Following the February Revolution in 1848, working-class women as well as men attempted to hold the government to its promise of the right to work, through street demonstrations, individual and collective demands for work, and participation in the national workshops that had been established in an attempt to address the problem of unemployment in the capital. In the process, these activists articulated what scholars have labelled as a democratic socialist vision of republicanism. In June of 1848, (...) class='Hi'>women participated in the insurrection that sought to defend the vision of a social republic. While the republicanism of working-class men and bourgeois women such as George Sand has been examined, studies of working-class women in the first half of the nineