population of teenage mothers and their babies, who receive support ser­ vices, supervision, and sometimes residence on the premises. Other, newer homes, ironically, have revived the evangelical mission of the origi­ nal founders as they aim to rescue unwed mothers from exercising the option of abortion and protect them from the dangers that face vulnerable young women in this society. Regina Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization o f Social Work 18901945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (New York: Routledge, 1992). ■ R IC K IE S O L IN G E R S ee

also

“Illegitimacy’VSingle Pregnancy.

g Medical Research arly health practices in the United States grew out of a long tradition of home-based health maintenance, disease prevention, and self-help “cures” for illnesses. Women’s roles had long been to enhance health through dietary means and to aid those who were ill. Although some homemakers and midwives were literate, domes­ tic care was often part of an oral tradition. Women learned by assisting other women. Less is known about early health beliefs and laydoctoring practices among Native Americans, Blacks, and Latinos. Particularly in the South, self-help cures were based more in notions of magic, prayer, and spirituality than in what mod­ ern physicians would consider science. Ethnically diverse folk practices were nonetheless based on careful observation, were transmitted orally and, in some cases, required an apprenticeship. Like other “ recipes,” these methods were “kitchentested,” albeit not rigorously proven. Folk meth­ ods were thus subjected to at least a modicum of scrutiny and, perhaps more importantly, were contemporaneously believed to work. From 1740 through i860, written domestic health guides often challenged the professional authority of physicians. In the 1700s both physi­ cian- and lay-authored manuals existed in the colonies. Some were written by women and com­ bined cooking and medicinal advice in a single volume, stressing proper diet, exercise, fresh air, dress reform, and cleanliness. Throughout the 1800s increasing conflict ex­ isted among competing trained practitioners and their theories. Without a dominant paradigm, there was no orthodoxy against which to judge treatments and identify quackery. By the mid1800s, a variety of medical groups arose: tradi­ tional and nontraditional. Traditional, or regular, medicine was the precursor to modern “scien­ tific” medicine. It was characterized by treatments such as bleeding, purging, and inducing vom­ iting. In 1809 modern surgery was introduced

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M E D IC A L RESEA RCH

in the United States by a Kentucky surgeon, Ephraim M cDowell, who successfully removed an ovarian cyst. Nontraditional approaches to medicine included homeopathy and, later, os­ teopathy, chiropractics, and hydropathy. Spiritual and homeopathic approaches to health were of­ ten combined with dietary and other lifestyle rec­ ommendations. Women were leaders of several charismatic re­ ligions that diverged from what became modem medicine. Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, published her textbook on mind healing in 1875. She had earlier been influenced by homeopathy. Ellen White, cofounder of the Sev­ enth-Day Adventist Church in 1963, advocated abstention from meat, alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee. Although women found it harder to gain ad­ mission to regular medical schools, they nonethe­ less participated in both traditional and nontradi­ tional areas of the field. Leaders in the feminist movement did, however, often support nontradi­ tional medicine. For example, Susan B. Anthony’s physician was a homeopath, Julia Holmes Smith. Anthony and Amelia Bloomer later helped found the Vegetarian Society. Elizabeth Blackwell, a leading feminist supporter, criticized regular (in­ terventionist) medical science as well as germ the­ ory. T he schism between traditional medicine and the various nontraditional groups, as well as the popularity of patent medicines, can be attrib­ uted to dissatisfaction with increasingly profes­ sionalized medicine. Some misogynist claims about women were framed in the language of science. In the six­ teenth century anatomical drawings and system­ atic observation of childbirth in France gave rise to “scientific midwifery.” Between 1800 and 1840 research was being conducted by relating clinical signs and symptoms with lesions observed at au­ topsy. Unfortunately, this approach offered little relief in the short run. Advances in anesthesia in the mid-i8oos hastened the use of surgical inter­ ventions, including those for childbirth. The British later developed surgical tools, such as for­

ceps, which could save lives, giving physicians, in comparison to midwives, a claim to special exper­ tise in childbirth. By 1852 the Alabama physician J. Marion Sims published a method for repairing vaginal tearing sustained during childbirth. Sims is known to have “experimented” surgically on Black female slaves, a form of torture. In London during the 1860s, sexual surgery on women was practiced briefly, including the re­ moval o f healthy ovaries and the clitoris. These practices quickly came into disrepute; still, the practice continued in the United States until the early 1900s. Women health care providers also used the “sci­ entific” method. Based on her work in the 1850s dur­ ing the Crim ean War, Florence Nightingale pro­ vided data supportingtheneed forsanitary reforms. She keptcareful records, contributingtoanalysesof data on outcomes. For example, she pioneered the use of pie charts to illustrate the percentages of re­ search subjects with different outcomes. Other women used science to more directly ad­ dress images of female frailty. In 1873 Dr. Edward Clarke published the influential Sex and Educa­ tion, which popularized the notion that education was physiologically draining for young women and that it was physically damaging to the devel­ opment of reproductive organs. He concluded that higher education for women produced “monstrous brains and puny bodies.” In the mid-i870s Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi in­ terviewed 268 women about their menstruationrelated experiences and found that those who were generally in poor health or under stress, or who did not exercise enough, had the greatest risk of menstrual pain. In the early 1900s Henry Hollingworth asked his wife, Leta, to assist him in an experimental study of the effects of caffeine on mental and motor abilities. The women subjects recorded their menses over the six-week study period. The menstrual cycle had no striking relevance and Hollingworth ignored these data in his report. His wife, however, examined tire data more care­ fully and, given recurrent negative stereotypes

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about menstruation, was much more interested than he in the “negative” finding. She went on to obtain her doctorate and published a study about her research in 1914. In this study, women per­ formed twenty-four tasks at two times during the menstrual cycle, demonstrating that learning and performance were not affected by timing in the cycle. More generically, notable medical findings made by women around the turn of the century included those of Augusta Klumpke (who won the Academy o f Medicine prize for her article on brachial plexus injury); Florence Rena Sabin (on the origins of lymphatic vessels); Dorothy Reed (on the cell type in lymphoid tissue that is pathog­ nomonic for Hodgkin’s disease); Alice Evans (on Brucellosis, which was transmitted in untreated milk); Winifred Ashby (who determined redblood-cell survival time); Maude Slye (who pro­ posed that cancer has a hereditary basis); and Hel­ en Taussig (whose heart research contributed to saving “blue babies” ). There were fewer Black than white women physicians. An early Black re­ searcher was May Chin, who believed that her pa­ tients were harmed by society as well as by disease. She obtained a public-health degree and worked in cancer research. Women’s scientific contribu­ tions generally tended to be lost or buried. Women researchers are not as commonly credited or cited in scientific literature as are men. In the 1800s female physicians specialized mainly in obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, public health and education, and counseling. Women activists, including women physicians, played important roles in the public-health move­ ment of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The women’s movement o f the Progressive Era sought to improve the health o f women, especially women as mothers. For example, women were ac­ tive in the fight to establish infant and prenatal clinics and to distribute milk to the needy. Women also founded the field of occupational or industrial health. In 1912 Congress banned the use of phosphorus in the match industry. Toxic exposure to phosphorus resulted in jaw necrosis in

some workers. Alice Hamilton studied toxic haz­ ards among women workers, ranging from lead poisoning to jaundice caused by T N T poisoning in munitions factories to jaw necrosis caused by radium exposure in watch-dial painters to psy­ chosis as a result of exposure to carbon disulphide among rayon workers. Others who contributed to the field o f public health during the 1920s and 1930s were Josephine Baker, Connie Guion, Leona Baumgartner, and Margaret Barnard. The status of women in medical science dimin­ ished after the 1920s. Appeals to “science” were in­ creasingly used to help justify the medicalization o f childbirth and, by the 1920s, childbirth was re­ moved from women’s homes and brought into the professionally dominated hospitals. To the extent that “women’s health” continued to be studied and taught, it survived largely in schools of nurs­ ing and in public health and the social health sci­ ences, including psychology. In the 1960s women initiated widespread, ac­ tivist concerns about environmental health issues, echoing earlier themes. The Women’s Strike for Peace led fifty thousand women in a march against nuclear testing. Thalidomide-related birth defects were recognized in 1962. And Rachel Car­ son’s Silent Spring focused public attention on the negative health effects of environmental tox­ ins, such as pesticides. In the 1970s pregnant women were increas­ ingly excluded from participation in clinical experiments and research, ostensibly because of fears of untoward effects on their unborn off­ spring. Ethicists and policymakers then were oddly blind to inadequate testing of oral contra­ ceptives and inappropriate use of D E S (diethylstilbesterol) in presumably pregnant women. Women’s health activists responded to these and other crises by forming groups such as the National Women’s Health Network, an impor­ tant advocacy organization. There was increasing diversity among scientists. Noted Black women researchers since the 1950s have included Jewel Plummer Cobb, a cancer researcher, and Effie Ellis, a parasitologist known for her work on the

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health and nutrition of the poor. Black physicianscientists have also made their mark in recent years—Janice E. Green Douglas, who has stud­ ied mechanisms of blood pressure regulation; Jane C . Wright, who has studied chemotherapy; Joycelyn Elders, who has studied cancer and served as surgeon general of the United States. The next critical step was to directly confront the gaps in scientific knowledge about women’s health. By the mid-1980s women physician-scientists and other health professionals began to work with advocacy and public policy experts in Washington, D .C ., to heighten public and professional aware­ ness of research issues pertaining to women’s health. This collaboration moved beyond a reac­ tive, crisis-to-crisis approach toward a proactive plan. Interest was galvanized by the public revela­ tion that as little as 13 percent of the budget for government-financed research at the National Institutes of Health wentto women’s health issues. In particular, there was concern that research on breast cancer, a leading killer of women, was un­ derfunded. Knowledge was lacking about cardio­ vascular illness among women (compared with the abundance of such knowledge about men) even though it was the leading killer of women. In addition, the negative effects of policies that ex­ cluded women from early phases of drug testing were documented. For example, men were found to respond better to some antidepressants than women, even though women were depressed and were treated with antidepressants twice as often as men. Recent studies have addressed gaps in knowl­ edge about women’s health. Current leaders in women’s health research include Elizabeth Barrett-Connors, Maureen Henderson, Margaret Chesney, Nancy Woods, Hortensia Amaro, and Vivian Pinn. Barrett-Connors has directed a post­ menopausal trial to determine which type of post­ menopausal hormone replacement treatment has the best effect on cardiovascular health outcome measures. Early findings will help to guide treat­ ment for many postmenopausal women.

Maureen Henderson, a cancer researcher, orig­ inally planned the Women’s Health Trial, which was later undertaken by the NIH. This is the largest single study related to midlife women’s health. Margaret Chesney, a health psychologist, has studied behavioral factors related to HIV in­ fection, as has Hortensia Amaro. Nancy Woods is a nursing researcher who obtained funding for the first NIH-sponsored Center for Research on Women’s Health. One of the most important leaders in women’s health research is Vivian Pinn, a physician-scientist specializing in pathol­ ogy. Pinn has served as the first director of the Of­ fice for Research on Women’s Health at the NIH. A Black woman, Pinn has worked to ensure the inclusion of people of color in clinical trials. Current themes in women’s health continue to echo those of the 1800s. The present focuses on “alternative” and more humane approaches to health maintenance and disease prevention are strikingly similar to the concerns of social and health reform movements led by women over a hundred years ago. What may distinguish the present revival is that women are increas­ ingly in a position, as medical researchers, to create and define knowledge. Since “women’s health” can be considered “ applied women’s studies,” there is also reason to hope that the ex­ plosion o f feminist knowledge in the humanities and social sciences can be transferred to med­ ical centers and other health institutions in a way that will help institutionalize advances and improve women’s lives. Rima D. Apple, ed., Women, Health, and Medicine in America: A Historical Handbook (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992); G. Kass-Simon and Patricia Fames, Women of Science: Righting the Record (Bloom­ ington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Eileen Nechas and Denise Foley, Unequal Treatment: What You Don’t Know About How Women Are Mistreated by the Medical Com­ munity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). ■ JEA N A. HAMILTON S ee

also

Cancer.

366

m en

M

’s

m o v em en t

Men’s Movement

lthough some would argue that to speak of a “men’s movement” in a male-dominated soci­ ety is redundant and even absurd, the term is commonly used to describe the organized efforts of men to champion, explore, or challenge either traditional notions of masculinity or the feminist movement. Some conservative men’s groups have denied that their efforts relate to feminism at all, yet the popularity of such groups throughout U.S. history seems inevitably to follow periods of women’s advancement; that is, the late nine­ teenth century, the mid-igoos, the mid-i94.os, the mid-1970s, and from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. In each period, the men’s movement, which is usually comprised of white, middle-class males, falls into three categories. The antifeminists de­ fend the “natural law” of male supremacy, warn that higher education for women inhibits fertility, and argue for the exemption of women from pub­ lic responsibilities due to their higher moral duty to curb the antisocial male. The masculinists in­ sist that men themselves suffer gender oppression and seek to protect their virility by establishing preserves against feminization, such as the Boy Scouts and fraternal orders. Robert Bly, author of Iron John, led “wild man” retreats for men to re­ cover “ essential masculinity” which, in his view, waned during the second wave of U.S. feminism. The pro-feminists support suffrage and reproduc­ tive rights, work to extend women’s influence be­ yond the home, challenge male violence against women, and lobby to enact feminist principles, believing feminism benefits men by creating a gender-just society.

A

■ KAY L E I G H HAGAN

§ Mental Health and Illness he diagnosis and treatment of women’s men­ tal health and illness in the United States have been shaped by cultural values about what consti­ tutes a good and acceptable woman and have been used to punish women who fall outside the norm. In particular, a woman’s body and its cycles as well as her adaptation to social roles have been implicated as factors that cause mental illness. As a result of these formulations, specific treatments have been designed “for women only.” Generally, these clinical interventions have been directed at women’s bodies or have taken the form of verbal prescriptions aimed at helping a woman live a more “feminine” life. In the mid-nineteenth century, women were judged by the standard of True Womanhood. The True Woman was a faithful wife, a pious ser­ vant, and, above all, a good mother. Ironically, biological mothering, so central to a woman’s identity as a True Woman, was considered in the nineteenth century to be a cause of insanity. One hypothesis linked insanity to prolonged lactation. One in eleven women diagnosed as “ insane” in the 1850s reportedly suffered a nervous break­ down either during or after pregnancy. The emphasis on “good mothering” posed additional problems for poor and African American wom­ en. Poor women had more children and felt more acutely the strain and burden of caring for them. For African American women, mother­ hood was tainted by the legacy of slavery, in which women were valued for their “breeding” potential and were often forcibly separated from their children. Women who strayed too far from the domestic sphere were also considered to be at risk for psy­ chic distress. A woman who overtaxed her deli­ cate sensibilities by engaging in too much intel­ lectual work was subject to “brain strain.” Not surprisingly, this same work was not considered to be crazy-making for men, who were felt to have

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M E N T A L H E A L T H AND I L L N E S S

the natural endowments to engage in active intel­ lectual efforts. At the end o f the nineteenth century, medicine began to adopt a more scientific approach, but medical literature about women’s mental illness remained unscientific. Failing to fulfill the roles of wife and mother and pursuing occupations and professions for which they were “not suited” were considered to cause insanity. Researchers postu­ lated that unfeminine activities caused uterine de­ rangement which in turn caused mental illness. During this period, two separate treatment ap­ proaches were developed specifically for female patients. The belief that an insane woman had something wrong with her “female organs” re­ sulted in treatments such as electrical stimulation of the uterus, clitoral cauterization, and pre­ scribed weight gain to prevent the ovaries from slipping out of place. Women diagnosed with psy­ chological problems were subjected to a form of paternalistic behavior modification. S. Weir Mitchell, the chief proponent of what was called the rest cure, recommended that women who were suffering from emotional exhaustion take to their beds for a period of six weeks to two months. This solution served to make being ill sufficiently aversive so that women would readily return to their roles as wives and mothers. Indigent women, by contrast, who received all of their care in staterun asylums, were prescribed “work therapy,” la­ boring as unpaid servants, performing many of the domestic chores required to keep the institution functioning. First-person accounts by women who were in­ stitutionalized in insane asylums in the nine­ teenth century suggest that incarceration in a mental hospital was used as one means of forcing conformity onto women. These women felt that the reason they were declared insane was that they held religious beliefs contrary to those of their families and husbands, owned property cov­ eted by relatives, or held controversial opinions not shared by members o f their family. In some states, husbands had the legal authority to commit

a wife to an asylum without a doctor’s order; thus “ unwanted” wives found their way into mental hospitals. By the beginning of the twentieth century, women began to see themselves not only as wives and mothers but also as sexual beings. Not sur­ prisingly, this new awareness of female sexuality and reproductive independence was implicated as a cause of mental illness. Excessive masturba­ tion by intellectual women was considered a cause of divorce in later life. Interrupted coitus (used to prevent conception) was deemed a cause of excessive nervousness and irritability. By the 1930s, psychoanalytic theory was a vital force in U.S. psychiatry. Early Freudian theory identified the castration complex and penis envy as core elements in female development. Even her eventual desire to bear a child was seen as a compensation for her lack of a penis. Early theo­ rists speculated that the sexually assertive woman was really a frustrated man, a woman uncomfort­ able with her own inherently passive position. Lesbianism, which was linked to feminism, was also declared deviant. Freudian psychology de­ fined both narcissism and masochism as particu­ larly feminine disorders. Some psychoanalysts concluded that feminism threatened a woman’s happiness, because a woman could not be herself when she was “ imitating a man,” that is, being as­ sertive. These psychoanalytic explanations of a woman’s psyche served to stigmatize and con­ demn independent and professional women at the time. Despite attempts to modify some o f its elements, Freudian theory remained a largely an­ tifemale force in U.S. psychiatry for almost fifty years. Psychiatric diagnosis and treatment historically have been used as means o f social control in the lives of women. Women who deviate from the cultural norm in terms of role, sexual orientation, demeanor, appearance, or race are more likely to be labeled deviant and to receive psychiatric treat­ ment. As late as 1986, in the Revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual o f Mental Disorders pub-

367

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M ID W IFER Y

lished and developed by the American Psychiatric Association, two disorders linked to a woman’s de­ meanor and to her female body were still under consideration for inclusion: Late Luteal Phase Dysphoric Disorder (characterized by anxiety, ir­ ritability, depression, and affective lability during a specific phase of the menstrual cycle) and Selfdefeating Personality Disorder (a variant of the old female “masochism” ). Women clearly have suffered because of the la­ bels and diagnoses assigned them—some accu­ rate, some not. By the late 1980s, researchers and practitioners began to recognize and acknowl­ edge that a large number of women being treated for mental illness were in fact experiencing symp­ toms as a result of sexual abuse trauma perpe­ trated by a trusted family member, male or fe­ male, or by a teacher, baby sitter, or clergy member. In the past, a woman’s accusations of sexual abuse, rather than being considered as an accurate report of her experience, were thought to be fantasies, delusional or “hysterical” thinking, or the result of suppressed and forbidden desires. Some women repressed the memory of their trauma involuntarily, thus retaining their role as good daughters within the traditional family struc­ ture. Throughout history, treatment and diagnosis of mental illness for women has been confounded by cultural norms of what constitutes acceptable “feminine” behavior. Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972); Jeffrey Geller and Maxine Harris, Women of the Asylum (New York: Anchor Books,

1994)■ M AXIN E H ARRIS See

M

also

Depression.

Mexican American Women S e e Chicanas and Mexican American Women.

§

Midwifery

robably the oldest women’s profession in the United States, midwifery is the practice of assisting women during childbirth. As such, it evokes strong and contradictory images. Some people condemn midwives as ignorant and super­ stitious women whose unsanitary practices risk mothers’ lives, while others glorify them as sensi­ tive, highly skilled health practitioners who have been unfairly victimized by a misogynistic med­ ical establishment. In reality, midwives were and are a varied group. They include highly skilled women who have delivered thousands of infants over long careers, and those who have attended a birth only occasionally. They include the for­ mally educated and the empirically trained, women who regard their work as a profession, and those who see it as a religious calling. They in­ clude nurse-midwives who work as part of an ob­ stetric team, and independent practitioners who reject the medical model of birth. The diversity among midwives reflects the changes and variety in women’s economic status and of religious and cultural views of childbirth and labor. Before the mid-eighteenth century virtually all babies in North America were delivered by mid­ wives. Native American midwives and female helpers gave physical support and, sometimes, herbal medicines to women in labor; they also performed other rituals, such as preparing the birth location, dancing, and bathing or naming the baby, depending on the traditions of the tribe. In most Native communities, women also at­ tended the sick, laid out the dead, and led the mourning ceremonies. African American midwives were both spiritual and medical advisers to their communities. Reli­ gious women whose skills were passed down be­ tween generations, they were esteemed members of their communities, delivering the babies of plantation whites as well as slaves. In addition to catching babies, “ granny” midwives provided

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M ID W IFER Y

herbs to heal the sick and comfort the dying, ad­ vised parents about child rearing, and took care of children while their mothers worked in the fields. In the process, they helped maintain West African culture and traditions. Like their Native and African American coun­ terparts, colonial English midwives also under­ stood their work in a religious context and served their communities through births, illnesses, and deaths with the help of other women. They used herbs to speed up labor and ease its pains, exam­ ined the cervix to assess the progress o f labor, and, if necessary, turned the baby. They also prescribed herbal treatments for burns and minor illnesses, helped patients with housework and child care, visited the sick, and prepared the dead for burial. While Native and African American traditions persisted well into the twentieth century, among Anglo Americans the medicalization of birth be­ gan prior to the American Revolution. Physicians, or “men-midwives,” entered the field of obstetrics in the 1760s. By the mid-nineteenth century, most middle-income women looked to science and medicine for safer and easier births, choosing doctors to deliver their babies. The influx of immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century led to a revival of midwifery: midwives delivered about one-half of all babies born in the United States in 1910. Immigrants from Europe, Mexico, and Asia still viewed child­ birth as a domestic, female event, not a medical one. Most wanted their babies to be delivered by midwives who, in addition to preparing teas and massaging the mother, cooked the meals, cleaned the house, looked after older children, and pro­ vided emotional support. Midwives also cost less than doctors; most worked in exchange for crops or services, or for nothing at all. And they attended births that doctors would not because of racial or ethnic prejudice, difficult access, or the patient’s inability to pay. Between 1910 and 1930 the proportion of mid­ wife-attended births dropped from 50 to 15 per­ cent. The decline of midwifery was due to a vari­

ety of factors, including immigration restriction, assimilation, a falling birthrate, and a vigorous medical campaign against midwives. Obstetri­ cians, seeking to advance their professional status by depicting obstetrics as a complicated medi­ cal specialty, blamed midwives for childbirthrelated deaths and called for the elimination of midwifery. Midwives, a diverse group without any central organization, were unable to defend themselves. Their only supporters were public health advocates who promoted training and li­ censing programs similar to those in Europe. The 1921 Sheppard-Towner Act provided federal matching funds for midwife training programs in thirty-one states. By 1930 80 percent of practicing midwives were in the South, where Black and Mexican American women were denied equal access to medical care. Midwifery remained an important part of the health care system until the 1950s. Black and Mexican American midwives contin­ ued to use herbs and traditional birth positions and followed established rituals, such as the African American practice of placing a knife un­ der the bed to “cut the pain.” At the same time, they worked with state health departments, pro­ viding immunizations and health education in rural communities. Strict licensing policies, how­ ever, combined with urban migration, led to the decline of traditional midwifery in the 1950s. By the early 1970s, the number of midwife-attended births nationwide reached an all-time low of 0.5 percent. W hile midwifery was dying out in the South, middle-class women dissatisfied with medicalized birth revived interest in woman-centered birth. A product of the 1970s women’s health movement, modern midwifery has gone in two directions. The first, nurse-midwifery, provides professional, woman-centered care for low-risk mothers within the framework of a medically directed health ser­ vice. The second, lay or “ independent” mid­ wifery, grew out of the home birth movement. Mostly empirically trained, independent mid-

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M ISC EG EN A T IO N

wives explicitly reject the medicalization of birth and have thus provoked considerable opposition from the medical profession. Currently, in the Native American community, there is a large movement to restore midwifery to its traditional role in the birthing process. Although midwives will probably never regain their former status, the revival of midwifery has increased women’s options and strengthened their chances for a woman-centered birth. Linda Janet Holmes, “African American Midwives in the South," in The American Way o f Birth, edited by Pamela S. Eakins (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Judy Barrett Litoff, American Midwives, i860 to the Pres­ ent (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vin­ tage, 1990). ■ M O L L Y LAD D -T AY LO R S e e a l s o Childbirth; Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act.

§ Military S e e Armed Forces.

g Miscegenation

S

exual liaisons that cross the color line have been intertwined in American history with is­ sues of gender, race, politics, and law from the colonial period onward. The word “miscegena­ tion” was invented during the 1864 presidential campaign (from the Latin miscere, “to mix,” and genus, race) when Democrats claimed that Lin­ coln’s Republican Party advocated sex and mar­ riage across the color line. Like “mulatto,” proba­ bly derived from the concept of mules and

hybridity, “ miscegenation” was pejorative in its historical context. Europeans and Africans reproduced together from the time of earliest contact in the colonial South, where white indentured servants and Black slaves lived and labored in the same house­ holds. White authorities wrote the first laws against such mixtures in the late seventeenth cen­ tury; white women and Black men were threat­ ened with the harshest consequences among the possible mixtures. Under the institution of racial slavery, such laws were intended to prevent the growth of a free African American population. One’s legal status as slave or free was based on the mother’s status as slave or free; thus when white women had children with Black men, those chil­ dren would be free but of partial African ancestry, thereby threatening racial slavery. When Black women bore the children of white men, however, those children would be slaves and usually re­ main enslaved throughout their lives, thereby benefiting the institution of racial slavery. Black women and their families in the South suffered continuous sexual exploitation, or the threat of it, by white masters. Historical docu­ ments testify to the anger and humiliation female slaves experienced in the face o f their masters’ cruelty. Although the women’s resistance re­ mained constant, their efforts often proved futile in a patriarchal slave society. Southern courts did not recognize the rape of Black women by white men as a crime. Under slavery it was much less frequent, though not impossible, for white women to have sexual liaisons with Black men. Dominant ideol­ ogy deemed these white women, especially the poorer ones, as depraved agents o f illicit actions, and they were usually treated as outcasts; elite white women were more likely to exercise so­ cial power and remain out of the public eye if their cross-racial relationships were discovered. Planter-class white women in the slave South also commanded power over Black men, including the power of sexual coercion.

M ISC EG EN A T IO N

In the antebellum North, liaisons between African Americans and whites were socially taboo at least until the Civil War ended, despite the fact that not all Northern states had laws against inter­ marriage. Voluntary cross-racial liaisons did oc­ cur, though many others were exploitive, usually occurring in the context of poverty. As members of the laboring poor, Black women were subject to exploitation from white employers, and Black and white women who were struggling economi­ cally might temporarily or permanently engage in prostitution, serving Black and white men alike. After emancipation, white Southerners vi­ ciously targeted white women and Black men who engaged in sexual liaisons together. These Southerners wished fervently to retain their place at the top of the racial hierarchy. They conflated the new political power and economic indepen­ dence of Black men with sexual transgressions against white women, ignoring the long history of sexual assault of Black women by white men un­ der slavery. As part of this process of countering African American freedom, Black women were also subject to assault and rape by Klansmen and their allies, and white women who consorted, or allegedly consorted, with Black men were also vulnerable to white violence. Thus full-fledged, racist white rage about sex between Black men and white women developed in the Reconstruc­ tion years, commencing an era of terrorism and lynchings which ultimately spread north and west. By the early twentieth century, marriages across the color line were rendered explicitly ille­ gal in the South, as well as in parts o f the North and West. The consequences of interracial mar­ riages ranged from simply declaring such unions null and void to imposing fines or imprisonment. Such laws were most frequently enforced against white women and Black men. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Black women began to organize nationally. Journalist and activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett candidly called attention to the newfound, intense white anxiety about sex between white women and Black men.

She demonstrated that lynching was part of a po­ litical campaign to suppress Black male suffrage and economic independence. She noted also that fears of sexuality had not existed when white Southern men had deserted their households when they went to fight in the Civil War, leaving their wives, daughters, and male slaves at home. In 1930 a group o f white, middle-class South­ ern women formed the Association o f Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, which as­ serted that white women suffered also under an ideology that cast Black men as rapists and white women as victims in need of protection from white men. Over the next decades, small numbers of those who lived in Northern and Western states married across the color line, especially after World War II. In the South, liaisons still took the form of concubinage between Black women and white men, though to a much lesser degree than during the slavery period. The 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, involving the marriage of a Black woman and a white man, reached the United States Supreme Court after nine years of trials and appeals. The Court ruled unanimously that laws prohibiting marriages be­ tween Blacks and whites were unconstitutional; at that time, sixteen Southern states had such laws. While the number of mixed couples has in­ creased in the second half of the twentieth cen­ tury, the percentage is still small. White women and Black men make up the majority of mixed couples; this phenomenon caused considerable tension between Black and white women during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Many African Americans, while recognizing legal sanc­ tions against intermarriage as racist and a viola­ tion of rights, have looked down on other Blacks who consorted with whites. Many white Ameri­ cans have continued to respond to mixed couples with racist attitudes. The ongoing legacies of the legal and social his­ tory of miscegenation are apparent in issues rang­ ing from the influence of racist ideology in sex crimes or alleged sex crimes, to ambivalence or

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antagonism on the part of both white and Black communities toward marriages and relationships across the color line. Karen A. Getman, “ Sexual Control in the Slaveholding South: The Implementation and Maintenance of a Racial Caste System,” Harvard Women’s Law Journal Vol. 7 (1984): 115—52; Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, rev. ed., 1993); Nell Irvin Painter, “ ‘Social Equality,’ Mis­ cegenation, Labor, and Power,” in The Evolution of South­ ern Culture, edited by Numan Bartley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988). ■ MARTHA HOD ES

See

M

also

Colorism; Rape; Whiteness.

Misogyny

isogyny has its roots in the Greek miso-, mean­ ing hatred, and gyne-, meaning woman; it means the hatred of women. In patriarchal culture the word is used to designate an extreme abhor­ rence o f women, a pathological antipathy not shared by ordinary or normal men, not expressed in laws or social policy or in the presumed human­ ism of art, literature, and philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher (1844-1900), and August Strindberg, a Swedish playwright (1849-1912), for instance, are recog­ nized as misogynists by the male-supremacist cul­ ture. In an 1888 letter to Strindberg, Nietzsche wrote of the “deathly hatred of the sexes.” This “deathly hatred” included the convictions that women are filthy (especially genitally), sluttish, and whorelike; and that physical love is a war in which the woman must be vanquished by physi­ cal force, not excluding beating, rape, and mur­ der. The woman is regarded as a provocateur who, by her nature and will, initiates combat. In Nietz­ sche’s and Strindberg’s view, feminists were an even worse “enemy,” an “army o f whores and would-be whores—professional whores with ab­

M

normal inclinations,” wrote Strindberg. Denunci­ ation, humiliating insult, and a degrading sexualization of women characterize misogyny, which is bitter, passionate, and often tormented. U.S. feminists recognize a more normative woman-hating that is institutionalized in a broad and, except for feminist challenges, uncontested social devaluation of women, second-class citi­ zenship for women, and systematic violence against women. Across different cultures, this misogyny is organized and institutionalized to dif­ ferent degrees and in different ways. In the United States, legitimized woman-hating has its origins in European and Anglo-Saxon in­ stitutions of ownership: married women were de­ fined as chattel, or property, of their husbands, with no rights to independent civil existence; the majority of the African American population was held in captivity as slaves, and women were worth half the price of men and subjected to forced sex­ ual intercourse by white owners. Indentured women, often white, often single, were owned for a fixed period of time, which was extended if the woman gave birth to a “bastard,” a legal designa­ tion that meant the child was not owned by a man but by the mother and therefore was in perma­ nent exile from civil society. These institutions of domination—marriage, slavery, and indentured labor—denied legal and social personhood to women. Men, especially white men, had rights over women and children that permitted physical brutality, invasion of the body, indifference to health and well-being, and coerced reproduction. Marriage, slavery, and indentured servitude were fundamental institutions of dominance in a European and British culture of conquest built on the genocide of the indigenous people of this con­ tinent. Thomas Jefferson wrote that the native population could be “extirpated from the earth” or vacate the land. He was committed to killing Native American women and children in particu­ lar. This bloodsoaked land, then, was fertile ground for despotic, not democratic, institutions

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M ISSIO N A R IE S

that wiped out personhood through ownership, domination, and civil invisibility, with a sadistic underbelly of physical assault and control. Many misogynist violations of women were once rights of men over women and children. These rights were protected by custom, law, and force of arms: battery, marital rape, child rape and incest, acquaintance rape. Male access to women through prostitution and pornography was pro­ tected even when illegal. Stranger rape was virtu­ ally immune from prosecution and nearly always considered the victim’s fault; it was a crime only insofar as it robbed a father of a pure daughter, or a husband of the exclusivity of physical possession of his wife. Women and children also lacked indi­ vidual sovereignty, civil rights, and human status. The state’s protection of male dominance had strong support from religions with Jewish and Christian imperatives. The theology and practices of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews upheld patriar­ chal power by positing a male godhead; andro­ centric authority; and a female nature, either de­ praved or submissive. The contemporary women’s movement has op­ posed traditional sex-role arrangements and chal­ lenged the conjunction of hierarchy and hate. Women activists have exposed intimate aggres­ sion and violation, dominance and invasion, and insult and humiliation as intolerable expressions of contempt. Women have repudiated the colo­ nial rights of men over their reproductive and sex­ ual capacities and resisted the industrial and technologized packaging and selling of women and children as sexual commodities. The dehuman­ ization o f women, women’s civil inequality, con­ tinuing economic marginality, and ongoing ex­ clusion from political power are manifestations of woman-hating: plain old misogyny. The war against women is not love. Nietzsche’s “ deathly hatred of the sexes” is not fundamental law. That hatred is the inevitable contempt a master feels for the slave he exploits. Woman-hating will end when women’s subordination is ended, however (or wherever) it is imposed.

Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: Dutton, 1974); Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Avon, 1971); Julia Cherry Spruill, Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972). • AN D R EA DWORKIN S ee

0

also

Violence Against Women.

Missionaries

issionary work provided U.S. women an op­ portunity to combine religious belief and spiritual concern with work that was thought to be socially useful. This was especially true in the nineteenth century, which saw a proliferation of Protestant women’s mission organizations. When this movement peaked in the early twentieth cen­ tury, it counted three million members who were drawn from mission organizations in every de­ nomination. Thousands of women served as for­ eign and home missionaries. Being a missionary was a way for women to become unofficial “min­ isters.” Ordination was closed to women in most Protestant denominations until the latter part of the twentieth century. It offered a rare opportunity to combine travel and adventure with work deemed “respectable.” Although the Protestantwomen’s mission move­ ment was predominantly white, Black women were involved, as well as women of color—in­ cluding Chinese Americans, Native Americans, and Latinas—who had been “ clients” of the mis­ sion organizations. Among home missions, the fields included work among the African Amer­ icans and poor whites of the South, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asian immigrants, and Mormons. Home missionaries also opened set­ tlements among European immigrants in indus­ trial cities, from New York to Chicago. Overseas, they went to China, Japan, Korea, the Philip­ pines, Turkey, India, and various parts of Africa.

M

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M ISSIO N A RIE S

Grace Roberts, a U.S. missionary, teaches the B ible to women in M anchuria, in 1903.

In the early nineteenth century, the movement also was intended to provide aid to the wives of male missionaries. As women in Protestant churches lobbied to expand their work, sin­ gle women were assigned to mission stations to work specifically among women. The Civil War served as a turning point, legitimizing, extending, and lending new power to women’s benevolent activities. Drawing on this experience, Protestant women demanded that informal mission soci­ eties be recognized as part of the Church. Women did gain official recognition and used these organizations to increase the numbers of women hired as missionaries, to raise money for their support, and to expand the social services of the Church. ■ SUSAN M. YOHN See

also

Protestantism.

Black Missionaries t the beginning of the nineteenth century, U.S. Protestant missionary societies began mission activities in Africa. The first white foreign missionary society was formed in 1810. In 1822 the African Methodist Episcopal Church became the first U.S. Black church to appoint an official for­ eign missionary to Africa. The last Black church to enter mission work in Africa was the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention of the United States, which was established in 1880 and sent six mis­ sionaries to Liberia in 1883. By the mid-nineteenth century, some women formed church groups for women only, including home and foreign mission societies, which sent out female workers. Often wives accompanied their husbands who had been appointed as mis­ sionaries, and eventually church officials ap-

A

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M ISSISSIP P I FREED O M SUM M ER

pointed single women as missionaries. Women missionaries, both Black and white, were desig­ nated assistant missionaries and were teachers or principals at day, industrial, and Sunday schools; supervised or worked in nurseries, orphanages, or boarding schools; made house-to-house visitation; did evangelistic work; conducted Bible classes; prepared vernacular literature; and provided medical care for women and children as nurses or physicians. The largest number of U.S. Black missionaries were sent to Africa during the period from 1880 to 1920. During that time almost eighty U.S. Black women traveled to Africa as assistant missionaries. These women were trained as teachers, nurses, and deaconesses. Almost half of the Black Ameri­ can missionaries sent to Africa from 1820 to 1980 were women. Two-thirds of these were unmarried commissioned missionaries and one-third were married to male missionaries. ■ SYLVIA M. JAC O B S

%

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

ounded in 1964 to protest racial segregation in mainstream political parties, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (M FD P) was a ra­ cially integrated alternative Democratic political group. At the Democratic National Convention that year, it challenged the seating of the regular all-white Mississippi delegation, which officially excluded Blacks. The noted civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who took part in its founding, spoke at the convention. In her eloquent testimony Hamer de­ scribed her attempt to register to vote in August 1962 and the harassment that followed, as well as the permanently disabling brutal beating that she, along with two middle-aged Black women and a young Black girl, had suffered while returning

F

from a voter registration workshop in South Car­ olina in 1963. These efforts did not unseat the all-white del­ egation, despite two compromises offered by Democrats Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mon­ dale, which stated that: 1) M F D P delegates could participate in party proceedings without any vote, and 2) Two nonvoting M F D P mem­ bers selected by Humphrey—African American Aaron Henry, president of Mississippi NAACP chapters, and Anglo-American Ed King, chap­ lain at the historically Black Tougaloo College —could have at-large seats. Acting on principle, the M F D P completely rejected both offers. The M F D P ’s actions, however, resulted in an unprecedented pledge from the national Democ­ ratic party not to seat any delegate groups that ex­ cluded Blacks at the next convention in 1968. Moreover, the publicity about Black disenfran­ chisement generated by the M F D P was a factor in President Lyndon Johnson’s introduction of voting rights legislation, which was enacted in the summer of 1965. The M F D P helped transform Mississippi politics locally and the Democratic party nationally. ■ LIN D A R E E D S e e a l s o Civil Rights Movement; Mississippi Free­ dom Summer.

%

Mississippi Freedom Summer

ississippi Freedom Summer refers to the summer of 1964 when a large contingent of white supporters, largely college students from various parts of the country, joined the on­ going Black-led civil rights movement in Missis­ sippi. They assisted with voter registration efforts and other projects throughout Mississippi, including

M

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MONTGOM ERY BUS BOYCOTT

setting up fifty Freedom Schools to continue com­ munity organizing. Through the support o f vari­ ous local people in communities in the state, vol­ unteers worked with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SN C C ) and other civil rights workers to teach African American youth and adults basic educational subjects such as reading, writing, and arithmetic. For adults, these skills increased the possibility of registering to vote because potential voters were required to pass lit­ eracy and “ understanding” tests. For youth, these Freedom Schools helped boost confidence and self-esteem. The summer is most remembered, however, for the horrific attacks of white extremists who op­ posed racial equality and the civil rights move­ ment in general. In June, national and inter­ national attention centered on three missing civil rights workers—Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and M ichael Schwerner. On August 4, their bodies were found buried under an earthen dam at a Neshoba Count}' farm. The search for them made clear that whites in Mississippi held no regard for the safety—and the lives—of Blacks and sympathetic whites who interfered with the status quo. We now know what members of the civil rights struggle suspected—that local authorities acted in concert with white racists. After this summer, doubts increased among some Blacks about whether racial equality could be achieved through peaceful means. By the end of the summer an estimated one thousand volunteers had contributed to the movement in Mississippi. Women’s participation was difficult because of additional sexist dangers and fear of violence or sexual assault by white op­ ponents o f the freedom struggle. Nonetheless, women made up approximately 40 percent of the group of volunteers for Mississippi Freedom Summer.

§ Montgomery Bus Boycott hen, on Decem ber 1, 1955, Rosa Parks re­ fused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated transit bus, she sparked the needed ac­ tion that tested the segregation policy on Mont­ gomery buses and symbolically raised the nation’s consciousness of the civil rights movement. Parks’s act embodied the pivotal role o f women in the movement. The Montgomery Bus Boycott that fol­ lowed brought together organizations that resulted in forty-two thousand African American men and women staying off the buses for thirteen months. Subsequently, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation on city buses was unconstitutional. Parks, who had been secretary o f the local N A A CP chapter, had the support o f the Black community, particularly the support of other women. Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, president of the Women’s Political Council (a group that pro­ moted voter registration and activism among Black women), duplicated the fliers calling for the boycott. W PC members and many others had long deplored segregated busing and had antici­ pated for years the activity that would end such practices. In May 1954, within days of the Brown v. Board o f Education decision, Robinson wrote to the mayor, threatening a boycott if conditions did not improve on the segregated bus system. Constituting 56 percent of the city’s Black pop­ ulation, women usually suffered more abusive treatment related to segregated busing than did men. The majority of Black women worked as do­ mestics in white homes across town and relied on public transportation to reach their workplaces. Their sacrifices and commitment were central to the success of the boycott, which became not only the symbolic beginning of the Black civil rights movement but a model for Black protests in that movement.

W

■ LIN D A R E E D See

also

Civil Rights Movement.

■ LIN D A R E E D See

also

Civil Rights Movement.

MORAL R E F O R M

M

Moral Reform

oral reform, a belief that women were sexu­ ally pure and men sexually dangerous, was the joint product of eighteenth-century sentimen­ talism and nineteenth-century evangelical reli­ gious enthusiasms. It played a key role in middleclass representations of “True Womanhood” and in middle-class men’s efforts to constrain women’s sexual and social autonomy and their political ac­ tivism. The term also refers to a specific mid-nineteenth-century women’s movement to end urban prostitution and enforce a national sexual stan­ dard to protect women. The American Female Moral Reform Society, founded in New York City in 1834, was one of the largest and most active women’s reform organizations in the nineteenth century, its members representing a broad spec­ trum of the population—fashionable bourgeois matrons, small-town housewives, farm women, New England mill girls and schoolteachers, and newly freed African American women. By the 1840s it boasted over 450 auxiliaries. Its bimonthly journal, The Advocate o f M oral Reform and Family Guardian, claimed twenty thousand subscribers and a far larger number of actual readers. To understand the Society’s complex sociosexual and political vision and the ways it differed from a more conservative male moral reform view, it is important to examine two stories that appeared repeatedly on the pages of the Advocate. The first was a realistic depiction of the lives of poor rural women new to the cities. Sweatshop­ like working conditions and exploitive wages transformed these women into an impoverished urban underground of beggars and prostitutes. Paralleling, indeed preceding, this economic nar­ rative was a second drama that told of vulnerable farming daughters who were seduced by urban merchants and lawyers and carried off to the city to face prostitution and sometimes death. By in­ terweaving these two stories, the Society’s sexual

M

rhetoric bespoke the women’s economic anxi­ eties. Male sexual avarice became a symbol for male economic avarice; women’s sexual vulnera­ bility for women’s economic vulnerability; prosti­ tution (e.g., commercialized sex) for commerce itself. The powerless prostitute stood for the image of helplessness all women felt within the new economy. The Society used its representations of male sexual license and female vulnerability to le­ gitimate middle-class matrons’ entrance into the public and political arena to denounce men’s sex­ ual and economic exploitation of women. M em­ bers signed political petitions, edited and printed reform journals, managed respectable employ­ ment agencies for women —all in the name of protecting women and the home. Increasingly politicized, many members joined the abolitionist movement, where, defending their sexually vulnerable enslaved “sisters,” they publicly denounced slavery for empowering las­ civious male slaveholders to rape and claim inno­ cent women for prostitution. Well into the twenti­ eth century, African American churchwomen continued moral reform and advocated “politics of respectability” to counter racist stigmatization of African American women as oversexed and un­ worthy of respect or legal protection. Feminist historians draw parallels between fem­ inist moral reform and contemporary feminism. Some evaluations are negative. “The feminist movement has played an important role in orga­ nizing and even creating women’s sense of sexual danger in the last one hundred fifty years,” Linda Gordon and Ellen DuBois have argued. “ M ain­ stream feminists,” they continue, “ceding the area of sexuality to men, addressed primarily the dan­ gers and few of the possibilities of sex.” Represent­ ing men as sexually powerful and unrestrained and good women as asexual victims of male sex­ ual appetites, moral reformers reinforced Victo­ rian sexual power relations. Other historians see strong similarities between moral reform concerns and contemporary femi­ nist rage against sexual harassment in the work-

377

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MORMONS

place and on campuses. Still others praise moral reform for successfully challenging eighteenthand nineteenth-century theories that excluded women from the political and public sphere be­ cause women were considered incapable of civic virtue and would corrupt men’s politics. Hand­ maidens of the Lord, these reformers made it women’s right, indeed their duty, to drive out las­ civious men and seize public and political space for God, virtue, and pure womanhood. So in­ spired, middle-class matrons worked closely with working-class women as early as the 1850s, be­ coming experts on urban poverty, homeless chil­ dren, and the problems of women in the needle trades. M ale moral reform, associated with Pro­ gressive public-health attacks upon prostitution and venereal disease, was far more restrictive of women’s autonomy. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880i. T h e y b u r d e n the country t with enormous taxes. 11. I l i* e o n t r a r y to t i i r V i - > I 6. T h e y b a r t h e p r o g r e s s of h ie . a inf to common sense. I civilization and religion. 12. W e h a v e a r i g h t to rid ourselves of the burden.

* dST" E ead , hand to your neighbor to read, ~ t l f more are w anted send for them to i B. H. M c D o n a l d & Co.. t f San Francisco. Cal., A eor. of Washington and Charlton Sts.. New York, t t

An early-nineteenth-century temperance flier shows the peacefulness and order o f a home free o f alcohol. The harmony surrounding the male figure reflects the emphasis that temperance activists placed on achieving family and com­ munity stability through the control o f male behavior.

In the early twentieth century, the Anti-Saloon League, a male-led organization, redirected the temperance drive from state-level reform toward a constitutional amendment that would ban legal commerce in alcohol throughout the country. Be­ cause of the W C T U ’s long history, this “Prohibi­

g Prostitution rostitution is the exchange of sex for money, a practice that for the most part involves men buying sex from women, boys, or girls. Patriarchy has mislabeled prostitution the “oldest profession” to suggest that it is an inevitable practice. In fact, it developed during historical periods that ex­ cluded women from public life. Women who were not confined by either slave labor or domes­ tic labor in the home were assumed to be prosti­ tutes and/or had no alternative means of survival. Prostitution persists in this form in underdevel­ oped countries today, where there are few possibil­ ities for economic survival for women who labor in the informal domestic sector. With industrializa­ tion, sex industries transform local, indigenous prostitution into major commodity markets. During U.S. industrialization in the nineteenth century, and in the late twentieth century in newly industrializing economies in the Third World, sex industries procure large numbers of rural girls and women for urban brothels, thus relieving the de­

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PR O STITU TIO N

veloping labor force from employing them. Men, enjoying the first advantages that come as a result of developing economies, turn part of their new in­ comes to buying prostitution. Although economic destitution is one factor in the proliferation of pros­ titution, only in the past decade has research re­ vealed another major factor that contributes to the prostitution of women: childhood sexual abuse. Systematic sexual abuse can cause harm to one’s identity and selfhood, convincing girls (and some boys) they have only a sexual value. Sometimes sexual trauma can result in the victim’s developing a multiple personality disorder or other debilitat­ ing psych iatric problems, which often leaves them vulnerable to becoming prostitutes. Customers (or “ johns” or “tricks” ) are men from all walks of life, across cultures, who have the economic means to buy the services of prosti­ tutes and search the market according to their in­ terests, child or adult, homosexual or heterosex­ ual, white or Black or Asian or Latino. They are the least known in the prostitution triangle of pimp, prostitute, and customer because they ex­ pect and require their identity to be kept secret as part of the prostitution exchange, which both in­ tensifies their sexual desire and protects them from exposure. It is estimated that over 90 percent of the prosti­ tution industry is pimp controlled. Pimps acquire women and children for prostitution (procuring) and put them into prostitution (pandering). They generally live off the earnings of prostitution (pimping), taking all or most of the prostitute’s money. Pimping includes individual operators, agencies, brothels or prostitution hotel operators, and pornographers. Sexually transmitted diseases are one of the principal health consequences of prostitution. Fe­ male prostitutes, who often have multiple sex partners daily, are in the highest risk category for AIDS. Even in the face of the increased threat of death from A ID S, prostitution has massively in­ creased globally. Some health agencies have en­ couraged the use of condoms among prostitutes,

but condoms are not totally effective to protect against AID S. Because many customers refuse to use condoms despite the prostitute’s insistence, they often pay the prostitute more money as a form of “ compensation.” Fear of A ID S has also caused men to seek younger, more “virginal” girls for sex. Drug abuse is another common consequence of prostitution. Women often report needing something to numb their feelings to get through many anonymous sexual contacts daily. Pimps frequently traffic in drugs as well as prostitutes and pacify the prostitutes with the drugs. However, the notion that all prostitutes are completely strung out on drugs is false. Usually addictions are suffi­ cient to help them distance themselves emotion­ ally from the sex exchange and the customer, but such drug effects do not prevent them from pro­ viding prostitution altogether. Prostitution laws in the United States, as else­ where in the world, reflect the sexual double stan­ dard of misogyny, which honors women as wives and condemns them as whores, making sure that the market always supplies men with prostitutes. Whether state laws prohibit prostitution, making prostitutes criminals (as they do in most of the United States), or they legalize it, thus making them functionaries of the state, or they decrimi­ nalize it, female prostitutes are the ones who are arrested, fined, and imprisoned for street prostitu­ tion. Thus, these women are expected to be avail­ able as commodities but are punished for being visible. Rarely are customers or pimps punished. In response to this legal double standard, some women in prostitution have organized. Either not seeing any way to get out of prostitution or not wanting to, they are demanding better treatment under the law and from society. Other women who have left prostitution have formed programs such as W H ISPER, Women Held in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt, to help women get out. They consider prostitution a sexual exploi­ tation that harms women’s health and identity, and they have developed self-help approaches, in­

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eluding shelters, health services, counseling, and job training programs. A small group of women in prostitution and other parts of the sex industry have organized to promote prostitution as a right over one’s own body, a viable form of work for women, and a legitimate mode of sexual expres­ sion. They created the International Whore’s Congresses in the Netherlands, where they have also influenced legislative changes to reflect a pro-prostitution policy, and sex workers’ groups in the United States. Their organizing has captured media attention and researchers and many agencies take them to be representative of all women in prostitution. As a result, these women become a powerful pro­ prostitution lobby. Their claim that prostitution is a woman’s right, a profession, and a form of sexual freedom has reintroduced a nineteenth-century debate about “forced” versus “free” prostitution. They oppose trafficking in women as a way of demonstrating that when prostitution is not forced by traffickers, it is freely chosen. This posi­ tion removes prostitution from the context of women’s economic subordination and detaches it from the context of sexual exploitation in society. In opposition, human rights groups and feminists, including former prostitutes, have called for new international standards o f human rights that would protect women from sexual exploitation, rape, prostitution, and pornography via a pro­ posed United Nations Convention Against Sexual Exploitation. ■ K A T H L E E N BARR Y See

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also

Sexual Slavery.

Protective Labor Legislation

or the past century the issue of sex-specific pro­ tective labor legislation has divided propo­ nents of women’s emancipation and generated

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debates that have shaped the meaning o f femi­ nism, equality, rights, and public welfare. The laws have varied from state to state and over time. But all have designated women a distinct legal class, adopting the notion of fundamental sex dif­ ference as their premise. Historically the legisla­ tion has derived from the theory that women’s unique capacity to be mothers renders them un­ equal to men in the work force and therefore spe­ cially entitled to legal protection. Protective legis­ lation throws into relief the dilemma of equality and difference that has haunted the feminist movement since its advent. Working women’s quest for labor legislation dates from the 1840s, when Massachusetts textile workers unsuccessfully petitioned the state for a ten-hour work day. Over the next few decades, a handful o f states imposed such rules. Some of the early laws used gender-neutral language. But the dominant trend was for legislatures to regulate only the hours, wages, and working conditions of women and children. This trend peaked in the Progressive Era, chiefly as a result of the efforts of female reformers in the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) and the National Consumers’ League (NCL). Founded in 1903, the W T U L aimed to promote female union membership and to educate the public about the needs of women workers. The N C L , created in 1899, sought to organize con­ sumer protest against unsafe and oppressive con­ ditions of labor. Contemporary investigations showed that such work conditions fell hardest on women —especially immigrant wom en—who were segregated in unskilled, poorly paid jobs and much less likely to belong to trade unions than were men. Cooperating across lines of class and ethnicity, wage-earning women and female re­ formers lobbied legislatures and provided crucial support when protective laws were challenged in court. As the union leader Pauline Newman de­ clared, in the absence of protection, women “were ‘free’ and ‘equal’ to work long hours for star­ vation wages.”

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The paradoxical proposition that women could gain genuine equality only through special legal protection was most fully developed by Florence Kelley, the N C L ’s leader and author of an Illinois statute. Kelley denounced “the cry ‘Equality, Equality,’ where Nature has created Inequality.” Focusing on women’s needs as mothers, empha­ sizing their frailty and dependence, she argued that innate difference justified sex-based legisla­ tion. In the landmark 1908 case M uller v. Oregon, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the constitu­ tionality of a ten-hour working day law for female workers. Carving out a gender-based exception to its 1905 holding in Lochner v. New York (which struck down an hours law covering male workers as an unconstitutional interference with individ­ ual rights of contract), the Court set its impri­ matur on the notion that a “woman’s physical structure” and public interest in her “ maternal functions” justified protection. No less notewor­ thy in M uller was the legal brief defending the Oregon law that was jointly written by Josephine Goldmark, of the N C L , and her brother-in-law, Louis Brandeis, soon to be appointed to the Supreme Court. Introducing a new sociological jurisprudence, the famous “Brandeis Brief” pre­ sented only two pages of abstract legal reasoning, but over one hundred pages of excerpts from so­ cial-scientific studies documenting the perils of overwork for women’s “special physical organiza­ tion.” Buoyed by M uller, the N C L led the cam­ paign for an extended web of sex-based labor laws. By 1925 all but four states limited women’s work day, sixteen states banned female night work in certain jobs, and thirteen states fixed minimum wages for women. If arguments for protection on grounds of sex difference held sway with lawmakers, by the 1920s they clashed with the agenda of the National Woman’s Party, which championed an Equal Rights Amendment. This wing of the women’s movement eschewed maternal ist rhetoric, insist­ ing that special legal treatment obstructed the hir­

ing of women and reinforced their inequality in the labor market—that difference meant dis­ crimination. As Harriet Stanton Blatch argued, women were “ ready for equality.” But to the E R A ’s opponents, this was “hysterical feminism with a slogan for a program.” The controversy in­ tensified with the Supreme Court’s 1923 decision in Adkins v. Childrens Hospital, which declared a minimum wage law unconstitutional in the name of women’s equal rights of free contract. Though both sides claimed to represent all women, nei­ ther addressed the exclusion of domestic and farm workers—the great mass of working women of color—from the laws’ protection. Today, gender-neutral labor laws have dis­ placed many sex-based precedents. The legal rev­ olution of the New Deal culminated in the Supreme Court’s validation of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which set national wage and hour rules for men and women alike. The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, abandoning a special treatment model based on female physiology, guarantees workers of both sexes unpaid leave to care for a new child or a sick family member. Yet the underlying conundrum of equality and differ­ en ce—of formal rights and special needs—re­ mains at the heart of feminist debate. . AMY DRU ST A N LEY S e e a l s o Equality and Difference; Muller v. Ore­ gon; Women’s Trade Union League.

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Protestantism

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ince the U.S. colonial period, the emphasis of the Protestant movement on the primacy of scripture gave religious women new opportunities for expression, despite the male domination of in­ stitutional structures within church and society. The Puritan vision of man as head and woman as helpmate was challenged by white women

PR O T ESTA N T ISM

such as Anne Hutchinson, who believed that grace came directly from God. She opened her home to teach others but was banished in 1637. Black women also challenged the Christian so­ cial order. Elizabeth (surname unknown), born a slave in Maryland in 1766, began a preaching ca­ reer at age thirty that called attention to “spiritual wickedness in high places.” Quakers believe Christ is revealed directly to the soul, deemphasizing the need for ordained clergy, liturgy, and sacraments. Inspired by this vi­ sion, Quaker women spoke out with authority in response to public issues such as slavery and uni­ versal suffrage. Shakers also allowed leadership roles for women. Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784), founder of the Shaker religion, claimed that Christ’s second coming would be as a woman. The communities she started believed they were living as though the millennium had already ar­ rived and felt there was no need to produce a new generation. Shaker communities gradually faded as the nineteenth century wore on. Early-nineteenth-century Protestantism was marked by revivals that awakened religious fervor and the growth of denominationalism on the fron­ tier. Despite the early success of evangelists such as Jarena Lee (1783-185?) and Phoebe Palmer (1807-1874), women needed sanctioned access to the pulpit. The struggle became visible with the full ordination of Antoinette Brown in 1853 at the Congregational Church in South Butler, New York. Some groups with a polity that did not em­ phasize hierarchy, such as the Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Disciples, ordained women much sooner than others, such as the Methodists, who licensed women to preach but did not admit them to full membership as clergy until many years later. As women pushed the boundaries within the church for ordination, their response to G od’s call to be in mission and ministry was also seen in increasingly public ways. Frances Willard, a Methodist laywoman, helped found the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union to wipe out drunk­

enness and promote family life. Other women worked in the inner cities, where the increasing numbers of immigrants were changing the urban landscape. Caroline Bartlett Crane, a Unitarian minister, was part of the Social Gospel move­ ment, which interpreted the Bible in response to the fracturing of Victorian culture and the grow­ ing industrialization. Some groups even con­ nected across racial lines, bound together by a common commitment to Christ. Following the Civil War, for example, women from the North­ ern Baptist and Black Baptist churches made joint mission efforts. Still other women answered the call to evangelize in foreign lands, particularly China, India, and Africa. Missionary training schools were key to the em­ powerment and training of women for these roles. Support for the mission work was provided throughout local churches by women’s groups who raised money and educated women about the world and its needs. Most Protestant churches had separate women’s societies by the late nine­ teenth century. Women’s service within the church expanded in the twentieth century. Volunteerism became a profession in itself. Helen Barrett Montgomery and Lucy Waterbury Peabody, two Northern Bap­ tist women who combined marriage and family with careers, led ecumenical efforts such as World Day of Prayer and union schools of higher edu­ cation for women overseas. Montgomery was elected president of the Northern Baptist Con­ vention in 1921, becoming the first woman to head a national governing body for a Protestant de­ nomination. Georgia Harkness was the first woman to teach theology in a Protestant seminary. Appointed to the faculty of Garrett Theological Seminary in 1939, she worked for international peace and the elimination of racism and sexism in the church. The battle over women’s ordination that had begun a century before reached fruition for the Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Pres­ byterians in the latter half of the twentieth cen-

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tury. The few who entered ordained ministry in the 1950s grew into a swelling stream by the 1970s, leading to the election of the first woman bishop, Reverend Marjorie Matthews, in 1980. In main­ line denominations and ecumenical organiza­ tions, women sit on boards and agencies, teach at and head seminaries, and provide leadership at all levels of the ordained and lay ministry o f the churches. Janet Wilson James, Women in American Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980); Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries o f American Women’s Religious Writings (San Francisco: Harper, 1995); Rose­ mary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, Women and Religion in America, 3 vols. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981). ■ L IN D A J. G E S L I N G See

also

Evangelicalism; Puritanism; Religion.

women, because they did not speak English). But general prescriptions for women’s silence were enforced so emphatically that when Emma Hart Willard, a white woman, addressed the New York legislature in 1819, she remained seated to avoid any suggestion that she was engaged in public speaking. At a Boston meeting of abolitionists in 1832, Maria B. M iller Stewart, a free African American woman, became the first U.S.-born woman to stand and speak publicly before an audi­ ence of women and men. In the twentieth century, dramatic increases in the numbers of women in “public” arenas have led to increased recognition of some women as public speakers. Equally important, the changes have led feminists to question whose speech is likely to be regarded as “ important” and “ histori­ cally significant” (that is, privileged white men who speak English), and to recognize why most women’s speech is not. ■ CANDACE W EST See

%

also

Language and Power.

Public Speaking

ublic speaking traditionally is seen as part of the art of persuasion. In theory, this art is judged in relation to the resources available to a speaker on a particular occasion, for a certain au­ dience, and for a specific end. In practice, other criteria are involved: the speaker’s “ importance,” the “significance” o f their actions to historical events, their evident position in a group, the lan­ guage they use, the setting for speaking, and their gender. Understandably, then, the history of women’s public speaking is relatively short. Throughout the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century, all U.S. women were barred from speaking “ in public,” that is, from the pulpit, in the courtroom, or on the Senate floor. Many women had little access to these forums in any case (for example, most African American women, because of slavery, and most Native American

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§ Puerto Rican Women

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ince before the twentieth century, Puerto Ri­ can women have played key roles in facilitat­ ing migration, building community, and shaping institutions on U.S. shores. The earliest Puerto Ri­ can enclaves in New York City included women who were exiled for their political persuasions and militant actions in the struggles for Antillean in­ dependence, which took place from 1868 until 1898, when the islands became U.S. possessions. The second migratory phase, predominantly comprised of working-class individuals, unfolded under U.S. occupation. Between 1900 and 1901 eleven expeditions carrying approximately five thousand contract workers, almost half of whom were women and children, set sail for Hawaii

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P U E R T O RICAN W O M E N

The Brooklyn, New York, chapter o f the Liga Puertorriqueha e Hispana circa 1927.

from Puerto Rico’s southern ports. The U.S. and Puerto Rican presses noted the gender balance in those prearranged labor movements, forecast­ ing the likelihood of steerage romances and im­ pending unions. Hawaiian planters favored fam­ ily groups that they felt would provide greater stability and length of service. As family mem­ bers, or on their own, women were critical to these expeditions although contractual work arrangements sanctioned gender-based salary dif­ ferentials that placed them at a distinct disadvan­ tage. Migration to the continental United States con­ tinued, particularly to New York City, which re­ ceived the bulk of the migrant flow until the 1960s. Profiles of migrant women in the 1920s and 1930s indicate that the average Puertorriquena was a woman in her reproductive years—usually fifteen to thirty-four years old—and a resident in

the city for less than five years. Among this group, most women upheld traditional values and identi­ fied themselves as housewives even though some were heads of households or were self-employed. Such homebound activities included piecework, needlecrafts, child care for working mothers, pro­ vision of room and board, and sale of home-pre­ pared foods. The late 1940s and 1950s set the stage for the “Great Migration,” a massive, economically moti­ vated relocation from Puerto Rico. More women came; daughters accompanied parents, single women followed siblings, wives joined trailblazing husbands, and some came on their own. All wanted a better life than was available in Puerto Rico, and although each held personal reasons for emigrating, their decision generally was rooted in the island’s impoverished conditions as well as public policies that sanctioned emigration.

P U E R T O RICAN W O M E N

A few women came to study or pursue careers in teaching or other professions, but the majority took jobs as domestics, or worked in manufactur­ ing, laundries, restaurants, hospitals, or the gar­ ment industry. Even as they confronted economic exploitation, discrimination, racism, and the inse­ curities inherent in the migration process on a daily basis, women fared better than did men in the job market, and Puertorriquenas left the home for the factory in record numbers. By the end o f the 1960s Puerto Rican women increasingly lost jobs in New York City and other urban centers in the economically depressed Northeast because of technological, industrial changes, including the relocation of factories to the sunbelt region. Nonetheless, more Puerto Ri­ can women entered white-collar and professional positions. Women had always been involved in the orga­ nizational life of their communities. Before 1898 women’s associations in New York cut across class and color lines as they marshaled support for Cuban and Puerto Rican independence from Spain. Clubs like Hijas de Cuba, Hijas de Libertad, and Cespedes y Marti raised migrant con­ sciousness as they engaged in promoting revolu­ tionary propaganda and fundraising. To support liberation, women held rallies, sponsored cultural events, and performed charitable work. After 1898, when Puerto Rico officially became a U.S. colony, Puerto Rican organizations continued to represent the interests of predominantly workingclass, racially diverse communities. These groups built a sociocultural, political agenda targeting conditions in U.S. communities, but maintained relations with Puerto Rico. Some groups, includ­ ing the Home Town clubs, fostered Hispanidad language, customs, traditions, and identity, while others provided social services for the indigent, af­ firmed culture, protested against imperialist inter­ ventions by the United States in Latin America, and denounced its colonial posture in Puerto Rico. Still others reflected island struggles over statehood, autonomy, and independence.

Women were also instrumental in the organiza­ tions that peaked following the Great Migration, for example ASPIRA (1961) and the Puerto Rican Family Institute (1963). A SPIRA projected a na­ tional image centered on education as the vehicle for advancing diaspora communities. It founded chapters in secondary schools for Puerto Ricans, aided in preparing students for college, and helped to procure the ASPIRA Consent Decree, which guaranteed bilingual education in New York City public schools. The Puerto Rican Fam­ ily Institute catered to the special needs of migrant families in transition, offering a wide array of so­ cial services. Women continue to contribute much to the progress, history, and education of Puerto Ricans in the United States. Feminists such as Luisa Capetillo; writers Lola Rodriguez de Tio, Pura Belpre, and Julia de Burgos; journalists including Josefina Silva de Cintron; the Reverend Leoncia Rosado, and Sister Carmel ita helped pave the way for their followers. Today’s writers, including Ju­ dith Ortiz Coffer, Aurora Levins Morales, Rosario Morales, and Nicholasa Mohr; grassroots organiz­ ers such as Evelina Antonetty, founder of United Bronx Parents; and perhaps the best-recognized, Antonia Pantoja, founder of the Puerto Rican Fo­ rum and ASPIRA, are joined by contemporary politicians like Nydia Velasquez, the first Puerto Rican woman elected to the U.S. Congress; Olga Mendez, New York State legislator; and many others committed to advancing Puerto Rican communities at all levels. The roll call of Puerto Rican women leaders and activists in feminist and gender politics, sociocultural organizations, commercial enter­ prises, professional associations, and the perform­ ing and creative arts is impressive. Women’s leadership in U.S. Puerto Rican communities en­ joys a long historical tradition measured and cele­ brated by the work that women perform daily —collectively and individually—in the home, barrios, boardrooms, public schools, and univer­ sities.

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Edna Acosta Belen, The Puerto Rican Woman (New York: Praeger, 1986); Virginia Sanchez Korrol, From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Altagracia Ortiz, ed., Puerto Rican Women in the Twentieth Century: New Perspectives on Gender, Labor and Migra­ tion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). ■ V IR G IN IA SA N C H E Z KORROL S e e a l s o Feminism, Puerto Rican; Latinas; Newyorican Women.

s Puritanism uritanism began as a religious reform move­ ment in late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-cen­ tury England. Its advocates hoped to “purify” the Protestant Church of England of all Roman Catholic influences. They called for the elimina­ tion of church ritual and all extraneous elements, including images, candles, vestments, holy days, even homiletic elegance. Followers of Calvinist theology, Puritans believed that all humanity was innately depraved but that God had chosen a few, the elect, for salvation through the offer of divine grace; the rest were predestined for damnation. One group of Puritans turned toward the colo­ nization of New England. The first immigrants landed in 1630, and during that decade, some twenty thousand more English immigrants ar­ rived. Determined to establish a biblical com­ monwealth, Puritans based their government upon biblical law. They envisioned themselves as the new chosen people and New England as the promised land. Native Americans were some­ times viewed as missionary opportunities, some­ times as obstacles, but always as heathens who must be transformed or removed so that the cre­ ation of the New Israel could move forward. Puritan leaders saw themselves as patriarchs. They established a rigidly hierarchical society with a family system that arranged all members

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into dichotomous power relationships: master-ser­ vant, parent-child, husband-wife. T he father as­ sumed the central role as head of household, and women spent their lives under the control of their fathers, then husbands. Even single women and widows generally turned to brothers, uncles, or adult sons for guidance and assistance. Within a climate that demanded submission, deference, and silence from women, those who assumed agency on their own behalf might have found themselves alienated from their community, ex­ communicated from the church, and, in extreme cases, accused of witchcraft. Spiritually, however, Puritans affirmed that all souls were equal before God. The elect included women as well as men, and every soul was per­ ceived to have a personal relationship with God. Salvation came through grace, and Puritans longed for and embraced conversion—the experi­ ence of that grace in their lives. Through this ex­ perience all believers discovered a close com­ munion with God. Such mystical phenomena affected and empowered both male and female Puritans of all ranks and vocations, and it became a powerful force for political upheaval, coloniza­ tion, and social revolution. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Pu­ ritans were stereotyped as an intolerant and moralistic community, whose members publicly rejected all physical pleasures, including sexual ones, and then hypocritically indulged them­ selves. While this reputation was grounded in the admittedly harsh treatment of supposed witches, sexual deviants, and dissidents, it owes more to such literary imaginations as that reflected in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or Arthur M iller’s The Crucible. Puritans rejected as­ ceticism in any form, enjoyed good food and drink (in moderation), and encouraged all per­ sons toward love and marriage. In fact, their writ­ ings decried celibacy, acknowledged human sex­ ual drives, and countenanced sexual satisfaction in marriage as a divine gift. Like all English peo­ ple of that time, they did not tolerate extramarital sexuality; homosexuality, bestiality, rape, and

Q U ILTIN G

adultery were all capital offenses. Puritans, how­ ever, were lenient in cases of premarital fornica­ tion. Puritans did espouse the Protestant ethics of hard work, frugality, sobriety, and chastity, but they also understood that class and rank were mat­ ters of providence, and that wealth and virtue were not synonymous. Puritanism as reconstructed in U.S. literature more closely resembles the writers’ Victorian and post-Freudian cultures than seventeenth-century New England. Puritanism, however, began as a sincerely religious culture whose spiritual radical­ ism clashed with its social conservatism. Puritan leaders often found themselves enmeshed in ir­ reconcilable conflicts between their commitment to patriarchy and the egalitarianism of their reli­ giosity. The most prominent illustrations of con­ flict were the trial o f Anne Hutchinson in 1637 and the response to the Quaker missionaries in the 1650s and 1660s. ■ M A R ILYN J. W EST E R K A M P Se e

also

Religion; Salem Witchcraft Trials.

§ Quilting omen have always made art, but for most women of the past, the arts most highly val­ ued by male society, such as painting, sculpture, and architecture, were closed to them. Women instead created needlework, a universal female art that transcends race, class, and national borders. Needlework is the one art in which women con­ trolled the education of their daughters, the pro­ duction of the art, and were also its audience and critics. Before the C ivil War quilting was the main form of needlework in the United States, prac­ ticed in most households by females old enough to hold a needle. Later, girls were taught to sew even before they learned to read (if they even were taught to read). Quilts as they were first made were products of necessity as well as tradi­

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tion. Factory-made blankets were largely unavail­ able until the mid-nineteenth century and fabric was scarce and expensive. To provide bed cover­ ings, women reused every scrap from worn-out clothing, lining their quilts with old homespun blankets, wool, cotton, or rags, and backing them with muslin or homespun. Quilts were made in three ways: pieced, ap­ plique, or by quilting stitches alone on a solidcolor background. For economic reasons a major­ ity were pieced: small bits of fabric joined edge to edge made a top single layer, called patchwork. Applique quilts, however, had a double top layer. Besides the designed top, quilts had two other lay­ ers, the padding for warmth and the backing layer. The layers were held together by fine quilting stitches that went through all three layers and con­ tributed light and rhythm of their own design. Solid-color quilts were usually white, their beauty coming from the low relief of the top created by thousands of tiny stitches, flattening out some ar­ eas, puffing out others. Piecing, applique, and quilting can be traced to ancient Syria, Egypt, India, and China. Flags are piecework (remember Betsy Ross?) and quilted bed coverings were made by Chinese and East In­ dian women in the seventeenth century as well as by European women. The tradition came to the United States with early female immigrants; sev­ eral of the first American designs are identical to those.from England. The mixture o f design tradi­ tions resulted in the creation of even more quilt designs here than had previously existed. The Eu­ ropean tradition continued with numerous varia­ tions and inventions; in addition, African slave women brought their needlework traditions to the American South, where they produced highly val­ ued applique quilts. The design influence of Na­ tive American tribes is notable for a variety of saw-tooth patterns. The most well-known Native American pattern is the Lakota Star, or Morning Star, which represents life and new beginnings. The repeat patterns characteristic of applique quilts became particularly American, as did the quilting bee and the custom of creating presenta-

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Applique quilt by Harriet Powers, circa 1900, de­ picting biblical tales and local folk legends. Bom a slave in Georgia, Powers used a traditional applique technique o f the Fon people o f Dahomey in West Africa.

tion quilts for special occasions, such as wed­ dings. Although quilts served functionally as bed cov­ erings, their display was equally important. Early bedrooms frequently possessed only one piece of furniture, the bed, and its quilt was the central motif. Good quilt makers were known and en­ vied throughout their area, and the exhibition of exceptionally fine craftswomanship at regional fairs, churches, or grange halls influenced other women and spread ideas about color and design. The history of American quilt making has been distorted by prejudices against women’s creativity; the quilting bee, for example, has been popularly understood as a site where women collaborated on designing and producing quilts. Bees were ac­ tually organized to assist an individual in the te­ dious work of quilting the top, which she had al­ ready designed and made. Even the design of the stitches was chosen in advance by the quilt maker, who functioned much as a traditional male artist directing studio assistants. Interestingly, Susan B. Anthony delivered her first speech to women at a church quilting bee in Cleveland. There are hundreds of names for quilt designs,

and often women changed the names, discarding the old ones as the visual image evoked became ir­ relevant to their lives. For example, a design known in England as Prince’s Feather became Princess Feather on arrival in the United States and afterward became California Plume. The names are generic, however, for a quilt’s design el­ ements are so complex (color, pattern, size, rhythm, borders) that duplication is virtually im­ possible; yet the belief continues that quilts had “patterns” that anonymous women followed. In fact, U.S. women became artists in a society in which their efforts were likely to be the only art that most o f the populace saw and frequently the only art possessed. Patricia Mainardi, Quilts: The Great American Art (San Pedro, Calif.: Miles and Weir Ltd., 1978); Patricia Mainardi, “Quilts: The Great American Art,” in Feminist Art History: Questioning the Litany, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1982); Patricia Mainardi, “Quilt Survivals and Revivals,” Arts Magazine Vol. 62 (May 1988): 49- 53. • PA T R IC IA MAINARDI See

also

Art and Crafts.

R A C IA L D I S C R I M I N A T I O N

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Racial Discrimination

acism is an enduring and integral part of U.S. history. From the earliest European incursion to the present, discriminatory practices and ide­ ologies have informed state and institutional structures and have framed national popular con­ sciousness and culture as well as social, eco­ nomic, and political discourse. Examples of dis­ crimination are abundant in our everyday lives: median income for whites is far greater than for nonwhites, while some of the widest income gaps are between white men and women of color; peo­ ple of color are consistently discriminated against in employment; they are disadvantaged in the criminal justice system, whether because of race biases in sentencing or in prosecutions or on ju­ ries. Meanwhile, the 1996 repeal of affirmative ac­ tion in California impairs people of color’s access to higher education and jobs, and may become a precedent for other states. Nonetheless, many Americans neither accept nor understand the centrality of race in U.S. his­ tory. Indeed, Americans tend to think of race as a residual problem, rather than as a core element of politics, institutions, and culture. This is in part because the category “race” and practices consid­ ered “racist” have changed over the centuries. It is only in the twentieth century that racial inequal­ ity has been mostly freed from a definition rooted in biology and blood. Until the early twentieth century, white people thought that biological dis­ tinctions among groups explained differences in character and culture. Correspondingly, the prac­ tice of ranking people by race and subordinating groups based on their ranking (racism)—for ex­ ample, under slavery, colonialism, and imperial­ ism—was viewed as a natural and justifiable con­ sequence of the biological superiority of whites. During the twentieth century, rigid notions of race have given way to more liberal, cultural, and academic understandings that offered such con­ cepts as assimilation and racial formation in op­

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position to biological and genetic theories. New ideas contesting the significance of race to human differentiation changed the way institutions, in­ cluding government, viewed racism. After a cen­ tury of political struggle, tire shift from biological theories of race also propelled a shift from govern­ ment-sponsored discrimination against some indi­ viduals based on their racial classification toward government-endorsed equal treatment of all indi­ viduals. Remaining categorization by race was generally aimed at compensating for past discrim­ ination; that is, affirmative action. The period of formal, legal discrimination stretched roughly from conquest and colonization to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the era of Jim Crow. Discrimination, or the formal practice o f racism, was manifest in discourses on nation­ hood, citizenship, and individual rights. Seques­ tration, exile, exclusion, and antimiscegenation laws were favored methods of discrimination. By the middle of the seventeenth century, British colonists had already begun a reservation system whose main purpose was the acquisition of Native American lands by white men. Through the eigh­ teenth and well into the nineteenth centuries, colonization and the dispossession of Indian lands were grounded in the conviction that whites were the superior race and were fueled by faith in the manifest destiny of white Americans to settle the West. Paternalism mixed with brute force gov­ erned encounters between whites and indigenous peoples, 90 percent of whom were eliminated by a combination of military force and imported dis­ eases. The enslavement of Africans by British colon­ ists and Americans from the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century also presumed that whites were the inherently superior race. While slavery as an institution was abolished first by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and then under the Thirteenth Amendment at the end of the Civil War, de jure racial subordination continued. For example, many Southern states passed so-called “ Black Codes,” which were de-

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signed to limit the rights of newly freed slaves, in­ cluding rights to travel or resettle. Even after pas­ sage o f the Fourteenth Amendment (equal pro­ tection) and the Fifteenth Amendment (voting for Black adult males), lynchings, poll taxes, wide use of racial epithets and slurs, white-enforced racial segregation, and white resistance to the very idea of Black equality persisted. For African Amer­ ican women, the practices of racism during this period included the spread of myths about their dangerous sexuality, their immorality, their fe­ cundity. Such stereotypes set Black women in stark opposition to the ideals and virtues o f white womanhood, and did so by locating Black wom­ en’s difference from white women in their biolog­ ically determined nature. Conquest and dispossession characterized the transfer of lands in the West and Southwest from Mexicans to whites. The Mexican War, the Treaty o f Guadalupe Hidalgo, and a system of taxation and review of land grants during the second half of the nineteenth century ensured economic, po­ litical, and cultural isolation of Chicanos, Hispanos, and Californios, as well as the establish­ ment o f a near-colonialist relationship between them and white Americans. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, im­ migrant laborers from China, Japan, and Korea settled in the U.S. West. Discrimination against Asian immigrants followed nineteenth-century le­ gal and political understandings of race, under­ standings that were primarily defined by Blackwhite experiences. However, the treatment of Asians was not strictly analogous to that of other races considered inferior: Asian immigrants were the only group excluded from the United States on racial grounds. Among Asian immigrants, the Chinese were the only group whose female mem­ bers were disproportionately disqualified from im­ migrating both because they were Chinese and because they were women. The 1882 Chinese Ex­ clusion Law, the 1908 Gentlem en’s Agreement with Japan, the 1924 National Origins Act, and the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act specifically targeted

and limited Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino im­ migration to the United States. In addition, be­ cause the Naturalization Law of 1870 deemed only whites and African males eligible for natural­ ization, foreign-born Asians were generally ex­ cluded from citizenship until federal legislation permitted the naturalization of Chinese in 1943 and of all Asians in 1952. Discrimination came under increasing chal­ lenge during the twentieth century. Antilynching campaigns early in the century, along with the N A A CP’s challenges to discriminatory laws, blos­ somed into a mass civil rights movement by the 1950s. This movement led to the historic 1954 Brown v. Board o f Education decision and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. National governmental ac­ tions to prohibit discrimination by state govern­ ments, schools, and employers were notable dur­ ing the 1960s. The federal government explicitly outlawed racial classifications designed to harm people of color, initiated affirmative action pro­ grams, and recognized additional racial categories in the federal census. A reaction to the rights revolution o f the 1960s set in during the Reagan-Bush presidencies (198092), a reaction that continues to drive much of contemporary politics. The backlash, which oc­ curs amidst globalization and shrinking econo­ mic opportunities for the middle classes, is di­ rected against social programs developed by the national government to compensate for some of the effects of centuries-long racial discrimination. Attacks against “big government” and the welfare state often express white resentment toward peo­ ple of color, whom whites see as receiving “special privileges” from government. It is important to point out that the granting of formal equality under law has not spelled an end to discrimination in and by the institutions that determine our opportunities and govern us. For example, biased or bigoted thinking continues to affect hiring, promotion, and admissions deci­ sions. Intentional discrimination may be strictly monitored now, but actions and habits that pro-

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duce discriminatory effects continue to constrain the life chances of people o f color. One of the most vexing late-twentieth-century debates about discrimination concerns how we define the prob­ lem. What exactly is discrimination? Should it be measured by outcomes, access, or opportunity? Two principal perspectives have emerged. One, chiefly associated with liberals, has tended to as­ sess progress against discrimination by outcomes. That is, has a school or employer or government program promoted the inclusion of underrepre­ sented groups where they have been historically excluded? Conservatives and neoconservatives, meanwhile, argue that policies should never take race into account, and if they do, color-blind op­ portunity should be their goal rather than positive outcomes for people of color. Another set of debates has centered on the rela­ tionship of racial discrimination to other forms of inequality—especially class, gender, and sexual inequalities. Feminists o f color in particular have developed theories of intersectionality, stressing the ways in which gender and class are braided with race in each of our experiences with one an­ other and with institutions. What is clear from existing historical research and contemporary case studies is that discrimina­ tion based on race may have independent effects but also interacts with other forms of discrimina­ tion. Likewise, while gender is a distinctive basis for discrimination, it is not a singular basis—it is always racialized. For example, racially discrimi­ natory practices in employment create racial hier­ archies among women workers, resulting in vast differences in income among women of different racial backgrounds. Also, racism and sexism func­ tion together both to maintain women’s oppres­ sion and to divide women o f color from white women. In the late twentieth century, discrimination flourishes in public and private arenas. As we ven­ ture into the twenty-first century, our key chal­ lenge is to forge a common comprehension of racism so that we can commonly work to extin­

guish it. To meet this challenge we will have to understand better how racism is concealed and encoded in discourses about other contemporary social problems such as welfare and crime. ■ DANA TAKAGI See

also

Civil Rights Movement; Legal Status;

Racism.

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Racism

tudents seldom hear the word “racism” in U.S. history classrooms, yet racism—the ideology that whites are superior to people of color, and the practices arising from that ideology—is as funda­ mental to the creation of the United States as are Enlightenment notions of liberty, such as reli­ gious freedom. Further, actions that challenge racism, beginning with slave rebellions, have al­ ways been part of this country’s history. The fail­ ure or refusal to address racism in school curric­ ula contributes to the reproduction of racism not only in the schools, but also in society as a whole, because it reinforces the view already widely held among whites that racism is a thing of the past, having ended with the demise of legally enforced segregation. From that perspective, racism has no explana­ tory power for the contemporary social situation in which people o f color are disproportionately poor, overrepresented in the prison population, and underrepresented in universities. Such per­ sistent inequalities, when not flatly denied or de­ liberately ignored by those who consign racism to an ever-more-distant past, tend to be blamed on people of color themselves, thereby exonerat­ ing whites from all responsibility. Without un­ derstanding how racism reproduces itself and acknowledging its deep roots and continued presence in U.S. culture, it is impossible to under­ stand our social system or to act effectively to

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change that system to a more equitable one. Although the civil rights movement of 1955— 1970 succeeded in pressuring a reluctant federal government to end the formal encoding of racism in the law, no Supreme Court decisions or federal statutes could root out racism—nor, indeed, was that their intent. Racism, like race itself, is funda­ mental to the U.S. power structure and is an in­ vention of culture, not simply of the law. Perhaps the most useful way to examine racism is first to distinguish it from prejudice and then to consider its two chief aspects: personal and in­ stitutional. Prejudice—a judgment (usually ad­ verse) formed beforehand without considering facts or evidence—can often do harm and cer­ tainly contributes to racism. Racism differs from prejudice, however, in its power to affect its tar­ gets’ life chances: where one lives, where (or if) one works, where (or if) one goes to school, whether one has access to health care, how long one lives, what one thinks of oneself and of one’s group. One widely used equation is Prejudice + Power = Racism, which exposes the fallacy of “re­ verse racism” (bias against whites). While individ­ ual people of color may indeed be prejudiced against whites, this prejudice does not find the sys­ temic reinforcement inherent in white racism; in short, it lacks power. Personal racism finds affirmation in the ordi­ nary practices of businesses, schools, and govern­ ment; in popular culture, including advertising, films, television, music, and magazines; and in common forms of speech (“Indian giver,” “ deni­ grate,” etc.). Racism is institutionalized. Most in­ stitutions in the United States were formed by whites to serve the perceived needs and desires of whites, as was the government itself. T he legal changes brought about by the civil rights move­ ment have greatly reduced open discrimination in employment and in schools by providing for the entry of people of color into previously all-white domains. However, antidiscrimination legislation has had less impact on institutions themselves, which for the most part have treated affirmative

action as a matter of adding people of color to ex­ isting structures without altering these structures. For instance, most school curricula still focus on the history and cultural productions of European Americans, with Americans of color ignored or relegated to the margins. In education, as in soci­ ety, people of color are not seen as constitutive of U.S. history and culture. Similarly, the movement of people of color into corporations has not al­ tered most corporations’ systems o f rewards, which favor those who have mastered the nuances of a white-defined way of being in the world and which reserve the highest positions for white males. Further, most people in the United States live highly segregated lives, with neighborhoods, schools, and churches seldom fully integrated. People of color still face discrimination caused by racism on the job, in housing, and in schools. Blacks and Latinos, in particular, are still met with police harassment and brutality throughout the United States, racial epithets on the street, and rudeness and suspicion in stores. People of color in general must still deal with racist jokes and re­ marks at work and in school, and distorted, stereo­ typical images in the mass media. One measure of the gulf racism creates between whites and people of color is the depth and breadth of the gap be­ tween these two groups in their attentiveness to racism: Many whites deny racism’s existence, while most people of color recognize racism’s per­ meation into every element of their lives. This gulf is not surprising, considering that racism is integral to U.S. history. It arrived in what is now the United States with the first Eu­ ropean attempts to settle here. In 1526, approxi­ mately five hundred Spaniards and one hundred enslaved Africans arrived in what is now South Carolina. Within a few years, the slaves rebelled, and the Spaniards attempted to put down the re­ bellion. The African survivors escaped to join lo­ cal Native Americans, while the Spanish sur­ vivors fled to what is now Haiti. The early part of the following century saw more permanent colonies established by British settlers, followed

R A C ISM

in short order by laws that bound Black people to be enslaved for life, and their descendants to be subjected to inherited slave status, a unique set of circumstances in the history of world slavery. At approximately the same time as they enacted laws meant to preserve the enslavement of Blacks, British colonists began a reservation sys­ tem to aid their theft of Native American lands. In these two events—the systematic destruction of Native Americans and theft of their land, and the enslavement of Africans to work that stolen land—are the intertwined historical roots of con­ temporary racism, roots that reveal unbridled eco­ nomic exploitation to benefit white middle and upper classes as racism’s first cause. Modern popular understandings of race origi­ nate in slavery, with Black and white seen as the fundamental (and opposing) categories, and slavocracy’s “ one drop” rule, which held that even one drop of “ colored” blood meant that a person was “ colored.” Although modern science has de­ bunked race as a legitimate biological category, society continues to function as if race is biologi­ cally determined and hierarchical. In general, other “minority” groups in the United States have been treated in the context of Black-white opposi­ tion, and the treatment afforded such groups has been socially determined by their placement in relation to the color gradations between Black and white. For example, laws limiting the immi­ gration of Asians followed the logic of the 1790 Naturalization Law that reserved citizenship for whites and was drafted mainly in response to the “problem” o f free Blacks and Native Americans. The very language used to describe Chinese peo­ ple in a California Supreme Court decision echoes the racist language describing Blacks in federal Supreme Court decisions of the same pe­ riod. In People v. H all (1854), the California Supreme Court asserted that a state statute bar­ ring Blacks and Indians from testifying in court cases involving whites logically extended also to Chinese people: “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of

progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point.” Every gain made by people of color has been achieved only through long and arduous struggle, and has often been met by white violence and in­ ventive new ways of legally reproducing and en­ forcing white supremacy. For example, as the doc­ trine of the “universal rights of man” caused some whites to turn against slavery and to support Black rights, and as increasing numbers of Northern states barred slavery, some Blacks began to suc­ ceed against the odds in farming and in small businesses. In response, beginning with the Ohio legislature in 1804, most Northern states passed “ Black Laws,” restricting the rights of free Blacks. The constitutions of three states went further, banning Black settlers outright. The Civil War and its aftermath changed the legal expression of racism, but had little effect on either the ideology itself or the many practices growing from it. In 1865, Southern states enacted Black Codes designed to relegate former slaves to virtual slave status. In response to such codes, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over President Johnson’s veto, giving Blacks citizen­ ship and the same rights “ enjoyed by white citi­ zens.” In 1867 Congress passed a series of Recon­ struction Acts, providing for political reforms such as the federal military oversight of the former Confederate states and the requirement of consti­ tutional conventions in those states. That same year saw the first national meeting of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization dedicated to the ideology of white supremacy and to preserving white power by illegal means, most notably campaigns of ter­ rorism against Blacks. These racist campaigns in­ tensified after the passage of the Fourteenth (equal protection) and Fifteenth (voting for Ne­ gro male adults) Amendments. Race riots, lynchings, and massacres of Blacks were common throughout the South as many whites resisted Black progress during the Reconstruction period. Schools and churches established by Blacks were frequently burned. Between 1890 and 1920, virtu-

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ally all Black progress was violently halted, segre­ gation increased in both the South and the North, and Blacks were forced back into pre-Reconstruction status. During this same period, civil rights groups remained active, and new campaigns against racism were begun, including many led by Black women, such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s anti­ lynching campaign, and the activist National As­ sociation of Colored Women, with Mary Church Terrell as president. In modern times, the years 1955 to 1970 marked the end of formal, legal segregation in the United States, with all credit due to the unremitting hard work and painful sacrifices made by participants in the civil rights movement. Protest by protest, le­ gal decision by legal decision, the framework of Jim Crow was dismantled. Large-scale, coordi­ nated actions, such as the Prayer Pilgrimage, Freedom Riders to register Black voters in the South, sit-ins at lunch counters across the South, the Poor People’s M arch on Washington, and many others, brought so much pressure to bear on the government that laws similar to those passed during Reconstruction improved the legal standing of people of color. Each gain—school desegregation, voting rights, housing antidiscrim­ ination legislation, restaurant and public accom­ modation desegregation—was met by renewed white racist attacks, including murder. During the same period, the Black Power, Black Nationalist, and Black Liberation move­ ments were more committed to empowering selfsufficient Black communities than to attaining government concessions and integration. These more militant strategies posed significant chal­ lenges to white supremacy and racism. From 1965 to 1980, employment, education, and income gaps between whites and people of color narrowed. Since 1980, however, those gaps have been widening as the Reagan and Bush ad­ ministrations failed to enforce antidiscrimination regulations. The 1990s have seen a renewed on­ slaught of overt, unashamed racism that has prompted anti-civil rights legislation in several

states, led to a turning away from affirmative ac­ tion, fueled an increase in hate crimes, pushed the federal government to reduce aid to the poor (although welfare programs serve more whites than any other group, welfare wears a Black face in the popular, racist imagination), increased the amount of spurious “research” that attributes in­ equalities to “natural” differences, and widened divisions both between whites and people of color and among different “minority” groups (e.g., Ko­ reans and Blacks). Even though white women have been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action programs, these programs are depicted in the media as “unfairly” favoring people of color, especially Blacks, over whites and are increasingly under attack. Given this history, racism may seem entirely in­ transigent and actions against it doomed. The civil rights, Black Power, and Black Liberation movements, however, proved that racism is muta­ ble. It is learned, not natural, and therefore can be unlearned and undone. The first step to ending racism lies in seeing it clearly. . M A U R E E N T. RED D Y S e e a l s o Civil Rights Movement; Japanese Ameri­ can Internment; Ku Klux Klan; Lynching; Racial Dis­ crimination; Racism in the Women’s Movement; Slavery; Whiteness.

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Racism in the Women’s Movement

acism has significantly undermined feminist organizing over the past two centuries. De­ spite the fact that campaigns for women’s rights in the United States have been initiated by women of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, and that var­ ious women’s organizations have fervently strug­ gled against racist hierarchies and institutions,

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R A C I S M IN T H E W O M E N ’ S M O V E M E N T

racism has persisted both within and beyond the movement. Consternation and denial about racism in the women’s movement stem from the political prin­ ciple that a movement struggling for the empow­ erment of women must, by definition, oppose all systems of oppression that affect women’s lives. Women of color who have committed themselves to the women’s liberation struggle have long done so from the standpoint that movements against sexism must also address racism if they are to have any real impact upon their lives. If the women’s liberation struggle pertains to all women, rather than to white women exclusively, then it must work to achieve an end to pervasive racism both in institutional forms and in personal dynamics. Al­ though various women’s organizations have cited countering racism as a priority, it is not surprising to find racist hierarchies within the movement that are both the reflection and the result of the racism of the larger culture. When John Adams failed to heed the advice of his wife, Abigail Adams, to “ remember the ladies” in the drafting of the Declaration of Indepen­ dence, women, as well as free Blacks, indigenous peoples, and other residents of non-European origins, were legally and politically excluded from the Revolution and the creation of this country. This disenfranchisement resulted in the marginalization of women in the new nation and in the total repression of Black participation in the new society, except as slave laborers. Two movements eventually grew out of this context: 1) the abolitionist movement that sought to abolish slavery, and 2) the movement for full suffrage for all residents, from which the woman’s suffrage movement emerged. Advocates of these causes often joined forces to strengthen one another’s efforts. Many feminist activists were birthed through these movements and although organi­ zations allied across race to resist slavery, their ef­ forts were largely segregated because of the over­ whelming racial segregation of U.S. society as a whole.

Women of color were discouraged from taking part in the first women’s rights convention in 1848, in Seneca Falls. Although the great Black aboli­ tionist Frederick Douglass participated, not a sin­ gle woman of color was recorded to be in at­ tendance. Moreover, with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which extended the right to vote to Black men, white women suffragists re­ sorted to aggressively racist tactics, undermining their fragile alliances with Black women who were working for the women’s vote. When women finally achieved the vote in 1920, some fifty years later, most Black women were func­ tionally disenfranchised following the rise of Jim (and Jane) Crow segregation in the South. Some whites who perceived rights for Blacks as a threat to white supremacy encouraged the belief among whites that Black men were likely to rape white women. This belief led to an era of lynchings of Black men for allegedly assaulting white women, many of whom had become fearful for their safety. These conditions exacerbated tensions be­ tween white women and women of color. Another barrier to alliances was created by the theft of lands long occupied by Native Americans in the southeast and midwest and by Mexicans in the southwest. The status of white women was of­ ten tied to the success of their men in establishing land claims and developing communities based in white culture. What is commonly referred to as the second wave of the women’s movement began in the 1960s, when great numbers of women activists who were involved in the Black civil rights and antiwar movements reacted against their exclu­ sion from significant leadership and decision­ making bodies by organizing for change. Once again an alliance for the empowerment of women and Blacks (later expanded to include other peo­ ple o f color) gained momentum and stirred pas­ sions. Black, Latina, and Asian American women were elected to public offices and appointed to ex­ ecutive positions for the first time in the nation’s history. Women acted as critical forces in elimi-

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nating barriers to fuller participation in society, in­ cluding Vilma Martinez’s leadership in securing the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Gloria Richardson’s community organizing to end segre­ gation, and Lillian Sing’s achievement of being the first Asian American woman to be appointed a judge. The women’s movement grew both in terms of individual activism and many newly formed grassroots and national organizations (the National Organization for Women, the National Abortion Rights Action League, the Center for Women Policy Studies, and the Women’s Legal Defense Fund). Some of the strongest antiracist voices within the movement emerged from the grassroots femi­ nist, and especially lesbian feminist, organizing of the second wave. The early 1970s, for instance, saw the establishment of the Black lesbian femi­ nist Combahee River Collective in Boston, whose mission statement proposed that racism, sexism, class oppression, and homophobia were linked systems of oppression that must be addressed together. Lesbian poets such as Pat Parker and Audre Lorde articulated a clearly feminist, pow­ erfully antiracist political point of view that chal­ lenged many white feminists’ views of women’s liberation. Radical feminists o f color claimed a space at the center of the dialogue on women’s rights for perhaps the first time in U.S. history. The reverberations of their work remain a dy­ namic force for change in feminist organizing to­ day. Among progressive white women, a tradition of resistance to racism continued to grow. It had its earliest origins in the Deep South, with abolition­ ists such as the Grimke sisters and white women who opposed lynching in the early twentieth cen­ tury, and it carried into the 1950s in the work of women such as the writer Lillian Smith. In the 1970s white lesbian poet Adrienne Rich created both a literature and a practice of resistance to racism that emerged from her southern predeces­ sors and was hewn out o f substantive alliances across race with women-of-color writer/activists.

In the 1990s southern lesbian feminists Suzanne Pharr and Mab Segrest carried this work to its next level in their writing and organizing. Alongside the more radical wing of the move­ ment, the mid-1970s to mid-1980s saw several mainstream women’s organizations focus in­ tensely on challenging racism, such as the YW CA, whose mission was “to eliminate racism wherever it exists and by whatever means neces­ sary.” Heightened awareness of the double jeop­ ardy of racism and sexism led in some sectors of the movement to new and more substantive al­ liances among women across race. Women of color actively formed coalitions that addressed the myriad forces influencing their lives. Despite consistent efforts to educate white women about the interconnectedness of oppres­ sions and their impact upon women’s lives, few women of color were provided the opportunity (by white feminists in power) to serve in the lead­ ership of second wave organizations, and many experienced a new kind of marginalization. Scholar and writer bell hooks wrote of this period in her book Ain’t I a Woman: “ Black feminists found that sisterhood for most white women did not mean surrendering allegiance to race, class, and sexual preference, to bond on the basis of the shared political belief that a feminist revolution was necessary so that all people, especially women, could reclaim their rightful citizenship in the world.” As disillusionment set in for women of color, hooks noted, “We dropped out of groups, weary of hearing talk about women as a force that could change the world when we had not changed ourselves.” This disillusionment that many women of color experienced in the second wave was most appar­ ent in the clash between purported “ feminist” goals (largely defined by white activists) and the actual needs o f women of color. Accordingly, as white women demanded ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, women o f color argued that economic equity was meaningless to people with­ out jobs. As white feminists at the helm of the do-

R A C I S M IN T H E W O M E N ’ S M O V E M E N T

mestic violence and antirape movements orga­ nized for mandatory arrest of batterers and an in­ tensified police presence to deter rape, they did so with no heed to the pervasiveness of police bru­ tality in communities of color. While white women developed a reproductive rights agenda that prioritized abortion rights, women of color ar­ gued that access to basic health care (including abortion and contraception) along with issues such as forced sterilization, the marketing of ex­ perimental and unsafe contraceptives in commu­ nities of color, and economic justice were at the crux of a woman’s right to choose motherhood. Finally, as white women emphasized the creation of women-only space and institutions, women of color saw their fate inextricably bound to the fate of men of color. Strengthened by progress in breaking down racial barriers in society, and often frustrated by attempts to overcome racism in women’s orga­ nizations, women of color revitalized and/or continued to create their own organizations to combat both the limitations of the women’s lib­ eration movement and the oppression o f racial degradation within the context of the second wave. Some declined to call themselves “femi­ nists” and chose instead Alice Walker’s “womanist” term; they demanded that white women sup­ port their efforts to organize and to secure funds; and in a remarkable alliance of purpose, women of color demanded that organizations seeking their endorsement and/or participation address the needs of racial/ethnic populations as repre­ sented in this country. With heightened con­ sciousness about the link between racism and sexism, new national women-of-color advocacy organizations emerged, including the Organiza­ tion of Pan Asia American Women (1976), the Organization of Chinese American Women (1977), the National Black Women’s Health Pro­ ject (1981), the National Institute for Women of Color (1980), the Mexican American Women’s National Association (1974), the National C on­ ference of Puerto Rican Women Inc. (1972), and

the North American Indian Women’s Association (1970). As white women proposed to change the system to allow women the opportunity to reap the same benefits as men, they often failed to recognize the complex realities embedded in this simple state­ ment. Over the course of more than a century of organizing for equality, white women consistently have failed to acknowledge the widely different historical, material, and cultural realities between themselves and women of color; they have thus presented white women’s experiences and agen­ das as representative of all women. Moreover, when challenged by women of color, white women often have faltered at examining the racist underpinnings of their analyses and practices — whether personal or organizational. Women of color have experienced these denials as a deep be­ trayal. Accordingly, fragile alliances among white women and women o f color frequently have not survived frank discussion of the various issues pre­ sented here. Fundamentally, the motives o f white women and women of color for organizing for equality co­ incide: the elimination of oppression that limits any woman’s access to full participation in the larger society. However, women of color generally have sought broad institutional transformation in the dismantling of policies, practices, and struc­ tures that perpetuate oppression on the basis of race/ethnicity, class, and gender, while white women generally have sought to gain access to male power structures and then to transform gen­ dered hierarchies from the inside. White femi­ nists have named “male power” as the root cause o f sexist practices, while women of color have long recognized that men of color are not the equals of white men in U.S. society and thus not fundamentally culpable in the perpetuation of ex­ isting hierarchies. Because women of color continue to gain visi­ bility and leadership strength in conventional po­ litical organizations as well as women’s move­ ment groups, white women and women o f color

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are working together in greater numbers, forming new alliances, and struggling to address substan­ tive differences. Such alliances will continue to challenge the primacy o f white, middle-class, re­ formist viewpoints within the mainstream wom­ en’s movement. White women’s involvement in antiracist movements is anticipated to in­ crease, as understanding between women across race foments new strategies and new visions for change. ■ JAIM E M. GRANT and SHARON PARKER S ee

M

also

Racism.

Radicalism

o be a “radical” is to advocate extreme or dras­ tic change in society, literally to go “to the root or foundation” to solve social problems. By this definition, many women in U.S. history have been radicals. As individuals and as members of organized social movements, women have advo­ cated fundamental changes in the economy, in the nature of politics in the public sphere, and in the equally political relationships and power dy­ namics within families and households. Although radicals are commonly associated with left-wing politics, radicalism can also occur in support of right-wing or antifeminist causes. On the left, women radicals have been active in a variety of anticapitalist, antiimperialist, socialist, commu­ nist, and feminist groups and in numerous move­ ments for liberation of people of color and colo­ nized peoples. On the right, women have engaged in efforts to restrict citizenship rights, to reduce the political power of women, and to out­ law nonconventional sexual and familial relation­ ships. It is also the case, however, that women often are labeled “radical” for supporting even moder­

T

ate or gradual reform measures. Because women’s proper role has been viewed historically as tied to a male-dominant family and household, any woman who dared to press in public for social change ran the risk of being viewed as a radical. Historically, feminist ideas have been de­ nounced as challenging the foundations o f family life and upsetting social arrangements rooted deeply in conventional gender roles. Even the most moderate advocates o f woman suffrage in the nineteenth century and women’s legal equal­ ity in the twentieth century were castigated as “radicals” by those unwilling to admit women as full members o f society. In both the suffrage movement and the contemporary feminist move­ ment, however, there were those who advocated more fundamental measures. The tactics and de­ mands of these radical suffragists and radical fem­ inists were to some extent key in securing the movement’s more moderate demands. As radicals pressed for basic social transformation, more tem­ perate calls for gender parity seemed less threat­ ening to established institutions, resulting in some political concessions and modest social change. In the nineteenth century, most suffragists were careful not to stray far from conventional morality and respectability. Yet some did push beyond re­ formist visions. Emboldened by the militant tac­ tics of British suffragists and drawing from the ex­ amples of the International Workers o f the World and other labor radicals, radical suffragists strug­ gled to end discrimination against women in the family, religion, the polity, and the workplace. Radicals in the second wave of the women’s movement similarly have refused to restrict their demands for change — or their visions of alterna­ tive ways to organize families, intimate relation­ ships, the economy, or politics—to those sanc­ tioned by mainstream political organizations. Radical feminists reject compromise in the quest for gender equality and struggle to create alterna­ tive, feminist-inspired ways of living. Through women’s culture, women-owned cooperative

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workplaces, and women-only households, radical feminists have fashioned highly participatory and egalitarian institutions separate from and opposed to the hierarchical, male-centered institutions of mainstream society, with the goal o f their even­ tual transformation. Until recently, those who insisted that women possessed sexual desires equal to those of men or that women should be permitted sexual fulfill­ ment without fear of unwanted pregnancy were decried as sex radicals. In the early twentieth cen­ tury some feminists proclaimed the erotic needs of women and urged greater (heterosexual) free­ dom for women, even outside the bounds of mar­ riage. At the same time, working-class and social­ ist women championed birth control as the means to liberate women from unwanted preg­ nancies and intolerable marriages. Currently, radical challenges to traditional norms of sexual desire and sexual behavior are continuing, including questioning the rigid di­ chotomies of male/female and heterosexual/homosexual, opening possibilities for bisexual, transgendered, and transsexual erotic attraction. Women have been active, if often invisible, in almost every U.S. radical movement for civil rights, peace politics, and economic justice. In the early nineteenth century, African American and European American women fought to end slavery. Women also fought for unionized, racially egalitarian, and participatory workplaces in many sectors o f the economy—from agriculture and automobile production to service and clerical work—often while struggling for recognition within their own male-dominated unions. They also have infused the civil rights struggles of African Americans, Chicanos and Latinos, Native Americans, the disabled, welfare recipients, and persons with A ID S with passion, commitment, and a vision of social equality and democratic pol­ itics. Women environmentalists and self-proclaimed “ peaceniks,” together with radical femi­ nists, have been in the forefront of struggles to abolish nuclear weapons, eliminate wars interna­

tionally, reduce military expenditures domesti­ cally, protect natural resources, and decrease re­ liance upon nonrenewable energy resources. Radical women of color in the U.S. have been particularly active in movements for Puerto Rican independence, Black liberation, American Indian and Native land rights, and farmworkers’ rights. Not all radicalism by women has been progres­ sive or feminist. Women have also been active, as leaders and followers, in a number of right-wing movements. These include movements favoring gender inequalities; opposing reproductive free­ dom in general and abortion in particular; sup­ porting restrictions on the rights of immigrants and/or people of color; and favoring white, Chris­ tian, and heterosexual supremacy. Many of these radical right-wing movements originated to op­ pose progressive or feminist social change efforts. Ruth Milkman, ed., Women, Work and Protest (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disor­ derly Conduct (Oxford University Press, 1985); Nancy Whittier, Feminist Generations (Temple University Press, 1985). ■ K A T H L E E N M. B L E E S e e a l s o Abolitionist Movement; Anarchism; Black Nationalism; Conservatism and the Right Wing; Fem­ inism, Radical; Labor Movement; Peace Movement; Socialism; Suffrage Movement.

M

Rape S e e Violence Against Women.

M

Reconstruction

lthough many mark the end of the Civil War with the surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, the beginning of Reconstruction predated

A

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the war’s end and might well be said to have be­ gun with the Emancipation Proclamation (Janu­ ary 1,1863). The dramatic restructuring of the po­ litical economy in the South from 1863 to 1877 began with the dismantling of slavery and fol­ lowed with the establishment of statewide consti­ tutional conventions that included newly fran­ chised Black male delegates. White political elites, used to tyrannical influence over African Americans, were hamstrung by the presence of federal troops, and white racists were driven un­ derground; they formed the Ku Klux Klan and other secret organizations. These enormous upheavals created unprece­ dented transformations for women in the North and South. Activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stan­ ton and Susan B. Anthony tried to push through female suffrage, as Congress rapidly enacted the Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fif­ teenth Amendments (1870), which abolished slav­ ery, extended citizenship to former slaves, and protected male voting rights. Even such a staunch supporter of women’s rights as Frederick Douglass was unwilling to compromise what he called “the Negro’s hour,” and thus feminists’ bid for suffrage failed. Despite limited advances (for example, in education when states established land grant, co­ educational colleges) feminists lost ground during Reconstruction. Women pioneers in the treasury office, the U.S. Sanitation Commission, and within private industry found their services no longer required once the war ended. At the same time, many Yankee women, Black and white, un­ dertook a noble adventure, traveling south to es­ tablish schools for freedpeople, despite hostile and dangerous conditions, an effort dubbed “the tenth crusade" by W .E.B. Du Bois. Most Southern women were consumed with the struggle for economic survival, as the war re­ sulted in unprecedented poverty within former Confederate states, particularly for recently freed Black women who had been slaves. Widows of Confederate veterans (over 80,000, for example, in Alabama alone), orphans, and others seeking

relief found that their appeals to the government confounded the white leadership, which was lit­ erally and metaphorically bankrupt. The C ivil War dramatically reshaped opportu­ nities for Native Americans. The war left the Cherokee Nation devastated —libraries, schools, churches, public buildings, and private homes were destroyed. By the surrender at Appomattox, at least seven thousand Cherokees had lost their lives. So many Cherokees died that one of the main priorities of the Cherokee Nation was to provide housing and care for their children. Southern Blacks sought assistance from the Freedman’s Bureau, a government agency estab­ lished to serve the needs of refugees and former slaves, but a bureaucracy overwhelmed by the prospect of redistributing lands, settling interra­ cial disputes, and, most significantly, protecting the freedpeople from violence and injustice. Many former masters sought to reinstitute pat­ terns of slavery. Indeed Southern lawmakers passed Black Codes, which reproduced patterns of expropriation and discrimination. These laws were struck down only by federal intervention. Black male leaders, eager to distance them­ selves from slavery’s legacy, fought hard to protect freedpeople’s rights and especially to safeguard other African Americans. White sexual coercion and rape of Black women, all too common before the C ivil War, continued to be a threat. Black working women struggled for economic justice in the worsening economy. In Jackson, Missis­ sippi, in June 1866, washerwomen petitioned the mayor, demanding better, more uniform wages. Labor militance and increasing defiance typified Black discourse during this era. White women, for example, reported that former slaves, now work­ ing for wages, were no longer willing to soak and clean menstrual rags, and many jeered at their ex­ mistresses’ demands. The former master class was devastated by post­ war conditions. One Georgia white woman com­ plained, “There is nothing for us to do but bow our heads in the dust and let the hateful con-

REL IG IO N

querors trample us under their feet.” Planter pride was only temporarily acquiescent, as Confederate diehards embraced and promoted the C ult of the Lost Cause. White women fashioned memorialization into a fine art, creating the United Daugh­ ters of the Confederacy, dedicated to preserving defeated values. “The suffering South” became the battle cry and by the mid-i8yos many North­ erners were won over, resulting in widespread ero­ sion of the commitment to Black equality. African Americans fled in the wake of federal retreat, like the “ Exodusters,” who pioneered allBlack settlements in Kansas beginning in 1879. Those who remained behind agonized over the introduction of “Jim Crow” legislation (writing segregation into law, beginning in Tennessee in 1881) and over the racial terrorism and lynching that followed. Nevertheless, the status quo of an­ tebellum life in the United States was never re­ stored. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Ellen DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Eric Foner, Re­ construction (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). ■ C A T H E R IN E C L IN T O N S e e a l s o Constitution and Amendments: Emanci­ pation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment; Ku Klux Klan; Lynching; Plantation System; Slavery.

%

Religion

roadly defined, religion is the process by which individuals and groups create meaning and affirm values. A shared understanding about human origins, ends, and ethical practice distin­ guishes one belief system from another. As a uni­ versal human endeavor that is historically and culturally defined as well as limited by human finitude, religion is contingent and ambiguous.

B

Religious organizations have used their beliefs to justify and legitimate practices that have caused evil and suffering on a massive scale. Religious be­ liefs have also inspired selflessness and sacrifice. With regard to women’s history, religions have been the source of insight and power as well as the cause of arbitrary violence and destruction in the name of divine authority. The religious history of the United States is shaped by the culturally diverse experiences of women. In spite of their diversity, women’s lives are affected by the patriarchal assumptions em­ bedded both in this country’s normative cultural value system and in the foundational principles of many traditional religions. Confronted by the choice between conforming to patriarchal values and choosing to define their own religious identi­ ties, some women accept traditional beliefs with­ out question. For others, the choice to remain committed to religious traditions that are funda­ mentally sexist may be predicated on the idea that it is possible to create the conditions for change from within. Those who reject sexist religious tra­ ditions turn to alternative forms of spirituality, or to political activism or secular humanism. During the formative period of U.S. religious history in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen­ turies, Protestant Christianity was established as the dominant religion. Although the constitu­ tional separation of church and state exists, Prot­ estant Christianity continues to have a powerful impact on U.S. politics and culture. Informed by both patriarchal assumptions and a Western Euro­ pean cultural predisposition, Protestant Christian­ ity defined Native Americans, Africans brought as slaves, and women as “ other.” Native Americans and African slaves were considered subhuman and, as a group, women were considered to be less significant than their male counterparts. These attitudes were reflected in the paternalism, infantilization, and abusive practices suffered by these marginalized groups. The colonization of the United States resulted in the destruction of Native American peoples,

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REL IG IO N

their cultures, religions, and traditions. Little writ­ ten evidence exists about the religious life of Na­ tive American women, because o f the oral tradi­ tion of tribal narratives. Written documentation was primarily the work of European male mis­ sionaries who paid little attention to the religious experiences of Native women, which varied from tribe to tribe. Most tribes had a creation myth that included a female creator and an Earth Mother figure, both of whom provided justification for women to be healers and shamans. Many Native American women were converted to Christianity, in which rituals of fasting, mortification, prayer, and visions were similar to those of Native Ameri­ can spirituality. Kateri Tekakwitha, from the M o­ hawk tribe of the Iroquois Nation, converted to Christianity in the middle of the seventeenth cen­ tury. After her death, miraculous events that oc­ curred on the reservation were attributed to her and she was venerated by the tribe. In the early colonial period, Puritan women were encouraged to participate in their churches. Some of those who challenged male author­ ity by desiring radical equality and the right to preach the gospel were excommunicated, hanged, or burned at the stake. Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), a midwife and healer, believed that grace and salvation were gifts from God given di­ rectly to individuals. She claimed that her theol­ ogy and her role as a teacher of younger women conformed to the teachings of the Scriptures. Hutchinson was excommunicated and banished, as was her friend, Mary Dyer, who shared her the­ ological beliefs. Dyer returned to England and became a Quaker. A year after the Bay Colony passed a law forbidding the profession of Quaker beliefs, Dyer returned to Boston. Defying the law, she preached and was expelled on three oc­ casions. Refusing to be silenced, she returned for the fourth time and was hanged in Boston on June 1,1660. Hutchinson, Dyer, and hundreds of other women were accused of practicing witchcraft. Nearly thirty women hanged between 1620 and

1725 were perceived to be a threat to the “natural” order. Their “ crimes” ranged from preaching and healing to disobeying their husbands, ministers, and magistrates. Historically, “woman” named the discursive rupture in the his-story of patriar­ chal authority. The natural order ascribed to women was subordination and silence. Those who opposed it were seen as threats to the divinely ordained harmony within the community. In spite of the cultural, ethnic, religious, and economic diversity that defined the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment vision o f democ­ racy and equality, the position of women in New England and the southern colonies remained un­ changed. Considered intellectually and morally inferior to men, women were instructed to restrict their piety to the home. Some women, particu­ larly in the South, extended the religious instruc­ tion they offered their children to their slaves. In general, slave owners feared that Christianization would lead to emancipation. Therefore, they taught slaves a version of Christianity that empha­ sized their sinfulness and the importance of obey­ ing the masters. Although the religious life of African slave women was in sharp contrast to their experience in Africa, where in some tribes women were reli­ gious leaders, Christianization offered a degree of empowerment. In the 1760s Phillis Wheatley was accepted as a member of Boston’s Old South M eeting House. Her zealous Congregationalist beliefs inspired her to write poetry and essays. Katherine Ferguson, a freed slave influenced by her Christian beliefs, opened the first Sabbath School for orphaned children in New York City in 1793. From the middle to the late eighteenth century, opportunities for women to exercise greater reli­ gious freedom increased. Events that contributed to the changes included the Great Awakening (1720-70), which revived interest in piety, and the nascent antislavery movement, the emergence of new religious groups, and the disestablishment of Protestant Christianity after the Revolutionary

R EL IG IO N

A woman rabbi reads the Torah. Traditionally, only men were permitted to touch the Torah, which contains the first five books o f the Hebrew Scriptures.

War, which, at least in principle, separated church and state and made religion a matter of personal conscience. Furthermore, the Enlight­ enment established the philosophical founda­ tions for religious tolerance, social justice, aboli­ tion, and woman suffrage. The individualization of religious experience during the Great Awakening emphasized per­ sonal salvation. Both Black and white women benefited from this shift. Their piety and fervor were valued by revivalist preachers and their testi­ mony of conversion provided legitimation of their experience as religious women. Although neither Black women nor white women were permitted to preach in most Christian churches, they could become missionaries or work for social causes. In spite of the fact that the Great Awakening is asso­

ciated with the name of Jonathan Edwards, it was his wife, Sarah Edwards, who was the source of his inspiration and his ideas about spiritual cleansing. With the growth of Quakerism, German Pietist sects, and evangelical revivalism, the religious ex­ perience o f women was enriched. Opportunities for leadership expanded and made it possible to displace the traditional hierarchy of male author­ ity over women worshipers. Women founded reli­ gions such as the Shakers, Christian Science, and Spiritualism, led the revival of Voodoo cults, and became leaders in Pentecostal churches. For Quakers, the theological basis for permitting women to preach was first established by Mar­ garet Fell, who supported the rights of women to participate fully in the life of the Society. There-

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fore, Quaker women had administrative and su­ pervisory roles within the Society and developed and managed social justice projects in their communities. Among the better-known Quaker women was Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), minister, abolitionist, and, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, coorganizer of the Seneca Falls Convention, which marked the beginning of the woman suf­ frage movement. Sarah Moore Grim ke (17921873) joined the Society of Friends in 1823, having rejected the privileges of her southern aristocratic upbringing. She was reformer, abolitionist, and woman suffragist. Although she admired Mott, she left the Society over its reluctance to support the antislavery bill. In her crusade against slavery she was joined by her sister, Angelina Grimke. During the revolutionary period and through­ out the nineteenth century, many new religions were founded, including some by women, offer­ ing a wide range of alternatives. The growing cul­ tural secularism, emerging socialism, and the per­ ception that religion was within the sphere of the feminine changed the country’s religious land­ scape. The claim that women were by nature reli­ gious and the new scholarly interest in the Scrip­ tures both justified the subordination of women and underscored their equality with men. The scriptural justification for human freedom and equality empowered women to live their religious beliefs in the public arena as supporters of aboli­ tion, woman suffrage, women’s ordination, and changes in divorce laws. Ann Lee (1736-1784), the founder o f Shakerism; Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), the founder of Christian Science; and the Fox sisters—Mar­ garet (1836-1893) and Kate (1839-1892)—who founded the Spiritualist movement all recognized in different ways the feminine as a higher form of divine consciousness. All represented powerful models of women in religious leadership posi­ tions as visionaries, prophets, preachers, and writ­ ers. The growing understanding of human perfec­ tionism and the value placed on individual experience encouraged women to develop new religious insights.

Some women turned their attention to social issues. Jewish women, such as Rebecca Gratz (1781-1869) of Philadelphia, organized the Fe­ male Association for the R elief o f Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances in 1801, es­ tablished the Hebrew Sunday School in 1818, and worked to create the Jewish Foster Home and Or­ phan Asylum in 1855. Catholic religious women were committed to improving education and health care. Owing to the culture’s anti-Catholic bigotry and suspicion of celibate women, the work of nuns historically has been underesti­ mated. Three notable women were Elizabeth Seton, who founded the order of the Sisters of Char­ ity in 1809; Frances Cabrini, who, as a Missionary o f the Sacred Heart, established schools and or­ phanages in New York’s Little Italy in 1889; and Katherine Drexel, who founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored Peo­ ple in 1891. In 1915 Drexel also founded Xavier University in New Orleans, the first and only Catholic university for Black students. Another woman who devoted her life to im­ proving the social conditions o f people affected by industrialization was Jane Addams (1860-1935), a committed pacifist. She founded Hull House in Chicago in order to meet the needs of the com­ munity. In 1915 she became chair of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and in 1931 was the corecipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, the first U.S. woman to be so honored. Evangelical revival meetings were an out­ growth of Protestant Christianity and the empha­ sis on individual salvation. They offered women opportunities for preaching and leadership that was not available within traditional churches. Among the best-known Black visionaries was So­ journer Truth (17977-1883), who, beginning in the late 1820s, was a street preacher in Manhattan and worked for social reform. After 1843, she preached throughout New England, supporting abolition and woman suffrage. Lay preacher Phebe Palmer (1807-1874), of the Methodist Episcopal C hurch, distinguished herself as the leader of the Holiness Movement. In 1859 she

R EL IG IO N

wrote an impassioned defense of women’s ordi­ nation. Amanda Smith (1837-1915), of the Afri­ can Methodist Church, and an internationally acknowledged Black evangelist, was influenced by Palmer. Despite ministers’ resistance, she preached from M aine to Tennessee in the 1870s and in England, India, and Africa from the late 1870s to 1890. Although not an evangelist herself, Ellen Gould White (1827-1915) was strongly influenced by Methodist evangelism. She was a member of the William M iller’s adventist sect, which be­ lieved in the imminent second coming of Christ. By the 1860s the sect renamed itself the SeventhDay Adventists, and White became their spiritual leader. Health reform was part of her Christian commitment; therefore, she established the West­ ern Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, Michigan, which became a model sanatarium. Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944), founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel; and Kathryn Kulhman (1907-1976), faith healer and radio and television evangelist, were two o f the best-known and widely acclaimed charismatic leaders of Pentecostal and Holiness movements. Within traditional Protestant churches, sup­ port for women’s ordination met with a great deal of resistance. The first woman to be ordained was Antoinette Brown, who became a Congregationalist minister in 1853. Anna Howard Shaw was ordained a United Methodist minister in 1880 but her ordination was revoked four years later because of her gender. At the end of the twentieth century, women ministers and bishops exist in several Protestant denominations, in­ cluding Anglican, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and United Methodist. There are also women in the rabbinate of Conservative and Reform Judaism. However, the Roman Catholic Church contin­ ues to refuse to ordain women. By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, women contributed significantly to reshaping religious self-under­ standing in the United States. Abolition, woman

suffrage, temperance, reform of divorce and child labor laws, education and health care reform were all within the purview of women’s commitment to social justice. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) founded the woman suffrage movement in col­ laboration with Lucretia Mott and Susan B. An­ thony. She also worked to change divorce laws that impoverished women. Between 1895 and 1898, with a committee o f international women scholars, Stanton published The Woman’s Bible, a commentary on the parts o f the Hebrew and Christian Bible that either demean women’s ex­ perience or are silent about the subordination and abuse of women. Frances Willard (1839-1898), a prominent educator, Dean of Women at North­ western University, and supporter of woman suf­ frage, worked with the Woman’s Christian Tem­ perance Union and served as its president from 1891 to 1898. Henrietta Szold (1860-1945) hied to preserve Jewish culture in the United States and supported the restoration of the state of Israel. In 1912 she founded and was the first president of Hadassah, a women’s organization committed to providing and supervising medical services to Jews in the Middle East. Dorothy Day (18971980), a Catholic and socialist, established The Catholic Worker, a monthly publication to which she contributed for over fifty years, supporting social causes and speaking on behalf of women, the poor, homeless, and unemployed. Com bin­ ing faith and charity, she created houses of hospi­ tality and rural communes for the needy. Throughout the twentieth century the tension between conformity to patriarchal norms and reli­ gious self-determination persists and continues to shape the nature of women’s religious experience, authority, and power. In Native American re­ ligions, mainstream Protestant denominations, Conservative and Reform Judaism, as well as within African American churches, women’s par­ ticipation and leadership was circumscribed by male authority. As a means of self-empowerment, women formed auxiliary organizations that fo­ cused on teaching, social work, and fundraising. In general, institutional religions remain patriar-

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chal, permitting women to participate only in sub­ ordinate positions. Among those that ordain women very few allow women to hold high posi­ tions of authority. There are more than sixteen hundred religions practiced in the U.S. today, including Mormonism; Unification Church; Scientology; Hin­ duism; Buddhism; Islam; and Yoruba, Voodoo, and Santaria, which are of African origin. There are also alternative religions, particularly wom­ en’s religions such as W icca, African Spiritual churches in New Orleans, and the Roman Cath­ olic nonseparatist Women-Church, which pro­ vide women with the greatest opportunities for leadership because they do not replicate patriar­ chal hierarchy. They attract charismatic women with a heightened sense of spirituality. Whereas their nineteenth-century predecessors focused on the spirit, currently, these movements focus on the body as well as the spirit in their attempt to recover women’s wisdom and power. They have replaced male gods and the Jewish-Christian rhetoric that blames Eve with goddess and nature worship, and have reclaimed their sensuality and sexuality as an integral part of their religious expe­ rience and practice. Alternative women’s reli­ gions tend to be participatory, emphasize inter­ connectedness among the members and the community, affirm the spiritual journey as a hu­ man endeavor of self-discovery and self-transcen­ dence, and provide a place where women can be free to determine their own spiritual realities. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, Women and Religion in America, 3 vols. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981); Rosemary Skinner Keller, “Women and Religion,” in Encyclopedia of American Re­ ligious Experience Vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988); Catherine Wessinger, ed., Women’s Leader­ ship in Marginal Religions: Explorations Outside the Mainstream (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993). ■ IR E N A S. M. MAKARUSHKA See

also

Buddhism; Catholicism; Evangelicalism;

Feminist Theology; Fundamentalism; Hinduism; Is­ lam; Judaism; Missionaries; Mormons; Native Ameri­ can Religions; Protestantism; Puritanism; Spirituality; Wicca.

§ Reproductive Rights nly during the last quarter century has the concept o f “ reproductive rights” come into common usage in this country. The legal recogni­ tion of the right to decide whether, when, and how to have children, reproductive rights encom­ passes a range of decisions concerning reproduc­ tive health, including family planning, contracep­ tion, abortion, pregnancy, and childbirth. Although fertility regulation has been a part of women’s lives throughout the past two centuries, it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that birth control ascended as a political and legal is­ sue. In 1873 Congress made it a crime to distribute via mail or to import information about contra­ ception and abortion. During the same period, the notion of “voluntary motherhood” and other tenets of a woman’s right to control her own fertil­ ity began to gain momentum among feminists. The contemporary movement for birth control blossomed in the early 1900s, as advocates of fam­ ily planning spoke out and wrote on the issue, dis­ tributed pamphlets, and established birth-control clinics. Although the early feminist movement sought to provide women with the means to con­ trol their own fertility, legislators and some mem­ bers of the medical profession sought to impose fertility control on certain “undesirable” elements in society. Criminals, who at one time were be­ lieved to be genetically predisposed to “antisocial” behavior, and persons with supposedly low men­ tal faculties were involuntarily sterilized under state laws and court orders. In 1927, in one of its most reprehensible decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court defended involuntary sterilization in Buck

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R EP R O D U C T IV E RIG H TS

v. Bell. A decade and a half later, however, the Court recognized as fundamental the right to pro­ create in its 1942 Skinner v. Oklahoma decision. Sadly, this constitutional guarantee did not pro­ tect countless low-income women, especially women of color, from being involuntarily steril­ ized by government programs and clinics well into the 1990s. Recently, long-lasting, hormonebased contraceptives such as Norplant and DepoProvera have raised similar concerns about coer­ cion, as their use is advocated for teenagers and women receiving public assistance. During the past thirty years, the Supreme Court has decided a number of cases involving the right of individuals to control their fertility. In a landmark 1965 case, Griswold v. Connecticut, the Court found that the right of married couples to use contraception is protected by the fundamental right of privacy found in the Fourteenth Amend­ ment and the other guarantees of the Bill of Rights. The Court subsequently extended this right to unmarried couples and individuals (Eisenstadt v. Baird, 1972) and to minors (Carey v. Population Services, 1977). Legislative action has also influ­ enced access to contraceptives and family plan­ ning services. In 1970 Congress enacted Title X of the Public Health Service Act, which provides direct federal grants to thousands of family plan­ ning providers that collectively serve more than five million low-income clients annually. The statute authorizing Title X, however, bars the use of funds “ in programs where abortion is a method of family planning.” From colonial times in this country, abortion was legal prior to “ quickening,” the point in preg­ nancy when fetal movement is detectable. Prior to the rise of the medical establishment in the mid1800s, pregnancy terminations were performed by people, primarily women, who usually were not physicians, and only a handful of states passed measures restricting abortion. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, however, state legisla­ tures enacted statutes criminalizing virtually all abortions.

A broad-based movement of women’s rights ac­ tivists, health care providers, and members of the clergy worked in the 1960s to find competent abortion providers for women seeking to termi­ nate unwanted pregnancies. By the early 1970s, one-third of the state legislatures had liberalized their abortion laws. Against this backdrop, in 1973 the Court issued rulings in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, which recognized for the first time that the fundamental constitutional “ right of privacy is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy” in consultation with her physician. The Court struck down criminal abortion statutes from Texas and Georgia, se­ verely limiting states’ ability to restrict abortions during the first two trimesters of pregnancy or af­ ter viability when the procedure is necessary to protect a woman’s life or health. Immediately following Roe, abortion oppo­ nents pressured state legislatures and the federal government to impose restrictions on abortion services. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, le­ gal advocates for women challenged restrictive state laws, ultimately obtaining Court review. Finding that certain laws imposed unconstitu­ tional limitations on a woman’s right to privacy, the Court struck down: ■ husband consent for a married woman’s abor­ tion (Planned Parenthood v. Danforth, 1976) ■ mandatory counseling and a twenty-four-hour waiting period for abortion (City o f Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, 1983; Thornburgh v. American College o f Obstetri­ cians & Gynecologists, 1986) ■ requirements that post-first-trimester abortions be performed only in hospitals (City o f Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, 1983) ■ mandatory use of techniques most likely to re­ sult in a live birth when a fetus is or may be vi­ able (Colautti v. Franklin, 1979) ■ requirements that physicians performing postvi­ ability abortions use the method most likely to preserve the life of the fetus and have a second

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physician present to “ save” the fetus (Thorn­ burgh v. American College o f Obstetricians & Gynecologists, 1986) Still, abortion opponents succeeded early on in restricting the right to choose abortion, par­ ticularly for low-income women and young women. Beginning in 1977, the Court found that the right to privacy does not extend to women who rely on state programs for their health care or to those obtaining abortion services at public hospitals (M aher v. Roe, Beal v. Doe, and Poelker v. Doe, 1977). Three years later, the Court found constitutional the Hyde Amendment, a prohibi­ tion on the use of federal funds for abortions under M edicaid—the joint federal/state program established in 1965 to provide comprehensive health care to low-income individuals (Harris v. McRae, 1980). Every year since 1976, the Hyde Amendment has been reenacted, barring federal reimburse­ ment for low-income women’s abortions except in extremely limited circumstances. Similar restric­ tions have been attached to a wide range of fed­ eral programs, at times affecting millions of U.S. citizens. Following the cutoff of federal coverage for abortion services, more than two-thirds of the state legislatures adopted similar limitations on state Medicaid funds. As a result, low-income women, particularly women o f color, have been forced to postpone abortion, thus exposing them­ selves to the risks associated with later abortions, or endangering their lives and health trying to self­ abort. The right and ability of young women to obtain abortions also have been weakened by the Court. The Court held that states may require a young woman to obtain the consent of, or notify, one or both parents prior to an abortion, so long as there is an “alternative” for waiving the requirement, such as a judicial bypass procedure, in which she must demonstrate to a judge that she is mature enough to choose abortion or that the procedure is in her best interests.

During the 1980s the antiabortion movement was bolstered both by its success in the courts and legislatures and by support from Presidents Rea­ gan and Bush, both o f whom opposed abortion and used the power of the executive office to re­ strict federal funds provided to domestic and in­ ternational health organizations; skew govern­ ment research and reporting on abortion; and prohibit personal importation of the pill RU486, a method of nonsurgical abortion. Reagan and Bush also had an enormous impact on the federal judiciary, appointing at least 60 percent of the nation’s sitting federal judges —the majority of whom espoused antiabortion philosophies and have ruled in favor of abortion restrictions. Until 1989 the Supreme Court appeared to sup­ port the right to choose abortion so long as an adult woman was seeking the procedure with her own funds. That year, however, in Webster v. Re­ productive Health Services, the Court upheld a number of Missouri abortion restrictions, which bar the use of public facilities and public employ­ ees in abortion procedures and create a presump­ tion of fetal “viability” beginning at twenty weeks’ gestation. Women’s rights advocates and antiabor­ tion forces were certain that the Court was ready and able to overturn Roe v. Wade, if the right case arose. In 1992, in Planned Parenthood o f Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Court reaffirmed that women have a constitutional right to choose abor­ tion and made clear that states cannot ban abor­ tion or give another person veto power over an adult woman’s choice. However, the justices adopted an “undue burden” standard, under which states may impose abortion restrictions so long as they do not have “ the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion.” Applying this standard, the Court struck down Pennsylvania’s mandatory husband notification provision, but a plurality upheld the state’s mandatory waiting pe­ riods, biased counseling, and parental involve­ ment requirements.

REPR O D U C TIV E RIGH TS

In 1993, President Clinton took office and quickly reversed some of the antiabortion policies of the previous administrations —lifting the ban on federal funding for research using fetal tissue; reversing the “Mexico City Policy,” which prohib­ ited nongovernmental organizations receiving federal funds from administering international family programs that encouraged or supported abortion “as a method of family planning” ; and urging review of the import ban on RU486. Antiabortion forces continued to push the lim­ its of the right to choose abortion. Although bar­ ring bans on abortion, the Casey ruling created ambiguity about the constitutionality o f many abortion restrictions. Some federal courts have upheld antiabortion measures identical to those struck down by the Court during the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, the Republican majority in the 104th Congress has imposed additional re­ strictions on abortion services and family plan­ ning programs. Some opponents of abortion advocate illegal, violent tactics to prevent women from obtaining medical services. Since the mid-1980s, abortion providers and women seeking their services have reported thousands of incidents of harassment and violence. Between M arch 1993 and D e­ cember 1994, two abortion providers, two clinic workers, and a volunteer security escort were killed by antiabortion demonstrators; others were wounded. Faced with such extreme pressure, some physicians have stopped performing abor­ tions, adding to an already critical shortage of these providers. By the early 1990s fear of reprisal, lack of med­ ical-school training, and the fact that many older physicians had retired left at least 84 percent of all U.S. counties without an abortion provider. In the early 1990s, legislative bodies and the federal and state judiciaries responded to antiabortion harass­ ment and violence by passing laws and imposing court orders designed to protect physicians as well as women obtaining abortions. From 1990 to 1995, the Court heard three cases involving antiabor­

tion harassment and violence and returned mixed opinions. In early 1994, Congress and President Clinton adopted a new federal statute—the Free­ dom of Access to Clinic Entrances A ct—creating federal jurisdiction over antiabortion violence and allowing criminal federal prosecution for vio­ lent actions directed against abortion providers and women seeking their services. Unfortunately, some of the earliest Court deci­ sions on pregnancy set troubling precedents, find­ ing that disability plans could treat pregnancy dif­ ferently from other disabilities without violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Responding to pressure from the wom­ en’s movement, the legal community, and civil rights advocates, in 1978 Congress adopted the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, repudiating the Court’s decision in General Electric v. Gilbert, 1976, and amending the definition of sex discrim­ ination to include pregnancy discrimination. In 1987 the Court upheld a law guaranteeing mater­ nity leave to pregnant women, finding that em­ ployment practices favoring pregnant women are not discriminatory. The statute’s protections, how­ ever, extend only to employment decisions and benefits such as employer-provided health insur­ ance; the law explicitly excludes discrimination on the basis of abortion. Neither the federal courts nor Congress has yet overturned the 1974 holding in Geduldig v. Aiello that pregnancy discrimina­ tion does not violate the Constitution. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the antiabortion movement’s agenda included efforts to regulate women’s behavior during pregnancy. Legal oppo­ nents developed a strategy to expand “fetal rights,” hoping that establishing such rights would help to reverse Roe v. Wade. Courts have consistently held that it is un­ constitutional to compel a person to undergo a medical procedure for the benefit of another. Nonetheless, doctors and hospitals still seek court orders to force pregnant women to undergo cae­ sarean sections and other procedures against their

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will. The fetal rights argument also has led to other punitive measures against pregnant women, including prosecution for drug or alcohol use, or for not following doctors’ orders. David J. Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Pri­ vacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (New York: Macmil­ lan, 1994); Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America (Revised and Updated) (New York: Penguin Books, 1990); James Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution o f National Policy, 1800-1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). ■ KATHRYN K O L B E R T and A N D R EA M I L L E R S e e a l s o Abortion; Birth Control; Eugenics; Fetal Rights; Pregnancy; Privacy Rights; Pro-Choice and Antiabortion Movements; R o e v. W ade; Sterilization and Sterilization Abuse.

U

Reproductive Technology

ince the late 1970s, clinicians developed nu­ merous techniques, with expansions and per­ mutations, to assist conception. On July 25,1978, in Oldham, England, the first laboratory-con­ ceived baby, Louise Brown, was born. From 1954 to 1969 attempts had been made to fertilize hu­ man eggs from ovaries removed in surgery. The 1970s saw the development of the technique of lap­ aroscopy: seeing tire eggs with a thin, lighted tele­ scope inserted at the navel. For standard in vitro fertilization (IVF) and embryo transfer (ET), eggs are aspirated through a needle inserted near the laparoscope, and sperm are added in a culture dish. If fertilization and cell division succeed, re­ sulting embryos are inserted into the potential mother’s uterus. To become a baby the embryo must then successfully implant in the uterus. After Louise Brown’s media-event birth, IV F clinics sprang up worldwide; by 1994 some eight world congresses on assisted reproduction had

S

taken place. Australia emerged early as a leader; France and Israel have the most clinics per capita; the United States by 1988 had more than one hun­ dred sixty clinics. Until 1981 only three IV F babies had been born; in that year twelve more arrived, including the first U.S. baby, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, conceived at the Jones Institute in Norfolk, Virginia. But even by 1995 success rates remained below 15 percent. Since a woman usually releases only one egg per menstrual cycle, and since more eggs increase the chance of success, most clinics inject fertility drugs to cause multiple ovulation. Usually a drug like Clom id®’ or Pergonal1’ is followed by the pregnancy hormone to trigger ovulation. Since 1986 many clinics have suppressed menstrual cy­ cles beforehand with contraceptive pills or an im­ itation hormone that disables the pituitary gland. Risks to women from these fertility drugs include ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, ovarian cysts, menstrual irregularities, premature menopause, and ovarian cancer. As with other drugs, regula­ tion of fertility drugs is loose: effectiveness and safety have not been ascertained; private physi­ cians sometimes prescribe unapproved drugs; ap­ proved drugs sometimes get used for other condi­ tions or at incorrect dosages. Laparoscopy requires a highly skilled surgeon; for the patient, the procedure is stressful and may cause hemorrhage, gas embolism, or coma from anesthesia. Between 1982 and 1985, European clinicians invented egg-retrieval procedures that use ultrasound to find eggs without surgery, and manufacturers devised ultrasound transducers to fit in the vagina. Although these procedures also require skill and are not pain- or risk-free, by 1990 most clinics had adopted an ultrasound method in which the egg-retrieval needle punctures the vaginal wall next to the cervix. One outcome of IV F may be multiple preg­ nancy if several embryos are transferred. In Aus­ tralia, from r979 through 1986, 38 percent of surviving IV F babies were twins, triplets, or quad­ ruplets. Multiple pregnancy risks include toxemia

REPRO D U CTIVE TECHNOLOGY

and gestational diabetes for the mother; congeni­ tal anomalies, reduced survival, growth retarda­ tion, and premature birth for the babies; as well as socioeconomic problems for parents raising triplets and quadruplets. Hence some clinics re­ strict the number of embryos transferred, and some use techniques for “ reduction in number,” in which a surgeon locates fetuses by ultrasound and then terminates all but one or two. As IV F attempts became widespread, expan­ sions and variations burgeoned. In 1984 in Texas, Ricardo Asch invented gamete intrafallopian transfer (G IFT ), in which eggs retrieved by lap­ aroscopy are mixed with sperm and inserted into the anesthetized woman’s fallopian tubes. Al­ though most Catholic hospitals will not carry out IVF/ET, many permit G IF T because egg and sperm unite inside the woman’s body. From the early 1980s, donor sperm had been used when male partners had few functional sperm. Then, in 1983, a Melbourne team reported the first donoregg baby, an event that soon became common­ place. Donor eggs are used when a potential mother’s eggs are at risk for a chromosome anom­ aly or defective gene or when she is past menopause or cannot ovulate. First reported in 1993, postmenopausal pregnancy immediately be­ came controversial—even forbidden in some countries. Another fad (also sometimes restricted) is obtaining eggs from ovaries of aborted fetuses. IVF-surrogacy, or gestational surrogacy, occurs when a woman incubates an embryo—from an egg and sperm united in the laboratory—to pro­ duce a baby for others, usually the couple who provided those gametes. The first reported U.S. IVF-surrogacy baby was born in 1986; in 1987 a South African mother bore triplets for her daugh­ ter. In 1984 a Melbourne team produced the world’s first baby from a frozen embryo. Freezing excess embryos has since become routine; most clinics offer or require it. Since the late 1980s many laboratories have tried injecting sperm through the egg’s coating but with limited suc­ cess.

Experiments with embryos of domestic animals have motivated many countries to prohibit cer­ tain procedures in humans, for example, fertiliz­ ing human eggs with nonhuman sperm (cross­ species fertilization) or splitting embryos in two (cloning). In the 1990s other expansions o f IV F included embryo biopsy and genetic screening. After re­ moval of one or two cells (biopsy) to test them, the rest of an eight- or sixteen-cell embryo (if success­ fully implanted) can become a complete baby; in 1989 the first sex-checked baby was born after such testing. In the 1990s, after pinpointing genes for numerous genetic disorders, many geneticists are trying to screen biopsied cells for “bad” genes in order to select embryos without disabilities. Be­ yond mere detection, many researchers hope to replace or cure defective genes in eggs or em­ bryos. Artificial or assisted insemination (AI) is the oldest, simplest, and most widely used reproduc­ tive technology. In its basic form, the doctor in­ serts sperm (from a partner or a donor) into a woman’s upper vagina at the time of ovulation. Freezing of sperm started in the 1940s; after the 1960s sperm banks proliferated. With the spread of the A ID S epidemic in the late 1980s, freezing often became mandatory to keep sperm until a donor had a second HIV test six months later. Since lesbians and single women were often ex­ cluded from AI clinics, they used self-insemina­ tion with known donors or anonymous ones re­ cruited by friends or by feminist sperm banks. A major social issue with AI is the conflict of secrecy to protect the donor versus the right to know one’s genetic parentage: often clinics either keep no records or refuse to reveal names of donors to grown AI children. Historically many parents have wished to choose their children’s sex, because of preferred family configurations or cultural devaluation of females. Although folk methods and unproven theories predominate, certain new techniques can indeed select sex. Technologies such as am-

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niocentesis and chorionic villus biopsy, that diag­ nose genetic anomalies in a fetus, can also give ac­ curate sex detection. Both procedures are invasive and have risks. Ultrasound, a much less invasive technology, improved rapidly through the 1980s until machines could depict genitalia in midpreg­ nancy with 95 percent accuracy. In India amnio­ centesis and ultrasound for sex selection are wide­ spread even though prohibited; in Western nations a pregnant woman with access to health care is routinely told her fetus’s sex after ultra­ sound. Most couples with a sex preference wish to avoid abortion. Do-it-yourself folk methods for sex selection o f sperm have appeared in scientific guise but produce sex ratios no better than chance. These methods include timing o f inter­ course or of orgasm, position during intercourse, acidity level in the vagina, and salt content in the diet. In 1986 ProCare of Colorado marketed a kit ("Gender Choice” ), based on a timing theory, but in 1987 the Food and Drug Administration la­ beled it “a gross deception,” and in 1988 ProCare went bankrupt. Another unverified procedure, the “ Ericsson method,” uses an albumen column to separate male- and female-determining sperm before AI; it allegedly produces over 75 percent boys. Most who attempt sex detection and sex pre­ selection (except for sex-linked diseases) seek males. Although few feminists study reproductive technologies, lively—sometimes heated—debate has occurred. Some have questioned safety, effi­ cacy, and informed consent; many have criticized lack of access. In the United States reproductive technologies (RTs) often are unavailable to les­ bians, single women, disabled persons, the poor, or women of color: prejudice may motivate doc­ tors to refuse treatment or avoid suggesting RTs. Poverty may limit access to any medical service: by 1995 only two states required all health insurers to cover IVF. In the 1990s almost no feminists supported the views of Shulamith Firestone, who, in 1970, rec­

ommended that technology be developed to free women from the burden of childbearing. Yet many liberal feminists believe that the new RTs offer options to wom en—that any woman fully in­ formed about risks and success rates should de­ cide whether to use them. Many radical feminists, however, maintain that RTs separate reproduc­ tion from the body and give doctors too much power over women’s bodies. This relatively inef­ fective service to infertile women may be eco­ nomically advantageous to the medical profession and to drug companies. For example, Serono Pharmaceuticals (which has the monopoly on Pergonal® in the U.S.) funds R E S O L V E , a pa­ tient advocacy/education group for infertile cou­ ples, which endorses all RTs. With these technologies now available to the educated middle class, friends and family may pressure an infertile woman to keep trying new variants of IVF. Inevitably, RTs reinforce the cul­ tural stereotype that procreation is women’s pri­ mary role. Andrea L. Bonnicksen, In Vitro Fertilization: Building Policy from Laboratories to Legislatures (New York: Co­ lumbia University Press, 1989); Helen Bequaert Holmes, “In Vitro Fertilization: Reflections on the State of the Art,” Birth Vol. 15 (1988): 134-45; Helen Bequaert Holmes, “Choosing Children’s Sex: Challenges to Feminist Ethics,” in Reproduction, Ethics and the Law, edited by Joan Callahan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)-

■ H E L E N B E Q U A E R T H OLM ES See

also

Infertility; Pregnancy; Surrogacy.

§ Republicanism

B

etween the fifteenth and eighteenth cen­ turies, the classical republican ideal of a virtu­ ous citizenry and an active public life was recov­ ered and refashioned in the context of growing

REP U B LIC A N ISM

national societies. Originally the outlook of Re­ naissance civic humanists, republicanism came to influence such broad political developments as the establishment of parliamentary rule in seven­ teenth-century England; the wars for indepen­ dence and the establishment of new republics in the Netherlands and colonial America; the claims of popular sovereignty and radical republicanism during the French Revolution; the emancipation of slaves and the fight to preserve the Union dur­ ing the American Civil War; and struggles to de­ mocratize politics and widen the suffrage to in­ clude propertyless men, women, and former slaves during the nineteenth century. Early modern republicans developed a theory that arms were essential to liberty and the defense of the republic. They also tied property ownership to virtuous citizenship. The republican commu­ nity was committed to the vita activa, according to which citizenship was not merely a role per­ formed by individuals but the very definition of what it means to be human. In the republican view, citizens were conscious, autonomous partic­ ipants in a free, self-governing community. The republican conception of liberty was positive not negative. Virtue signified a devotion to the public good as well as relations of equality among those citizens who were actively engaged in ruling and being ruled. The modern republican revival also invested public action with a decidedly masculinist ethos. Active citizenship in the republic was deemed to be the explicit province of men, since only men possessed the prerequisites of citizenship—the ca­ pacity to soldier and own property. From constitu­ tional monarchists to democratic populists, re­ publicans agreed on the necessity and propriety of female domesticity. Modern republicanism ac­ corded the domestic sphere a civic importance. Though private, the modern republican family as­ sumed a decidedly political function within the larger commonwealth and women’s freedom was associated with their domestic roles. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) articulated

forcefully the gender dimension of modern re­ publicanism, placing the “woman question" at the center of an argument for political and social reform. He posited woman as a new kind of polit­ ical and moral subject, curiously lacking in for­ mal political rights. He praised virtuous women’s domesticity and “ chaste power,” which allowed them to “govern” men, if only in the realm of the family. However, others inspired by republican convictions sought to expand on women’s role. The British author Mary Wollstonecraft (1759— 1797), the Americans Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) and Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), and the French philosopher and revolutionary the Mar­ quis de Condorcet (1743-1794) all advocated for women’s education. In the nineteenth century in the United States, the doctrine of republican motherhood helped to consolidate the class interests of an emerging white middle-class elite in much the same way that republicanism remained an expression of the world view and interests of white middle-class men, despite the strong appeal of its broadly uni­ versal principles of liberty, free labor and equality to working men. Middle-class white women were empowered by a new ideal of companionate mar­ riage, a shared belief in women’s education, and a view of motherhood as vital to the transmission of civic virtue. By the 1830s and 1840s, numbers of white northern, middle-class, Protestant women moved beyond the domestic sphere to swell the ranks of moral reform and abolitionism. White antislavery women drew upon the language of re­ publicanism to condemn slavery but divided over whether to endorse association with Black anti­ slavery women. The issue o f racial equality proved far more intractable than that of antislavery, and female republicans, like their male counterparts, disputed the concrete meanings o f legal and po­ litical equality for Blacks. After the failure of her experiment for racial amalgamation and slave emancipation, feminist, abolitionist, and labor re­ former Frances Wright transported former slaves from her community in Nashoba, Tennessee to

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Haiti out of concern that color would preclude their equality in the United States. Similarly, re­ publican doctrines did not wholly alleviate class and ethnic divisions in the new nation, such as those between native women and immigrant new­ comers. It was white middle-class women who most ef­ fectively seized upon republican rhetoric, as in the new women’s rights movement born at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Supporters of republican motherhood saw education as bring­ ing about a progressive future, though one still an­ chored in the force of natural sexual distinctions. They believed that an improved education would raise women’s natural virtues up to the level of reason, and that a republican mother’s major po­ litical task was to instill her children with patriotic duty. As citizens, women would be educated be­ yond their limited horizons and wholly self-ori­ ented concerns in order to serve their families and the republic, but would leave to men the foremost political task of governing the nation. Beginning in 1848, however, feminists would claim that women had a special contribution to make as ac­ tive citizens in the public sphere. Like moral re­ formers and abolitionists, they challenged the overwhelmingly masculinist construction of the republican political tradition. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: 1980); Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience (New York: Mc­ Graw-Hill, 1994). ■ JOAN B . LA N D E S S ee

also

Citizenship; Liberalism.

§ Revolution S e e Wars: Colonization to 1900.

M Roe

v.

Wade

n January 22,1973, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 7-2 decision in Roe v. Wade, which recognized for the first time that the constitu­ tional right to privacy encompasses a woman’s right to decide to terminate her pregnancy. Strik­ ing down Texas’s criminal ban on abortions not necessary to save a woman’s life, this ruling marked a critical moment in this nation’s his­ tory—an intersection of the demands of a bur­ geoning grassroots movement for women’s libera­ tion and the efforts of legal scholars and advocates seeking to use the courts to guarantee equal rights for all Americans. Written by Associate Justice Harry A. Blackmun, Roe v. Wade also reflects the perpetual tension in the law between the need for the U.S. Constitution to evolve to protect vulner­ able members of our society and the need to ad­ here to precedent. Finally, the case—which had been argued before the Court twice prior to this decision—highlighted the intense divisions in the United States over the issue of abortion. The Court’s task “ is to resolve the issue by con­ stitutional measurement, free of emotion and of predilection,” wrote Justice Blackmun. He dis­ passionately reviewed the history of abortion from ancient times, noting that “the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of States today are of relatively recent vintage.” Not­ ing that pregnancy and childbirth implicate a woman’s physical and mental health, the major­ ity specifically recognized the stigma of “ unwed motherhood” and the difficulties o f families un­ able to care for an additional child. However, the many tragedies caused by the criminalization of abortion—scores o f women died from illegal or self-induced abortions; many others were left scarred and m aim ed—were not detailed in the Court’s opinion. As former counsel to the prestigious Mayo C linic in Rochester, Minnesota, Justice Black­ mun recognized the importance of positioning

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the right to choose abortion as, at its base, a deci­ sion resting on a physician’s best medical judg­ ment. As a result, the opinion detailed the stance of the American Medical Association—as an ad­ vocate for criminal abortion laws in the m id- to late nineteenth century and a supporter of liberal­ ized abortion statutes beginning in the late 1960s—and cited the American Public Health As­ sociation’s 1970 standards for abortion services. The majority opinion also noted that criminal abortion statutes often sought to protect pregnant women from the severe health risks of terminating a pregnancy and emphasized that medical ad­ vances made abortion a safer option for women, with mortality rates for early abortions as low or lower than for childbirth. Roe’s companion case, Doe v. Bolton, which struck down a Georgia statute criminalizing most abortions, underscored the Court’s emphasis on physicians, stating that Roe “sets forth our conclusion that a pregnant woman does not have an absolute constitutional right to an abortion on her demand.’’ In that rul­ ing, the 7-2 majority opinion stated that a physi­ cian’s professional judgment regarding when an abortion may be performed “ may be exercised in the light of all factors—physical, emotional, psy­ chological, familial, and the woman’s age—rele­ vant to the well-being of the patient.” The majority opinion in Roe was careful to ac­ knowledge the need to strike a balance between a pregnant woman’s right to privacy and the state’s interests in potential human life, stating that “ [t]he pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy.” To that end, the Court established a framework under which the state’s interest in po­ tential life did not become “ compelling” until af­ ter the point of viability—the point in pregnancy when the fetus is capable of independent survival; even then, protection o f potential life could not be promoted at the expense of a woman’s life or health. During the first trimester, restrictions on abortion (other than a requirement that the pro­ cedure be performed by a licensed physician) would be unconstitutional. After the first trimester

but prior to viability, a state could only impose measures that represented the least restrictive means for protecting a woman’s health. More­ over, the Court stated that the question of whether the fetus is a “person” is fraught with po­ litical and religious controversy, which should not be decided by the judiciary. The legal foundations for the Roe decision were formed in Supreme Court decisions dating from the 1890s. Although the term right to privacy does not exist within the text of the U.S. Constitution, the Court had long recognized that citizens have a fundamental right against governmental intru­ sion in such intimate family matters as procre­ ation, child rearing, and marriage. The Court re­ lied particularly on the Fourteenth Amendment’s explicit guarantee of individual liberty, which it has repeatedly found to encompass privacy. In the mid-1960s, a 7-2 majority of the Supreme Court recognized that this “zone of privacy” protects the right of married couples to use contraceptives. The year before Roe was decided, the Justices ex­ tended this protection to unmarried couples and individuals, stating, “If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted govern­ mental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” Rather than creating a new affir­ mative right, Justice Blackmun drew on the his­ torical constitutional tradition of limited govern­ ment to protect “a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” To find other­ wise would have signaled a radical departure from legal precedent. Roe by no means put to rest the political con­ flict over abortion and the judicial debate over the scope and contours of constitutional protection for individual liberties. However, the decision heralded a new era and forever changed the face of this nation. Although the language in Roe did not tout the decision’s truly momentous nature, the Supreme Court’s ruling nearly twenty years later to reaffirm the landmark case stated it

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clearly: “ [F]or two decades of economic and so­ cial developments, people have organized inti­ mate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in soci­ ety, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. T he abil­ ity of women to participate equally in the eco­ nomic and social life of the Nation has been facil­ itated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.” Indeed, as Justice Blackmun himself stated upon his retirement from the High Court, Roe was “a step that had to be taken as we go down the road toward the full emancipation o f women.” ■ JA N E T B E N S H O O F S e e a l s o Abortion; Privacy Rights; Pro-Choice and Antiabortion Movements; Reproductive Rights.

§ Romance Novels o genre of women’s writing is more ma­ ligned—or more popular—than romances: stories reflecting the interests, conflicts, and de­ sires that animate women. A romance is tradition­ ally defined as a love story between a woman and a man who meet, struggle, and end up happily together. But women’s fiction—stories from a woman’s point of view—dates back only to the eighteenth century in the United States, when the growth o f capitalism and women’s literacy first made it profitable to write and publish stories for women. Throughout the eighteenth and nine­ teenth centuries, most bestsellers were by women, and most contained elements of romance: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), for in­ stance, includes several love stories between slaves. Modern romances, in which strong women truly choose their destinies, could not be created until women had much more power in the world—in the twentieth century. With Harlequin

N

romances, introduced by the English publisher M ills and Boon in 1954, the contemporary series (“ category” ) romances were born. The Harlequin romances were small, professionally written nov­ els of uniform length (about two hundred pages), with relatively simple one woman-one man plots. Sold by mail and in nonbookstore outlets, Harle­ quins reached readers who might never enter bookstores. Also popular by the 1960s were gothic romances and romantic suspense stories by such writers as Phyllis A. Whitney, whose resourceful heroines triumph over mysterious or arrogant men. Yet the white women in pre-i97os Harle­ quins and gothics tended to be young, fairly uned­ ucated, and naive; some accepted violence from men. Sexual intercourse was unmentionable in these books. By the 1970s the women’s liberation movement spurred discussions and protests among women about jobs and equal pay, reproductive and sexual freedom, and getting men to be nurturers. New stories were needed, and the first was Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flam e and the Flower (1972), a historical romance delivering what modern ro­ mance readers wanted—passionate and sensual (but not graphic) sex scenes; a strong, beautiful heroine with a sense of purpose; and an arrogant hero whose love for her transforms him. After Woodiwiss, such writers as Rosemary Rogers (Sweet Savage Love, 1974) wrote “bodice rippers,” historical romances about repeatedly raped women who survive—but readers eventually re­ jected such violent stories o f women as victims. In 1980 Silhouette Books (Simon and Schuster) became Harlequin’s first U.S.-based competitor. In 1981 Dell series romances opened the bedroom door: as in real life, unmarried heroines were hav­ ing sex. In the 1990s, because o f A ID S, the women in romance novels were more apt to wait for sex. Publishers have created multiple lines of category romances, many with “tip sheets” advis­ ing would-be authors about characters’ preferred ages, occupations, secondary plots, and level of explicit sex. Different lines now vary in length and

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emphases (mystery, second chances, historical). The Regency historical novels, modeled after Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, take place in the early nineteenth century and feature clever word play and romantic comedy. In 1994 Pinna­ cle’s Arabesque line was founded to publish ro­ mances for women of color, especially African American women. Noncategory historical romances have also flourished, as have contemporary mainstream women’s novels and family sagas by such writers as Belva Plain and Danielle Steel (although their work is not strictly “ romance” ). Some authors who began as category writers—notably Sandra Brown, Janet Dailey, Jayne Ann Krentz, and Nora Roberts —have now moved into writing main­ stream bestsellers. Romances still depict women’s professional and personal power and pleasure, yet romance readers and writers are often wrongly ac­ cused of being dupes of capitalist patriarchy. Even feminist critics writing about romance (Tania Modleski, Kay Mussel], Janice Radway) disparage the genre and its readers. Few academic critics mention the numerous lesbian romances pub­ lished by Naiad Press, for example, whose best­ selling author is Katherine Forrest. In Jayne Ann Krentz’s book about romance literature, Dangerous M en and Adventurous Women, however, nineteen romance writers note their work’s impact (47 percent of mass-market pa­ perback sales are romances); their typical readers (college-educated, full-time workers); and their books’ most appealing features (verbal sparring, sensually coded language, sexual tension, and in­ triguing plots in which the woman always wins). Most romance authors are members of the Ro­ mance Writers of America (RWA), the largest writers’ organization in the world and a strong lob­ byist for authors’ rights. Through local chapters, RWA also provides critique groups to teach mem­ bers to write publishable romances. Romance writers are the only authors who train their own competition and pride themselves on sharing what they know.

The world of romances involves women’s tradi­ tional values: love, family, relationships—but also the empowerment of women to control their own destinies. Most romance writers call themselves feminists, part of an ancient sisterhood of women telling and sharing stories. Jayne Ann Krentz, ed., Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal o f the Romance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1992); Ro­ mance Writers of America, Romance Writers' Report (13700 Veterans Memorial, Suite 315, Houston, TX 77014), bimonthly journal; Emily Toth, “Labors of Love,” Women’s Review o f Books Vol. 10 (January 1993): 10-11. ■ E M IL Y TOTH See

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Literature.

Rosie the Riveter

argely because of the exodus of over twelve million men into the armed services during World War II, the employment of women in the U.S. industrial labor force increased from twelve million to nineteen million between 1941 and 1945. In this most striking labor-market develop­ ment of the war, white women and women of color entered industries previously reserved al­ most exclusively for white men. After the soldiers returned, in 1945-46, women were bumped from their skilled, well-paying industrial jobs. But they never really left employment. They couldn’t af­ ford to. This is the true story. But truth at the time was shrouded in the mythic figure of “ Rosie the Riv­ eter,” invented by the government’s poster-mak­ ing crews and popularized by the press. The “ Rosie the Riveter” so depicted had never worked before the war and had entered industrial em­ ployment only out of patriotic duty, loneliness for her soldier husband, or boredom. Although the nation admired her willingness to exchange her

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SALEM W IT C H C R A F T TRIALS

A teenage girl in Salem Village, Massachusetts, accuses George Jacobs o f witchcraft at the trials in 1692. The painting, made by T. H. Matteson in 1855, conveys the centrality o f the young women accusers.

kitchen apron for overalls, people assumed that her industrial work was temporary and that she (the mythic “ Rosie” ) would be happy to relin­ quish her job to a returning soldier so that she could resume her role as homemaker. The myth reflected both the nation’s desire to romanticize wartime work and its continuing un­ willingness to see women as equal earning part­ ners with men. Industrial employment was good employment from working people’s point of view; it provided job security, union membership, and wages unavailable in the laundries, piecework manufacturing, and in the domestic work that working-class women had done before the war. It

was to reinstate that occupational gender and racial segregation after the war that the myth of wartime “Rosie the Riveter” was perpetuated. ■ S H E IL A TOBIAS S

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Salem Witchcraft Trials

uring the colonial period, nearly three hun­ dred women were accused by their neighbors o f performing witchcraft. Although those accusa-

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S C I E N C E AND G E N D E R

tions spanned approximately the first century of English settlement in North America, about half were voiced during one ten-month period in 1692. This episode is commonly known as the Salem witchcraft crisis, although it began in Salem V il­ lage (now Danvers), Massachusetts, a small settle­ ment on the outskirts of Salem Town, and al­ though most of the accused were from nearby Andover. The crisis began when a group of girls and young women connected to the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris began to suffer from con­ vulsions and hysterical fits. By the end of February 1692 the afflicted young people had accused vari­ ous local women of having bewitched them. Oth­ ers in the surrounding area then also claimed to be the objects of sorcery, and the jails were soon crowded with accused men and women. A special court handled the trials, and by the time prosecu­ tions ceased in May 1693, twenty-six people had been convicted and nineteen (including sixteen women) executed by hanging. Fifty more people confessed to being witches. Historians have had great difficulty explaining this puzzling episode, which was one of the last two witch-hunts in the English-speaking world. It does seem, however, to have been generated in part by divisions within Salem Village that were magnified because local institutions were unable to resolve the conflicts satisfactorily. Still, current interpretations have not yet adequately accounted for women’s prominent role in the crisis. ■ MARY B E T H NORTON See

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Puritanism.

Science and Gender

or many years, questions about the differences in mathematical, scientific, and technical abil­ ity between boys and girls have been staple fea­ tures of newspaper and magazine articles. The ar­ ticles suggest that boys make better grades in math

F

than girls because mathematical ability and, more generally, scientific ability are biologically based. They also claim that that’s why most scientists are male. In the mid-1970s female scientists in the United States began to address the question of why so few women were scientists. Despite the efforts of female scientists since the 1920s to improve the status o f women through a number of strategies—the development of educa­ tional programs designed to encourage more young women to enter the sciences in elementary and high schools; summer research programs for undergraduate women in leading university and industrial laboratories; increased support and funding for graduate education; wider recogni­ tion for the contributions of senior female scien­ tists and more visibility for women in science at every level —some female scientists felt that little significant progress had been made and identified the need for different approaches to understand the persistent underrepresentation of women in the sciences. Instead of asking why so few women were be­ coming scientists, they asked what it was about sci­ ence that had prevented women from participat­ ing more and from advancing to the field’s highest levels. Feminist scientists challenged the notion that biologically based gender differences were re­ sponsible for women’s lack of achievement in the sciences and began to reevaluate the validity of the notion. They exposed flaws in research de­ sign, subject choice, data interrelation, and theo­ retical constructs that purported to demonstrate a biological basis for female inferiority. M uch of this literature attempted to explain observeji gen­ der differences in social roles or socially recog­ nized achievements. The scientists demonstrated that much of the research on sex differences had flaws in both experimental design and interpreta­ tion, including sociobiology, brain lateralization, psychology, and primatology. The biologists also urged caution in assigning behavior to any single root cause. Biology, they ar­ gued, both shapes and is shaped by interactions in society. W hile much of this research claimed to

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SCULPTURE

study differences between males and females, that is, sex differences, they concluded that what was actually being studied was gender differences— those masculine and feminine behaviors which are actually social meanings and values assigned to sex differences. Gender differences are shaped by social behaviors that are considered appropri­ ate for girls and boys. Therefore, the differences in mathematical ability between boys and girls must be influenced by biology and the fact that, until recently, girls in many societies were restricted from participating in certain activities to the same extent as boys. Science has been historically represented as quintessentially masculine: abstract, depersonal­ ized, objective, authoritative. Feminists involved in the study of gender and science have tried to discover how certain notions of gender shape the theory and practice of science. Their goal is to provide a fuller account o f the natural world by not devaluing the influence of the feminine and by explaining how scientific knowledge is shaped to some extent by scientists’ practices and beliefs. For example, the standard textbook description of human reproduction has been revised. This dis­ cussion typically emphasized that an “active” sperm comes in contact with a “passive” egg. Feminist biologists argued that this explanation was not supported by fact—indeed, fertilization is an active process that requires the participation of both egg and sperm. The traditional version relied on cultural stereotypes of male and female behav­ ior rather than on scientific facts. This productive and evolving field o f freeing science from gender includes topics such as studies of new reproduc­ tive technologies and women; the social behavior of primates; genetic theories of gender and behav­ ior; biographies of women scientists; ecology, en­ vironmentalism and concepts of nature and women crossculturally; computer technologies and women; and many other issues that reveal the place of gender in the theory and practice of sci­ ence. • E V E L Y N N M. HAM MONDS

= Sculpture he achievements of U.S. women sculptors have never been adequately recognized. Since early times women have executed largescale works that stand in parks, plazas, and public buildings. Long before the arrival o f white settlers, Native American women among the Anasazis of the Southwest, the Mississippi tribes, and others were creating three-dimensional objects in bas­ ketry, ceramics, and other materials. Just before the American Revolution, a Quaker widow, Patience Wright, became the first pro­ fessional white U.S. sculptor. Beginning her ca­ reer with a waxworks tableau, she later won ac­ claim in London for wax portraits o f prominent Britons. During the mid-nineteenth century a small number of women studied sculpture in Rome and became professionals. Among them, Harriet Hosmer achieved international fame for works based on mythological and literary themes. Edmonia Lewis drew inspiration for marble sculptures from her mixed Black and Native American heritage; Em m a Stebbins created the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, and Vinnie Ream completed a mar­ ble portrait, Lincoln, for the U.S. Capitol. By the early twentieth century, sculptors such as Anna Hyatt Huntington and Evelyn Longman were members of the National Sculpture Society, completing equestrian statues and other commis­ sions. At the same time, others began to challenge the academic tradition of glorified realism and al­ legory. Abastenia Eberle, a member of the ashcan school, modeled sensitive, lively bronze studies of poor immigrants as early as 1908. Around 1917 Al­ ice Morgan Wright and Adelheid Roosevelt cre­ ated some of the earliest U.S. cubist and abstract sculptures. Augusta Savage and other Black women sculptors, inspired by the Harlem Renais­ sance, employed themes drawn from African American culture. During the Great Depression of the 1930s,

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women hired by federal art agencies carried out commissions for post offices and public buildings around the country. After World War II the ab­ stract movement swept through U.S. art, and Louise Nevelson, Lee Bontecou, and others cre­ ated a variety of powerful works. Osage artist Yeffe Kimball studied at the Art Students League and in Paris, paving the way, with her abstract and expressionist forms, for Native American artists to enter the mainstream. In the 1960s Marisol and Niki de St. Phalle developed their own distinctive figurative approaches, related to pop art. Despite the emerging freedoms of the feminist movement in the 1970s, women artists still were largely shut out of museums, galleries, and text­ books. In protest of all chauvinistic aspects of the art world, they picketed museums, formed their own organizations, and, led by innovators such as Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago, explored new forms based.on female sexuality, spirituality, and other aspects of women’s experience. Em ­ bracing the long women’s tradition of crafts, they broke down the boundaries between sculpture, weaving, ceramics, and other three-dimensional forms. Feminist critics discovered depths of mean­ ing in the work of such innovative sculptors as Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse. Women of color, such as Elizabeth Catlett, Betye Saar, and Latina artist Amalia Mesa-Bains, moved into the forefront. Today, although sexism is far from eradicated, women like Louise Bourgeois and Nancy Graves are major figures in the mainstream art world. Mary Miss, Athena Tacha, Ann Hamilton, and many others are creating large site works and in­ stallations. Perhaps the work that best exemplifies the expanding position of women in U.S. sculp­ ture is Maya L in ’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall (1982) in Washington, D .C . Conceived and executed by this young Asian American, the wall is one of the greatest war memorials ever created and brings new meaning to the concept of a pub­ lic monument.

Charlotte S. Rubinstein, American Women Artists: From Early Indian Times to the Present (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982); Charlotte S. Rubinstein, American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimen­ sions (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1990). • C H A R L O T T E S T R E I F E R R U B IN S T E IN See

also

Art and Crafts.

§SDS S e e Students for a Democratic Society.

§ Senate S e e Congress.

§ Seneca Falls he Seneca Falls Convention met in Seneca Falls, New York, from July 19-20,1848. It was the first convention in the world held specifically to discuss women’s rights. Attended by 240 people (including forty men), the meeting was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Mott and Stanton, both Quakers, had met in 1840 at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in Lon­ don, where Mott had been denied a seat because of her sex. The event encouraged Mott and Stan­ ton to join forces to work for abolitionism and women’s rights. The Seneca Falls Convention issued the “ D ec­ laration of Sentiments,” a comprehensive enu­ meration of the many ways U.S. women were op­ pressed. It asserted that “all men and women are created equal,” and discussed women’s exclusion from higher education, the professions, and the pulpit. The document also lamented female dis-

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SEPARATE S P H E R E S

franchisement and the absence o f married wom­ en’s legal and property rights, among other issues. It demanded, finally, that women be granted “ im­ mediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States,” including the right to vote. The suffrage demand was the only resolution not unanimously supported by the convention; many, including Mott, worried that its inclusion would weaken public support for other demands. Two weeks after Seneca Falls, an even larger women’s rights convention was held in Rochester, New York. From that point forward, annual meet­ ings would become an important component of the women’s movement. ■ AN D R EA TONE S ee

also

Jacksonian Period.

men. The concept o f separate spheres was also cen­ tral to common-law doctrines, which, until re­ forms in the mid- and late nineteenth century, se­ verely restricted married women’s legal rights and independence. It also underlay that key feministsponsored Progressive economic reform—protec­ tive labor legislation that sought to protect women workers as the future mothers of America. The philosophy of separate spheres was also closely tied to emerging medical and scientific theories. The assumptions of biologically deter­ mined separateness thus shaped physicians and scientists’ visions, and biological determinism pre­ sumed and reaffirmed this vision. Alice Paul introduced the Equal Rights Amend­ ment in the 1920s, one of the movement’s first formal challenges. Feminists continued the attack in the 1970s. Nevertheless, a belief that innate differences distinguish men and women remains central to some current feminist thought. ■ CARROLL SM ITH -RO SEN BERG

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Separate Spheres

eparate spheres embodied the vision of a social order based on a polarity of roles and personal­ ities rooted in presumed biological and sexual dif­ ferences between the sexes. M en were rational, instrumental, independent, competitive, and ag­ gressive; women were emotional, maternal, do­ mestic, and dependent. England’s nineteenthcentury emerging bourgeoisie, idealized and popularized by the sentimental novel, advice books, and medical and religious writings, em­ phasized the concept of a society structured around supposedly “natural,” God-ordained dis­ tinct male and female spheres. Western political theories, both republicanism and liberalism, inscribed the concept, pronounc­ ing the political sphere, civic virtue, and citizen­ ship exclusively male preserves, and excluding women from political subjectivity. Feminist polit­ ical theorists argue that the social contract estab­ lished women’s political and legal inferiority to

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Service Sector

he service sector, which accounts for ninety percent of the jobs created in the past decade, has expanded far beyond the traditional consumer or institutional service industries and currently in­ cludes distributive services, such as transporta­ tion, communications, and utilities; the rapidly expanding producer services, such as finance, in­ surance, real estate, and advertising; wholesale and retail trade and sales; the nonprofit sector, in­ cluding health, philanthropy, and education; and government. Institutional service work, which in­ cludes food production, laundry and dry clean­ ing, cleaning and building services and janitorial work, child care, health care service, teaching, the manufacture of clothing, and personal services, is the sector in which women of all races and ethnic

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SERV IC E SEC TO R

The expanding service sector o f the 1920s opened the job market for many women, such as these tele­ phone operators, photographed on April 7,1927. Their fashionably bobbed hair and silky dresses illustrate the influence o f consumer culture on young women and the increasing importance o f female appearance in the workplace. Although opportunities grew for white women, racism limited women o f color to domestic employment and the least desirable factory jobs.

groups first constituted an unprecedented major­ ity of the work force. Service industries employ relatively large num­ bers of low-paid workers and high-paid profes­ sionals, and distribute wages more unequally than goods-producing industries. Over one-quarter of workers in the service sector are hired on a tem­ porary, subcontracted, or leased basis, without benefits or job security, in small decentralized work sites. Technological advances provide pro­ fessionals with greater labor-saving flexibility, and many men are for the first time sharing the menial

tasks of their job with a computer instead o f a sec­ retary. The use of technology in the service sector promotes deskilling, that is, automation, routinization, and punitive supervision. lir e division of labor in the service industries highlights the pervasive gender and racial stratifi­ cation built into organizational structures through lines of authority, job descriptions, rules, and spa­ tial and temporal segregation. Jobs have been and continue to be segregated by race as well as class: women of color are disproportionately employed as service workers in institutional settings while

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white-collar, supervisory, and lower professional positions are filled by white women. White women are more frequently hired for positions re­ quiring physical and social contact with the pub­ lic, that is, as waitresses, transportation attendants, and dental assistants. Women of color typically do the heavy, dirty, “back-room” chores of cooking in restaurants and serving food in cafeterias, clean­ ing hotel rooms and offices, and caring for the el­ derly and ill in hospitals and nursing homes. Clear patterns of racial specialization in the structure of institutionalized service work often follow the racial-ethnic caste lines of the local economies, in which distinct racial and ethnic groups of workers gravitate toward “ niches” that become distinct homogeneous occupational com­ munities. These occupational/ethnic niches often reflect the tight social structures and status of various ethnic communities as well as the flow of recent immigrant patterns. In Los Angeles, one scholar found that “the pattern of niching is most evident in the hotels, where Mexicans and C en ­ tral Americans dominate housekeeping and the kitchen; blacks are likely to work in security, park­ ing, and the front office; Filipinos are employed as accountants, night managers and clericals; and whites work as waitresses in the restaurants and bars.” In one Los Angeles hotel, “the Hispanics were so strong that they successfully refused to work with Filipino and other Asian workers.” Only the “Russian ladies” in housekeeping had the stamina to stand up against them and survive. Management’s hiring strategies often lead to the displacement of African American and other native-born groups: instead they recruit people from those immigrant groups that are perceived to be more productive and more tractable, such as Asians and Latinas, and they expel those groups they consider to be troublemakers and/or those groups whose members’ career ambitions lie be­ yond the secondary labor market. Finally, the interaction of the racial and gender division of labor in the service sector aggravates conflicts among women as well as ethnic and

racial tensions that present a challenge to a just, civil society. Karen Brodkin Sacks, Caring by the Hour: Women, Work, and Organizing at Duke Medical Center (Urbana: Uni­ versity of Illinois Press, 1988); Dorothy Sue Cobble, ed., “Introduction,” in Women and Unions: Forging a Partner­ ship (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1993); Roger Waldinger, Still the Promised City? African Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1996). ■ B E T S Y ARON S

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Waitresses.

§ Settlement House Movement he settlement house movement flourished in the United States from the late 1880s through the Great Depression. Middle-class women and men volunteers lived and worked in settlement houses, which were often converted residential buildings in poor urban neighborhoods. The vol­ unteers hoped to improve the lives o f poor fami­ lies by providing amenities and services not then extended by government agencies, beginning with clubs, classes, and social gatherings, and ex­ tending to playgrounds, arts programs, sports and summer camps, clean-milk stations, well-baby clinics, and other innovative programs. Early set­ tlement leaders saw their mission as social reform, and the settlements became “laboratories” for de­ veloping new techniques and offering training in the rapidly professionalizing field of social work. By World War I the settlements had become the most important setting for the honing of a U.S. philosophy of social work and social services, with ties to universities, city governments, and other agencies. The settlement house movement originated in England in the early 1880s as a quasi-religious middle-class response to industrial poverty. Lon-

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SE T T L E M E N T HOUSE M O VEM EN T

A basket-weaving class at Denison House in Boston, Massachusetts, circa 1915. Denison was one o f many settlement houses where young girls learned traditionally female arts and crafts, activities that were believed to alleviate the stresses caused by Americanization and urban life. Note the Renaissance art on the walls, intended to be a positive influence.

don-based reformers collaborated with university dons and students to substitute “personal service” to the poor for the alms so distasteful to bourgeois sensibilities on both the Left and the Right. Sev­ eral years after the founding of the first English settlement in 1884, the idea reached the United States and appeared almost simultaneously in New York (the Neighborhood Guild and the C ol­ lege Settlement on Rivington Street), Boston (Andover House), and Chicago (Hull House). Dozens of settlements would be founded over the next three decades by middle-class activists with different religious and institutional affiliations.

*

Shortly after 1910 the new National Federation of Settlements listed over four hundred settlement houses concentrated in the urban East and M id­ west. The U.S. settlement movement took on its own priorities and rhetoric, centered on the cultural is­ sues arising from the concentration of European immigrants and their children in U.S. cities by 1900. W hile they prided themselves on the “ de­ mocratic” flavor o f their work, the mostly Protes­ tant settlement workers often showed insensitivity toward Catholic and Jewish immigrants, which stemmed from the chauvinism of their own cul-

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tural, racial, and class backgrounds. Jane Addams, of Hull House, typifies the most liberal of the set­ tlement philosophers, as she called on nativeborn Americans to appreciate “ immigrant gifts” in the form of ethnic arts and artisans’ skills. Yet she may be seen as more of an assimilationist than a pluralist because she believed the future would reveal the essential commonality of all peoples. Many settlements based their programs on rapid “Americanization” of immigrants’ language, work habits, family life, and ideals. The simplest form of immigrant resistance to settlement programs was failure to attend them. Jane Addams admitted ruefully that her experiment with a public kitchen (modeled on Ellen Richards’s New England Kitchen), which sold nutritious prepared foods to overworked laboring families, flopped because immigrants preferred their own food choices. With few exceptions, the white settlements and settlement workers replicated the racism of the Progressive Era by distinguishing between nativeborn Blacks and immigrant whites. European Americans were deemed good candidates for ac­ culturation, while African Americans were seen as a degraded group with special rehabilitative needs. Settlements for Blacks were segregated from those for whites; moreover, most settlement­ like experiments in Black communities, such as rural, school-based settlements and YWCA-affili­ ated houses, have been overlooked by historians because they appeared different from the “ main­ stream” settlements. Although whites often were involved in staffing these settlements, Blacks, par­ ticularly women, were central in launching and maintaining Black settlement work. The U.S. settlement movement’s virtual gender parity was unique among U.S. institutions during the Progressive Era. At least half of the prominent U.S. settlement houses were headed and staffed largely by women. The roster of influential wo­ men settlement leaders includes Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Mary K. Simkhovitch, Mary M c­ Dowell, and Helena Dudley. Further, the set­ tlements offered an urban immersion to thou­

sands more middle-class women, including Hull House’s Florence Kelley, Alice Hamilton, Julia Lathrop, and Grace and Edith Abbott, who moved rapidly into government service and advo­ cacy for children, workers, and immigrants. Mina Carson, Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Ruth Hutchinson Crocker, Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits o f Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). ■ MINA CARSON S

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Progressive Era; Social Work.

Sex Education

exuality education ideally would encompass sexual knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors. Included would be anatomy, phys­ iology, and biochemistry of the sexual response system, gender roles, identity and personality, and thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and relationships. In addition, moral and ethical concerns, group and cultural diversity, and social change would be addressed. Unfortunately, sexuality education classes in the United States fall far from this ideal. In 1992 Debra Haffner found that less than 10 percent of U.S. children “receive comprehensive sexuality education from kindergarten through adulthood.” Although most students are exposed to some type of sexuality education before they complete high school, they usually study only bi­ ology, reproduction, and virology. Sexuality edu­ cation classes often focus on disaster prevention. In elementary grades, sexual abuse is presented; HIV/AIDS is introduced by junior high school; and in high schools, date rape is addressed. Al-

S

S EX EDUCATION

though these areas are all crucial and essential components of sexuality education, omission of more positive aspects of sexuality conveys a pow­ erful message that sex is dangerous. Most pro­ grams in the United States promote abstinence from sexual behaviors without offering equal at­ tention to a presentation of safe sex. The official curriculum focuses on heterosexual reproductive sexuality, excluding discussion of gender politics, sexual violence, and pleasure. Parallel to the “official curriculum” in sexual­ ity education in the typical U.S. high school ex­ ists the “hidden curriculum,” which teaches teenagers that popularity requires one to be at­ tractive, physically fit, able-bodied, and hetero­ sexual to conform to gender-role expectations and to dress according to school norms. For males, social status depends on “scoring” the sex­ ual conquests of females; for females, social sta­ tus requires a sexually attractive appearance based on highly unrealistic standards, paired with denial of desire and sexual agency. The double standard continues to exert great influ­ ence on the sexuality of adolescents and remains largely unaddressed and uncontested by standard sexuality curricula. Sexuality educators in James Sears’s 1992 Sexuality and the Curriculum: The Politics and Practices o f Sexuality Education cri­ tique sexuality education as “an instrument of so­ cial control, often reinforcing patriarchal, antisexual norms.” Although politically conservative forces have lost the battle to prevent sexuality ed­ ucation, opposition groups promote the teaching of moral absolutes, sexual abstinence, and with­ holding information in an attempt to prevent adolescents’ sexual behavior. According to Sears, the abortion controversy, AID S, and teenage pregnancy have resulted in the mandating of sexuality education in twentytwo states, compared to three in 1980. Two-thirds of the nation’s largest school districts require sex education. What the classes include, however, varies considerably. For example, South Carolina prohibits teaching about abortion or homosexual­

ity, and in Utah it is a misdemeanor for school personnel to discuss condoms with students with­ out parental consent. Only three states (New Jer­ sey, New York, and Wisconsin) and Washington, D .C ., have a program on sex education and AIDS education. The most common sexuality-related topics covered in schools are anatomy and physi­ ology (e.g., changes at puberty, physical differ­ ences), sexually transmitted diseases, and sexual decision making with particular emphasis on ab­ stinence. Topics least discussed are homosex­ uality, gynecologic examinations, birth control, abortion, and masturbation and other safer sex practices. Treatment of sexuality in the curriculum does not meet students’ needs and concerns. Given that a substantial number of youth are sexually ac­ tive before they encounter sexuality education, it is clear that the timing of sexuality education is generally too late to have an impact on adoles­ cents’ decisions to engage in sexual activities. However, adolescent females who have had expo­ sure to sexuality education are more likely to seek birth-control services when available. Unfortu­ nately, this holds only for white women; for African Americans and Latinas, studies find no re­ lationship between sexuality instruction and con­ traceptive behavior. This may indicate that even at best, the sexuality curriculum fails to help many students of color. In addition to inappropriate timing of sexuality education, a gap exists between topics of interest to adolescents and content of such courses. One Chicago-based survey found that teens were most concerned about birth control, abortion, and how to handle sexual feelings while 75 percent of sex­ uality teachers believed that students should be taught not to have sex. Given a social context in which the former U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, was dismissed for acknowledging the normalcy of masturbation, it is not surprising that sexuality educators may feel constrained in their choice o f material. The dominant sexuality conveyed in curricu-

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lum materials, according to Sears, presents sexu­ ality as a “ natural human drive to be held in abeyance through self-control, self-management, and postponement of sexual gratification. As a re­ sult, these curricula are poorly timed in presenta­ tion and prove irrelevant and damaging by omis­ sion of crucial information. M ichelle Fine argues that the naming of desire, pleasure, or sexual enti­ tlement, particularly for females, barely exists in the formal agenda of public schooling on sexual­ ity. When spoken, it is tagged with reminders of “consequences.” Fine cites the approved dis­ courses on adolescent female sexuality as dis­ courses of victimization, disease, and morality. She suggests that the missing discourse o f desire may result in girls’ failure to know themselves as the subjects of their own sexuality. Deborah Tolman notes, “ If girls could conceive of themselves as sexual subjects, they could then potentially make decisions about their sexual behavior and experience that would be healthy for them.” The importance of social context has also been acknowledged by some sexuality edu­ cators, suggesting that having just more sexuality education, or earlier is not enough, and that sex­ uality education will be more effective when accompanied by efforts to improve social condi­ tions, decrease poverty, and train people in life skills. Debra W. Haffner, Sex Education in 2000: A Call to Ac­ tion (New York: Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S., 1990); James Sears, ed., Sexuality and the Cur­ riculum: The Politics and Practice o f Sexuality Education (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1992); Deborah Tolman, “Adolescent Girls, Women and Sexuality: Discerning Dilemmas of Desire," Women and Therapy, Women, Girls, and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance, 11, no. 3/4 (1991): 55-70. • W EN D Y STO CK S ee also

Sexuality.

s

Sexism

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exism is the cultural assumption that men are superior to women and deserve preference and power over them. The term sexism was coined in the 1960s by feminists working in the civil rights movement to dramatize the parallel between the negative stereotyping of women and Blacks. The parallel was discussed in the nine­ teenth century by abolitionists and suffragists and in the early twentieth century by sociologists studying race relations. The resonance between the words “sexism” and “sexist,” and the common words “ racism” and “racist,” occurred to a number o f feminists at about the same time. In a mimeographed speech of 1965, Pauline Leet, then director of special pro­ grams at Franklin and Marshall College, charged that historians had been sexist in ignoring women poets, just as historians had been racist in “ ignor­ ing the contributions of Negroes.” In 1967 Caroline Bird had trouble getting per­ mission to use the phrase sexist and racist job as­ signments in her 1968 book, Bom Female, because the terms weren’t in the dictionary. Asked for a de­ finition, she said that it meant “going by sex where it doesn’t matter” and repeated that definition on September 25,1968, in an appeal for sex equality to the Episcopal Church Executive Council. The most influential early use of the term was in a position paper for the Southern Student Or­ ganizing Committee, demanding that women working to enfranchise Blacks be treated as the equals of the men in the movement. “ Freedom for Movement Girls Now,” a document dated 1969 and signed only with the gender-neutral last name “Vaughan,” asserted that “the parallels be­ tween sexism and racism are sharp and clear.” The manifesto was mentioned in the February 1969 is­ sue of the early feminist publication No More Fun and Games, with the suggestion that “we use the word sexism rather than male chauvinism or male supremacy.

SEXOLOGY

The premise of female inferiority and subordi­ nation runs so deep and affects so many customs that it is hard to recognize and uproot, so although the premise has faded from mainstream rhetoric, many of its results still remain. In employment, for instance, childbearing and family duties are no longer used to justify paying women less than men for the same job. Jobs once confined to males have been redesigned to specify the physical ability required, such as upper-arm strength for firefighters, but the cultural funneling of women into subordinate “ women’s jobs” still depresses women’s pay relative to men. In education single-sex institutions founded on the presumption that women need the protection of segregation and special training for feminine roles at home have all but disappeared, but cul­ tural conditioning still discourages females from the “ hard” sciences and from leadership in ex­ tracurricular affairs on college campuses. In sports the presumption of female weakness has been challenged by the records of women granted access to competitions such as marathon racing, but when the sexes are segregated, wom­ en’s athletics still aren’t funded as well as men’s. ■ C A R O L IN E BIRD

See

a l s o

Stereotypes, Sexual.

g Sexology he late nineteenth century was an important era in the history o f sexuality. Rapid social changes, such as the shift from the household economy and the intensification of industrializa­ tion and urbanization, facilitated a shift in domi­ nant sexual ideologies away from a family-cen­ tered, reproduction-oriented sexuality. This new era, described by historians as “sexual liberalism,” marked the emergence of patterns familiar to us today—the growing separation of sex and repro­

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duction; the expansion of commercialized sexual­ ity; and the affirmation of sex as central, not just for a solid marriage but for personal fulfillment. The medical profession, most specifically the field of sexology, played a crucial role in both sup­ porting and helping to effect some of these chang­ ing dynamics. “ Sexology” is loosely defined as the scientific study of sex. It is an umbrella term denoting the activity of a multidisciplinary group of researchers, clinicians, and educators concerned with sexual­ ity. Over the last century, sexologists have endeav­ ored to establish themselves as a viable profession with cultural authority over issues of sexuality and gender. Sexual scientists are concerned with sex­ ual functioning, sexual variation, and gender de­ velopment and dysfunction. They have invented interpretive systems, categories, and languages to describe sexual experience. Sexology has played a complex role in identifying, challenging, and perpetuating cultural imperatives about sex and gender. Sexology arose indirectly in Europe as a result of public concerns about such issues as prostitu­ tion and venereal disease. In addition, the eugen­ ics movement, which sought to create a “superior race” by regulating sexual behavior and limiting reproduction of supposedly inferior groups such as immigrants, Blacks, and Jews, prompted sup­ port among many officials for the scientific study of sex. By the beginning of the twentieth century, ma­ jor figures such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis had written significant texts on sex­ uality. Early sexology was centered in Germany. In addition to housing two professional organiza­ tions, Berlin was the home of the first sexolog­ ical institute, the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaff, founded in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld. Although by the early 1930s there were approximately eighty sex-reform organizations, their efforts were cut short by Hitler’s rise to power. In M ay 1933 Nazis raided Hirschfeld’s institute and burned much of their material.

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While the progress of Germ an sexology was largely destroyed, sexual science had emerged in other countries, most notably the United States. Among early U.S. sexologists, including Clelia Mosher and Robert Latou Dickinson, it was Al­ fred Kinsey’s research that garnered the most visi­ bility in the young field. Sexual Behavior in the Human M ale (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) triggered enormous con­ troversy but, along with the growing cultural dis­ course on sexuality, helped to establish the foun­ dation for an explosion o f sex research in the second half of the twentieth century. Masters and Johnson, Helen Singer Kaplan, and John Money are among the most recognized contemporary sexologists. Sexologists have engaged in two major projects: the development and provision o f sex therapy; and research and therapy concerning sex/gender variations, such as transsexualism and homosexu­ ality. An assessment of these endeavors is com­ plex, since sexologists have often been motivated by contradictory impulses. They have been dedi­ cated to dispelling sexual myths and ignorance and to encouraging sexual knowledge and plea­ sure. Yet their progressive impulses have been me­ diated by society’s conservative tendencies and hindered in their attempts to achieve professional credibility and to create financially lucrative mar­ kets for their services. Sexology’s complicated impact is clearly evi­ dent with respect to women. On the one hand, sexologists assert the importance of women’s sex­ uality and sexual pleasure. Feminists have used sex research to address the myth of the vaginal or­ gasm and to implement self-help and sexual em­ powerment groups. Many sexologists have gen­ uinely dedicated their work to the achievement of sexual and gender equality and to the support of lesbian/gay liberation. On the other hand, sexual science operates in some cases to reinforce many traditionally oppressive sexual values. For exam­ ple, most of the categories of sexual dysfunction that sex therapists developed, such as impotence,

vaginismus (spasm and severe constriction of the vaginal barrel, which prevents penetration), and dyspareunia (difficult or painful coitus) privilege the norm o f sexual intercourse. And although many sexologists support lesbian/gay rights, some have developed “therapeutic” programs that at­ tempt to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals. Finally, sexology has attended largely to the con­ cerns of well-educated, high-income European Americans. Although this bias is now shifting, much sex research has ignored diversity in sexual cultures based on influences such as race and eth­ nicity as well as social class. There are two important methodological and theoretical weaknesses in sexology. First, there is an overriding emphasis on scientific objectivity. This affords sexologists the illusion that their work is neutral, rather than acknowledging that values infuse all scientific projects. Second, most sexolo­ gists view sexuality as a natural, internal drive rather than as socially constructed. In their view, sexual problems are individual rather than social issues. The insistence on objectivity, coupled with biological determinism, renders sexology ineffec­ tive in truly grappling with the profoundly social and political nature of sexuality and gender. The failure of sexology to address power and social re­ lations and to explore diversity in the symbols, val­ ues, and meanings different groups may attach to sexuality has cleared a path for challenge and re­ sistance by the feminist and lesbian/gay liberation movements. These social movements have dem­ onstrated more successfully that sexuality is not just a product of our hormones or genes, but that it is deeply shaped by our varied social and cul­ tural backgrounds. Janice M. Irvine, Disorders o f Desire: Sex and Gender in Modem American Sexology (Philadelphia: Temple Uni­ versity Press, 1990); Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Dis­ contents (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). ■ JA N IC E M. IRVINE

See

also

Sexuality.

SEXUAL H ARA SSM EN T

%

Sexual Harassment

omen were sexually harassed long before there was a word for it. Under slavery, African American women were sexually used by white masters. Women working in homes have long been targets o f sexual abuse. Since industri­ alization, women working in factories and offices have had to endure sexual comments and de­ mands by bosses and coworkers as the price for economic survival. As students, women and girls have been sexual prey to teachers for as long as they have been allowed to be educated. On the streets and in the home, sexual pressure that women are not in a position to refuse has been in­ visible but pervasive. The exchange of sex for sur­ vival under conditions of coercion that defines prostitution has also marked women and men’s unequal relations throughout and across societies. In the mid-1970s women began to speak in pub­ lic for the first time about this form of sexual abuse. The Women’s Center at Cornell Univer­ sity held the first Speak Out in May 1975; femi­ nists in Boston and women workers in New York formed action groups; women students organized at Berkeley and Yale. In this political context, the words “sexual harassment” emerged to describe and give coherence, communality, and commu­ nicability to an experience that women previously had no choice but to consider just life. T he history of sexual harassment is, to an un­ usual degree, a legal history. Unlike most abuses of women, sexual harassment was established as a legal claim long before it was commonly accepted as harmful. In the early 1970s, before the law against sexual harassment existed, individual women, most of them Black, brought suits against perpetrators and institutions for acts amounting to sexual harassment under civil rights laws, arguing that they were victimized by sexual harassment because they were women, hence treated un­ equally on the basis o f sex. In 1977, in the case of Paulette Barnes, an appeals court first agreed;

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other courts soon followed. Sexual harassment was recognized as a legal claim for sex discrimina­ tion at work under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1980, in Pamela Price’s case, sexual harass­ ment in education was found to violate women’s rights to equal access to an education as guaran­ teed under Title IX o f the Education Amend­ ments o f 1972. Universities were thereafter re­ quired to have grievance procedures through which victims could complain or the school could face a cutoff of federal funds. Sexual harassment is illegal at work and school because that is where sex equality is legally guar­ anteed, not because there is no sexual harassment in other places in society. Activists, scholars, and legislators have begun trying to address sexual harassment by priests, lawyers, landlords, and passersby on the street, but the absence of a legal right to sex equality in these social relations has made this difficult. Once it became possible to hold perpetrators publicly accountable for sexual harassment, it be­ came possible to learn about it. Studies found that most victims of sexual harassment are women, al­ though some are men, and most perpetrators are men in some position of power over the women (and men) they harass. Approximately 85 percent of working women have been or will be sexually harassed at some point in their working lives, and most never report the abuse. About one-third of women students are victimized. Almost no differ­ ence in incidence of sexual harassment has been identified on the basis of race, class, age, marital status, or income. Unwanted sexual incursions in­ clude threats, extortion, and rape, as well as leer­ ing and ogling, obscene gestures, misogynistic hate speech, groping and fondling, and pressure for dates. Often pornography is posted, circulated, or directly forced on women as part of the prac­ tice. M uch sexual harassment sexualizes racism. Many perpetrators have had no idea they were do­ ing anything wrong. In the decade from 1976 to 1986, as hundreds of

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cases were adjudicated, sexual harassment was legally divided into two types. The simplest, termed quid pro quo, demands sex in exchange for benefits to which a person is otherwise entitled. But sexual harassment can be oppressive and ex­ clusionary in itself also, whether or not a measur­ able benefit or opportunity is lost. This second type is termed hostile environment. Sexualizing a job or school environment can poison it for any­ one who wants to be accepted as an equal worker or student—something few men have to tolerate. Often the perpetrators are otherwise women’s equals in formal hierarchies, or even their formal subordinates. Environmental sexual harassment can include sexual advances, epithets, and forced sex—all imposed forms of sexual behavior that a woman must either tolerate or leave where she is entitled to be, free of sex discrimination. When men are harassed sexually because they are men, the same prohibitions apply, although the hierar­ chy of men over women in society makes this rare. Sexual harassment was recognized as a practice of sex discrimination, hence illegal, by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986. The case that established this principle was brought by M echelle Vinson, a Black woman who sued her supervisor for sexual harassment because she had been raped by him over a period of two-and-a-half years. She argued that having to tolerate forced sex to keep her job was environmental sexual harassment, hence sex discrimination in itself—whether or not she actu­ ally lost the job for this reason. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed, establishing freedom in the work­ ing environment from severe or pervasive sexual harassment as women’s human right. In 1993, in Patricia Harris’s case, the Court further specified that a woman need not be psychologically dam­ aged by sexual harassment to sue; being disadvan­ taged by it because she is a woman is enough. During twenty years of litigation, no perpetrator argued that he had a First Amendment right to say “ Sleep with me and I’ll give you an A ” to a stu­ dent, or “ Fuck me or you’re fired" to an em­ ployee. The argument has been raised recently

that because sexual harassment can be verbal or expressive conduct, it should be legally protected speech, or, at least, word-only environmental sex­ ual harassment should be. Since the First Amend­ ment was written and has been interpreted largely in an equality vacuum, the outcome of this devel­ oping tension will measure progress in taking equality seriously. The law against sexual harassment is the first law to be written on the basis of wom en’s experi­ ence, as well as the first to recognize that sexual abuse can violate equality rights. When Professor Anita Hill charged now Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in his 1991 confirmation hear­ ing, with sexually harassing her, national politics were also affected by women’s enraged response to the extent of disregard and disbelief of Professor Hill. Justice Thomas was confirmed, but con­ sciousness of sexual harassment soared world­ wide; laws against sexual harassment were passed abroad; complaints to agencies skyrocketed in number. Many women, seeking to keep their jobs but end their abuse, impatient with the delays and loss of control of being caught up in the legal sys­ tem and apprehensive at its insensitivity, have created their own remedies. Some of the most ef­ fective and imaginative have been scripted “con­ frontations” with abusers, in which groups of sup­ porters o f the sexually harassed carry out a carefully planned encounter with the sexual ha­ rasses during which he is pointedly educated. The story o f sexual harassment is a story of women’s mobilization for accountability and change against one form of male dominance and gender bias. Law now exposes this practice of big­ otry rather than colluding in silence. Sexual ha­ rassment has become less legitimate and less costly to resist. It remains to be seen whether the fact that sexual harassment is illegal and increas­ ingly unacceptable means it will stop. Martha J. Langelan, Back Off! Confronting Sexual Ha­ rassment and Sexual Harassers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993); Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sexual Ha-

SEXUALITY

rassment of Working Women: A Case o f Sex Discrimina­ tion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979). ■ C A T H A R IN E A. M AC K IN NO N See

also

Title VII.

§ Sexuality hroughout the course of U.S. history, the meaning of sexuality has been continuously reshaped by changing economic and social insti­ tutions. From a strong mooring in reproduction during the colonial era, sexuality later became as­ sociated with passion and marital intimacy. To­ day’s consumer society has further elaborated an ideal in which sexual relations are expected to provide personal identity and individual happi­ ness—apart from either reproduction or marriage. Increasingly, sexuality and its regulation have been politically contested by forces objecting to those changes, which reflect the realignment of gender, class, and race relations. Among European settlers in the colonial era, sexuality was almost always organized within fam­ ilies. A scarcity of laborers encouraged a high rate of reproduction; white women bore an average of over eight children. Church and state ensured the familial and racial “legitimacy,” or patriarchal ownership, of children, prosecuting those who committed fornication, rape, sodomy, adultery, or miscegenation. In contrast, neither sexuality nor reproduction could be owned within Native American cultures. Rape and prostitution were extremely rare, and some tribes allowed same-sex marriages. In the nineteenth century, the growth of a mar­ ket economy in which children were an eco­ nomic liability rather than an asset as agricultural laborers encouraged a new reproductive strategy of family limitation as did a growing agitation for fertility control by women. White marital fertility

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rates dropped by 50 percent, from over seven chil­ dren in 1800 to under four in 1900; African Amer­ ican rates paralleled the drop one or two genera­ tions later. Although some couples limited family size through periodic abstinence, many couples began to use contraception, and when it failed, some turned to abortion. Sex thus became more associated with personal intimacy. The meaning of sexuality, however, differed for men and women, and by race and class. Among the white middle class, a morally pure, domestic woman maintained her family’s virtue and status, but men had access to nonreproductive sexual re­ lations outside the home, including with women of color. Working-class women filled the ranks of prostitutes in Northern cities; Southern white men assumed the sexual availability of slave women and profited by owning the offspring of in­ terracial rapes; imported Chinese slave prostitutes provided sex for Western male migrants. M en’s ex­ tramarital relationships were condoned by a dou­ ble standard that condemned and heavily penal­ ized adulterous white women and defined most prostitutes as “fallen women.” Some middle-class women opposed the double standard through moral reform and social purity campaigns. Physi­ cians also claimed authority over sexual policies, attempting to regulate prostitution and success­ fully criminalizing abortion. By 1900 a new sexual system emerged among working- and middle-class youth of both sexes. Educated women formed same-sex “Boston Mar­ riages” or became “New Women” in search of sex­ ual independence. A small male homosexual sub­ culture began in some cities. Working women, including daughters of immigrants, dated men and engaged in sex not for pay but pleasure. These changes provoked political efforts to chan­ nel sexuality back into the home and reproductive arena through censorship of birth-control infor­ mation, and antiprostitution and antivenereal dis­ ease campaigns. Sex became a political symbol, as seen in the Southern lynchings that relied on often false claims of interracial rape to intimidate

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the Black population and to keep white women immobilized on a pedestal. Despite resistance to change, the commercial­ ization of sex within the economy and popular culture paved the way for “sexual liberalism” in the twentieth century. This system separated sex­ uality from a purely procreative purpose, affirmed the value of heterosexual pleasure, and defined sexual satisfaction as critical to personal happi­ ness. By the 1950s birth control, once a radical cause, became less controversial; as women in­ creasingly entered the labor market, fertility con­ trol became critical, as evidenced by the decrimi­ nalization of abortion and extensive use of oral contraceptives. By the 1980s the separation o f sex­ uality and reproduction deepened further as new reproductive technologies —such as artificial in­ semination and in vitro fertilization—made possi­ ble reproduction outside of the family and even apart from heterosexual relationships. The “science” of sexology and the widespread use of sex to market consumer goods helped make sexuality a primary form of identity. A key feature of sexual liberalism became the removal of older constraints—the deregulation of birth-control in­ formation, the liberalization of abortion, and the reduction of censorship. By the 1960s sexuality had been channeled into acceptable patterns of pleasure seeking, including marital heterosexual relations, “going steady” among U.S. teenagers, and commercialized fantasies, including Playboy magazine and clubs. Homosexuality was subject to closer scrutiny and social stigma, which in turn strengthened lesbian and gay identities and polit­ ical resistance. Women’s fear of pregnancy, soci­ ety’s fear of “ illegitimate” children, and ongoing racist practices continued to mark the boundaries of female sexuality. In its demand for “control over one’s own body,” the feminist movement of the late 1960s sought to extend the ideal of reproductive and sex­ ual autonomy from men to women. In the process feminists exposed subtle and direct means by which women’s bodies had been appropriated by men, whether through advertising or the use of vi­

olence against women. Lesbian feminism and gay liberation extended sexual liberalism to include previously outcast groups. Some feminists em­ phasized sexual exploitation by men, others in­ sisted on greater sexual expression for women, and still others focused on the sexual nexus of racism and sexism. A backlash in response to modern sexual poli­ tics represented opposition to the separation of sexuality and procreation. After Roe v. Wade, con­ servative women and men in particular called on the state to restore the earlier reproduction-cen­ tered system by limiting or cutting off women’s ac­ cess to abortion and denying rights to lesbians and gay men. In the wake of the A ID S epidemic, con­ servative politicians rallied support for a narrow, reproductive view of sexuality by calling for a re­ turn to “traditional” sexual morality. In response to right-wing political attacks and slow govern­ ment response to the A ID S crisis, lesbian and gay activists demanded funding for medical research and greater sex education. By the end of the twen­ tieth century, debates about sexuality had become central to U.S. politics, just as sexuality had be­ come central to personal identity. John D ’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Mat­ ters: A History o f Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons, with Robert A. Padgug, eds., Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983). ■ E S T E L L E B. F R EED M A N S e e a l s o Bisexuality; Celibacy; Gender; Heterosex­ uality; Lesbianism; Sex Education; Sexology; Sexual Revolution, The.

M

The Sexual Revolution

t is ironic that the birth-control pill, first devel­ oped to regulate irregular menstrual cycles and thus enhance women’s ability to conceive, be-

I

T H E SEXUAL R EV O LU TIO N

came a powerful weapon that gave women greater control of their fertility and thus of their sexuality. Until the 1960s, girls were indoctrinated with the idea that no “good” girl had (or admitted to hav­ ing) premarital sex, as it was delicately called. A typical edict decreed that no man would respect her, much less marry her, if she did. The specter of “ unwed motherhood” or of a “back-alley abor­ tion” was enough to cause some women to con­ sider suicide. While mainstream culture (through such youth-oriented films as Where the Boys Are di­ rected by Henry Lievin, i960) reinforced the idea that girls who “went all the way” were doomed, Playboy magazine was enthusiastically repackag­ ing and promoting “free love” for men. This was the one reputedly communist precept to be openly espoused at a time when anything smack­ ing of the “ Red M enace” was rejected. Along with pictorials of women, the magazine promulgated the findings of the second Kinsey report; it trum­ peted the news that women did enjoy sex, i.e., were virtually always orgasmic when properly stimulated, and perhaps most liberating of all, that men no longer considered virginity in women im­ portant or even desirable. As the 1960s progressed and the establishmentchallenging student movement gained momen­ tum, the idea that women were now as readily available for guilt-free sexual intercourse as men began to be taken for granted, even foreordained. If prior to this male-oriented sexual revolution women who had sex before marriage were consid­ ered degenerate, now those who resisted sex on demand were vulnerable to having their mental and political health questioned. Fashions, as usual, reflected the changing sexual mores and attitudes: stiff, teased, and straightened hair, cinched waists, panty girdles and high heels were replaced by long, flowing or naturally curly hair; Afros; flat, comfortable footwear, jeans, loose gar­ ments, and miniskirts or hot pants. Brassieres be­ came optional. Required intercourse flourished, as this phase of the sexual revolution moved into full swing. The Pill and the I.U.D. (intrauterine

device) created a false sense of security; there was no dearth of unwanted pregnancies when these and other contraceptives, ever more widely and legally available, failed. Abortion was still not fed­ erally sanctioned, so the consequences of slip-ups were still dire and/or expensive. With the founding of the National Organiza­ tion for Women in 1966, the feminist movement began to push the pendulum of sexual mores to­ ward the center, from the extremes of sex-never and sex-always. Masters and Johnson published their landmark study of sexuality in 1966, but it was a feminist theorist, Anne Koedt, who popular­ ized and interpreted the study’s findings: 1) female orgasms do not vary in kind, but in intensity; 2) all orgasms originate in the clitoris, whether it is stim­ ulated directly or indirectly; and 3) women are in the main multiorgasmic; when stimulated imme­ diately after orgasm, most women can experience an orgasmic chain reaction. Another major contribution to the feminist sex­ ual revolution was Betty Dodson’s insufficiently recognized work on the demystification of gyne­ cology and masturbation. Dodson organized workshops to familiarize women with their sexual and reproductive organs, using a slide show of dozens of vaginas, which through repetition took on an iconic value; and through the distribution and use of transparent plastic specula. Dodson contended that masturbation was the last frontier, branded as lonely, antisocial, and second-best. V i­ brators were utilized as a way for women to con­ trol their own orgasms and set sexual standards for themselves: speed of response, frequency, inten­ sity, duration. The reproductive rights movement gained im­ petus and strength from the women’s movement in the 1960s. Thanks to feminist involvement, the legal thrust was changed from reforming laws lim­ iting pregnancy termination to repeal of all laws limiting access to abortion. Success was achieved on a federal level with the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, allowing women who could afford it the right to voluntary maternity. W hile the importance o f this legislation cannot

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be overestimated, it places a heavy responsibility on women. Safe medical pregnancy terminations and reliable contraception are basic requirements for sexual equality, and feminists pointed out that all these methods, with the exception of vasec­ tomy and condoms, involve exclusively women’s bodies. In the early blooming o f feminist con­ sciousness, and since responsibilities were more available than rights, many women, primarily white middle- and upper-class women, consid­ ered it a point o f honor to assume the full emo­ tional (and often financial) burden for abortion. Whatever the effects of the sexual revolution upon white middle- and upper-class women, its impact upon and meanings to women of color were vastly different. Historically all groups of women of color in the United States often have been sexually exploited and brutalized by white males; for example, the organized and sanctioned rape of Black women during and after the era of slavery. This exploitation was justified by the most virulent racist sexual stereotypes and myths. Since most women of color, especially African Ameri­ can women, are still widely viewed as sexually amoral, the sexual revolution supposedly has had little impact upon their already “promiscuous” sexual values and behavior. In reality there is a complex range of sexual mores and practices among different racial, eth­ nic, and nationality groups of women of color; there is also a variety of sexual attitudes and prac­ tices among individual women of color, influ­ enced by such factors as upbringing, personality, economic opportunities, education, religious be­ liefs, and cultural values. Access to effective con­ traception and legal abortion positively affected women of color during the sexual revolution. But they carried with them a history o f racist sexual ex­ ploitation and vicious stereotyping o f their sex­ uality. In some cases, more liberated views of women’s sexuality in communities of color that predated the 1960s greatly affected how women of color perceived and experienced the so-called sex­ ual revolution.

Also part of the feminist sexual revolution was the recognition that the lack of free or inexpensive contraception and abortion is most onerous for poor women, the working poor, and women on welfare (a disproportionate number of whom are women of color). They regularly found them­ selves caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of dangerous, illegal abortions or enforced, serial, single motherhood. Added to this were pressures in the Black and Latina communities to see re­ course to abortion and birth control by women of color as collusion with the white power structure, to contain and limit their demographic increase, thus equating the attempt to control one’s repro­ ductive destiny with the betrayal of one’s own people. During the 1960s the prevailing atmosphere of sexual experimentation, the challenging o f new ideas, and sexual hedonism, as well as a context in which other oppressed groups were fighting for the right to exist, created the conditions for les­ bians and gay men to come forward and de­ nounce discrimination based on sexual prefer­ ence. On June 29,1969, the patrons of a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village resisted a police raid for the first time. The Stonewall Inn riots, as they came to be known, led to the founding of the gay liberation movement. During the early years of the second wave of the feminist movement, there was opposition in some quarters to the open acceptance of lesbians. This was vigorously con­ tested and effectively defeated within the feminist movement (though not in society at large) by a vote at the Second Conference to Unite Women in New York City in 1970. A popular British film released that same year (Saturday Night and Sun­ day Morning, directed by Karl Reisz) is an exam­ ple of the glamor that bisexuality had assumed by the end of the decade. This applied especially to the androgynous male, at least until the advent of AIDS. During this tumultuous era many advances were made toward sexual equality. However, the controversies surrounding sexual harassment, re-

SEXU AL SLAVERY

productive rights, antipornography, and gay an­ tidiscrimination legislation testify that contradic­ tions, especially for women, persist, and that is­ sues of sexual politics raised during and by the sexual revolution are far from resolved. Betty Dodson, Sex for One: The Joy o f Self-Loving (New York: Crown Publishers, 1986); Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone, “The Myth of Vaginal Or­ gasm,” in The Anthology o f Radical Feminism (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973); Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983). . A N S E L M A D E L L ’ OLIO

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Sexual Slavery

emale sexual slavery is present in all situations where women or girls cannot change the im­ mediate conditions o f their existence; where re­ gardless of how they got into those situations, they cannot get out; and where they are subject to sex­ ual violence and exploitation. It takes the form of systematic wife abuse; incest; and prostitution, pornography, and trafficking of women in the sex industries. Shelter programs provide refuge for victims of wife abuse and new laws now frequently result in the removal of sexually abusive fathers from homes, rather than removing the child or children. In the sex industries, sexual slavery results from the trafficking in women from one country or re­ gion to another. Pimping is considered a form of sexual enslaving. It is known as the exploitation of the prostitution of others, in brothels and through other marketing outlets, such as the pornography industry. Studies show that once a pimp has con­ trol of a woman for prostitution or pornography, he rarely allows her to leave. Sexual slavery is imposed individually through a “seasoning” process that breaks down the will and ego of its victims. Systematic subjugation to

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debasing practices and derogatory comments steadily erodes women’s or girls’ sense of selfworth. Beatings and rape from spouses, pimps, or traffickers secure the enslaving conditions until, eventually, the pimp can leave the victim alone at home or out on the street to prostitute without fear she will flee. Trafficking in women for the purposes of prosti­ tution from one country or region to another of­ ten involves fraudulent contracts. Women are kid­ napped or promised jobs abroad and then forced into prostitution when they arrive. In their coun­ try o f origin, they sign a contract for other work, which enables traffickers to clear them through immigration and customs without question. Upon arrival, their passports and airline tickets are confiscated so that they have no means of escape. Traffic routes often include transfer of women from Latin America and Southeast Asia to Aus­ tralia, Europe, Japan, and the United States. Sexual slavery includes forcing women into prostitution to provide sex for men in the military, sometimes known as military prostitution. For ex­ ample, during the Vietnam War, an estimated 250,000 Vietnamese women and girls were prosti­ tuted to serve the military, primarily U.S. forces. Sexual slavery is culturally based in the devalu­ ation of women and girls, which in the First World takes the forms o f economic and political discrimination as well as sexual exploitation in pornography and in the media, which promote a normalization of prostitution, the base for traffick­ ing and sexual enslavement. In the United States, although prostitution is illegal and women are fre­ quently arrested for prostitution, few cases that involve actual trafficking of women are brought to the criminal justice system. Periodic raids in brothels, however, reveal the existence of under­ ground sexual slavery, especially among women from Southeast Asia or Latin America. In some ar­ eas of the Third World, the devaluation of women and girls exists in belief systems and practices such as the dowry, which effectively makes girls economic liabilities for their families. The sale of

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girls for slave labor or to traffickers for prostitution takes place under these conditions; sex industries are organized to exploit that market. Laws against sexual slavery include local laws in certain regions that ban pimping, the United Na­ tions Convention Against the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, and, in the United States, the more narrowly construed Mann Act. ■ K A T H L E E N BARRY S

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a l s o

Prostitution; Violence Against Women.

by the women-led Children’s Bureau, with the as­ sistance of volunteers from women’s clubs and parent-teacher organizations. They were popular with mothers and contributed to a significant drop in infant mortality. Still, opponents o f the Sheppard-Towner Act managed to force the bill’s repeal in 1929. Although federal funds for mater­ nal and infant care were restored in the 1935 So­ cial Security Act, public health services were no longer available for women and children of all classes. Instead, the services were needs-based and limited to the poor. ■ M O L L Y LAD D -TAYLO R S

§ Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act he Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act of 1921 was the first federally funded social welfare measure in the United States. Sponsored by Texas Senator Morris Sheppard and Iowa Con­ gressman Horace Towner, it distributed federal matching grants to the states for prenatal and child health clinics, information on nutrition and hygiene, midwife training, and visiting nurses for pregnant women and new mothers. It did not pro­ vide any financial aid or medical care. Infant and maternal mortality rates were very high in the 1910s, and women’s organizations made passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act their first priority after winning the right to vote. The “maternity bill,” written by U.S. Children’s Bu­ reau chief Julia Lathrop and introduced into Congress by Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in the House of Representatives, was supported by virtually every women’s organization. It was vigor­ ously opposed by right-wing groups and by the American M edical Association, whose members called it a threat to the home and a step toward state medicine. Congress, appealing to the new “women’s vote,” passed the bill by a wide margin. Sheppard-Towner programs were administered

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a l s o

Children’s Bureau; Welfare and Public

Relief.

g Single Motherhood he term single motherhood became popular about 1970, replacing “ unmarried” or “un­ wed” mother. The new term was intended to mute emphasis on the relation o f “ mother” to marriage. But public discourse had firmly estab­ lished the stigma o f unmarried maternity—a woman was not a mother without a husband—so the new descriptor, especially in the conservative, misogynistic political climate after 1980, incorpo­ rated and extended the assumptions of the older terms. In the late 1930s, when the marital status of pregnant women became a public policy con­ cern, and not simply a familial or community dilemma, policymakers began to treat unwed mothers in racially specific ways and to use unwed motherhood to prove theories of racial inferiority and gender subordination. White single mothers were considered mentally ill and a source of ba­ bies for childless married couples. Unmarried African American and other girls and women of color who gave birth were reviled by the same pol-

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icy analysts as the source of all problems in com­ munities of color, including unwanted babies for whom white taxpayers were alleged to pay the levy. Under the dictates of racialization, white single mothers were coerced into giving up their babies to married, middle-class couples, while single mothers of color, including Native Americans, Asian Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexican Americans as well as Blacks, generally kept their babies but were threatened with legislative efforts mandating sterilization, incarceration, and denial of welfare benefits. In the late 1960s, in the context of the struggle for abortion rights, many women asserted the right to decide whether and when to become a mother and also the right to decide who was a mother. Consequently, thousands of white single mothers each year kept their babies, and many single mothers of color participated in the civil rights, welfare rights, and antisterilization move­ ments, declaring that reproductive autonomy was key to female self-determination. In the somewhat liberalized political climate between 1965 and 1980, single mothers demanded that their legiti­ macy as mothers be recognized, although individ­ uals of various races often lacked the material and political resources to secure the cultural legiti­ macy of single mothers. After 1980 the disintegration of the industrial base in the United States and the surge of politi­ cal conservatism fostered a new hostility toward poor, single mothers and a renewed willingness to level punitive sanctions against them. In the 1990s approximately 65 percent of African Amer­ ican babies and nearly one of four white babies were born to single mothers. This phenomenon reflects, among other causes, unprecedented lev­ els of unemployment and incarceration of men of color, reduced job opportunities and wages in cities, persistence of male domination and sexual coercion, inadequate access to and resources for birth control and abortion services, as well as the determination o f many women to decide on their

own terms about childbearing. Nevertheless, “single mother” became code for insubordinate wom an—sexually self-indulgent and fiscally irre­ sponsible. Despite the demonstrable vulnerabil­ ity of single mothers, politicians of every stripe ascribed extraordinary power to them, assigning them responsibility for the degradation of the large structures o f society, for example, the fam­ ily, and the educational, taxation, and welfare systems. ■ R I C K I E S O L IN G E R S e e A L S O “Illegitimacy’VSingle Pregnancy; Mother­ hood; Poverty.

§ Single Women ifferent categories of single women became socially and demographically prominent at different times in U.S. history. Widows, divorcees, and never-married women varied in numbers, de­ pending on contemporary economic and cultural circumstances. Before 1800 most single women were widows. The proportion of never-married women rose steadily in the nineteenth century, cresting around 1900. In the twentieth century the percent of never-married women declined and widowhood occurred more frequently toward the end of the life cycle, while the numbers of di­ vorced or separated women increased dramati­ cally. Between 1607 and 1807, it was difficult for U.S. women to choose to remain unmarried. Except in New England, men predominated among mi­ grants to the New World. Economically, the fam­ ily served as the chief mode of production before 1830, making it hard for single women (or single men) to support themselves. Under these condi­ tions, fewer than 5 percent o f women did not marry. A widow might choose not to remarry if she could perpetuate the economic base that she and

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her husband had previously established, or if she could draw upon the labor of her children, or if she succeeded at one of the few trades open to mature women, such as innkeeping. But unmar­ ried daughters could not establish an economic base unassisted, and patriarchal cultural patterns of inheritance prevented most of them from in­ heriting land. To remain unmarried was to forfeit even the modest degree of independence that married women achieved by running their own households. Unable to support themselves, “spin­ sters,” as never-married women came to be called in the seventeenth century (referring to their work at the spinning wheel), had to accept a place in a relative’s home, where, in exchange for services, they customarily were supplied with shelter and food. Although free Blacks formed legal marriages in both the North and South, the marriages of slave women and men were not legally recognized. Nevertheless, most slave women formed lasting unions and considered themselves married. Mar­ riages and visiting privileges across plantation boundaries were common. Between 1800 and i860, however, when slavery expanded westward, many slave couples were separated through forced migration. After emancipation in 1865, for­ mer slaves sought legal recognition of their unions. Two new populations of never-married women appeared in the nineteenth century. The first oc­ curred after 1830 in New England and the mid-At­ lantic states in connection with the extensive out­ migration from that region that populated the Northwest Territory, the upper Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest between 1800 and 1850. Al­ though most of that migration took place in fam­ ily units, more women than men stayed behind. This growing population of single women often exercised a disproportionate influence in the lives of other women in their communities. Because single women retained civil rights that married women did not have, especially the right to make contracts or open bank accounts, they served dis­

proportionately as treasurers of many women’s organizations that developed during the surge of voluntarism and social reform in the antebel­ lum era. A second, larger, group o f single women emerged between 1880 and 1920 with the expan­ sion of women’s access to higher education. Al­ though few persons obtained a college education then, by 1880 women constituted one of every three students enrolled at institutions of higher learning, and many remained single. O f eight thousand female college graduates in 1880, only five thousand were married. M any o f these women had access to meaningful professional employment, which was one alternative to mar­ riage. In 1890 the proportion of women doctors was greater than it was to be in i960, and the pro­ portion of women in other professions was twice that o f those in the work force as a whole. In 1890, for example, when women composed about 17 percent of the labor force, 36 percent of all “pro­ fessionals” were women. After 1920 the proportion of never-married women declined dramatically. “Companionate marriage,” involving the use of contraceptives, recognized women’s sexual needs as similar to those of men, and many women continued to work after marriage, although usually not after the birth of children. Personal satisfaction replaced economic need as the chief basis for marriage. Soaring divorce rates accompanied this change. In 1880 one divorce was recorded for every twentyone marriages; in 1900, one for every twelve mar­ riages; and by 1916, one for every nine marriages. About two-thirds of these divorces were sought by women. By the 1990s a new pattern had emerged. Many women chose not to marry. About 19 percent of women age eighteen and over in 1990 had never married—a proportion roughly equivalent to that of 1890. Although a smaller proportion o f women age 35 and older in 1990 remained unmarried than was the case in 1890, the proportion remain­ ing unmarried was larger than at any previous

SLAVERY

time in the twentieth century. Some of these un­ married women lived alone. Some lived with het­ erosexual partners. Some lived with partners of the same sex. Many lesbians preferred to marry, but the state refused to sanction their unions. Women o f color found their marital options re­ duced by the rising rates o f imprisonment that kept men of their racial and ethnic group behind bars. Perhaps the most important difference between unmarried women in the 1890s and the 1990s was the high proportion of single mothers in the 1990s. Being single and having children was no longer a contradiction in terms. In 1970 the pro­ portion of single mothers among white women was about 9 percent; by 1991 that proportion had grown to 19 percent. Among African American women the proportions were 33 percent in 1970 and 58 percent in 1991. Comparable statistics for Latinas show that 24 percent were single mothers in 1980 and 29 percent in 1991. One important cause for this unprecedented increase in the numbers o f single mothers was the economic gains made by women wage earners. In 1939 the average wages of full-time, year-round employed women were not sufficient for a woman to support herself and two children. In 1970 such wages were sufficient. Patterns of remarriage or serial monog­ amy reveal women’s desire to supplement their own income with that of another wage earner, but by 1990 the twentieth-century pattern of single motherhood was well established as an alternative to marriage. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Hus­ band: Single Women in America: The Generations of 17801840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Nancy Cott, “ Divorce and the Changing Status of Women in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly 33 (1976): 586-614; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Cath­ arine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973; pb Norton, 1976). • KATHRYN K ISH SKLAR See

also

Marriage; Single Motherhood.

§ Slavery he story of female slavery is the story of sur­ vival of Black women and their construction of a definition of womanhood that made sense to them. In some ways it is the story of the phoenix. Faced with misery and suffering that many suc­ cumbed to, African American women as a group proved resilient enough to triumph against the odds. Despite their common bondage, men and women did not experience slavery the same way. Slave women experienced sexual exploitation, childbearing, motherhood, and the slaveholder’s sexism. Slave women were exploited for their re­ productive as well as productive capacities. Stereotypes were devised to justify the sex­ ual exploitation of Black women. Unlike white women, who were viewed as prudish, pious, and domestic, Black women were considered sensual and promiscuous, an idea used to sanction the rape of African American women. The conditions under which slave women lived and worked only confirmed these stereotypes. In the United States, slavery after abolition of the for­ eign slave trade in 1807 depended upon reproduc­ tion rather than continual transatlantic importa­ tions; the burden of slave increase was on the slave woman’s shoulders. Since causal correla­ tions were drawn between sensuality and fertility, the increase in the slave population served as “ ev­ idence” of the slave woman’s lust. Slave women were no more or less lustful than other women but in slavery their bodies did not command respect. Unlike white women, Black women did not dress in layers of clothes. Black women often worked with their dresses lifted up around their hips to keep the hems out of the water, dirt, and mud in which they worked. Women’s bodies were also exposed during whip­ pings. Indeed some whippings had sexual over­ tones. Few utterances are as revealing as those of ex-slave Henry Bibb’s master, who declared that

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“he had rather paddle a female than eat when he was hungry.” Female slavery was also distinguished and struc­ tured by childbearing and childbirth. Each year between 1750 and the Civil War more than onefifth of the Black women in the 15 to 44 age group bore a child. It was no accident of nature that caused the average slave woman to begin mother­ hood two years before the average white Southern woman. Slaveholders, both men and women, manipu­ lated Black women to have children early and fre­ quently. First they used verbal prodding, then sub­ tle practices such as giving pregnant women more food and less work. Some slaveholders used an outright system of rewards such as a new dress, or silver dollar, or Saturday afternoons off. For women who resisted these “positive” incentives coercion always existed —the threat of a whip­ ping, sale, or both. Medical care was usually unavailable or inade­ quate for pregnant slave women. Black women were neglected because of the common assump­ tions that they were less fragile, gave birth more easily, and therefore needed less care than white women. They were thus more likely to have a midwife deliver their child than a more costly doctor. Midwives, many of whom were slaves, were usually competent, but they could do little for women who had severe complications or for women who suffered from illness resulting from the brutality and callousness of masters, mis­ tresses, and overseers. Women who had been whipped, forced to perform heavy tasks, or sent back to fieldwork too soon after delivery ran a high risk of death. Motherhood structured a woman’s life as much as planter manipulation of reproduction. On plantations where there were nurseries, women were constantly running back and forth between the field and the quarters to nurse their children. On farms where there was no central place for the children, women had to take their children to the fields with them and either work with them on

their backs or put them down somewhere. Moth­ ers risked a whipping if they attended their chil­ dren too often; their children risked harm if left unattended, ffouse servants were not always bet­ ter off. Often they were not allowed to keep their children with them, and they too ran back and forth to the quarters caring for their children. Childbearing and child rearing structured the slave woman’s pattern of resistance. Most run­ aways were between sixteen and thirty-five years old. Most slave women this age were either preg­ nant, nursing an infant, or had at least one small child to care for—male runaways could be more assured that their children would be cared for, but slave women had no such assurance. This is why all of the 150 fugitive women advertised for in the 1850 New Orleans newspapers ran away with their children. Escaping with children only made an already hazardous undertaking all the more risky. “ Fe­ males,” wrote William Still, the head of the Philadelphia Underground Railroad, “undertook three times the risk of failure [to escape] that males are liable to.” Truancy, running away for short periods of time, seems to have been the way many slave women reconciled their desire to flee and their need to stay. Slaveholder sexism also made female slavery different from male slavery. That sexism played a role in structuring the female slave’s workload and day-to-day existence is somewhat ironic since slaveholders so often treated Black women like men. Not surprisingly, however, Black women were denied most of the so-called “ rewards” of womanhood while they suffered all of the restric­ tions and performed all the “woman’s work.” There is no question that slave women worked as hard as men. They worked as lumberjacks and turpentine producers in the forest o f the Carolinas and Georgia. They hauled logs by leather straps attached to their shoulders. They plowed using mule and ox teams, and hoed, sometimes with the heaviest implements available. They dug ditches, spread manure fertilizer, and piled coarse

SLAVERY

Several generations o f slaves at a plantation in Beaufort, South Carolina, 1862. Women formed the center o f the slave family.

fodder with their bare hands. They built southern roads and railroads, and they cultivated rice, cut cane and tobacco, and picked cotton. Besides all this exhausting labor, slave women also did “woman’s work.” For instance, in the Sea Islands, sorting cotton lint according to color and fineness and removing cotton seeds that the gin had crushed into the cotton and lint was woman’s work. M en usually shelled corn, threshed peas, cut potatoes for planting, and platted shucks. Grinding corn into meal or hominy, however, was woman’s work, as was spinning, weaving, sewing, and washing, work done on Saturday or at night, after a long day at other backbreaking work. Besides making women’s days especially long, slaveholder practices restricted female slave movement. Slaveholders usually chose their male slaves to assist in the transportation of crops to market and the transport of supplies and other materials to the farm or plantation. More male

than female slaves were artisans and craftsmen, so when slaveholders had a chance to hire skilled slaves from other plantations, they usually hired males. Fewer bondwomen, therefore, had a chance to vary their work experience. Therefore women, more than men, were tied to the immediate environment of the plantation or farm. Like motherhood, this decreased the likeli­ hood that women would run away. The would-be female fugitive had to consider her unfamiliarity with the surrounding countryside before fleeing. She also had to consider how conspicuous a lone Black woman or group of Black women would be in the predominantly white-populated country­ side. Some female fugitives like the celebrated Ellen Craft overcame this last impediment by dis­ guising themselves as males. Flowever, the small number of female fugitives indicates that few slave women could match the legendary exploits of Flarriet Tubman, who not only ran away but re-

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turned over and over to rescue more than 300 slaves. Self-protection and individual resistance were necessarily part and parcel of the female slave’s definition of womanhood. Women could not rely on men for protection, and they had no recourse in any formal justice system. Therefore, they had to protect themselves against whites and Black men the best they could. Some women were overtly aggressive. Some murdered their masters and mistresses, some were arsonists, and still oth­ ers refused to be whipped. Although those who re­ sisted whippings usually were strong enough to fight off their master, mistress, or overseer, those bold enough to commit murder usually used poi­ son rather than outright violence. Since slaves could not ignore the reality of the overwhelming power and authority of whites, most women dissembled and feigned illness to get their way. As did men, women pretended to be ig­ norant of a job in order not to have to do it. Some pretended to be mentally unbalanced and regu­ larly insulted whites and refused to do their bid­ ding. The most common form o f female self-de­ fense was feigning illness. This form of resistance proved effective for slave women because they were expected to have children, and slaveholders could never be sure that the women’s aches and pains would not impair their ability to have chil­ dren. Since the eighteenth and nineteenth cen­ turies still found women’s diseases shrouded in mystery, as long as slave women did not overdo it, the clever could feign illness and get away with it. While resistance demonstrates the resourceful­ ness and self-reliance of the slave woman, these traits were learned from other women. On large southern plantations Black women usually worked together in single-sex work gangs. Women also attended at childbirth and helped with post­ partum care. M uch of the medical care for women and children was in the hands o f slave women who served as nurses for Black and white alike. Self-reliance and self-sufficiency, therefore, were not just functions of what the slave woman

did for herself but what the female community did for itself. Slave women shared child-rearing responsibili­ ties. They depended on the elderly women who ran plantation nurseries, midwives, nurses who mixed folk and contemporary medical techniques to heal the sick, and other female relatives and friends to provide food, clothing, and supervision. Communal motherhood helped slaves cope with one of the most difficult of predicaments—who would provide maternal care for a child whose mother was either sold or deceased? Fathers sometimes served as both mother and father, but when slaves, as opposed to the master, determined child care it was usually someone from the female community who became a child’s surrogate mother. In this way they helped structure their world. Good cooks and seamstresses were admired, as were midwives and “ doctor women.” Occasion­ ally women were put in charge of female work gangs, and these women, if not admired, were at least respected. The same could be said of con­ jure women and women thought to be witches. Along with respect there was fear. Old women, though, were in a class apart. Absolute age was im­ portant, but for women, age also corresponded to the number o f children one had, and one’s stage in the childbearing cycle. By virtue of their greater experience, wisdom, and number o f chil­ dren, old women commanded the respect of the young. To consider the cooperative aspect of female slave life is to understand one o f the ways that Black women provided a buffer against the deper­ sonalizing regime of plantation work and the de­ humanizing nature of slavery. M en were more likely to be sold than were childbearing women. Add to this the facts that women were much more confined to the plantation than men; that some women were part of “abroad” marriages, where husbands visited infrequently; and that slave women generally outlived men by two years, and we find that on a given plantation the male pres-

SLAVERY

ence was more tenuous than the female presence. We also find that outside of their forced depen­ dence on whites for food and shelter, women were more dependent on one another than they were on men. The female community also schooled its mem­ bers on survival under slavery, helped and pro­ tected them when possible, but most of all gave its women the opportunity to forge independent ideas about womanhood. In the slave woman’s definition of womanhood, motherhood was more central than marriage. This is because mothers were the least likely to be separated from their children, and mothers were the crucial link between a child and his or her separated father. Since nonprolific women were sold, childbearing was a way to anchor oneself to a given plantation for an extended period of time and thus maintain enduring relationships with family and friends. Childbirth also secured some­ what the nuclear family against breakup by sale because stable, childbearing families were an as­ set to slaveholders. Beyond this, giving birth was a life-affirming ac­ tion. It was, ironically, an act of defiance, a signal to the slaveowner, that no matter how cruel and inhuman his actions, African Americans would not be utterly subjugated or destroyed. For these reasons motherhood, not marriage, was a Black girl’s most important rite of passage. So central was motherhood to womanhood that unmarried mothers were not stigmatized; neither were their children deemed illegitimate. This did not mean of course that male-female relationships were of no consequence, just that they were subject to many uncertainties. Because white men and women could and did make cruel and life-threatening decisions, their power and in­ fluence not only shaped the nature of male-fe­ male relationships but also molded the role that women assumed in slave families. Without a master’s interference courtship and marriage looked very familiar. Women appreci­ ated male attention and did what was necessary to

An enslaved woman, Louisa, holds a hahy, who legally owns her, as evidenced by this bill o f sale.

get it. On Sundays they fixed their hair and dressed in clothes that had sat in sweet-smelling flowers all week. They responded to flattery and made men vie with one another for their atten­ tion. Although marriage was not legally binding, and masters treated slave unions casually, slaves held their marriage vows sacred. However, the oppressive hands of white men and women seldom failed to touch male-female relationships. Husbands and wives were often sep­ arated. They could not protect each other nor their children from whippings. Although en-

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slaved males could sometimes retaliate against the Black men who abused their daughters, wives, and mothers, when white men assaulted Black women, raped them, and made them bear their children, they could do nothing. The violence done to the Black woman’s body was not recog­ nized as a crime. Few relationships survived this brutal assault. Slavery, therefore, made it impossible for women to be overly dependent on their husbands. Like their men they had to hunt, fish, grow, and steal extra food for their family. They had to sur­ vive, with and without the help of men or the fe­ male community. And the women did survive, generation after generation. The slave system tried to beat them down but African American women survived con­ ditions that were debilitating to body and mind, all the while inventing a womanhood with its own meaning. ■ DEBO RAH GR AY WH ITE S e e a l s o Abolitionist Movement; Constitution and Amendments: Emancipation Proclamation and Thir­ teenth Amendment; Pedestal; Plantation System.

M S

SNCC Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

e e

U

Social Hygiene

merging after 1900, social hygiene recast the issues of social and sexual order in the secular and technical terms of the twentieth century. Its adherents offered a pragmatic approach to social reform based on applying scientific research methods and organizational efficiency to the problems of vice and disease. Although dispas­

E

sionate social scientists rhetorically distanced themselves from moral reformers, ultimately the movement bolstered conservative moral precepts while vastly expanding the reach of social and state intervention. Hygienists established new rationales for social action, placing issues that had been viewed as re­ ligious, spiritual, and personal into the secular, physical, and civic framework of public health. Social hygienists argued that prostitution spread venereal disease; illegitimate infants had high mortality rates and drained the public purse; and the unfit reproduced, weakening the national stock. Considering health the basis for social sta­ bility and the good society, hygienists believed that solutions to such problems were in the public interest. Public health advocates thus demanded breaking the Victorian code of silence on sexual matters, presented a critique of laissez faire, and provided a key rationale for an activist, discipli­ nary state. As researchers in the fields of medicine, social work, education, law, sociology, and criminology replaced the concept o f sin with the concept of sickness, they simultaneously established them­ selves as society’s doctors, disseminating scientifi­ cally sound data on social and sexual matters and demonstrating the efficacy o f their methods through experimental social programs. Cultural authority shifted from female voluntary reformers and mothers to trained, usually male, experts. Despite social hygiene’s claim to scientific au­ thority, hygienists were as concerned with moral cleanliness as with physical vigor. Teaching the values of sexual continence and self-discipline was as important as teaching the biology of repro­ duction. In the name of public health rather than morality, professionals took responsibility for the sanctity of the family and for securing conserva­ tive values. Thus, social hygiene drew together two poles of social reform: health and morality— those seeking a technocratic vision and those seeking a homogeneous moral order. Concern about unrestrained sexuality and its

SO CIALISM

consequences often brought female moral re­ formers together with social hygienists, yet such alliances were uneasy because of the groups’ dif­ fering gender politics. To moral reformers, sister­ hood demanded that women protect one another from male exploitation. In contrast, social hygien­ ists argued that sexually transgressive women were not victims but culprits. Understanding the causes of vice and disease in individual, often hereditarian terms, social hy­ gienists relied on physical and psychological testing to identify those who would benefit from rehabilitation. Their solutions were thus ther­ apeutic, instructional, or eugenic, transforming individuals or populations rather than social con­ ditions, and expanding the authoritarian scope of experts and the state to intervene in individual and family life. The social hygiene movement gained strength in a period of extensive immigration and chang­ ing gender roles. In these new social contexts so­ cial hygiene reinforced racism and gender stereo­ types, grounding them in alleged biological truth and historical necessity. ■ ELIZA BETH FED ER

S

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a l s o

Moral Reform.

§ Socialism omen of all races, classes, and sexual orien­ tations have played a major role in the de­ velopment of socialism in the United States, both in officially socialist parties and ideologies, and in the wealth of movements for social and economic justice that have shaped the socialist movement. Socialism, in turn, has had an impact on a wide range of movements and issues that have affected women. Socialism is the theory and practice of replac­ ing capitalism with a political, economic, and so­

W

cial system believed to be more just and equi­ table. According to socialist theory, private owner­ ship of the means of production is replaced with collective, cooperative, or public ownership. Gov­ ernment policies protecting private wealth are changed to promote more equal ownership and distribution of resources. International aggression to secure raw materials, markets, and labor is re­ placed with international working-class solidarity. In practice, countries and movements calling themselves socialist have had a wide variety of structures and policies, from egalitarian to elitist. In the development of U.S. capitalism, the wealth o f some was inextricably tied to the poverty of others, and race and gender largely determined which were which: Native American land, Black slavery, Latin American resources, and the under­ paid labor of women and children factory workers formed the pillars of capital accumulation. Thus race, gender, and class, as interrelated factors in oppression and resistance, are at the core of the history of U.S. socialism. Socialist and nonsocialist movements for fun­ damental social change are historically intercon­ nected; together they constitute the “left,” or pro­ gressive, forces of the political spectrum. They include various socialist parties and organizations; the labor movement; organizations for the rights and survival of Native Americans, African Ameri­ cans, Asian Americans, and Latinas/os; the suf­ fragist, women’s liberation, feminist, and lesbian feminist movements; anti-imperialist, antiwar, and international solidarity movements; and com­ munity-based groups fighting for economic and social justice. Modern socialism was brought to the United States by European immigrants in the 1870s. It was a movement of workers that defined the pri­ mary moving force in history as a class struggle be­ tween workers and owners. The early socialist im­ migrants brought with them a history of women’s participation and of debates on “the woman ques­ tion” —the sexual division o f labor, the family, women wage workers, and sexuality.

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The first socialist party in the United States was the Socialist Labor Party, formed in 1876. Its char­ ter read, in part, “The emancipation of women will be accomplished with the emancipation of men, and the so-called women’s rights question will be solved with the labor question. All evils and wrongs of the present society can be abol­ ished only when economical freedom is con­ quered for men as well as for women.” This posi­ tion was challenged as more women entered the socialist movement; it formed the starting point for a still-ongoing debate about the relationship between class and gender oppression. Women first made their mark on U.S. socialism through strikes and trade union activism, and the first prominent U.S. women socialists, in the early 1900s, were labor leaders such as Elizabeth G ur­ ley Flynn and Mother Jones. From 1900 to 1919, challenges to traditional gender roles in the United States often involved women who were both feminist and socialist. These challenges were precursors to later feminist and lesbian feminist movements. Emma Goldman, Charlotte Perkins Gilm an, Crystal Eastman, and Margaret Sanger advocated birth control, suffrage, economic re­ form, and nontraditional sexuality. Turn-of-the-century labor and socialist organi­ zations included few Black men, and even fewer Black women. Lucy Parsons (1853-1942), leg­ endary labor leader, anarchist, journalist, orator, and communist organizer, was a notable excep­ tion. Because of white workers’ fear of Black com­ petition, socialist and labor movements often failed to support Black rights. Early socialist ideol­ ogy did not recognize African slavery as an indis­ pensable pillar of international capitalism. Dur­ ing the following decades, the pivotal political impact of the struggle for African American rights and freedom forced changes in these policies. African American women in the early 1900s or­ ganized women’s clubs, church groups, and civic organizations; addressed the needs of their com­ munities; advocated for justice; and campaigned against lynching. This continuous tradition of ac­

tivism built the foundations for the Black resis­ tance movements that would redefine social jus­ tice for socialists and other progressives later in this century. Native American movements usually have not considered themselves socialist. Nevertheless, early socialists drew inspiration from indigenous cultures characterized by equality and communal property ownership. The relatively independent and equal status of women in most Native Ameri­ can nations has been particularly important in de­ veloping a socialist vision of women’s rights. How­ ever, socialists often failed to support the rights and survival of indigenous nations. During the battle for Indian rights at Wounded Knee in 1973 and the protests in 1992 surrounding the five-hun­ dredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing, Native American activists for justice and others, includ­ ing socialists, began to forge links. After a period of severe repression and decline in the 1920s, the socialist movement in the United States reached its greatest strength during the 1930s and 1940s. Propelled by the Great Depres­ sion, the Communist Party of the United States formed Unemployed Councils, published jour­ nals, ran candidates for public office, protested evictions, led labor union activity, and created popular organizations. Women of all races were involved in socialist and socialist-led activities. This was also a period o f confluence between so­ cialism and the movement for Black freedom. The influential Harlem Communist Party in­ cluded dynamic women leaders, such as Clau­ dia Jones, Maude White, and Audley (Queen Mother) Moore. The courageous Sharecroppers’ Union in Alabama had substantial Black women leadership. An onslaught of anticommunist repression in the 1950s devastated the alliances forged among socialists, trade unionists, feminists, and Black rights activists. The reconvergence of these forces during a period of international revolutionary fer­ ment in the 1960s and 1970s posed for a time a for­ midable threat to “the system” : capitalism, impe-

SO CIA LISM

rialism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and the es­ tablished order of power. In China, Vietnam, Cuba, Mozambique, An­ gola, and Nicaragua, liberation movements with socialist leadership won national independence. Internationally, socialism was no longer the prop­ erty of Europeans but was being implemented by people of color—many of them women. Women and men in the new societies reexamined and re­ constructed traditional sexual roles and relation­ ships. In the United States, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the Black liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which in­ cluded socialist and nonsocialist forces, irrevoca­ bly changed the definition of justice to include racial justice. Inspired by liberation movements around the world and by the civil rights move­ ment at home, a vast array of movements for social change flowered in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. A new breed of activists, including many socialists, defined a different sort of chal­ lenge to capitalism, one in which race, gender, nation, class, and sexual orientation were linked. The Mexican and Chicano/a farmworkers’ movement, which rose under the banner of the United Farm Workers in the early 1960s, ex­ panded the concept of union organizing to in­ clude health, housing, immigration, and educa­ tion as they impacted not just individual workers but whole communities. Women were vital lead­ ers in this movement. The history of Puerto Rican socialism since U.S. occupation in 1898 has been intertwined with the movement for independence. Puerto Ri­ can activists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s called the attention of international progressives and so­ cialists to continuing U.S. colonial exploitation in Puerto Rico. Many independentistas captured in the 1980s, including Alejandrina Torres, are still serving long prison terms. Asian American women, excluded for eight decades by racially biased immigration laws, be­ gan to enter the United States in large numbers

only after the Immigration Act of 1965. Some joined the movements of the day. Many were, and are, employed in the garment industry. Their re­ sistance has exposed the existence of 1800s sweat­ shop conditions in the 1990s. A generation of youth threw itself into campus uprisings, the Vietnam antiwar movement, Black power, peace, student rights, community organiz­ ing, and anti-apartheid and anti-imperialism ef­ forts. As they increasingly questioned a society that could produce so much injustice, a plethora o f socialist, communist, and anarchist parties and youth groups appeared, along with scores of other organizations. T he women’s movement emerged from wom­ en’s involvement in all of the social justice movements of the time, especially the civil rights movement. Women of color and white women, lesbians and heterosexual women, organized to­ gether and separately in caucuses and indepen­ dent women’s groups. Lesbian feminists, the his­ toric bedrock of the women’s movement, came out both as individuals and as an organized force. Women began to articulate an ideology of so­ cial change from women’s point of view, rewriting history and theory to include themselves. Much of this rewriting was influenced by socialism. So­ cialist and feminist women, divided by the ques­ tion of whether class or gender is primary in the history of human oppression, influenced each other powerfully, overlapped, and changed both movements. Women of color and lesbians ana­ lyzed the intersections of class, race, gender, and homophobic oppression. In the 1980s and 1990s, the fall of the state-cen­ tered regimes of Eastern Europe and serious de­ feats to the socialist countries and movements of the Third World opened a period of profound change for socialism. Its opponents pronounce it dead; its proponents engage in extensive reevalu­ ation and reflection, examining the relationship of socialist practice to the ideals of democratic participation, women’s rights, and racial justice. At the same time, the conditions that produced so-

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cialism have intensified: the domestic and inter­ national concentration of wealth and power, pre­ dominantly along lines of race; the persistence of interconnected oppressions of class, race, sexual­ ity, and gender; international economic aggres­ sion and military violence; and the tendency of capitalism to produce fascist and right-wing forces. As a new generation of justice seekers con­ fronts these conditions, it will need to draw on the experiences, contributions, and lessons of its pre­ decessors, including those of socialism. ■ NAOMI J A F F E S ee

also

women, regardless of how long they had been married, were ineligible for a spouse benefit if their former husbands retired. Widows were only eligible for benefits if they were at least sixty-five, living with their husbands at the time of his death, and had never remarried. Like wives, widows were ineligible for benefits in their own names. Thus, the eligibility rules for benefits rewarded women in stable marriages who were supported by their husbands but penalized women who be­ came separated or divorced or worked outside the home. Subsequent reforms have corrected some of these inequities.

Feminism, Socialist.

■ J I L L QUADAGNO S e e a l s o Mothers’ Pensions; Welfare and Public Re­ lief; Welfare State.

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Social Security Act

he Social Security Act of 1935 initiated a na­ tional old-age pension for wage workers. Un­ der the Old Age Insurance program (OAI), work­ ers and employers each paid a tax of 1 percent on the first three thousand dollars of wages. At age sixty-five workers could retire with a modest bene­ fit. Because agricultural laborers and domestic servants were excluded from OAI coverage, threefifths of African American workers were ineligible for these benefits, as were most Native Americans. Also excluded were teachers, nurses, hospital em­ ployees, librarians, and social workers —all pre­ dominantly female occupations. O f the 22 per­ cent of women employed in 1930, 52 percent were not covered by Social Security. In 1939 amendments to the Social Security Act added benefits for spouses and widows. The spouse benefit granted wives a portion of the full benefit if they were at least sixty-five and living with their husbands. Women separated from their husbands, even if they were still married, were in­ eligible for Social Security. Working wives were also ineligible if their own earned benefit was more than one-half the spouse’s benefit. Divorced

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§ Social Work

S

ocial work in the United States reflects the stresses and strains of modern liberalism, which is committed to developing policies that al­ leviate human suffering without fundamentally altering the economic structures that create un­ employment, poverty, and persistent social in­ equalities. Taking a woman-centered look at the history of social work highlights the dual role of the social work profession as a source of progres­ sive social policy and a supporter of a social order characterized by hierarchies o f race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Although more women than men are and have been social workers, their status and image, like those of people of color and poor people, reflect the Eurocentric, androcentric priorities of the dominant culture. In 1990 women social workers, constituting 67 percent o f the profession, earned less money and held fewer doctoral degrees and senior administrative and academic positions than did their male peers. Social work practice that pro­ motes feminist objectives is impeded in the late

SOCIAL WORK

twentieth century by increasingly conservative policies that limit women’s access to education, employment, child care, mental health services, and medical care. The social work profession has, however, con­ tinuously supported women’s causes and needs. Social workers have played a large role in policy­ making and social welfare activism. Currently, so­ cial workers are focusing their attention on “vul­ nerable populations” and supporting feminist activities such as rape crisis centers, battered women’s shelters, and therapeutic programs that treat women who have suffered sexual abuse, eco­ nomic exploitation, and medical neglect and mis­ treatment. Social work is one of the few professional fields that historically has recognized the existence of social classes in the United States. Professional so­ cial work emerged in the early twentieth century from a culture of voluntary and quasi-voluntary groups such as settlement houses and charity or­ ganization societies. Several generations of mid­ dle-class women, many with college degrees, pro­ vided staff and sometimes leadership in these organizations. The imperative for “service” pro­ moted by religious groups motivated many volun­ teers of the late Victorian period—even those in the settlement movement, many of whom tried to honor the pluralistic, tolerant philosophy of Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in 1889. For these women pioneers who provided social service to an industrializing society, class divisions as well as gender commonalities were acknowledged in the relationships between them and their largely fe­ male, white, immigrant clients. “ Civic house­ keeping” justified women’s contributions to ur­ ban reform movements in sanitation, education, health, and recreation. For example, in the Wom­ an’s Christian Temperance Union (W CTU) and the YW CA, women settlement workers advocated for clean milk stations, day nurseries, limited hours, and better working conditions for women laborers. Perhaps the best example of this philos­ ophy of women’s service to women’s interests is

the creation of the federal Children’s Bureau. The bureau’s advocates, including Florence Kel­ ley, Addams, and Lillian Wald, aimed to aid poor children without removing them from their homes. After Congress created the Children’s Bu­ reau in 1912, its promoters lobbied for Julia Lathrop as its first head, believing that a woman should administer an agency concerned with children and families. Despite their relative progressivism in matters affecting women and labor, very few white social workers of the early twentieth century advocated for people of color, who experienced the so-called Progressive Era as a dangerous period of increased race-based lynchings and legal discrimination un­ dergirded by pseudoscientific doctrines of the racial inferiority of non-Western European peo­ ples. Social service organizations and institutions remained segregated into the 1960s. White settle­ ment leaders were at best ambivalent about serv­ ing predominantly or increasingly African Ameri­ can neighborhoods. Some settlements segregated their activities; some excluded Blacks outright; some encouraged founding all-Black settlements; some followed migrating white populations to new locations. With a few exceptions, Black lead­ ership spearheaded the vital institutions serving Black communities of the North and South in the first half of the twentieth century: the Y M C A and YW C A movements, the Urban League, the school-settlement experiments in the rural South, and others. Among African American communi­ ties, as among white ones, there was a movement of middle-class women to serve poorer Blacks, children, and those with special needs. And per­ haps even more than white social workers, many Black social workers were influenced by their ob­ servations to embrace social justice and civil rights objectives. The Black, colleges that edu­ cated these workers as well as other Black profes­ sionals became functional centers of leadership training focused on social change as well as com­ munity service. Social service providers attempted to construct

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a “profession” of social work through adopting common goals and values and establishing com­ mon training curricula in schools that could credential their graduates. This fifty-year process culminated in the founding of the National Association of Social Work in 1955 and yielded mixed outcomes for the status of social work among U.S. professions and for the status of women within social work. Though many of the early theorists and educators of social work (such as Mary Richmond, Edith Abbott, and Sophonisba Breckenridge) were women, men were over­ represented in leadership ranks in proportion to their numbers in the occupation (about 30 per­ cent in New York in 1915) and in social work schools (about 20 percent between 1912 and 1917). Psychiatric social work, beginning during World War I, was perceived as an appropriate oc­ cupation for women. The defining aim of psychi­ atric social work—psychological “adjustment” of the individual—was an acceptable ideology that suited the times and the mores prescribed for mid­ dle-class young women. Prior to the 1960s, with the exception of the “rank-and-file” movement of the Depression years, social workers did little col­ lectively to challenge the dominant U.S. political and social order. However, alone among profes­ sionals, they deliberately concerned themselves with the welfare of the poor, a group of little inter­ est or potential for profit, as sociologist John Ehrenreich points out, to more fortunate Ameri­ cans. Like the civil rights and antiwar movements, the antipoverty programs of the 1960s Johnson ad­ ministration planted seeds of feminist change by mandating “maximum feasible participation” of agency clients and neighborhood residents while empowering male agency heads, policymakers, and community leaders. Not until the mid-1980s did the social work literature reflect issues con­ cerning the feminist movement, which responded angrily and assertively to an era of social-change movements that often excluded women. The “postmodern” movements o f the 1980s—move­

ments that recognize the social construction of gender and racial identities and highlight the per­ sistence of social and economic hierarchies in modern democratic societies—have found their way into the social work theory of the early 1990s. The first phase of civil-rights-era feminism carried mostly middle-class white women’s concerns into social work practice; in the 1990s, some activist social workers have begun to focus on feminism as a transformative ideology that addresses issues of race and class as well as gender. Clarke A. Chambers, “Women in the Creation of the Pro­ fession of Social Work,” Social Service Review, 60 (March 1986): 1—33; John H. Ehrenreich, The Altruistic Imagina­ tion: A History o f Social Work and Social Policy in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence o f So­ cial Work as a Career, 1880-1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Har­ vard University Press, 1965). ■ MINA CARSON S e e a l s o National Urban League; Settlement House Movement; YWCA.

§ South Asian American Women lthough a small segment of the population, South Asian women have made significant contributions to gender issues in the United States. Before the 1960s, South Asian communities in the United States were male-dominated, consist­ ing of agricultural laborers on the West Coast and Western-educated professionals and merchants scattered throughout the country. Women were few but stood out as strong individuals. Most South Asian women in the United States now are either post-i96os immigrants or their daughters. Large proportions of these immigrant women are highly educated and professional workers. Ac­ cording to the 1990 census, about 85 percent of Asian Indian women, the largest group among the

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SPIRIT U A LIT Y

diverse category of South Asians, had at least a high school level education. Beginning in the 1980s, a series of South Asian women’s organizations, such as Manavi in New Jersey, Narika in the San Francisco Bay area, and Sakhi in New York City, emerged. Their agendas ranged from providing specific services to South Asian women to advocating for general women’s issues. Through these efforts, South Asian women have tried to establish the centrality of women’s is­ sues to the well-being of families and children and to contribute to the public debate about immigra­ tion and ethnic representation. Outside of these women’s organizations, South Asian women are spearheading community mobilization efforts. To empower women of color and their communities, the leaders are forging links among activists from their South Asian communities and across cul­ tures. South Asian women face many challenges in the United States, not the least of which is fight­ ing the stereotypical image of a weak woman who comes from a tradition-bound society. South Asian women have opened up the complex layers of human and social dynamics and intervened in the making and unmaking of cultural traditions. They have not soaked in feminism as passive re­ ceivers but have given it their own agency and color. Chandra Talpade Mohanty charts the con­ tours of struggle of Third World women in her in­ troduction to Third World Women and the Politics o f Feminism. Naheed Islam points to the pitfalls of the callously constructed idea of ethnic diversity in her essay titled, “In the Belly o f the M ulticul­ tural Beast, I Am Named South Asian.” Shamita Das Dasgupta, a cofounder o f Manavi, locates her feminist activism both in a local immigrant com­ munity and an international women’s movement. Some of the leading contributions o f South Asian women are their thought-provoking work on Third World feminism, on tradition and moder­ nity, and on the place of gender at the intersection of forces of race, nation, ethnicity, and class. In their respective fields of expertise—among

others, M eena Alexander as a writer, Urvashi Vaid as the former director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Mira Nair as a movie di­ rector— South Asian women are offering their dis­ tinct perspectives. Whether in their homes or workplaces, South Asian women are facing chal­ lenges of empowerment with tremendous forti­ tude and vigor. Their efforts are characterized in the title of an anthology edited by the Women of South Asian Collective, Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women o f the South Asian Diaspora. • M AD HU LIKA S. KHANDELWAL S ee

M

also

Asian Pacific Women.

Spirituality

omen have always been spiritual leaders in society and in religious and occult groups. But around 1970 there began a movement, born of feminism, to identify and create a separate women’s spirituality. Many women felt that the prevailing images of women in contemporary so­ ciety were so tainted with patriarchal values that it was important to do research into history, archae­ ology, anthropology, and myth to find images of women that were stronger than those in the pre­ vailing culture. While some feminists do not believe spirituality is a part of feminism, and regard it as a diversion from the necessary political struggles at hand, the women’s spirituality movement has engaged per­ haps a hundred thousand U.S. women, and the ideas in the movement have influenced women’s literature, art, and music. The women’s spirituality movement exists both within and outside mainstream religious institu­ tions. In the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, small gatherings of women sat in a circle and spoke about their most personal and intimate concerns. They learned that what was seemingly

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SPORTS

peculiar and unique to them, since it had been unspoken, was often part of other women’s lives. They gained a feeling of empowerment, political insight into the nature of women’s oppression, and a belief that personal experiences were to be trusted and acted upon. In later years, some women began to feel that sharing spiritual experiences, dreams, visions, and psychic phenomena could also be important. Us­ ing the consciousness-raising group as a model, women began to form small, nonhierarchical groups for religious and psychic exploration. Some women became interested in ancient his­ tory and began to research whether women in other times and societies had held more power or used power differently. In the last twenty years, hundreds o f feminist scholars have written groundbreaking works in history, archaeology, and anthropology, examining these questions and also creating controversy. Two principal controversies have emerged as a result of women’s scholarship in these areas. First, they explored whether there was a previous matri­ archal age when women had equal or superior power to men and when the primary deity was a goddess or goddesses. Second, they examined whether there is an “ essential female nature.” Some feminists believe that women are by nature more intuitive and peaceful. Other feminists dis­ agree strongly and believe most differences be­ tween the sexes are cultural. Many women both within and outside main­ stream religions began to look into the question of God as female. Patriarchy seemed founded on the notion that God was male and men were fash­ ioned in his image, with women as a lesser after­ thought. Women began to write new liturgies and ceremonies. Since 1980 a veritable revolution has occurred in the liberal mainstream churches, with the production of revised versions of hymn books and prayers to include less male-centered language. Feminist Jewish women have rewrit­ ten the Seder. Catholic, Episcopal, and Jewish women have fought dynamic battles to enter the ministry.

Some women found their own religions too op­ pressive and opted to create new religious organi­ zations. Groups of women chose to identify with the ancient archetype of the witch as a symbol for feminine power. While often depicted as ugly and evil, the witch was also seen as a woman who de­ fined herself; claimed her own authority; was at home with nature and her own intuition; and was skilled in the ancient arts of healing, herbalism, midwifery, and magic. The witch, therefore, was a powerful symbol for thousands o f women who op­ posed patriarchal ideas—particularly those in pre­ dominantly male medical and scientific establish­ ments. The images of ancient goddesses sparked inter­ est as well. The idea of a goddess, one that stands simply for the creative force within, or an actual deity, is a difficult concept for some women to em­ brace, but for others it is an idea that for the first time freed them from the vestigial prejudices they may have held about their own body. No longer were they the daughters of Eve, the sinner, a mere bone of Adam; they were part of the divine cos­ mos. Certain women saw the goddess as the earth; others saw her as the creative force in the uni­ verse; and some saw her as the mystery o f birth, life, death, and regeneration. By the 1990s thousands of wom en’s spirituality groups in North America existed, ranging from study groups within Jewish and Christian denom­ inations to at least a thousand small goddess-ori­ ented W icca groups. ■ MARGOT AD LER S ee

also

Feminist Theology; Religion.

§ Sports hroughout much o f the past century, the woman athlete has been a controversial pub­ lic figure. Noted for her muscular physique, her athletic virtuosity, and her bold entrance into a traditionally male arena, she has embodied soci-

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SPORTS

A Chinese American girls’ basketball team in Boston, Massachusetts, circa 1930.

ety’s hopes, fears, and conflicts about ever chang­ ing definitions of womanhood. Sometimes cele­ brated as the quintessential modern woman, other times condemned as a repulsive aberration from proper femininity, the woman athlete has provided a focal point for larger cultural debates about gender relations and, specifically, the much disputed question of whether men are “naturally” or physiologically superior to women. As popular debates swirled around them, however, most women played sports simply for the pleasures and challenges of athletics. Through sport, they found opportunities to develop skills, win public ac­ claim, expand their social worlds, and push their physical and mental limits through competition and teamwork. In the early 1800s women romped, skated, played Native American ball games, and some­ times entered road races and boxing matches. Not until the late nineteenth century did women en­ ter organized sports in significant numbers. In the post-Civil War decades, wealthy white women

took up country club sports like tennis and golf while middle-class girls and women rode bicycles, followed exercise regimens, and played basketball and baseball at their high schools and colleges. In the 1910s and 1920s young working-class women also took up sports in municipal athletic leagues, YW CAs, ethnic clubs, and workplace recreation programs. In Chicago, for example, African American women played basketball on the pow­ erhouse “Roamer Girls” team while Jewish base­ ball players from the Hebrew Institute formed the “ Hebrew Maidens” team. Early-twentieth-century observers were fasci­ nated by the “modern athletic girl,” who seemed to thrive in every class, racial, and ethnic commu­ nity. Lippincott’s Monthly in 1911 glowingly de­ scribed the modern athletic woman: “ She loves to walk, to row, to ride, to motor, to jump and ru n . . . as Man walks, jumps, rows, rides, motors, and runs.” Some doubted that the resemblance was a change for the better. In 1912 the Ladies’ Home Journal published a piece whose tide, “Are Athlet-

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ics Making Girls M asculine?” , signaled alarm at the very possibility. The article posed the question in its starkest terms: Would female athleticism turn women into masculine facsimiles of the op­ posite sex? Or might women “feminize” sport, eroding the boundary between male and female realms? When women competed seriously as athletes, they threatened men’s exclusive claim to “ mascu­ line” qualities of physical aggression, strength, speed, and power; women’s participation in sports suggested that physical differences between the sexes might be an artifact of culture rather than a law of nature. M uch of the debate about female athleticism focused on an area of undisputed physical difference—women’s reproductive ca­ pacity. Although doctors had long recommended moderate exercise as a cure for menstrual irregu­ larity and discomfort, women’s enthusiasm for highly competitive sport pushed experts toward a revised view of athletics as dangerous. Doctors and physical educators warned that excessive ex­ ercise would damage reproductive organs, dimin­ ish fertility, and overstimulate female emotions to the point of nervous collapse. They warned as well that overindulgence in sport would reduce the sexual inhibitions, and thus the moral stature, of the “overzealous girl.” In response to such fears, medical experts and women physical educators agreed that the best policy was to recommend moderate competition under separately supervised female athletic pro­ grams. The policy of moderation sought to pre­ serve the benefits of sport to the modern athletic girl while at the same time ensuring her physical safety and moral respectability. For women physi­ cal educators, “moderation” also served as a ratio­ nale for their separate control of women’s sports in schools and colleges around the country. From the rg2os to the 1970s, school athletic programs typically limited female students to intramural competition among classmates, banning inter­ scholastic competitions as too strenuous and “un­ ladylike.”

As the policy of moderate competition took hold in school and city recreation programs, commer­ cial sport promoters and sympathetic journalists worked out another solution to the conflict be­ tween femininity and athleticism. Responding to the charge that sport made women ugly and un­ feminine, promoters and journalists countered with the claim that an athlete’s “ masculine” skills were offset by her appealing femininity. The me­ dia, enraptured with aquatic stars like Helene Wainright and tennis “goddesses” like Helen Wills, promoted women athletes as exemplars of a new standard of beauty characterized by physical energy and a sassy vitality. Advertisers even hosted beauty pageants as sidelight events at athletic tour­ naments, featuring athletes as contestants. To their credit, sports promoters actively supported highly competitive sport for women. But by constantly contrasting women’s “ masculine” athletic talents with their “feminine” attributes, their strategy im­ plicitly apologized for women’s athletic skill and confirmed the essential masculinity of sport. This strategy of promotion mixed with apology increased the popularity of women’s sport in the years between World War I and World War II but did little to reduce the underlying tension be­ tween sport and womanhood. In fact the great popularity of sport in the 1920s led many journal­ ists to view it as a site of women’s larger challenge to male authority. Reporters described recordbreaking female performances as “battlefs] won for feminism” by women athletes “who can meet the male upon even terms.” Although few women competed directly against men, the press regu­ larly reported on women-only events as if they were mixed competitions designed to dethrone men from their designated position of athletic and social superiority. Catch phrases such as “Men’s athletic crown in danger” or “Who will be the weaker sex?” hinted that underneath the fascina­ tion with female athletic achievements lay a per­ ception that women’s athleticism did indeed chal­ lenge men’s physical and cultural authority. In the late 1930s and 1940s, the sense of imper-

SPORTS

iled manhood became more explicit. The playing fields were increasingly populated not by glam­ orous swimmers and golfers but by white workingclass women, African American women, and other women of color, who competed on factorybased teams, at the renowned Tuskegee Institute track teams, or for ethnic clubs like the Polish Fal­ cons. As the unsettled social relations of the De­ pression and war years sparked a renewed conser­ vatism on matters of gender, the media’s earlier tone of wondrous appreciation shifted to one of suspicion and hostility. The career of Mildred “ Babe” Didrikson illumi­ nates the changing currents in women’s sport. As a working-class teenager from Port Arthur, Texas, Didrikson was recruited in the late 1920s to play for a Dallas insurance company and soon became a national celebrity when she won two golds and a silver medal in track and field at the 1932 Los Ange­ les Olympics. With her slim, angular build, closecropped hair, and baggy sweatsuit, Didrikson was a diamond in the rough who delighted the media with her homespun manner and razor-sharp wit. Yet because she excelled in the more controversial women’s sports—track, basketball, and baseball — and failed to meet conventional standards of femi­ ninity or show any romantic or sexual interest in men, Didrikson’s spot in the limelight faded quickly. By the late 1930s, if the press referred to her at all, it was as a freakish anomaly. In the mid-i940s, however, Didrikson made a remarkable comeback in the sport of golf. To en­ sure her success, Didrikson muffled her earlier outspokenness and, like many midcentury U.S. women athletes, chose a path of compromise. She took up a more “ respectable sport,” began to wear skirts and makeup, and married professional wrestler George Zaharias. She successfully re­ vived both her career and her image through a combination of astounding skill and accommoda­ tion to prevailing gender norms. The press com­ mented less on the former and more on the latter; in 1947 Life magazine featured Didrikson under the headline “ Babe Is a Lady Now: The World’s

Most Amazing Athlete Has Learned to Wear Ny­ lons and Cook for Her Huge Husband.” The Midwest-based All-American Girls Profes­ sional Baseball League (AAGPBL), which drew over a half-million fans annually between 1943 and 1954, adopted a similar approach. The league employed what officials called the “femininity principle,” a shrewd strategy designed to contrast athletes’ “masculine skill” with their “feminine at­ tractiveness.” Dressed in pastel, skirted uniforms and forbidden by league rules to wear their hair in boyish bobs or to dress in masculine garb, A A G P B L players courted public approval with a wholesome girl-next-door image while thrilling their fans with stellar play. Although some players approved of the femininity principle and others found it ludicrous, all agreed that abiding by the rules was a small price to pay for the chance to pursue a dream —playing high-level professional sport before appreciative audiences. Women of color were denied this opportunity, since the allwhite league management believed that African American players, in particular, might damage the league’s “feminine” image. Outside of the Olympics, a de facto color bar prevailed until the 1950s, when Althea Gibson broke the racial bar­ rier in women’s tennis. The near obsession with femininity in the post­ war era spoke to a relatively new anxiety con­ nected to women’s sport—the matter of lesbian­ ism. As mentioned earlier, previous fears about women’s sexuality centered on the possibility that sport might remove sexual inhibitions and un­ leash women’s heterosexual passions. But mid­ century Americans more often suspected that the erotic desires released through sport might be those of women for other women. During the first half of the century, the recognition of active fe­ male desire, the acceptance of Freudian theories of sexual development, and a greater awareness of homosexuality combined to cast sexual suspicion on all women who did not appear appropriately feminine and heterosexual. Women athletes, long noted for their “masculine” skills and desires, be-

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came prime targets of the heightened sexual sus­ picion. Although lesbians typically rejected the perni­ cious stereotype of the mannish lesbian athlete, by the 1940s and 1950s many athletically inclined les­ bians had found sport to be a convivial and safe space to gather with other women. As a public ac­ tivity that encouraged a certain amount of gender unorthodoxy—to “throw like a boy” was a good thing in sport—and nurtured close bonds among women, sport provided a social space in which lesbians could express themselves and create a sense of community. By the 1960s the problematic image and limited popularity of women’s sport had created some­ thing ofa stalemate. Women continued to compete in school sport, industrial and community-based recreation, and high-level amateur competitions like the Olympics, but they did so with minimal financial support, scant media coverage, and damning suspicion about their sexual preference. However, the stasis soon gave way to change as a restless generation of young physical educators began to lobby for intercollegiate competition. Women within the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) were also pressing for change, and after decades of rivalrous animosity physical educators and AAU leaders joined forces to promote women’s athletics. With the new wave of feminism in the early 1970s, women’s athletics entered a watershed era in which long-standing barriers to full participa­ tion in sport seemed to fall almost as fast as women could push them over. Bolstered by the women’s movement, advocates of women’s sport began de­ manding equal access to athletic resources and training. They won their most important and con­ troversial victory with the passage of Title IX of the 1972 Educational Act, which prohibited sex dis­ crimination in any educational institution receiv­ ing federal funds. Although slow to be enforced, the act dictated that schools at all levels establish gender equality in their athletic programs. Title IX and the momentum it generated ush­ ered in two decades of significant athletic prog­

ress not limited to academic institutions. While professional athletes such as tennis player Billie Jean King organized women’s tours and cam­ paigned for increased prize monies, amateur women’s sport blossomed at all levels, from elite Olympic competitions to community-based pro­ grams like youth soccer, aerobics, and adult softball. Girls’ participation in interscholastic high school competition jumped from three hundred thousand in 1971 to more than two million in 1992. In women’s college sport, the number of in­ tercollegiate athletes rose from sixteen thousand to over one hundred sixty thousand between the early 1970s and late 1980s. Along with this dra­ matic increase in numbers, women athletes have also earned far greater acceptance and apprecia­ tion as women such as tennis star Martina Navratilova (who is now “out” as a lesbian), track champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee, speed skater Bonnie Blair, and figure skaters Debi Thomas and Kristi Yamaguchi became household names and national celebrities. The recent popularity of women’s sports also in­ dicates its pivotal and controversial place in ongo­ ing conflicts over gender and power in U.S. society. Within sport, issues of access and equity are by no means resolved. After more than two decades since Title IX, few colleges meet standards for gender eq­ uity in school sport, and women’s athletics are typ­ ically governed by male-dominated athletic de­ partments and national sports organizations. Some women’s struggles around body image and sexual­ ity suggest that the persistent tension between sport and womanhood continues to affect athletes on a personal level as well. For some, the pressure to meet ever shrinking ideals of thinness has turned athletic training into a punitive program of weight loss rather than a source of skill or enjoyment; for others, the continued stigma of the “ mannish les­ bian” creates pressure to leave sport, compete less vigorously, or remain closeted. Far from being discouraged, women are ap­ proaching these barriers with a new sense of enti­ tlement, energized by their own positive experi­ ences in sport. In its fullest expression, the demand

STAN DA RD IZED T E S T IN G

for meaningful leisure, unrestricted access to sport, and athletic self-determination involves more than simply forcing men to make room for women in the existing sports world. It demands that ath­ letic attributes long defined as m asculine—skill, strength, speed, physical assertiveness,uninhibited use of space and motion—become human quali­ ties, not those of a particular gender. Ultimately, obtaining athletic freedom will be part of trans­ forming the broader social relations of gender within which sporting life takes place. Susan K. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport (N.Y.: Free Press, 1994); Helen Lenskyj, Out o f Bounds: Women, Sport and Sexuality (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1986); Mariah Burton Nelson, Are We Winning Yet?: How Women Are Changing Sports and Sports Are Changing Women (N.Y.: Random House, 1991). . SUSAN K. CAHN See

also

Title IX.

§ Standardized Testing tandardized testing began in the United States in the early 1900s to determine one’s individ­ ual intelligence quotient (I.Q.) and has generally benefited Northwestern European men while lowering the opportunities o f women, Southern and Eastern European men, and people of color. This was unequivocally true until 1992, when Asian American males received higher average scores than white males on the major college ad­ missions tests, the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) and the American College Testing Pro­ gram’s A C T Assessment (ACT). Many occupa­ tions also require standardized licensing tests, which has an adverse impact on the participation of women and people of color. Standardized testing is used educationally from kindergarten through college to determine readi­ ness for school; to track students into remedial, regular, or advanced classes; for admission to col­

S

m

lege or graduate school; and to place students in college English and math classes. Standardized I.Q. and achievement tests have restricted educa­ tional opportunities for African American, Latina/ Latino, and immigrant students by classifying them as “ learning disabled” or slow learners and tracking them in special education classes in the earliest elementary school years. Frequently, the result is that they are never able to catch up to their peers and eventually drop out of school. In 1986 the U.S. District Court for the Northern Dis­ trict o f California ruled in the Larry P. v. Wilson Riles case, a class-action suit brought by a group of African American parents, that standardized and other I.Q. tests could no longer be used to classify children as “ educable mentally retarded.” The standardized tests that have the greatest im­ pact on women’s educational opportunities are the major gatekeeping college entrance examina­ tions. The main purpose of these tests is to predict first-year college grades, not subsequent college grades or success in later life. Considerable docu­ mentation shows that women receive higher aver­ age grades than men in every course they take in high school and college. However their score av­ erages on the SAT have been 50 to 60 points lower than men’s since 1967. Since 1981 women have av­ eraged approximately 10 points lower than men on the SAT-Verbal and 50 points lower on the SAT-Math despite equal training in math and nearly equal background in science. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) has ac­ knowledged that the SAT underpredicts women’s college performance and overpredicts men’s. It also admits that the single best predictor of college grades is high school grades. Many studies have corroborated this, including an E T S researcher’s 1991 study of twelve thousand students, which found that the SAT substantially underpredicts women’s college math grades at every level. Mas­ sachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) accepts women with lower SAT-Math scores than men and finds they perform equally well throughout their college career. In 1989 a federal district court in the southern district of New York ruled that the

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SAT could no longer be the sole criterion for de­ termining merit scholarships in New York State because of its bias against women. The A C T Assessment is also biased against women. In 1993 women averaged 20.5 points out of a possible 36 points while men averaged 21.0. The A C T is a test of acquired knowledge in English, math, reading, and science reasoning. Women tra­ ditionally score higher on the English and reading sections but lower in math and science. Reasons for the differences on college entrance tests are complex but relate to the speed o f the test; women’s reluctance to guess if they aren’t sure of the answer; and the content o f the ques­ tions, which are more often about math, science, and politics, subjects that favor men’s scores, rather than the humanities, the arts, psychology, and writing, in which women excel. Women have consistently outperformed men on tests of writing ability, including E T S ’s tests. These biased tests diminish women’s opportu­ nities to obtain millions o f dollars in merit schol­ arships that are awarded by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation—women receive only two-fifths of the National Merit Scholarships— and hundreds of private companies and founda­ tions; gain admission to the nearly r,6oo accred­ ited colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Europe; and enter many special ed­ ucation programs for “gifted and talented” high school students, which rely on these scores for ad­ mission. Lower scores also result in women being placed in less challenging college English and math courses. These factors contribute to a real dollar loss for women in later life; they get less prestigious jobs, earn less money, and have fewer leadership op­ portunities than do men, which may affect their self-esteem. Students of color, except for Asian American males, have much lower average scores than white males on both college entrance exams. Fe­ males of color are doubly penalized by the SAT because on average they have lower SAT scores

than the males in their racial or ethnic group. (The A C T does not publish gender breakdowns of scores by ethnic group.) Students of color have problems with the tests because o f differences in language usage, cultural experience, and quality of academic preparation. For women of all races, gender bias on the SAT is systemic and has oc­ curred for more than twenty-five years. ■ P H Y L L IS ROSSER See

B

also

Education.

Stereotypes

Age Stereotypes he pairing of ageism and sexism creates stereo­ types against older women that are among the most vicious in society. Even if stereotypes are false, they are powerful and can be harmful be­ cause they influence public opinion and action. Throughout history negative images o f older women have resulted in dislike, denigration, and outright persecution. Older women are lumped together as if their only identity is age and as if age somehow disqualifies their sexuality and value. Because of these stereotypes men, employers, and younger women discriminate against older women. Older women themselves internalize the nega­ tive stereotypes. As they age, some women have di­ minished self-esteem. Instead of being proud of their age, they deny their aging to others and even to themselves. Many try to hide the signs of aging, as if aging is shameful, and often he about their ages. Stereotypes stigmatize older women at much earlier ages than men and result in what Susan Sontag first called the double standard o f aging. By contrast, in Native American cultures, older women are generally well-respected members of the community. They are listened to, their coun­ sel on important matters is sought, and they are

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STEREOTYPES

well incorporated into the community and family. In some tribes, women cannot become healers or medicine people until after menopause. Being called an Elder is an honorific word, not one that calls forth a negative image. In medieval times, old women were stereotyped as witches and suffered cruel punishments. Fairy tales and other stories characterized old women also as nuisances, mean, selfish, and shrews. Ac­ cording to Jane M ills’s research in Womanwords: A Dictionary o f Words, the following stereotypes are often applied to old women: anile, bag, battleaxe, beldam, biddy, dame, dowager, girl, gorgon, gossip, hag, haggard, hen, jade, maid/maiden, mother, mutton, spinster, and witch. “Anile,” which comes from the Latin word anus, means old woman and, as M ills points out, the word “ entered English in the mid 17th century with grotesque, misogynistic connotations. Dictio­ nary definitions include a doddering old woman, old womanish, imbecile, a silly old woman.” “Anile” was used more in England than in the United States, according to M ills, who lives in England. However, most o f the other terms con­ tinue to be used in the United States. In the 1890s the word “bag” referred to a middle-aged or elderly slattern, notes Mills. In the United States “bag” has come to refer to a woman with an old uterus or to a postmenopausal, nonfertile older woman. In the United States older women are also stereotyped as witches, bitches, nags, and crones. Older feminists are reclaiming the word “crone” as an honored appellation by creating craning ceremonies to celebrate the coming of maturity. Despite this, “ crone” is still used to describe old women negatively. Numerous dictionaries, for ex­ ample, define crone as “an ugly, withered old woman.” Even the seemingly neutral word “grand­ mother” also may be used as a stereotype. As Bar­ bara Macdonald points out in her book with C yn­ thia Rich, Look M e in the Eye: O ld Women, Aging, and Ageism, even women who never marry or who are childless are stereotyped as grand­

mothers once they are older and are often ex­ pected to serve and nurture others, including younger feminists whose feminism fails to em­ brace old women as worthwhile. This author’s research demonstrates that not only are older women stereotyped by others but also that many self-stereotype by adopting a peapod lifestyle characterized by the seven Ps: ad­ hering to patriarchy, propriety, politeness, per­ fectionism, passivity, patterning, and mourning prettiness. T he older women’s movement has sought to substitute more positive Ps such as pride, power, passion, and proactivity. When women become mothers-in-law, they suffer from cruel stereotypes claiming that all mothers-in-law are possessive of sons, manipula­ tive, mean to daughters-in-law, and so on. Older mothers themselves are the butt of many jokes that stereotype them as demanding, whining, en­ veloping women who are unable to give up con­ trol. Such stereotypes can be most cruel to Jewish older women. Many lesbians, now old, suffered terribly in youth from homophobic stereotypes. Now, in somewhat more accepting times, they suffer from the double stigmatization of being old women and being lesbians. Even within the lesbian women’s community, young lesbians are not im­ mune to the ageism that permeates society. Despite some notable exceptions, movies, tele­ vision, and the print media stereotype older women as silly, stupid, senile, screechy, and stub­ born. For example, Sophia, the old mother in the long-running situation comedy The Golden Girls, had some endearing qualities but nevertheless perpetuated ageist stereotypes. Although many people loved the portrayal by Ruth Gordon of feisty eighty-year-old Maude in the film Harold and Maude, this film also stereotyped old women as useless. Maude committed suicide at age eighty because she saw no further role for herself. The stereotype that older women are nonsexual has had profound consequences both for women, who have feared what would happen to them, and

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also for older men, who have eschewed older women to bed or have wed women much younger than themselves. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut has re­ ferred to the “ new cookie syndrome” of men drop­ ping their midlife and old wives for younger women. Women who are unmarried at later ages are of­ ten called old maids and considered to be petty, peculiar, prudish, or pests. Married, single, wid­ owed, or divorced older women are sometimes re­ ferred to as “girls,” which infantilizes them and denies their wisdom and life experience. Despite the marvelous new roles some older women are carving out, the stereotype o f the old woman knitting in a rocking chair persists. Ac­ cording to this author’s research, when people are asked to write anonymously what comes to mind when they hear “old woman,” they gener­ ally write words such as cranky, lonely, sad, wrin­ kled, messy, poor, or infirm. Younger women fear aging because of these negative images and often fail to include old women in their friendship and organizational networks or relegate them to serv­ ing refreshments, as Barbara Macdonald has pointed out. A leading opponent of ageist stereotypes has been Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Pan­ thers. This organization began when Kuhn and some of her friends were forced to retire because of the ageist stereotype that they could no longer function well after sixty-five. The myths about older women, embodied in stereotypes, were also combated as early as the 1970s by Robert Butler, M .D ., in his book Why Survive: Being O ld in America. Despite nearly twenty years of combat­ ing stereotypes by these and other leaders, ageist stereotypes remain prevalent in U.S. society. In the 1990s, with the focus on the U.S. health care system, old women, who tend to live longer than do men, became stereotyped as costly con­ sumers of health care, including long-term care. They were blamed for rising health costs and ra­ tioned services when the problems in the health care system obviously resulted from other causes. Research also has demonstrated that many

physicians discriminate against older women. Rather than spending time and effort for diagno­ sis, advice, and treatment, many physicians often rush older women out o f the office or overmed­ icate them with psychotropic medications. Per­ haps the negative stereotypes of older women in many physicians’ magazines influence the doc­ tors. For example, Geriatrics, a journal read by many physicians, is full of pharmaceutical com­ panies’ color advertisements that depict meno­ pausal women and old women as cranky, de­ pressed, frail, confused, and silly. Even when the women’s illnesses, such as arthritis, were the same as men’s, the old women were portrayed in the journal as unkempt, passive, and incompetent, while the men with the same diagnosis appeared neat, well dressed, and active. Perhaps it was accurate that the 1994-95 televi­ sion series Chicago Hope, in one of its first shows, portrayed a young male physician who over­ looked appendicitis in an old woman, then yelled at a female intern for interrupting him and asking him to look at “an old woman with arthritis.” The patient might have had terrible arthritis (his stereotype of old women), but she also ended up with a burst appendix because o f his stereotypical thinking. Stereotypes hurt old women and can even kill if old women are neglected as a result. There are homeless old women on U.S. streets who are pic­ tured as senile when what really troubles them is poverty and the lack of affordable housing. One old woman in a housing project for the elderly keeps a basket of marbles outside her apartment. When asked why she does this, she explains, “I want to show I haven’t lost my marbles,” which is her joking way of counteracting the stereotype. However, on the whole, many old women in the United States feel powerless to counteract the stereotypes against them. Ruth Harriet Jacobs, Be An Outrageous Older Woman—A R.A.S.P. [Remarkable Aging Smart Person] (Manchester, Conn.: K.I.T. Press, 1993); Barbara Macdonald, with Cyn­ thia Rich, Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging and Ageism (San Francisco: Spinsters, Inc., 1993); Jane Mills,

STEREO TYPES

Wonumwords: A Dictionary o f Words About Women (New York: The Free Press, 1992). . RUTH H A R R IE T JACOBS See

also

Aging.

Class Stereotypes lass stereotypes, which abound in all classstratified societies, have always been a part of U.S. culture. The primary stereotypes have typi­ cally reflected the world views of the dominant classes—their self-satisfaction on the one hand and their contempt for underlings on the other. While women who belong to the social elite have been stereotyped as refined, accomplished, and virtuous, for example, women who belong to sub­ ordinate groups have been labeled ignorant, lazy, and depraved. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the numerous stereotypes that have disparaged the sexual morality of women at the bottom of class hierarchies. A prime example is the “Jezebel” stereotype that has been applied to Black slaves. Building on transatlantic slave traders’ derogatory descriptions of African mores, slave-holding households in the U.S. colonies excused men’s sexual abuse of fe­ male slaves by labeling the victims instinctively promiscuous women. By the time of the Ameri­ can Revolution, images of lustful bondwomen suffused public discussion of chattel slavery. Such images became more pervasive in the nineteenth century, when antislavery movements demanded discussion of the rape evidenced by the significant numbers of slaves fathered by white men. The Jezebel stereotype was deployed by slavery’s oppo­ nents as well as its defenders: abolitionists referred to Black Jezebels and white rapists alike to support arguments that slavery corrupted everyone it touched. At base, though, the Jezebel stereotype served slavery’s defenders. It buttressed the master class’s claims to respectability by excusing the men for rape and suggesting that women of the

C

master class were paragons of chastity because males looking for illicit sex had to look no further than the slave quarters. When bondwomen were branded libidinous, the whole slave community was defined as unfit for freedom because its mem­ bers supposedly lacked self-control. Dichotomous thinking about the sexual stan­ dards of women on opposite sides of the color line has shaped other class stereotypes as well. In the late 1840s, when Anglo businessmen began to form financial and marital alliances with wealthy Mexican families in California, Anglo writers re­ placed blanket aspersions on M exicanas’ moral character with sharply color-conscious portrayals of lower-class mestiza hussies and upper-class “ Spanish ladies.” In the 1880s and 1890s, journal­ ists associated with political movements that wished to bar Chinese immigrants from the United States stereotyped West-Coast prostitutes as “ Chinese slave girls” and ignored the far greater numbers of white prostitutes. Contrasting images of vice-laden Black workers and innocent white working women in danger of contamination be­ came key ideological props for excluding Black workers from factory jobs in the industrializing South. Stereotypes of Native American women as ignorant drudges clinging to backward ways of life have long gone hand in hand with romantic de­ pictions o f white women “ civilizing the wilder­ ness” as homesteaders. Women of color who excel in their work some­ times have been condescendingly labeled “credits to their race,” but only when their work has seemed valuable in capitalist terms. The domi­ nant culture has disparaged or ignored their labors for people other than white employers: Na­ tive American women’s contributions to tribal so­ cieties, Mexicanas’ role in communal economies that antedated Anglo settlement and investment in the Southwest, Black women’s domestic work for their own families as opposed to white house­ holds, and so on. This has fueled stereotypes that define women of color as virtually worthless un­ less they are working under white supervision. White chauvinism has not been so inflexible,

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however, as to preclude stereotypes that depict white working-class women as sexually loose. Members of stigmatized ethnic communities have often felt the sting o f such insults. In the 1840s and 1850s, for example, Irish Catholic im­ migrants were widely portrayed as loose women, as were Russian Jewish immigrants in the early 1900s. Another especially vulnerable group has been white women who work in occupations in which people of color predominate—sharecrop­ pers in the Southeast, for instance, and migrant agricultural laborers in the West. But ethnic prej­ udice and contempt for whites in jobs defined as “ colored” have not by any means been the only forces at play. Sterling testaments to that fact can be found in genteel literature on white “working girls” em­ ployed in the Northeast’s factories and department stores in the late nineteenth century. Though these women held jobs exclusively reserved for whites and belonged in the vast majority of cases to ethnic groups well above the bottom of the heap, legions o f writers defined the working girl as a woman prone to sexual vice. Some blamed her parents, portraying them as lowlifes incapable of imbuing their children with decent behavioral standards. Others argued that miserably low wages com­ pelled working girls to engage in part-time prosti­ tution in order to make ends meet. The image dominating the literature, however, was that o f a woman corrupted by an unseemly taste for luxu­ ries beyond her means. Working girls were most commonly vilified, in other words, for failing to ac­ cept their lowly station. Stereotypes charging lower-class women with sexual misconduct have invariably promoted the idea that the communities these women represent deserve their lot in life. The underlying assump­ tion in every case has been that a natural domin­ ion of good people over bad people determines the community’s place in the social order. Just how the line dividing the good people from the bad people is drawn has depended on the racial and ethnic identity of the particular target group

and on the specific historical circumstances that made the group a target. One thing has remained constant, however; so­ cially subordinate classes have been depicted as morally inferior beings. Bigotry on the part of the stereotypes’ architects accounts to a large degree for this motif, but fears regarding the social order’s stability enter the picture as well. Slaveholders and their sympathizers peddled the Jezebel myth with increased vigor, for instance, in response to a wave o f antislavery agitation led by free Blacks af­ ter the American Revolution. Denigrating images of the late-nineteenth-century working girl came to the fore as her communities launched mighty challenges to employers’ control of the workplace and to upper-class political clout. Charges that Russian Jewish women staffed a giant network of brothels established by their landsmen poured forth in the muckraking press of the 1910s as work­ ers from that same ethnic group took the lead in a series of strikes and union-organizing drives in the garment industry. In similar fashion, today’s stereotype of the immoral “welfare mother” —por­ trayed as an African American or Latina despite the fact that most women receiving welfare pay­ ments are white—emerged against the backdrop o f social revolts by working-class people of color in the 1960s and 1970s. As these patterns suggest, stereotypes that define oppressed populations as inherently base can also be interpreted as admissions that their subordina­ tion requires ideological props—that it is not, in fact, a law of nature but the result of social arrange­ ments that might be overturned. If class hierar­ chies and the racial-ethnic inequities that interlace them were really natural phenomena, the elite would have no need to defend their privilege with specious images of the groups they dominate. Antonia I. Castaneda, “The Political Economy of Nine­ teenth-Century Stereotypes of Californianas,” in Between Borders, edited by Adelaida Del Castillo (Los Angeles: Floricanto Press, 1989); Sarah Eisenstein, Give Us Bread But Give Us Roses: Working Women’s Consciousness in the United States, 1890 to the First World War (London: Rout-

STEREO TYPES

ledge & Kegan Paul, 1983); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985). ■ P R I S C I L L A MUROLO

Disability Stereotypes ver the past several decades, the treatment of people with disabilities has been evolving from a charity model to a civil rights model, but societal attitudes have lagged far behind. Women and jnen with disabilities face pervasive negative stereotypes that call into question their ability to function as independent, competent, sexual adults. Women with disabilities face disabilitybased and gender-based stereotypes that are mu­ tually reinforcing and further limit their roles and options. According to available research, the attitudes of nondisabled people toward people with disabili­ ties are predominantly negative. Typical assump­ tions are that disability is punishment for sin, that it is contagious, and that individuals with disabili­ ties are sick, helpless, incompetent, and asexual. These stereotypes are reflected in the language used to describe people with disabilities, which is dehumanizing and emphasizes victimization, for example, “the blind,” “suffers from polio,” or “ confined to a wheelchair.” The disability rights movement favors language that puts the person first, and presents disability as a fact, not a tragedy. This movement has successfully fought for the passage o f laws that prohibit discrimination against people with disabilities, such as the land­ mark Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). In part, stereotypical attitudes reflect a lack of exposure to and realistic information about the lives of people with disabilities. Also, nondisabled people often use their own experiences with ill­ ness and temporary disability to make assump­ tions about the helplessness of disabled people. Finally, at the root of frightened and hostile feel­

O

ings are unconscious anxieties regarding whole­ ness, perfection, loss, and weakness. Women with disabilities face numerous stereo­ types, including those based on disability, gender, race, and sexual orientation. Studies suggest they are perceived more negatively than are disabled men or nondisabled women. Stereotypes about disability tend to reinforce stereotypes about women. Both emphasize passivity, weakness, and helplessness, so that women with disabilities have few models for positive identification. In contrast, the positive male stereotypes of virility, assertive­ ness, and independence serve as a counterforce to negative disability stereotypes; thus men with dis­ abilities have some affirmative imagery with which to identify. Although stereotypes of women and disability overlap, women with disabilities are not perceived as the “ ideal” female. Myths about their sexuality and nurturing capacities bring into question their ability to assume the traditional female roles of wife and mother. The power of these myths is suggested by the fact that women with disabilities are less likely to have partners and face more barriers to having children than do nondisabled women or disabled men. Because sexual attractiveness and desirability of women continue to be measured in terms of physical perfection, women who fail to meet traditional standards of beauty by virtue of disability are often perceived as asexual. Based on this narrow view of sexuality, such a perception fails to acknowledge the potential of every individ­ ual to be sexual. Existing simultaneously with the myth of asexuality is the myth that women with dis­ abilities are oversexed and/or unable to control their sexuality, as though disability inevitably alters their impulses and judgment. This assumption is often used to restrict their sexual expression and childbearing, for example, through sterilization or placement in institutions or other confining envi­ ronments, in the guise of protecting them from be­ coming victims of sexual exploitation. Another stereotype limiting the access of women with disabilities to the social/sexual arena

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is that they “should stick with their own kind” and choose disabled partners, as though disability is their only defining characteristic. For lesbians with disabilities, a prevalent myth reflecting het­ erosexist bias is that these women have become lesbians by default, since they cannot attract a man. Partners of women with disabilities face their own set of stereotypes, including being “saints” for coupling with a disabled woman, or choosing to be with her as the result of psycholog­ ical problems, such as a pathological need to res­ cue someone who is “ helpless,” or that they are with her because they have low self-esteem and feel they cannot attract anyone “better.” Such stereotypes about partners are based on the false assumption that disabled women only take and have nothing to give in the relationship. A variety of myths serve to deny women with disabilities the right to bear or raise children. These include the assumption that women with disabilities will invariably produce children with disabilities. While this is rarely the case—most disabilities are not hereditary—reproductive free­ dom should encompass the right of women to bear children like themselves, including children with disabilities. Another myth is that women with disabilities will be unable to care adequately for their children, disabled or not. Some of the misconceptions embedded in this myth are that women who may need disability-related help are also not capable of giving nurturance, and that there is only one “right” way to mother. Negative assumptions about sexual desires and mothering capacities of women with disabilities have limited their access to sex education and in­ formation and to family planning services. Also, there have been widespread efforts to restrict their procreative activities through involuntary steril­ ization or other extreme birth-control methods, at times prescribed without the woman’s consent; laws prohibiting the marriage of people with cer­ tain disabilities; and the use of legal means or family pressures to remove children from the care of mothers with disabilities.

While stereotypes about sexuality and nurtur­ ance limit the access o f women with disabilities to partner and parent roles, stereotypes about their competence also limit their access to worker roles. It is typically assumed that women with disabili­ ties need care, not jobs. In fact, women with dis­ abilities are less likely to be employed than are men with disabilities or women without disabili­ ties, and they are more likely to have lower-paying jobs when they are employed. Disabled women of color have even greater difficulty securing decent employment. Schools can be training grounds for unemployment: young women with disabilities are less likely than young men to participate in ca­ reer-oriented courses or to receive training for high-paying jobs. For women with disabilities, the limited access to the socially sanctioned roles of partner, mother, and worker can be debilitating. But some women are able to create new identities that move beyond stereotypes and negative societal expectations, taking pride in inhabiting and exhibiting their bodies exactly the way they are, disability and all. Women whose disabilities affect sexual expres­ sion, pleasure, and positioning invent new ways of doing that which is as old as time. Women whose capabilities are called into question are able to challenge the narrow-minded definitions of com­ petence that focus on the male way and/or the able-bodied way o f doing things. In addition to in­ dividual successes, women with disabilities have begun organizing as a movement committed to fighting oppression, confronting stereotypes, and translating their strengths into positive imagery that can benefit all women. Susan E. Browne, Debra Connors, and Nanci Stern, eds., With the Power o f Each Breath: A Disabled Women’s An­ thology (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1985); Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch, “Disabled Women: Sexism Without the Pedestal,” Journal o f Sociology and Social Welfare Vol. 8 (July 1981): 233-48; Jenny Morris, Pride Against Preju­ dice: Transforming Attitudes to Disability (Philadelphia: New Society Press, 1991). • H A R IL Y N ROUSSO

STEREO TYPES

Racial Stereotypes

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tereotypes—fixed, conventional notions of in­ dividuals and groups thatsuppress individuality and critical thinking—affect many people and groups in society. However, they have special sig­ nificance for women, and for any other less power­ ful or marginalized groups, because the stereotypes applied to them are usually imposed and controlled by others and, as a result, are difficultto change. Who are you? It’s a simple question that de­ mands a complex answer if any of us is to come close to describing ourselves. However, the stereo­ types that society imposes usually have less to do with an individual’s or a group’s characteristics than with the assignment of preordained roles. This typecasting indicates what is expected from you: behavior, intellect, integrity, capabilities, as well as how others treat you. Individuality is over­ shadowed by negative judgments based on caste, class, sexuality, gender, and race. Often passed from one generation to the next as indisputable truths, stereotypes become embed­ ded within family and community belief systems and in turn are used to justify how society re­ sponds to those being labeled, and to advance spe­ cific-policies or agendas. Not surprisingly, race has been central to the creation and perpetuation of stereotypes in the United States. Racial stereotyping flourishes in the most viru­ lent forms when race, more correctly the concept of racial groupings, is used systematically as a means of advancing nationalistic or economic goals, assuming and maintaining privileges, estab­ lishing apartheid systems, denying access, abridg­ ing rights, or fostering inequalities. Such racist stereotypes have been a key ingredient in the lethal mix of conquest, exploitation, oppression, and genocide that has defined this nation’s history. Sexuality and sexual behavior, mental capacity, moral and ethical beliefs, and physical character­ istics are all ingredients of stereotypes that depict people of color in this country as abnormal and in­ ferior. At their most hateful extreme, such labeling

advances the dangerous libel that “ they” are less than fully human. For example, the stereotyping of Native people as “ dirty, thieving, bloodthirsty sav­ ages” has historically been used to justify punitive military policies, routine acts of atrocity, wholesale slaughter, and seizure of land. Stereotyping of African Americans that denied their humanity, in­ telligence, morality, and capabilities was similarly and routinely used in support of slavery and the subsequent limitation of their rights and freedoms. Racial stereotyping not only disempowers and dehumanizes the targeted group as a whole, it is also gendered to place women and men outside society’s ideal of femininity and masculinity, removing any possibility ofprivilegeorprotection. For women, re­ gardless of color, gendered stereotypes tend to un­ dermine self-esteem, while also pushing them to conform to socially set standards of speech, dress, and behavior, and to keep to their assigned sec­ ondary place in the sexual hierarchy. Racially gen­ dered stereotypes of women of color are employed to confirm their greater subservience, deny them the respect and “protection” accorded to white women, and to sanction their use and abuse. All too often these stereotypes reflect this soci­ ety’s obsessive and twisted fixation on female sex­ uality. If white women were once locked into tightly prescribed roles that deified their virtue, the stereotyping o f women of color frequently has depicted them as virtueless, sexually available, and eager. Where some white women are labeled “sluts” and therefore made to seem like “accept­ able prey,” all women of color are often stereo­ typed in that way. In addition to being labeled sexually loose, women o f color have also been characterized as lazy, irresponsible, childlike, and untrustworthy, among a host of other diminishing terms and images meant to justify their perceived lack of status. In popular culture, the colored “she” becomes nameless: “squaw,” “ nigger bitch,” “ mama san,” “tamale.” Racially gendered stereotyping not only seeks to destroy women’s worth to enhance the superiority of others but it also seeks to undermine women’s

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value within their own group, and to distort women’s collective and individual sense o f es­ teem. How many stories and films, how many news reports have played to this theme by depict­ ing women o f color being abused, given away or traded by their own kin, or typically cast as addicts, prostitutes, derelicts, drug dealers, or abusive or negligent mothers? Through the distorted lens of racial stereotypes, the woman on welfare almost automatically be­ comes beige or brown, and her mothering skills, state of need, sexual behavior, reproductive choices, ethics, and morals are immediately sus­ pect in the public mind. She can be demonized and used to justify punitive policies. If you say “ il­ legal immigrant,” the imagined person’s skin is immediately visualized as dark. Images of women of color as breeders dropping babies wherever they go, taking public resources, and giving noth­ ing back in return fuel the fire of those who cry for a policy to close the doors and kick the “ interlop­ ers” out. Through this lens the woman on drugs is vilified and criminalization supersedes treatment; the issue of teenage sexuality is reduced to brand­ ing pregnant teenagers as shameless wantons in need of harsh supervision; poor women’s sexual behavior and responsibility become even more suspect and in need of outside controls ranging from pushing contraceptive techniques to forced sterilization to denying funding for abortion. These racial stereotypes of “ illegal immigrants” perpetuate their subjugation when, in reality, countless women without U.S. citizenship often perform menial, low-paying tasks, without job se­ curity, union protection, or other benefits af­ forded to women in mainstream U.S. society. Stereotyping also leads to public indifference re­ garding issues ranging from women’s increased rates o f incarceration (because the majority of those behind bars are women of color) to the de­ cline in public health or housing services (because it is assumed that women of color are the major beneficiaries). In a society where violence and poverty overshadow the lives of millions of women and children, these stereotypes are used to distance

further those ugly realities, deaden the public’s conscience, distort the debate, and stifle reform. ■ M ARCIA G IL L E S P IE S ee

also

Images ofWomen.

Sexual Stereotypes

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exual or gender stereotypes are structured in­ ferences that link personal attributes to the so­ cial categories o f women and men. Despite women’s recent advances in nontraditional areas and occupations, certain sexual stereotypes per­ sist. These stereotypes interact closely with racial, class, and sexual orientation stereotypes. Stereotypes tend to form most representations of women in media. For example, the “Jewish American Princess” dominates the film Clueless (1995) and Black or Latina women often fill the roles of domestics, as in films such as Forrest Gum p (1994) and The First Wives C lub (1996). In some rap music, the stereotype of the Black woman as emasculating and manipulative is cen­ tral to the message. Lesbians have had to watch as the pendulum of popular culture swings from the stereotype of man-hating and masculine, to chic and fashionable. Stereotypes have been used both to define women and to control them. They limit the possi­ bilities women envision for themselves and there­ fore damage women’s self-esteem and deprive soci­ ety of women’s potential. Examples abound in literature and social reality of the damage sexual stereotypes have done to women’s lives. Because of the limited options embedded in stereotypes, women have suffered alcoholism, drug addiction, self-hate, andsuicide. Although men have been de­ fined by their relationship to the outside world—to nature, to society, even to God — women have been defined in relationship to men. This fact—defini­ tion by relationship to men —holds true for all women, but women ofcolor are defined not only by their relationship to white men but also by their relationship to white women and to men of color.

STEREO TYPES

Nearly all the sexual stereotypes of women cur­ rently in operation were formed in the past century under racist and classist ideologies. Anglo-Ameri­ can women of the upper and middle classes were generally confined to the roles ofwife, mother, and mistress. As white man’s ideal companion and as the mother of his children, the Anglo-American woman was considered the “true woman.” True womanhood wasglorified and placed on a pedestal, especially in the antebellum and post-Civil War South. Accordingto the “cultoftrue womanhood,” white women possessed four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. The exter­ nal, physical signs of true womanhood were deli­ cacy, softness, and weakness. The true woman was to be protected by white men, and true womanhood was inaccessible to working-class, poor white women and to all women of color. It is difficult in this instance (indeed, in most instances) to separate ideology from stereotype: they work together like a hand and glove. In the nineteenth century, enslaved women of African descent were expected to be strong—able to bear fatigue and reproduce “property” for the white master. African American women were everything that the white, “true” woman could not be. In terms of sexuality, they were viewed as promiscuous and overtly sexual. After emancipa­ tion, the stereotype of the strong, Black womanslave fragmented into the controlling images of the mammy, matriarch, welfare mother, and jezebel. Each of these images is central to the in­ terlocking systems of race, gender, and class op­ pression. The mammy, for example, is the faith­ ful, devoted family servant. Although portrayed as physically sensuous, she is asexual, a surrogate mother devoted to the happy development of a white family. Lately, professional Black women have been hampered by this image more than any other. They are treated like mammies and penal­ ized if they do not appear warm and nurturing. A more recent image of Black women, that of the welfare mother, is an updated version of the “breeder” stereotype created during slavery. The welfare mother is categorized as a bad mother,

content to sit around and live off the “dole,” shun­ ning work, passing on her bad values to her off­ spring, and having babies to receive more welfare. Sexual stereotypes are also projected onto other women of color. The mammy stereotype is ap­ plied to the Latina/Chicana domestic in the west­ ern and southwestern United States but with a twist: she is assumed to lack intelligence because she does not speak English. Latinas are also seen as sexually aggressive in response to the cultural stereotype of machismo and sexually repressive, strict Roman Catholicism. This sexual aggression feeds stereotypes o f Latinas’ welfare dependency. Asian women are stereotyped as quiet, delicate, and submissive, especially to men’s desires. O f all women of color, Asian women are perceived as closest to the stereotype of true womanhood but with the discriminating marker of sexual avail­ ability. Stereotypes of the sexually available Asian woman range from the geisha to the mail-order bride. The crucial difference between this stereo­ type and the jezebel/whore image is that Asian women are not seen as aggressive, just available and malleable. According to the stereotype, Asian women make ideal wives because they make no demands, never complain, and exist only to serve. These stereotypes, because they limit roles and opportunities for Asian American women, are as controlling for Asian American women as the im­ ages of matriarch and welfare mother are for Black women. Also burdened by the label of “model minority,” Asian women are exploited economically and politically. Native American women are stereotyped as strong, spiritual “earth mothers.” Because Native peoples have been effectively controlled by U.S. policies, the Native woman is not seen as a threat and has not been subject to stereotyping in recent years. In fact, she has been rendered invisible. But during the period of colonization and westward expansion of the United States, two dominant stereotypes of Native women existed. The first, a variant of the mammy stereotype, was represented by Pocahontas (Native name: Matoaka) and Sacajawea. Loyal, trusting, and trustworthy, these Na-

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tive women “ redeemed” themselves by being useful to white men. The other stereotype of Na­ tive women was the “squaw.” They were seen as general servants to men —ministering to their sex­ ual needs, mothering their children, and main­ taining the culture, while the men were great hunters and warriors. Both these stereotypes dis­ miss the real power Native women had and have in many Native nations. All the sexual stereotypes discussed so far are rooted in heterosexuality. Women who claim a lesbian or bisexual identity share a similar stereo­ type, with variations based on race or class. Until recently, popular culture, arguably, dismissed les­ bians as social rejects—unattractive, unpleasant, and frustrated women. Current portrayals are less negative for lesbians, but more negative for bisex­ ual women, who, especially in film, are stereo­ typed as dishonest, maniacal, murderous, promis­ cuous, and fearful of commitment. Lesbians of color and bisexual women of color have to con­ tend with the perception in their broader com­ munities that homoeroticism is a “white thing.” Claim ing a lesbian or bisexual identity is some­ times perceived as a rejection of ethnic and racial culture and community. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Unwin Hyman,

199° ) ■ « S H E L L E Y P. H A LEY See

M

also

Images of Women.

Sterilization and Sterilization Abuse

n the early 1970s women created a movement to end sterilizations without proper informed consent. The movement arose in many parts of the country as a result of abuses that were then coming to light. Numerous community organiza­

I

tions, particularly the National Welfare Rights Or­ ganization, became alarmed at reports of forced sterilizations of women on welfare and of those re­ ceiving care in city, county, and other government hospitals. Following the disclosures o f the R elf case in 1973, leaders of Black organizations and civil lib­ ertarians raised outraged voices against what was increasingly recognized as sterilization abuse. R elf involved two sisters, Mary Alice, then four­ teen, and Minnie Lee Relf, then twelve, who were sterilized in Montgomery, Alabama, in June 1973. As described in court, two representatives of the federally financed Montgomery Community Ac­ tion Agency called on the girls’ mother requesting consent to give the children birth-control shots. She consented by placing an X on a form that called for surgical sterilization. Presiding Judge Gerhard Gesell declared: Although Congress has been insistent that all fam­ ily planning programs function purely on a volun­ tary basis there is uncontroverted evidence in the record that minors and other incompetents have been sterilized with federal funds and that an indef­ inite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation un­ der the threat that various federally supported wel­ fare benefits would be withdrawn unless they sub­ mitted to irreversible sterilization. Native American women were also targeted. A General Accounting Office report in 1976 re­ vealed that the Indian Llealth Services, a federal agency, had sterilized thousands of women be­ tween the ages of fourteen and forty-four between 1973 and 1976. As a result of the 1974 decision in the R elf case, government-funded sterilizations of individuals under twenty-one were no longer per­ mitted. Nevertheless, the Indian Health Services had sterilized thirteen women and girls younger than twenty-one years. M any other instances substantiated women’s allegations that abuses were rampant. In Los An­ geles County, M exican American women were being sterilized at the County Hospital without

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ST R IK E S

much explanation or information. In South Car­ olina a white physician threatened women on Medicaid, white and Black, by refusing to deliver their babies unless they consented to be sterilized after giving birth. Women and men organized to research, publi­ cize, agitate, and to enact guidelines and legisla­ tion for informed consent. Organizations such as the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse on the East Coast and the Committee Against Forced Sterilization on the West Coast took on the cam­ paigns and formed coalitions with other groups committed to reproductive and health rights. The history of forced sterilization in the United States is long and tragic. The first of the laws em­ powering the state to sterilize unwilling and un­ witting people was passed in 1907 by the Indiana Legislature. The act was intended to prevent pro­ creation of “confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists, and imbeciles” who were confined to state insti­ tutions. Other states followed with what became known as the eugenics laws. It is shocking to learn that between 1907 and 1964 more than 63,000 people were sterilized under such laws in the United States and in the colony of Puerto Rico. These infamous laws are no longer on the books, but their spirit lingers. By the late 1970s at least ten states had proposed compulsory steriliza­ tion of women on welfare. Similar proposals in the 1990s aim to limit welfare benefits of women who have more than the approved number of children or to mandate the use of long-acting con­ traceptives, such as Norplant, for poor women. T he movement against sterilization without proper consent accomplished great successes. One was the enactment o f regulations for New York City hospitals and of a law in New York City requiring a thorough informed consent procedure that has become a model for the country. Another success was the establishment of new guidelines for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, based on those used in New York City. The organizations involved in those struggles of the 1970s established a forum for dialogue among different groups of women. Initially, the N ew York

coalitions working to establish guidelines in the city hospitals brought together representatives of hospital community boards, health care profes­ sionals, civil rights groups, and women’s groups in­ volved in securing abortion rights. Such diverse groups as the National Black Feminist Organiza­ tion, the Lower East Side Neighborhood Health Center, Healthright, Health-PAC, the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse, the Center for Consti­ tutional Rights, the Family Planning Division of the Human Resources Administration, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, Ms. magazine, the National Council of Negro Women, and the National Or­ ganization for Women ensured that many experi­ ences, opinions, and positions were shared. In the process, white middle-class women understood that women of color and women of low income ex­ perienced realities vastly different from their own. Women learned together that the male-dominated medical power structure could act differently to­ ward them because of classist and racist attitudes. But the women also learned that the power struc­ ture viewed them with similar misogyny, infring­ ing upon their rights to make choices. Allan Chase, The Legacy o f Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977); Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics o f Population Control and Reproduc­ tive Choice, rev. ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1995); Helen Rodriguez-Trias, “The Women’s Health Move­ ment: Women Take Power," in Reforming Medicine: Lessons o f the Last Quarter Century, edited by Victor W. Sidel and Ruth Sidel (New York: Pantheon, 1984). ■ H E L E N R O D R IG U E Z - T R IA S See

also

Birth Control; Eugenics; Reproductive

Rights.

g Strikes trikes originated as collective employee work stoppages and, with accompanying picket lines and boycotts, became labor’s chief weapons against employers. They proved effective for other

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ST R IK E S

The famous shoemakers’ strike in Lynn, Massachusetts, on M arch 7, i860, was the largest labor uprising before the C ivil War. The twenty thousand workers on strike included these eight hundred women, whose banner read, “American ladies w ill not be slaves. G ive us a fair compensation and we labour cheerfully.”

forms of social conflict, and women have used adaptations o f the strategies in struggles o f many different kinds, including the following illustra­ tive (but not exhaustive) examples: In 1852, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, president of the Women’s State Temperance Association, probably inspired by Lysistrata, proposed a strike advising women to resolutely refuse conjugal rights to husbands who drank to excess. There is no evidence, however, of this strike’s effectiveness. Skyrocketing food prices led thousands of im­ migrant Jewish working-class housewives in New York City to organize boycotts of kosher butchers in 1902 and of chicken, fish, and vegetable sellers in 1917. Similar protests occurred in Philadel­ phia, Boston, Chicago, and other cities that year.

Women, desperate to feed their families, used mob violence against peddlers and market own­ ers to enforce the boycotts. In 1904 and 1907, spiraling rents led to mass rent strikes, again organized by working-class Jewish women. Further rent strikes occurred be­ tween 1917 and 1920 and again in the 1930s, all women-led. The latter led to the formation of the Consolidated Tenants League of Harlem, which organized a parade of over four thousand protesters. Historians call these consumer actions, com­ mon in Europe, “communal strikes,” in which working-class women, acting out of “female con­ sciousness,” mobilize to preserve their communi­ ties, rather than to fight for gender equality.

STU D EN TS FO R A DEM O CRA TIC SO C IETY (SD S)

Similarly, using the slogan “ D on’t Buy Where You C an ’t Work,” African American women orga­ nized boycotts of white businesses during the de­ pression in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, De­ troit, Harlem, and Cleveland. The following three mass protests involving largely middle-class white women, though not literal strikes, were called strikes to dramatize their militancy: After U.S. entrance into World War I, fought presumably to “ save the world for democracy,” the National Woman’s Party, the militant wing of the suffrage movement, con­ ducted a round-the-clock silent vigil, picketing the White House, their banners demanding democracy at home. Some women were arrested and jailed for up to seven months for “obstruct­ ing sidewalk traffic” ; imprisoned women resorted to hunger strikes and were forcibly fed. Over five hundred women were arrested, one hundred sev­ enty imprisoned, between 1917 and 1919. Courts invalidated the convictions in 1919; this nonvio­ lent protest contributed to the victory of women’s suffrage in 1920. In 1961 an estimated fifty thousand women in sixty communities joined in an unprecedented strike for peace, demanding, “ End the Arms Race, Not the Human Race,” and later helping to achieve the ban on atmospheric testing. The nationwide Women’s Strike for Equality on August 26,1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the Woman’s Suffrage Amendment, was the largest protest for gender equality in U.S. history. Moder­ ates and radicals joined to demand equal opportu­ nities in employment and education, free abor­ tion on demand, and twenty-four-hour child-care centers. Clearly, the word “strike” has become a widely used name for many different kinds of mass strug­ gle, which do not always involve work stoppages, the word’s classic meaning. ■ M A R G E FR AN T Z S e e a l s o Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike; Labor Movement; Labor Unions.

U

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

tudents for a Democratic Society (SDS) was the most important white, radical, New Left organization of the 1960s. It began as a primarily male youth group in a small, anticommunist left­ ist organization but became the central organiza­ tional vehicle for the student movement o f the 1960s. In 1962 students from the University of Michigan produced the Port Huron Statement, which became S D S ’s manifesto. The group’s founders articulated a political concept of partici­ patory democracy in which individuals partici­ pate in decisions affecting their lives. S D S ’s ideas attracted thousands of college students, many in­ fluenced by the civil rights movement’s efforts to practice direct democracy in the struggle against racial segregation. The rejection by young, middle-class whites of their society’s elite control and bureaucracy in fa­ vor of its democratic promise was one of the most dramatic developments of the postwar period. In the mid-1960s, S D S ’s opposition to the Vietnam War made it the actual and symbolic leader of the New Left. Thousands of students looked to SD S to articulate their discontent with U.S. society. The organization became popularly associated with the 1960s’ generational and youth revolt. As the decade progressed and young people be­ came more frustrated and disappointed, particu­ larly with the Vietnam War and the government’s responses to the civil rights and Black power movements, violent demonstrations and tactics took their place alongside peaceful protests and community organizing. By the late 1960s SD S had split into a Marxist-Leninist group and a guer­ rillalike, underground vanguard organization (called Weathermen), which advocated a violent, Third World revolution. Although most of the at­ tention in SD S focused on white male leaders of the organization, many white women were as ac­

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S T U D E N T N O N -V IO L E N T C O O R D IN A TIN G C O M M I T T E E (S N C C )

tive as the men and, in the movement, first com­ prehended the sexism they experienced in the larger society. Organizers and activists, women also found themselves providing support and ser­ vice for male leaders. M uch of what they learned they brought with them into the women’s move­ ment, most noteworthy, perhaps, skills, political ideas, and anger. SD S disappeared by 1970 as an important Left political force. ■ WINI B R E I N E S S ee

also

Radicalism.

Without S N C C ’s entry into these communities, the civil rights movement could not have suc­ ceeded. S N C C developed a massive education pro­ gram which was implemented through the Free­ dom schools. They educated the poor about their constitutional rights and began door-to-door voter registration drives. M uch of this daily one-on-one work was done by African American women whose efforts persuaded the masses to join the movement despite widespread fear of reprisals. Af­ ter the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, S N C C began to question its goals and philoso­ phies. The group began to dissolve and ended in l 97°-

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Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

he Student Non-Violent Coordinating C om ­ mittee (SN C C ), created in i960, was the brainchild of Ella Baker, a seasoned activist and former director of the N A A CP’s national branches. Although women rarely held positions on the executive committee, they were active leaders at the grassroots level. Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Diane Nash, Muriel Tillinghast, Dorie Ladner, Prathia Hall, Donna Moses, Cynthia Washington, and Marian Wright are just a few of the women whose leadership proved critical to the successful mobilization of the civil rights movement. S N C C ’s primary contribution to the move­ ment was its mobilization of rural communities in the deep South. S N C C encouraged local leader­ ship, and many of these leaders were women, in­ cluding Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, V ic­ toria Gray, Unita Blackwell, and Mama Dollie. These women facilitated the entry of S N C C workers into their communities. Work in these ar­ eas was extraordinarily dangerous and many of these women were jailed, threatened, and beaten.

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• BELIND A ROBNETT S ee

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also

Civil Rights Movement.

Suburbanization

uburbs developed early in United States his­ tory. By the 1830s a form o f domestic archi­ tecture called the “cottage” encouraged families to construct homes outside the towns or cities that supplied their livelihood. Social reformers thought the countryside a better place for families than crowded, dirty cities. In the 1890s improved railways and trolleys expanded this trend, as did the abundance of cheap land and the invention of the balloon-frame house. But not until after 1945, when the federal government began subsidizing housing for the families of returning World War II veterans, did the suburban boom become the dominant trend in U.S. home ownership. The movement to the suburbs was widespread but was not equal among all groups. In 1949 the Federal Housing Authority denied home loans to female-headed households and to people of color. The communities that prospered on the periph­ ery o f urban areas were racially segregated by de-

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SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT

sign. After the beginning of the federal desegrega­ tion of schools in 1954, white, urban Americans moved to the suburbs by the millions to seek what they deemed superior educational opportunities for their children. The suburbs were not necessar­ ily ideal, however. Women became more isolated within their homes, their domestic work in­ creased in order to maintain the presumed higher standard of living, and they became more thor­ oughly identified by the domestic work they per­ formed for their families. By the 1970s many sub­ urban women, discontented with their circum­ stances, swelled the ranks of the National Organi­ zation for Women and joined the women’s move­ ment. ■ KATHRYN KISH SKLAR See

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also

Housing.

Suffrage Movement

he first clear assertion of women’s right to the vote was made in 1848 at the women’s rights convention organized in Seneca Falls, New York. At that point, when many progressive people re­ garded the political arena with contempt for its collusion with slavery, woman suffrage was con­ troversial even among women’s rights advocates. Thus, it was not really until the constitutional up­ heavals of Reconstruction that woman suffrage became the chief women’s rights demand. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments expanded and federalized the franchise, legiti­ mated the popular sense that suffrage was a fun­ damental right of citizenship, and then excluded women from the newly democratized electorate. In response, two organizations were formed in 1869, the National and the American Woman Suf­ frage Associations. Both were committed to win­ ning the right to vote for women but disagreed on how. The American Woman Suffrage Association

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(AWSA) conceded the federal arena to those de­ fending the freedmen’s right to vote and concen­ trated on the state level so as to minimize interfer­ ence between Black and woman suffrage. AWSA also tended to focus exclusively on suffrage, again so as not to raise opposition to political equality for women. The National Woman Suffrage Asso­ ciation, led by Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, insisted on fighting for woman suffrage at the federal and constitutional level as the only way to establish women’s political rights beyond challenge, and thus for a few years challenged the Fifteenth Amendment for excluding women. This led to a dramatic and painful break with for­ mer abolitionist allies and many defenders of Black suffrage. The association also linked votes for women to other aspects of emancipation, most notoriously to challenges to women’s marital and sexual subordination. Unfortunately, the two or­ ganizations shared a strong tendency to argue for woman suffrage on the nativist and racist grounds that educated, white, native-born women should not be denied the franchise, when immigrant and ex-slave men were honored with it. During the next two decades, both organiza­ tions reached out for new recruits across the coun­ try. By the late 1880s state woman suffrage associa­ tions had been formed almost everywhere, and woman suffrage was on its way to becoming a sub­ stantial, broad-based political movement. The original causes for the split now were less impor­ tant and the two societies united in 1890, forming the National American Woman Suffrage Associa­ tion (NAWSA), which remained the major orga­ nizational framework for the U.S. suffrage move­ ment for the next thirty years. Other developments and organizations also helped to build the woman suffrage movement from a tiny band of women’s rights radicals into a mass women’s movement by the early twentieth century. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (W CTU ), formed in 1874, carried the woman suffrage movement west and brought it to the attention of large numbers of native-born

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Protestant white women. Frances Willard, second president of the W C TU , became convinced that the W C T U ’s mission to defend the values of home and church against the depredations of “ King Alcohol” could be won only by women moving outside the domestic sphere and into pol­ itics. She established an approach to woman suf­ frage that would be pursued until equal political rights for women were secured in 1920: that women deserved political responsibilities on the basis o f their traditional obligations as home­ makers, wives, and mothers. African American women also began to form their own organiza­ tions, uniting in 1896 as the National Association of Colored Women, and they showed consider­ able eagerness for the vote to try to counter the ac­ celerating de facto disfranchisement of their men. Through the 1870s and 1880s U.S. women be­ gan to secure various “partial suffrages,” such as the right to vote in municipal elections, for school boards, and on prohibition measures. But it was not until the 1890s that full-fledged enfranchise­ ment began to be secured. Wyoming, which had enacted votes for women in 1869 when it was still a territory, entered the union in 1890 with its woman suffrage provisions in place. An even more important victory occurred in Colorado in 1893, when, for the first time, voters (all men) en­ franchised the women of their state. The victory in Colorado reflected the influence of the Pop­ ulist movement in the West, which was more sup­ portive of woman suffrage than the Republican and Democratic parties. The 1890s was also the period in which the woman suffrage movement went international. In 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world to enfranchise women on the same terms as men, followed in 1902 by Australia, 1906 in Finland and 1913 in Norway. U.S. suffragists ex­ ported woman suffrage ideas around the world and drew on victories in other countries to make their own case. In 1912 Anna Howard Shaw marched down Fifth Avenue in New York under a banner that read, “ Catching Up With China,” be­

cause Chinese provinces had briefly authorized votes for women in 1911, and she was contending that New York State should be able to go as far. Beginning about 1906 and 1907, the U.S. suf­ frage movement not only underwent a consider­ able revival but changed in many ways, becoming much more modern and politically sophisticated. The revival of suffragism was centered in the cities, and instead of arguing for woman suffrage as a way to defend traditional American values, supporters began to call for women’s political in­ volvement as a way to deal with new economic, political, and social conditions. Also, new classes were drawn into the movement. Wage-earning women in the cities were among the first of the “new” suffragists; they claimed that inasmuch as they labored outside the home and were subject to laws and government regulation, they needed the vote to gain control over their conditions and to protect themselves rather than to be protected by fathers and husbands. They argued for the vote less as an individual right than as a class tool. Wage-earning women were joined by collegeeducated, aspiring young professionals such as lawyers, teachers, and librarians. They too saw a link between political rights and their working lives. While wage-earning women helped to build the ranks of the suffrage movement, young profes­ sional women provided the organizers, publicists, and propagandists. Finally, extremely wealthy women, wives and daughters of gilded age mil­ lionaires, began to find suffragism “fashionable” and provided the money for full-fledged political campaigns to win the vote. These classes formed an uneasy but potent alliance that gave the cause new power and possibility. African American women, barred from full participation in many suffrage societies by the widespread racism of white suffragists, energetically continued to de­ mand political equality nonetheless. So much had suffragism changed by 1910 that it began to be known by a new name: “Votes for Women.” The final decade of the movement in the United States was characterized by great tacti-

SUFFRAG E M OVEM ENT

Suffragists march in Washington, D .C ., April 7,19 13

cal originality and bold political strategies. Suf­ fragists moved out from their parlors and made their arguments before groups of working-class men on street corners, and to giant crowds of spec­ tators lining the streets of the cities to watch their parades. They formed new organizations, includ­ ing the Women’s Political Union and Woman Suffrage Party, in New York; the Political Equality League, in Philadelphia; and the Wage Earners Suffrage League, in San Francisco. They issued tens of thousands of leaflets in many languages to reach voters of different nationalities. Their graphics were striking and modern and they made use of all the newest technologies—moving pic­ tures, telephones, and automobiles. Perhaps most important, suffragists began to learn the intricacies of the U.S. political system and to tackle the traditional enemies of women’s

reform activism, the mechanisms of party and par­ tisanship. The lockhold that Republicans and Democrats had on state legislatures began to give way as third parties, particularly the Progressives and the Socialists, gained greater power in state legislatures, and suffragists learned how to exploit rifts in party loyalty. In 1910 the first successful ref­ erendum since Idaho’s in 1896 occurred in Wash­ ington, and suffragism was on the march again. In 1911 California voters passed votes for women by a narrow four-thousand-vote margin. In 1914 Illinois became the first state east of the Mississippi in which women could vote in presidential elec­ tions, though this was done by clever legal ma­ neuvering rather than by action of the voters. At this point, the movement’s energies, which had been building at the state level, began to move toward the national arena. It is important to

579

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SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT

understand how each of the state victories of the 1910s helped shift the movement’s dynamic to the federal level. When the women of Colorado, Washington, and California were enfranchised by action of the electorate, they gained the vote, not just in state elections but also in federal elections. (One of suffragists’ favorite arguments was that it was unfair for a woman who lived in Colorado and had full voting rights to lose them when she crossed the border and moved to Nebraska.) By 1916 women in twelve states had full voting power, and it became clear that these women voters were potent forces in fostering action at the federal level. In the final phase of the suffrage movement, the giant NAWSA proved quite inadequate to the new energies coursing through the movement and to the intricate political maneuvering necessary to force reluctant national political parties to amend the Constitution and complete the enfranchise­ ment of women. In 1913 a new organization, the Congressional Union, was formed, initially within the NAWSA and then as its rival, to bring modern methods and energies to the national campaign. Formed by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, the C on­ gressional Union was the dynamic center o f the fi­ nal campaign for political rights for women. Its debut was a stunning, disciplined national suf­ frage parade held in the nation’s capital in March 1913. By this time, British suffragists had gained in­ ternational headlines for their dramatic acts of civil disobedience on behalf o f the vote: by 1913 they were being arrested, undertaking hunger strikes, and being force-fed by the British police. The Congressional Union felt much allegiance with their militant British sisters, although U.S. women did not resort to such tactics for several years. Instead, what they borrowed from the British militants was a plan to force the party in power (the Democrats, who, after 1912, controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress) to enact woman suffrage. In 1914 and again in 1916, the Congressional Union worked to organize tens

of thousands of women voters to pledge to vote against the Democrats until they made woman suffrage law. In 1916 the Congressional Union be­ came the National Woman’s Party (NWP) in recognition of the importance o f this strategy of organizing women voters on behalf of votes for women. At this point, the Great War intervened, both complicating and accelerating victory. President Woodrow Wilson, the National Woman’s Party’s primary target, was now leader of a nation at war, moreover a war to end all wars. The women of the suffrage movement, like the rest of the American people, split over the war, the majority supporting Wilson and the minority opposing the war. NAWSA urged its members to undertake war-sup­ port work, hoping that such patriotic service would strengthen women’s case for the vote when hostilities were over. However, the National Woman’s Party insisted on maintaining its anti­ government stance, ignoring cries to put aside “lesser” issues for the duration. The NW P’s dra­ matic picketing of the White House, which had been tolerated before, now appeared treasonous, and in M ay 1917 the first militants were arrested and imprisoned. The NW P claimed it was these arrests and the trouble they caused Wilson that led to his deci­ sion to support the amendment and the success­ ful January 1918 House of Representatives vote on woman suffrage. NAWSA argued that it was other factors, especially the successful November 1917 suffrage referendum in New York. Ratification seemed right around the corner, but it was not. The Senate, led by obstructionists from southern and eastern states, took another year and a half to pass the amendment, and the ratification process was also excruciatingly slow. Finally, in 1920, Ten­ nessee became the thirty-eighth state to approve the amendment, and woman suffrage became constitutional law. T he story o f woman suffrage conventionally ends here. But the Nineteenth Amendment was interpreted as not applying to U.S. territories, and

SU P E R H E R O IN E S

separate campaigns had to be launched in Puerto Rico and the Philippines; nor did African Ameri­ can women gain full use of their franchise for many decades. From their perspective, the civil rights movement of the 1960s was yet another stage in the ongoing struggle for women’s political equality.

EXCUSING HERSELF, DIANA RE­ TIRES TO HER O FFICE AND HASTILY TRANSFORMS HERSELF TO WONDER WOMAN. SO I'M A FAKE, AM / P JU ST LIKE A MAN fo THINK NO GIRL

Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emer­ gence o f an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Eleanor Flexner, Century o f Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1975); Aileen Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). ■ E L L E N CAR O L DUBOIS S e e ALSO Constitution and Amendments: Nine­ teenth Amendment; National Woman’s Party; Seneca Falls; Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

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Superheroines

ecember 1941 saw America’s entry into World War II, and the birth of Wonder Woman— “beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, stronger than Hercules, and swifter than Mercury” — in All Star Comics. Psychologist W illiam Moulton Marston, creator of the world’s first superheroine, had set out to design a heroine for girls in the hith­ erto all-male cosmos of comics. He succeeded, us­ ing a mixture o f myth and feminism. The traditional hero of European mythology is a child of a mortal mother (usually a virgin) and a godly father. But in Marston’s version, Princess Diana, daughter of the amazon queen, Hippolyta, has as her other parent the goddess Aphrodite: Thus little Diana has two mommies. Marston knew that children identify most strongly with their own gender, and Wonder Woman’s world is comprised almost entirely of women; men play a marginal role. Even villains

D iana Prince transforms herself in the Fall 1943 issue o f Wonder Woman.

D

tend to be beautiful females who eventually see the error o f their ways, though male villains, such as the Duke of Deception or Doctor Psycho, are often grotesque dwarves who remain evil. The pervading message is one of sisterhood and self-es­ teem: women can do everything men can do, and working together they can often do it better. Wonder Woman was not the first costumed heroine in comics. Miss Fury, a newspaper strip by a woman, Tarpe Mills, beat her by eight months. Although beautifully drawn and reading like film noir, the strip’s heroine lacked super­ powers and seldom wore her panther costume af­ ter the strip’s first year. Scores of comics about superwomen followed Wonder Woman, but they were called Sun Girl, Moon Girl, Hawk Girl, Bullet Girl, Super Girl, and

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Bat Girl and tended to be sidekicks of the male he­ roes (dubbed “man,” not the equivalent “boy” ): Hawkman, Bulletman, Superman, Batman. Most did not last very long. Miss America (1944) lasted exactly one issue, then the superheroine, whose patriotic costume was clearly inspired by Wonder Woman, was relegated to the back of Blonde Phan­ tom’s comic book. Blonde Phantom herself, fight­ ing crime in a red evening gown and high-heeled pumps, lasted only ten issues. Many of these costumed heroines did not really have superpowers, but one of the longest lived, Mary Marvel, had only to say the magic word “ Shazam!” to become invincible. Bullets bounced off her, and she could fly. Perhaps best of all, Mary Marvel really was a girl—she was too young to have breasts. One can only guess how many ten-year-old girls in 1947 whispered “ Shazam!” alone in their bedrooms, hoping to become like their idol. Mary lasted for twenty-eight issues in her own comic book, and also appeared in Captain Marvel, The Marvel Family, Wow, and Shazam. The comics industry has made at least some at­ tempt to change with the times. In 1974 Marvel comics introduced the first Black superheroine, Storm, in its popular series, the X-Men. But Storm, an African goddesslike figure, has always been portrayed with Caucasian features. It was up to the Black-owned company, Milestone, in 1993, to come up with African American superheroines who not only look Black but who reflect contem­ porary social problems. One of these characters, Flashback, is a crack addict, and another, Rocket, is fifteen years old, unmarried, and pregnant. But Rocket is just the sidekick of Icon, the real hero of the comic book, and Flashback belongs to a team of superheroes. Despite the rise of feminism in the real world, only rarely does a superheroine star in her own book today. Television superheroines have not fared any better. A letter written by nine-year-old Alexandra Early of Arlington, Massachusetts, and printed in the Los Angeles Times on November 9,1993, said, “There aren’t enough girl superheroes on TV. On

‘King Arthur and the Knights of Justice,’ there are only princesses and they always need to be saved. . . . On ‘X-M en,’ there are some strong-seeming women, but they always need help and they al­ ways look sexy. They’re very thin. They wear short dresses and funny bikini tops.” Speaking for countless U.S. girls and women, Alexandra ended her letter, “ I hope the people who make these shows know that girls like me are watching. We want fairness.” ■ T R IN A R O B BIN S

M

Surrogacy

F

irst coined in 1981, “surrogacy” describes the arrangement in which a woman gestates a fe­ tus for others after artificial insemination. Current terms include contract pregnancy, intrauterine adoption, or preconception arrangement. By the early 1990s, private agreements and some twenty agencies had arranged over four thousand births. Although most surrogacy arrangements are suc­ cessful, some go awry. In the widely publicized “ Baby M ” case, M ary Beth Whitehead contracted to carry a child for William and Betsy Stern, but then decided to keep the baby. William Stern’s sperm was used to impregnate Whitehead. After a court awarded the Sterns temporary custody, the Whiteheads fled with Baby M to Florida, where police later found and removed the baby. In 1987 a New Jersey court gave the Sterns permanent cus­ tody and prohibited W hitehead’s further contact. Upon appeal, a higher court sustained the custody award, but Whitehead gained visitation rights. Feminists are divided on the question of surro­ gacy. Most feminist writers strongly oppose sur­ rogacy’s valorization of women’s biological role and its potential for exploitation of low-income women who become surrogates because they need money. Others argue for surrogacy as a lowtech, woman-controllable method for alleviating

SW EATSHOPS

Apparel workers in a 1950s sweatshop.

infertility that enables alternative family struc­ tures and they oppose limiting women’s freedom to choose how to use their bodies. Since surrogacy is expensive, it is generally a white middle-class phenomenon, one that risks exploiting the poor. However, racism or elitism may also limit transactions since women of a given race are unlikely to buy eggs from women of another race or from malnourished or drug-ad­ dicted women. ■ H ELEN BEQUAERT HOLMES and LAURA M. PU RD Y

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Sweatshops

he late-nineteenth-century sweatshop —with its low wages, long hours, poor sanitation, and detrimental working conditions — symbolized the

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exploitation of immigrant women and child la­ borers. Characteristic of the ready-made garment industry, these tenement workrooms encouraged sweating, or a form of production under which “the worker is at the mercy of middlemen, where his [or her] life-blood is sweated out by the pres­ sure of the profit-sucking contractors piled on top,” the poet Edwin Markim explained in 1907. Under intense competition, contractors and sub­ contractors lowered piece rates so that individual earnings remained below the amount necessary to sustain life. Domestic life and wage earning merged as the employer’s own living quarters turned into a place where employees of both sexes ran foot-powered sewing machines. Homes also became sweatshops when women and their chil­ dren took in garments to finish or flowers to as­ semble. By 1900 nearly all clothing manufactured in Chicago and over four-fifths in New York came from these overcrowded, badly ventilated places.

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TAKE BACK T H E N IG H T

Women reformers and trade unionists con­ demned sweatshops for spreading disease to the consumer, but also, as the middle-class periodical The Outlook asserted in 1895, for “ destroying] the home life of its victims,” who were predominantly Jewish and Italian. From the state factory acts of the 1890s through the federal Fair Labor Stan­ dards Act of 1937, legislation outlawed sweatshop conditions and promoted minimum wages, maxi­ mum hours, and safe workplaces. During the 1980s sweatshops returned under intensified in­ ternational competition, new immigration, weak­ ened trade unions, and economic deregulation. Recent arrivals from Asia and the Americas today compose the sweatshop labor force, often working for compatriots as had the European immigrant women of the early twentieth century. ■ E I L E E N BO R IS

curred around the world. The slogan has become a symbolic statement of women’s commitment to stopping not just pornography but also all vio­ lence against women. It reflects the realization that crimes against women are linked — including rape, domestic violence, child sexual abuse, in­ cest, and sexual harassment. It represents the con­ viction that images of women being raped, tor­ tured, or degraded for male sexual entertainment are related to and contribute to a culture of vio­ lence against women. Until Take Back the Night, only two sides to the pornography issue existed: the conservative approach that pornography is immoral because it exposes the human body; and the liberal approach that pornography is just an­ other aspect of human sexuality. A third and fem­ inist perspective holds that pornography is part of a cultural ideology that promotes and condones violent crimes against women.

S e e a l s o Fair Labor Standards Act; Needle Trades; Protective Labor Legislation.

■ LAURA J. L E D E R E R S e e a l s o Antipomography Activism; Marches; Vio­ lence Against Women.

§ Take Back the Night he slogan Take Back the Night was first used in 1978 as a theme for a national protest march in San Francisco. The march took place at night following the first feminist conference on pornog­ raphy. Conference participants heard testimony by women who had been harmed by pornogra­ phy, research results asserting that pornography is harmful, and legal analysis of the First Amend­ ment’s protection of pornographers. Over ten thousand people marched down residential streets and in the area where strip joints, peep shows, pornography theaters, massage parlors, and broth­ els lined the streets. That event was the largest an­ tipornography march in the history of the women’s movement. Thousands of similar marches have since oc­

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§ Talk Shows his relatively unscripted format—a host plus interviewees, letters or phone calls from listeners, and/or audience participation—has brought entertainment, advice, consumerism, ed­ ucation, and shared experience into the daily lives of women since the 1920s and 1930s, when twothirds of U.S. homes acquired radios, more than had telephones. As television arrived in the 1950s, these inexpensive-to-produce shows became the “bread and butter” of programming. By the 1970s, 97 percent of homes had a TV. T V talk shows of­ ten became platforms for the personal experi­ ences from which feminism sprang, as well as for activist information. Radio was more likely to fea­ ture women psychologists who gave personal ad-

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TALK SH Sh O oW wS s

vice or suggested activism. By the 1980s, however, the numerous T V talk shows, in a ratings compe­ tition, often focused on the most bizarre experi­ ences rather than the most shared ones, and of­ fered escape rather than help. This trend became known as “freak TV .” T he 1980s backlash against social change also created radio call-in shows with combative male hosts who invented terms like “feminazi,” and who opposed efforts toward racial equality, gay rights, environmental protection, and other challenges to the traditional status quo. In the 1990s, the advent of personal computers and the World Wide Web had created “ chat rooms” and other participant-controlled, special­ ized talk formats. Though mostly white, male, and class-bound, this new technological link to communities o f interest, local and international, motivated many women and girls to gain access to the high-tech revolution. From the beginning, talk show subjects have been almost as diverse as talk itself, ranging from Hollywood gossip to foreign policy, from cooking to national politics. By making this wide range of experience and information available without re­ gard to sex, race, class, geography, literacy, or ac­ cess to anything other than a radio or television, talk shows have had a disproportionate impact on homemakers; rural women; domestic workers; immigrants learning English; women seeking eth­ nic, racial, or language communities; and house­ bound or otherwise isolated women. In rural America, Native American women have innovated the use of radio talk shows as a way of bridging long distances, furthering consensus building in the tradition of “talking circles,” and teaching Native languages and practices that were discouraged or forbidden by the dominant culture. In general, women of color have been voices in their communities, especially those large enough to have their own radio stations. Mainstream talk shows began to diversify only in the 1960s, with pressure from social justice movements, and the Federal Communications Commission’s affirma­ tive action requirements for licensing both radio

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and T V stations. Now, Spanish-speaking Ameri­ cans who once listened to shows originating in M exico, Cuba, or Puerto Rico can hear daily Spanish-language programs, such as “ Cristina Opina,” hosted by veteran journalist Cristina Saralegui. Nevertheless, mainstream radio listeners still hear mostly male voices, and rarely even an accent. With respect to T V talk shows, the technical, vi­ sual, and capital-intensive nature of the medium wiped out much of the progress women had made on radio. Age and appearance requirements dis­ couraged the transfer of hard-won gains by women on radio, and ornaments became the or­ der of the day for the predominantly young, thin, white, beautiful, and usually blonde personalities. Feminist pressures of the 1970s for broader cov­ erage and improved hiring policies wrought some progress. A major advance also came with a male host’s talk show scheduled in the “women’s ghetto.” Phil Donahue—who was influenced not only by the issues being raised by the women’s movement but also by the consciousness-raising style of leaderless feminist groups—became the first T V host to invite a mostly female audience to discuss social and political topics with a wide vari­ ety of guests. His talk show became the most pop­ ular in the nation and remained there for much of the next twenty-five years. As Donahue always ex­ plained, “ If I succeed, the next major talk show host will be a Black woman.” His prediction came true in the 1980s when Oprah Winfrey, an on-air journalist who had worked in Baltimore and Chicago, became the first nationally successful African American woman talk show host. Other T V talk show hosts range from Sally Jessy Raphael, who makes activist suggestions at the end of programs, to Rolonda, to cable shows that pair a liberal/feminist with a conservative/antifeminist. On political talk shows, however, there are few female hosts, and none on the major latenight talk shows. Moreover, the choice and treat­ ment of women interviewees on daytime shows give the frequent impression that they have power

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only to complain, not to act. Thus, an advertisingmotivated, gender-polarized T V talk show world continues. • G LO R IA ST E IN E M

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Teaching Profession

omen began to leave their homes and enter public school classrooms as teachers in the United States in the early nineteenth century. Three reasons explain this remarkable change in antebellum United States. One was the emer­ gence of “republican motherhood” as an ideol­ ogy. Concerned about how to educate boys for the responsibilities of citizenship, leaders turned first to mothers for instruction at home in the virtues of liberty. Before women could teach their sons, however, they had to be educated themselves. Second, school administrators recruited women as teachers because they could be paid half the salary men earned. Third, women were viewed as natural guardians of the young and better able to nurture learning among children. By the end of the Civil War white women were firmly en­ trenched in teaching and outnumbered men as teachers in public schools. In 1900 teaching ranked fifth in paid employment for women, clearly making it the most populous occupation that could be ranked as “profession.” By the late 1830s reformers in education, desir­ ing a more proficient teaching force, instituted rigorous and standardized examinations and pushed states to build training schools to teach ed­ ucational methods as well as to increase knowl­ edge in subject areas. By the 1920s most northern and western states demanded at least a high school diploma and many required training be­ yond high school. In southern states, teacher training, like education in general, was segre­ gated, and some African American women en­ tered classrooms with little or no formal training. Initially teaching was viewed as an occupation

W

ideally suited to young women before they mar­ ried. With the exception of western states, most teachers were young and single until the late 1930s. In the early twentieth century teachers ini­ tiated challenges to laws that ejected them from the classroom upon marriage but it was severe teacher shortages during World War II that prompted the repeal of such laws. As a result many more older women are presently teaching. W hile both age and marital status of women teachers has changed, social class has remained consistent. Most who entered teaching grew up in middle-class white families. For immigrant women and women of color, teaching was a route to the middle class. Not until the end of the nine­ teenth century were teaching jobs available in large numbers to them. Wages were a crucial reason young women entered teaching. Many preferred teaching to factory, agricultural, or domestic work. For nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women, teaching was also a means to gain advanced edu­ cation. Teaching offered women a sense of inde­ pendence and autonomy and, until recently, was one o f only a few professions besides social work and nursing accessible to them. Through the 1940s those women who completed postbaccalau­ reate work found employment in colleges and universities, but after World War II those opportu­ nities declined. African American women sought professional training as well, often at institutions founded specifically for them. Teaching provided women access to the politi­ cal arena in the early twentieth century. Many white women were elected to school boards and positions as superintendents of education. But as superintendency became appointed rather than elected and required advanced training, men re­ claimed those slots. Since the 1960s, however, women increasingly have been hired as superin­ tendents. Activism has also emerged from the teaching profession. Classroom teachers were the first to advocate equal pay for equal work. In their deter-

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TEACH IN G P R O F E S S IO N

Public school in Valdez, Colorado, October 1902. Because schools in most rural areas at this time did not have school boards, teachers—most o f them young women—essentially ran the schools.

mination to exert influence on educational bu­ reaucracies and to have a voice in structuring the teaching profession, teachers began to form unions in the 1890s. The Chicago Teachers Federation was the strongest and most active. The American Fed­ eration of Teachers was created in 1912, and it for­ mally joined the American Federation of Labor in 1915. In the 1890s white women teachers also claimed a place in the male-dominated National Education Association, the largest educational or­ ganization in the United States. At the same time African American teachers formed the National Association of Teachers of Colored Students. Today, as they did a century ago, women com­ pose more than 70 percent o f the elementary and secondary teaching force but hold only 30 percent of the principalships. Three-quarters are married,

their median age is about forty, and more than half hold a graduate degree. Women of color make up roughly 12 percent of the female teaching corps. Teaching has been a profession of central impor­ tance to women over the past one hundred sixty years, allowing them a socially acceptable means of working outside the domestic arena. Although it is not the best-paying occupation, teaching has served historically as one way to autonomy and higher education for U. S . women. Nancy Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History o f Teaching (New York: The Feminist Press, 1981); Donald Warren, ed., American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work (New York: Macmillan, 1989). ■ K A T H LE E N UNDERW OOD See

also

Education.

TER R O R ISM

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Temperance S e e Prohibition and Tem perance.

§ Temporary Work S e e Contingent Work.

§ Terrorism he term terrorism traditionally has described acts of violence against civilians meant to draw attention to the political demands of the terrorists. It is a tactic sometimes used to exact revenge against the state or against an enemy. It is also used symbolically to demonstrate the power to cause destruction as well as the inability of society to prevent it. For example, bombs set off in mar­ ketplaces, government offices, or railroad stations are usually followed by a statement or demand from the organization responsible. The devastat­ ing 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal office building is an example of terrorism directed against the government by right-wing extremists. The word “terrorism” con­ notes senseless violence directed at innocent peo­ ple by uncaring zealots. During the civil rights movement and the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s the of­ ten violent and repressive tactics used by federal and state authorities against protesters and politi­ cal activists increased public awareness of the state’s power to use force against its citizens. Radi­ cal thinkers began to see aspects of state repres­ sion as terrorism. Examples of state-sponsored ter­ rorism include the repression of leftists during the 1960s and 1970s in C hile and Argentina; in both cases many innocent people were killed at the whim of the state. In the United States terrorism

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directed primarily against people of color, such as police brutality or white supremacist violence, is sometimes condoned or tolerated by forces of the state. In recent years the definition o f terrorism in­ creasingly has been expanded to include biasmotivated hate crimes. A bias-motivated hate crime, such as the killing of an African American by white supremacist youths, shares many of the characteristics of the classic definition of terror­ ism. A crime such as this evokes the lynchings and burnings of the past and both reflects and is in­ tended to incite hatred of Black people. Biasmotivated hate crimes can be seen also in the contemporary murders and beatings of lesbians and gay men and immigrants, simply for being who they are. Given this new understanding of the shared characteristics of bias-motivated hate crimes and terrorism, it is logical that women, who are killed by their spouse or boyfriend at the rate of four per day in the United States, are in­ creasingly beginning to see this unrelenting vio­ lence as an epidemic of hate crimes. The ongoing use o f terror tactics such as rape, beatings, and stalking, combined with the position of domi­ nance occupied by men in the larger society, is considered by many to be an impressive fit with the expanded definition of terrorism. Within the debate over the collection of statis­ tics on bias-motivated hate crimes, a prominent is­ sue has been, and continues to be, whether or not to include crimes against women. To define a crime as bias-motivated one must positively an­ swer the question, Did the act reflect a bias against the victim for his or her innate character­ istics? Experts agree that statistics should be kept on hate crimes based on racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia, but as yet no consensus exists about whether crimes motivated by misogyny and directed against women also should be consid­ ered motivated by bias. ■ JEA N V. HARD I STY

TEXTILE/A PPA REL W ORKERS

Skirtmakers in an engraving from Harper’s Weekly, February 1 9 ,1859. The industrial revolution trans­ formed the traditional textile work o f young rural white women by moving it from the home into the mills.

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Textile/Apparel Workers

ucy Larcom, a Lowell, Massachusetts, mill worker, recalled that when she was a small child she believed that the “ chief end of woman was to make clothing for mankind.” In her West­ ern world the distaff, used to spin, had long sym­ bolized the female sex; in time “spinster” came to mean a single woman. Not all women were spin­ ners and weavers, but in virtually every culture women have prepared the clothing. In the early nineteenth century an Indian agent concluded that teaching Native American women, proficient at curing animal skins, the arts of carding, spin­

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ning, and weaving was essential to their becoming “ civilized.” Enslaved African women commonly worked as field laborers, but some, including two advertised as “Wenches about 16 or 17 Years of Age, who Understand Spinning and Knitting,” were considered especially valuable. Most white women in the North and South did their own spinning. A white colonial diarist observed that “all spin, weave, and knit, whereby they make good shift to cloath the whole family; and to their cred it. . . many of them do it very completely.” Eventually women who previously produced ap­ parel at home were hired to work in the textile fac­ tories, which was considered work still in keeping with a woman’s central “ domestic” role.

t e x t il e

/a

pparel w o rkers —

The transition to a market economy in textiles and apparel was gradual and uneven. Some women continued spinning at home and traded their yarn for woven goods while others bought factory yarn to weave. The putout system, paying women for home production, continued through­ out the nineteenth century. In 1813 the first large, integrated textile factories were built in Lowell, Massachusetts, and young women were hired. The Lowell system of strict su­ pervision was widely heralded as a model for orga­ nizing female labor. Young women typically worked for several years and controlled their own wages until they married. The resulting sense o f in­ dependence sometimes prompted protest, includ­ ing several strikes to demand less control and better conditions. As the textile industry spread south, so did the preference for hiring female workers, al­ though a system utilizing family labor ultimately became more common than the Lowell system. After they gave up spinning and weaving, women still continued sewing at home. By i860 the number of working women who were seam­ stresses ranked second only to domestics. Seam­ stress work was transformed in the 1850s as a result of the invention o f the sewing machine, which al­ lowed women to stop laborious hand sewing but, according to one study, also “provided closer con­ trol of workers in the industry and additional op­ portunities for contractors to cheat them.” The garment industry grew in the Northeast through the late nineteenth century, hiring large numbers of immigrants, especially Italians and Jews, for its female work force. By the turn of the century most women garment workers were em­ ployed in sweatshops or small factories, including the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. In 1909 its workers went on strike to demand bet­ ter working conditions. Owners made minimal concessions but continued such practices as lock­ ing fire escape doors. When a fire erupted there in 1911,146 women died. Polish and Slavic women often worked in tex­ tile factories in the Northeast. In the South, white women and children made up a majority o f the

textile industry’s work force. Throughout the United States, however, women were denied ac­ cess to the highest-paying jobs or leadership posi­ tions in the unions, including the National Textile Workers Union and the International Ladies’ Gar­ ment Workers Union, which sought to represent them. Women often played key roles in strikes. In 1929 Ella May Wiggins was killed during a textile workers’ strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, and became a martyr for the struggle to unionize. Although New Deal legislation somewhat im­ proved the conditions in mills and sweatshops, the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor documented that poor conditions continued. The proportion o f females in the textile industry dropped in the twentieth century until the 1960s, when it rose to nearly 50 percent; the number of African American female textile workers, who had previously been denied employment because of racism, grew almost fourfold. Since World War II the rise of imports from Asia has profoundly af­ fected the textile and apparel industries. T he ap­ parel industry, particularly, has looked to female Hispanic immigrants in the Southwest to com­ pete with the low-paid Asian work force. In the early 1970s garment workers at Farah Manufactur­ ing Company in E l Paso, Texas, virtually all of them Chicanos and 85 percent of them women, successfully struck for a union contract. In the 1970s the popular film Norma Rae drama­ tized the plight of nonunionized textile workers as well as their determination to fight for improve­ ment. T he movie ends with their victory; but the reality for the many women today who “ make the clothing for mankind” is a continuing struggle. Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation o f Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 18261860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South,” journal of American History Vol. 73 (1986): 354-82. ■ B E S S B EA TTY S e e a l s o Industrial Revolution; Labor Unions: Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union

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THEATER

(ACTWU); Labor Unions: International Ladies’ Gar­ ment Workers Union (ILGWU); Needle Trades.

§ Thalidomide n i960 the widespread use of the drug thalido­ mide in nearly twenty countries later yielded a tragic epidemic o f limbless babies born to moth­ ers who thought they were using a mild sedative. Food and Drug Administration medical officer Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey refused approval of thalidomide for distribution in the United States, despite early news of the drug’s success and pres­ sure from its U.S. manufacturer, The Merrell Company. W hile the drug’s effects on animals tested negative to malformation, Dr. Kelsey mis­ trusted the sleeping pill that did not cause sleepi­ ness in animals. She was not told that her suspicions were cor­ rect when, in November 1961, West Germany re­ ported to the FD A that thalidomide had been as­ sociated with birth defects. Told instead was The Merrell Company, which had furnished nearly 1,100 doctors (almost 250 obstetricians and gyne­ cologists) with samples of the drug. Disbelieving West Germ an evidence, The Merrell Company wrote only a brief letter of warning to just 10 per­ cent of the physicians to whom thalidomide was distributed. They were still hoping for the drug’s FDA approval and promising prescription sales. Thalidomide’s danger to pregnant women was not made public in the United States until 1962, a year after it was recognized abroad. The Washing­ ton Post broke the story about Dr. Kelsey’s good judgment, and President Kennedy ordered a crash program to retrieve all samples of thalido­ mide. For her role in preventing thalidomide dis­ tribution, Dr. Kelsey received the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service in 1962. In that same year, Sherri Finkbine, a thalido­ mide-exposed pregnant woman, was denied the

I

U.S. abortion she sought for medical reasons, but did obtain one in Sweden. Her harrowing, wellpublicized odyssey helped arouse sentiment for abortion law reform. Although widely banned, thalidomide re­ mained available for limited use as a leprosy treat­ ment. It was controversially revived in the 1990s as an experimental treatment for tuberculosis and certain AIDS-related wasting illnesses. ■ BARBARA SEAM AN

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Theater

he development of the theater in the United States had a difficult beginning, mainly be­ cause of the influence of various religious groups that regarded theater as sinful and frivolous. Also, much of early U.S. theater was based on maledominated European traditions and participation by women was limited. From the early Greeks to Shakespeare, women’s roles were performed by men. Women slowly took to the stage during the late eighteenth century, primarily as actresses. Some of the first performers were Anne Merry, Olive Logan, and Charlotte Cushman; the twen­ tieth century produced such great actresses as Eva Le Gallienne, Katherine Cornell, Uta Hagen, and Helen Hayes. Despite women’s historical lack of recognition, until recently, women have and continue to play a significant role in the American theater both on and off the stage. Anna Mowatt was one of the first female playwrights— in 1845 she authored Fash­ ion. The first female writer to affect the theater was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. W hile Stowe neither authorized the count­ less dramatic adaptations nor received royalties from the hundreds of “Tom shows” that resulted from the novel, productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were the most-produced plays during the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

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THEATER

The early part of the twentieth century wit­ nessed women writers on Broadway. Rachel Crothers, best known for A M an’s World (1910) and regarded by scholars as the first U.S. feminist playwright, had twenty-five plays produced on Broadway between 1906 and 1937. Other writers of the time included Alice Gerstenberg (Over­ tones), Zona Gale (Miss Lulu Bett), Sophie Treadwell (Machinal), and Susan Glaspell (Tri­ fles). These women focused primarily on female protagonists who struggled for autonomy and of­ ten threatened male authority. From the 1930s through the 1950s, writers such as Lillian Hellman (The Childrens Hour), Carson M cCullers (Member o f the Wedding), and Ketti Frings (Look Homeward Angel) came to the fore. Alice C h il­ dress (Trouble in M ind) was the first African American to receive the Obie Award, in 1955; in 1959 Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by an African American fe­ male to be produced on Broadway. With the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, many more women playwrights wrote about issues rele­ vant to women including Wendy Wasserstein, winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for The Heidi Chronicles; Beth Henley; Marsha Norman, who won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for ’Night, Mother; and Wendy Kesselman. Women-produced plays emerged, along with a growing number of female producers and feminist theaters, including com­ panies like The Women’s Project in New York City, and At the Foot of the Mountain in M in­ nesota. Women historically have often taken the lead as theatrical producers or directors since the late nineteenth century. Susan Glaspell cofounded the Provincetown Players in 1915, which pro­ moted dramatist Eugene O ’Neill. When the Fed­ eral Theatre Project (FTP) was organized in 1935, Hallie Flanagan was appointed national director. In 1950 Zelda Fichandler created Arena Stage in Washington, D .C ., currently one of the leading regional theaters in the nation. While white women faced sexual discrimina­

tion, women of color encountered—and still do —the double burden of racial and sexual dis­ crimination. Women o f color were barred from playing dramatic roles in early mainstream U.S. theater. Roles for Blacks were confined to the mu­ sical stage or vaudeville, while whites “blackened up” and stereotypically portrayed Black characters and other people of color. In 1916 African Ameri­ can actress Anita Bush organized the Anita Bush Players, the first major Black professional com­ pany, as an alternative to Broadway, which later became the Lafayette Players. Her group became the oldest Black professional theater company of its time, producing some of the greatest dramatic performers. One of the earliest Broadway African American actresses, Rose M cClendon, produced plays during the 1930s; when the Negro Unit of the F T P was organized, she was appointed its di­ rector, although she died shortly afterward. The civil rights movement of the 1960s spurred the Black theater movement, in which African American women participated in all areas of dra­ matics. Prominent companies included Ellen Stewart’s La Mama, Vinnette Carroll’s Urban Arts Corp, Hazel Bryant’s Richard Allen Center, and Barbara Ann Teer’s The National Black Theatre. Inspired by the vitality of the Black theater move­ ment, other women of color organized groups. Some included Tisa Chang of the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, Miriam Colon of the Puerto Rican Traveling Company, and the Native Amer­ ican companies of Spiderwoman and the C ol­ orado Sisters. Other outstanding producers of color include Marsha Jackson, Abena Brown, Rosalba Rolon, Roberta Uno, and Pearl Cleage, to name a few. Many of these women, who had started their careers as performers, created these companies to provide a platform for people of color. Several women-of-color playwrights came into prominence during the 1960s and 1970s, for ex­ ample, Maria Fornes, Adrienne Kennedy, and Ntozake Shange. A new generation of writers now includes Elizabeth Wong, Jessica Hagedorn, En-

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T I T L E IX

desha Holland, Velina Houston, Cheryl West, Cherrie Moraga, Marga Gom ez, and Migdalia Cruz. These women address an array of issues dealing with universal female themes and experi­ ences in addition to confronting racial issues. One of the most difficult areas for women to break into has been design. Those who have suc­ ceeded include Theoni Aldredge, Judy Dearing, Florence Klotz, Patricia Zipprodt, and Willa Kim for costumes; Jean Rosenthal, Peggy Clark Kelley, Tharon Musser, Jennifer Tipton, Shirley Prendergast, Dawn Chiang, and Marcia Madeira for lighting; and Marjorie Kellogg, Heidi Landesman, and Franne Lee for set design. Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins, eds., Women in American Theatre (New York: Theatre Com­ munications Group, 1987). ■ KATH Y A. P E R K IN S

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Thirteenth Amendment S

e e

Constitution and Amendments.

§ Title VII itle VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the centerpiece of efforts to end discrimination in the workplace. It prohibits discrimination in hir­ ing, firing, promotion, and terms and conditions of work based on race, color, religion, sex, or na­ tional origin. Ironically, the ban on sex discrimi­ nation was added to the act by amendment during the House floor debate by enemies of its passage, who believed that some members of Congress would vote against the bill if its protections were extended to women. The place of women in the work world had been the product of an ideology that assigned man the role of breadwinner and woman the role of childrearer. Underlying this ideology was the

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belief that women and men are fundamentally different. Early Title VII litigators sought to dis­ mantle sexual inequality in the workplace by at­ tacking the assertion that men and women are fundamentally different. They argued that the an­ tidiscrimination principle required that women and men similarly situated must be treated equally with respect to ability to perform a partic­ ular job. Title VII enables employers to defend practices and policies that discriminate on the basis of sex where sex is found to be a bona fide occupational qualification. In the 1991 groundbreaking deci­ sion o f International Union, UAW v. Johnson Con­ trols, for example, the Supreme Court held that an employer must prove that a sex-based job qual­ ification is related to the essence of the employer’s business. The Court required the employer to prove that substantially all women are unable to perform the job’s duties safely, efficiently, and without discrimination. The Court also has sent a strong signal that sex­ ual harassment is a serious violation of the law and that lower courts should cease putting legal road­ blocks in the way of success. Title VII undoubt­ edly has improved the condition of women in the workplace. Much remains to be accomplished to “break the glass ceiling,” including improving women’s wages, providing job settings that ac­ commodate work and family needs, and fully in­ tegrating women into traditionally male-domi­ nated occupations. ■ JA N E D O LKART S

e e

a l s o

Sexual Harassment.

H Title IX ponsored by feminists in Congress, including Edith Green and Patsy Mink, Title IX of the Education Act Amendments of 1972 offers women a legal weapon with which to contest discrimina-

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TRA SH IN G

tion in education, including admissions, athletics, financial aid, extracurricular activities, and acad­ emic programs. The provision parallels Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars race dis­ crimination in education. When first debated in Congress, Title IX met furious opposition from the educational establish­ ment. Prestigious schools, athletic directors, and male congresspersons charged that the measure would require unisex locker rooms and integrated football teams; would destroy sororities and frater­ nities; and would shrink the pool of generous alumni contributors. Title IX withstood a vicious and often misogynist assault, however, and re­ mains the most important policy affecting women in education today. Title IX put schools in a contractual relation­ ship with the federal government: to receive fed­ eral funds they must not discriminate. In 1991 the Supreme Court expanded the financial incen­ tives for Title IX compliance when it permitted victims of discrimination to seek monetary dam­ ages. The federal government has not always en­ forced Title IX consistently. Under the Republi­ can administrations of the 1980s, Title IX’s en­ forcement agency (headed for a time by Clarence Thomas) pursued few complaints and rarely initiated compliance reviews. In addition, the Supreme Court restricted the meaning of Title IX in its 1984 decision in Grove City College v. Bell. In 1988 the Congress reversed the Court in the C ivil Rights Restoration Act, enacted over Presi­ dent Reagan’s veto. This created new possibilities for Title IX enforcement during the Clinton ad­ ministration. In 1994 an invigorated Office for Civil Rights conducted a pivotal “ hostile environ­ ment” investigation of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Women have secured important new opportu­ nities since Title IX ’s enactment. Title IX ex­ panded athletics programs, tore down inequitable admissions policies, broadened women’s voca­ tional education choices, permitted women to en­

ter professional schools in unprecedented num­ bers, reduced discrimination against pregnant stu­ dents and teen mothers, and provided women with a means to fight sexual harassment. As a re­ sult of Title IX, women’s participation in school sports has increased more than tenfold since 1971, women’s enrollment in law schools has risen from 6.9 percent in 1971 to nearly 50 percent at many institutions today, pregnant students are now enti­ tled to remain in school, and many colleges and universities have developed sexual harassment policies. ■ GW EN D O LYN M INK See

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also

Education.

Trashing

uring the first few years of the women’s libera­ tion movement, women who stood out in any way, particularly those who were achievers or had assertive personal styles or who received too much publicity, were often attacked, both privately and publicly, by other feminists. Known as “trashing,” this phenomenon went far beyond criticism; it was the woman herself, not her deeds or words, that was targeted. These attacks were usually quite vague, marked by name-calling and character assassination. Al­ though occasional confrontations arose, most ac­ cusations were made behind a woman’s back so she was never able to defend herself to her ac­ cusers, or even know exactly who they were. Her activities were interpreted in the most negative light. Reports would be circulated that anything she did was for personal gain rather than for the benefit of the movement. A woman being trashed was shunned, but no one would admit what was going on. She would be ignored in meetings, removed from mailing lists, left out o f delegations, not notified of

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UNEM PLOYM ENT

changes in meeting dates or places, and generally treated like a nonperson. If she questioned this treatment, it was usually denied, though she would be told that “others” thought she was too aggressive, too masculine, too ambitious, “ elitist,” or some other bad thing. Trashing was a group phenomenon. It was much more common in the small rap groups or service projects that claimed to operate on con­ sensus or without structure than in the large organizations which relied on parliamentary process. It was rare for more than one woman in any given group to be trashed at a time. Isolation was part o f the process. Eventually the woman would drop out and no one would ever ask her why. Exposing trashing did not have any effect on its pervasiveness. Anselma D ell’Olio gave a speech on this topic at the 1970 Congress to Unite Women. In June 1970 a small group of women from around the country dubbed themselves the “feminist refugees.” Joreen wrote about “Trash­ ing: The Dark Side o f Sisterhood” in Ms. in 1975. The response from readers was so great that Ms. devoted several pages to the letters in a subse­ quent issue. T he effects of trashing are best summed up by Ti-Grace Atkinson, herself an object of some very vicious attacks: “ Sisterhood is Powerful: It Kills Sisters.” Despite the fact that trashing helped de­ stroy part o f the movement, it was never ade­ quately analyzed, explained, or understood. ■ JO F R E E M A N

havior so that all individuals willing to work at pre­ vailing wages are able to do so. Unemployment caused by market rigidity includes, for example, the case when workers do not leave an economi­ cally depressed area in sufficient numbers to lower unemployment rates there. Alternately, em­ ployers may not hire available white women or people of color, preferring to pay a higher wage to white males and creating more unemployment than would exist in the absence of discrimination. Unemployment generated by imperfect expecta­ tions or information would include cases where employers overestimate the future rate of inflation or the productivity of employees and, as a result, pay wages that are too high relative to other com­ ponents of production. Unexpected external shocks, such as oil price increases, can diminish demand for what firms produce, causing them to reduce production and their need for workers. Most economists believe that removing imper­ fections in the market and improving information and the accuracy of expectations would result in lower unemployment rates. There is, however, debate as to whether policies aimed at lowering unemployment by stimulating the economy can reduce unemployment in the long run. In data collected by the U.S. government for most of the twentieth century (the only period for which data have been methodically collected), a person is considered unemployed if she or he does not have a job and is actively seeking em­ ployment. The labor force is defined as the sum of employed and unemployed individuals. Given these definitions, the unemployment rate is: number of persons unemployed total number of persons in the labor force

%

Unemployment

nemployment occurs when and where rigid market structures, imperfect information, or incorrect expectations of the economy prevent workers and employers from adjusting their be­

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This measure is commonly said to underesti­ mate unemployment because it fails to capture those unemployed workers who become “dis­ couraged” and stop looking for work. It also fails to capture “underemployed” workers who have jobs but would like to work more hours or at higher

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UNEM PLOYM ENT

skill levels. Women are especially likely to be “dis­ couraged” or “ underemployed” since they are more likely to leave the labor force or accept re­ duced hours during economic downturns in or­ der to work in the home. Therefore this tradi­ tional measure of unemployment may understate the female unemployment rate more than it un­ derstates that of men. And because unemploy­ ment statistics are based on self-reporting, the re­ sulting data fail to capture the experiences of those who are difficult to locate, such as the homeless and the poor, or those who participate in the underground economy. Unemployment has become an increasingly important issue as Americans have become more dependent on wage labor. In the antebellum pe­ riod, land was plentiful and most Americans en­ gaged in agriculture either as self-employed farm­ ers or as slaves. In this context, unemployment was not a significant issue. Throughout the nine­ teenth century, the proportion of the population engaged in wage labor increased with industrial­ ization and urbanization. Until the 1980s female unemployment rates were usually higher than male rates, but women’s rates have also generally been less susceptible to economic downturns than men’s, at least since World War II. The unemployment rates of women o f color have generally been higher than those of white women, although they have at times been lower than the rates of men of color. Mothers of all races tend to have higher rates of unemployment than childless women. Women’s relatively high rates of unemployment have been attributed to many factors, including statistical ar­ tifact, the inconsistency o f a woman’s labor-force participation over her lifetime, the limited ability of women to change occupations or geographic locations, and discrimination. During economic downturns, women’s—like men’s —unemployment rates typically rise; not all women, however, are affected equally. Many women work in occupations such as .clerical work, areas where employment is not very sensi­

tive to economic downturns. Other women, work­ ing in industries such as manufacturing, histori­ cally have experienced higher unemployment rates than their male counterparts, as they were more likely to be laid off or fired during reces­ sions. Workers at the bottom of the employment hierarchy, often women of color, also face in­ creased risk of unemployment during recessions as the downward mobility affecting all workers pushes them out of the work force altogether. During the Great Depression, many Black women pushed out o f service jobs were not able to find alternative sources o f employment. Immi­ grant women, particularly immigrant women of color, also have particularly high unemployment during recessions. For instance, during the Great Depression, only 28 percent of Mexican-born families were able to find employment for at least two able-bodied workers compared to 39 percent of all white immigrant families. Since the Great Depression, the federal and state governments have attempted to ameliorate unemployment through targeted job develop­ ment strategies, fiscal and monetary policies, and social insurance. Women have traditionally benefited less from these programs. Since its in­ ception in 1935, women have been less likely to qualify for Unemployment Insurance (UI) be­ cause they have been overrepresented in indus­ tries not required to provide UI (such as domes­ tic service) and because their hours and earnings are often insufficient to meet eligibility require­ ments. Women are also underrepresented in in­ dustries such as construction and defense, typi­ cal targets of government efforts to increase aggregate demand during recessions. Govern­ ment programs to reduce unemployment in par­ ticular geographic areas through job creation, such as the 1930s’ Works Progress Administration or more recent community reinvestment pro­ grams, may be more likely to reach women who are identified as unemployed since they typi­ cally target all unemployed workers in a given community.

U RBA N IZA TIO N

Teresa L. Amott and Julie A. Matthaei, Race, Gender, and Work (Boston: South End Press, 1991); Francine D. Blau and Marianne A. Ferber, The Economics o f Women, Men, and Work, 2d ed, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1992); The Economic Report o f the President (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1992). ■ S T E P H A N IE AARONSON and H E ID I HARTM ANN

§ United Farm Workers S e e Labor Unions.

§ Urbanization rban places within the present boundaries of the United States include sixteenth-century Spanish cities, and English, Dutch, and French colonial towns and ports. The process of urbaniza­ tion that involved the creation of large industrialera cities was a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Urban U.S. growth occurred simultaneously with the incorporation of distinctive regions and peo­ ples. Eastern seaboard towns began to grow as early as 1820 as a result of the expansion of internal trade, industry, and transportation. Southern towns also grew and were the frequent destination of Black women emancipated from slavery. Slav­ ery created a complex community o f women in southern cities, but significant urbanization did not begin there or in the West until after the Civil War. Towns expanded into industrial cities in the Midwest and Northeast between 1880 and 1920. These years overlapped with the period of enor­ mous immigration from Europe, Asia, and M ex­ ico. In the former Mexican and Indian territories of the West, new U.S. cities created the urban and financial structures to support the growth of in­

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dustrialized agriculture, mining, and cattle ranch­ ing. Some western U.S. towns grew out of former colonial and Mexican pueblos, whose histories, as inscribed in the physical structure of town space, were often reduced to only traces of the past in the new urban order. Nineteenth-century urbanization coincided with the rise of new social classes and gender rela­ tions. As industrialization began, land became an increasingly important way to accumulate capital through rent and speculation. Renters, in turn, sought a wage to pay for their lodging. Urban working-class wives and mothers bought, sold, traded, and shared goods among neighbors. They created close-knit communities for their survival. The city offered women greater economic inde­ pendence than did the countryside, but women who worked as domestic laborers, cooks, laun­ dresses, seamstresses, boardinghouse operators, and working girls in the textile and garment trades earned meager wages that improved only slightly with the growth of jobs in the clerical and retail sectors. T he middle class shaped the city into socially differentiated communities after 1820 by creating neighborhoods built around an ideology of do­ mesticity that removed middle-class wives and daughters from places of production and ex­ change to the private space of the home, where they were expected to attend to the family. The middle class created the urban structures that sep­ arated work and residence and developed a lan­ guage of housing that defined residential condi­ tions as manifestations of individual or collective morality and ethics rather than relating housing issues to structures of urban power and wealth. This language of housing relied on polarized cat­ egories of private and public, respectable and im­ moral, home and workplace. City governments’ role in urban planning was formalized in the twentieth century, but their earlier decisions tended to protect the property values of middleclass neighborhoods and provide better services and public works.

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V IE T N A M ERA

The housewife’s work removed most middleclass married women from public life until the end of the twentieth century, but unmarried women commonly worked outside the home, and those who remained single often worked as “social housekeepers” in professions that included teach­ ing, nursing, social work, and urban reform. Their initiatives attempted to regulate industry; end po­ litical corruption; extend the vote to women; and improve housing, education, and public health. As settlement-house workers, urban reformers built educational and social welfare institutions in im­ migrant neighborhoods across the nation. M any of their ideas influenced the urban and social policy of the welfare state that emerged during the 1930s. Northern cities promised work and a cultural renaissance for southern Black women whose large-scale migration began when industry ex­ panded and jobs opened up as male workers went to fight during World War I. Northern and midwestern cities became cultural meccas with their innovative music, artistic, and dance scenes, epit­ omized by the Harlem Renaissance o f the 1920s. In her novel Jazz, Toni Morrison describes what New York City offered to rural women of all back­ grounds: “ Even if the room they rented was smaller than the heifer’s stall and darker than a morning privy, they stayed to .. . hear themselves in an audience, feel themselves moving down the street among hundreds of others who moved the way they d id .. . . Part of why they loved it was the specter they left behind.” The specter, of course, was that of southern racism and extreme poverty. But an ideology o f white superiority cut into the utopian vision of the city. The systematic segrega­ tion of persons identified as racial minorities be­ gan as early as the 1850s with the creation o f re­ stricted areas for Chinese residents in western towns. Public institutions and places o f leisure, commerce, and entertainment also segregated persons of Mexican, Native American, Black, and Asian descent, even though the white majority’s right to do so was contested frequently in the courts at the time.

Ethnic neighborhoods historically preceded segregation in U.S. cities. They are generally comprised of more than one ethnic group, though one group, with origins in a common area of mi­ gration, typically predominates. Neighbors com­ monly develop close ties, and the neighborhood offers a commercial and cultural life that re­ sponds to the tastes and social practices o f its resi­ dents. In the post-World War II era, suburbs and shop­ ping malls were built across the nation in such massive proportions that they began to replace the prominence and function of the city. Federal and state governments supported suburban sprawl by funding roads and highways in lieu of supporting mass-transit systems and centralized urban growth. A slow deindustrialization coupled with suburban­ ization left cities with high unemployment be­ cause of the decline in job opportunities. T he loss of a tax base led to a decline in the quality of local services. City governments and planning agencies have developed policies to bring capital invest­ ment, jobs, and commerce back into the cities. Grassroots community organizations similarly have organized since the 1960s to contest urban de­ cay and redevelopment policies they consider un­ favorable to their neighborhoods. These urban movements often are led by women who draw upon strong community ties. Despite the impor­ tance of these movements and of urban policy ini­ tiatives, the future of U.S. cities remains unclear at the close of the twentieth century. ■ L IS B E T H HAAS S e e a l s o Housing; Immigration; Industrialization; Settlement House Movement; Suburbanization.

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Vietnam Era

he era of the Vietnam War (1964-1975) was a time of breathtaking change for women in the United States. New patterns, long in the making,

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reshaped most women’s lives. Women partici­ pated in and frequently led the social movements we associate with the era and initiated a massive second wave o f feminism. Since the American Revolution, wars have been times o f accelerated change in gender roles. In such times daily life takes on intensified political meaning, and labor shortages created by mobilization open up new economic opportunities for women. Historians of women, however, have challenged the tendency of political, military, and diplomatic historians to frame historical narratives around wars as turning points. The Vietnam War was a different kind of war. It lasted longer than any other war. It was not a “to­ tal war,” which required the mobilization of the entire population, and it was ultimately very un­ popular, ending in defeat. One of the key charac­ teristics of this era is the breakdown of an Ameri­ can consensus on many levels. Women, without question, led the way in this breakdown and opened up for subsequent generations a new world o f possibilities for relations between the sexes. When President Johnson asked Congress for authorization to “ take all necessary measures” (G ulf of Tonkin Resolution, August 1964), a care­ ful look at American women might have pre­ dicted that this war would not be fought on the same gender terrain as previous wars. The mean­ ing of womanhood was under challenge (which meant, of course, that manhood was also an un­ stable ideal). The baby boom was over. Birthrates plummeted; marriage ages rose; and, in an ex­ panding economy, women’s education levels as well as men’s skyrocketed. Middle-class women’s employment patterns had shifted decisively dur­ ing the previous decade away from the norm of marriage and full-time domesticity toward greater labor force participation for mothers and individ­ ualistic (often sexual) self-expression for younger single women. Thousands of Black women in the South were mobilizing in their communities, challenging political authorities, and providing

grassroots leadership to the civil rights movement. In California, Latinas like Delores Huerta were beginning to mobilize migrant farm workers in the campaign led by Cesar Chavez. These mo­ mentous changes were well under way by the mid-1960s. As the war began to escalate, early signs of the second wave abounded: Betty Friedan had issued her salvo against traditional domestic­ ity in The Feminine Mystique, in 1963; in February 1964, an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act had added “sex” to the categories of people protected from discrimination in employ­ ment. On college campuses a new mobilization of students was well under way. In October 1966, the National Organization for Women was founded at a conference of state Commissions on the Status of Women. By the fall of 1967, women’s liberation groups began to emerge among student activists across the country. The rebirth of feminism provided a counter­ point to the cynicism and despair generated by the conduct of the war (including official lying about “body counts,” and so on) and later by the Watergate scandal. The first national gathering of radical feminists took place at an antiwar march in January 1968, the Jeannette Rankin Brigade. Later that same year, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and street riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, women’s liberationists made the na­ tional news with a demonstration at the Miss America Pageant, where the protesters crowned a live sheep. The years between 1970 and 1975 were filled with female activism. A national women’s strike for equality on the fiftieth anniversary of woman suffrage brought thousands of women into city streets to make good-humored but firm demands for change. “ Don’t Iron While the Strike Is Hot,” they said. While radical feminists formed con­ sciousness-raising groups, liberals created new structures to address policy issues and public in­ equities: the Women’s Equity Action League (W EAL), the National Women’s Political Caucus

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(NW PC), the NOW Legal Defense Fund, and the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW ). Lesbian and gay liberation groups formed across the country. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm was the first African American woman to run for president in a major party’s primaries. Congress passed an equal rights amendment to the Constitution and sent it to the states for ratification (which was never com­ pleted). Consciousness-raising groups also gave birth to the first shelters for battered women, rape crisis hotlines, and a self-help health movement. They founded dozens of journals, presses, coffee­ houses, clinics, bookstores, day-care centers, and women’s studies programs. Ms. magazine com­ peted with M cC a ll’s and Redbook at grocery checkout lines. Despite ridicule even words be­ gan to change: fireman gave way to firefighter; hymns about “brotherhood” were revised to be more inclusive. The mobilization of women for greater equality evoked an opposing response in which women also played important roles. Phyllis Schlafly founded STO P ER A in 1972, as soon as the amendment passed Congress. When the Su­ preme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade (1973) that abortion in the early months of pregnancy was a private decision to be made between a woman and her doctor, a pro-life movement emerged as a powerful force in the New Right. Women were also among the Vietnam War vets who returned home to a country that wanted to forget the experience. Still excluded from combat duty, women served extensively in the armed forces and especially in military hospitals. Their service was rendered invisible both by the pre­ sumption that soldiers (and war) are male and by the debates then raging about whether an ERA would make women subject to the draft. Not un­ til the 1990s was their service recognized and memorialized. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War era, Amer­ ican politics incorporated a range of issues previ­ ously considered private. The old consensus was

gone, and women and men faced a long process of renegotiating the meanings of womanhood and manhood. For better or worse, the personal had become political. • SARA M. EVANS S ee

also

Wars: 1900 to the Present.

0 Vietnamese American Women he flow of refugees from Vietnam to the United States began in 19 7;, the year that marked the end of the long war and the reunifica­ tion of the country under communist forces. As part of the evacuation effort designed to aid South Vietnamese associated with the U.S. military pres­ ence in Vietnam, about 130,000 Vietnamese were flown to the United States. Since then, thousands of other Vietnamese have fled Vietnam to escape political and economic persecution by the new government. From 1975 to 1985, nearly half a mil­ lion Vietnamese settled in the United States. For Vietnamese American women, the process of migration has been accompanied by important life changes. Vietnamese women in the United States are o f course not a monolithic group, but one that is differentiated by such variables as so­ cial class and age, each of which shapes the form and extent of the change caused by migration in women’s lives. Although migration to the United States has re­ sulted in greater gender equality, it has also in­ volved important gender-role changes for Viet­ namese American men and women. The ideal traditional Vietnamese family, modeled on Confucian principles, is one in which women are sub­ ordinate to men in all phases and aspects of their lives. According to Confucian teachings, women are expected to obey their fathers when they are young, their husbands when they are married, and their sons when they are widowed. The ideol-

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ogy o f male dominance is expressed in sayings such as “A hundred girls aren’t worth a single tes­ ticle.” The reality of traditional Vietnamese gender re­ lations deviated from this normative model in many ways. Despite all appearances, women in traditional Vietnamese society had not been bereft of power and respect. One o f the most famous historical Vietnamese revolts against Chinese domination (in a . d . 40) was led by wom en—the Trung sisters—who are widely revered by the Vietnamese as national heroines. Certain systematic avenues of authority and power for women existed in traditional Viet­ namese life. Older women tended to have consid­ erable power in the household. As part of their do­ mestic caretaking role, women often controlled the family budget and exerted influence over the family economy. Although men controlled key economic institutions, Vietnamese women did have access to economic resources through their extensive involvement in small business and trad­ ing. A recent ethnographic study of low-income, newly arrived Vietnamese refugees suggests a movement toward greater equality in the relations of men and women who migrated to the United States. The rise in women’s power resulted from the complex interaction of many factors. Perhaps most importantly, the income of women had be­ come more critical to the survival of their fami­ lies. Unlike the situation in pre-1975 Vietnam, the Vietnamese men were unable to find jobs that paid enough to comfortably support their fami­ lies. Families were thus more dependent on the income generated by women through their em­ ployment, which usually consisted of low-paying and unstable jobs such as housecleaning, waitressing, and assembling garments. Besides economic conditions, changes in Viet­ namese American gender relations reflected the male-dominated sex ratio of the Vietnamese American population. Young unmarried women in particular experienced greater power in their

sexual relationships with men because of the “shortage” of Vietnamese women in the United States. Migration to the United States had also ex­ panded the Vietnamese immigrant women’s homemaking activities beyond such traditional work as child care and housework to include ne­ gotiation with social institutions located outside the household, such as schools, hospitals, and welfare agencies. Despite the fact that negotiating with bureaucratic institutions on behalf of the household was onerous work, it was a process that ultimately equipped women with valuable skills that were a resource in women’s efforts to exert control over household affairs. One arena in which Vietnamese American women collectively and actively used the re­ sources that they had gained in the migration process was in situations of domestic violence against women. Women often used informal net­ works of women friends and kin to intervene on be­ half of other women who were the victims of do­ mestic violence. Using such mechanisms of social control as gossip and ostracism, the women’s net­ works were sometimes able to influence positively men’s behavior toward women in the family. Along with these gains, Vietnamese American women also associated migration to the United States with important losses, including the de­ cline in their authority as mothers over children. Many Vietnamese American women felt that U.S. society impinged on their rights as parents, and they were ambivalent about the protection from domestic violence offered to them by the U.S. legal system. The women were extremely concerned that the intervention of the law into family life detracted from the authority and rights of parents to discipline their children as they chose. These attitudes highlight the complexity of women’s position within the patriarchal family or­ der, which assigned women to a position of subor­ dination to men but also gave power and authority to women in their relations with children. Besides a decline in their authority as mothers, Vietnamese American women also associated mi-

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gration to the United States with a general deteri­ oration in the quality of family life and relations. That is, what had been lost or at least threatened by the move to the United States were the tradi­ tions of obligation, cooperation, and caring that had marked their family life in Vietnam. Nazli Kibria, Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni­ versity Press, 1993). ■ N A ZLI K IB R IA S

e e

ALSO

Asian Pacific Women.

§ Violence Against Women estern society identifies gender, class, race or ethnicity, and sexual orientation as signif­ icant social categories. These categories, which often overlap, serve to locate individuals in hierar­ chically ordered groups within the social struc­ ture. Depending on their place in that structure, the groups are valued or devalued and conse­ quently are differentially advantaged or disadvan­ taged. For example, white women are privileged by their race, penalized for their gender, and may be further disadvantaged if they are members of the “lower” class; Black women, who form a dis­ proportionate share of the poor, are penalized for their race and gender. Despite differences of class, race or ethnicity, or sexual orientation, many women still share cer­ tain similarities. One similarity is that women are targets for specific forms of violence: incest, bat­ tering, sexual harassment, and rape. Whether pornography is a form of violence against women remains a matter of serious contention and dis­ agreement among feminists. Each form of vio­ lence is a manifestation of societally organized, supported, and condoned or “naturalized” arrange­ ments of power and control based on the combi­

W

nation of gender, race or ethnicity, class, and sex­ ual orientation. T he interrelationship among the forms of vio­ lence is widely acknowledged. Each form of vio­ lence supports the others; together they create sys­ temic and pervasive constraints on women. The infliction or threat of violence and abuse is a means of keeping women silent, and thereby con­ trolling them. Despite guarantees of legalized equality between men and women, this silencing often compromises the possibility of women’s full and active participation in society and their rights as citizens in a democracy. Violence against women has occurred for cen­ turies within a historical and cultural context. The infliction of violence has varied in its extent and incidence over time. For example, during the nineteenth century non-slave women who worked in domestic service were the targets of rape and sexual harassment regardless of their race and this violence went unpunished. Young white women who worked in New England tex­ tile mills suffered the same experience. Prior to the divorce-law reforms o f the second half of the twentieth century, women seeking a divorce from an abusive husband were required to demonstrate ongoing serious abuse before a court would grant a divorce on the grounds o f cruelty. Punishment for offenders is often divided along racial lines in the United States. Research shows that Black men accused of raping white women were and still are more likely to be charged and convicted than Black men accused o f raping Black women. Moreover, compared with the rate o f conviction for white men accused of raping white or Black women, Black men are still more likely to be convicted. M en from the lower class or men of color are commonly stereotyped — when accused, they are assumed to be guilty of battering their wives or partners, while white men from the middle or upper classes are far less likely to be accused or convicted for battering. Privi­ leged white men serve less time in jail; and in communities where there are alternative sen-

V I O L E N C E AGAINST W O M E N

Marchers in 1978 symbolically reclaim the streets as safe for women.

tences, such as mandatory participation in batter­ ers’ reeducation groups, economically privileged white men frequently are allowed to seek private therapeutic help in lieu of attending publicly sub­ sidized reeducation programs. In rape cases, lawyers often use rules of evi­ dence or other means to undermine the credibil­ ity o f a woman who alleges rape. This test of the accuser’s credibility predominates in the legal sys­ tem and perpetuates the sexist belief that women are likely to lie or misrepresent the facts when they accuse a man of rape. Skepticism regarding women’s motivation for alleging rape occurs on the civil side of the law as well. W hen women claim that they have been sexually harassed or have been the victim of incest, society’s message is remarkably similar. A woman’s word is subject to

distortion and bias. Regardless of the formal law, there is a strong likelihood that she will be viewed as a liar, provocateur, or fantasizer until proven otherwise under intensive and often demeaning courtroom scrutiny. In the past twenty years, women’s rights groups have uncovered and documented the epidemic nature of all forms of violence against women. Re­ searchers have questioned the disparity between the aggressive pursuit by police and prosecutors of virtually all crimes and their lack of similar tactics in cases of battering and rape. The increased in­ terest in recent decades regarding violence against women has underscored the failure of public offi­ cials and social agencies to act responsively and responsibly toward and on behalf of women who are targets o f violence.

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Widespread systemic problems and gaps exist in the formal law, its implementation, and the policies and practices of concerned agencies. In many jurisdictions police officers fail to answer in a timely fashion emergency calls from abused women, or they may treat domestic violence as a “private” matter. The police may also fail to en­ force court-ordered protective or “stay-away” or­ ders against a perpetrator. Police officers are sometimes insensitive to the emotional needs of a woman who has been raped. Prosecutors often subject women who allege rape to demeaning and confusing procedures or fail to prosecute bat­ terers or family members alleged to have commit­ ted incest. Criminal court judges frequently “warn” batterers rather than mandate treatment or incarceration. Family court judges are often overwhelmed with cases and may be cynical about the prospects for successful interventions aimed at preventing future family violence. In many cases, social workers lack the resources to provide adequate follow-up services for abused or raped women, and some health care providers may not recognize or report incidents of violence. Women who are the targets of violence may be too frightened or intimidated to report the vio­ lence or to pursue available legal remedies such as a court order of protection. Dramatic events such as the recent case of alleged rape against Kennedy-family member William Smith, the Anita H ill-Clarence Thomas hearings, or the charges of domestic violence raised in the O. J. Simpson trials, as well as less notorious incidents of violence against women, fuel public awareness and concern. Research documenting the incidence, fre­ quency, and severity of domestic violence has helped to strengthen calls for reform in laws and policies addressing Violence against women. As a result of pressure from grassroots activist organiza­ tions, significant reforms have been initiated at different levels of government. In many states laws have been amended to require mandatory arrest of batterers. Special training and education about

domestic violence and rape has been mandated for police, prosecutors, and judges. Various case disposition and punishment regimes such as in­ carceration, a combination of jail plus work re­ lease, and required counseling and reeducation programs for batterers are being developed or evaluated. Some states have passed legislation ex­ tending the statute of limitations for bringing a charge of incest; some have included marital rape in their criminal code. At the federal level, judges have recognized sexual harassment as a civil rights violation. Recent congressional legislation (such as the 1994 Violence Against Women Act) under­ scores the seriousness of violence against women and the need for additional federal efforts to re­ duce such crimes. Within Native American communities, women confront unique issues when assaulted. If they live in a tribal community or on a reservation, they may experience racism or cultural insensitivity by some outside service providers. In addition, laws created by predominantly male tribal officials have often ignored the problem o f violence against Native American women. An increase in such violence has occurred as tribal cultures have begun to adopt the values of the world around them, but many communities continue to view this type of violence as not only an assault against an individual woman but also an assault against the larger community, family, and tribal culture. In response, some tribal governments have adopted extensive protective codes and strict sanc­ tions for those who perpetrate violence against women. Some o f the most innovative and creative pro­ grams addressing the needs of all women who have been the targets of violence have been and continue to be developed and implemented by women’s rights activists. They have organized rape and domestic violence crisis hotlines; bat­ tered women’s shelters; support groups for women who have experienced rape, battering, or incest; and “Take Back the Night” marches, designed to call attention to women’s right to walk the streets

V IO L E N C E AGAINST W O M EN

safely. These women-centered institutions and ac­ tivities also have attempted, though not always successfully, to address the many complexities re­ garding racial, ethnic, or class issues. Federal legislation recognizes the special vul­ nerability o f immigrant battered women, whose lack of access to police and social services may be exacerbated by their lack of fluency in English, and whose legal residence is often dependent on the citizenship status of the abusive spouse. Asian Pacific and Latina organizations have been cru­ cial to the development o f culturally sensitive ser­ vices for battered women in their communities. They have also challenged some batterers’ “cul­ tural defense” theory that wife or partner beating is an integral part of their culture. Women-oriented social services recently have begun to receive public funding and support. The funding is an acknowledgment that there exists a gap in services for female victims of violence, though many programs are ready targets for a right-wing fiscal retrenchment. There remains a pronounced need for expanding services and de­ veloping new programs. For example, battered women who are divorced custodial parents often risk further violence from their perpetrators dur­ ing the men’s visits with their children. To protect divorced women, supervised visitation programs for noncustodial parents must be developed and monitored. Moreover, family violence has a strong negative impact on children. As a result there is a clear need for greater sensitivity on the part of educators and other adults in identifying children who observe or are targets of abuse. School programs are being created that are de­ voted to the issue of family violence. Neither the conventional category of “victim” nor the identification of “learned helplessness” as a dominant mode of abused women’s behavior fully encompasses or recognizes the many strate­ gies for survival and resistance developed by women confronted with violence. Although the categories of victim, survivor, and resister are not mutually exclusive in experiential terms, they are

mm

often classified as distinct within the larger society and may generate different responses. For exam­ ple, societal presumptions regarding “appropri­ ate” roles for women may create more sympathy and support for a “victim” than for a “resister” who readily strikes back. Women who appear to be “helpless” in a violent situation are stereotyped as women who demonstrate “acceptable” sex-spe­ cific behaviors and responses. Existing assumptions in the law are open to question and revision regarding what constitutes “ reasonable” behavior, or self-defense, on the abused woman’s part in response to rape, batter­ ing, sexual harassment, or incest. Scholars dis­ agree about the desirability and utility of develop­ ing a sex-specific standard for “ reasonableness” or relying on gender-neutral standards. Whether a sex-specific or sex-neutral standard is used, the le­ gal system’s failure to understand the complexity of women’s responses in violent situations often results in a double penalty for women: first as the actual target of violence and again as a plaintiff in the courts. For example, women who recognize that there is little or no possibility of avoiding rape in a particular situation may encourage the rapist to reveal information that could later lead to his identification and arrest; her “ complicitous” be­ havior should not be misconstrued as “ consent.” Or, a battered woman may remain with her male partner because she believes that by staying she can best protect her children from abuse. In such circumstances the woman’s behavior should not be considered child neglect, which could lead to termination of her parental rights. Lesbian battered women are rarely able to use existing in­ tervention systems because their relationships are not legally sanctioned. Battered lesbians are rarely treated seriously by police, prosecutors, or courts. During the 1990s recognition in the United States and other countries that violence against women is a cross-cultural and cross-national phe­ nomenon has led to an understanding that all forms o f violence against women are viola-

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tions of women’s human rights internationally. The amended International Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW ) and other worldwide campaigns that focus on violence against women reflect this emerging consciousness. Kerry Lobel, ed., Naming the Violence (Seattle: Seal Press, 1986); Susan Schechter, Women and Male Violence (Boston: South End Press, 1982); Kersti Yllo and Michele Bograd, eds., Feminist Perspectives on Wife Abuse (New­ bury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1988). ■ IS A B E L M ARCUS

Abuse iolence against women cuts across cultures and time, extending through the entire life cy­ cle from abortion of unwanted female fetuses and rites of female circumcision to beating deaths or forced suicides of elderly women. Age, color, reli­ gion, and socioeconomic status do not protect against becoming the target or victim o f abuse. No group of women is safe. In research based on behavioral observations of family violence in ninety societies worldwide, David Levinson (1989) recorded more than forty categories of family violence. Wife beating oc­ curred in seventy-six societies and was rare in only fourteen. Forty-two societies recorded fatal inci­ dents of wife beating. Husband beating occurred in twenty-four cultures. Where husband beating was found, the frequency and severity was less than with wife beatings. Abuse is not confined to the home, however. Woman abuse ranges from personal crimes o f vio­ lence such as muggings and rapes, to work-related exploitation and harassment, to system-embedded bias against all women. Further, in many parts of the world, including the United States, at least some forms o f woman abuse are considered nor­ mal and are reinforced by the prevailing culture and institutions.

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Because psychology, history, anthropology, so­ ciology, medicine, and law all have documented the frequency, severity, and forms of abuse of girls and women, a standard definition of abuse is needed that will be useful to researchers across disciplines and account for a spectrum of violent acts. Richard Gelles and Murray Straus have con­ ducted and analyzed national surveys of violence in U.S. families and define violence as “an act car­ ried out with the intention, or perceived inten­ tion, of causing physical pain or injury to another person.” Feminists have criticized this definition be­ cause 1) it gives scant attention to psychological techniques of terrorism that may not involve phys­ ical injury but that have devastating impact on victims, and 2) it can lead to simple tallies of vio­ lent behaviors that insufficiently differentiate less violent forms of abuse (more often used by women) from more dangerous acts (dispropor­ tionately used by men). Such a definition can lead one to conclude women and men are equally violent. Nonetheless, the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) developed by Gelles and Straus for use in their sur­ veys has become a standard instrument to measure interpersonal violence. Hundreds of researchers have used it since the late 1970s. The C T S remains a valuable tool for comparative purposes. A further complication is that findings from one discipline may negatively affect efforts by another. For example, medical researchers have linked brain chemistry changes in abused children to the children’s aggressive behavior. Social scientists, victim advocates, and prosecutors are concerned that such findings could be utilized by batterers who were abused as children to avoid account­ ability and responsibility for their criminal acts. Contradictions occur not only across disci­ plines but also within professions. Feminist psy­ chotherapists work in the context of a profession that initially validated women’s reports of sexual abuse; Freud then labeled such reports the prod­ ucts o f fantasy and wish fulfillment. Anna O.,

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treated and abandoned by Joseph Breuer and sub­ ject of one of Freud’s best-known case studies, for­ tunately survived. As Bertha Pappenheim, she ac­ complished her own recovery, then became an early contributor to feminist social theory in Ger­ many. Similar contradictions occur within the legal arena. The attorney general’s Task Force on Fam­ ily Violence final report (1984) stated, “The legal response to family violence must be guided pri­ marily by the nature of the abusive act, not the re­ lationship between the victim and the abuser.. . . Many segments of the population are unaware that beating one’s wife or children is a crime.” Lawyers used this report to craft innovative laws to improve community response to violence against women and to extend protection under family violence legislation to never-married part­ ners, including same-sex couples. Despite these efforts, ten years later the task force findings are neither universally understood nor consistently accepted and applied. The legal system remains a dangerous place for women. For example, women are severely criticized for remaining with abusive partners. Mothers are threatened with ter­ mination of their parental rights by a legal system that holds her responsible for neglect even if she is not the child’s abuser. Laws do not protect her from medical insurers who deny her coverage be­ cause treating her injuries from assaults represents risk to the company, or from employers who fire her because she misses work as a result of assaults. Yet when women leave abusive partners, they also risk losing custody of their children. Domes­ tic violence is not considered relevant to custody decisions in some states. Judges may grant custody to the batterer because he is economically supe­ rior or seems the friendlier parent in court. State welfare agencies may label survivor mothers ne­ glectful instead of addressing their poverty. Pro­ fessional women may lose custody because their success is interpreted as proof that they are less ef­ fective parents than are fathers with similar ca­ reers.

Poor women are threatened with losing custody for having too many children or for being teenagers. Older women whose financial security frequently depends upon male wage earners are particularly vulnerable to poverty following di­ vorce or widowhood. Elder abuse is emerging as a particular hazard for older women who have lost their independence and must rely upon relatives, home health aides, or institutions for care. No single theory explains all forms of violence against women. The fact that violence against women is both traditional and normative in much of the world creates significant barriers to naming abuse, documenting its frequency and severity, and finding ways to prevent, reduce, and elimi­ nate it. Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Mary P. Koss, Lisa A. Goodman, et ah, No Safe Haven: Male Violence Against Women at Home, at Work, and in the Community (Washington, D.C.: Ameri­ can Psychological Association, 1994); David Levinson, Family Violence in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1989). ■ MARTHA L. D EED

Battered Women

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y tradition, law, and religious prescription, men in most societies throughout most of recorded history have been entitled to discipline their wives and to inflict physical punishment. That some men routinely beat their wives or girl­ friends for “bad” behavior was regarded as a fact of life. The first thoroughgoing protest against this violence was published in England in 1879 by Frances Power Cobbe, who urged legislation to prevent “Wife Torture in England.” Protest con­ tinued in the United States. Susan B. Anthony and other leaders o f the nineteenth-century women’s movement often spoke out against the brutality of men who coerced their wives through physical and sexual violence. After 1964, the year

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Al-Anon women in Pasadena, California, opened the first shelter for women victims of physical abuse, the term battered women gradually began to come into widespread use. The term has proved problematic in several ways. First, it suggests that “battered” is the woman’s constant condition—that she exists in an unremitting state of victimhood—a description few battered women would accept. On the con­ trary, most battering is intermittent or occasional, and most battered women see themselves not as victims but as strong women working hard to get on with life while coping with a difficult situation. Second, by focusing attention on victim rather than perpetrator, the term battered woman en­ courages the persistent public habit of blaming her for what the perpetrator does to her. For the past twenty years battered women (but not batterers) have been a popular research sub­ ject for psychologists seeking to explain why some women are battered. Many “ experts” still main­ tain that battered women are masochists. Femi­ nist researchers, on the other hand, note that bat­ tered women generally try to prevent, defuse, or flee violence, and recent studies have found bat­ tered women to be extraordinarily resourceful and resilient in escaping violence. Recent feminist analysis focuses not on battered women but on men who perpetrate assault and on social institu­ tions that look the other way. One widely publicized and generally misunder­ stood psychological concept colors public percep­ tions o f battered women: the concept of the bat­ tered woman syndrome. The syndrome is said to include extreme passivity or “learned helpless­ ness,” a condition that results from repeated bat­ tering and impairs the woman’s ability to take constructive action on her own behalf. Expert witnesses at the murder trials of battered women who kill their batterers in self-defense use this theory (originally developed by Lenore Walker) to explain to jurors why the woman was unable to leave the man before the fatal confrontation. Yet battered woman syndrome is com monly—and

wrongly—thought to be a legal defense that gives any battered woman an excuse to kill. The term also unfortunately suggests that a woman who de­ fends herself against a batterer is somehow men­ tally defective. Originally intended to help bat­ tered women, the concept is now often used against them and is often rigorously applied by prosecutors to disqualify a woman’s claims of selfdefense: if a woman was not utterly passive and “helpless,” as most battered women are not, then she may be disqualified as a “ real” battered woman and portrayed as a cold-blooded killer. The stan­ dard is used particularly against women of color and poor women who cannot afford expert help. In addition, in civil divorce proceedings, some women are deemed unfit mothers and lose custody of their children when the court determines they are impaired by battered woman syndrome. During the 1970s women who identified them­ selves as “formerly battered" and their feminist al­ lies organized the battered women’s movement to stop violence against women by providing emer­ gency shelter, raising awareness, and influencing legislation and public policy. This grassroots movement marked an extraordinary moment in U.S. history: never before had there been such an organization of crime victims who, when denied redress, established a de facto system of protection for themselves and other crime victims. By 1978 the movement had established a National Coali­ tion Against Domestic Violence. In the following decade, in addition to providing shelter and sup­ port for battered women and their children, the movement effected legal changes giving battered women the right to obtain orders of protection, maintain residence (while batterers are evicted), and receive child custody and support. Facing enormous resistance from the criminal justice sys­ tem, the movement brought lawsuits and influ­ enced police, prosecutors, and judges to enforce laws against domestic assault just as they would in nondomestic cases. The movement also emphasized public educa­ tion and in-service training for people who come

V IO L E N C E AGAINST W O M EN

in contact with battered women, including crimi­ nal justice, social work, and medical personnel. Working at local, state, and national levels, the movement caught public attention and made “private” violence against women in the home a public social issue of great importance. This achievement prompted several foundations and professional organizations, including the Ameri­ can Medical Association and the American Bar Association, to initiate programs to combat vio­ lence against women and children in the home. The movement’s achievements are also reflected in the Violence Against Women Act passed by Congress in 1994, legislation that includes provi­ sions to aid battered women. Despite these remarkable accomplishments, battering remains the most frequently committed crime in the United States. Law enforcement is still inadequate and erratic, and shelters and ser­ vices for battered women are increasingly institu­ tionalized, staffed primarily by professionals in mental health and social work rather than by formerly battered women and feminists. These conditions reflect the persistence of age-old atti­ tudes—that wife beating is an individual psycho­ logical and marital problem, that it cannot be stopped, that it is normal behavior bound to hap­ pen when women “ask for it,” and that victimized women have only themselves to blame. Ann Jones, Next Time, S h ell Be Dead: Battering CS' How to Stop It (Boston: Beacon, 1994); Susan Schechter, Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women's Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1982); Lenore E. Walker, The Battered Woman Syn­ drome (New York: Springer, 1984). ■ ANN JO N E S

Domestic Violence n 1978 feminists of the grassroots battered women’s movement lobbied Congress in sup­ port of civil rights legislation for battered women.

I

They devised the phrase domestic violence to over­ come congressional resistance to a “women’s” is­ sue. This euphemism became the common term for criminal acts of assault and battery committed by a person against a current or former intimate partner, most often at home. Responsibility for such assaults is usually, but erroneously, assigned to the woman, who is thought to provoke, invite, and enjoy violence. Feminist analysis assigns re­ sponsibility for violence to the perpetrator and sees violent acts as part of a pattern of deliberate coercive control designed to compel the victim to comply with the victimizer. Domestic violence occurs in heterosexual, lesbian, and gay relation­ ships, and men are sometimes the victims of ei­ ther their male or female partner. Men batter four million women a year, accord­ ing to the National Clearinghouse on Domestic Violence, and battering is the leading cause of in­ jury to women in the United States. Untold num­ bers of women suffer permanent disfigurement and disabilities. Approximately twenty-five hun­ dred domestic violence homicides occur every year; some fifteen hundred women die violently at the hands of current and former husbands and boyfriends, while about one thousand battered women defend themselves by killing batterers. ■ ANN JO N ES

Incest lthough there is no consensus regarding the best definition of incest, most researchers in­ clude sex acts between blood and nonblood rela­ tives (whether of the same or opposite sex) rang­ ing from vaginal and anal intercourse to milder acts of sexual contact such as sexual kissing. Some researchers also include noncontact expe­ riences such as genital exhibition or sexual propositions. The term incestuous abuse is used here to distinguish exploitive incest from normal

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sex play between relatives of approximately the same age. With the emergence of the second wave of fem­ inism in the United States, increasing numbers of incest survivors began to talk about their abuse. For example, in 1978 a random multiethnic sam­ ple of San Francisco’s women residents con­ ducted by this author found that approximately 16 percent, or one in every six women, admitted hav­ ing experienced at least one incident of incestu­ ous abuse before the age of eighteen. This study contradicted the widely held myth that incestuous abuse is more prevalent in the lower classes and among people of color. When focusing on father-daughter incest, however, sig­ nificant differences in prevalence emerged. Al­ though the number of Native Americans in the sample was unreliably small, 36 percent of them had been sexually abused by a father compared with 7.5 percent of Latina women, 5.4 percent of non-Jewish white women, 4.4 percent of African American women, and o percent o f Asian, Filipina, and Jewish women. These findings merit further research. Studies invariably show that the overwhelming majority of female incest survivors are abused by male relatives and that most male incest survivors are also abused by males. The prevalence of in­ cestuous abuse for boys, however, consistently has been found to be much lower than for girls. For example, in the largest national epidemiological study conducted in the United States (n = 2,626), only 1.8 percent of boys reported having been incestuously abused. Eight percent of girls in this study reported such abuse—a rate more than four times that of the boys. Incestuous abuse is an important social prob­ lem because of the trauma and long-term damage that frequently result. Research, such as that re­ viewed by David Finkelhor and Angela Browne in 1986, repeatedly has found a history of incestuous abuse to be associated with adult mental health impairments; including “depression, self-destruc­ tive behavior, anxiety, feelings of isolation and

stigma, poor self-esteem, a tendency towards re­ victimization, and substance abuse.” Sexual mal­ adjustments and difficulty in trusting others also are widely reported. Acting-out behavior by fe­ m ales—for example, running away from home, prostitution, alcoholism, drug addiction, and delinquency—also is common. Feminism has revolutionized our understand­ ing of violence and sexual abuse of females, in­ cluding incestuous abuse. Besides helping incest survivors to disclose their experiences without fear of being blamed, the feminist movement recog­ nizes how gender inequality, embedded in patri­ archal institutions like the traditional family, pro­ motes incestuous abuse. In her groundbreaking 1981 book on father-daughter incest, for example, Judith Flerman wrote, “a frankly feminist perspec­ tive offers the best explanation o f the existing data [on incestuous abuse]. Without an understanding of male supremacy and female oppression, it is impossible to explain why the vast majority of in­ cest perpetrators . . . are male, and why the major­ ity of victim s. . . are female.” Herman goes on to indict the patriarchal family as the structural con­ text that fosters incestuous abuse. Efforts to combat incestuous abuse therefore re­ quire a radical transformation o f the patriarchal family into a family based on equality—whether the adult caregivers are heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, or gay. To achieve such a shift is a mam­ moth and daunting task. Recently, a movement has emerged that denies the validity of retrieved memories of forgotten in­ cestuous abuse reported by many adults. This movement has become a serious threat to incest survivors because their experiences once again are being discredited and their voices silenced. Al­ though many convincing cases exist in which false memories of incestuous abuse have been in­ duced by authority figures, particularly therapists, the false memory movement grossly exaggerates their prevalence. Its supporters—including many accused child molesters—appear to be trying to turn back the clock to the “good old days” when

V IO L E N C E AGAINST W O M EN

incestuous abuse was a secret between perpetrator and victim. Just as Freud maintained that most of his female patients’ reports of incestuous abuse were fantasies, most future reports o f incestuous abuse may come to be dismissed as instances of false memory. The lack of an organized and polit­ ically militant incest survivor movement increases the likelihood of this tragic outcome. David Finkelhor, A Sourcebook on Child Sexual Abuse (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1986); Judith Herman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Diana E. H. Russell, The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women (New York: Basic Books, 1986). ■ DIANA E . H. R U S S E L L See

also

Child Abuse.

Medical Response to Violence Against Women uthorities in public health have come to rec­ ognize that “wife beating” is not only a crime, but also a major cause of death and injury to women. An estimate accepted by the American Medical Association (AMA) states that more than half of female murder victims are killed by their partners, and that eight to twelve million women in the United States are at risk of abuse. While many battered women fear informing the police and courts, they do access health facili­ ties, where, until recent years, professionals have been ill-equipped to treat victims of domestic vio­ lence. The AM A estimates that “ 75 percent of bat­ tered women first identified in a medical setting will go on to suffer repeated abuse,” and that a ma­ jority of women who are murdered by intimates had previously sought medical help. The vast number o f unaided and unidentified victims of spousal abuse was discovered during the 1980s by a handful of women physicians, in­ cluding Drs. Anne H. Flitcraft and Carole War-

A

shaw. At New York’s Bellevue Hospital, Dr. Mary Zachary discovered that while 40 percent of female emergency patients were presently or previously battered, only one in twenty-five are so recorded. When in 1985, Surgeon General Everett Koop confirmed that more women are in­ jured by battery than by rape, muggings, and acci­ dents combined, domestic violence reached the forefront of public health reform. Government, public health, and organized medical authorities have since developed a blueprint for new medical response to domestic violence. In 1990, the American Medical Women’s Associ­ ation became the first major medical group to pass resolutions regarding physicians’ responsibility to­ ward victims of domestic violence. Their example was followed by several state health institutions, and the U.S. Public Health Service, which announced as its objective for the year 2000 that at least 90 per­ cent of hospital emergency departments would have procedures for routinely identifying, treating, and referring victims ofspouseabuse. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAH O), which can close down a hospital or portion thereof for noncompliance, in January 1992 required that ambu­ latory departments and emergency rooms attend to domestic violence and elder abuse with proce­ dures similar to those used to address victims of child abuse and rape. Ultimately, a shift in responsibility from the police and courts to the educated healthcare provider as the first intervening authority in the lives of battered women will occur in healthcare reform. The AM A’s Council on Ethical and Judi­ cial Affairs has concluded that the principle of “beneficence” requires physicians to intervene in cases o f domestic violence, and warns that the physician who does not inquire about abuse or who accepts an unlikely explanation for injuries could be held liable for any subsequent injuries suffered by the victim. Often, the simplest and least expensive efforts in public health reform bring the greatest results.

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If on every intake form issued to emergency room patients the question “ Did anyone hurt you?” was added, and a social worker was present to treat bat­ tered victims, thousands of lives could be saved. Furthermore, a good record (photographs and medical prognosis) of the victim’s injuries would help victims in court. A four-step intervention strategy is suggested for use by all healthcare providers who treat female patients: identify battered women by interviewing all female patients apart from their partner; vali­ date her experience by believing what she tells you; advocate for her safety and help her expand her options; and support the battered woman in her choices. It is sad, however, how frequently a “backlash” phenomenon occurs when women begin to make progress to correct injustices. As more physicians follow protocols to identify and document domes­ tic abuse, some insurance companies use these medical records as an excuse to deny coverage (health, life, and even property) to victims of abuse, considering battered women to be at “high risk” and to have made a “voluntary lifestyle choice.” Some insurers also get information from legal records such as orders of protection. Starting in the mid-1990s some state legislatures as well as the federal government began considering pro­ posals to stop insurance discrimination against battery survivors. At this writing, in 1996, only one company, State Farm, has voluntarily eliminated domestic violence as a reason to rate or deny in­ surance. ■ BARBARA SEAM AN

Rape rom a legal standpoint, rape laws have their origins in laws about property, since women were considered to be property under AngloSaxon law. Transplanted from England, the law traditionally defined rape as “ intercourse between

F

a man and a woman not his wife, against the woman’s will and without her consent.” The history of rape and rape law in the United States is full of contradictions. “On paper,” for hundreds of years, rape has been illegal and sub­ ject to severe penalties. Yet it has been effectively legal, because it has been almost impossible to prove in most circumstances. One type of rape charge historically has been easy to prove, namely that involving a Black man and a white woman. From slavery through the post-Civil War period and to some extent to the present, when a Black man/white woman rape has been claimed, the le­ gal system and society generally have come down with full force on the alleged offender. The most common “ justification” for lynching Black men was the claim that they had raped a white woman. W hen a white woman claimed that a Black man raped her, the legal system treated her with much less suspicion than when a white woman claimed that a white man raped her. The courts historically provided Black men virtually no pro­ tection from false rape charges, yet they protected white men even if the charges were true. Rape of Black women during slavery was legal for white men. Rape o f slaves by slaves was legal. The K K K and white mobs used rape of Black women as a weapon of terror during Reconstruc­ tion. Following Reconstruction, and to some ex­ tent to the present, rape of Black women by white and Black men was ignored and/or minimized by the legal system. Several recent studies have found that historical patterns still continue. For example, a 1990 Texas study found that average prison sentences for men convicted of raping Black women were only one-fifth of average sen­ tences for men convicted of raping white women. Some scholars conclude that of all racial combi­ nations of rape charges, the legal system still treats accusations by Black women of rape by Black men the least seriously and accusations by white women of rape by Black men the most seriously. Scholars have not conducted much historical or analytical work on rape of female Native Amer-

V IO L E N C E AGAINST W O M EN

icans, Asian Americans, or Latinas and other groups. Rape of Amerindian women by coloniz­ ing Spanish soldiers in what is now California was frequent. Whites also raped Native American women but the incidence is impossible to esti­ mate, as it is for rapes of white women by Indians. Before the 1970s rape was widely seen as a sex­ ual act of uncontrollable lust, not an act o f vio­ lence. Critical to the concept of rape was the con­ cept of women’s “ chastity.” In traditional rape ideology, an “unchaste” (sexually experienced) woman lacked credibility and/or must have “wanted it” or consented. Only white women could be “chaste” ; the law presumed that Black and probably other women o f color were “ un­ chaste.” The historical treatment of rape charges often stemmed from men’s extreme distrust of women (when the alleged perpetrator was white). Freudian theory posited that women fantasized rapes and fueled the legal system’s suspicious atti­ tude. Police and prosecutors frequently have been hostile to women alleging rape. They threw out charges if the woman reported the rape too soon, or not soon enough after the event. Rape charges had to be supported by physical evidence, while other crimes did not. Until recently it was impossible to gather mean­ ingful estimates o f the incidence of rape; inci­ dence is still hard to gauge. T he 1990 FBI statistics show a total of 102,560 reported forcible rapes (in­ cluding attempted rapes). Rape is statistically un­ derreported, but the extent to which it is underre­ ported is unknown. By comparing the 1990 FBI rape statistics cited above with statistics from stud­ ies of victims by the Justice Department, it is esti­ mated that in 1990, 54 percent of forcible rapes were reported. Susan Brownmiller, in Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), esti­ mated that between one in five and one in twenty rapes were reported. It appears that reporting rates for rape have increased over the past twenty years. Rape became widely recognized as a public policy issue in the 1970s, sparked in part by

Against Our Will. Feminists criticized society’s treatment o f rape, although they often did not challenge the racist aspects of the culture’s atti­ tude toward rape. Feminists reconceptualized rape as a crime of violence and as part of a range of violence against women. This approach gained wide acceptance, although some feminists be­ lieved that the specifically sexual aspect of rape should be emphasized more. In the 1970s and 1980s rape reform efforts spread around the country. Activists sought to im­ prove the treatment of victims, expand the defini­ tion of rape, and increase the conviction rate for offenders. Feminists set up rape crisis centers and rape hotlines that helped women deal with the legal system and supported rape victims. Al­ most every state passed rape reform laws. Many laws shielded victims from being forced to reveal their sexual histories during cross-examination, a change from traditional tactics. Activists also tried to change the definition of rape so that it would fo­ cus more on the defendant’s behavior and less on the victim and whether she resisted sufficiently. Marital rape, previously legal, was outlawed in many states although it still remains legal in some circumstances. Police training programs to raise awareness were initiated. Increased numbers of women became prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges. In the late 1980s society increasingly recognized the act of forced sex in social situations, which came to be known as “ date” or “acquaintance rape.” Researchers at several college campuses found that one in five women reported being forced by a male companion to have intercourse. Activists made efforts to deal with the problem. Others attracted publicity in the early 1990s by claiming that feminists were exaggerating the problem. It is not clear what difference the changes since the 1970s have made overall. Some argue that the legal system treats rape the same way that it did, al­ though the written laws have changed. Indeed, several empirical studies have found that rape law

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reforms have made no difference in the arrest, prosecution, or conviction of rapists. The crimi­ nal justice system retains race-based, genderbased, and other inequities. Yet, the work that has been done brings society closer to the recognition that women have an absolute right to be free from forced sex. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975); Susan Estrich, Real Rape (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Jennifer Wriggins, “Rape, Racism and the Law,” Harvard Women’s Law ]oumal, 6, no. 3 (1983): 104—41.

(1917)

a permanent and federally assisted place in public junior and senior high schools in the United States. Office work, teaching, social work, and nursing were occupations in which women dominated the labor market, yet it wasn’t until the 1960s that the federal government expanded the scope and definition of vocations for young women by for­ mally recognizing and funding business courses. ■ JA N E B ER N A R D -PO W ER S S

e e

a l s o

Education; Title IX.

■ JE N N IF E R W R IG G IN S See

a lso

Pedestal.

g Voters For Choice U

Vocational Education Act (1917)

hen the National Commission on Federal Aid to Vocational Education convened in 1914 to shape policies and define programs in vocational education, the range o f vocational choices for most young women was clear and lim­ ited. Courses in women’s trades prepared them for industry, and courses in typing, stenography, and bookkeeping prepared them for office work. The legislation that resulted from the commis­ sion’s work and was approved by Congress was the Smith Hughes Act of 1917. This landmark legisla­ tion that became law followed the lead of conser­ vative women’s groups in the United States by fo­ cusing on home economics as the definitive vocational coursework for young women. The im­ plementation of the legislation gave rise to the de­ velopment of a large bureaucratic structure that sustained home economics departments in pub­ lic schools. Moreover, a broad-based campaign to increase funding for women’s vocational educa­ tion in the late 1920s resulted in a substantial in­ crease in federal monies expended on “vocational home economics.” By 1930 home economics had

W

oters For Choice was founded in 1979 by Glo­ ria Steinem and board members o f Planned Parenthood as the only independent, bipartisan political action committee devoted exclusively to electing pro-choice candidates. It offers contribu­ tions and assistance to candidates running for the U.S. House o f Representatives and Senate, state governorships, and state legislative seats during each election cycle. In addition to contributions, Voters For Choice provides in-kind technical assistance to candi­ dates related to polling, media, fundraising, and general political strategy. One element of the group’s services is their publication, Winning With Choice, a guide to candidates. In its eighth edition, it has been distributed to nearly 10,000 candidates. Voters For Choice assisted more than 240 fed­ eral candidates in the 1996 election. The organi­ zation directly contributed $360,000 to federal candidates and conducted voter identification and informational campaigns in California, Illi­ nois, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington, D .C . Evidence of its success may be seen in the fact that of the 25 close races targeted by Voters For Choice for priority attention, 21 of those can-

V

W AG E GAP

didates endorsed won. Fund-raising efforts have included rock concerts on the East and West Coasts and nationwide fund-raising and publicity tours. ■ SU E THOM AS See

also

Pro-Choice and Antiabortion Movements.

g Voting S e e Civil Rights Movement; Suffrage Move­

ment.

g Wage Gap he wage gap refers to the difference in earn­ ings between female and male workers and between workers of different races and ethnicities. One statistic commonly used for studying the gender wage gap is the wage ratio, the female wage rate divided by the male wage rate. The wage gap is one minus the wage ratio multiplied by 100. For instance, a wage ratio of 0.56 signifies a wage gap of 44 percent. Historically, men have had higher wages than women, and white male workers have had the highest wages of all. Economic studies offer dif­ ferent explanations about why white men are paid more than other workers. Some portion of the wage gap is due to differences in education, skills, and other individual endowments between the groups whose wages are being compared. Portions of the wage gap that cannot be attributed to indi­ vidual characteristics may be due to employer discrimination. Many argue that differences in ed­ ucation and skills also may be the result of dis­ crimination. The first surveys of earnings and individual characteristics in the late nineteenth century in­

T

dicate that men were paid more than women upon hiring but that the wage gap closed over time. Analysis of these data suggests that the nine­ teenth-century wage gap can be explained largely by differences in experience, productivity, and ex­ pected lifetime workforce participation. The fact that women were paid low wages may have en­ couraged them to leave the workplace, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of low employer expecta­ tions, low wages, and low lifetime female work­ force participation. Starting in the mid-twentieth century, the pro­ portion of the wage gap accounted for by individ­ ual characteristics began to shrink. Surveys show that women and men receive similar wages at young ages in the same fields but that a gap devel­ ops with experience. The portion of the wage gap not due to personal characteristics grew during this time as employers increasingly barred women from higher wage jobs. However, occupational segregation does not account for the entire gap. Employers may also pay women less for the same or comparable jobs. One study found that dis­ crimination increased from no more than 20 per­ cent of the wage gap in manufacturing jobs around 1900 to 55 percent of the wage gap among office workers in 1940. Studies of recent data find that the unexplained proportion of the wage gap is between 23 and 72 percent with studies including more detailed variables on education and experi­ ence finding a smaller unexplained gap. Just as the causes of the wage gap have changed over time, so too has the size of the wage gap. Dur­ ing the early nineteenth century, the wage gap fell rapidly in manufacturing and agriculture as industrialization increased the productivity of women relative to that of men. Between 1820 and 1885, the wage ratio for full-time employees in manufacturing increased from approximately 0.35 to 0.56. Between 1885 and 1970, the wage ratio for full­ time manufacturing workers rose slightly, to 0.59. The wage ratio did fluctuate, rising during reces­ sions and falling during expansion. This pattern

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W A ITRESSES

may result from employers substituting cheaper female labor for expensive male labor in hard times or because women may work in more reces­ sion-proof industries. The wage ratio for full-time workers across all occupations increased from approximately 0.463 around 1900 to 0.603 in 1970. Professional women experienced the greatest growth in the wage ratio (from 0.236 to 0.710). Clerical workers also expe­ rienced an increase in the wage ratio. The wage ratio in agriculture, service, and manufactur­ ing stayed relatively constant, between 0.53 and 0.598, while female sales workers experienced a decrease in relative earnings from 0.595 1 ° 0.438. One factor contributing to the generally slow improvement in the wage ratio between 1885 and 1970 was the enormous growth of the female labor force and the consequent entrance of women with lower levels of experience into the job market. At the same time, a greater proportion of men than women entered the higher-paying professions. Between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s, the wage gap closed by about one percent a year, with the female/male wage ratio for all full-time work­ ers reaching a historical high of 0.715 in 1993. Black, Latina, and white women saw an increase in their wages relative to those of white men, though white women’s wages are consistently above those of Latina and Black women. Further­ more, white women’s earnings rose more quickly relative to white men’s earnings than did the earn­ ings of women of color. Three factors are generally credited with the in­ crease in the wage ratio during this period. First, the gap in skills, education, and experience be­ tween women and men closed as women gained college education and increased their time in the workforce. Second, women began to be paid more similarly to men for their experience and skills. Third, men’s real wages declined, because they were heavily represented in the depressed in­ dustry of manufacturing. In contrast, women tended to work in growing occupations and in­ dustries. Women also increasingly trained and be­

came employed in occupations not traditionally open to them, such as law, medicine, and various skilled trades. Another factor enabling women’s entry into these formerly segregated occupations is the array o f civil rights legislation and regula­ tions including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Higher Ed­ ucation Act of 1965, the Federal Contract Com ­ pliance program, and the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Francine D. Blau and Marianne A. Ferber, The Econom­ ics o f Women, Men, and Work, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N): Prentice-Hall, 1992); Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History o f American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). ■ S T E P H A N IE AARONSON and H E ID I HARTMANN

M

Waitresses

aitressing is the quintessential female job, re­ vealing the deeply gender-based expecta­ tions in the world of work. It is also the prototypic job of the modern service work force: sex-segre­ gated, low wage, part-time, and contingent. Before the 1920s the majority of commercial food and lodging establishments employed men. Two his­ torical transformations rapidly feminized the trade: eating became a widespread commercial phenomenon rather than a home event; and the presence of women in public became socially ac­ ceptable. Other forces—such as Prohibition (it was much more acceptable for women to work if liquor was not served), economic crisis, immigra­ tion restrictions, and the two world wars—played important roles. In addition, consumer preference for attractive young white women played a role in the feminization of the waiting occupation. As waitressing emerged in the twentieth cen­ tury as one of the principal jobs for women, it be­ gan as a job largely reserved for white women drawn from the “old” Northern European immi­ grant groups: English, Irish, German, Scandina-

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W AITRESSES

vian. Although this racial and ethnic homogene­ ity enabled waitresses to sustain a culture of soli­ darity, it reinforced their racial and ethnic preju­ dices—as well as those of the proprietors—and showed the real limits of “sisterhood.” In unions, the majority of waitress locals excluded Black and Asian women from membership until the 1930s and 1940s. A similar lack o f Southern and Eastern European immigrants also existed. Even after le­ gal racial barriers fell, women of color continued to be relegated to the lowest-paid, least-desirable positions in the industry and remain underrepre­ sented in the occupation. Whites monopolized employment at higher-priced restaurants while women of color worked in fast food chains or neighborhood restaurants that served people of color. Despite the larger societal view of their work as unskilled, the quality of waitresses’ service was central to their consideration o f themselves as skilled craftswomen. Before the advent o f self-ser­ vice buffets and cafeterias, food service required both highly choreographed teamwork and indi­ vidual enterprise to ensure that hundreds of indi­ vidual multicourse meals were correctly and con­ temporaneously dispatched. Verbal and mental agility as well as emotional and physical stamina were demanded of waitresses, who often worked long hours at a frantic pace; yet their low wages were not complemented by health or other bene­ fits. Instead, they faced unsanitary conditions, capricious management, threatening customers, and the highest rates of sexual harassment of any occupation. Especially because most waitresses lived apart from a family setting and were there­ fore primarily self-supporting, they could not re­ sign themselves to withering work conditions but actively created a supportive work culture and militant organizations. Beginning in 1900 waitresses joined mixed culi­ nary locals of waiters, cooks, and bartenders; they also formed all-female union locals, which en­ joyed a degree of institutional independence and autonomy experienced by few other groups of or­

ganized women. Although they were affiliated al­ most exclusively with a male-dominated interna­ tional union (the Hotel Employees and Restau­ rant Employees International Union, H ERE), the waitresses’ separate craft- and sex-based locals re­ mained among the most powerful organizations within H E R E until the 1970s, despite the official mixed-sex and mixed-craft organizing strategy en­ dorsed by H E R E in the 1930s. At the height of their influence in the 1940s and 1950s, over onefourth of all women in the trade were organized. Most waitresses today do not belong to unions. Separate-sex craft organizations were informed by the distinctive experiences of wage-earning women. Waitresses advocated for a feminism that stressed “difference” and “separateness” rather than for the similarity of the sexes stressed by the dominant middle-class ideology. They endorsed sex-based legislation, sex-based organizational structures, and a separate “female sphere” within the work world. They sought economic justice and “ equal opportunity” through collective ad­ vancement and unionization of jobs traditionally held by women, rather than focusing on individ­ ual upward mobility. They also created a social identity and solidarity centered on a quest for re­ spect and for rights that are otherwise not a char­ acteristic feature of service sector work. These women’s historic struggles and achievements are critically relevant to the new majority of service sector workers. Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Robin Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization o f Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); James P. Spradley and Brenda J. Mann, The Cocktail Waitress: Woman’s Work in a Man’s World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975). ■ B E T S Y ARON S e e a l s o Service Sector; Labor Unions: Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Union.

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War on Poverty S e e Great Society/War on Poverty.

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Wars: Colonization to 1900

he peoples who inhabited the North Ameri­ can continent before the arrival of Europeans were varied in their attitudes toward war making. Some were nomadic and assigned high value to the role of warrior. Others, for instance the Iro­ quois, appear to have developed cultures that be­ stowed fewer privileges on warriors, looking in­ stead upon agricultural cultivation as more integral to collective security than warfare. It was the latter communities that were less likely to imagine that masculinity was a precondition for community authority. On the other hand, when the British, Dutch, French, and Spanish arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they brought with them not only advanced war-mak­ ing technology—the stirrup, the rifle, gunpow­ der—they also imported notions of state adminis­ tration, land ownership, and conquest that rapidly spread across the continent, along with the pre­ sumption that making national-security decisions was “men’s work.” Warfare in North America tended to bolster the idea that men, particularly white Christian men, were the principal protectors of the nation’s well­ being and the ones in whom public trust could be invested. U.S. warfare was never merely an all­ male affair, however. As in Europe, Asia, and Africa, male soldiers did not live on weapons alone. To conduct wars—first against the Indians, the French, and the British; later to take Texas from the Mexicans and the southern white seces­ sionists; and finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, against the Caribbean Spanish colonists — the government had to mobilize U.S. women of different ethnic and racial groups to support war.

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1900

During wartime crops had to be planted or gath­ ered and meals prepared; uniforms had to be sewn and laundered; boys had to be raised and taught to accept soldiering as manly; wounds had to be bandaged and healed; rifles had to be as­ sembled and ammunition had to be packed with gunpowder; heroism had to be valorized and emotional scars tended; and imperial visions had to be portrayed as Christian and civilized. All of these war-supporting activities depended on women’s participation. U.S. women of all classes and races were excluded from voting and holding public office during these years. Women were not subject to military conscription, and they were not enlisted as volunteers into the regular uni­ formed ranks of the U.S. military before the twen­ tieth century. Yet without the physical labor and moral support of at least a majority of U.S. women, none of these wars could have been waged successfully. Although there is evidence that women dis­ guised as men (the most celebrated being Debo­ rah Sampson) served in the revolutionary army and that General George Washington mobilized a group of women to water down overheated can­ nons when he ran short of men, by the end of the Revolutionary War male constitution writers were imagining citizen soldiers as men and soldiering as the duty of vote-endowed citizens. While the existence of a standing army was hotly contested in the new nation and male conscription contin­ ued to be widely resisted throughout the nine­ teenth century, the founding assumption per­ sisted: only men could soldier and only men (free, unenslaved men) who soldiered for the federal government had the right to cast a ballot. An estimated 3,200 white and Black women served as volunteer nurses without pay in both the Confederate and Union armies during the Civil War. These women were not deemed genuine soldiers, though they served at great risk often in the midst of gunfire and their skills allowed the commanders to send scarce troops back into bat­ tle. Their presence was resisted by some male of-

WARS: C O L O N IZ A TIO N TO

ficers; but others, including the press, regarded the volunteer nurses as feminized patriots. Women also served as spies, tire most famous be­ ing former slave and Underground Railroad ac­ tivist Harriet Tubman. Like nursing, spying was treated as marginal to “ real” soldiering and thus consistent with the male-only suffrage principle. Contemporary and subsequent commentators paid less attention to the scores of women who worked in armories along the Connecticut River between Hartford and Springfield, the precursors of the modern defense industry. These women came from the same backgrounds —often literally the same families—as the women who supplied the majority of labor for the textile and garment factories that produced the Union army’s uni­ forms. Women’s increasing importance to U.S. industrialization during the mid-nineteenth cen­ tury meant that they had also become essential to U.S. war making. Also overlooked in most histories of the Civil War were the Black and white women who farmed and grew needed crops while men were off at war, as well as those white women who be­ gan to take over clerical jobs from white men in Washington’s expanding civil service. Ignored al­ together were those women, often destitute, who decided to follow the troops, providing services ranging from cooking to laundry to sex, in ex­ change for subsistence. Those women who fol­ lowed the Union soldiers commanded by General Joe Hooker were disparagingly labeled “hookers,” a term that has survived in the parlance, though its roots in warfare have been forgotten. Euro-Americans’ military assault on the conti­ nent’s Native American women and men is per­ haps one of the central themes o f seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century U.S. history. In the thirty years following the Civil War, these assaults reached their zenith. Sometimes they took the form of engagement between Euro-Ameri­ can (and some African American) male soldiers and Native male warriors. But very often these military attacks pitted the U.S. army against un­

1900

armed Native women, men, and children. Native women were displaced from their lands, often raped, and frequently taken prisoner by U.S. troops. Military wives have received scant attention in the history of U.S. wars. Yet women as wives helped to sustain the armed forces as they sup­ ported expansion westward into the regions con­ trolled by Native peoples, by independent Mex­ ico, and by the Hawaiian monarchy. White U.S. women married to U.S. army officers sent to fight and then constrain Indians left behind letters and diaries that described their work as assisting their government’s territorial expansion. They were their husbands’ helpmates but also the represen­ tatives of East Coast, European-defined civiliza­ tion. They, along with white pioneering women, often set themselves up as role models for the In­ dian women, now confined to reservations. Indian women were active in developing their own strate­ gies for supporting resistance to a kind of warfare that increasingly targeted civilian populations in the name of pacification and for developing sur­ vival strategies subsequent to their peoples’ defeats at the hands of the U.S. cavalry. Thus the rela­ tionships between white military wives, white pio­ neer women, and Indian women during the latter half of the nineteenth century were complex and dynamic. The image of U.S. society as not only a beacon of civilization but also as an active exporter of civ­ ilization was a crucial building block for the pop­ ular support of the government’s western, Pacific, and Caribbean military operations. Central to that image was the notion that U.S. womanhood was somehow more advanced, more enlightened, and more free than that of other cultures, espe­ cially those societies resistant to U.S. government annexation or paternalistic control. In this sense, nineteenth-century U.S. debates over feminine respectability and women’s rights helped legit­ imize or undercut U.S. warfare. U.S. peace activism became a prominent movement during the 1890s. Many of the spokes-

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people and organizers critical of imperialist ex­ pansion were Black and white women, who chal­ lenged the ideas that U.S. society was a model of enlightenment and that U.S. women in particular were its beneficiaries. W hile, for instance, jour­ nalists and congressmen who urged U.S. inter­ vention in C uba’s war of independence expressed horror at the rapes of Cuban women by Span­ ish colonists, actions that allegedly violated U.S. values, anti-imperialist women contended that women in this country in fact routinely were treated merely as the property of men. Not only were wives often the property of husbands, slave women were, by definition, property. For cen­ turies, Black women had been raped, a right of white male ownership. On the other hand, it was precisely because soldiering remained for men a litmus test of so­ cietal acceptance that some African American women antiracist activists saw the government’s overseas operations as a chance for Black men to prove their trustworthiness and courage. Thus in 1898, Ida B. Wells, a leader of the antilynch­ ing movement, lobbied Washington officials to stop lynchings of Black people. She found that members of Congress were so swept up in the excitement over the war with Spain that they scarcely had time to think of anything else. She decided, therefore, that her antilynching cause would be furthered if the Illinois state’s Black regiment were sent to Cuba. She was successful and went to the Springfield train station to see off the men. Throughout the nineteenth century women could be found on both the pro-imperialist and anti-imperialist sides of the emerging public de­ bate about when and where U.S. military opera­ tions were justified. By the time of the SpanishAmerican War, the debate was as much about gender as it was about commerce. While the United States supposedly had a model o f wom­ anhood to carry to the far reaches of the world, there was rising anxiety over what industrializa­ tion, city life, and office work were doing to

once-rugged U.S. white manhood. As the cen­ tury came to a close military intervention in the Caribbean and the Philippines was being pro­ moted by many as a formula for reinvigorating the wilting image of U.S. masculinity. Theodore Roosevelt and others were trying to persuade their compatriots that soldiering abroad would roll back the “softening” effects of urban life and office work that threatened to feminize the coun­ try’s men. Insofar as U.S. women accepted this argument, they aided in the promotion of over­ seas warfare and imperialism as guarantors of the nation’s security. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures o f Amer­ ican Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Linda K. Kerber, “May All Our Citizens Be Soldiers and All Our Soldiers Citizens: The Ambiguities of Female Citizenship in the New Nation,” in Women, Militarism and War, edited by Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila To­ bias, 89—104. (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Pub­ lishers, 1990); Susie King Taylor, A Black Womans Civil War Memoirs (New York: Marcus Wiener Publishing, 1988). ■ C YN TH IA EN LO E

0

Wars: 1900 to the Present

he U.S. war against independence forces in the newly annexed Philippines was its first of the new century (1901-1902). As in past wars, U.S. women were involved (even though they were still denied the vote) as supporters, as critics, as wives and mothers of male soldiers, as laborers who helped support the war effort, and especially as civilian missionaries and teachers who helped to consolidate the U.S. colonialization process af­ ter the Filipino nationalists were defeated. Flad they had the means to make contact with their Filipino counterparts, one could speculate that Native American women might have aided the pro-independence insurgents’ efforts.

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WARS:

1900

TO TH E PR E SE N T

First-generation Japanese American women in Chicago sell Liberty Bonds to help finance the war effort, 1917.

During World War I, factories for war prepara­ tions became a home-front business, in which women participated. Some suffragists were con­ cerned about women’s entry into war industries and saw the war as a contest between imperialist, male elites driven by notions of masculinized honor. Other suffragists contended that if women con­ tributed to the war effort against Germany, they would prove that women deserved the right to vote. Jane Addams and Alice Paul, among other U.S. women pacifist feminists, helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (W ILPF) in 1915 to sustain female re­ formers’ connections internationally and to orga­ nize opposition to U.S. entry into World War I. W ILPF, with its headquarters in Geneva, and its U.S. main office in Philadelphia, remains active today. Once the government decided to enter the war in 1917, women were of explicit concern to U.S. policymakers—as mothers and wives of soldiers, as workers, and as threats to the health of male sol­ diers. One concern related to venereal disease,

which was designated a major threat to U.S. male soldiers who hired prostitutes. Local public health officials and police officers worked with federal authorities to control and often to shut down brothels frequented by soldiers. Although a brief conflict for Americans, World War I spawned stiffer rules against labor activism. A new African American women’s organization, the Women Wage-Earners Association, tried to support the demands of poorly paid Black women employees at the American Cigar Company in Norfolk, Virginia. The association was investi­ gated by government agents on the grounds that its members were subverting the war effort. While many Black women did increase their income during the war, their gains proved short-lived; when the war ended, returning male soldiers re­ claimed their pre-war jobs, and by 1920 almost 90 percent o f all employed Black women were work­ ing in domestic service or agriculture; only 6.7 percent retained jobs in industry. During the World War I period, the armed ser­ vices were scarcely prepared to wage tire sort of

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battles being fought against Germany. One early decision made by U.S. male military planners to bolster the country’s military resources was to mo­ bilize women to serve in the armed forces. The Army Nurse Corps had already been created in rgoi, and the Navy Nurse Corps began in 1908. While even the idea of women serving as volun­ teers far from the battle-front contravened Victo­ rian notions of feminine respectability, the navy department convinced Congress that hiring women would meet the needs of the personnelshort military and allow more men to go into bat­ tle. By the end of World War I, approximately 10,000 American women had served as army and navy nurses, more than 1,000 American women had served as “Yeomen (F)” in the navy and marines, and another several thousand civilian women became army employees in France. Women won the vote in 1920, but they were quickly demobilized after the war. The U.S. mili­ tary was once again an overwhelmingly male in­ stitution. The nursing corps remained one of the few female units, but it too became smaller: within the corps a handful of Black women nurses had gained entry into the military in the last months of World War I, but they were excluded at war’s end —military nursing became once more an all-white affair. In the late 1930s, World War II began to loom in Europe and the Pacific. U.S. women activists drew upon the lessons of World War I and tried to pre­ vent a repeat of the post-World War I rollback of women’s wartime gains. For the first time in U.S. history, this war would be fought in a domestic po­ litical context partially shaped by women, who now had the right to vote. While pacifist Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin was vocal in opposition to a declaration of war, in 1941 Massachusetts Re­ publican Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers, backed by several women’s organizations, notified the War Department that she planned to introduce a bill to establish a women’s army unit. In the face of this pressure, the department eventually created the Women’s Army Corps (WAC).

Racial discrimination in the military and the struggles to overcome it became an integral part ofWorld War II politics. Several hundred Native American women enlisted in the regular armed forces, though most had a hard time resisting de­ mobilization after the war. Black women activists such as Mary M cLeod Bethune effectively lob­ bied to ensure not only that Black women could serve in the armed forces but also that they would be assigned duties that matched their skills and educational credentials. Nonetheless, while the WAC recruited more than 4,000 Black women, more than one hundred of whom became offi­ cers, the W AC’s membership was never less than 94 percent white. Black women nurses were al­ lowed to care for white soldiers only later in the war after Bethune, the Black nurses association, and Eleanor Roosevelt together had exerted pres­ sure on President Roosevelt. Virtually all U.S. eth­ nic and racial communities faced controversies over whether enlisted women were jeopardizing their feminine respectability in the still largely masculinized military. The women in charge of recruiting thousands of women into the armed forces, consequently, invested considerable en­ ergy' into ensuring that women in uniform would not be portrayed in the press either as “promiscu­ ous” or “unfeminine.” Policies designed to define and control sexual behavior were deemed crucial in World War II also. For many women, joining the military pro­ vided an unprecedented opportunity to define their sexuality. The U.S. military, however, was in­ creasingly bureaucratizing and psychologizing its fears of homosexuality. Lesbians in the service also felt pressured to hide their sexual orienta­ tion from their women superiors. Government personnel debated over whether contraceptives should be distributed to heterosexual women troops, just as condoms were being distributed to male soldiers. Hawaiian brothels were allowed to operate smoothly despite the military’s own anti­ prostitution guidelines. In Britain, white British women choosing to

WARS:

1900

TO TH E PR E SE N T

date American Black soldiers provoked a dispute between officials in London and Washington. When some British officials called on their wartime allies to send over more African Ameri­ can armed forces women to serve as social part­ ners of African American men, General Dwight Eisenhower refused. The government vastly expanded its facilities in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Puerto Rican, Aleut, and Eskimo women gained access to jobs at the new civilian bases. The enormous increase in women of color’s economic dependency on military bases would raise difficult questions in the 1990s, when many of the bases were closed. “ Rosie the Riveter” had come to symbolize op­ portunities for women in higher-paying industrial jobs as the government drafted more and more men into the military. As in the military itself, the actual processes by which these well-paying jobs were distributed and maintained, however, were fraught with racist overtones. It took concerted or­ ganizing by African American women’s groups to open up the most highly skilled, best-paying jobs to Black women in war factories. Opposition to Black female workers came not only from white male managers but also from white male indus­ trial workers and white women as well. For Japanese American women on the West Coast, World War II brought profound losses, not gains. While Japanese Americans in Hawaii were seen by federal officials as too valuable a part of the labor force to intern, those in California, Oregon, and Washington were forced to abandon their homes and businesses and to travel to remote and barren internment camps. Later, Japanese Ameri­ can young men in these camps were offered re­ lease if they enlisted in the U.S. military, while most women were compelled to stay in the camps. In the postwar years from 1946 to 1973, civilian women had to struggle to hold on to the eco­ nomic gains made during World War II. The mil­ itary kept its Waves and WAC and largely female nursing units, but they reverted to small and mostly white units. Even the battles in Korea and

Vietnam did not cause Congress to lift the post­ war 2 percent ceiling it had imposed on women’s membership in the active duty military. The De­ fense Department used the draft to fill its ranks. Neither the Korean conflict nor the Vietnam War was an all-male U.S. operation. Women held medical posts, including those in “ M A SH ” (Mo­ bile Army Surgical Hospital) units, and they filled clerical, administrative, and communications po­ sitions. The very nature o f the war in Vietnam, in which the boundaries, purposes, and goals were often blurry, undermined the presumption that women would be safely confined to “noncombat” jobs. Almost unnoticed was the role many Ameri­ can women played during the Korean conflict and the Vietnam War as emotional supports for male soldiers. As wives, mothers, and girlfriends, U.S. women were expected to help returning vet­ erans reenter civilian life and overcome their psy­ chological wounds. Korean American women were directly en­ gaged in the 1951-54 conflict, especially because they often had family members living in South Korea and because some came from families in which political commitments—whether to the re­ sistance to Japanese colonialism, to communism, or to the imposition of U.S. control —infused the war with ideological significance. Similarly, the U.S. war against nationalist and communist forces in Vietnam between 1965 and 1975 had distinctive meanings for Asian American women. Many Asian American women watched the prostitu­ tion industry flourish in South Vietnam, where it was designed to service U.S. male soldiers. The women connected such prostitution directly with the perpetuation of stereotypes of Asian Ameri­ can women as passive, sexually available “ Susie Wongs.” Korean and Filipino women who, in the early 1990s, uncovered evidence of the Japanese Imperial Army’s forced recruitment of “comfort women” made the point that this World War II Japanese practice was not so far removed from the U.S.-Asia prostitution policies in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

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By the 1980s Congress had ended the male mil­ itary draft and lifted the 2 percent ceiling on women in the military. Many women inside and outside the military saw the invasions of Grenada (1982) and Panama (1989) as tests of the military’s commitment to women. The press gave increas­ ing coverage to women soldiers, and polls showed that a rising proportion of the American public ac­ knowledged the right of women to serve in com­ bat posts. Some feminists, however, especially those active in the 1980s’ peace movement, warned that women on battleships or piloting jet fighters would only give new credibility to an in­ stitution that remained imperialistic and patriar­ chal. The G u lf War, though it lasted only from Au­ gust 1990 to the spring o f 1991, perhaps most per­ suaded the majority of Americans that the reality of women as soldiers was now normal, even when those women were subject to capture and death. The press and television coverage portrayed U.S. women soldiers as “ liberated,” especially when contrasted with Muslim women, who were de­ picted by journalists as veiled and subservient. Seven percent (41,000) of the U.S. troops sent to Saudi Arabia to battle and defeat the Iraqi forces in Kuwait were women. Incidences o f rape and sexual harassment of U.S. women soldiers by their own male superiors were not reported during the war, though they were later the subject of senato­ rial hearings. By the early 1990s the performance of women in the G u lf War and the favorable me­ dia coverage, together with the legislative strategizing by women House members, seemed to push forward Congress and the Defense Depart­ ment to lift nearly all bans on women holding combat posts. The militarization of women’s lives occurs whenever women are pressed to adopt attitudes, values, and roles intended to bolster a military’s smooth operation. Not all women, however, are pressed to play the same part: some are needed by the military to be loyal wives, others to be prosti­ tutes, still others (a few) to be uniformed person­

nel. It is during wartime that these roles are most visible. But militarizing pressures shape women’s self-perceptions long before and long after the guns are fired. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1984); Judith Hicks Stiehm, Arms and the Enlisted Woman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Yoshiko Uchida, Desert Exile: The Uprooting o f a Japanese American Family (Seat­ tle: University of Washington Press, 1982). ■ C YN TH IA E N L O E S e e a l s o Armed Forces; Rosie the Riveter; Vietnam Era; World War I Period; World War II Period.

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Wealth and Its Distribution

o economists, personal wealth consists of as­ sets that have a market value. Wealth can take the form of real property (as in buildings, land, or machinery) and financial assets (as in stocks or bonds, which imply a share of ownership in real wealth or a claim on income). Wealth also in­ cludes, in theory, assets such as education or job training that produce income. Measures of wealth and property focus on market values and thus ig­ nore women’s unpaid work in reproduction. Slav­ ery constitutes an appalling exception to this gen­ eral lack of attention to wom en’s reproductive role: the value of a woman slave depended in large measure on her capacity to bear and raise children. Although most Americans own some personal property, ownership of income-producing assets is far more highly concentrated. Ownership of wealth that produces income also conveys power, both because the wealthy are not required to work for others and because they have privileged access to political power. The distribution of wealth, therefore, is a measure of the distribution of power in a society. Measurement of wealth poses a num-

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W E A L T H AN D I T S D I S T R I B U T I O N

ber of conceptual problems. Since 1962, the Fed­ eral Reserve Board has surveyed households regu­ larly to determine their assets and debits and a measure of their net worth. Historical studies have imputed wealth through indirect means such as probate and estate tax records. Since data on wealth are collected by household, no studies ex­ ist that measure the real distribution of wealth be­ tween women and men. The available data sug­ gest that men own substantially more wealth than do women in the United States; only recently, for example, have divorce settlements accorded to women equal shares in marital property upon the dissolution of a marriage. Ownership of wealth, however, does not necessarily imply control over that wealth (freedom to sell the asset or to control the income it produces). A worker who has a pen­ sion fund does not control that wealth but, nonetheless, will have a claim on the income it produces in her retirement years. To avoid taxes, wealth owners may sign over assets to family members who hold legal title to the wealth but have no actual control over its disposition or over the income it produces. A woman whose husband is the legal heir to a family fortune is likely to have a higher standard of living than a woman whose husband has no property, even though neither woman may actually have property in her own name. Thus, it is difficult to separate out issues of legal ownership, control, and consumption in as­ sessing the gender distribution of wealth. T he distribution of wealth is far more highly concentrated in the hands of the very few than is the distribution of income. Data from the 1989 Survey o f Consumer Finances conducted by the Federal Reserve Board suggest that the richest 0.5 percent of families hold as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. For most households, the fam­ ily home is the most important asset. Subtracting residential assets, the distribution of wealth be­ comes even more concentrated: the top 10 per­ cent hold 79 percent of nonresidential wealth. Prior to industrialization, most wealth consisted of productive land and slaves and was held by

white men. To the extent that indigenous peoples were pushed off the land through armed force, genocide, trickery, and other means, and that slaves constituted “wealth,” the distribution of wealth starkly illustrated Proudhon’s famous state­ ment that “ property is theft.” In the tradition of British common law, married women ceased to exist as independent legal agents and were sub­ sumed under their husband’s legal identity. Thus, married women were barred from holding prop­ erty. Widows and daughters could, however, in­ herit property, and there are records of property' ownership among both white and free African American women in the seventeenth and eigh­ teenth centuries. Slaves were themselves property and thus could not own property. With the aboli­ tion of slavery and expansion of married women’s property rights, property ownership became more common for groups other than white men. Still, white men continue to monopolize wealth own­ ership. In 1989, the most recent year for which data are available, white families had median net worth 20 times greater than families of color. Historical studies of the distribution of wealth in the United States suggest that the distribution of wealth was relatively equal and stable for free people during colonial times, but the studies show that inequality rose sharply in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Civil War era brought some leveling in the wealth distribution, but the first two decades of the twentieth century were again marked by sharply rising inequality. From 1929 to midcentury, there was some movement to­ ward equality, and the distribution of wealth has been essentially stable since. Conservatives typically argue that inequality in the distribution of wealth serves as an important incentive for capital accumulation and economic growth and that the income from wealth serves as a reward for risk taking and saving. Liberals argue that inequality in the distribution of wealth cre­ ates undesirable barriers to mobility, leaves fami­ lies without wealth vulnerable to any interruption in income, and concentrates political power in

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the hands of the wealthy. Thus, they favor estate taxes and other forms of progressive taxation aimed at wealth. Radicals agree with these criti­ cisms, arguing that ownership of certain forms of wealth, particularly ownership of the means of production, is illegitimate because it represents, in the first instance, the equivalent to an outcome of theft, and, in subsequent form, the appropria­ tion of value produced by labor. Radical econo­ mists favor more sweeping changes in property rights along with progressive taxation of wealth. Lawrence Mishel and Jared Bernstein, The State of Work­ ing America 1994-1995 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1995); Andrew J. Winnick, Toward Two Societies: The Changing Distributions o f Income and Wealth in the U.S. Since i960 (New York: Praeger, 1989); Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter H. Lindert, American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History (New York: Academic Press, 1980). ■ T E R E S A L. AMOTT

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e e

a l s o

Economic Growth; Poverty; Unemploy­

ment.

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Welfare and Public Relief

he organization of public assistance has had particular import for women because women have been overrepresented among the poor and because public welfare systems have enforced and constructed particular family and gender systems. For centuries public assistance has been stigma­ tized; hostility toward the poor, toward relief, to­ ward women without male support, and more re­ cently toward racial/ethnic minorities created an escalating spiral of ill will. That stigma has been so embedded in language that the history of wel­ fare cannot be understood without examining its terms. Welfare is stigmatized only when it is given to the poor. The U.S. government was constructed

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around “giveaways” —starting with land grants to European settlers and developing into massive tax deductions and aid to corporations. The idea of a welfare state developed in the mid-twentieth cen­ tury as governments became more active in pro­ moting public health, safety, education, and well­ being. But by the 1960s in the United States, “welfare” referred only to stigmatized forms of as­ sistance—primarily Aid to Families with Depen­ dent Children (A FD C), which provided support for poor single mothers and their children and was the main program people meant when they spoke of “welfare” until the Personal Responsibil­ ity Act of 1996 repealed the program. By contrast, aid programs which benefit the nonpoor, such as Social Security old-age insurance, are not consid­ ered “welfare.” Yet 80 percent of direct govern­ ment aid goes to citizens who are not poor. In the early British North American colonies, relief for the poor was governed by the traditions of the English poor laws dating from 1597. Poor re­ lief was the responsibility of local governments, usually towns or cities, which might provide both “ indoor” (institutional) and “outdoor” (aiding the poor in their own homes) assistance. Government aid at this time did not so much substitute for as supplement women’s familial responsibility. Kin­ folk (mainly female) were expected to care for rel­ atives, even rather distant ones; those among the needy who lacked helpful relatives and could not care for themselves were often placed in the households of others (again female) who, for a small stipend, provided caretaking services. The 1662 English law of settlement was also influential in the United States, creating legal residency re­ quirements for obtaining relief. Since men were the primary citizens and property owners, women left on their own could find it difficult to prove le­ gal settlement. Early poor relief was guided by assumptions that continue to shape our welfare system today. One was the distinction between the “ deserving” and the “ undeserving” poor, the belief that relief should go only to the morally worthy, and the fear

W E L F A R E AND P U B L I C R E L I E F

that relief might encourage immorality if too eas­ ily or generously allocated. These moral distinc­ tions heightened discrimination against women, especially since women’s sexual activity outside of marriage as well as single motherhood were al­ ways morally suspect. Another assumption was the principle that public assistance should always provide less than the lowest local wages. Here the justification was that public assistance should not make it more difficult for employers to hire help, but the effect was to increase poverty and push down wages by pressuring workers to accept what they were offered. The U.S. Constitution’s Tenth Amendment as­ signed responsibility for the public welfare to the states and local governments, explicitly removing this function from federal jurisdiction—an as­ signment that created a major legal obstacle to the development of a national welfare state dur­ ing the early twentieth century. In the nineteenth century both poverty (under­ stood as a relative concept) and the stigma of relief intensified. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration together worsened some aspects of poverty and made it more visible. Private charities multiplied. Progressive reformers began to under­ stand that a capitalist industrial economy by its nature produced unemployment and economic distress and responded with public investigations to establish the “facts” o f poverty. Women and feminists were disproportionately influential in this social welfare movement. But simultaneously the Horatio Alger mythology, that those who worked hard would succeed, insisted that poverty was in itself a sign of character defect. This myth fed resentment among the prosperous about money spent on “paupers.” Such punitive atti­ tudes expanded the institutionalization of the needy in poorhouses, where their characters could be “reformed.” In the midst of the nineteenth century two federal welfare programs developed. The first was the Freedmen’s Bureau, a multifaceted federal agency devoted to advancing the welfare of for­

mer slaves; its promising work ended with the de­ feat of Reconstruction and the resurgence of southern states’ autonomy. Most southern Blacks were recaptured into a sharecropping system that deprived them of political and economic rights. The second was the most massive federal program before the New Deal —Civil War pensions. By the 1890s 40 percent of the annual federal budget, about $106 million, went to support needy soldiers and their relatives; by 1912 it covered two-thirds of nonsouthern white native-born men. These re­ cipients, although most were distant from those who actually fought the war, were not screened for their moral respectability, and the pension program was in this respect a precursor of today’s honorable, non-“welfare” welfare programs. At the same time the administration of the pensions was partly shaped by political patronage, which led many reformers to suspect that all government provision would necessarily be corrupt. By the Progressive Era (approximately 18901917), the problems of poverty and the horrors of large asylums had become so visible that a re­ newed campaign for public “ outdoor” aid devel­ oped. The first victory was won by women who or­ ganized and designed state programs of aid to single mothers, the Mothers’ Aid laws, passed in forty-one states between 1911 and 1920. Their ob­ jectives were to prevent children from being sepa­ rated from their mothers and to stop child labor by providing stipends for poor single mothers, pri­ marily widows; it was also important to them to demonstrate that public aid could be adminis­ tered efficiently. To win support for their pro­ grams the mothers’-aid reformers argued that they should serve only the “ deserving,” using rhetoric that required maligning some of the poor as morally undeserving. During the same period forty-three states passed workmen’s compensation laws, requiring employers to compensate employ­ ees for workplace injuries; and although most re­ lied on private insurance companies, the laws nevertheless set the precedent that government could require employers to provide certain bene-

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fits. Workmen’s compensation and mothers’ aid both supported the then-dominant view of women as economic dependents of men; both ig­ nored the increasing numbers of wage-earning women. Resistance to a federal government welfare role was broken by the Great Depression of the 1930s. With one-third of the nation in poverty, the usual conservative, corporate, and states’-rights opposi­ tions to national welfare programs were temporar­ ily weakened and President Roosevelt was able to inaugurate the foundations of today’s welfare sys­ tem. The most dramatic New Deal initiatives pro­ vided emergency aid and public jobs through pro­ grams such as the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. These pro­ grams effectively relieved suffering, but they also discriminated against women and minority men by excluding them from jobs and/or offering them inferior work and stipends. Despite the great pop­ ularity of these direct federal projects, Roosevelt, whose inclinations were fiscally conservative and antifederal, insisted that they remain temporary and that the states should reassume responsibility for emergency relief. The Roosevelt administration’s permanent wel­ fare legislation was the Social Security Act of 1935. Its centerpiece was two social-insurance pro­ grams—old-age insurance and unemployment compensation—which were intended to prevent the need for relief by compensating unemployed men for lost wages, thus also taking care of their dependents. The programs were not means-tested (earmarked for the poor) and in fact benefited the nonpoor much more; and they were not moralstested (covering only the “deserving” ) and thus carried no stigma. But these programs excluded the majority of Americans. Most women were not covered, except in an inferior way—as depen­ dents of covered men. Entitlement to the pro­ grams derived from employment in certain cate­ gories of jobs and again most women and minority men were excluded. Social Security also contained one modest

program, A F D C , intended to help single-mother families not covered by the social-insurance pro­ grams. T he designers of the program, adopting the mothers’-aid model, envisioned it as small and temporary because they believed that single motherhood would decline as a growing welfare state reduced poverty. Even this program origi­ nally excluded most minority and most unmar­ ried single mothers. It was inferior to the socialinsurance programs in a number of ways: it was means-tested and morals-tested; its benefits were below the lowest prevailing minimum wages; it was funded primarily by the states through prop­ erty and sales taxes; and it was not an entitle­ ment but a public charity. As a result, the one program specifically aimed at women and chil­ dren gradually became stigmatized, scapegoated, and vulnerable to tax-cutting rhetoric, while the programs that benefited primarily prosperous white men and their dependents were consid­ ered honorable and politically immune from challenge. Simultaneously several other welfare programs that New Dealers expected to pass, such as med­ ical insurance and a permanent program of pub­ lic jobs during times of high unemployment, were blocked. Their absence contributed to wors­ ening inequality in the years since, as those who had good wages got steadily better public and pri­ vate benefits while those who most needed public help got less. Women were also becoming more stratified among themselves, as a large middle class of employed women began to receive good benefits, separating their interests from those of poor women. In the 1950s and 1960s, poor minority single mothers began asserting their rights to be in­ cluded in and decently treated by the welfare sys­ tem. In 1961 Congress extended A F D C eligibility to two-parent families with unemployed parents. A F D C rolls grew dramatically and recipients formed the National Welfare Rights Organization (N W RO )—an organization that was part of both the civil rights and women’s movements and won major legal changes. It had been regular state

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practice for social workers to conduct surprise, late-night visits to welfare recipients’ homes where, without warrants, they searched for extra toothbrushes, men’s clothing, or gifts that had not been reported and deducted from a stipend. Us­ ing the “ substitute father” rule, state welfare ad­ ministrators regularly held that any man in a re­ cipient’s life should be considered responsible for the support of the mother’s children. Protesting these and other forms of harassment, the NW RO mobilized lawyers, who won considerable legal victories. The Supreme Court held in Goldberg v. Kelly in 1970 that welfare benefits could not be cut off without a prior hearing, challenging a tra­ dition of arbitrary use of welfare as a weapon to control women. In other decisions the Court de­ fended recipients’ right to privacy (outlawing “midnight raids” ) and to freedom of travel (out­ lawing residency requirements) and abolished the “man-in-the-house” rule. As A F D C grew and took in more minority and unmarried mothers, so legislative and administra­ tive attempts to shrink it also grew. For forty years, starting in the 1950s, attempts to “reform” welfare have emphasized fraud and the “undeserving­ ness” of recipients and have used primarily puni­ tive measures to try to cut costs rather than to al­ leviate poverty among mothers and children. A F D C recipients were caught in the middle of a historical contradiction: their program had been designed in the 1930s to keep mothers out of the labor force and its rules penalized wage earning; but as more women became employed, including mothers of young children, the alleged “ idleness” of welfare recipients became a target of resent­ ment. Several welfare reform campaigns, starting with Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, tried to in­ duce or coerce recipients into relying exclusively on wage work. These campaigns almost all failed, largely because the low wages of unskilled women did not enable most recipients to support them­ selves and their children even with full-time work. Although the NW RO captured the imagina­ tion of the left wing of the newly reviving feminist movement in the late 1960s, it rarely gained much

support from middle-class or working women, many of whom shared the view that “welfare” re­ cipients were collecting often undeserved charity at the expense of hardworking taxpayers. Thus the two-tier American welfare system —in which the benefits of the more prosperous are considered entitlements and those going to the poor are con­ sidered “welfare” —helped shape the values of a predominantly middle-class feminist movement, which has not made welfare rights a priority. In 1992 Bill Clinton was elected president on a platform that included a promise to “ end welfare as we know it.” He too used “welfare” to refer only to A F D C and his administration made no threats to entitlement programs that benefited the mid­ dle class or the wealthy. The Clinton proposal combined major cutbacks with promises to help single mothers earn through job creation and training. In the 1994 Congressional campaign, the Republicans competed by escalating threats to “welfare” still further: dropping any assumption of obligation to help single mothers and children out of poverty, they fully resurrected the nine­ teenth-century conservative view that “welfare” created only laziness and dependency. In the summer of 1996, President Clinton signed legisla­ tion into law that ended A F D C , repealed the fed­ eral guarantee of economic assistance to poor mothers and children, block granted welfare funds to the states, and imposed strict conditions and time limits on welfare eligibility. Mimi Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston: South End Press, 1988); Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not En­ titled: Single Mothers and the History o f Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1994); Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History o f Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986). ■ L IN D A GO RDO N S e e a l s o Great SocietyAVar on Poverty; Mothers’ Pensions; National Welfare Rights Organization; New Deal; Poverty; Social Security Act; Welfare State.

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Welfare State

elfare states—systems of public social provi­ sion in all the Western industrial capitalist democracies—modify the play o f market forces and family arrangements and/or provide security against risks of income interruption due to retire­ ment, disability or accident, widowhood, single parenthood, unemployment, and sickness. (The term itself was coined only in the 1940s in Britain but is commonly used to refer to all modern social programs.) These interventions vary greatly crossnationally; states may create greater equality among their citizens but may also reinforce or alter gender norms, market discipline, and racial/ethnic distinctions. Modern social pro­ grams give assistance as a right of citizenship, in contrast to the earlier system of public provision, poor relief, which forced able-bodied workers to sell their labor power by conditioning assistance on entering a semipenal workhouse. Mothers were not treated consistently; sometimes they were exempted from paid labor and given relief in their homes under strict supervision, other times forced to work and to institutionalize their chil­ dren. Social-scientific research challenging individu­ alistic analyses of poverty, the support of working class, social reform, and women’s organizations for nonpunitive assistance to the elderly, wid­ owed, and jobless, and the spread of new views of the importance of mothering for children under­ mined poor relief. The initial programs of the wel­ fare state were gendered, reflecting the realities of the sexual division of labor, with men as bread­ winners and most women as primary caretakers and domestic workers (and sometimes as sec­ ondary wage earners). In the 1910s women’s voluntary groups, such as the National Congress of Mothers and the G en­ eral Federation of Women’s Clubs, campaigned for mothers’ pensions—cash public assistance to allow widowed mothers to stay home to care for

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their children. Despite the resistance o f private charities, by the 1920s most states had county-op­ tional mothers’ pension programs, although inad­ equate funding meant that not all eligible families received aid. African American widows, despite their poverty, were underrepresented among pen­ sioners, reflecting discrimination and the absence of pension programs in the rural counties where most African Americans lived. Maternalist re­ formers and others were also instrumental in pass­ ing the Sheppard-Towner Act (1921), which gave federal funding to states to establish infant and maternal health programs and initiated protective labor legislation for women workers (e.g., hours laws, minimum-wage statutes and safety legisla­ tion). Protections for male workers such as old-age pensions or health insurance were unsuccessful, despite the backing of the American Association of Labor Legislation, trade unions, and some politicians; only workmen’s compensation legisla­ tion, requiring employers to insure their workers against industrial accidents, was passed in most states. Private “welfare capitalism” —corporations offering programs for their employees—was cele­ brated instead. The Sheppard-Towner program, despite its successes, was allowed to lapse. The Great Depression ushered in a political crisis that gave new openings for policy reform in the 1930s. The Social Security Act, the “charter legislation” for the current U.S. version of the wel­ fare state, was passed in 1935, backed by President Franklin Roosevelt, Democratic politicians, the organized elderly, and unions. Women’s political mobilization was at an ebb. Indeed, women’s is­ sues were not prominent on the political agenda, despite participation o f women social scientists and officials in the Committee on Economic Security, headed by Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, that drafted the Social Security Act. Rather, concern focused on the plight of unem­ ployed and forcibly retired wage earners. The So­ cial Security Act established contributory social insurance programs against the risks of income loss due to retirement and unemployment for

W E L FA R E STATE

wage earners, disproportionately white men, as well as giving federal funding to state-level, noncontributory old-age assistance programs (OAA) and to the mothers’ pensions programs, renamed Aid to Dependent Children (ADC). Conservative and southern political forces excluded agricul­ tural and domestic workers—meaning most African Americans and Latinas/Latinos—from so­ cial insurance coverage and permitted states to set benefit levels and eligibility requirements for OAA and A D C . In the 1939 amendments to the Social Security Act, the actuarially strict contribu­ tory old-age insurance program was fundamen­ tally altered by the addition of dependents’ and survivors’ benefits for spouses and widows of cov­ ered wage earners, leaving only divorced, de­ serted, and never-married mothers dependent on A D C . Health coverage was considered but ex­ cluded from the bill due to fears that doctors’ op­ position would scuttle the entire package. Labor standards legislation was extended to all workers with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. As in the earlier period, these social programs assumed a traditional sexual division of labor, with women responsible for caretaking and domestic work. Yet views of women’s work were racialized—while white women were expected to stay at home to care for their children, some state-level officials, particularly in the South, enforced paid work on Black single mothers. The social security approach of the New Deal­ ers was premised on government economic plan­ ning and the provision of public jobs to deal with unemployment, but both were ended after World War II. Through the 1950s and early 1960s pri­ vately provided welfare in the form of fringe benefits was increasingly offered to many wage earners in the primary labor market, leaving non­ workers and those outside the primary labor mar­ ket with inferior coverage. When the buoyant economic conditions of the post-World War II era vanished after the 1960s, the combined lack of public employment and planning capacities and

employment-dependent coverage impeded an­ tipoverty efforts. The next burst of activity related to the welfare state was initiated with President Lyndon John­ son’s “War on Poverty” of the 1960s, encompass­ ing efforts (e.g., job training) to help those left be­ hind by the expanding economy, especially African American, Latino, and poor rural white male breadwinners. A series of political and legal challenges, notably by the National Welfare Rights Organization, also led to changes in A F D C . A F D C assumed more the character of an income-tested entitlement, which could be com­ bined with paid work. Old-age provision became nearly universal, and old-age poverty was reduced by legislated benefit increases and the replace­ ment of sometimes-discriminatory state old-age pensions by the fully federal Supplemental Secu­ rity Income program in 1972. The expansion of the U.S. welfare state led to historically low poverty levels in the late 1970s. The U.S. welfare state was made formally gen­ der-neutral in the 1960s and 1970s, but women who do not have the typical male worker’s pattern of uninterrupted, full-time work are still at greater risk o f poverty if single or widowed. Civil rights laws invalidated protective legislation and dis­ criminatory hiring practices for women only. But labor market and family “failures” are still covered by different programs. Wage earners are treated differently from those who do primarily unpaid domestic work; thus, men’s and women’s different locations within the labor force and the house­ hold division of labor mean they are not treated equivalently. Reforms that would have brought welfare pro­ vision to larger segments of the population were unsuccessful. Jobs and training programs never went beyond the hard-core unemployed; a Nixon administration proposal to replace A F D C with a national Negative Income Tax for all the working poor was scuttled when experiments correlated payments with increased marital breakups and re­ duced work effort. Universal medical insurance

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proposals failed; instead, in 1965 health coverage was provided for the elderly and the very poor (Medicare and Medicaid). The division among groups of single mothers resulting from the 1939 amendments proved espe­ cially significant for the racial and ethnic compo­ sition of different social programs in the wake of social policy changes of the 1960s and 1970s. Wid­ ows covered under social security, disproportion­ ately white, benefited from the expansion of sur­ vivors’ insurance. As eligibility barriers to A F D C fell, increasing proportions of the single mothers depending on A F D C were African American and Latina due to demographic differences and their greater vulnerability to poverty. “Welfare” (i.e., A FD C ) became a racialized term at just the his­ toric conjuncture when women of color were able to claim the right to domestic motherhood through A FD C . Thus, rather than a coherent system of protec­ tion affording welfare for all citizens, Americans were left with a “two-tier,” residual system—“wel­ fare” for the poorest single mothers and their chil­ dren, largely people of color, and “social security” for most wage earners and their families. Univer­ sal programs for working-aged people and their children—health insurance, family allowances, job training, or child care—are lacking, and U.S. citizens tend to rely on private, market-based forms of welfare provision. The residualism of U.S. public provision, except for that targeted to­ ward the elderly, and the racialized character of A F D C , help to explain the political support for welfare cutbacks in the 1980s and 1990s and the political isolation of welfare recipients. Increasingly stringent requirements for work on the part of single-parent welfare recipients and more rigorous attempts to collect child support from noncustodial parents of children on welfare (mostly fathers) also date from the 1960s; but they were stepped up considerably under the Reagan and Bush administrations. The 1988 Family Sup­ port Act, passed with bipartisan support, required all A FD C parents with children three years of age

and above (one or above at state option) to work or undergo training. In the mid-1990s, almost all pro­ posed changes to welfare would limit recipients to a fixed, lifetime term of welfare eligibility. En­ acted in 1996, these and other changes will further limit full-time caregiving as an option for poor mothers. The United States, then, is moving in the direction of making welfare more similar to unemployment insurance—a short-term benefit to help claimants “get on their feet” after the crisis of job loss, divorce or birth of a child outside of marriage, but then requiring paid work, perhaps with some support services. The policy pendulum has swung 180 degrees from the intentions ex­ pressed in the Social Security Act—women are to be treated as workers rather than as mothers. ■ ANN SH O LA O R LO F F S e e a l s o Fair Labor Standards Act; Great Society/ War on Poverty; New Deal; Sheppard-Towner Mater­ nity and Infancy Protection Act; Social Security Act; Welfare and Public Relief.

g Western Women omen and their menfolk have inhabited places we now think of as western for tens of thousands o f years. When Europeans invaded what became the West, the women who de­ scended from these first peoples lived in a variety of cultural, spiritual, and natural worlds, from Arctic Alaska and the coastal Northwest, to the Great Plains and desert Southwest, to the lush Hawaiian islands. Native women’s relations with European newcomers depended on the historical moment of contact, which ranged from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and the provenance and pur­ poses of the colonizers, who were Spanish, French, English, and Russian. Relations were shaped too by the decisions Native women and men made as the European presence forced changes in subsis-

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Polly Bemis, bom in C hina in 1853, became a highly respected homesteader in Warrens, Idaho.

tence—for example, as a decline in animal popu­ lations altered the relative importance of women’s gathering or farming and m en’s hunting; or as E u ­ ropean introductions, such as horses or iron ket­ tles, engendered new cultural practices. Also key was the disproportionate number o f men among the newcomers, which brought both intermar­ riage between Native women and European men and sexual violence against Native women. Then, too, as European women arrived in western places, Native wives and their mixed-blood offspring often lost status. But separate Metis and Mestizo comrtiunities also took root. In the nineteenth century the West emerged as an identifiable region when the United States took title to the former hinterlands of European empires. Native claims to use of the land still ex­ isted, and multiracial and mixed-blood communi­ ties flourished too. But territorial aggrandizement spelled an unprecedented migration of EuroAmericans, as easterners came to terms with in­ dustrialization and the commercialization of agri­ culture. Women and men sold farms, loaded wagons, and headed to Oregon; merchants set out

to profit from the Santa Fe trade; young men an­ swered the call of gold and silver that beckoned them to the Sierra Nevada or Rocky Mountains or Klondike; young women followed these m en—or those who herded cattle on the plains—hoping to earn their keep selling domestic or sexual services in western boomtowns. Some westering women followed different paths: In the 1830s, for example, the U.S. gov­ ernment forced southeastern peoples such as Choctaws and Cherokees to resettle in presentday Oklahoma as part of a policy of removing In­ dians from the East to the West. This policy was forsaken when white westward movement by the 1860s precipitated Native resistance and, in turn, a new practice of restricting Native peoples to reservations. White women who joined the Church of Jesus Christ o f Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) back east faced persecution; they fol­ lowed their leaders west in the 1840s to presentday Utah. There, some engaged in the churchsanctioned practice of plural marriage. All of these newcomers wrought changes in the lives of women resident in the West. Spanish-

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Mexican women in New Mexican villages, for ex­ ample, took on new responsibilities as men en­ tered a wage economy, while some in Santa Fe decided to profit from Anglo intruders by working in saloons or dance halls. In California, Miwok women assimilated gold digging into their cus­ tomary gathering activities, thereby enabling In­ dians to purchase food as miners trampled plants and killed off game. New women became westerners as well; C h i­ nese women, for instance, sailed east to the West. A few were married to merchants, but most, like many white women migrants, did sex work in heavily male communities. In 1875 the U.S. gov­ ernment all but ended the immigration of C hi­ nese women with passage of the Page Law, which targeted prostitutes. The moral panic that occa­ sioned its passage coincided with an influx of mid­ dle-class white women to the West, as railroads reached the Pacific and cities and towns prolifer­ ated. This suggests a central theme of western women’s history: that white women, though sub­ jugated to white men, were nonetheless linchpins in establishing racial and economic dominance in the West. They did this by supplanting with “re­ spectable” gatherings popular recreations that catered to men and provided work for polyglot women; by casting themselves as moral guardians of women led astray by western men (prostitutes and plural wives, for example); by constricting the meaning of “woman” to the habits and values that ruled their own lives. Not all white women benefited equally from this dominance, and class privilege was not unique to Euro-Americans. As mining industrial­ ized, for example, multiethnic working-class com­ munities emerged in western gold, silver, and copper towns. White women in these communi­ ties enjoyed fewer perquisites than their affluent sisters, and they often joined their menfolk in contesting the power of employers over working people. Nonetheless, given western demographic diversity and interlocking ideas about white su­

premacy, sexual propriety, and female morality, race privilege was readily available to white women who upheld norms of chastity outside of marriage and fidelity within. Notions of “re­ spectability” involved with class meanings also structured the all-Black towns that emerged on the Great Plains, as African Americans fled the post-Reconstruction South. But, as elsewhere in Black communities, the western emphasis on morality and propriety emerged from a southern context in which white men forced sex on Black women with impunity. At the turn of the century, ideas about women and women’s habits were changing: mothers had fewer children, more women demanded a voice in politics, and more worked outside their homes. It was in the West that women first won full voting rights; the trend began in Wyoming Territory in 1869, and by 1914 almost all far western states plus Kansas had granted women suffrage (no east­ ern state had done so). And since the West was becoming the most urban of U.S. regions, and women’s job opportunities expanded most quickly in cities, it appears that national trends in women’s employment got a strong western re­ gional push. Urbanization and expansion of the female labor force offered unmarried women the chance to live apart from conventional families. Meanwhile, sexual desire between women en­ tered the vocabulary of everyday life, and people began to think of such desire and its practices as constituting a lesbian identity. By midcentury rec­ ognizable lesbian communities thrived in cities such as Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Western urbanization was linked to a larger transformation of the regional economy from one dominated by extractive and agricultural pursuits to one in which manufacturing gained a foothold, while the service sector grew exponentially. Farm­ ing itself industrialized, most notably in Califor­ nia, where the shift from wheat to fruit and veg­ etable growing also gave rise to large-scale food processing ventures. If women’s work, often un­ derstood as reproductive in nature, had been

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largely invisible in the agricultural economy that glorified m en’s productive activity, in the new economic order it was harder to obscure the labor of women. And by midcentury, the number and kinds of women who lived in the West had multi­ plied. Econom ic change drew unprecedented num­ bers of women to the West from around the globe and elsewhere in the United States and encour­ aged migration within the region too. Mexican, Japanese, and Filipino immigration all exploded in the early twentieth century, and some Koreans and South Asians arrived as well. California was the destination of disproportionate numbers of these peoples. But many new Asian immigrants traveled first to work on Hawaiian plantations, while some moved to the Pacific Northwest or Alaska. And many Mexicans crossed the border into Texas or other southwestern states. What characterized the labor of these western women of color—whether as field hands or cannery work­ ers or domestics in the homes of affluent white wom en—were low wages, high turnover, and seasonality with attendant migration. What char­ acterized their lives at home and at work was par­ ticipation in new ethnic communities as family members, labor activists, and community orga­ nizers. World War II introduced another shift as the federal government poured capital into the West and built a manufacturing base there. For the first time since Blacks had migrated to the Great Plains, large numbers of African American women moved west, especially to far western cities where defense industries burgeoned. Native Americans, too, left reservations to work in urban factories, part of a larger trend of wartime rural to urban migration. W hile Japanese American women and their families were interned in re­ mote western camps by a hysterical U.S. govern­ ment, other women in the region were allowed — indeed, encouraged—to break with a past of labor segmentation by sex for the duration of the war. Many left or lost traditionally male jobs when the

troops returned, but patterns of high female laborforce participation in the West, as elsewhere, con­ tinued. Women increasingly found work in the expanding service sector. Since World War II this trend has accelerated, as suburbanization and then the growth of multicentered, postsuburban metropolises have altered the landscape of western women’s lives. The late twentieth century has also seen heightened consciousness of how powerful gender, race, class, and sexuality are in defining women’s life chances. Such consciousness is not a distinctly western phenomenon —indeed, much inspira­ tion came from the southern movement for Black civil rights. The Chicano and Asian American movements began in the West, with strong stu­ dent contingents in the universities, where Third World strikes could bring academic business to a halt. Women have been active participants, some advancing separate women’s agendas that have challenged male domination in ethnic move­ ments for social change and white domination in the concurrent resurgence of feminism. Similarly, much of the renaissance in Native American ac­ tivism occurred in the West, both on and off the reservations. Native women have been central to this activism, and many also have worked in tribally based women’s organizations or pan-Indian women’s groups. Perhaps the best introduction to this new west­ ern landscape—a landscape created by conquest, capitalism, migration, accommodation, and resis­ tance—can be found in the women’s literature that has blossomed in the late twentieth century. We are blessed by many such writers, including Betty Louise Bell, Mary Clearman Blew, Octavia Butler, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, Gretel Ehrlich, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Teresa Jordan, Cynthia Kadohata, Maxine Hong Kingston, Valerie M iner, Cherrie Moraga, Fae Myenne Ng, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Amy Tan—westerners all. ■ SUSAN L E E JOHNSON

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Whiteness

hiteness emerged in the seventeenth cen­ tury in the British colonies as a common identity across class lines among Europeans in op­ position to African slaves and Native Americans. The first shipment of “negars” to the British colonies debarked in Virginia in 1619, only twelve years after the first settlement at Jamestown. By 1640 Africans were being subjected to lifetime servitude and inherited slave status, the twin char­ acteristics of slavery and both very different from the indentured servitude of Europeans and the “tendency toward liberty” of English common law. Discriminatory laws and practices against Africans accompanied the consolidation of chat­ tel slavery. By 1671 the British began encouraging the naturalization of Scots, Welsh, and Irish to en­ joy the “ liberties, privileges, immunities” o f nat­ ural-born Englishmen. In 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia showed the danger of cross-racial al­ liances when indentured and unemployed Euro­ pean workers joined slaves in an uprising against the planter aristocracy. Historian Winthrop Jor­ dan commented, “ From the initially most com­ mon term Christian, at midcentury there was a marked drift toward English and free. After about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term appeared—white.” The emergence of the term white for the vari­ ous hues of European pigmentation was shaped, probably, by the existing dichotomy between light and dark in Elizabethan culture, which led the English (one of the most light-skinned peoples) to see Africans (one of the darkest-skinned peoples) as both “ Black” and “ heathen” and to link their physical appearance with barbarity, animalistic behavior, and the devil. C olor and culture were dangerously conflated. The decision to allow African slaves to become Christian (the Virginia legislature decided in 1670s that “the conferring of baptism doth not alter the condition of the per­ son as to his bondage or freedome”) removed the

W

“ heathen” part of the equation, so that biology came to stand for culture. Ironically, miscegena­ tion (often through the rape o f Black slave women by white masters) was lightening skin pigment be­ low the color line. In the British colonies, policy regarding the racial identity of the offspring of in­ terracial unions was much more rigid than the Spanish policy, categorizing anyone with any African parentage as belonging to the subordi­ nated race to ensure property rights of slavehold­ ers, a practice historian Marvin Harris calls the “law of hypodescent.” The expansion of democracy for Europeans would continue to occur at periods of contraction of freedom for people of color. White identity be­ came a fluid concept which, over the centuries, would allow various European nationalities ac­ cess to relative privilege, with the ultimate priv­ ilege and most secure whiteness reserved for Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The administration of Andrew Jackson (1828-36) brought a frontiersman into the White House, displacing the Virginia aristocracy that had ruled during previous presi­ dencies. Constitutional changes in a number of states widened suffrage, in some cases giving the vote to all adult white males. These votes brought Jackson to the White House. Jackson, who had risen to prominence in the Indian Wars of the Southeast, removed the five southern tribes to the Midwest, in spite of the fact that Supreme Court C h ie f Justice John Marshall found the removal unconstitutional. The Indian removals, which de­ stroyed one-quarter of the Cherokee tribe, were actually conceptualized by Jefferson and then ex­ tended and carried out by Jackson. There were great debates about whether the “ redskins” were human and whether they had souls. After the Civil War new waves of immigrants from eastern Europe entered a work force during the Industrial Revolution that suddenly skewed the distribution o f wealth. These immigrants were often viewed as different “ races" from Northern Europeans; however, they eventually battled their way into the white working class through a bur-

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geoning union movement in the twentieth cen­ tury. By the nineteenth century, ideologies o f white supremacy had evolved to justify several centuries of white supremacist practice. Opposition to the slave trade at the end of the seventeenth centuryprompted European and United States scientists to consolidate the theory of race, drawing on an­ thropology and evolution. In 1843 the English Ethnological Society grew out of the need to un­ derstand “the whole mental condition of the sav­ age . . . so different from ours” in the various do­ mains of the British Empire. Charles Darwin did not himself assign superiority to particular traits or place races in positions on the evolutionary scale, but his followers did. They used the doctrine of natural selection or survival of the fittest to explain the superiority of the conquering European (in the United States read “white” ) culture. Various tests were devised to classify humanity into racial groups in a highly subjective process that always placed the European/white person in a superior position and in the United States justified the dec­ imation of indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, the appropriation of Mexican territory in the Southwest, and the use of Asians, African Americans, and Latinas/Latinos as a superexploited class. T he belief that European cultures were more evolved also undergirded U.S. im­ perialism, as President M cKinley explained in his decision to keep the Philippines after the Spanish-American War: “They were unfit for self-government.. . . There was nothing left for us to do but take them all.” The same hierarchy locked women into seem­ ingly biologically determined roles: as breeders and mothers, as guardians of public morality, and as sexually determined beings (virgins or whores). Men of color were often also viciously sexualized (leading, among other things, to an epidemic of lynching in the South), and white women (femi­ nists included) often identified politically and emotionally with white power. Like the “ cult of true womanhood,” which worked to draw the line

around who was a “ real woman,” race ideology created a highly elastic cult of “true whiteness,” both of these seemingly biological categories drawing power in part from their volatility and their ability to exclude. ■ MAB S E G R E S T S e e ALSO

Colorism; Miscegenation; Racism.

g Wicca \ \ T i c c a is the term commonly used to describe f T several different traditions of contemporary Paganism—an earth-centered religion that re­ veres nature; celebrates seasonal and lunar cy­ cles; and worships a goddess, or many goddesses, or sometimes a goddess and a god. Although peo­ ple involved in Wicca often call themselves witches, their religion has nothing to do with the historical accounts of witchcraft during the four­ teenth through seventeenth centuries. It also has nothing in common with the popular notions of witches in film or fiction, nor does it relate to Sa­ tanism. The modern Wiccan movement began in Eng­ land in the 1920s and 1930s, inspired by the writ­ ings of folklorists, including Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner, who described Wicca as the “ old religion,” the pre-Christian religion of Europe. Contemporary practitioners of Wicca draw on the ancient traditions o f Europe and the rest of the world: herbalism, midwifery, and the healing arts. Within W icca, the many different traditions in­ clude those from the Celtic, Italian, Greek, and Norse cultures. Beginning in the 1970s many women in the United States became interested in W icca and other outgrowths o f women’s spirituality associ­ ated with the feminist movement. Searching through history, anthropology, archaeology, and myth, women found evidence of goddesses,

W I T C H C R A F T ON T H E S P A N I S H - M E X I C A N B O R D E R L A N D S

witches, and matrilineal societies to counter patri­ archal ideas and connect women to the sacred. Wicca was attractive not only because its primary deity was a goddess but also because men and women had equal leadership roles. Although the witch was often depicted as ugly and feared, she was a powerful woman, skilled in folk wisdom, and at home with nature and herself. She defined her own reality, clear that her reality existed out­ side the predominantly male scientific and med­ ical establishments. Wicca in the United States is a decentralized religion; each group is autonomous. Wiccans worship in small groups, often in people’s homes or in an outdoor environment. They also worship on the date of a full or new moon and during eight seasonal festivals. The basic tenets of Wicca in­ clude a reverence for nature and ecological prin­ ciples and a code of ethics known as the Wiccan Rede: “An ye harm none, do what ye will.” ■ MARGOT ADLER See

also

Religion.

Witchcraft

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S e e Salem Witchcraft Trials; Witchcraft on the Spanish-Mexican Borderlands.

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Witchcraft on the SpanishMexican Borderlands

rom the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, brujeria (witchcraft) and hechiceria (sorcery) on the Spanish-Mexican borderlands were defined as heresy and criminal acts. As throughout Christendom, individuals accused of witchcraft on the borderlands were mainly

F

women. Rooted in the religious, political, and gender history of medieval and early-modern Spain, the gendering and the criminalization of witchcraft were fixed at the end of the Middle Ages. During the late fifteenth century, Roman Catholicism and the new Spanish nation-state ini­ tiated a Christian order and a nationalism rooted in the reinscription of misogyny and the violent extirpation of the religious, political, racial, lin­ guistic, and cultural “other,” specifically Jews and Muslims, from the body politic. To accomplish this, the church and state initi­ ated the Inquisition (1478), a terrifying political institution designed to “cleanse” Spain o f hereti­ cal non-Christian beliefs and practices. While tar­ geting Judaism and Islam, the Inquisition also sought to abolish all residual “paganism,” espe­ cially witchcraft and sorcery. In 1487 two Domini­ can Inquisitors published Malleus Maleficarum, the misogynist theological treatise that laid the theoretical and ideological foundation for crimi­ nalizing and persecuting witchcraft. Calling witchcraft a “vast and vile conspiracy against the Faith, a treason against God, and the most horri­ ble of all crimes deserving the most exemplary punishment,” this work linked the maleficium of popular sorcery with heresy through the agency of the Christian concept of the Devil. It also placed the blame for sorcery on women and created the popular view of the witch as a woman. Witchcraft was subsequently sexualized and eroticized, and women who practiced it were represented as can­ nibalistic child murderesses. Some of these events occurred during the Counter Reformation, a period in which church and state further inscribed misogyny by centering on women’s powers to lead men’s souls to hell and by condemning all women as inherently danger­ ous to men. Accordingly, men’s salvation de­ pended upon the control of women — in particu­ lar, control of the female body, of women’s sexuality. The gender ideology that required con­ trol of women on the basis of their sex was thus conceptualized and institutionalized. It was fixed

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at the time when the Spanish Inquisition was rid­ ding the nation of Jews, Muslims, and all other “heretics" and when European powers were im­ posing colonial hegemonies, including enslave­ ment, on the religious, racial, cultural, and lin­ guistic “ other” —the non-Christian peoples of the Americas and Africa. While all women on the Spanish-Mexican bor­ derlands were suspect of being witches on the basis of gender, women of colonized groups were suspect on multiple grounds. Amerin­ dian women, African-origin women, and racially mixed women, whether Indo-mestizas or Afromestizas, were automatically suspect by virtue of being female, of deriving from non-Christian reli­ gions and cultures, and of being colonized or en­ slaved peoples. In the Christian imperialist gaze, non-Christian women and their mestiza daugh­ ters were thereby sexualized, racialized, and de­ monized. With few exceptions, women charged with witchcraft between 1525 and 1817 in M exico were Black or mulatta and women accused of witch­ craft on the borderlands were Mexican Indian, In­ dian, mestiza, or mulatta. The borderlands’ de­ nunciations focused on “sexualized magic” such as using women’s menstrual blood, wash water, pubic hair, and ensorcelled food to attract, tame, or tie men into submission, or, sometimes, to harm or kill a physically abusive, often unfaithful husband or lover. In this way women used “ magical” power to re­ sist gender oppression and subvert the male order. Amerindian women who participated in rebel­ lions and resistance movements against Spanish colonial oppression were invariably accused of witchcraft, sorcery, or diabolism. By attributing Amerindian women’s visible and active rebellion to witchcraft or other supernatural phenomena, their Spanish-Mexican captors effectively dis­ missed women’s agency and their conscious, po­ litical action, which, in addition to armed re­ bellion, included planning strategy, poisoning priests, and serving as decoys. From the mid-six­

teenth to the mid-nineteenth century on the Spanish-Mexican borderlands, the criminaliza­ tion of witchcraft can best be understood within the context of the gendered, sexualized, and racialized ideologies, politics, and policies of colo­ nialism. Ruth Behar, “Sexual Witchcraft, Colonialism, and Women’s Power: Views from the Mexican Inquisition,” in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, edited by Asuncion Lavrfn, 178-206. (Lincoln and London: Uni­ versity of Nebraska Press, 1989); Marfa Helena SanchezOrtega, “Woman as a Source o f‘Evil’ in Counter-Refor­ mation Spain,” in Hispanic Issues: Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, edited by Anne ). Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, 196-215. Vol. 7 (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Marc Sim­ mons, Witchcraft in the Southwest: Spanish and Indian Supematuralism on the Rio Grande (Lincoln and Lon­ don: University of Nebraska Press, 1980). ■ AN TO NIA I. CASTAN ED A

§ Womanism omanist and womanism are culture-specific and poetic synonyms for Black feminist and Black feminism. Though womanism appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as a nineteenthcentury term for “advocacy of or enthusiasm for the rights, achievements etc. of women” —and womanist as a synonym for “womanizer” —their current U.S. usage has been redefined by Alice Walker, African American novelist, poet, essayist, and activist. In her 1983 collection of essays, In Search o f Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, she traced the populist origin of these terms to such usage as “the black folk expression of moth­ ers to female children, ‘You acting womanish,’ i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. . . as in: ‘Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.’ Reply: ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’”

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W OM ANISM

As Walker explained to the New York Times Magazine in 1984: “I don’t choose womanism be­ cause it is ‘better than feminism . . . Since wom­ anism means black feminism, this would be a nonsensical distinction. I choose it because I pre­ fer the sound, the feel, the fit of it; because I cher­ ish the spirit of the women (like Sojourner) the word calls to mind, and because I share the old ethnic-American habit of offering society a new word when the old word it is using fails to describe behavior and change that only a new word can help it more fully see.” Walker added in an inter­ view for this article, “I dislike having to add a color in order to become visible, as in black feminist. Womanism gives us a word of our own.” Welcomed by some for having a stronger sound because the word’s root is not shared with femi­ nine—as Walker put it in 1983, “Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender” —womanist and womanism bring a racialized and often class-lo­ cated experience to the gendered experience sug­ gested by feminism. These terms have helped give visibility to the experience of African American women and other women of color who have al­ ways been in the forefront of movements against sexual and racial caste systems yet have often been marginalized in history texts, the media, and fem­ inist movements led by white feminists or civil rights movements led by men of color. Thus, womanism reflects a link with a history that in­ cludes African cultural heritage, enslavement in the United States, and a kinship with other women, especially women of color. As Walker told the Times, “ Feminism (all colors) definitely teaches women they are capable, one reason for its universal appeal. In addition to this, womanist (i.e. black feminist) tradition assumes, because of our experiences during slavery, that black women are capable.” Her 1983 definition also included any “feminist of color . . . Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility (values tears as nat­ ural counterbalance of laughter), and women’s

strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexu­ ally and/or nonsexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Traditionally universalist. . . Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.” By the late 1980s, the terms womanist and wom­ anism had been adopted in many Women’s Stud­ ies and Black Studies courses as well as by many of Walker’s readers. In addition to identifying as womanists, for example, some historians felt bet­ ter described as womanist historians, religious scholars called themselves womanist theologians, activists felt more included and inclusive by talk­ ing about womanist theory, and critics traced a womanist creative tradition that extended from quilts made by anonymous Black women during slavery to modern films such as Daughters o f the Dust; from the timeless patterns of Ndebele women’s wall paintings to the timely references in Emma Amos’s paintings. Perhaps the most thoughtful extensions of Walker’s definition have taken place among womanist theologians who do not offer Black feminist or feminist o f color as syn­ onyms but prefer womanist to stand alone, de­ scribing a woman of African descent, strong in her faith (not necessarily Christian) and concerned about the multiply oppressive impact of race, class, and gender. Unlike feminist and profeminist, however, the definitions of womanism and womanist rarely in­ cluded men who were also working for equality: thus some feminists, male and female, were still reluctant to use them. Others preferred Black fem­ inism because retaining the adjective made racial experience visible, because the noun was better understood, or because failing to use feminism might have been seen as deserting its controver­ sies; for instance, the notion that feminism is syn­ onymous with lesbianism. By 1993, however, the new usage of these terms was wide enough to be included in The American

w o m en

Heritage Dictionary, which defined womanist as: “ Having or expressing a belief in or respect for women and their talents and abilities beyond the boundaries of race and class; exhibiting a femi­ nism that is inclusive esp. of Black American cul­ ture.” As Alice Walker made clear, womanist and womanism were not popularized to narrow or crit­ icize existing terms, but to shed light on women’s experience by increasing the number and rich­ ness of words describing it. ■ G LO R IA ST E IN E M with D IANA L . HAYES

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a l s o

Fem inism , Black.

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union

rganized in 1873-74, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (W CTU) quickly be­ came the largest U.S. women’s organization in the nineteenth century. The W C T U built on social traditions of Protestant women’s activism that had developed between 1830 and i860. The union achieved national scope, appealing to both white and African American women, and offering a wide range of activities. W hen Frances Willard was elected president in 1879, the W C T U shifted its focus from closing saloons to an ambitious and multifaceted campaign, “ Do Everything.” The union endorsed woman suffrage when it was still considered radical. By 1896 the W C T U served as an umbrella orga­ nization for social activism for temperance as well as for prison reform, public health, suffrage, and improved working conditions for wage-earning women. The strength of the union rested on its decentralized practice of allowing locals to select which departments their members would pursue. Through lobbying and petitioning, the W C TU

’s

641

bureau

gave numerous middle-class, native-born women the opportunity to participate in U.S. civic and po­ litical life long before the passage of the 1920 woman suffrage amendment to the Constitution. By 1900 the W C T U ’s heyday had passed. The W C T U reflected racial and class bound­ aries of contemporary society. Black women par­ ticipated actively but usually within their own lo­ cals, partly because they focused on “the Negro question,” and partly because they were not wel­ come in most white locals. Similarly, W C T U ac­ tivists were more interested in “saving” immigrant communities from their foreign ways than in em­ powering immigrant women. T he white, Protes­ tant, middle-class traditions that originally led W C T U members into activism also limited their ability to form coalitions with Black, workingclass, or immigrant women. ■ KATHRYN KISH SKLAR

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a l s o

Prohibition and Tem perance.

O

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Women’s Bureau

he U.S. Women’s Bureau, established in 1920, remains the only federal agency specifically devoted to the advancement of women workers. Created as a temporary agency during World War I, the bureau developed the first U.S. standards for the employment of women workers. After the war, women’s organizations successfully lobbied Con­ gress to establish the bureau permanently. Mary Anderson, a member of the Chicago boot and shoe union and a founder of the Chicago Women’s Trade Union League, was the first di­ rector. Her long term o f leadership (1920-45) ce­ mented the bureau’s ties to (white) middle-class women’s organizations and (white) working-class women in the trade unions and stamped it with a firm commitment to “maternalist” ideas about women workers.

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642

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’s

The Women’s Bureau was a relatively small, in­ effective agency during its first forty years. Ander­ son’s weak leadership, the battle among women reformers over the ERA, and the inhospitable cli­ mate for a federal labor agency during the 1920s consigned it to the margins of the federal govern­ ment. During the New Deal era and World War II, the bureau provided data on women workers to the National Recovery Administration and the National War Labor Board and lobbied cease­ lessly for more equitable treatment of women workers. But the bureau was unable to benefit permanently from the great expansion of govern­ mental authority that took place at this time. The rationale for an agency devoted specifically to women workers seemed to disappear when the Supreme Court upheld labor legislation for men as well as women. From 1937 on, the Women’s Bureau was bypassed, as federal authority over employment was placed in new agencies respon­ sible for both male and female workers. The Women’s Bureau remained active during the postwar years. Hoping to build on wartime regulations, the bureau campaigned unsuccess­ fully for congressional enactment of an equal pay law. The bureau also led the campaign within the federal government to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, which the bureau believed would jeopardize the legal status of the special labor leg­ islation passed for women in the early twentieth century. Even after the Supreme Court upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1941, establishing the legality of wage and hours laws for men and women, the bureau maintained that women workers needed additional legal protection. The Women’s Bureau did not drop its opposition to the ERA until the 1970s. The bureau’s height of influence occurred dur­ ing the Kennedy administration. Under the lead­ ership of Esther Peterson, a savvy former lobbyist for the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the bureau achieved many of its long-standing goals. The Women’s Bureau finally convinced Congress to approve the Equal Pay Act in 1963. It

c o lleg es

also persuaded Kennedy to establish the Presi­ dent’s Commission on the Status of Women (1961-63), the first national committee to review the position of women in U.S. society. Though the bureau never again achieved a similar degree of influence, it has continued to be an important voice for women workers within the federal gov­ ernment. ■ H E L E N E S IL V E R B E R G S e e a l s o Commissions on the Status of Women; Equal Pay Act.

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Women’s Colleges

hroughout the nineteenth century, a fierce de­ bate raged concerning the wisdom of allowing women to attend colleges and universities. Propo­ nents argued that women were the intellectual equals of men and their cultural superiors, and that the fulfillment of women’s duties as mothers and elementary school teachers necessitated the best education available. Those opposed main­ tained that higher education would “ unsex” women, rendering them physically and emotion­ ally unfit for traditional roles. In the midst of these arguments, women gradu­ ally gained access to advanced secondary and higher education, sometimes in coeducational schools, but also in a nationwide network of single-sex institutions, beginning in the 1830s and 1840s with the creation of women’s seminar­ ies, academies, and normal schools. The first women’s colleges were Georgia Female College (1839) and Mary Sharp College in Tennessee (1851). In the post-Civil War era, pressure from tax-paying parents who wanted their daughters to have a means of self-support led to the admission of women to newly created state universities in the West and the Midwest. In the South and the East, neither the well-established prestigious men’s colleges nor the state universities would ac-

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w o m en

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c o lleg es

ill Spelm an Seminary students, 1893. The varied ages o f the students and the pregnant student (front) reflect the institutions wide appeal.

cept women students. In 1870 only one-third of existing colleges and universities were coeduca­ tional. Thus, between the 1860s and the 1930s, many more women’s colleges were founded by different individuals and organizations. New women’s colleges included the institu­ tions of the “women’s Ivy League” or the “ Seven Sister” schools—Barnard (a coordinate college with Columbia), Bryn Mawr, Mt. Holyoke, Radcliffe (the women’s college o f Harvard), Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley. Six of the Seven Sisters were founded either by individual philanthro­ pists (Matthew Vassar, Sophia Smith, Wellesley’s Henry Durant) or by groups o f wealthy and influ­ ential women determined to provide high-quality education for girls (Barnard, Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr). In the South, individual philanthropy and church support led to the establishment of

Goucher (the Women’s College of Baltimore), Sophie Newcomb (the women’s college of Tulane University), and Agnes Scott, among others. Catholic orders o f sisters founded nineteen wom­ en’s colleges between 1900 and 1930; many more followed. White women missionaries established Spelman Seminary for African American girls and women in 1881, and it became a college in 1923. Other historically Black institutions —Bennett, Barber-Scotia, and Huston-Tillotson—have been women’s colleges at various times. The demographic features of women’s colleges remained relatively constant until the 1970s. Some, particularly the Catholic institutions, had a diverse student population, but most restricted their admissions to accept only those who could pay their own way. However, most excluded or re­ stricted nonwhites and Jews.

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Women’s colleges have always prided them­ selves on offering an education fully as rigorous as that provided by the best men’s colleges, but they never slavishly reproduced the Amherst, Notre Dame, or Morehouse curricula. They pioneered in offering laboratory science and fine-arts courses; some also offered but did not require vo­ cational subjects. Others have established special opportunities for “returning” older students, and programs (e.g., the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe) designed to encourage women scholars and pro­ fessionals. A few, such as Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, and Smith, offer graduate work. Motivated by the need to demonstrate their respectability, women’s colleges placed numerous social restric­ tions on their students and many did not support political activities such as the feminist or civil rights movements. Women’s studies programs originated at coeducational institutions and were not initially welcomed by women’s colleges. Nevertheless, women’s colleges were hardly conservative institutions. They hired women scholars who encouraged their students to attend graduate school and enter the professions. The student culture at women’s colleges was assertive and socially progressive. M any alumnae became career women, participated in politics, remained single, had smaller families, and in other ways de­ fied middle-class feminine norms. Recognizing this, the public has periodically attacked wom­ en’s colleges for producing spinsters (1890-1920), encouraging lesbian relationships (1920s and 1970-90), or educating women to be discontent with domesticity (1930-60). Since i960 women’s colleges have seemed anachronistic to many in an era when even Har­ vard and West Point are co-ed. Their numbers dropped rapidly—from 233 in i960 to 90 in 1986. In i960,10 percent of women college students at­ tended single-sex institutions; by 1986 less than 2 percent did. And yet recent social science re­ search demonstrates that alumnae of women’s colleges, even those from less prestigious and wealthy institutions, include a greater percentage

c o lleg es

of “achievers,” especially in nontraditional fields, than do graduates of coeducational schools, possi­ bly because of mentoring and the supportive en­ vironment. Although it seems unlikely that new wom en’s colleges will be established, it seems equally unlikely (as well as undesirable) that the remaining ones will disappear. Lynn D. Gordon, “Race, Class, and the Bonds of Wom­ anhood at Spelman Seminary, 1881-1923," History of Higher Education Annual Vol. 9 (1989): 7—32; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984); Patricia A. Palmieri, “Women’s Colleges,” in Women in Academe: Progress and Prospects, edited by Mariam K. Chamberlain, 107-31 (New York: Russell Sage Founda­ tion, 1988). ■ LYN N D. GORDON S

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a l s o

Education.

Black Women’s Colleges ith the founding of colleges for African American women during the nineteenth century, much debate ensued on the philosophy o f Black women’s education, especially on the role of Black wom en’s education for the better­ ment or “ uplift” of the race. Educators also fo­ cused on the differences between the role of higher education for Black women and for white women. Notable among the institutions that were once Black women’s colleges but that became coedu­ cational are the following: 1) Barber-Scotia Col­ lege, Concord, North Carolina, founded in 1867 as Scotia Seminary, a preparatory school for African American women. Scotia merged with Barber Memorial College, Anniston, Alabama, in 1930, adopted the name Barber-Scotia College in 1932, and became coeducational in 1954; 2) Bethune-Cookman College, Daytona Beach, Florida, is the result of the merger in 1923 of Day-

W

w o m en

’s

e d u c a t io n a l

tona Normal and Industrial Institute for Girls, founded in 1904 by Dr. Mary M cLeod Bethune, and the Cookman Institute for Boys, Jacksonville, Florida; and 3) Huston-Tillotson College, Austin, Texas, which is the result of the merger in 1952 of Andrews Normal School, founded in 1876, Dal­ las, Texas, and Tillotson Collegiate and Normal Institute, founded in 1875, which was a women’s college from 1925 to 1935. Only two U.S. institutions remain exclusively Black women’s colleges: Bennett College, Greensboro, North Carolina; and Spelman C ol­ lege, Atlanta, Georgia. Bennett was founded as a coeducational institution in 1873 and was reorga­ nized as a college for women in 1926. Spelman was founded in 1881 and has always been a women’s college. Bennett College began in 1873 in the basement of St. Matthew’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Greensboro. The school was named Bennett Seminary in recognition of its first large donor, Lyman Bennett. In 1926, with society turning more attention to the educational needs of women, the Methodist Board of Education and the Methodist Woman’s Home Missionary Soci­ ety began the joint enterprise of overseeing Ben­ nett College for Women with an academic pro­ gram ranging from the seventh grade through the first year of college. By 1932 the school offered a full four-year college program. O f historically Black colleges and universities that award bache­ lor’s degrees, Bennett College is among the top ten in graduating African Americans who earn the doctorate degree. Spelman College is the nation’s oldest under­ graduate liberal arts college for Black women. Founded in 1881 by two white women from New England, Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles, Spel­ man first opened in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta. The initial class at the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, as it was known at that time, consisted of eleven pupils of all ages, girls and women newly freed from slavery. In 1884, in recognition of John D. Rockefeller’s fi­

e q u it y a ct

(w

eea

)

nancial support, which allowed the school to pre­ vent its merger with the Atlanta Baptist Seminary (later Morehouse College), the school’s name changed to Spelman Seminary, after his wife’s maiden name. In 1924 the name became Spel­ man College. Spelman, along with Clark Atlanta University, Interdenominational Theological Center, More­ house College, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Morris Brown College, together compose the Atlanta University Center. Spelman benefits from access to and cooperation with these five other in­ stitutions, while still offering special opportunities for the education of women. In 1988 Spelman was named one of the nation’s best colleges or univer­ sities in U.S. News & World Report. In 1993 Spel­ man was listed in U.S. News C$ World Report as the number one liberal arts college in the South. ■ JO H N N ETTA B. C O LE S ee

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a lso

Education.

Women’s Educational Equity Act (WEEA)

he Women’s Educational Equity Act was in­ troduced in Congress by Representative Patsy T. M ink in 1973 as a complement to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and to Title IX of the Education Act Amendments. The ER A would have required equal treatment for women and T i­ tle IX struck down barriers to women’s educa­ tional opportunity. But neither addressed the so­ cial and cultural structures o f gender inequality. The persistence of gender stereotyping, gender tracking, and sexism in schools and society would not be rooted out by the ERA and Title IX. In fact, continued sex bias in the curriculum would un­ dermine the promise of both. Enacted in 1974, the W E E A provided federal funds for projects designed to promote gender eq-

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e n v ir o n m e n t and d e v e l o p m e n t o r g a n iz a t io n

uity in the curriculum, in counseling and guid­ ance, in physical education, and in the develop­ ment of classroom materials. The measure also supported activities for reentering women stu­ dents, expanded vocational and career education for women, and funded women’s resource center initiatives. Although the W E E A was never generously funded, it was a successful program during its early years. W E E A stimulated projects across the country that challenged the restrictive messages given to women and girls. During the 1980s, how­ ever, Republican administrations substantially weakened the program through funding cuts. A 1992 report published by the American Asso­ ciation of University Women showed that gender bias against girls and women continues to pervade our educational system; teachers pay more atten­ tion to boys than to girls; textbooks ignore or stereotype women; and vocational education pro­ grams continue to channel women into tradition­ ally female-dominated, low-wage jobs. Since 1993 feminists in Congress have worked to revive and expand the W E E A to more intensively combat gender bias in instruction, career advising, and the educational climate. ■ PATSY T. M IN K

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pacities in movements to restore the environment to sustainable health, W E D O is committed to empowering women. But in both industrialized and developing nations, policymakers, who are overwhelmingly male, have largely ignored the needs and concerns of women. From the grass­ roots level to the international arena, women are challenging that exclusionary view. Based in New York City, W E D O has a global information and advocacy network of more than twenty thousand. In 1991 W ED O held the World Women’s Con­ gress for a Healthy Planet in M iami, Florida. At­ tended by 1,500 women from 83 countries, with about one-third coming from developing coun­ tries, the conference was designed to bring women’s perspectives to the process leading up to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environ­ ment and Development (U N C E D ), also known as the Earth Summit. W ED O has since organized a women’s caucus meeting at every major international conference affecting women, including the International Conference on Population and Development, held September 1994 in Cairo, Egypt, the World Summit for Social Development held March 1995 in Copenhagen, Denmark, and the Fourth World Conference on Women held in September 1995 in Beijing, China.

Education; Title IX.

■ B ELLA ABZUG

See

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Women’s Environment and Development Organization

he Women’s Environment and Development Organization (W EDO) was founded in 1990 to put analytic and activist clout behind its two guiding themes: Women must have an equal say in fate-of-the-Earth decisions, and healthy com­ munities make a healthy planet. In focusing on women’s roles, needs, and ca­

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Environm entalism .

§ Women’s Health Movement

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orn unmistakably out of feminism’s second wave in the late 1960s, the Women’s Health M ovement’s (WHM) values derived from femi­ nism’s broad commitment to equality and nondis­ crimination. It came alive out of the protest cli­ mate of the 1960s, inspired by “the movement” for social justice then sweeping the land.

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health

Unique to the W HM o f the second wave was its insistence on placing female sexuality, sexual selfdetermination, and sexual identity at the center of wom en’s health concerns. This analysis exposed the blame-the-victim moral tyranny, prejudice and health neglect underlying so many of the re­ productive laws and medical practices of the day. The W H M started spontaneously in different parts of the country through different activities, with varied leadership, and raising multiple is­ sues; there was never any single individual or group founder of the W HM . Contrary to popular assumptions, however, women o f various ages, women of color, and working-class women did participate in the W HM from its beginnings, al­ though not in great numbers. Latinas, Black women, and Native American women knew first­ hand about clinic care, illegal abortions, infant mortality, sterilization abuse, and population con­ trol. For the W H M , these scandals rapidly be­ came core knowledge for every advocate in the ongoing class, race, and gender analysis of the health system. “ Consciousness-raising” and “know-your-body” group experiences gradually changed thousands of women’s outlooks on their private lives and on the meaning of personal bodily and medical expe­ riences, allowing them to see these events for the first time in political terms. In women’s groups across the country, and eventually the world, activists introduced per­ sonal gynecological self-examination via plastic speculums, along with alternative remedies, fer­ tility awareness, and basic body wisdom, called self-help groups. Menstrual Extraction (M E) or Menstrual Regulation (MR) (withdrawing the uterine lining in a simple, sterile, mechanical pro­ cedure) was unquestionably the most precedentshattering achievement of “lay” women working in advanced self-help groups. Their development of the flexible cannula was and is revolutionary. This innovation established a higher worldwide standard for abortion care, acknowledged by the medical establishment itself. The full potential of

m o v em en t

this technology for returning abortion control to women, however, has yet to be realized. The era of citizen and journalist health investi­ gations was at its height. Harmful drugs were on the market; contraceptive experiments such as the birth-control pill involved deaths that were concealed; unnecessary hysterectomies, ovariec­ tomies, and mastectomies were widespread and ignored; poor women were used as guinea pigs in government-approved experiments. W HM writers and researchers began producing a prolific flow of books, pamphlets, films, and arti­ cles. These works provided an enraging history of women’s health, a platform for protest, and, even­ tually, a solid base of accurate knowledge on which ordinary women and the oncoming move­ ment were nourished and could begin to pursue their advocacy and action efforts. Ordinary women, “lay” women, suddenly felt entitled to conduct their own research, to chal­ lenge publicly the presumed scientific authority of doctors’ pronouncements about female sexual­ ity, women’s proper roles in society, and their health and diseases. These attitudes and behaviors were considered extremely deviant at the time. As with sexuality, women patients challenging med­ ical and scientific expertise in public discourse was shocking. Women began to listen to and trust other women. The W HM thus was considered “ revolutionary.” The movement came early to its international, “global” outlook. Outraged by experimental birth control for poor women—mostly women of color —activists quickly took up the issue of popula­ tion-control practices. In the 1970s the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) policies made aggressive, high-technol­ ogy birth-control programs a precondition for loans and economic aid to Third World coun­ tries. When U.S. W HM activists realized their efforts were effective in protecting U.S. women by keep­ ing dangerous or questionable drugs and devices off the U.S. market (e.g., the “high-dose” pill; the

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Daikon Shield IU D ; Depo-Provera), they saw these products simply “ dumped” or widely avail­ able as bargains for financially strapped Third World governments. Without benefit of warnings, millions of women could be harmed by these re­ jects. The W HM protested, demanding action on behalf of women overseas. A global view thus be­ came essential. M uch of the W H M ’s early focus was concerned with women’s need for sexual self-knowledge, selfdetermination, and reproductive rights, but the W H M ’s vision was broader, including addressing the impact of D E S and its iatrogenic effects, un­ necessary surgery, damaging childbirth practices, and violence against women. Long before HIV/ A ID S was identified, women’s health advocates took the lead in educating women about the risks of undiagnosed sexually transmitted diseases and pelvic inflammatory disease. Menstruation was demystified and PM S alternative remedies discov­ ered. Others founded Feminist Women’s Health Centers in several U.S. cities, providing womencontrolled settings for self-help programs, and, once abortion became legal in 1973, early abor­ tion care. Simultaneously, other women’s com­ munities across the country launched their own well-woman health and abortion centers as “alter­ natives” to conventional care. By 1975 the National Women’s Health Net­ work (NWHN) was formed, the nation’s first and only public-interest membership organization devoted exclusively to all women’s health issues, especially those related to federal policy. The NW HN helped to strengthen the FD A ’s Patient Package Insert (PPI) program, improving the quality of warnings, especially to healthy women, about the risks and side effects of the Pill and powerful menopausal estrogens. It supported class-action suits against drug companies that manufactured D E S. The W H M monitored the federal budget for amounts spent on barrier methods of contraception as opposed to more ex­ perimental hormonal or device methods. The W H M also helped initiate the study and ap­

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proval of the cervical cap as an alternative. It launched Citizen Petitions to the FDA, estab­ lished registries for women given drugs or de­ vices not approved for the purpose, and devel­ oped model informed consent forms so women could become more aware of potential health risks. Working with women scientists, it chal­ lenged research protocols and raised ethical is­ sues concerning the use of healthy women in studies. It organized letter-writing campaigns to force the FD A to establish uniform labeling of tampons to prevent Toxic Shock Syndrome and helped expose corporate negligence related to the Daikon Shield IUD and silicone breast im­ plants. By the mid-1970s, U.S. women and the WHM saw both setbacks and gains. The rise of the New Right and antiabortion religious groups had begun. The Hyde Amendment passed in 1977, eliminating federal Medicaid funding for abortions, forcing all states to decide whether or how to fund this service. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the 1980s, resisting right-wing and antiabortion efforts to roll back gains consumed the efforts of most activists. De­ spite this struggle, the W HM was now estab­ lished. Growing out of an NW HN project, incorporat­ ing W HM values, the National Black Women’s Health Project (NBWHP) was ignited by a highly successful 1983 conference. It has become one of the country’s major women’s health groups advo­ cating for the needs of women of color. Other groups, the National Latina Health Organization, the Native American Community Board’s Wom­ en’s Health Education Project, Asian American Sisters in Action, and the National Asian Wom­ en’s Health Organization, also were formed. New national coalitions of women of color organized around reproductive rights, population and envi­ ronment issues, violence, and A ID S. Women of color transformed the W H M by leading organiza­ tions drawn from their own communities and by participating in the leadership of multicultural

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women’s health organizations such as the Na­ tional Women’s Health Network. Focusing on health issues in the context of racism, coercion and violence, and economic discrimination, these diverse voices have strengthened the movement at all levels. The public became increasingly aware of the dearth o f woman-centered medical research or health-care provisions. Many women found it difficult to demystify health-related concerns or to challenge doctors; instead, they pinned their hopes for better care on finding a sympathetic woman doctor. The results have been mixed. Al­ though studies show that most women are pleased, many women bring inappropriate ex­ pectations to women doctors, whose ability to be flexible or question traditional medical prac­ tice often is more constrained than that of most male physicians. Most women doctors collabo­ rate with the drug industry, just as male doctors do, and tend to disparage alternative therapies. Nevertheless, women physicians are mobilizing to change teaching programs in medical schools to include more about women’s health. The W H M has always worked with progressive women professionals and supported women’s struggle to become a critical new force in medi­ cine and health care. The W HM continues debate on the potential of women professionals’ leadership to improve medicine or health and medical care for women. Some argue for a women’s health medical spe­ cialty, while others agree with experts who con­ clude that the system needs fewer, not more, specialists. Opponents believe obstetrics and gy­ necology, as a surgical specialty that excludes pri­ mary care, needs either to be abolished altogether or drastically revamped to meet women’s needs rather than those of doctors and surgeons. Many W HM activists feel that there are too many physi­ cians, as much public-health research suggests. Recognizing the justice in women having equal access to a medical career, reformers promote in­ creased use of midlevel nurse practitioners and

m o v em en t

nurse-midwives. They see nurses as the best pos­ sible providers of more satisfying and equitable care at far less cost—even as these health care workers become increasingly tied to the insur­ ance and drug industries and to the medical profession. The W H M continues to include all reproduc­ tive rights as a central part of its agenda, believing that a woman’s right to control and express her fer­ tility is a basic precondition for exercising other rights. Many believe that without improvements in fundamental economic conditions for women, family planning alone cannot cure poverty. Most continue to feel that women’s reproductive op­ tions are best exercised within the framework of all women’s right to optimum economic survival, comprehensive health services, and sexual self-de­ termination. The W HM remains concerned with the broad­ est range of health and disease issues affecting women as well as with the safety and efficacy of touted technologies and therapies. But it is also concerned with women’s paid and unpaid rela­ tionship to the service-delivery and caregiving sys­ tems, which profit handsomely at women’s ex­ pense. In addition to women-of-color concerns, the movement has also broadened since its begin­ nings to include older women; differently abled women; and the issues of working women facing occupational health hazards, reproductive rights violations, and harassment problems. The W H M ’s strongest focus remains on issues of accountability to citizens/users/consumers/patients/clients. This includes making government more accountable for the impact on women of its health policies and regulations, more forthcom­ ing to all citizens with health and medical care in­ formation it collects through taxpayers’ money, and more vigorous in policing researchers and corporations. The W H M challenges conven­ tional medical ethics and medical education or training to include feminist values, working to keep alive issues of patients’ rights, informed con­ sent, experimental treatments, and Patient Pack-

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age Inserts in pharmaceutical products. In effect, feminist health activists have become a new breed of ethicists. Citizen-led women’s health organizations con­ tinue to play the major role in defining the W ffM and producing its leadership, although many out­ standing individuals contribute. The public in­ terest initiative in women’s health —community women’s control and input, accountability from the medical establishment, government and cor­ porations—will remain with the W H M for the foreseeable future. In some ways, these “lay” spokeswomen have themselves become experts in health, developing perspectives that have scien­ tific validity but are frequently at odds with the medical establishment’s opinion or practice. One original dream of the W HM , that all women would eventually be able to evaluate critically the entire realm of health and medicine for women, has remained elusive. However, women’s groups across the United States are now coming to the realization that health reform is overwhelmingly a women’s issue. In a few states, women’s health activists are nowforming state-level coalitions, planning for the long haul to become a force with which their state legislatures and state regulators will have to reckon. Many observers feel that the W H M re­ mains one of the most vibrant, active, leading edges of the women’s movement. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: One Hundred Fifty Years o f Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1989); Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control (Boston: South End Press, 1994); Nancy Worcester and Marianne H. Whatley, Women's Health: Readings on Social, Economic and Polit­ ical Issues, 2d ed. (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt, 1994). • NORMA SW ENSON e e a l s o Abortion Self-Help Movement; Alternative Healing; Boston Women’s Health Book Collective; Diethylstilbestrol (DES); Medical Research.

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Women’s Liberation

omen’s Liberation was the early term for the feminist movement that began in the 1960s. The popularity of the term declined after a few years because some used it to ridicule the move­ ment. No one person coined the term. The word “lib­ eration” was in common use, having been adapted from Third World movements that were attempting to liberate themselves from colonial occupation. In particular the National Liberation Front in Vietnam was instrumental in “libera­ tion” becoming part of the popular lexicon, but it was also used in this country by many different or­ ganized efforts to reject traditional roles, re­ straints, and expectations. The phrase women’s liberation movement first appeared in March 1968 as the tag line of the first issue of the movement’s national newsletter. When the second issue came out in June, it was called the “voice o f the women’s liberation move­ ment.” The newsletter’s first editor, Joreen, picked this name because she wanted to refocus the de­ bate from the “woman problem” or “woman ques­ tion,” as it had been called in previous decades, to the question of women’s liberation. The new movement had two origins from two different strata of society, with two different styles, orientations, values, and forms of organization. In many ways there were two separate movements that only began to merge in the mid-1970s. Al­ though the composition of both branches was pre­ dominantly white, middle class, and college-edu­ cated, initially the median age of the activists in the “ older branch” of the movement was about twenty years greater. Early descriptions o f the movement called the two branches “women’s rights” and “women’s lib­ eration.” The implication was that those espous­ ing women’s liberation were more radical than those seeking merely wom en’s rights. However, the primary difference was structure and style.

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The “ older branch” consisted of national organi­ zations with a formal structure, and the “younger branch” was made up of small groups, loosely linked by the newsletter and subsequent publica­ tions. The latter borrowed the idea of participa­ tory democracy from the New Left, and expanded it to include the idea that groups should deemphasize structure and leadership. Over time the press turned the words “women’s liberation” into “women’s lib” and began to refer to active participants as “ libbers,” “libbies,” and “libbists.” The use of the diminutive was not neu­ tral. As if to highlight the intended disrespect, one article was even entitled “ Black Liberation and Women’s Lib.” Because of this ridicule, the phrase women’s liberation slowly went out of common use, to be replaced by the more generic term feminist. The name’s intended goal, of defin­ ing the debate as one of how to liberate women, was never achieved. ■ JO F R E E M A N See

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also

Feminism and Feminisms.

Women’s Studies

omen’s studies has its roots in the social fer­ ment of the late 1960s and 1970s. The con­ tinuing movement for civil rights among people of color, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the women’s liberation movement criticized both the structure of educational institutions and the content o f scholarship. For feminists the former critique led to the development of affirmative ac­ tion programs, while the latter led to the founding of the field of women’s studies. “Women’s Studies” became an established aca­ demic field within twenty years, one of the most remarkable accomplishments of the second wave of feminism. Before 1969 no women’s studies pro­ grams and few courses were available at universi­

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ties or colleges in the United States. But by the early 1990s over five hundred formal women’s studies programs existed, most of which offered a major, minor, and/or certificate; over fifty offered some type of graduate degree. Many campuses also created research institutes for the study of women and gender. The early goals of women’s studies were to transform higher education by including the his­ tory and culture of women in most courses and re­ search and by developing new forms of pedagogy that were more cooperative and gave women a more active role in their education. Soon the goals became more complicated. The content of women’s studies came to include identifying and criticizing male bias in research and curriculum; encouraging teaching and research about women and gender; and using this new knowledge to de­ velop women-centered but inclusive frameworks for understanding the world. Such a comprehen­ sive definition of women’s studies encouraged its development in social sciences, natural sciences, education, the law, and the humanities. The formation of the National Women’s Stud­ ies Association (NWSA) in 1977 was influential in developing the field. Its annual conventions brought together women’s studies scholars and students from around the nation to share their re­ search and teaching and to formulate strategies for the institutionalization o f women’s studies. Unlike most academic organizations, the NW SA affirmed its political roots, placing social change for women on the agenda. It experimented with forms of governance that fostered solidarity among feminists yet also encouraged dissent. Third World women and lesbian caucuses played a prominent role from the beginning, the former making the fight against racism integral to women’s studies, the latter supporting the visibil­ ity of lesbians in academe. Other caucuses in­ clude preschool educators, Jewish women, and poor, working-class women. Over the years the NW SA has been resilient despite crises brought on by lack of resources and political differences.

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Despite a verbal commitment to represent the voices of all women, most women’s studies schol­ arship has focused on European American, mid­ dle-class heterosexual women as a result of racism, elitism, and heterosexism in the society as a whole as well as the restrictive traditions of acad­ emic scholarship and hiring. Just as women’s stud­ ies has continuously criticized the academy for its male bias, women of color, working-class women, and lesbians have actively criticized the biases of women’s studies. Although such reevaluation is ongoing, it has already had some results; feminist scholarship has begun to explore differences among women and examine the social hierar­ chies that divide women, as well as their similari­ ties. Women of color have also taken the lead in developing links between women’s studies and ethnic studies programs. An early issue facing scholars in the field of women’s studies was whether to become a sepa­ rate department or a network of feminist faculty hired in different departments. It became clear that both approaches had advantages. If the goal was to change the content of research and teaching throughout the university, it would be useful to have feminist faculty fully integrated into departments. At the same time an indepen­ dent resource base and a focused intellectual group would also help. To prevent their ghettoization, women’s studies programs developed curriculum transformation projects that offered faculty development for all those interested in including women and gender in their research and teaching. This model also has been used to foster the inclusion of women of color in the curriculum. Most universities and colleges resisted the de­ velopment of women’s studies, and in many cases women’s studies has not yet gained full respect and support. Faculty and students have had to ex­ pend enormous political energy to shepherd women’s studies through educational bureaucra­ cies. In the process, the support of the feminist movement nationwide was essential. In addition,

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the high quality of feminist research was helpful in winning over hostile or indifferent faculty. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women o f Color (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981); Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982); Ellen Carol DuBois, Gail Paradise Kelly, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Carolyn W. Korsmeyer, and Lillian S. Robinson, eds., Feminist Scholar­ ship: Kindling in the Groves of Academe (Urbana: Uni­ versity of Illinois Press, 1985). ■ ELIZA BETH See

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LAPOVSKY KEN N ED Y

Education; History and Historians.

Women’s Trade Union League

ounded in 1903 during the Boston convention of the American Federation of Labor, the Women’s Trade Union League (W TUL) was a unique organization of wage-earning women and their middle- and upper-class supporters. Like its British counterpart, the W T U L pursued the dual goals of unionizing female workers and advocat­ ing labor legislation for women. The cross-class nature of the W T U L was exemplified by its first two presidents: Margaret Dreier Robins, the daughter of a wealthy and influential New York family; and Rose Schneiderman, a Russian-Polish immigrant and former factory worker. The W T U L was mostactive in New York and Chicago and played a major role in the garment workers’ strikes of 1909-10 and in the response to the Tri­ angle Shirtwaist fire disaster. The league was also instrumental in developing working-class support for women’s suffrage. The W T U L’s union-organizing efforts were met by indifference or hostility from the maledominated American Federation of Labor. Lack of support from male trade unionists, combined

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WORK

A woman airs bedding outside her home in Green Lake, Washington, 1890.

with the difficulties inherent in organizing women whom society perceived as only temporary mem­ bers of the labor force, led the W T U L to focus in­ creasingly on protective legislation. After World War I, the W T U L abandoned much of its union­ organizing work in favor o f campaigns for the eight-hour day, a minimum wage, and child labor legislation. W T U L members strongly opposed the Equal Rights Amendment because it would overturn protective laws for women workers, lead­ ing to a bitter rivalry with the National Woman’s Party. Membership began to decline during the 1920s, and the W T U L disbanded in 1950. ■ B EA T R IX H OFFM AN

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Labor M ovem ent; Labor Unions; Protec­

tive Labor Legislation.

§ Work

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ince the nineteenth century women in the United States have been caught in a bind: much of the daily labor they perform is not directly

compensated with wages, and yet the dominant ideology defines “work” as waged labor only. Thus many women have had to struggle against the no­ tion that they “don’t work” while trying to achieve recognition for the labor they do perform. This dominant, narrow definition of work has been historically constructed. Pre- and postcon­ quest Native American tribal communities con­ ceptualized work in dramatically different terms, integrating it into spiritually understood sexual di­ visions of labor bound to the natural world. In the European colonies o f the seventeenth and eigh­ teenth centuries, waged labor itself was rare. Most women and men worked in differing forms of bound labor—whether enslaved or as indentured servants—or as subsistence farmers, none of whom received cash compensation and all of whom were acknowledged to be “working.” The concept o f the skilled “goodwife” captured the high value placed on European American wom­ en’s domestic labors, which were viewed as com­ plementary to men’s skills. Only with the triumph of “free labor” and in­ dustrial capitalism in the nineteenth century did new ideologies emerge that devalued much of

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women’s labor. As markets in both labor and com­ modities spread to dominate economic life, only those activities rewarded through cash—whether wages, salary, or entrepreneurial profits—were viewed as “work.” Unwaged labor in the home, now called “housework,” was newly invisible. Most of the labor performed by men now was con­ sidered “work,” while the women’s labor in the home was transposed into “ leisure.” The ubiqui­ tous presence of domestic servants performing housework for wages failed to undermine this ide­ ology, since working-class women, often women of color, were not considered “women.” In the twentieth century women are still strug­ gling with this legacy. Wage-earning women are seen as “working women,” but women who per­ form full-time domestic labor are asked “ Do you work?” and often respond “No.” The rapidly rising labor-force participation of all groups of women has only heightened the tension between waged and unwaged work, without a greater recognition of women’s “ double day” of waged work plus cleaning, shopping, child care, and the emotional labor involved in kinship and nurturance. Femi­ nist theorists are only beginning to rethink the de­ finition of work and how to take all of women’s labors into account. Yet popular, alternative conceptualizations of work have always thrived among women, coun­ tering the dominant ideology. Women have been well aware that their reproductive labors are in­ deed work, hard work. At the same time, much of what others might view as drudgery has imparted value: the pleasure of producing a clean house, a delicious dinner, or a cherished holiday ritual. For much of women’s labor, traditional notions of the line between work and leisure have not applied. Cut off from the social valuation some men ob­ tain through achievement in the labor force, women have built their own cultures valuing one another not by their wage-earning capacities but by their centrality in providing love, sustenance, and survival for their communities. ■ DANA F R A N K

S e e a l s o Contingent Work; Double-Day; House­ hold Workers; Indentured Servitude; Labor Move­ ment; Nontraditional Jobs; Service Sector; Slavery; and entries for specific professions.

§ World War I Period lthough the United States was formally at war for only a year and a half, World War I profoundly affected many American women. It opened new job opportunities in industry, com­ merce, and public service to women white and Black. Volunteers produced huge quantities of food and supplies for European war victims. Sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney built and ran a hospital in France; novelist Edith Wharton depleted her fortune assisting European orphans and refugees; others spent their life’s savings to sail to Europe to nurse or work in the motor corps. Even before the United States entered the war, American nurses thronged to battlefields, where they did heroic work. Some women agitated against the war. Some created pacifist organizations like Lilian Wald’s and Crystal Eastman’s American Union Against Militarism. Anarchist Em m a Goldman warned against the militarism that was already fostering a repressive atmosphere in the United States. When the United States entered the war in 1917, three years after fighting began in Europe, draft resisters demonstrated across the country. Gold­ man encouraged them: troops broke up her meet­ ings and arrested dissenters, and Goldman was sentenced to two years in prison. Suffrage organizations differed in strategy. Mainstream feminists swarmed into war work. Carrie Chapman Catt, leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), felt that assisting the war effort would improve the suffragists’ position afterwards. NAWSA and Women’s Trade Union League leaders took gov­ ernment posts. The National Woman’s Party,

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however, with many Quakers in its leadership, continued to picket the White House. When Alexander Kerensky, briefly the premier of Russia (which granted women suffrage after the revolu­ tion), visited the White House, suffragist banners declared that Woodrow Wilson could not make the world safe for democracy since his own coun­ try was not democratic. M ale onlookers and sol­ diers violently attacked the women; the police imprisoned nearly one hundred women. The suffragists’ various war-related activities ultimately led President Wilson to support the Nineteenth Amendment. W hile some women protested the war, some women participated in it. In 1916, worried about maintaining sufficient clerical staff if the United States entered the war, the Secretary of the Navy decided that law did not say yeomen must be male, and accepted 13,000 women in the navy and 300 in the Marine Corps. None were permit­ ted to remain in service when the war ended in 1919. Women everywhere were fired from their jobs. The one positive aftermath o f the war for women was that in 1920, after seventy-two years of struggle, they won suffrage for women of all races—though poll taxes, literacy tests, and other racial barriers prevented the majority o f Black women from voting until the civil rights move­ ment of the 1960s. • M A R IL YN F R E N C H

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Wars: 1900 to the Present.

g World War II Period istorians often claim that women benefit from the upheaval that accompanies war because economic, political, and social opportunities open up for women as men are called into battle. Women’s economic gains were indeed dramatic during World War II but tended to be short-lived. Overall female labor-force rates rose from 23.6

H

percent in 1930 to 27.9 percent in 1940, peaking at 37 percent in 1944. The sharpest increase was for married women, who composed 3 million of the 6.5 million new female workers. This trend af­ fected white and Native American women more than Black, who had higher rates of prewar employment. Black women also experienced marked discrimination in wartime hiring, al­ though the war also provided Native and other women o f color an opportunity to work in nonser­ vice, higher-paying occupations. Japanese Ameri­ can women, interned during the early part o f the war, were later released to work in defense plants. As women shifted into manufacturing and other sectors previously reserved for men, they encoun­ tered hostility from male workers; trade unions of­ fered only sporadic protection. Lack of adequate housing and transportation, long shifts and erratic hours, and a scarcity of quality child care intensi­ fied the double burden of wage work and family care. Nevertheless, many female workers planned to remain employed after the war; male veterans, however, received priority in postwar hiring. Women’s efforts to participate in the military were similarly constrained by both racial and gen­ der prejudice. Sixty thousand nurses were re­ cruited into the Army Nurse Corps, including un­ precedented numbers of Native American nurses, but the pool of trained Black nurses was underuti­ lized despite severe shortages. Black women also were excluded from the Women’s Airforce Ser­ vice Pilots (WASP) and segregated in other ser­ vice branches. Native American women, how­ ever, were largely integrated into white-led units. Partially as a result of opposition by the predomi­ nantly male American Medical Association, fe­ male doctors were barred from military service until 1943. All branches scrutinized recruits for suspected lesbians. Women in the military shared in many of the men’s entitlements, including vet­ erans’ benefits and the G I Bill, but their pay was lower, and their dependents were denied allot­ ments. The various female corps attracted hun­ dreds of thousands o f volunteers, including the

656

W O R L D WAR I I P E R I O D

M exican American women workers on the South Pacific R ail Road during World War II.

Women’s Army Corps, 140,000; WAVES (Navy), 100,000; and the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, 23,000, among others. Gender ideology permitted women’s entry into nontraditional employment but stressed that their new economic and social roles were “for the du­ ration only.” Women were encouraged to retain their “femininity” ; the iconic “ Rosie the Riveter” was depicted wearing overalls and nail polish. Postwar “prescriptions for Penelope” urging wom­ en to defer to returning male loved ones and re­ sume their domestic roles led to the “baby boom.” After a brief dip in 1945, employment rates for both single and married women resumed their

climb, slowly changing U.S. family patterns (but hardly disturbing occupational stratification by gender). Lesbians and gay men benefited from wartime opportunities and began forming strong communities despite severe repression during the M cCarthy era. M any historians believe that women’s expanded opportunities and often con­ tradictory experiences during the 1940s led to the flowering of a feminist women’s movement two decades later. ■ SONYA M IC H E L

S ee

ent.

a l s o

Rosie the Riveter; Wars: 1900 to the Pres­

657

YWCA

n

YWCA

he Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) is one of the largest and most influ­ ential world organizations o f women, providing educational and recreational services and leader­ ship training opportunities for women and girls. First organized in London in 1855, the YW CA opened in New York City in 1858. Women orga­ nized YW C A associations in many U.S. cities to provide housing and religious instruction to young single women who were flooding into ur­ ban areas. In 1906 city organizations and collegebased student associations that had been inspired by the Protestant evangelical movement joined together to form the YW C A of the USA. Origi­ nally a Protestant lay movement, it is now open to women of all religious persuasions. The YW C A of the USA is associated with the World YW CA, first organized in 1894, a federation of YW C A associa­ tions from over seventy nations. The YW C A of the USA was influenced by the Social Gospel movement of the early twentieth century and adopted a social reform program, fo­ cusing first on the needs of working women. The YW C A organized the Industrial Clubs in the first decade of the twentieth century to provide a fo­ rum for working-class women to discuss wages, safety and health standards, and protective legisla­ tion. During the 1920s and 1930s the YW C A advo­ cated protective labor legislation and encouraged trade union organization for women. During the 1920s and 1930s the YW C A gradu­ ally moved toward a more progressive stance on race relations as well. The group was composed of women from many different racial and ethnic groups from the 1890s on, but women of color were organized into segregated facilities and pro­ grams. By the 1940s approximately 10 percent of the Y W C A ’s membership was African American. In addition, the Y W C A had programs for Native American girls in Indian schools, as well as for Chinese American, Japanese American, and Mex­

T

ican American girls and women. During the 1920s and 1930s increasing pressure was mounted within the YW CA, particularly from the Student Division, to end the practice o f segregation. In 1946 the National Convention of the YW C A endorsed an “ Interracial Charter,” pledging the YW CA to racial integration. The YW CA provided support for the civil rights movement during the 1960s; the Student YW C A contributed partici­ pants to sit-ins and sponsored voter registration projects, while the National Board lobbied for civil rights legislation. In 1970 the Y ’s national convention endorsed the elimination of racism as its “ one imperative.” The Y W C A supported liberal internationalist positions in the postwar world, urging the United States to support the United Nations both to adju­ dicate disputes and to provide aid to developing nations. The YW C A ’s internationalist perspective flowed partly from the international connections women made; members of the YW C A of the USA often served as advisory personnel to YW CAs in other nations. The YW C A continued to work to advance women’s interests after World War II. In the face of post-World War II demobilization, the YW CA defended the right of women to work for wages and pushed for equal opportunities with men in education, training, and employment. The YW C A encouraged debate about women’s roles in families and fostered women’s leadership de­ velopment. From the 1930s onward it advocated the dissemination of birth-control information. Several prominent members of the YW CA served on President Kennedy’s Commission on the Sta­ tus of Women. In 1973 the YW C A endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment, indicating its support for the revival o f feminism. During the 1970s na­ tional conventions called for an expansion of child-care services, and maternal and child health services. The YW C A also supported repeal of all laws restricting abortions and greater involvement of women in governmental positions. ■ SUSAN LYN N

Index of Contributors Aaronson, Stephanie, 134-35, 595-97,615-16 Abramovitz, Mimi, 464-68 Abzug, Bella, 645-46 Ackelsberg, Martha, 99-100,145-47

Acker, Ally, 232-34 Acosta-Belen, Edna, 216-17,430-31 Adler, Margot, 555-56,637-38 Alpern, Sara, 54 Ammar, Nawal H., 283-84 Amott, Teresa L., 162-63,624-26 Anderson, Margo A., 81 Antler, Joyce, 292-95,394-95 Apodaca, Linda, 119 Aptheker, Bettina, 205-7 Armstrong, Jeannette C ., 413-14 Aron, Betsy, 307, 524-26,616-17 Awiakta, Marilou, 416-18 Baer, Judith A., 128-29 Bair, Barbara, 237 Banner, Lois W., 270-73 Barry, Kathleen, 217-18, 354,480-82, 539-40 Beatty, Bess, 589-90 Beck, Evelyn Torton, 341-42 Beck, Martha N., 378-80 Bell, Susan E., 66-67, 149-50 Benshoof, Janet, 516-18 Bepko, Claudia, 24-26 Bernard-Powers, Jane, 614 Berson, Alma R., 280-81 Bird, Caroline, 530-31 Biren, Joan E., 357-58,445-46 Blair, Karen J., 242 Blee, Kathleen M ., 31-33,298-300, 500-501 Blum, Linda M ., 119-21, 305-6 Boles, Janet K., 456-59 Bonica, Patricia, 237-40 Boris, Eileen, 277-78,426, 583-84 Boyd, Nan Alamilla, 23-24, 213-14 Bravo, Ellen, 111-13 Breines, Wini, 229-30, 575-76 Brodie, Janet Farrell, 57-61 Brown, Rita Mae, 320 Bryant, Jean Gould, 425-26 Bunch, Charlotte, 254-55 Burton, Julie, 392,474-78

Cahn, Susan K., 556-61 Card, Emily, 172-73 Carson, Mina, 526-28, 552-54 Castaneda, Antonia I., 638-39 Cheng, Lucie, 273-76 Child, Brenda, 422-23 Cline, Sally, 79 Clinton, Catherine, 121-22,452-53, 501-3 Cole, Johnnetta B., 644-45 Collier, Sophia, 170 -71 Collier-Thomas, Bettye, 395 Cook, Blanche Wiesen, 426-28 Cook, Katsi, 414-15 Coss, Clare, 240 Costain, Anne N., 168-69 Crawford, Vicki, 103-7 Cromley, Elizabeth C ., 37, 143-45, 266-67 Damon-Moore, Helen, 8-9 D ’Antonio, Patricia, 310,434-36 Dauenhauer, Nora Marks, 415-16 Davis, Angela Y., 117-19 Davis, Martha F., 397 Deed, Martha L., 606-7 D ell’Olio, Anselma, 536-39 DeVault, Ileen A., 309,432 Dewey, Janice L., 327 Dolkart, Jane, 593 Downer, Carol, 7 Drachman, Virginia G ., 320-21 DuBois, Ellen Carol, 130 -31,131-32,38 7-8 9 , 479-80, 577-81 Dunbar, Roxanne, 214-15 Dworkin, Andrea, 33-35, 372-73 Eisenstein, Zillah, 218-19, 3 4 4 _ 4 5 Enloe, Cynthia, 38-39,618-20,620-24 Evans, Sara M ., 598-600 Falk, Candace, 30-31 Feder, Elizabeth, 548-49 Feerick, Peggy A., 445-46 Feldberg, Roslyn L., 306-7 Fineman, Martha Albertson, 153-55 Fitzgerald, Maureen, 94, 394 Flores-Ortiz, Yvette G ., 147-49, 1 5 7 _ 5 9 Frank, Dana, 107-9, 132-34, 220-21,653-54 Frantz, Marge, 31, 308, 573-75 Freccero, Carla, 222-24 Freedman, Estelle B., 535-36

■■ 662

IN D EX O F CO NTRIBUTO RS

Freeman, Jo, 594-95, 650-51 French, Marilyn, 654-55 Fugh-Berman, Adriane, 26-27 Funiciello, Theresa, 399 Gabin, Nancy F., 311 Garcia, Alma M ., 82,124-25,204-5 Gesling, Linda J., 483-85 Gillespie, Marcia, 569-70 Goldstein, Leslie Friedman, 129-30 Gordon, Linda, 240-41,626-29 Gordon, Lynn D., 642-44 Gould, Janice, 342-43,420-22 Gould, Sara K., 161-62 Grant, Jaime M., 237-40,496-500 Green-Devens, Carol, 179 Gross, Rita M ., 71-72 Guerin-Gonzales, Camille, 316-17 Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, 350-52,442-43

Hunter, Tera W., 50 Hurtado, Alda, 2 11-13 Hynes, H. Patricia, 171-72 Ireland, Patricia, 207-9 , 3 5 7 Irvine, Janice M ., 531-32 Jacobs, Ruth Harriet, 17-21, 562-65 Jacobs, Sylvia M ., 374-75 Jaffe, Naomi, 549-52 Jimenez-Munoz, Gladys M ., 317-20 Johnson, Susan Lee, 632-35 Jones, Adrienne Lash, 447 Jones, Ann, 607-9,609 Jordan, Teresa, 137 Joseph, Suad, 199-200 Ka’ahumanu, Lani, 61-62 Kahn, Peggy, 119 -21,173-74 , 305-6

Kaminer, Wendy, 174-75 Haag, Pamela, 28-30 Haas, Lisbeth, 55, 597-98 Haber, Barbara, 135-36 Hadley Freydberg, Elizabeth Amelia, 52-54 Hagan, Kay Leigh, 366 Haizlip, Shirlee Taylor, 115-16 Haley, Shelley P., 570-72 Hamilton, Jean A., 362-65 Hammonds, Evelynn M ., 520-22 Harding, Susan, 236 Hardisty, Jean V., 588 Harjo, Joy, 198-99 Harris, Maxine, 366-68 Harrison, Cynthia, 122-24 Harrison, Daphne Duval, 290-92 Hartman, Holly, 436-39 Hartmann, Heidi, 134-35, 595-97,615-16 Haus, Leah, 397-98 Hayes, Diana L., 639-41 Helmbold, Lois Rita, 245-48 Henry, Karen, 35-37 Heschel, Susannah, 295-96 Hewitt, Nancy A., 478-79 Hill, Lisa Beth, 391 Hine, Darlene Clark, 12-17 Hodes, Martha, 370-72 Hoffman, Beatrix, 304-5, 306,450-51,652-53 Hole, Judith, 396-97 Holmes, Helen Bequaert, 512-14, 582-83 Hull, Akasha (Gloria), 251

Kaplan, Temma, 281-82 Kaufman, Debra Renee, 72-73 Kelber, M im, 241-42,400-401 Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, 327-30,332-34,

652—52 Khandelwal, Madhulika S., 554-55 Kibria, Nazli, 600-602 Kidwell, Clara Sue, 179-8 1,256-59,40 1-3, 405-10 King, Wilma, 234-36 King, Ynestra, 207 Kissling, Frances, 77-78,432-34 Klatch, Rebecca E., 125-28 Kolbert, Kathryn, 508-12 Komhauser, Anne, 310-11 Korrol, Virginia Sanchez, 485-88 Krestan, Jo-Ann, 24-26 Ladd-Taylor, Molly, 368-70,384-85, 540 Lakoff, Robin Tolmach, 314-15 Landes, Joan B., 514-16 Langer, Cassandra, 43-44 Law, Sylvia A., 472-74 Lederer, Laura J., 584 Libov, Charlotte, 252-53 Lindemann, Marilee, 345-50 Lynn, Susan, 657 MacKinnon, Catharine A., 221-22, 533-35 Mainardi, Patricia, 489-90

IN D EX

Makarushka, Irena S. M ., 503-8 Mankiller, Wilma, 187-92,282-83 Mann, Henrietta, 418-19 Marcus, Isabel, 136-37,602-6 Matsumoto, Valerie, 286-88 Matthaei, Julie, 156,263-66 Matthews, Glenna, 383-84 Mazumdar, Sucheta, 46-49 M cCann, Carole R., 178-79,451-52 McCarthy, Kathleen D., 443-45 M cCreesh, Carolyn D., 308-9 McGregor, Davianna Pomaika’i, 423-25 McKay, Nellie Y., 50-52 Medicine, Beatrice, 4 03-5,411-12 Mettler, Suzanne B., 181-82 Meyerowitz, Ruth, 113 M ichel, Sonya, 92-94,655-56 Milkman, Ruth, 300-302,302-4 Miller, Andrea, 508-12 Mills, Kay, 428-30 Mink, Gwendolyn, 10 -12 ,10 0 -10 1,10 1-3, i92-97, 323-27,436, 593-94 Mink, Patsy T., 646 Minnich, Elizabeth Kamarck, 163-67 Morantz-Sanchez, Regina, 448-49 Murolo, Priscilla, 565-67 Naples, Nancy A., 248-50 Narayanan, Vasudha, 255-56 Navarro, Marysa, 187-92,209-10 Neverdon-Morton, Cynthia, 282 Newberger, Carolyn Moore, 86-88 Ng, Vivien W., 334-35 Nomura, Gail M ., 288-90 Norton, Maty Beth, 114-15, 520 Nussbaum, Karen, 309-10 Nye, Bernadette, 460-62 O’Connor, Karen, 460-62 Orloff, Ann Shola, 630-32 Orozco, Cynthia E., 322 Osterud, Grey, 21-23 Parker, Sharon, 496-500 Peiss, Kathy, 55-57 Perkins, Kathy A., 591-93 Phillips, Susan L., 313-14 Pogrebin, Letty Cottin, 210-11 Polakow, Valerie, 380-83 Posadas, Barbara M ., 230-32

O F C O N T RIB U TO RS

Proeller, Marie Luise, 40-43 Purdy, Laura M ., 582-83 Quadagno, Jill, 552 Randall, Margaret, 459-60 Ray, Gerda W., 453-56 Reddy, Maureen T., 493-96 Reed, Linda, 375, 375-76,376 Riley, Melissa, 345 Robbins, Trina, 581-82 Robnett, Belinda, 576 Robson, Ruthann, 358-60 Rodriguez-Trias, Helen, 572-73 Rodrique, Jessie M ., 398 Romero, Mary, 155,260-63 Rose, Margaret, 313 Rosser, Phyllis, 561-62 Roth, Rachel, 228-29 Rothman, Barbara Katz, 468-70 Rounds, Kate, 354-56 Rousso, Harilyn, 150-53, 567-68 Roy, Judith M ., 74-77 Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer, 522-23 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 226-27 Ruiz, Vicki L., 82-86,122, 312,387-89 Rupp, Leila J., 330-32,399-400 Russell, Diana E. H., 609-11 Sambo Dorough, Dalee 4 10-11 Schwarz, Judith, 253-54 Scott, Anne Firor, 132, 322-23 Seajay, Carol, 224-26 Seaman, Barbara, 6 7-71, 591,611-12 Segrest, Mab, 636-37 Shaw, Stephanie J., 62-63 Sierra, Christine Marie, 315-16 Silverberg, Helene, 116 -17,175 -7 6 ,18 1,6 4 1-4 2 Sklar, Kathryn Kish, 176-78, 541-43, 576-77, 641 Sloan-Hunter, Margaret, 393 j Smith, Barbara, 192-97,202-4, 336—37 Smith, Martha Nell, 345-50 Smith, Nancy B., 250 | Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 139, 377-78,430, 524 Smitherman, Geneva, 65-66 Solinger, Rickie, 3-7,139 -40 ,269 -70, 360-62, 540-41 Sosa-Riddell, Adaljiza, 386 Stacey, Judith, 182-85

663

IN D EX

Stanley, Amy Dru, 386-87,482-83 Steinem, Gloria, 187-92,385-86, 584-86, 639-41 Stimpson, Catharine R., 345-50 Stock, Wendy, 463-64, 528-30 Stoller, Nancy E., 471-72 Strom, Sharon Hartman, 312 Strossen, Nadine, 79-81 Swenson, Norma, 646-50 Swerdlow, Amy, 439-42

Takagi, Dana, 491-93 Takagi, Tani, 356 Tate, Gayle T., 63-64 Taylor, Verta, 330-32 Thom, Mary, 352-54 Thomas, Sue, 169-70, 395-96, 614-15 Thompson, Becky W., 159-61 Thorne, Barrie, 182-85 Thorpe, Rochella, 339-41 Tiller, Veronica E. Velarde, 419-20 Tobias, Sheila, 519-20 Tone, Andrea, 278-80,285, 523-24 Toth, Emily, 518-19 Trimberger, E. Kay, 255 Troutman-Robinson, Denise, 65-66 Underwood, Kathleen, 586-87

O F C O N T RIB U TO RS

Villasenor, Antonia, 338-39 Wagner, Mary Jo, 462-63 Walker-Hill, Helen, 109-11, 389-91 Ward, Skye, 393-94 Weisstein, Naomi, 267-68 Wertz, Dorothy, 88-92 West, Gandace, 485 Westerkamp, Marilyn J., 276-77,488-89 Wheelwright, Julie, 138-39 White, Deborah Gray, 543-48 White, Katie Kinnard, 64 Williams, Lillian Serece, 391-92 Williams, Susan M., 198-99 Wilson, Marie, 242-45 Woo, Deborah, 44-45 Wriggins, Jennifer, 612-14 Yaeger, Lynn, 156-57,185-87 Yang Murray, Alice 45,45-46,285-86,296-98 Yee, Shirley J., 1—3 Yohn, Susan M ., 373-74 Young, Tricia Henry, 140-43 Yung, Judy, 95-98, 98,449 Zemsky, Beth, 259-60 Zhou, Min, 95 Zia, Helen, 200-202

General Index NOTE: Page numbers in bold refer to main entries (arti­

cles) for a subject. Page numbers in italics refer to illus­ trations. Abbott, Berenice, 446 Abbott, Edith, 29, 528, 554 Abbott, Grace, 29, 528 Abdul, Paula, 143 Abdulahad, Tania, 337 Abinanti, Abby, 394 Abolitionist movement, 1-3 ,2 ,19 1,4 9 7 Abortion, 3-7 ,2 7,4 33-34 , 509-10 and fetal rights, 228-29 among Muslim women, 284 pro-choice and antiabortion movements, 474-78 self-help movement, 7 ,27 Abuse of children, 86-88 sexual, 368,606-7 Abzug, Bella, 123,173, 385,400,442 Achtenberg, Roberta, 394,461 ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), 24,239, 3 3 1_ 3 2 Action Watch, 464 Adams, Abigail, 129,221,497 Adarand v. Pena, 11 Addams, Jane, 28, 272, 329, 347, 384, 391,430,440, 444,478, 506, 528, 553, 621 Addiction. See Substance abuse Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 483 Adnan, Etel, 200 Advertising, 8 -9 ,9 Affirmative action, 10 -12,49 1 Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston, 235

African American Lesbian and Gay Alliance, 331 African American women, 12-17 abortions by, 4 ,6 alcohol consumption by, 25 in armed forces, 38 art and crafts by, 40 autobiographies by, 51 as aviators, 52-54 cancer among, 67, 76 child care by, 92 in colonial period, 114-15

in dance, 140-41 enslavement of, 12-13, X9X feminist, 190,202-4, 639-41 language of, 65-66 lesbian, 238, 336-37 life expectancy of, 17 African American Women in Defense of Ourselves, 204 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 374 Aging, 17 -2 1,19 Agrest, Diana, 37 Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, 313 Agriculture, 21-23,22, 313,452-53 Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), 94,269, 384, 394, 428,631 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), 384, 399,467,626,628-29,631-32 AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), 23-24,61,4 81, 536 Ainsworth, Mary, 381 Alan Guttmacher Institute, 474 Alarcon, Norma, 223 Alaska, indigenous population of, 4 10-11 Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB), 416 Alaska Native Sisterhood, 4 11,416 Albers, Anni, 42 Alcoholism, 24-26 Alcott, Louisa May, 347 Alcott, May, 41 Aldredge, Theoni, 593 Alejandro, Brenda, 431 Alexander, Meena, 555 All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), 559 Allen, Dede, 233 Adlen, Florence, 321 Allen, Gracie, 268 Allen, Paula Gunn, 187,198, 206,223, 328 Allen, Virginia, 400 Alliance for Better Child Care, 93 Ailsop, Marin, 110 Adternative healing, 2 6 -2 7 , 3 ^ 3 Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTW U), 304-5,309,426 Amaro, Hortensia, 365 Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), 560 American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFAS), 3 American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS), 3 American Association of Labor Legislation, 630 American Association of Retired Persons Women’s Initiative, 20

G EN ERAL IN DEX

666

American Association of University Women (AAUW), 244,646 American Bar Association (ABA), 321,609 American Birth Control Association, 60 American Cancer Society (ACS), 68, 70 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 454 American Craft Council, 43 American Craft Museum, 43 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 302, 309,652 American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (A FSCM E). 120, 305-6 American Federation ofTeachers (AFT), 587 American Female Moral Reform Society, 377 American Indian Dance Theatre, 140 American Indian Freedom of Religion Act of 1978,404 American Jewish Congress, Women’s Division of, 293 American Law Institute, 5 American Medical Association (AMA), 4, 5-6, 59,94, 517, 540,609,611,655 American Medical Women’s Association, 448,611 American Nurses Association (ANA), 310,434,435 American Public Health Association, 517 “American Renaissance,” 51 American Revolution, 38,129,618 American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), 4 5 6>577

Americanization, 28-30, 56,135-36,155,194,262, 528 Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990,150, 567 Ames, Jessie Daniel, 282, 351,443 Amnesty International (AI), 459 Amos, Emma, 640 Anarchism, 30-31 Andersen, Owanah, 198 Anderson, Beth, 111 Anderson, Cora, 328 Anderson, Iowne, 415 Anderson, Ivy, 291 Anderson, John, 241 Anderson, Laurie, 111 Anderson, Margaret, 30, 332 Anderson, Marge, 423 Anderson, Marian, 110

Anderson, Mary, 313-14,641 Anderson, Regina, 251 Andreu de Aguilar, Isabel, 216 Angelou, Maya, 52 Anorexia nervosa, 159-61,273 Anthony, Susan B., 131,189 ,19 3,20 9 , 352, 363, 378,456, 490, 502, 507, 577,607 Anti-Saloon League, 480

Anticommunism, 3 1, 126 Antifeminism, 31-33, 3^6 Antin, Mary, 294, 348 Antipomography activism, 33-35, 81 Antonetty, Evelina, 487 Anzaldua, Gloria, 86,205,206,223, 319,320,342 Aquino, Corazon, 354 Arab American women, 35-37 feminist, 3 6 , 199-200 Arab Women’s Union, 200 Arbus, Diane, 41 Architectural Institute of America (AIA), 37 Architecture, 37 Arden, Elizabeth, 56 Armed forces, 38-39,333,338, 358,622-23,655 Armed Forces Nurse Corps, 16 Armstrong, Lil, 291 Army Nurse Corps, 622,655 Art and crafts, 40-43,41 Art criticism, 43-44 Artificial (assisted) insemination, 513 Arts and crafts movement, 41,143-44 Arzner, Dorothy, 233,234 Asch, Adrienne, 151 Asch, Richard, 513 Ashby, Winifred, 364 Asian American Sisters in Action, 648 Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA), 44-45 Asian Law Alliance (ALA), 45 Asian Law Caucus (ALC), 45-46 Asian Lesbians o f the East Coast, 334 Asian Pacific Lesbian Network (APLN), 334-35 Asian Pacific women, 46-49. See also specific groups alcohol consumption by, 25 breast cancer among, 67 feminist, 200-202 lesbian, 334-35 Asian Women United, 334 ASPIRA, 487 Assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), 280,281 Associacion Nacional Pro Peronanas Mayores (National Association for Hispanic Elderly), 20 Association for Lesbian and Gay Journalists, 239 Association for Middle Eastern Women’s Studies, 199 Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), 306 Association of Korean American Victims of the L.A. Riot, 298 Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), 282, 351, 371,443 Aswad, Barbara, 35

GEN ERAL IN D EX

A th erosclerosis, 252

B a u r, C la ra , 109

A tkin son , T i-G r a c e , 2 18 , 595

B a y m , N in a , 346

A tlan ta w a sh e rw o m e n ’s strike (18 8 1), 50

B e a c h , M rs. H .H .A ., 110

A u n t Je m im a , 272

B e a l, F ra n c e s M ., 215

A u sten , A lic e , 4 1 ,3 3 3 ,4 4 5

B e a rd , C h a rle s an d M ary, 257

A u stin , D e b ra , 142

B eau ty c u ltu re , 5 5 - 5 7 ,5 6

A u tob io g rap h y, 5 0 - 5 2 ,1 1 7

B e c k , E v e ly n T orton , 339

A viatio n , 5 2 - 5 4 ,5 3

B e c k e r, C h a rle s, 2 5 7 ,2 5 8 B e e c h e r, C a th a rin e , 346, 380

B a b y b o o m , 2 2 9 ,6 5 6

B e id e rb e c k e , B ix , 291

“ B a b y M ” case , 582

B e ll, B etty L o u ise , 635

B a c a , Ju d ith , 4 3 ,8 6

B e lm o n t, M rs. O .H .P .,4 5 6

B a d a d , R a c h e l, 29

B e lp re , P u ra, 487

B a e z , Jo a n , 390

B eltran , H ayd ee, 460

B a in s, A m a lia M e sa , 86

B e n ja m in , A sh er, 37

B a ird , Z o e , 2 6 2 -6 3

B e n n e tt C o lle g e , 6 4 3 ,6 4 5

B ak er, E lla , 1 6 ,1 0 4 ,1 0 7 , 576

B e n n in g , S a d ie , 43

B ak er, Jo se p h in e , 2 7 1, 364

B e n so n , E z r a T aft, 379

B a k e r, P a u la , 147

B e n ta c o u r, M a rfa , 13 7

B a ld rid g e , L etitia, 3 5 5 ,3 5 6

B e n tley, G la d y s, 2 51, 336

B a ld w in , L o la , 455

B e rg , G e rtru d e , 295

B a ll, L u c ille , 2 3 3 ,2 6 8

B erk sh ire W o m e n ’s H istory C o n fe re n c e s,

B a lla rd , M e lv in , 379 B a lle t, 14 1-4 2 B a lm o ri, D ia n a , 37

19 9 ,2 5 8 B e th u n e , M a ry M c L e o d , 16 ,2 4 7 , 392, 3 9 5 ,4 3 0 4 4 3 ,4 5 7 ,6 2 2 ,6 4 5

B a m b a ra , T o n i C a d e , 16 ,2 0 3

Better Homes and Gardens , 145

B a n k in g a n d cred it, 5 4 ,1 3 7

B ill o f R igh ts, 1 2 8 ,1 2 9 - 3 0 ,1 4 6

B ap tist F o reig n M issio n C o n v e n tio n o f

B iN e t U S A : N a tio n a l B ise x u a l N etw o rk , 239

th e U n ited States, 374

B ird , C a r o lin e , 530

B a rb u d o , M a rfa M e rc e d e s, 212

B ir e n , Jo a n E . 446

B a rn a rd , M arg aret, 364

B irn e y , A lic e M c L e lla n , 394

B a rn a rd C o lle g e , 292

B irth c on tro l, 27, 5 7 - 6 1 , 5 8 ,1 7 8

B a rn e s, D ju n a , 430

B irth C o n tro l F e d eratio n o f A m e ric a , 451

B a rn e s, P au lette, 533

B isc a c c ia n ti, E liz a O stin e lli, 110

B arn ett, F e rd in an d , 14

B isexu ality, 6 1 - 6 2 ,2 3 7 - 1 4 0

B arn ey, N a ta lie , 332

B ish o p , E liz a b e th , 348

B a rn u m , G e rtru d e , 308

B la c k , W in ifre d , 428

B arrett, Ja m e s, 476

B la c k c lu b w o m e n ’s m o v em en t, 1 4 , 6 2 - 6 3 , 202-

B arrett, K ate W aller, 360

B la c k C ro ss N u rses, 6 3 ,2 3 7

B arrett-C o n n o rs, E liz a b e th , 365

B la c k E lk , 408

E l B a rrio , 55

B la c k F a m ily R e u n io n , 395

B a rrio D e fe n s e C o m m itte e , 4 5 4

B la c k G a y an d L e s b ia n L e a d e rsh ip F o ru m

B a rro n , B e b e , 111

( B G L L F ) , 239

B a rto n , M a rg e , 240

B la c k n a tio n alism , 6 3 - 6 4 ,4 9 6

B ass, C h a rlo tta , 429

B la c k P an th er Party, 64

Batt, S h a ro n , 7 0

B la c k P ow er m o v em en t, 6 4 ,10 4 ,4 9 6

B attered w o m e n , 1 6 1 - 6 2 ,6 0 7 - 9

B la c k sororities, 64

B a u e r, M a r io n , 110

B la c k w o m e n . See A fric a n A m e ric a n w o m e n

B a u m a n , B aty a, 240

B la c k w o m e n ’s la n g u a g e , 6 5 - 6 6

B au m g artn er, L e o n a , 364

B la c k m u n , H arry A ., 5 16 - 18

667

GEN ERAL IN D EX

668 B la c k w e ll, E liz a b e th , 5 1 ,8 9 ,1 5 3 , 3 6 3 ,4 4 8

Bridge, 354

B la c k w e ll, E m ily , 448

B rid ge s, A m y, 133

B la c k w e ll, U n ita, 10 6 - 7 , 57^

B ritton , Jo h n , 476

Blackwell v. Issaquena County Board o f Education, 10 7

B ro c k , B ill, 173

B la ir, B o n n ie , 560

B ro n e r, E . M ., 294

B la sco e r, F ra n ce s, 391

B rooks, E liz a b e th , 392

B la tc h , H arriet S tan to n , 483

B ro o ks, G w e n d o ly n , 349

B le w , M a r y C le a rm a n , 635

B ro w n , A b e n a , 592

B lo c h , A lic e , 340

B ro w n , A n to in ette, 484, 507

B lo o m e r, A m e lia , 15 6 ,1 8 9 , 352, 363

B ro w n , C h a rlo tte E m e rs o n , 242

B lo o m e r c o stu m e, 1 5 6 ,1 5 7 ,1 8 6 ,1 8 9

B ro w n , E la in e , 64

B ly, N e llie , 428

B ro w n , H e le n G u rle y , 353

B ly, R o b ert, 366

B ro w n , J o h n , 13

B o g a n , L u c ille , 329

B ro w n , L o u ise , 512

B o k , E d w ard , 353

B ro w n , R ita M a e , 2 0 6 ,2 15 ', 225, 349

B o lin , Ja n e , 321

B ro w n , Sa n d ra , 519

B o m h e ck , E r m a , 268268

B ro w n (C h a p p e ll), W illa , 53

B o n n in , G e rtru d e (Zitkaka-sa), 347

Brown v. Board o f Education, 104 , 3 7 6 ,4 9 2

B o n te c o u , L e e , 523

B ro w n e, A n g e la , 6 10

B o o r, E lla R e e v e , 117

B ro w n m ille r, S u sa n , 34, 6 13

B o rd er In d u strializatio n P ro g ram (B IP ), 356

B ryan t, H a z e l, 592

B osto n m arriages, 329, 535

B ryan t, Je n n in g s, 4 63

B osto n W o m e n ’s H ealth B o o k C o lle c tiv e , 6 6 - 6 7 , 224

B u c h a n a n , E d n a , 429

B o u d in , K athy, 4 6 0

B u c k , C a r r ie , 179

B o u la n g e r, N ad ia, 110

B u c k , M a rily n , 4 6 0

B o u rg eo is, L o u ise , 42, 523

Buck v. Bell, 17 8 - 7 9 , 5 0 8 -9

B ou rk e-W h ite, M arg aret, 4 1,4 4 6

B u c k le y , T h o m a s , 404

B ow , C la ra , 233

B u d d h ism , 71-72

B o w e n , L o u ise de K o v en , 444

L as B u e n a s A m igas, 341

Bowers v. Hardwick, 3 5 8 ,4 7 3

B u ild in g S e rv ic e E m p lo y e e s In tern atio n al

B ow lb y, Jo h n , 381

U n io n ( B S E IU ) , 3 1 0 - 1 1

B o x er, B arb a ra , 3 9 ,1 7 0 ,2 9 4

B u lk in , E lly , 340

B o y d , B e lle , 121

B u lim ia , 1 5 9 - 6 1 ,2 7 3

B racetti, M a ria n a , 216

B u n c h , C h a rlo tte , 206

B ra d e n , A n n e , 1 0 3 ,1 0 4

B u r e a u o f In d ian A ffairs (B IA ), 1 2 3 ,2 3 0 ,4 06

B ra d e n , C a r l, 103

B u rk e , M ary, 313

B rad ley , L isa , 14 1

B u rk e , Y v o n n e B raith w aite, 124

B rad ley, M a rio n Z im m e r , 349

B urk s, M a r y Fa ir, 103

Brad street, A n n e D u d le y , 50, 346

B u rn s, L u c y , 580

B rad w ell, M yra, 324

B u rn sid e , V i, 291

B rag g, Ja n e t H a rm o n , 53

B u rro u g h s, N a n n ie , 430

B ran d eis, L o u is, 483

B u s h , A n ita, 592

B ran t, B eth , 19 8 , 343

B u sh , G e o rg e , 2 4 1,4 7 5 , 510

B rasc h i, G ia n n in a , 4 3 1

B u sin e ssw o m e n an d corp o ratio n s, 72-73

B ra u n , C a r o l M o se le y , 1 6 ,1 2 3 ,1 7 0 ,4 6 2

B u tle r, O ctavia, 3 4 9 ,6 3 5

B reast c a n c e r, 6 7 - 7 1 , 365

B u tle r, R o b ert, 564

B re c k in rid g e , So p h o n ish a, 2 57, 554

B y ro n , B everly , 39

B rey er, S te p h e n , 4 7 7 B ric e , Fan n y, 2 6 8 ,2 9 5

C a b le A c t o f 19 2 2 ,10 1

B ric o , A n to n ia, 110

C a b r in i, F ra n c e s, 506

G EN ERAL IN DEX

C a ld w e ll, S a rah , n o

C h a s e , L u c ia , 141

C a lifo r n ia , 7 , 4 5 - 4 7 , 174-75* 495* 579

C h a se -R ib o u d , B arb a ra , 42

California Federal Savings and Loan Ass’n v. Guerra, 17 4

C h a v e z , C e s a r , 85, 313 , 599

C a lifo r n ia L e a g u e o f M e x ic a n A m e ric a n W o m e n , 82

C h a v e z , H e le n , 313

C a lifo r n ia S a n ita ry C a n n in g C o m p a n y Strik e (19 39 ), 85

C h a v e z , M argaret, 438

C a lla s , M a ria , n o

C h e a n g , S h u L e a , 43

C a m b rid g e (M ass.) S c h o o l o f A rc h ite c tu re and

C h e c k , Ja m e s, 4 63

L a n d sc a p e A rc h ite c tu re , 37

C h e e n e y , M a rin d a , 143

C a m e ro n , B arb a ra , 343

C h e r n in , K im , 52, 294

C a m p b e ll, L u c ie , 390

C h e r o k e e N a tio n , 18 8 ,4 1 7 , 502

C a n ce r, 7 4 -7 7

C h e s le r , P h yllis, 218

C a n n e r y an d A g ricu ltu ra l W orkers In d u strial

C h e s n e y , M argaret, 365

U n io n (C A W IU ), 85

C h ia n g , D aw n , 593

C a n n o n , A n n ie Ju m p , 153

C h ia n g K ai-sh ek, M a d a m e , 49

C a p e tillo , L u is a , 2 16 ,4 8 7

C h ic a g o , Jud y, 4 2 ,2 0 6 ,4 3 9 , 523

Carey v. Population Services, 509

C h ic a n a c iv il rights o rgan ization s, 82

C a r m e lit a (n u n ), 487

C h ic a n a N a tio n a l W elfare Righ ts O rga n izatio n , 82

C a r r , E liz a b e th Jo rd a n , 512

C h ic a n a s an d M e x ic a n A m e ric a n w o m e n , 8 2 - 8 6 ,8 3

C a r r o ll, V in n e tte , 592 C a rs o n , G e r a ld , 355

c iv il rights of, 82 fem in ist, 2 0 4 -5

C a rs o n , R a c h e l, 1 7 1 - 7 2 , 364

C h ild , L y d ia M a ria , 346

C a rte r, Jim m y , 6 9 ,2 4 1

C h ild ab u se, 8 6 -8 8

C a rte r, Jo h n M a c k , 354

C h ild care , 9 2 - 9 4 ,2 6 3 - 6 6

C a rte r, M a n d y , 337

C h ild C a r e A c t o f 19 9 1, 396

C a rte r F am ily, 390

C h ild custod y, 1 5 3 - 5 5 , 6 ° 7

C a rtie r, Ja c q u e s, 18 0

C h ild la b or, 94

C a r y , M a r y A n n S h ad d , 235

C h ild b ir th , 2 6 - 2 7 ,8 8 - 9 2

C a s e lla s , G ilb e r t, 17 3

“ illeg itim a te’Vsingle, 2 6 9 - 7 0 , 361

C assatt, M ary, 4 1 ,4 3 8

C h ild r e n ’s B u re a u , U .S ., 9 4 ,3 6 1 , 3 8 1,3 8 4 ,

C a s tillo , A n a , 3 5 0 ,6 3 5 C a stra tio n c o m p le x , 36 7

5 4 °. 553 C h ild re s s , A lic e , 592

C a th e r , W illa , 3 4 8 ,4 3 0

C h in , M a y , 364

C a th o lic is m , 7 7 - 7 8 ,4 7 5

C h in a to w n s, 95

C a th o lic s for a F re e C h o ic e , 7 8 ,4 7 6

C h in e s e A m e ric a n w o m e n , 4 6 - 4 9 ,9 5 - 9 8 ,9 8

C a tle tt, E liz a b e th , 4 2 ,2 0 6 , 523

C h in e s e E x c lu s io n A c t o f 1 8 8 2 ,4 7 ,4 9 ,9 5 ,9 6 ,9 7 ,

C a tt, C a r r ie C h a p m a n , 1 3 2 ,2 0 9 ,4 4 0 ,4 5 6 ,6 5 4

9 8 ,2 7 4 , 3 9 8 ,4 9 2

C e lib a c y , 7 9

C h in n , M a y , 45 1

C e ll 16 ,2 18

C h iro p ra c tic s, 27

C e n so rsh ip , 7 9 - 8 1

C h is h o lm , S h irle y , 12 3 ,4 5 8 ,6 0 0

C e n su s , 81

C h o i, Ay, 46

C e n te r fo r Im m ig ran t R igh ts, 320

C h o p in , K ate, 347

C e n te rs for D ise a se C o n tro l ( C D C ) , 2 3 ,2 4

C h o u te a u , Y v o n n e , 141

C e n tro p ara el d esarrollo de la m u je r

C h ristia n , B arb a ra , 223

d o m in ic a n a , 320

C h ristia n , M e g , 206, 390

C e rv a n te s, L o rn a D ., 2 1 1- 1 2

C h ristia n C o a litio n , 4 7 7

C h a c e , E liz a b e th B u ffu m , 2

C h rysto s, 343

C h a n e y , Ja m e s, 1 0 6 ,3 7 6

C h u r c h o f Jesu s C h r ist o f L a tt e r -D a y Sain ts.

C h a n g , C h ristin e , 43

See M o rm o n s

C h a n g , T isa , 592

C h u r c h ill, W ain righ t, 259

C h a p lin , C h a r lie , 232

C isn e ro s, Sa n d ra , 8 6 ,2 0 6 , 3 5 0 ,6 3 5

G EN ERAL IN D EX

C itiz e n sh ip , 9 9 - 1 0 0 ,1 3 2

C o c a , Im o g e n e , 268

for A fric an A m e ric a n w o m e n , 13

C o lb e rt, C la u d e tte , 233

an d n ation ality, 1 0 0 - 1 0 1

C o le , R e b e c c a J., 448

City o f Richmond v. Croson, 11

C o le m a n , B essie, 53

C iv ic h u m a n ism , 515

C o le tte , 353

C iv il A ir Patrol (C A P ), 53

C o lle g e s

C iv il L ib e rties A c t o f 19 8 8 ,2 8 6

B la c k w o m e n ’s, 6 4 4 -4 5

C iv il rights, 99

g e n d e r quotas at, 16 6

C iv il R ights A c t o f 18 6 6 ,4 9 5 C iv il R ights A c t o f 1 9 6 4 ,1 0 ,1 0 1 - 3 , " 6 . 325, 396, 4 9 2 ,6 16

w o m e n ’s, 6 4 2 -4 4 C o llin s , Ja n e t, 142 C o llin s , Ju d y, 390

C iv il R ights A c t o f 1 9 9 1 ,1 0 2 ,1 6 7 ,1 7 3 , 326

C o lo n , Ju a n a , 216

C iv il rights m o v em en t, 16 , 3 1 , 1 0 3 - 7 ,1 0 5 , 203

C o lo n , M ir ia m , 592

C iv il W ar, 6 18 - 19

C o lo n ia l p erio d , 1 1 4 - 1 5

C o n fe d e ra te w o m e n in , 1 2 1- 2 2 , 502

a lc o h o l c o n su m p tio n in , 2 4 -2 5

lab or sh ortage after, 112

art a n d crafts in , 40

R ec o n stru ctio n after, 14 ,9 9 , 5 0 1 - 3

au to b io grap h ies fro m , 5 0 -5 1

C iv ilia n C o n serva tio n C o r p s ( C C C ) , 4 2 7 ,6 2 8

c h ild c are in , 92

C iv ilia n P ilo t T ra in in g P ro g ram ( C P T P ) , 53

c lo th in g in , 186

C la m p itt, A m y, 348

fa m ilie s in , 18 3, 380

C la rk , E le a n o r, 348

fe m in ism in, 190

C la rk , Ju d y, 460

racism in , 4 9 4 -9 5

C la rk , S e p tim a Poinsette, 103

sexu ality in , 328, 340, 535

C la rk e , A m y, 121

w ars in , 6 18

C la rk e , C h e r y l, 337

w itch c ra ft in , 504, 5 2 0 - 5 2 1,5 2 0

C la rk e , E d w a rd , 363

C o lo ra d o , 6, 578

C la ss, 1 0 7 - 9 , 5 6 5 -6 6

C o lo r e d F e m a le R e lig io u s an d M o ra l S o c ie ty o f

C la ss ic a l m u sic, 1 0 9 - 1 1 C le a g e , Pearl, 592

S a le m (M assach u setts), 62 C o lo r e d W o m e n ’s L e a g u e , 62

C le a v e r , K a th le e n N e a l, 64

C o lo r is m , 1 1 5 - 1 6

C le g h o r n , M ild re d , 460

C o m b a h e e R iv e r C o lle c tiv e , 1 6 - 1 7 , 2° 3> 3 3 L 3 37>4 9 ®

C le m m o n s , V iv ia n , 240

C o m isio n F e m e n il N a c io n a l (N a tio n al F e m in ist

C le r ic a l w ork, 1 1 1 - 1 3 , 112 C liff, M ic h e lle , 206

C o m m issio n ), 82 C o m m is sio n on In terracial C o o p e ra tio n ( C I C ) , 282

C lin e , Patsy, 390

C o m m issio n s o n the Statu s o f W o m en , 1 1 6 - 1 7 ,6 4 2 ,6 5 7

C lin to n , B ill, 3 9 ,2 4 1,2 4 2 , 3 5 8 ,4 7 7 ,4 7 8 , 5 11,6 2 9

C o m m o n law , 1 2 8 ,13 6 ,3 2 4 ,6 2 5

C lin to n , K ate, 268

C o m m u n ic a tio n s D e c e n c y A c t ( C D A ) o f 19 9 6 ,8 0

C lo o n e y , R osem ary, 390

C o m m u n is m , 1 1 7 - 1 9 ,118

C lo t h in g

o p p o sitio n to, 3 1 ,1 2 6

cross-dressing, 1 3 8 - 3 9 ,1 3 8

C o m m u n ity A c tio n P rogram s (C A P s), 249

dress reform , 1 5 6 - 5 7 ,1 8 6

C o m m u n ity C h e s t, 3 6 1,3 6 2

fash io n an d style, 1 8 5 - 8 7

C o m m u n ity S e rv ic e O rga n izatio n ( C S O ) , 8 5 ,1 1 9

o f M u s lim w o m e n , 284

C o m p a ra b le w orth, 1 1 9 - 2 1 , 1 7 5 - 7 6

textile/apparel w orkers, 5 8 9 - 9 1

C o m p re h e n s iv e C h ild D e v e lo p m e n t A c t o f 1 9 7 1 ,9 3

C o a litio n for A b o rtion R igh ts, 476

C o m sto c k , A n th o n y, 6 0 ,8 0 ,4 3 6

C o a litio n o f L a b o r U n io n W o m en ( C L U W ) , 1 1 3 ,

C o n d o rc e t, M a rq u is de (M a rie -Je a n C a rita t), 515

19 6 ,2 2 0 , 3 0 0 ,3 0 1, 3 11, 3 12 ,6 0 0

C o n fe d e ra te w o m e n , 1 2 1- 2 2 , 502

C o b b , Je w e l P lu m m e r, 364

C o n fe re n c e o f C a th o lic L e sb ia n s, 78

C o b b e , F ra n c e s Pow er, 607

C o n flic t T ac tics S c a le ( C T S ) , 606

C o b b le , D o ro th y S u e , 220

E l C o n g re so de P u eb lo s de H a b la E s p a n o la , 8 5 ,12 2

G EN ERAL IN D EX

C o n g re ss, U .S ., 12 2 - 2 4 , l 7 °> '97> 2 0 8 - 9 ,4 6 1 - 6 2 C o n g re ss fo r R a c ia l E q u a lity ( C O R E ) , 213

C r im in a l ju stice. See P o lic e fo rces; P o litical prisoners; Prisons

C o n g re ss o f In d u strial O rg an izatio n s ( C IO ) , 3 0 3 - 4 , 312

C ritte n d e n h o m e s, 36 0, 362

C o n g re ssio n a l C a u c u s on W o m e n ’s Issues ( C C W I) , 124

C ro c k e tt, Polly, 234

C o n g re ssio n a l U n io n , 580

C ro ly , Ja n e C u n n in g h a m , 242

C o n n e c tic u t, 4

C ro sb y , F a n n ie Ja n e , 390

C o n sc io u sn e ss raisin g, 1 2 4 - 2 5 ,1 2 5 ,1 9 5 ,2 1 7

C ro ss-d ressin g, 1 3 8 - 3 9 ,1 3 8 , 328

C o n serva tism an d th e R ig h t W in g , 1 2 5 - 2 8 ,1 8 4 - 8 5 ,4 7 5

C ro th e rs, R a c h e l, 592

C o n stitu tio n an d A m en d m en ts

C ru sis, A n n a , 39 1

B ill o f R igh ts, 1 2 8 ,1 2 9 - 3 0 ,1 4 6

C r u z , M ig d a lia , 593

C o n stitu tio n , 1 2 8 - 2 9 ,1 4 6

C u lle n , C o u n te e , 251

E ig h te e n th A m e n d m e n t, 480

C u lle y , M a rg o , 52

E m a n c ip a tio n P ro cla m a tio n an d T h irteen th

C u lt o f D o m esticity, 4 7 ,1 3 9 ,1 5 5 ,2 6 0 ,2 6 4 - 6 5 ,

A m e n d m e n t, 1 3 0 - 3 1 ,4 9 1 , 502 Fo u rteen th an d F ifte e n th A m e n d m e n ts, 1 3 ,9 9 ,

366 C u lt u r a l diversity, 4 19

1 3 0 , 1 3 1 - 3 2 ,1 4 6 , 1 7 7 , 2 0 2 , 3 2 4 ,4 7 2 ,4 7 3 ,4 9 2 ,4 9 7 ,

C u lt u r a l fe m in ism , 2 0 5 - 7

502, 5 11, 577

C u ltu r a l p lu ralism , 388

N in e te e n th A m e n d m e n t, 3 2 , 9 9 ,1 1 7 ,1 2 9 ,1 3 2 , 1 4 6 , 16 8 ,2 2 1, 325, 5 8 0 - 8 1,6 5 5

“ C u lt u r e o f poverty,” 13 9 - 4 0 C u rry , C o n n ie , 104

T h irte e n th A m e n d m e n t, 236

C u rtis, C y ru s , 353

T w en ty-first A m e n d m e n t, 480

C u s h m a n , C h a rlo tte , 591

C o n s u m e r C r e d it P ro tectio n A c t o f 19 6 8 , 5 4 ,17 2

C u ste r, G e o rg e A rm stron g, 405

C o n s u m e ris m an d c o n su m p tio n , 1 3 2 - 3 4 C o n tin g e n t w ork, 1 3 4 - 3 5

D a b b s, Ja m e s M c B r id e , 442

C o n tra c e p tio n

D ah l-W o lfe, L o u ise , 446

C o n tra c t w ith A m e ric a , 10 0

D a ile y , Ja n e t, 519

C o n w a y , P atricia, 37

D a ile y , P h y llis, 16

C o o k in g , 1 3 5 - 3 6 ,1 3 6

D a ik o n S h ie ld I U D , 648

C o o p e r , A n n a Ju lia , 18 9 ,2 0 3

D a ly , M ary, 2 2 6 ,2 2 7

C o o p e ra tiv e s, o f w o m e n , 162

D a n c e , 14 0 - 4 3

C o r d e r o , H e le n , 42

D a rw in , C h a rle s, 6 37

C o r d o v a , D o ro th y L a ig o , 231

D a sg u p ta , S h a m ita D a s, 555

C o r n e ll, K ath erin e, 591

D a s h , Ju lie , 1 6 ,4 3 ,2 3 3

C o r o n a , B ert, 122

D a te (acq u ain ta n c e) rap e, 6 13

C o rp o ra tio n s, b u sin essw o m en an d , 7 2 - 7 3

D au g h ters o f A fric a, 62

C o rte z , H ern an d o , 180

D a u g h ters o f B ilitis (D O B ), 238, 3 3 0 - 3 1 ,3 3 4 ,

Cosmopolitan, 24, 353 C o te ra , M a rta , 8 6 ,2 12

338 .4 5 4 D a u g h ters o f Z io n , 62

C o tt, N a n c y , 253

D a v is, A n g e la , 64

C o v e rtu re , 1 2 8 ,1 3 6 - 3 7 ,3 2 4

D av is, B ette, 232

C o w a n , G lo r ia , 4 63

D av is, D ev ra L e e , 68

C o w g irls, 1 3 7

D avis, H en rietta V in to n , 237

C o x , Id a, 251

D a v is, Je ffe rso n , 121

C ra ft, E lle n , 545

D a v is, V arin a, 122

C ra ft, N ik k i, 33

D aw es, H en ry, 188

C r a ft u n io n ism , 302

D a w e s A c t o f 18 8 7 ,4 2 3

C r a n e , C a r o lin e B artlett, 4 84

D aw so n , D o ro th y, 104

C r a n e , Ju lia E ttie , 109

D a y , D o ro th y, 507

C ra w fo rd , Jo a n , 233

de A rm in o , F ra n c a , 216

C ra w fo rd , V ic k ie , 13 7

d e B ea u v o ir, S im o n e , 1 8 7 ,2 15

672

GEN ERAL IN D EX

d e B u rg o s, Ju lia , 4 3.1,4 8 7

D o m e stic w ork. See H o u se h o ld w orkers, u n p aid

d e C le y r e , V o lta irin e, 30

D o n a h u e , P h il, 585

de K o o n in g , E la in e , 42

D o u b le-d ay, 15 6 , 654

de la C r u z , S o r Ju a n a In es, 86

D o u g la s, Ja n ic e E . G r e e n , 365

D e M e n a , M .L .T ., 237

D o u g lass, F re d e ric k , 19 1 ,2 0 2 ,4 9 7 , 502

D e M ille , A g n es, 141

D o u g lass, G r a c e B u still, 1

de Soto, H ern an d o , 18 0

D o u g lass, S a ra h , 1

D e a rin g , Ju d y, 593

D o u g lass, S a ra h M a p p s, 235

D e b s, E u g e n e , 118

D o w n e r, C a r o l, 6

D e c la ra tio n o f In d e p e n d e n c e , 1 2 8 ,17 0 ,4 2 8 ,4 9 7

D o xtater, D e b o ra h , 423

D e c o rativ e arts, 1 4 3 - 4 5 , H 4

D ra k e , S ir F ra n cis, 18 0

D e e r , A d a, 12 3 ,4 2 3

D raves, V ic to ria , 231

D e fe n se o f M arriag e A c t o f 19 9 6 , 360

Dred Scott case, 13 0

“ D e fic it c u ltu re.” See “ C u lt u r e o f poverty”

D ress refo rm , 1 5 6 - 5 7 , 1 5 7 ,1 8 6

D e itc h , D o n n a , 234

D re x e l, K a th e rin e , 506

D e la n e y , L u c y , 2 3 4 -3 5

D r u g u se an d ab u se, 2 6 ,1 5 7 - 5 9 ,4 8 1

D e L a r ia , L e a , 268

D u B ois, W .E .B ., 1 4 ,6 3 , 3 9 1, 502

D e l’em , 7

D u B o is, E lle n , 37 7

D e ll’O lio , A n se lm a , 595

D u d le y , H e le n a , 528

D e lo ria , V in e , 404

D u e process, 13 0 ,4 7 2

Democracy, 145-47

D u g a n , Jo y c e , 4 18

D e n iso n H o u se (B oston), 527

D u k ak is, M ic h a e l, 241

Dennis, Peggy, 117

D u n b a r N e lso n , A lic e , 1 5 ,2 5 1, 329, 336

D ep o -P ro v era, 5 0 9 ,6 4 8

D u n c a n , Isad ora, 142

D ep ressio n , 1 4 7 - 4 9 , 158

D u n h a m , K a th e rin e , 142

D e v in e , A n n ie B e lle R o b in so n , 10 6 , 576

D u n n , Ida V an Sm ith , 54

D e W o lfe , E ls ie , 144

D u n n e , Ire n e , 233

D ia n a Press, 225

D u n y e , C h e r y l, 43

D ia n a R oss an d the S u p re m e s, 390

d u P re, Ja c q u e lin e , 110

D ic k in so n , E m ily , 346, 350

D u ra n , M a rg a rita , 119

D ic k in so n , R o b ert L a to u , 532

D u ra n , M a ria , 119

D id io n , Jo a n , 349

D u ran t, H en ry, 643

D id rikso n (Z ah arias), M ild re d “ B a b e ,” 559

D u ra z o , M a rfa E le n a , 86

D ieth ylstilb estro l ( D E S ) , 6 7 ,1 4 9 - 5 0 ,3 6 4 ,6 4 8

D u rh a m , M rs. M . T ., 390

D isa b ility, 1 5 0 - 5 3 ,1 5 1 ,1 6 7 , 5 6 7 -6 8

D u rr, C liffo rd , 10 3

D isc rim in atio n

D u rr, V irg in ia Foster, 1 0 3 ,1 0 4

e c o n o m ic , 54

D w o rk in , A n d rea, 463

racial, 4 9 1 - 9 3

D y er, M ary, 89, 504

sex, 1 0 1 - 2 ,1 7 3 - 7 4 , 5 3 ° —31

D y k e w o m a n , E la n a , 340

D ism o n d , G e ra ld y n , 251 D iv o rc e an d custody, 1 5 3 - 5 5 , S42’ 607

E a m e s, E m m a , 110

D lu g o szew sk i, L u c ia , 111

E arh art, A m e lia , 52

D o b k in , A lix , 340

E a stm a n , C ry sta l, 5 5 0 ,6 5 4

D o d so n , Betty, 537

E a tin g disorders, 1 5 9 - 6 1 ,2 7 3

Doe v. Bolton, 509, 517

E a to n , E d ith M a u d , 348

D o le , R o b ert (B o b ), 2 4 2 ,4 7 5

E a u b o n n e , F ra n co ise d ’, 207

D o llie , M a m a , 576

E b e r le , A basten ia, 522

D o m e stic sc ie n c e , 15 5

E c h o ls , A lic e , 215

D o m estic service. See H o u seh o ld w orkers, p aid

E c k fo rd , E liz a b e th , 105

D o m estic v io le n c e , 609

E c o fe m in is m , 207

GEN ERAL IN DEX

E c o n o m ic d iscrim in atio n , 54

E q u a l R ights A m e n d m e n t (E R A ), 3 2 - 3 3 ,1 1 6 ,1 2 9 ,

E c o n o m ic em p ow erm en t/au ton om y, 1 6 1 - 6 2

17 6 - 7 8 , 19 4 ,2 0 8 , 3 11, 325, 357 , 396, 3 9 7 ,4 0 0 ,4 8 3 ,

E c o n o m ic grow th, 1 6 2 - 6 3

49 8, 5 2 4 ,6 4 2 ,6 5 3 ,6 5 7

E c o n o m ic O p p o rtu n ity A c t (E O A ), 2 4 8 -4 9

E q u a l R ights Party, 458

E d d y , M a ry B a k e r, 36 3, 506

E q u a lity an d d iffe re n c e , 174-75

E d e l, D e b o ra h , 327

E r d r ic h , L o u ise , 350, 635

E d m o n d s, Sa rah E m m a , 139

E rn a n d e s, A n to n ia L u sgard ia, 83

E d m o n d so n , B e lle , 121

E ro to p h o b ia , 259

E d u c a tio n , 16 3 -6 7 , 1 6 4 ,1 6 5 ,4 6 6

E s c a la n te , A lic ia , 82

E d u c a tio n A c t

E s c u e la P o p u lar N o rte n a , 320

E d u c a tio n in a D isa b le d G a y E n v iro n m e n t, 3 3 1

Essence, 353

E d u c a tio n a l T estin g S e r v ic e ( E T S ) , 561

E ste fa n , G lo r ia , 390

E d w ard s, S a ra h , 505

E stev es, S a n d ra M a rfa , 4 3 1

E h r lic h , G r e te l, 635

E th e rid g e , M e lissa , 39 1

E ilb e r g , A m y, 294

E tiq u ette. See M a n n e rs an d etiquette

E ise n h o w e r, D w ig h t D ., 16 8 ,6 2 3

E tter-L ew is, G w e n d o ly n , 65

Eisenstadt v. Baird, 4 7 3 , 509

E u g e n ic s , 178-79

E ise n ste in , Z illa h , 219

E u ro p e a n A m e ric a n lesb ian s, 338-39

E la w , Z ilp a h , 235

E v a n g e lic a lis m , 17 9 , 236, 5 0 6 -7

E ld e rs, Jo y c e ly n , 36 5, 529

E v a n s, A lic e , 364

E le c to r a l fem in ism , 2 0 7 - 9

E v a n s, M in n ie , 438

E le c to ra l p o litics, 16 8 - 6 9

E v a n s, Sa ra, 215

E lg in , Patricia H a d e n , 349

E v e rs-W illia m s, M y rlie , 391

E lla s (Texas), 341

E x e c u tiv e O rd ers 1 0 , 1 1 , 16 7 ,2 8 6 ,2 9 0

E lla s e n A c c io n , 341

“ E x od u ste rs,” 503

E llis, E ffie , 364

E x p lo rers, 179 -8 1

E llis , H a v e lo ck , 531 E llis Islan d , 293

F a d d en , M ary, 4 15

E lss le r, F a n n y, 141

F a d e rm a n , L illia n , 206

E m a n c ip a tio n P ro cla m a tio n an d T h irte e n th

F a g en so n , E lle n , 7 3

A m e n d m e n t, 13 0 - 3 1, 4 9 1, 502 E m b ry o tran sfer, 512 E m e rs o n , R a lp h W ald o, 355

F a ir E m p lo y m e n t P ractices C o m m itte e ( F E P C ) , 181 F a ir L a b o r Stan d ard s A c t ( F L S A ) o f 1 9 3 8 ,1 7 5 - 7 6 ,1 7 7 ,

18 1-8 2 , 2 7 8 ,4 2 8 ,4 8 3 , 5 8 4 ,6 3 1,6 4 2

E M I L Y ’s L ist, 16 9 -7 0 , 2 0 8 ,4 4 5

Fa lletta, Jo A n n e , 110

E m m a L azaru s F e d eratio n o f Je w ish W o m e n ’s

Fa lse m e m o ry m o v em en t, 6 1 0 - 1 1

G ro u p s , 293

F a m ilie s, 182-85.

E m o tio n a l in te llig e n c e , 245

F a m ilies In te rn atio n al, In c ., 20

E n c u e n tr o d e L e sb ian as d e L a tin o A m e ric a y

F a m ily an d M e d ic a l L e a v e A c t o f 1 9 9 3 ,11 3 , 3 0 6 ,4 8 3

E l C a r ib e , 341

F a m ily A ssistan ce P la n , 629

Encuentro Feminil, 354

Family Circle, 353

E n g e ls , F rie d ric h , 1 1 7 ,2 1 5

F a m ily re u n ifica tio n , 275

E n tre p re n e u rs, 170 -7 1

F a m ily S u p p o rt A c t o f 19 8 8 ,9 3 , 632

E n v iro n m e n ta l racism , 17 2

F a m ily v alu es, 1 8 5 ,1 9 7

E n v iro n m e n ta lis m , 171-72

F a ren th o ld , F ra n c e s, 458

E q u a l C r e d it O p p o rtu n ity A c t o f 19 7 4 ( E C O A ) , 54,

F a rm ers’ A llia n c e , 22

! 7 2- 7 T 396 E q u a l E m p lo y m e n t O p p o rtu n ity C o m m issio n

Farrak h an , L o u is, 64

( E E O C ) , 1 0 2 , 17 3 - 7 4 ,1® 1>3°6> 429

F a rrell, S u z a n n e , 141 Fash io n an d style, 18 5 -8 7 ,186

E q u a l Pay A c t o f 1 9 6 3 ,1 2 0 , 17 5 - 7 6 , 325, 3 9 6 ,6 16 ,6 4 2

Fauset, C ry sta l, 457

E q u a l R igh ts A d vo c ates, 393

Fauset, Je ssie R e d m o n , 1 5 ,2 5 1, 348, 391

674

G EN ERAL IN D EX

F e d eral A rt P ro jec t, 42

F e ta l rights, 2 2 8 -2 9 , 5n ~ 12

F e d eral C o n tra c t C o m p lia n c e P ro gram , 6 16

F e ta l tissue resea rc h , 4 7 7 , 511

Fed eral E m e rg e n c y R e lie f A d m in istratio n ( F E R A ) , 628

F ic h a n d le r , Z e ld a , 592

F e d eral T h e a te r P ro je c t ( F T P ) , 592

F ie ld , Ja m e s, 462

Fed eratio n o f F e m in ist W o m en ’s H ealth C e n te rs, 7

F ie ld s , M ary, 336

Fein stein , D ia n n e , 17 0 ,2 9 4

F ie rro de B rig h t, Jo se fin a , 122

F e ld m a n , M a x in e , 340

T h e F iftie s, 2 2 9 -3 0

F e ll, M arg aret, 227, 505

F ilip in a s, 4 8 ,2 3 0 - 3 2

F e llm a n , Jy l L y n n , 340

F ilm , 2 3 2 - 3 4 ,2 3 3

F e m a le in fa n tic id e, 201

F in e , M ic h e lle , 15 1, 530

F e m in ism an d fem in ism s

F in k b in e , S h e rri, 591

A m e ric a n In d ian , 18 8 -8 9 , *9 ° ’ 19 8 - 9 9

F in k e lh o r, D a v id , 6 10

A rab A m e ric a n , 3 6 ,1 9 9 - 2 0 0

F io re n z a , E lisa b e th Sc h iissle r, 227

in art criticism , 4 3 - 4 4

F iresto n e, S h u la m ith , 2 15 ,2 18 , 514

A sian A m e ric a n , 2 0 0 -2 0 2

F ish , Ja n et, 439

Black, 1 9 0 ,2 0 2 - 4 , 639-41

F itzg erald , E lla , 291, 390

C h ic a n a , 2 0 4 -5

F la c k , A u d rey, 4 39

c u ltu ra l, 2 0 5 - 7

F la n a g a n , H a llie , 592

d escrip tio n of, 18 7 - 9 2

F le tc h e r, A lic e , 188

o f disab led p erson s, 153

F lig h t atten dan ts, 306

e c o fem in ism , 20 7

F litcraft, A n n e H ., 6 11

elec to ral, 2 0 7 - 9

F lo re s, F ra n cisca , 82

history of, 1 9 2 - 9 7

F ly n n , E liz a b e th G u rle y , 117 , 3 0 8 ,5 5 0

in tern atio n al, 2 0 9 - 10

F o n fa, A n n , 68

Jew ish , 2 1 0 - 1 1 ,2 9 4 , 3 3 9 -4 0

Fo o , L o ra Jo , 46

L a tin a , 2 1 1 - 1 3

Fo o d . See A g ric u ltu re ; C o o k in g

lesb ian , 1 9 0 ,1 9 6 ,2 1 3 - 1 4 , 320

Fo o d an d D r u g A d m in istratio n , U .S ., 5 7 ,6 1 ,1 4 9 - 5 0 , 514

M arxist, 2 1 4 - 1 5

Fo o te, Ju lia A . J., 235

opp o sitio n to, 3 1 - 3 3 , 366

F o rd h a m , S ig n ith ia , 245

P u erto R ic a n , 2 1 6 - 1 7

F o m e s, M a r ia , 592

rad ical, 5 7 ,2 1 7 - 1 8

F o m e s, M a ria Ire n e , 349

socialist, 2 1 8 - 1 9

Forrest, K ath erin e, 519

w orkin g-class, 2 2 0 -2 1

Fo rten , M argaretta , 235

Fe m in ist A n ti-C e n so rsh ip T ask F o rce ( F A C T ), 8 1,4 6 4

Fo rten , S a ra h , 236

Fe m in ist A rab A m e ric a n N etw ork , 200

Foster, A b ig a il K e lle y , 3

Fe m in ist ju risp ru d en c e, 2 2 1- 2 2

F o u c a u lt, M ic h e l, 258

Fe m in ist literary criticism , 2 2 2 -2 4

4-H , 22

Fe m in ist M a jo rity F o u n d atio n , 445

Fo u rth W orld M a n ifesto , 218

T h e F e m in ist Press, 225

Fox, M a rg a re t an d K ate, 506

Fe m in ist presses, p u b lic atio n s, an d bookstores, 2 2 4 -2 6

F r a m in g h a m H eart Stud y, 252

Fe m in ist th eology, 2 2 6 -2 7

F ran k , B arn ey, 286

T h e Fem in ists (rad ical o rgan izatio n ), 218

F ra n k en th aler, H e le n , 4 39

Fem in ists fo r L ife , 4 75

F ra n k lin , A reth a, 390

Fe rb er, E d n a , 294

F ra n k lin , B e n ja m in , 1 7 0 ,3 5 5

F e re b e e , D o ro th y, 4 5 1

F re e B la c k w o m e n , 1 3 ,1 8 9 ,2 3 4 - 3 6

Fe rg u son , K ath erin e, 504

F re e F e d eratio n o f L a b o r (F ed erac id n L ib r e de

Ferran d , B eatrix, 37

T rab ajad o res, F L T ) , 216

Ferraro, G e r a ld in e , 2 0 8 ,4 5 8 ,4 6 0

F re e P ro d u c e M o v e m e n t, 1

Ferre, R o sario , 4 3 1

F r e e d m e n ’s B u re a u , 5 0 2 ,6 2 7

F e ta l A lc o h o l Sy n d ro m e , 2 2 9 ,4 6 9

F re e d o m N o w , 459

GEN ERAL IN D EX

F re e d o m o f A c c e ss to C lin ic E n tra n c e s A c t o f 199 4, 511

an d sc ie n c e skills, 5 2 0 -2 2

F re e d o m o f sp e e c h , 7 9 - 8 1,1 2 9

selec tio n of, 5 13 - 14

F r e n c h , M a rily n , 349 F ric h n e r, T o n ya , 4 15 F rie d a n , Betty, 9 ,8 0 ,19 5 ,2 2 9 ,2 9 4 , 320, 3 3 1, 349, 3 9 6>5 9 9

socializatio n of, 2 4 2-4 5 G e n d e r gap , 1 6 9 ,2 0 8 ,2 4 1 - 4 2 ,4 5 6 - 5 7

General Electric v. Gilbert, 5 11 G e n e ra l F e d eratio n o f W o m e n ’s C lu b s , 2 4 2 ,6 3 0

F rin g s, K etti, 592

G e n tle m e n ’s A g re e m e n t o f 1 9 0 7 ,4 7 ,4 8 ,2 8 9 ,4 4 9 ,4 9 2

F ry e , M a rily n , 66

G e rste n b e rg , A lic e , 592

F u lle r , L o ie , 142

G h o s t d a n c e re lig io n , 405

F u lle r , M arg aret, 51, 346, 3 5 2 ,4 2 8

G ib b s, L o is, 1 7 1 ,1 7 2

F u n d a m e n ta lism , 1 7 9 ,2 3 6

G ib ra n , K a m ila , 35

T h e F u rie s, 2 5 5 ,3 3 1

G ib so n , A lth ea , 559 G id e o n , M ir ia m , 111

G a g e , M a tild a Jo sly n , 18 9

G ilb e r t, R o n n ie , 390

G a le , Z o n a , 592

G ile s , H arriet, 645

G a llu p , P atricia, 17 0

G illia m , D o ro th y, 429

G a lto n , F ra n cis, 17 8

G illig a n , C a r o l, 244

G a m e te in trafallo p ian transfer, 513

G ilm a n , C h a rlo tte Perkins, 17 8 ,2 4 0 , 347 , 550

G a r b e r , M ary, 429

G in s b u rg , R u th B a d e r, 294, 3 2 5 ,4 7 7

G a r c ia , A n g ie , 322

G ir ls ’ so c ializatio n , 16 8 ,2 4 2 - 4 5

G a r d e n , M a ry , 110

G is h , L illia n , 232

G a r d n e r , G e r a ld , 6 3 7

Glamour, 353, 354

G a r n e r, J. D ia n n e , 20

G la sp e ll, S u sa n , 592

G arrett, M ary, 444

“ G la ss c e ilin g ,” 4 50, 593

G a rriso n , W illia m L lo y d , 1, 3

G le n n , E v e ly n N a k an o , 389

G a rv e y , A m y Ja c q u e s, 1 5 ,6 3 ,2 0 3 ,2 3 7 ,2 7 6

G lo b a l F u n d for W o m en , 445

G a rv e y , M a rc u s, 1 5 ,6 3 ,2 3 7

G o d d a rd , K ath erin e M ary, 17 0

G a rv e y ism , 2 3 7

G o d d a rd , M a ry K ath erin e, 428

Garza, Carmen Lomas, 43,86

G o d d e sse s, 556

G a s p a r d e A lb a , A lic ia , 8 6 ,6 3 5

Godey’s Ladies’ Book, 5 6 ,1 1 0 ,1 4 4 , 352

G a u m o n t, L e o n , 2 3 2 -3 3

G o ffm a n , E rv in g , 9

G a y , le sb ia n , an d b isexu al organ ization s, 2 3 7 - 4 0 ,

G o ld b e rg , W h o o p i, 268

330 -32 G a y A m e ric a n Indian s (G A I), 343 In d ian A I D S p ro je ct ( G A 1LAP), 238

Goldberg v. Kelly, 629 G o ld m a n , E m m a , 3 0 ,1 1 7 ,1 7 8 ,1 9 0 ,2 7 6 ,2 9 4 , 5 5 0 ,6 5 4 G o ld m a rk , Jo se p h in e , 2 5 7 ,4 7 8 ,4 8 3

G a y an d L e sb ia n A llia n c e A g ain st D e fa m a tio n , 239

G o ld sm ith , D e b o ra h , 40

G a y a n d L e sb ia n M e d ic a l A ssociatio n ( G L M A ) , 239

G o m e z , A n a N ie to , 8 6 ,2 0 4

G a y a n d L e sb ia n Parents C o a litio n ( G L P C ) , 238

G o m e z , Je w e lle , 337

G a y an d L e sb ia n V ic to r y F u n d , 239

G o m e z , M a rg a , 268, 593

G a y L a tin o s U n id os ( G L U ) , 341

G o o d m a n , A n d rew , 1 0 6 ,3 7 6

G a y lib eratio n m o v em en t, 334, 3 3 8 -3 9

G o rd o n , L in d a , 377

G a y W o m e n ’s A ltern ative (G W A ), 240

G o rd o n , R u th , 563

Geduldig v. Aiello, 511

G o rk y , A rsh ile , 42

G e io g a m a h , H an ay, 140

G ra d y , E liz a b e th , 310

G e lle r , R u th , 340

G r a h a m , A b b ie , 257

G e lle s , R ic h a rd , 606

G r a h a m , B ette N esm ith , 17 0

G ender

G r a h a m , K ath arin e, 17 1

in ad vertisin g, 8 - 9

G r a h a m , M arth a, 142

d efin ition of, 2 4 0 -4 1

G r a h n , Jud y, 19 0 ,2 0 6

an d la n g u a g e , 3 14 - 15

G r a m s c i, A n to n io , 223

675

676

GEN ERAL IN D EX

G r a n g e , 22

H alsted , W illia m , 69

G ra tz , R e b e c c a , 2 9 3 -9 4 , 5 ° 6

H a m e r, F a n n ie L o u , 10 6 , 3 7 5 , 576

G ra v e s, N an cy , 523

H a m ilto n , A lic e , 364, 528

G ra y , V ic to ria , 106 , 576

H a m ilto n , A n n , 523

G r a y Panthers, 19, 20, 564

H a n , Ju H u i (“ Ju d y ” ), 335

G r e a t A w ak en in g , 5 0 4 -5

H an d el, F a n n ie , 143

G r e a t D ep ressio n , 5 ,1 5 - 1 6 ,2 4 5 - 4 8 ,2 4 7 , 628

H ansberry, L o rra in e , 592

G r e a t M ig ra tio n , o f A fric a n A m e ric a n s, 15

H ard in , H e le n , 206

G r e a t P lain s, in d ig en o u s p o p u la tio n of, 4 1 1 - 1 2

H arkn ess, G e o rg ia , 484

G r e a t S o ciety, 2 4 8 - 5 0

H arkn ess, R e b e k a h , 14 1

G r e e n , A n n a K ath erin e, 347

H a rle m R e n a issa n c e , 1 5 ,2 5 1 ,3 3 2 , 336 , 348, 598

G r e e n , E d ith , 123, 593

H a rle q u in ro m an c es, 518

G r e e n , R a yn a , 19 0 ,19 8

H arp er, F ra n c e s E lle n W atkin s, 1 , 1 3 , 1 9 1 , 2 0 2 ,

G re e n b e rg , Ire n e , 4 6 4

236, 346

G r e e n e , C a th a rin e , 452

Harper’s Bazaar, 352, 353

G r e e n fie ld , E liz a b e th T aylo r, 110

H arp er’s Ferry, 13

G re e n h o w , R o se, 121

H arrin gto n , M ic h a e l, 248

G re e n o u g h , A lic e , 13 7

H arris, M a rv in , 636

G r e e r , G e r m a in e , 77

H arris, Patricia, 534

G re g o ry , C y n th ia , 14 1

Harris v. McRae, 4 7 3 , 510

G r iffin , S u sa n , 206

H artm an n , H eid i, 219

G riffith s, M arth a, 10 2 ,12 3

H arvard , Jo h n , 443

G rim k e , A n g e lin a an d S a ra h M o o re , 3 ,1 9 1 ,4 9 8 , 506

H arvard U n iversity, 443—44

G r im k e , A n g e lin a W eld , 251, 336

Harvard Womens Law Journal, 221

Griswold v. Connecticut, 4 7 3 ,4 7 4 , 509

H av em eyer, L o u isin e , 444

G ro ss, R ita , 227

H aw aii, 4 2 ,4 7 ,2 8 8

Grove City College v. Bell, 594

N ativ e w o m e n of, 49, 4 2 3 -2 5

G r o v e Press, 34

H aw a iian S u g a r P lan ters A ssociatio n , 2 31

G u e r in , E lsa Ja n e , 13 8 - 3 9

H aw n , G o ld ie , 268

G u e rre rro , D o lo re s A d am e, 322

H aw th o rn e, N a th a n ie l, 3 8 0 ,4 8 8

G u e r rilla G irls , 4 3 ,2 5 0

H ayd en , D o lo re s, 37

G u io n , C o n n ie , 364

H ayd en , M e lissa , 14 1

G u lfW a r , 623

H ayd en , S a n d ra C a se y , 10 4 -5

G u n n , D a v id , 476

H ayes, H e le n , 591

G u y B la c h e , A lic e , 2 3 2 -3 3

H aym ark et m assacre (C h ic a g o ), 118

G u y -S h e fta ll, B everly, 192

H ayn es, S u z a n n e , 67 H ayw oo d , C la ir e , 142

H . D . (H ild a D o o little), 3 4 8 ,4 3 0

H ayw oo d , W illia m (“ B ig B ill” ), 118

H acker, M a ily n , 349

H ayw orth , R ita , 233

H ad assah , 2 9 3 ,5 0 7

H ead Start, 249

H affn er, D e b ra , 528

H ealey, D o ro th y R ay, 117 , 312

H ag ed o rn , Jessica , 2 31, 592

H ealy, D r. B ern ad e tte, 7 7

H a g e n , U ta, 591

H eart disease, 2 5 2 - 5 3

H ag o od , M arg aret, 109

H e b re w W o m e n ’s B e n e v o le n t So c ie tie s, 293

H a le , S a ra h Jo se p h a , 352

H efn e r, H u g h , 33

H all, A n n , 4 1

H e ilm a n , L illia n , 294, 349, 592

H a ll, G . Stan ley, 381

H en d erso n , M a u re e n , 365

H a ll, M u rray, 328

H en ley, B eth , 592

H a ll, Prath ia, 576

H en ry, A a ro n , 375

H a ll, R a d c ly ffe , 80, 329

H en ry Stre et settlem en t, 381

GEN ERAL IN DEX

H e p b u rn , K ath arin e, 2 3 2 ,2 3 3

u n p aid , 2 6 3 - 6 6 ,2 7 9 - 8 0 ,6 5 3 - 5 4

H e rb a lism , 27

H o u se w iv e s’ L e a g u e o f D etro it, 15

H e rm a n , Ju d ith , 6 10

H o u sin g , 2 0 ,3 7 ,2 6 6 - 6 7 , 5 7 6 -7 7

H e rn a n d e z , E m ilia , 216

H o u sto n , V e lin a , 593

H e rn an d ez, Ju d ith e, 43

H ovey, M a rio n , 444

H e rn a n d o n , A n g e lo , 118

H o w e, Ju lia W ard, 3 8 4 ,4 3 9

H esse, E v a , 523

H o w e, L o u ise K a p p , 4 50

H etero d o xy (clu b ), 2 5 3 - 5 4

H o w e , M a rie Je n n e y , 253

H etero sex ism , 2 5 4 -5 5

H o w e, M ary, 110

H etero sexu ality, 255

H o w e, S u sa n , 348

H e u m a n n , Ju d y, 153

H u e rta , D o lo re s, 8 5 ,1 1 9 ,2 1 2 ,3 1 3 ,4 5 9 , 599

H ew itt, J .N .B ., 189

H u g g in s, E ric k a , 64

H ew itt, S o p h ia , 109

H u g h e s, L an g sto n , 251

H ick s, S h e ila , 42

H u ll, G lo r ia T ., 223

H ig g in s, M a rg u e rite , 429

H u ll H o u se, 3 8 1,4 4 4 , 528, 553

H ig h e r E d u c a tio n A c t o f 19 6 5 ,6 16

H ultkran tz, A k e, 4 0 4

H ig h to w er, R o se lla , 141

H u m a n L ife A m e n d m e n t, 4 7 5 ,4 7 6

H ill, A n ita, 1 0 2 ,1 7 3 ,1 9 7 ,2 0 4 ,2 0 8 , 356 , 5 3 4 ,6 0 4

H u m a n R ights C a m p a ig n F u n d , 238

H illis, M arg aret, 110

H u m o r, 2 6 7 - 6 8

H in d u ism , 2 5 5 - 5 6

H u m p h rey, D o ris, 142

H in o jo sa, T is h , 390

H u m p h rey, H u b e rt H ., 16 8 ,3 7 5

H in o jo sa de B a lli, R o sa, 13 7

H u n ter, C h a rla y n e , 10 4

H irsch fe ld , M a g n u s, 531

H u n ter, C le m e n t in e , 4 38

H isp a n ic w o m e n . See C h ic a n a s an d M e x ic a n A m e ric a n

H u n tin g to n , A n n a H yatt, 522

w o m e n ; L atin as; P u erto R ic a n w o m en

H u rley , R u b y, 104

H istory an d historian s, 2 5 6 - 5 9

H urst, F a n n ie , 294

H itc h e n s, D o n n a , 394

H ursto n , Z o r a N e a le , 1 5 ,2 2 3 ,2 5 1 ,3 4 8 ,4 3 0

H o c h sc h ild , A rlie , 4 6 7

H u ssain , Pat, 337

H o fm a n n , H an s, 42

H u tch in so n , A n n e , 89, 3 4 6 ,4 8 4 ,4 8 9 , 504

H o lid ay, B illie , 15 ,2 9 1,2 9 2

H utto n , In a R ay, 291

H o lla n d , E n d e s h a , 5 9 2 -9 3

H yd e A m e n d m e n t, 6, 3 2 6 ,4 7 3 , 5 10 ,6 4 8

H o llin g w o rth , H en ry, 363

H yer, A n n a an d E m m a , 110

H o llin g w o rth , L e ta , 363

H ysterecto m ies, 26

H o llu b , A rth u r, 69

H ysteria, 2 6 ,15 8

H o lm , H an y a, 142 H o m e birth m o v em en t, 369

Iden tity p o litics, 223

H o m e ec o n o m ic s. See D o m e stic scie n c e

“ Ille g itim a c y ’V single p regn an cy, 2 6 9 - 7 0 ,3 6 1

H o m e fo r W ork in g W om en (N e w York C ity ), 266

Illin o is, 579

H o m o p h o b ia , 2 5 9 - 6 0 ,2 7 2

Im ages o f w o m e n , 8 ,1 6 0 ,2 7 0 - 7 3

H o o k er, Jo e , 6 19

Im m ig ra n t Pro tective L e a g u e , 29

H o o v er, J. E d g a r, 455

Im m igratio n , 2 7 3 - 7 6 ,2 7 5

H o p k in s, H arry, 427

o f A sian P a cific w o m e n , 4 6 -4 9

H o rm o n e re p la c e m e n t th erap y ( H R T ), 2 6 ,2 5 2

o f C h in e s e w o m e n , 9 6 - 9 7 ,9 8

H o sm er, H arriet, 522

o f Ja p a n e se A m e ric a n w o m e n , 4 7 - 4 8 ,2 8 8 - 9 0

H osp ita l w orkers, 3 0 6 - 7

o f Je w ish w o m e n , 2 9 2 -9 5

H o tel E m p lo y e e s an d R estau ran t E m p lo y e e s

o f K o re a n A m e ric a n w o m e n , 4 8 ,2 9 6 - 9 8

( H E R E ) U n io n , 3 0 7 ,6 1 7

o f V ie tn a m e se A m e ric a n w o m e n , 6 0 0 -6 0 2

H o u se o f Industry, P h ila d e lp h ia , 92

Im m ig ratio n an d N a tu ra liz a tio n A c t o f 19 6 5 ,2 9 0 , 551

H o u se h o ld w orkers

In vitro fertilizatio n , 280, 512

p a id , 2 6 0 - 6 3 ,2 6 1

In cest, 6 0 9 - 1 1

677

678

G EN ERAL IN D EX

In d e n tu red servitu d e, 1 2 ,2 7 6 - 7 7 ,2 7 7

Jac k so n , M a h a lia , 2 91, 390

In d e p e n d e n t liv in g m o v em en t, 153

Jac k so n , M a rsh a , 592

In d ian C iv il R ights A c t o f 19 6 8 ,10 2

Jac k so n ian p eriod , 8 9 ,2 8 5

In d ian H ealth Se rv ic e s, 572

Ja c o b i, M a r y P u tn am , 363

In d ian w o m en . See N ativ e A m e ric a n w o m e n

Ja c o b s, H arriet (“ L in d a B re n t” ), 5 1 ,1 9 1 ,2 3 6 , 346

In d ig en ou s W o m e n ’s N etw ork , 19 8 - 9 9

Jam iso n , Ju d ith , 142

Indigo G irls , 391

Ja n e C o lle c t iv e (C h ic a g o ), 6 ,2 7

Ind u strial h o m ew o rk , 2 7 7 - 7 8

Jan ew ay , E liz a b e th , 349

Indu strial R ev o lu tio n , 18 3 ,2 7 8 - 8 0

Ja p an ese A m e ric a n C it iz e n ’s L e a g u e (J A C L ) ,

Indu strial W orkers o f the W orld (IW W ), 1 1 7 - 1 8 , 300, 30 8 , 500

2 8 5 -8 6 Ja p an ese A m e ric a n in tern m en t, 4 9 ,2 8 6 - 8 8 ,2 8 7 ,2 9 0

Ines de la C r u z , Ju a n a , 18 0 ,19 0

Ja p an ese A m e ric a n w o m e n , 4 7 - 4 8 ,2 8 8 - 9 0 ,2 8 9 ,4 4 9

Infertility, 2 8 0 - 8 1

Ja p a n e se E x c lu s io n A c t o f 1924, 398

Inq u isition , 638

Jarvis, A n n a , 3 8 3 -8 4

In te llig en t qu o tien t (I.Q .), 561

Ja z z an d b lu e s, 2 9 0 -9 2

Intern atio n al A ssociation o f W o m en P o lic e , 455

Je ffe rso n , T h o m a s , 355, 3 7 2 ,6 3 6

In tern atio n al C o n fe re n c e o f S o c ia list W o m en , 209

Je m iso n , M a e C a r o l, 16 , 54

In tern atio n al C o n g re ss o f W o m e n , 2 0 9 ,4 4 0

Je n so n , M o llie , 37

In tern atio n al C o n v e n tio n on th e E lim in a tio n o f

Jew ett, S a ra h O m e , 347

D isc rim in a tio n A g a in st W om en (C E D A W ) , 606 In tern atio n al C o u n c il o f W o m en , 209 In tern atio n al F e d eratio n o n A g in g , 20 In tern atio n al fem in ism , 2 0 9 - 10

Je w ish w o m e n , 2 9 2 - 9 5 ,2 9 3 , 506 fem in ist, 2 1 0 - 1 1 ,2 9 4 , 341 lesb ian , 2 9 5 -9 6 , 3 3 9 - 4 0 Je z e b e l, 565

In tern atio n al L a b o r O rg a n izatio n ( IL O ), 120

Jig o n h sa seh (N e w F a c e ), 4 14

In tern atio n al L a d ie s’ G a r m e n t W orkers U n io n

Jo h n P a u l II (p o p e), 78

( IL G W U ) , 3 0 5 ,3 0 5 , 3 0 8 - 9 ,4 2 6 , 590

Jo h n so n , G e o rg ia D o u g la s, 251

In tern atio n al Sw eeth earts o f R h yth m , 291

Jo h n so n , H a z e l an d C h e r y l, 172

In tern atio n al U n io n o f E le c tric a l W orkers (IU E ), 312

Jo h n so n , H e le n e , 251

In tern atio n al W h o res’ C o n g re sse s, 482

Jo h n so n , K ath ryn , 39 1

In tern atio n al W o m an S u ffra g e A llia n c e , 209

Jo h n so n , L iz z ie , 13 7

In tern atio n al W o m an ’s Y e a r (19 7 5), 210

Jo h n so n , L y n d o n B ., 1 0 ,1 6 8 ,2 4 8 , 375, 5 9 9 ,6 3 1

In tern atio n al W o m en ’s D a y (IW D ), 4 9 ,2 0 9 - 10 ,

Jo h n so n , S o n ia , 379

2 8 1-8 2

Jo h n so n , V irg in ia (b allerin a), 142

In terracial c o o p eratio n m o v em en t, 282

Jo h n so n , V irg in ia (sexologist), 532, 537

Iow a C ity W o m e n ’s Press, 225

Jo h n sto n , F ra n c e s B e n ja m in , 445

Iroqu ois C o n fe d e ra c y , 1 8 8 ,1 8 9 - 9 0 ,2 8 2 - 8 3 ,4 H

Jo h n sto n , H en rietta, 4 0

Irw in , In ez H ayn es, 254

Jo n e s, C la u d ia , 1 1 7 , 1 1 8 , 550

Ish im o to , S h id z u e , 4 5 1

Jo n e s, D o ris, 142

Islam , 2 8 3 - 8 4

Jo n e s, Jo A n n , 423

Islam , N a h e e d , 555

Jo n e s, L o is M a ilo u , 4 2 ,4 3 8

Islam ic fu n d a m e n ta list m o v em en t, 200

Jo n e s, “ M o th e r” M a ry H arry, 1 1 7 - 1 8 ,2 7 6 ,3 0 8 , 357 , 550

Israeli W o m e n ’s N etw ork , 211

Jo n e s, Sissieretta, 110

Ivin s, M o lly , 268

Jo n e s, V iv ia n M a lo n e , 104

Ivy, Je a n E ic h e lb e rg e r, 111

Jo n g , E r ic a , 349, 353 Jo p lin , Ja n is, 390

J. P. Steven s C o m p a n y , 304

Jo rd a n , Ju n e , 349

Ja c k so n , A n d rew , 636

Jo rd a n , S h e ila , 291

Jackso n , B essie, 336

Jo rd a n , T eresa , 635

Jackso n , Ja n e t, 143

Jo rd a n , W in th ro p , 636

Ja c k so n , Ja n ic e , 73

Jo sep h , Je n n y , 20

G EN ERAL IN D EX

Jo y n er-K ersee, Ja c k ie , 560

K n igh ts o f L a b o r, 3 0 0 ,3 0 3 , 309

Ju d a h th e P rin c e (rabbi), 210

K n o ll, F lo r e n c e , 144

Ju d a ism , 2 9 5 - 9 6

K N O W (organ izatio n ), 224

Ju m p e r, B etty M a e , 4 18

K oedt, A n n e , 537 K o lb , B arb a ra , 111

K a d o h a ta , C y n th ia , 635

K o llo n ta i, A lexan d ra, 117

K a h lo , F rid a, 206

K o llw itz, K ath e, 206

K a n a g a , C o n s u e lo , 446

K o o p , C . E verett, 6 11

K a p la n , H e le n S in g e r, 532

K o re a n A m e ric a n w o m e n , 4 8 ,2 9 6 - 9 8 ,4 4 9

K arn es, K aren , 42

K o rean c o n flic t, 623

K aseb ier, G e rtru d e , 445

Korematsu v. U.S., 130

K asseb au m , N a n c y , 123

K rafft-E b in g , R ic h a rd v o n , 117

K atz, Jo n a th a n , 328

K rasn er, L e e , 4 2 ,4 3 6 ,4 3 8

K atz, Ju d ith , 340

K ren tz, Ja y n e A n n , 519

K a u a n u i, J. K e h a u la n i, 335

K ru g er, B arb a ra , 4 3 ,4 4 6

K aye/K an tro w itz, M e la n ie , 340

K u K lu x K la n (K K K ), 1 4 ,2 8 2 ,2 9 8 - 3 0 0 ,2 9 9 ,4 9 5 , 502

K e a tin g -O w e n A c t o f 19 1 6 ,9 4

K u h n , M a g g ie , 19, 20, 564

K e lle r, H e le n , 232

K u lh m a n , K ath ryn , 507

K e lle y , F lo r e n c e , 4 8 3, 528, 553

K u sh n e r, R o se, 69

K e lle y , P eg g y C la rk , 593 K e llo g g , C la r a L o u ise , 110

L a B arb a ra , Jo a n , 111

K e llo g g , M a rjo rie , 593

L a R a z a , N a tio n a l C o u n c il o f ( N C L R ) , 3 1 5 - 1 6 , 3 1 5

K elsey , F ra n c e s O ld h a m , 591

L a R a za C e n tr o L e g a l, 45

K e m b le , F a n n y, 1 9 1 ,4 5 3

L a b o r m o v em en t, 3 0 0 -3 0 2

K e m p e , C . H en ry, 86

L a b o r u n io n s, 3 0 2 - 4 ,3 0 3 ,3 0 5 . See also specific labor

K e n n e d y , A d rie n n e , 592 K e n n e d y , Jo h n F ., 11 6 ,1 6 8 ,2 4 8 , 591 K e n n e ll, Jo h n , 38 1

unions fo r h o sp ital w orkers, 3 0 6 - 7 fo r nurses, 3 10

K ep le y , A d a, 320

L a c ta tio n , 366

K eren sk y, A lexan d er, 655

The Ladder (m agaz in e), 3 3 0 ,3 5 3

K e sse lm a n , W end y, 592

L ad ies B e n e v o le n t S o c ie ty o f D etro it, 62

K im , W illa , 593

Ladies’ Home journal, 8 ,14 5 , 3 5 2 - 5 3 ,4 4 5 , 5 5 7 -5 8

K im b a ll, Y effe, 523

L a d n e r, D o rie , 576

K im u ra , L illia n , 286

“ L a d y o f C o fita c h e q u i,” 18 0

K in g , B illie Je a n , 560 K in g , C a r o le , 390

Lady’s Magazine and Repository o f Entertaining Knowledge, 352

K in g , E d , 375

L a F r a n c e , B re n d a , 4 14

K in g , M a rtin L u th e r, Jr., 3 0 5 , 357

L a m a z e m eth o d (o f c h ild b irth ), 91

K in g , M a ry , 10 4 -5

L a m b d a L e g a l D e fe n s e an d E d u c a tio n F u n d

K in g sto n , M a x in e H o n g , 5 2 ,1 9 0 ,2 0 1 , 3 4 9 ,6 3 5

( L L D E F ) , 238, 335

K in sey , A lfre d , 259 , 330, 532

L a m p k in , D aisy, 4 5 7

K irkp atrick , Je a n e , 127

L a n d e sm a n , H eid i, 593

K itc h elt, F lo r e n c e , 29

L a n d sc a p e arch itectu re, 37

K itc h e n T a b le : W o m en o f C o lo r P ress, 2 2 5 ,2 3 9 ,3 1 9

la n g , k. d ., 391

K la u s, M a rsh a ll, 38 1

L a n g e , D o ro th e a , 4 1 ,2 4 7 ,2 4 7 ,4 4 6

K le p fisz , Ire n e , 2 0 6 ,2 9 4 , 340

Language

K lotz, F lo r e n c e , 593

o f B la c k w o m e n , 6 5 - 6 6

K lu m p k e , A u g u sta, 364

an d p ow er, 3 1 4 - 1 5

K n a p p , L o u isa , 8, 353 K n ap p , P h o e b e P a lm er, 390

o f p u b lic sp eakin g, 3 14 - 4 15 ,4 8 5 L a n sin g , Sh erry, 233

680

G EN ERAL IN D EX

L a rc o m , L u c y , 589

L e sb ia n organ ization s, 2 3 7 - 4 0 ,3 3 0 - 3 2

L ark in , M o sc e ly n e , 141

L e s b ia n S w itc h b o a rd , 240

Larry P. v, Wilson Riles , 561 L arsen , N e lla , 1 5 , 251, 348

T h e L e s b ia n T id e , 254 L e sb ian as L atin as A m e ric a n a s (L L A ), 341

L a R u e , L isa , 389

L e sb ian as U n id as, 341

Lasser, T erese (“ T e d ” ), 6 9 - 7 0

L e sb ia n ism , 3 2 7 - 3 0

L ath ro p , Ju lia , 94, 528, 540, 553

L e sb ia n s, 3 3 2 - 3 4 ,3 3 3 ,3 3 7

L a tin a /C h ic a n a m igratio n , 3 1 6 - 1 7

age of, 18

L a tin a L e sb ia n A rc h iv e, 342

in arm ed fo rces, 3Q, 332, 338 , 338

L a tin a L e sb ian as de T u c so n , 341

A sian A m e ric a n , 3 3 4 - 3 5

L atin as, 3 17 - 2 0

as ath letes, 560

alco h o l co n su m p tio n by, 25

B la c k , 238, 3 3 6 - 3 7

breast c a n c e r a m o n g , 6 7

c a n c e r a m o n g , 6 7 - 6 8 ,7 6

c iv il rights of, 122

C h ic a n a , 8 6 ,2 0 5

fem in ist, 2 1 1 - 1 3

cross-dressing by, 139

lesb ian , 213, 319 , 3 4 0 -4 2

E u r o p e a n A m e ric a n , 3 3 8 - 3 9

L a v e n d e r M e n a c e , 320, 331

fem in ist, 1 9 0 ,1 9 6 ,2 1 3 - 1 4 , 320

L a v n e r, L y n n , 340

Je w ish , 2 9 5 -9 6 , 3 3 9 - 4 0

L aw , R u th , 52

L a tin a , 2 13, 319 , 3 4 0 -4 2

Law yers, 3 2 0 -2 1

m arc h es by, 3 5 7 - 5 8

L a y te n , S . W illie , 430

m e n ta l h ealth an d illn ess of, 148

L e a c o c k , E le a n o r, 215

as m o th ers, 383

L e a g u e o f C o lo re d W o m en , 14

N a tiv e A m e ric a n , 238 , 3 4 2 -4 3

L e a g u e o f U n ite d L a tin A m e ric a n C itiz e n s ( L U L A C ) , 85, 322

p o lic e h arassm en t of, 454 L e s lie , M rs. F ran k , 444

L e a g u e o f W om en Voters (L W V ), 3 2 2 -2 3

L e S u e u r , M e rid e l, 206

L e a rn e d help lessn ess, 605

L e v in so n , D a v id , 606

L ear’s, 354

L e w is, E d m o n ia , 4 1,4 2 , 522

L e a se , M a ry E liz a b e th , 462

L e w is , O sc ar, 139

L e b ro n , L o lita , 460

L e w is an d C la rk exp ed itio n , 18 0

L e e , M o th e r A n n , 484, 506

L e y v a , Y o lan d a, 341, 342

L e e , D oris, 4 3 7

L ib e ra lism , 3 4 4 -4 5

L e e , F ra n n e , 593

The Liberator (n ew sp ap er), 1

L e e , Ja re n a , 17 9 ,2 3 5 ,4 8 4

L ib e ria , 37 4

L e e , J e e Y eu n , 335

L ib e rta ria n ism , 126

L e e , Peggy, 390

L ib ra ria n sh ip , 345

L e e t, P a u lin e , 530

L ic a d , C e c ile , 231

L e g a l status, 128, 3 2 3 - 2 7 , 370

L ife e x p e cta n c y , 1 7 - 1 8

L e G a llie n n e , E v a , 591

L ig a P u erto rriq u en a e H isp a n a, 4 8 6

L eg in sk a, E th e l, 110

Lilith (m agaz in e), 2 11,2 9 4 , 353

L eg islatu re. See C o n g ress

L il i ’u ok alan i, q u een o f H aw a ii, 4 7

L e G u in , U rsu la , 349

L in , M a y a , 523

L e m lic h , C la ra , 292

L in c o ln , A b ra h a m , 13 0 , 346

L e d n , T an ia, 110

L in d b e rg h , A n n e M orrow , 52

L e rn e r, C e r d a , 257

L ip p a rd , L u c y , 44

L e sb ia n an d G a y C o m m u n ity S e rv ic e s C e n te r, 335

Lippincott’s Monthly (m agaz in e), 557

L e sb ia n A ven gers, 239, 332

L ip p s, R o z , 240

L e sb ia n baitin g, 259

L isto n , M e lb a , 292

L e sb ia n H erstory A rc h iv es (L H A ), 2 3 8 ,2 4 0 , 327

L iteratu re, 3 4 5 - 5 0 ,3 4 7

L e sb ia n M oth ers N a tio n a l D e fe n s e F u n d , 331

au to b io g ra p h ic a l, 5 0 - 5 2 ,1 1 7

G EN ERAL IN D EX

fem in ist critic ism of, 2 2 2 -2 4

M a la m u th , N e il, 4 63

o f H a rle m R e n a issa n c e , 251

M a lc o lm , E lle n , 169

ro m a n c e n o vels, 5 18 - 1 9

M a lc o lm X (E l H ajj M a lik E l-S h a b a z z ), 63

L ittle , Jo a n , 4 6 0

M a le c h a u v in ism , 5 3 0 - 3 1

L ittle T u rtle , C a r m , 446

M a lo n e , A n n ie T u rn b o , 56

L iu , H u n g , 4 39

M a m m y , 272, 571

L o c a l 119 9 , H osp ita l W orkers U n io n , 30 7 , 310

M a n a v i, 555

Lochner v. New York, 48 3

M a n k ille r, W ilm a , 199, 3 8 2 ,4 18

L o c k e , Jo h n , 344

M a n n e rs an d etiquette, 3 5 4 - 5 6

L o c k w o o d , A n n e a , 111

M a n sfie ld , A ra b e lla , 320

L o c k w o o d , B e lv a A n n B en n ett, 458

M a n so u r, Sister A gn es M ary, 4 33

L o g a n , O liv e , 591

Maquiladoras, 356

L o n g b o a t, Ja n , 4 14

M a ra c c i, C a r m e lita , 141

L o n g e a u x y V asq u ez, E n riq u e ta , 204

M a rc h e s , 3 5 7

L o n g m a n , E v e ly n , 522

le sb ia n an d gay, 3 5 7 - 5 8

L o o s, A n ita, 233

M a rin a (L a M a lin c h e , M a lin tz in ), 1 8 0 ,1 9 0 ,2 7 2 ,4 0 9

L o r d e , A u d re, 2 0 3 ,2 0 6 , 3 3 7 ,3 3 7 , 3 4 9 ,4 9 8

M a r in e C o rp s W o m e n ’s R eserve , 656

L o s A n g e le s D ressm a k ers’ Strike (19 33), 85

M a rio n , F ra n c e s, 233

L o v e , D r. S u sa n , 68

M a riso l, 523

L o v e la c e , L in d a , 34

M a rita l rape, 6 13

L o v e ll, L u c y B u ffu m , 2

M a rk , M a r y E lle n , 446

L o v ie A u stin an d H e r B lu e S eren ad ers, 291

M a rk im , E d w in , 583

Loving v. Virginia, 369

M a rria g e , 3 5 8 - 6 0

L o w e ll, M assach u setts: textile m ills in , 279 , 5 8 9 ,5 9 0

arran ged , 29, 201 B oston , 329, 535

L o w n ey , S h a n n o n , 4 7 6

c o m p an io n a te, 542

L u c a s , T a d , 13 7

divorce an d c usto d y arran gem en ts, 1 5 3 - 5 5

L u c e , C la r e B o o th e, 349

o f N ativ e A m e ric a n s, 408

L u c y , A u th erin e, 104

p o ly gam o u s, 3 5 9 - 6 0 ,3 7 8

L u g o n e s, M a ria , 320

an d poverty, 4 6 5 -6 6

L u h a n , M a b e l D o d g e , 253

sam e-sex, 286, 360

L u n a , C e lia , 4 54

o f slaves, 359 , 542, 5 4 6 -4 8

L u n a , E v e ly n , 220

sym m etric al, 156

L u n a , G r a c e , 85

w o m e n ’s p ro p erty rights in , 1 9 0 ,2 8 5 ,3 5 9 ,6 2 5

L u p in o , Id a, 2 3 3 ,2 3 4

M a rrie d W o m e n ’s Pro p erty A cts, 19 0 ,2 8 5 , 359

L u x e m b u rg , R o sa, 117

M a rsh a ll, Jo h n , 636

L y n c h , C h a rle s, 350

M a rsh a ll, T h u rg o o d , 175

L y n c h in g , 14 ,2 8 2 , 3 5 0 - 5 2 ,4 9 5 - 9 6

M arsto n , W illia m M o u lto n , 581

Lynn, Loretta, 390

M a rte ll, E sp e ra n z a , 212

L y n n (M assachu setts) sh oe m ak ers’ strike, 5 74

M a rtin , D e l, 334

L y o n , P h yllis, 334

M a rtin , Jud ith (“ M iss M a n n e rs” ), 3 5 5 ,3 5 6 M a rtin , L y n n , 124

M a c d o n a ld , B arb ara, 563, 564

M a rtin , R o b erta, 390

M a c D o w e ll, D e b o ra h , 223

M a rtin , S a llie , 390

M a c K in n o n , C a th a rin e A ., 3 4 ,2 15 ,4 6 3

M a rtin e z , E liz a b e th S u th e rla n d , 8 6 ,2 15 ,3 8 9

M a d a r, O lg a , 311

M a rtin e z , M a ria M o n to ya , 42

M a d e ira , M a rc ia , 593

M a rtin e z , V ilm a , 498

M a d o n n a , 1 4 3 ,2 7 3 , 390

M artz, Sa n d ra , 20

M a g a z in e s,

8, 3 5 2 - 5 4 , 353

M ail-o rd er brid es, 2 0 1,2 7 4 , 354

M a rx , K arl, 1 1 7 ,2 1 5 M a rx ism , 1 0 7 ,2 1 4 - 1 5

681

682

G EN ERAL IN D EX

M a so c h ism , 36 7

M ig ratio n

M assach u setts, 8 0 ,4 8 2

o f A fric a n A m e ric a n s, 15

M asters, W illia m , 532, 537

o f L a tin a s/C h ic a n a s, 3 1 6 - 1 7

M atern al-in fan t b o n d in g , 381 M atern ity h o m es, 3 6 0 -6 2

o f P u erto R ic a n w o m e n , 4 8 5 -8 8 M ik u lsk i, B arb a ra , 17 0

M ath ew s, L u c ia K le in h a n s, 143

M ill, J. S „ 344

M atrilin eality, 4 0 7 ,4 14

M illa y , E d n a St. V in c e n t, 348

M atso n , M ilto n B ., 328

M ille r, A rth ur, 488

M a tta c h in e S o ciety, 2 3 8 ,3 3 0 , 334

M ille r, E liz a b e th Sm ith , 189

M atth ew s, Rev. M a rjo rie , 485

M ille r , V e rn ic e , 172

M a y , E la in e , 233

M ille tt, K ate, 218, 349

M c C a rra n -W a lte r A c t o f 19 5 2 ,2 9 0 ,2 9 7

M ills , F lo r e n c e , 251

M c C a rth y , Jo se p h , 3 1 ,12 6

M ills , Ja n e , 563

M c C a rth y , M ary, 348

M ills , T arp e, 581

M c C le n d o n , R o se, 592

M in e r, V a le rie , 635

M c C o r m ic k , A n n e O ’H are, 429

M in e ta , N o rm a n , 286

M c C o r m ic k , K ath erin e D exter, 444

M in k , Patsy T ak em o to , 12 3 ,2 9 0 , 5 9 3 ,6 4 6

M c C u lle r s , C a rso n , 592

M in o r, V irg in ia , 324

M c D o w e ll, E p h ra im , 363

Mirahella, 354

M c D o w e ll, M ary, 528

M irik ita n i, Ja n ic e , 201

M c K in le y , W illia m , 6 37

M isc e g e n a tio n , 3 7 0 - 7 2

M c L e a n , P risc illa, 1 1 1

M iso gyn y, 3 7 2 - 7 3 ,4 8 1

M c M illa n , Terry, 66

M iss, M ary, 523

M c P h e rso n , A im e e S e m p le , 507

M iss A m e ric a P agean t, 33, 56, 5 7 ,1 9 5 ,2 1 7 , 599

M e a d , M arg aret, 2 4 1,2 7 2

Miss Saigon, 335

M e d ia A c tio n A llia n c e , 464

M issio n aries, 17 9 , 3 7 3 - 7 4 ,3 7 4 ,4 8 4

M e d ic a l research , 3 6 2 - 6 5

B la c k , 3 7 4 - 7 5

M e d ic in e E a g le , B ro o k e , 389

M ississip p i, 13 7

M e d ic in e H eart W om an , 389

M ississip p i F re e d o m D e m o c ra tic Party ( M F D P ) ,

M e k e e l, Jo y c e , 111

1 0 6 ,3 7 5

M e m p h is Free Speech, 14

M ississip p i F re e d o m S u m m e r, 10 5 - 6 , 3 7 5 - 7 6 ,4 9 6

M e n o f A ll C o lo rs T o geth er, 238

M isso u ri, 510

M e n d e z , O lg a , 487

M itc h e ll, A rth ur, 142

M e n d o z a , L yd ia, 390

M itc h e ll, Jo n i, 390

M e n ’s m o v em en t, 36 6

M itc h e ll, Ju lie t, 219

M e n stru a l extraction, 6 , 7 , 2 7 ,6 4 7

M itc h e ll, S . W eir, 367

M e n stru a l huts, 404

M o d le sk i, T a n ia , 519

M e n ta l h ealth an d illn ess, 2 6 ,15 8 , 3 6 6 - 6 8

M o h an ty, C h a n d r a T a lp e d e , 555

M ere d ith , Jam es, 429

M o h r, N ic h o la sa , 4 3 1,4 8 7

M ern issi, Fatim a, 200

M o lin a r i, S u sa n , 123

M e rrill, Ju d ith , 349

“ M o m m y track,” 4 6 7

M erry, A n n e , 591

M o n d a le , W alter, 375

M esa -B ain s, A m a lia , 523

M o n e y , Jo h n , 532

M e x ic a n A m e ric a n w o m e n . See C h ic a n a s an d

M o n k , M e re d ith , 111

M e x ic a n A m e ric a n w o m e n M e x ic a n A m e ric a n W o m e n ’s N a tio n a l A ssociatio n (M A N A )>8 2 ,4 99

M o n ro e , M a rily n , 268 M o n te flo re s, C a r m e n d e, 4 3 1 M o n te m a y o r, A lic e D ic k e rso n , 322

M e y e r, A n n ie N a th a n , 292

M o n tg o m ery, H e le n B arrett, 4 84

M ichael M. v. Superior Court, 17 5

M o n tg o m e ry b us boycott, 1 6 ,1 0 3 , 3 7 6 , 391

M id le r, B ette, 268

M o o re , A u d le y (Q u e e n M o th e r), 550

M id w ifery, 27, 89, 9 1, 36 3, 3 6 8 - 7 0

M o o re , M a ria n n e , 348, 353

G EN ERAL IN D EX

M o ra , M a g d e le n a , 85

M u s s e ll, K ay, 519

M o ra , Pat, 86

M u sser, T h a r o n , 593

M o ra g a , C h e r r ie , 5 2 ,8 6 ,2 0 5 ,2 0 6 ,2 2 3 , 319 , 342,

Mutualistas, 1 1 9 ,3 1 7

3 5 ° , 9 3 ,6 3 5 M o ra l reform , 139 , 3 7 7 - 7 8

N a ir, M ir a , 555

M o ra le s, A u rora L e v in s an d R o sario , 4 3 1 ,4 8 7

N A M E S P ro je c t Q u ilt, 358

M o ra le s, L u p e , 119

N a n c e , E t h e l R ay, 251

M o r e n o , L u isa , 8 6 ,1 2 2 ,3 1 2

N a n n yg ate con troversy, 2 6 2 -6 3

M o rg a n , M a rc ia , 65

N a p o li, M ary a n n , 68

M o rg a n , M id d y , 13 7

N arcissism , 36 7

M o rg a n , R o b in , 34, 3 4 9 ,4 6 3

N arik a, 555

M o rm o n s, 3 7 8 - 8 0 ,3 7 9 , 6 33

N a sh , D ia n e , 104 , 576

M o rrill A c t o f 18 6 2 ,16 4

N a th a n , M a u d , 294

M o rriso n , T o n i, 16 ,2 0 6 ,2 2 3 , 349, 598

N a tio n o f Islam , 6 3 - 6 4

M o ses, D o n n a , 576

N a tio n a l A b o rtion an d R ep ro d u c tiv e R ights

M o sh e r, C le lia , 532 M o sh e r, D o n a ld , 464 M oss, R a lp h , 68 M o th e rh o o d , 4 7 , 3 8 0 - 8 3 M o th e r ’s D ay , 3 8 3 - 8 4 M o th e rs’ N a tio n a l D e fe n s e F u n d (n ow L a v e n d e r F a m ilies R e so u rc e N etw o rk ), 238 M o th e rs’ P ea ce D a y , 4 39

A c tio n L e a g u e (N A R A L ), 3 9 1 ,4 7 5 N a tio n a l A c tio n F o ru m fo r M id life an d O ld e r W o m en , 20 N a tio n a l A d v o c a c y C o a litio n on Y outh an d Sex u a l O rien tatio n (N A C Y S O ) , 240 N a tio n a l A m e ric a n W om an S u ffra g e A ssociation (N A W S A ), 1 3 2 ,2 0 9 ,3 2 2 ,3 9 9 - 4 0 0 ,4 5 6 , 577, 5 8 0 ,6 5 4

M o th e rs’ p en sio n s, 19 4 , 3 8 4 - 8 5 ,3 9 4 ,6 2 7 - 2 8 ,6 3 1

N a tio n a l A sian P a cific C e n te r o n A g in g , 20

M ott, Ja m e s, 1

N atio n al A sian W o m e n ’s H ealth O rga n izatio n , 648

M ott, L u c re tia C o ffin , 1 , 1 1 7 , 1 8 9 , 506, 507, 523

N atio n al A ssem b ly o f R e lig io u s W om en , 433

M o u n t, Ju lia L u n a , 85

N a tio n a l A ssociatio n fo r C h ic a n o Stud ies ( N A C S ),

M o u n ta in W o lf W om an , 4 0 9 ,4 2 2

20 5 N atio n al A ssociation fo r L e sb ia n an d G a y G eron to lo gy,

M t. P leasan t, Ja n e , 415 M o u r n in g D o v e (C h ristin e Q u in task et), 347 M o w att, A n n a , 591 M o y , A fo n g , 46 M o y n ih a n , D a n ie l, 184 M s., 3 8 5 - 8 6 M s. F o u n d a tio n , 2 4 4 ,4 4 4 -4 5 M s. m a g a z in e , 9 ,8 0 ,2 2 4 ,3 5 3 ,3 5 4 , 3 8 5 ,6 0 0 M u h a m m a d , E lija h , 63 M u h a m m a d , W a lla ce , 64

20 N a tio n a l A ssociation fo r the A d v a n c e m e n t o f C o lo re d P eo p le (N A A C P ), 1 4 ,1 0 3 , 351, 3 9 1 N a tio n a l A ssociatio n fo r th e R e p e a l o f A b ortion Law s, 6 N a tio n a l A ssociatio n o f B la c k an d W h ite M e n T o g eth er, 238 N atio n al A ssociatio n o f C o lo r e d G ra d u a te N u rses ( N A C G N ) , 16 ,4 3 5

M u h a m m e d , 283

N a tio n a l A ssociatio n o f C o lo r e d W o m en (N A C W ), 14,

M u ir , Jo h n , 172

6 2 - 6 3 , 2° 3>2§2> 35L 3 9 2 > 3 95, 4 4 7 >4 9 6 - 578 N a tio n a l A ssociatio n o f S o c ia l W ork, 554

M u je re s A ctivas en L etras y C a m b io S o c ia l ( M A L C S ) , 82, 3 2 0 ,3 8 6 M u je re s A rtistas d el Su ro este (So u th w estern W om en Artists), 4 39

M uller v. Oregon, 228, 325, 3 8 6 - 8 7 ,4 7 2 ,4 8 3

N a tio n a l A ssociation o f T e a c h e rs o f C o lo r e d Stud en ts, 587 N a tio n a l A ssociatio n O p p o sed to W om an Su ffra ge (N A O W S ), 32

M u ltic u ltu ra lism , 3 8 7 - 8 9

N a tio n a l B la c k Fe m in ist O rga n izatio n ( N B F O ) , 16 ,

M u rray, E liz a b e th , 4 39 M u rra y , Ju d ith S a rg en t, 128, 346, 515

2 0 3> 337. 393 N a tio n a l B la c k N u rses A ssociatio n , 4 35

M u rra y , M arg aret, 6 37

N atio n al B la c k W o m e n ’s H ealth P ro je c t (N B W H P ),

M u rra y , Patty, 17 0 M u s ic , 3 8 9 - 9 1

16 1,4 7 0 ,4 9 9 ,6 4 8 N a tio n a l C a n c e r Institute ( N C I) , 6 8 ,6 9

683

684

G EN ERAL IN DEX

N atio n al C a u c u s an d C e n te r o n the B la c k A g e d , 20

an d lesb ian ism , 32 0 , 331

N atio n al C e n te r fo r L e sb ia n R ights ( N C L R ) , 238, 331,

opp o sitio n to m ale-o n ly m ilitary registration ,

393-

94

N a tio n a l C h ic a n o P o litical C o n fe re n c e , 205 N a tio n a l C o a litio n A g a in st D o m e stic V io le n c e , 16 1,

3 8 -3 9 o p p o sitio n to sex d iscrim in atio n , 1 0 2 ,1 7 3 in party p o litics, 459 p o lic e su rv e illa n c e of, 4 5 4

608 N a tio n a l C o a litio n o f 10 0 B la c k W o m en , 395

sup p o rt fo r E R A in , 17 7

N a tio n a l C o a litio n o f A m e ric a n N u n s, 433

N a tio n a l O rigin s A c t o f 19 2 4 ,4 8 ,3 9 7 - 9 8 ,4 9 2

N a tio n a l C o a litio n o f B la c k L esb ian s an d G a y s, 238, 331

N a tio n a l R ig h t to L ife C o m m itte e , 4 75

N a tio n a l C o a litio n o f L e s b ia n an d Fe m in ist C a n c e r

N a tio n a l S u ffra g e A ssociatio n , 209, 577

Pro jects, 239

N a tio n a l T extile W orkers U n io n , 590

N a tio n a l C o m in g O u t D a y ( N C O D ) , 239

N a tio n a l U rb a n L e a g u e , 398

N a tio n a l C o m m itte e o n F e d eral L eg islatio n for B irth

N a tio n a l W ar L a b o r B o a rd , 17 5

C o n tro l, 58 N atio n al C o m m itte e o n th e C a u s e an d C u r e o f W ar ( N C C C W ) , 441

N a tio n a l W elfare R igh ts O rg a n izatio n (N W R O ), 39 9 , 4 54, 5 7 2 ,6 2 8 - 2 9 ,6 3 1 W elfa re an d p u b lic r e lie f

N atio n al C o n fe re n c e o f P u erto R ic a n W om en In c ., 499

N a tio n a l W o m an ’s D a y , 2 0 9 ,2 8 2

N atio n al C o n g re ss o f M o th ers, 3 8 1 ,3 9 4 ,6 3 0

N a tio n a l W o m a n ’s Party, 1 3 2 ,1 7 6 ,1 7 7 ,1 9 4 , 38 1,

N atio n al C o n g re ss o f Parents an d T e a c h e rs, 394

399-

4 0 0 ,4 5 6 ,4 8 3 , 575, 5 8 0 ,6 5 3 ,6 5 5

N atio n al C o n s u m e rs ’ L e a g u e ( N C L ) , 3 8 6 ,4 8 2

N a tio n a l W o m e n ’s C o n fe re n c e (19 7 7 ), 255

N atio n al C o u n c il o f Je w ish W om en ( N C JW ) , 293,

N a tio n a l W o m e n ’s H ealth N etw o rk (N W H N ), 26,

394-

9 5 ,4 4 0

N a tio n a l C o u n c il o f N e g ro W o m e n ( N C N W ) , 1 6 ,1 0 7 , 3 9 2>3 9 5 . 4 4 °

N atio n al E d u c a tio n A ssociatio n (N E A ), 587

6 7,6 9 , 3 6 4 ,6 4 8 N a tio n a l W o m e n ’s L o y a l L e a g u e , 13 1 N a tio n a l W o m e n ’s P o litical C a u c u s (N W P C ), 208, 400-

4 0 1,4 5 9 , 599

N a tio n a l E n d o w m e n t fo r th e Arts (N E A ), 80

N atio n al W o m e n ’s Stud ies A ssociatio n (N W S A ), 6 51

N atio n al F a rm e r’s A llia n c e , 462

N atio n ality, an d c itiz en sh ip , 1 0 0 - 1 0 1

N atio n al Fed eratio n o f A fro -A m eric an W o m en , 14 ,6 2

N a tio n ’s E q u a lity Party, 4 59

N a tio n a l Fed eratio n o f B u sin ess an d Pro fessio n al

N ativ e A m e ric a n c u ltu res, 1 3 5 , 1 7 1 , 1 8 2 - 8 3 , 4 0 1 - 3

W o m e n ’s C lu b s , 17 7 N atio n al Fed eratio n o f B u sin ess an d Pro fessio n al

N ativ e A m e ric a n relig io n s, 4 0 3 - 5 N ativ e A m e ric a n w o m e n , 2 1 ,4 0 5 - 1 0 ,4 0 6 ,4 0 8

W om en o f th e U n ited States (B P W /U S A ),

o f A laska, 4 1 0 - 1 1

395-

a lc o h o l c o n su m p tio n by, 25

96

N atio n al Fed eratio n o f D a y N u rseries ( N F D N ) , 93

art an d crafts by, 4 0 ,1 4 3 ,1 4 4

N a tio n a l Fed eratio n o f S ettlem en ts, 527

as assistants to E u r o p e a n exp lorers, 18 0 - 8 1

N a tio n a l Fed eratio n o f T e m p le Sisterh o od s, 294

b reast c a n c e r a m o n g , 67

N a tio n a l G a y an d L e sb ia n T ask F o rce ( N G L T F ) , 238

class of, 109

N a tio n a l G a y R ights A d vo cates ( N G R A ) , 238

c lo th in g of, 18 6

N a tio n a l Institute for W o m en o f C o lo r , 19 8 ,4 9 9

in c o lo n ia l p e rio d , 114

N a tio n a l Institutes o f H ealth ( N IH ), 365

in d a n c e , 140

N a tio n a l L a tin a H ealth O rg a n izatio n , 4 7 0 , 648

ed u c atio n of, 1 6 3 - 6 4 ,1 6 4 ,1 6 5 ,1 6 6

N a tio n a l L atin o/a L e sb ia n an d G a y O rga n izatio n

fem in ist, 18 8 -8 9 , l 9°> 19 8 - 9 9 g e n d e r d iscrim in atio n against, 102

( L L E G O ) , 239, 331, 341 N a tio n a l M e rit S c h o la rsh ip C o rp o ra tio n , 562

o f th e G r e a t P lain s, 4 1 1 - 1 2

N a tio n a l N etw o rk o f W o m e n ’s F u n d s , 445

o f th e In la n d N o rth w est P latea u , 4 1 3 - 1 4

N a tio n a l O rg a n izatio n fo r W o m en (N O W ), 19 5 ,2 0 8 ,

le sb ia n , 2 3 8 ,3 4 2 - 4 3

396-

97

life e x p e c ta n c y of, 17

fo u n d in g o f, 1 1 7 , 1 7 3 , 599

o f th e N o rth east, 4 1 4 - 1 5

L e g a l D e fe n se an d E d u c a tio n F u n d

o f the N o rth w est C o a st, 4 1 5 - 1 6

( N O W -L D E F ) , 3 9 7

roots o f fe m in ism a m o n g , 1 8 8 - 8 9 ,1 9 °

G E N E R A L IN D EX

of the Southeast, 416-18 of the Southern Plains, 418-19 of the Southwest, 419-20 of the West Coast, 420-22 of the Woodlands, 422-23 Native American Women’s Health Education Center/Project, 470,648 Native Hawaiian women, 49,423-25 Natividad, Irene, 201 Nativism, 101,425-26 Natori, Josefina Cruz, 231 Naturalization laws, 48,100-101,275,290,492,495 Navratilova, Martina, 560 Navy Nurse Corps, 16,622 Neakok, Sadie, 410 Near, Holly, 206, 391 Needle trades, 426 Neel, Alice, 438

Neoconservatism, 126, 344-45 “Nerve force” theory, 74-75 Nestle, Joan, 327 Nevelson, Louise, 42, 523 New Deal, 93,100,126,246,278,426-28,628 New England Free Press, 224 New Jersey, 529 New Victoria Press, 225 The New Woman, 329,430, 535 New York Age, 14 New York Radical Women (NYRW), 213 New York State, 6 ,137, 529 Newman, Pauline, 292, 308,482 Newspapers, 428-30 Newyorican women, 430-31 Ng, Fae Myenne, 635 Nichols, Caroline B., 110 Nichols, Leeann, 476 Nichols, Maria Longworth, 143 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 371 Nightingale, Florence, 363 Nine to Five (District 925 of SEIU ), 196,300, 301, 309-10 Nisei Women’s Forum, 49 Nixon, Richard M ., 9 3,168,171,249 ,629 Noggle, Anne, 446 Nontraditional jobs, 432 Normal School for Colored Girls (Washington, D .C.),

235 Norman, Marsha, 592 Normand, Mabel, 232,268 Norplant, 61, 509, 573

North American Indian Women’s Association, 410,499 North Carolina, 6 Northeast, indigenous population of, 414-15 Northwest Coast, indigenous population of, 4 15-16 Northwest Inland Plateau, indigenous population of,

4D-14 Norton, Eleanor Holmes, 173 Nuns, 432-34, 506 Nurses’ unions, 310 Nursing profession, 310,434-36,435 Oates, Joyce Carol, 348 Oberlin College, 163,164,235 Obscenity, 4 ,436,463 Occupational (industrial) health, 364 O ’Connor, Flannery, 348 Oda, Mayumi, 206 o ff our backs, 429 Oh, Angela, 298 O’Hanlan, Katherine, 67 OHOYO, 198 Ohoyo (newsletter), 353 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 41,438' Old-age assistance (OAA) programs, 631 Old Age Insurance (OAI), 552,626 Old Lesbian Organizing Committee (O LO C), 20 Old wives’ tales, 272 Older Women’s League (OWL), 19,20 Oliver, Denise, 320 Oliveros, Pauline, 111 Olsen, Tillie, 206,294 Onate, Juan de, 180 O N E, Incorporated, 330 O ’Reilly, Jane, 353 Organization of Chinese American Women, 499 Organization of Pan Asia American Women, 499 Organizing Against Pornography, 464 Orkin, Ruth, 446 Ortiz, Alfonso, 403 Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 431,487 Our Bodies, Ourselves, 26,66,69,80,224 Overeaters Anonymous, 161 Ovington, Mary White, 391 Ozick, Cynthia, 294 Packard, Sophia, 645 Packwood, Bob, 356 Pagan, Dylcia, 460 Pagan, Genara, 216 Page, Patti, 390

685

686

G E N E R A L IN D EX

Page, Ruth, 141 Painting, 436-39,437 Palcy, Euzhan, 233 Paley, Grace, 294, 349 Palmer, Phoebe, 484, 506 Pan-Africanism, 63,203,237 Pandora, 270 Pantoja, Antonia, 212,487 Pappenheim, Bertha (Anna O.), 606-7 Paris Commune (1871), 31 Parker, Pat, 203, 337,498 Parkerson, M ichelle, 43 Parks, Rosa, 16 ,10 3,376 Parris, Rev. Samuel, 520 Parsons, Albert, 118 Parsons, Lucy, 357 Parsons, Lucy Gonzales, 117-18, 550 Parton, Dolly, 390 Parton, Sara Payson Willis, 346 Pasteur, Louis, 90 Patent medicines, 25 Paul, Alice, 132,176,381,400,456, 524, 580, 621 Paxson, Minora, 27 Pay equity. See Comparable worth; Equal Pay Act of 1963; Wage gap Payne, Ethel, 429 Peabody, Lucy Waterbury, 484 Peace movement, 439-42,440, 619-20, 654 Peake, Mary, 235 Peale, Sarah Miriam, 41,436,438 Pedestal, 442-43, 536, 571 Pei, Mario, 385 Pendleton, Clarence, 121 Penis envy, 367 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 437 People of Color Caucus, 358 People v. Hall, 493 Peratrovich, Elizabeth Wanamaker, 410,411,416 Perez, Rosie, 143 Perkins, Frances, 247,630 Perot, Ross, 241 Perry, Julia, 111 Personal Responsibility Act of 1996,467,626 Peters, M. Vera, 70-71 Peterson, Dorothy, 251 Peterson, Esther, 10, 642 Petrides, Frederique, 110 Petry, Ann, 203 Pharr, Suzanne, 498 Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS), 1

Philanthropy, 443-45 Phillips, Kevin, 475 Phyllis Wheatley Clubs and Homes, 447-48,447 Photography, 445-46 Physicians, 448-49 Pica, 159 Pickford, Mary, 232,233,233 Picture brides, 29,48,274,289,297,449,450 Piercy, Marge, 206,294, 349 Pinchot, Gifford, 172 Pinckney, Eliza Lucas, 452 Pink collar ghetto, 450-51 Pinn, Vivian, 365 Pinney, Eunice, 40 Pioneer Women (Na’amat), 293 Plain, Belva, 519 Planned Parenthood, 6 0 ,4 51-52,4 75,6 14 Planned Parenthood o f Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 510 Plantation system, 21,452-53 Plath, Sylvia, 349 Playboy magazine, 537 Pocahontas, 180,272, 571 Police forces, 11,4 53-56 Political parties, 456-59 Political prisoners, 459-60 Political rights, 99-100 Politicians, 460-62 Polygamy, 359-60, 378 Popular Feminist Association (Asociacion Feminista Popular), 216 Population control movement, 7 Populism, 462-63, 578 Porcino, Jane, 20 Pornography, 463-64 Port Huron Statement, 575 Portia Law School, 321 Portillo, Lourdes, 43 Post, Elizabeth L., 355 Post, Emily, 355 Postmodernism, 43,44, 350 Poverty, 18-20,184,464-68 Powell, Maud, 110 Powers, Jean, 240 Prather-Moses, Alice I., 143 Pregnancy, 4 68-71 “illegitimate’Vsingle, 269-70, 361 and infertility, 280-81 surrogate, 468, 512, 582-83 Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, 326, 511

G EN ERAL IN DEX

Preisand, Sally, 294 Prejudice, 494 Prendergast, Shirley, 593 Prettyman, Kathleen Collins, 233 Price, Florence, 110 Price, Leontyne, 110 Price, Pamela, 533 Primus, Pearl, 142 Prisons, 4 71-72 Privacy rights, 472-74, 517 Pro-choice and antiabortion movements, 6,474-78, 474, 510, 511 Progressive Era, 9 3,478-79,482, 528, 553,627 Prohibition and temperance, 25,479-80,480 Prostitution, 46-47,480-82 Protective labor legislation, 174,181,194,472, 482-83 Protestantism, 483-85, 503 PTA. See National Congress of Mothers Public Health Service, U.S., 611 Public speaking, 314-415,485 Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs, 212 Puerto Rican Association of Women Suffragists, 216 Puerto Rican Family Institute, 487 Puerto Rican Feminine League, 216 Puerto Rican women, 2 16 -17,318 -19 ,4 8 5-8 8 ,4 8 6 Purdah (social seclusion), 201 Puritanism, 488-89, 504 Pwan-ye-koo, Miss, 46 Quakers. See Society of Friends (Quakers) Quan, Katie, 308 Quayle, Dan, 470 Queen Latifah, 390 Queer Nation, 332 Quevedo, Eduardo, 122 Quilting, 489-90,490 Quimby, Harriet, 52 Rachel, 280 Racial discrimination, 10 -12,4 9 1-9 3 Racial equality, 2-3 Racism, 491,493-96 environmental, 172 in the women’s movement, 496-500 Radcliffe, Anne, 443 Radical Republicanism, 131 Radicalesbians, 254, 331 Radicalism, 31, 57, 500-501 feminist, 57,217-18

Radio, 9, 584-86 Radway, Janice, 519 Rainey, M a, 336 Ramirez, Sara Estela, 86 Ramos, Juanita, 342 Rand, Ayn, 126 Rankin, Jeannette, 122,441,461, 540,622 Rape, 612-14 Raphael, Sally Jessy, 585 Ray, Charlotte, 321 Raymond, Eleanor, 37 Reach to Recovery (R2R), 69-70 Reagan, Ronald, 169,173,241,278,475, 510 Ream, Vinnie, 522 Reconstruction, 14,99, 501-3 Red scare, 31 Redstockings, 6,213,217 Reed, Dorothy, 364 Reed, Ralph, 477 Reform movements abolitionist, 1- 3 dress, 156 -57,186 moral, 377-78 social, 179,194 Reformatories, 471 Regents o f the University o f California v. Bakke, 10 Rehabilitation Act of 1973,167 Reich, Robert, 111 Relf, Mary Alice and Minnie Lee, 572 Religion, 503-8,505 Buddhism, 71-72 Catholicism, 77-78 ,4 75 Evangelicalism, 179,236, 506-7 feminist theology, 226-27 fundamentalism, 179,236 Hinduism, 255-56 Islam, 283-84 Judaism, 295-96 missionaries, 17 9 ,3 7 3 -7 4 ,374~75> 4&4 Mormons, 378-80,633 Native American religions, 403-5 Protestantism, 483-85, 503 Puritanism, 488-89, 504 Quakers, 227,484,489, 505-6 spirituality, 555-56 Wicca, 508,637-38 Remond, Sarah, 235 Representative government. See Democracy Reproductive Freedom Project, 476 Reproductive rights, 60, 508-12, 537-38,649

688

G EN ERAL IN D EX

Reproductive technology, 185,280,281, 512-14 Republicanism, 514-16 Rest cures, 367 Retter, Yolanda, 341 Revista Mujeres, 354 Revolutionary War, 38,129,618 Reynolds, Malvina, 390 Rhoads, Geraldine, 353 Rhode Island, 154 Rich, Adrienne, 206,294, 330, 340, 349,498 Rich, Cynthia, 563 Richards, Ellen, 155, 528 Richardson, Gloria, 498 Richmond, Mary, 554 Riddle, Estelle Massey, 16 Ride, Sally, 54 Right-wing movements, 125-28 Rincon, Bernice, 204 Ringgold, Faith, 42,439 Rios, Lucy, 119 Ritzdorf, Marsha, 267 Rive-King, Julie, 110 Rivera, Etna Iris, 431 Rivers, Joan, 268 Roberts, Grace, 374 Roberts, Nora, 519 Robins, Margaret Dreier, 652 Robinson, Bernice, 103 Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson, 16,103,276 Robinson, Ruby Doris Smith, 104, 576 Robles, Belen, 322 Rockefeller, John D., 645 Rodman, Charmayne, 137 Rodriguez, Alicia, 460 Rodriguez, Chipita, 212 Rodriguez, Ida Luz, 460 Rodriguez de Tio, Lola, 216,487 Roe v. Wade, 6 ,33,6 0 ,16 9 ,19 6 ,228 , 392,473,475,477, 509, 516-18, 537-38,600 Rogers, Edith Nourse, 123,622 Rogers, Rosemary, 518 Rogow, Faith, 339 Rolandson, Mary, 51 Rolon, Rosalba, 592 Rolonda, 585 Romance novels, 518-19 Romance Writers of America (RWA), 519 Romo-Carmona, Mariana, 341 Ronstadt, Linda, 390 Roosevelt, Adelheid, 522 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 116,247,272,417,429,622

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 49,126,181,245,286,290, 426-28,628,630 Roosevelt, James, 181 Roosevelt, Theodore, 620 Roque de Duprey, Ana, 216 Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana, 123 Rosado, Rev. Leoncia, 487 Rosales, Rosa, 322 Rose, Ernestine, 190 Rose, Margaret, 85 Roseanne, 268 Rosenbaum, FI. Jon, 350 Rosenberg, Susan, 460 Rosenthal, Jean, 593 Rosie the Riveter, 519-20,623,656 Ross, Betsy, 143,270,489 Ross, Nellie Tayloe, 461 Rostker v. Goldberg, 38 Rothman, Lorraine, 6 ,7 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 515 Rowbotham, Sheila, 219 Rowlandson, Mary, 346 Rowson, Susanna, 144 Rowson, Susanna Haswell, 346 Roybal, Edward R., 119 Roybal, Lucille, 119 RU-486,61,476,477, 510, 511 Rubenstein, Helena, 56 Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre, 14,63,203 Ruiz de Burton, Maria Amparo, 84 Rukeyser, Muriel, 294, 340, 348 Rush, Benjamin, 515 Russ, Joanna, 349 Russell, Diana E. H., 463 Russell, Lillian, 110 Russell, Rosalind, 233 Ruzek, Sheryl, 470 Saadat, Kathleen, 337 Saadawi, Nawal el, 200 Saar, Betye, 42, 523 Sabin, Florence Rena, 364 Sacajawea, 180,409, 571 Saegert, Susan, 267 Sage, Olivia, 444 St. Denis, Ruth, 142 Sainte-Marie, Buffy, 389 St. George, Katharine, 123 St. Phalle, Niki de, 523 Sakhi, 555 Salem witchcraft trials, 520,520

GEN ERAL IN DEX

Salerno-Sonnenberg, Nadja, no Salonga, Lea, 231 Salsa Soul Sisters (now African Ancestral Lesbians United for Societal Change)337 Salt ’n’ Pepa, 390 Salt o f the Earth (film), 220 Saltonstall, M ary and Dorothy, 443 Salvation Army, 360, 362 Sampson, Deborah, 618 San Antonio Pecan Shelters Strike (1938), 85 Sanapia, 409 Sandoval, Chela, 86 Sanger, Margaret, 60,80,425, 550 Santiago, Esmeralda, 431 Santos, Adele, 37 Sapphire, 271 Saralegui, Cristina, 585 Sasaki, Ruth Fuller Everett, 72 Sasso, Sandy, 294 Savage, Augusta, 42, 522 Schapiro, Miriam, 42,439, 523 Scheidler, Joe, 476 Schlafly, Phyllis, 32-33, 39 ,126 ,177,4 75,60 0 Schlesinger, Arthur, 257 Schneiderman, Rose, 257,292, 308,478,652 Schoolcraft, Jane Johnston, 347 Schroeder, Patricia, 39,208 Schwartz, Martha, 37 Schwarz, Judith, 327 Schwei, Barbara, 140 Schwerner, M ichael, 106,376 Science, 520-22 Scott, Blanche Stuart, 52 Scott, Clara H., 390 Scottsboro Nine, 118 Sculpture, 522-23 SC U M (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, 218 Seal Press, 225 Sears, James, 529 Seasonal labor, 134 “ Second shift,” 467 Sederberg, Peter C ., 350 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 346 Seeger, Charles, 111 Seeger, Pete, 111 Seeger, Ruth Crawford, 110 -11 Segovia, Josefa, 84 Segrest, Mab, 498 Seise, Maria, 46 Selena, 390

Seneca Falls Convention, 117,156,285,497, 516, 523-24, 577 Senior Action in a Gay Environment (SAGE), 20, 240, 331 Senn, Charlene, 464 Separate spheres, 324, 380, 524 Service Employees International Union (SEIU), 310 -11 Service sector, 524-26,525 Seton, Elizabeth, 506 Settlement house movement, 28, 526-28,527, 553 Seventh-Day Adventists, 507 Sex education, 528-30 Sex tourism, 201 Sex trafficking, 201 Sexism, 10 1-2,173-74 , 55°—31 Sexology, 531-32 Sexton, Anne, 349 Sexual harassment, 39,197,356, 533-35 The Sexual Revolution, 5, 536-39 Sexual slavery, 539-40 Sexuality, 535-36 bisexuality, 61-62 celibacy, 79 of disabled persons, 152-53, 567-68 heterosexuality, 255 lesbianism, 327-30 radical, 501 Sexually transmitted diseases, 481,621 Shador, 284 Shakur, Assata (JoAnne Chesimard), 64,459,460 Shange, Ntozake, 17,203,206, 349, 592 Shapsnikoff, Anfesia, 411 Shaw, Anna Howard, 507, 578 Shear, Linda, 340 Sheehy, Ethel, 53 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 349 Shenandoah, Joanne, 389 Shepard, Peggy, 172 Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921,9 1,9 4,19 4,369 , 381, 540,630 Sherman, Cindy, 43 Shields, Laurie, 19 Shigemura, Lia, 286 Shore, Dinah, 390 Shiftman, Alix Kates, 349 Shulman, Sarah, 340 Siebert, Muriel, 170 Siegel, Isaaca, 240 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 346 Silicon breast implants, 648

690

GEN ERAL IN D EX

Silko, Leslie Marmon, 206,350,635 Silva de Cintron, Josefina, 487 Simkhovitch, Mary K., 528 Simply Marvelous, 268 Simpson, O. J., 604 Sims, J. Marion, 363 Sinatra, Frank, 2gi Sinclair, Jo (Ruth Seid), 340 Sing, Lillian, 498 Single motherhood, 382-83,465,469-70, 540-41, 543

Single pregnancy /“ illegitimacy,” 269-70,361 Single women, 541-43 Sister Souljah, 390 Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa (S 1 SA), 240 Skinner v. Oklahoma, 509 Skull, Sally, 137 Slave narratives, 51 Slavery, 12, 543-48,545,547 and abolitionist movement, 1- 3 on plantations, 21,452-53 and racism, 495 Sleigh, Sylvia, 42 Slenczynski, Ruth, 110 Slick, Grace, 390 Sloan, Margaret, 203 Slye, Maude, 364 Smith, Amanda, 507 Smith, Barbara, 16, 203,206,223, 337, 349 Smith, Bessie, 15,251,291,292,336 Smith, Clara, 251 Smith, John, 180,272 Smith, Joseph, 378 Smith, Julia Holmes, 363 Smith, Kenneth, 259 Smith, Lillian, 498 Smith, Mamie, 290 Smith, Margaret, 268 Smith, Margaret Chase, 123,458 Smith, Mary Louise, 457 Smith, Mary Rozet, 444 Smith, Sophia, 643 Smith, William, 604 Smith, Willie Mae, 390 Smith Hughes Act of 1917,614 Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll, 257, 328 Snooks, Netta, 52 Snow, Carmel, 353 Snow, Carrie, 268

“ Sob sisters,” 428 Social Gospel movement, 657 Social hygiene, 548-49 Social rights, 99,100 Social Security Act of 1935, 384,428, 552,626,628,630 Social status. See Class Social work, 552-54 Socialism, 549-52 feminist, 218-19 Socialist Labor Party, 550 Socialist Workers Party, 458 Society for Humane Abortion, 6 Society of American Indians, 410 Society of Friends (Quakers), 227,484,489, 505-6 Sofia, Ginny, 70 Sola, Mercedes, 216 Solanos, Valerie, 218 Las Soldaderas, 212 Solomon, Hannah Greenebaum, 394 Sommers, Tish, 19 Sonnenschein, Rosa, 352 Sontag, Susan, 348, 562 Sororities, Black, 64 Sorosis, 242

South Asian American women, 554-55 South Carolina, 529 Southeast, indigenous population of, 416-18 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SC L C ), 16,104 Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching, 282 Southern Plains, indigenous population of, 418-19 Southern Regional Council (SRC), 282 Southern Student Organizing Committee, 530 Southwest, indigenous population of, 419-20 Spelman Seminary (College), 643,643, 645 Spencer, Rev. Anna Garland, 189 Spencer, Anne, 251 Spencer, Lilly Martin, 438 Spender, Dale, 386 Spiegel, David, 68 Spiritualist movement, 506 Spirituality, 555-56 Spooner, Sarah, 385 Sports, 556-61,557 Squaws, 271, 572 Stanback, Marsha, 65

Standardized testing, 561-62 Stansell, Christine, 107 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 51,117 ,13 1,13 2 ,15 6 ,18 9 ,

>9 i. >9 ?. 352 . 4 5 6- 5 ° 2>5o6>5° 7 >52 3 - 5 7 4 . 577

GEN ERAL IN DEX

Stanton, Lucy, 235 Starhawk, 227 States’ rights, 323 Staupers, Mabel K., 16,451 Stebbins, Emma, 522 Steel, Danielle, 519 Steel, Dawn, 233 Stein, Gertrude, 294, 332, 348,430 Steinem, Gloria, 9, 33,6 8 ,349 ,353,6 14 Stembridge, Jane, 104 Stereotypes of age, 562-65 of class, 565-67 of disability, 151, 567-68 of race, 569-70 of sex (gender), 570-72 Sterilization and sterilization abuse, 7,6 0 ,17 8 , 508-9,572-73 Stern, William and Betsy, 582 Stewart, A. T., 266 Stewart, Ellen, 592 Stewart, Maria B. M iller, 3,13,202,485 Stewart, Maria W., 63,235 Still, William, 544 Stinson, Emma, 52 Stinson, Katherine, 52 Stinson, Marjorie, 52 Stock, Wendy, 464 Stokes, Rose Pastor, 294 Stone, Lucy, 456 Stonewall Riots/Rebellion (1969), 213,237, 334,

358, 538 STO P-ERA, 32-33,600 Storer, Dr. Horatio Robinson, 4 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 346, 518, 591 Straus, Murray, 606 Streisand, Barbra, 295, 390 Strikes, 573-75,574 Strindberg, August, 371 Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SN C C ), 16 ,10 4 -5 ,21 5 >376, 576 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 213, 575-7 6 Substance abuse alcoholism, 24-26 drug use and abuse, 2 6,157-59 Suburbanization, 576-77 Suffrage movement, 32,117,49 7, 577-8 1,579 Sullivan, Kathryn, 54 Sumner, Charles, 131

Sun Dance, 412,419 Sunday-school movement, 293,295 Superheroines, 581-82,581 Superwomen, 156 Supreme Court, U.S. on abortion, 6, 33,60,228,473, 509-10, 516-18, 537-38,600 on affirmative action, 10 -11 on censorship, 8i on compulsory sterilization, 178-79 on differential criminal prosecution, 175 on due process, 130,472 on female lawyers, 320 on gay sex, 358,473 on legal status of women, 324-26 on male-only military registration (draft), 38 on marital rights, 359 on miscegenation, 371 on obscenity, 436 on protective labor legislation, 175,228,386-87, 472,483 on racial segregation, 376 on reproductive rights, 509 on sexual discrimination, 593 on sexual harassment, 197, 534 on sterilization, 178-79, 508-9 on welfare, 629 Surrogacy, 468, 512, 582-83 Sutton, Sharon, 37 Swallow, Ellen, 171 Swanson, Gloria, 232 Sweatshops, 583-84,583 Sweeney, John, 311 Sweet Honey in the Rock, 390 Szold, Henrietta, 293, 507 Tacha, Athena, 523 Tafolla, Carmen, 86 Taff-Hartley Act of 1947, 307 Tailhook Convention, 39 Takaezu, Toshiko, 42 Take Back the Night, 34, 357, 584,603, 604-5 Talbert, Mary Burnett, 14, 392 Talk shows, 584-86 Tallchief, Maria, 141 Tallchief, Marjorie, 141 Talma, Louise, 111 Tan, Amy, 635 Tannen, Deborah, 314 Tanning, Dorothea, 438

691

692

G EN ERAL IN D EX

Tapahonso, Luci, 137 Tarbell, Ida, 352 Taussig, Helen, 364 Tawney, Leonore, 42 Taylor, Harriet, 344 Taylor, Susie King, 13 Teaching profession, 293, 586-87,587 Teer, Barbara Ann, 592 Tekakwitha, Kateri, 504 Telephone operators, 525 Television, 9, 584-86 Temperance, 25,479-80 Temporary work. See Contingent work Tenayucca, Emma, 86,212 Terrell, Mary Church, 14,16,203,209, 351, 391, 392, 4 5 7 .4 9 6 Terrorism, 588 Textile/apparel workers, 277-78, 589-91,589 Thalidomide, 364, 591 Tharpe, Rosetta, 390 Theater, 591-93 Thomas, Alma, 42,436,438 Thomas, Debi, 560 Thomas, M. Carey, 430 Thompson, Dorothy, 429 Thompson, E. R , 107 Thoreau, Henry David, 172 Thurber, Jeanette, 109 Tienda, Marta, 318, 319 Tiger, Lisa, 24 Till, Emmett, 104 Tillinghast, Muriel, 576 Tillmon, Johnnie, 399 Timothy, Elizabeth, 428 Tipton, Billy, 139 Tipton, Jennifer, 593 Title VII, Civil Rights Act o f 19 64 ,10 ,10 1,10 2,120, lTi> U 4 . U 7 >181,248, 396,511,533, 593, 599, 616 Title IX, Education Act Amendments, 10,72,166, 3 9 6 , 5 3 3 . 560, 593-94 Title X, Public Health Service Act, 509 Title XVIII (Medicare), Social Security Act, 248,249 Title XIX (Medicaid), Social Security Act, 248 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 146 Toder, Nancy, 340 Tolman, Deborah, 530 Tomlin, Elaine, 446 Tomlin, Lily, 268, 349 Tompkins, Sally, 121

Toomer, Jean, 251 Torre, Susanna, 37 Torres, Alejandrina, 460, 551 Torres, Concepcion (Concha), 216 Tower, Joan, 111 Toxic Shock Syndrome, 648 Trail of Tears, 417,418 TransSisters, 239 Trashing, 594-95 Treadwell, Sophie, 592 Tristan, Flora, 190 True, Ruth, 29 True Womanhood, C ult of. See C ult of Domesticity Trujillo, Carla, 342 Trujillo, Estela, 206 Trung sisters, 601 Truth, Sojourner, 13,19 1,202,235-36 , 506 Truth in Lending Act of 1968, 54 Tsui, Kitty, 206 Tubman, Harriet, 1,2 ,13 ,15 3 ,19 0 ,2 3 4 , 545-46,619 Tucker, Sophie, 295 Tureck, Rosalyn, 110 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 257 Turnham, Edythe, 291 Twiggy, 273 “Twilight Sleep,” 90-91 Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934,231,492 Tyler, Robin, 340 Umpierre, Luz Marfa, 431 Underground Railroad, 13 Unemployment, 595-97 Unemployment Insurance (UI), 596 Union of Needle Trades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (U N ITE!), 305, 309,426 Union of Orthodox Congregations, Women’s Branch of, 294 Union of Palestinian Women’s Association, 200 United Auto Workers (UAW), 301, 311 United Auto Workers v. Johnson Controls, 228, 593 United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America/Food, Tobacco, Agri­ cultural, and Allied Workers of America (U CAPAWA/FTA), 312 United Daughters o f the Confederacy, 122, 503 United Electrical Workers (UE), 312 United Farm Workers (UFW), 85, 313,357, 551 United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW ), 313-14 United Nations Conferences on Women, 39,294

G EN ERAL IN DEX

United Nations Convention Against Sexual Exploitation, 482, 540 United Nations Decade for Women, 210 United States National Student Association, 104 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 15.63,20 3,237 Uno, Roberta, 592 Urbanization, 596-98 Utah, 529 Uyeda, Ann Uri, 335 Vaid, Urvashi, 555 Valentin, Carmen, 460 Vallejo, Linda, 43 Van de Vate, Nancy, 111 Van Kleek, Mary, 257 Van Upp, Virginia, 233 Varela, Maria, 86 Vasquez, Rosario (“ Rosie”), 119 Vassar, Matthew, 643 Vaudeville, 141 Vaughan, Sarah, 291 Vedas, 256 Vegetarian Society, 363 Velasquez, Nydia, 487 Vermont, 154 Victor, Metta (Seeley Register), 347 Vidale, Thea, 268 Vietnam era, 598-600 Vietnamese American women, 600-602 Viguerie, Richard, 475 Villaesquesa, Enriqueta, 119 Villard, Oswald Garrison, 391 Vinson, Mechelle, 534 Violence against women, 602-6,603 abuse, 368,606-7 battered women, 607-9 domestic violence, 609 incest, 609-11 medical response to, 611-12 rape, 612-14 sexual harassment, 3 9 ,19 7 ,356, 533-35 Violence Against Women Act of 1994,201, 326, 397, 604, 609 Virgin Mary, 270,272 Virgin of Guadalupe, 272 Vocational Education Act of 1917,614 Vogue, 352,353 Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), 249 von Ranke, Leopold, 256

von Trotta, Margarethe, 234 Vonnegut, Kurt, 564 Voter registration. See Mississippi Freedom Summer Voters For Choice, 476,614-15 Voting. See Civil rights movement; Suffrage movement Voting Rights Act of 19 65,16,9 9 ,146 Vreeland, Diana, 353 Wachner, Linda, 170 Wage gap, 615-16 Wage labor. See Work Wagner, Jane, 349 Wagner, Sally Roesch, 188 Wainwright, Helene, 558 Waitresses, 616-17 Wald, Lillian, 28, 528, 553,654 Walker, A’Lelia, 336 Walker, Alice, 17 ,116 ,2 0 3,22 2 -2 3 , 3 4 9 , 3 5 3 , 4 9 9 , 639-41 Walker, Madame C . J. (Sarah Breedlove), 14-15, 56, 170,444 Walker, Lenore, 608 Walker, Maggie Lena, 54 Walker, Dr. Mary Edwards, 186 Wallace, M ichele, 17,203 Wallins, William English, 391 Walrond, Eric, 251 War brides, 289,290,297 War Brides Act of 1945,274,275 War on Poverty, 248-50,631 Ward, Mrs. H. O., 355 Ward, Nancy, 199 Warfield, Marsha, 268 Warner, Anna B., 390 Warner, Susan, 346 Warren, Mercy Otis, 129 Wars colonization to 1900,618-20 1900 to the present, 620-24,621 Warshaw, Carole, 611 Washington, Booker T., 14 Washington, Cynthia, 576 Washington, George, 355,618 Washington, Margaret Murray, 14, 391, 392 Washington, Mary Helen, 223 Washington, D .C ., 529 Washington College of Law, 321 Washington Post, 171 Washington State, 120 Wasserstein, Wendy, 295, 349, 592 Waters, Ethel, 251

694

GEN ERAL IN D EX

Watkins, Gloria (bell hooks), 349,498 Wattleton, Faye, 452 WAVES (Navy), 656 Wealth, distribution of, 624-26 Weathermen, 575 Weaver, James, 462 Weber, Lois, 232 Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 510 Weems, Carrie Mae, 446 Weill, Claudia, 233 Weinbaum, Batya, 133 Weinberg, George, 259 Welfare and public relief, 467,626-29 Welfare state, 630-32 Wells, Kitty, 390 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 14,203,351, 357,371,391,428, 430,442,443,478,496,620 Welty, Eudora, 348 West, Cheryl, 593 West, Cornel, 223 West, Mae, 233,268 West Coast, indigenous population of, 420-22 Western women, 632-35,633 Westwood, Jean, 457 Weyrich, Paul, 475 Wharton, Edith, 144, 348,654 Wheatley, Phillis, 223, 346,347,447, 504 Wheeler, Candace, 144 Wheelock, Margery, 143 “When I Am an Old Woman I Will Wear Purple” (poem), 20 Where We At: Black Women Artists, 439 W H ISPER (Women Held in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt), 481 White, Deborah Gray, 12 White, Ellen Gould, 363, 507 White, Hayden, 258 White, Maude, 550 Whitehead, Mary Beth, 582 Whitehom, Laura, 460 Whiteness, 636-37 Whitman, Christine Todd, 458,461 Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt, 654 Whitney, Phyllis A., 518 Wicca, 508,637-38 Widener, Eleanor Elkins, 443,444 Widowhood, 18 Wiggins, Ella May, 590 Wilberforce University, 235 Wiley, George, 399

Wilkinson, Raven, 142 Willard, Emma Hart, 485 Willard, Frances Elizabeth, 51,209,478,479,484, 507, 578, 641 Willebrandt, Mabel Walker, 321 Williams, Elizabeth (“Tex” ), 446 Williams, Evelyn, 459 Williams, Fannie Barrier, 14 Williams, Mary Lou, 292 Williamson, Cris, 206, 391 Williamson, Verna, 199 W illing Workers, Detroit, 62 Wills, Helen, 558 Willson, Mary Ann, 40 Wilson, Edith, 291 Wilson, Harriet E., 346 Wilson, Mary Anne, 438 Wilson, Dr. Peter, 190 Wilson, Woodrow, 383, 580,655 Winbum, Anna M ae, 291 Winfrey, Oprah, 585 Wisconsin, sex education in, 529 WISH List, 170,208 W ITC H (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), 218 Witchcraft in Colonial America, 504, 520,520 on the Spanish-Mexican borderlands, 638-39 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 31,128,187,240, 344, 515 Womanism, 78,222,499,639-41 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (W CTU), 25, 479-80, 553, 577-78,641. Womans Day, 353 Woman’s Hospital of New York, 75 Woman’s Pentagon Action, 442 Women Against Pornography (WAP), 34,464 Women Against Violence Against Women, 34 Women Against Violence in Media and Pornography, 34 Women-Church Convergence, 78, 508 Women of All Red Nations, 198,410 Women o f color, 431 as agricultural workers, 22 in armed forces, 38 class of, 108-9 in Congress, 123 consciousness raising by, 124-25 as consumers, 8, 9 as feminists, 196 heart disease among, 252 mental health and illness of, 148-49

G EN ERAL IN D EX

Women Strike for Peace (WSP), 31,364,441 Women Wage-Earners Association, 621 Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), 655 Women’s American ORT, 293 Women’s Army Corps (WACs), 333,622,656 Women’s Breast Cancer Advisory Center, 69 Women’s Bureau, 116 ,17 5 , 641-42 Women’s Business Ownership Act of 1988, 396 Women’s clubs, 14 , 62-63,202-3, 24 2 Women’s colleges, 642-44,643 Black, 644-45 Women’s Economic Development Corporation (W ED CO ), 162 Women’s Educational Equity Act (W EEA), 645 Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WE DO), 442,646 Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL), 599 Women’s Health Care Initiative, 77 Women’s health movement, 27,364, 36 9 ,4 70 , 646-50 Women’s Health Trial, 365 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 441,454, 506,621 Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, 101 Women's League of United Synagogues, 294 Women’s Liberation, 5 ,6 ,19 5,2 17 , 338, 496-500,

650-51 Women’s Ordination Conference, 78 Women’s Peace Party (WPP), 440 Women’s Peace Society, 441 Women’s Peace Union, 441 Women’s Political Council (WPC), 103 Women’s Press Collective, 225

Women’s Strike for Equality, 357, 575 Women’s studies, 16 7 , 651-52 Women’s Trade Union League (W TUL), 300, 301, 386,482, 652-53,654 Women’s Way of Philadephia, 445 Wong, Elizabeth, 592 Wood, Edith Elmer, 267 Woodhull, Victoria Claflin, 458 Woodiwiss, Kathleen, 518 Woodlands, indigenous population of, 422-23 Woodruff, Wilford, 378 Woods, Nancy, 365 Woods, Pat, 240 Woodward, Ellen Sullivan, 427 Woolf, Virginia, 222,353 Woolley, Mary, 329 Work, 653-54,653. See also entries for specific professions

affirmative action in, 10-12 and child labor laws, 94 clerical, 111-13 contingent, 134-35 nontraditional, 432 during World War II, 519-20 Work therapy, 367 Working-class feminism, 220-21 Working Woman, 354 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 42,427, 596,628 World Community of Islam in the West, 64 World War I period, 621-22, 654-55 World War II period, 622-23, 655-56,656 Asian Pacific women in, 48-49,623 Japanese American internment in, 4 9 , 286-88,290 propaganda campaigns in, 9 women’s employment during, 519-20 World Wide Web, 585 World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 209 Wright, Alice Morgan, 522 Wright, Frances, 31,189, 515 Wright, Jane C ., 365 Wright, Marian, 576 Wright, Patience, 522 Wurster, Catherine Bauer, 267 Wyatt, Addie, 314 Wyoming, 578 Yamada, Mitsuye, 349-50 Yamaguchi, Kristi, 290, 560 Yarborough, Sara, 142 Yates, Josephine Silone, 392 Yezierska, Anzia, 294, 348 Yo Yo, 390 Yorkin, Peg, 445 Young, Brigham, 378 Young, Ella Flagg, 448 Young, Rose, 254 YW CA (Young Women’s Christian Association), 28,208,266,447,498, 553, 657 Zachary, Mary, 611 Zavala, Iris, 431 Zeisler, Fannie Bloomfield, 110 Zetkin, Clara, 117,209,281-82 Zillman, Dolf, 463 Zipprodt, Patricia, 593 Zollar, Jawole Willa Jo, 142 Zorach, Marguerite Thompson, 438 Zwilich, Ellen Taafe, 111

695

Illustration Credits Abolitionist Movement, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Advertising, Scott Paper Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Aging, © Freda Leinwand Agriculture, National Archives and Records Administration Art and Crafts, Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Aviation, courtesy of Elizabeth Amelia Hadley Freydberg Beauty Culture, Denver Public Library, Western History Department Birth Control, Library of Congress Chicanas and Mexican American Women, Rio Grande Historical Collections, New Mexico State University Library Chinese American Women, National Archives and Records Administration Civil Rights Movement, UPI/Corbis-Bettmann Archive Clerical Work, Brown Brothers Communism, UPI/Corbis-Bettmann Archive Consciousness Raising, © Bettye Lane Cooking, The University of Pennsylvania, Center for Judaic Studies Cross-Dressing, Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Pub­ lic Library Decorative Arts, Courtesy of the Santa Fe Railway Disability, © JEB (Joan E. Biren) Dress Reform, Library of Congress Education (Oberlin College), Oberlin College Archives Education (Cherokee Young Ladies’ Seminary), Denver Public Library, Western History Collection Fashion and Style, Library of Congress Film, Courtesy of Ally Acker Great Depression, National Archives and Records Adminis­ tration Household Workers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin Immigration, Library of Congress Indentured Servitude, Historical Society of Pennsylvania Japanese American Internment, National Archives and Records Administration Japanese American Women, National Japanese American Historical Society Jewish Women, Brown Brothers Ku Klux Klan, Indiana Historical Society Library Labor Unions (ILGWU), © JEB (Joan E. Biren) Labor Unions (Knights of Labor), Library of Congress La Raza, Alfonso Vazquez Collection, Houston Metro­ politan Research Center, Houston Public Library

Lesbians (E. Alice Austen), Staten Island Historical Society Library Lesbians (Washington, D.C., march), © JEB (Joan E. Biren) Literature, Smithsonian Institution, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. Magazines, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Missionaries, ABCFM photographs, by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University Mormons, Courtesy of the Oakland Museum History Department Native American Women (BIA occupation), UPI/CorbisBettmann Archive Native American Women (Seminole), Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives, Washington, D.C. Nursing Profession, Brown Brothers Painting, Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago Peace Movement, © JEB (Joan E. Biren) Phyllis Wheatley Clubs and Homes, Courtesy of the Phyllis Wheatley Association, Cleveland, Ohio Picture Brides, UPI/Corbis-Bettmann Archive Pro-Choice/Antiabortion Movements, © JEB (Joan E. Biren) Prohibition and Temperance, Archive Photos Puerto Rican Women, The Jesus Colon Papers, Center for Puerto Rican Studies Library and Archives, Hunter Col­ lege, City University ofNew York Quilting, Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Religion, © JEB (Joan E. Biren) Salem Witchcraft Trials, The Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts Service Sector, National Archives and Records Administration Settlement House Movement, The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College Slavery (family), Library of Congress Slavery (Louisa), Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis Sports, The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College Strikes, Library of Congress Suffrage Movement, Library of Congress Superheroines, Courtesy of Trina Robbins Sweatshops, Courtesy of the Women’s Bureau Teaching Profession, National Archives and Records Admin­ istration Textile/Apparel Workers, Library of Congress Violence Against Women, © JE B (Joan E. Biren) Wars: 1900 to the Present, National Japanese American His­ torical Society Western Women, Idaho State Historical Society Women's Colleges, Courtesy of Spelman College Archives Work, University of Washington Libraries World War II Period, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson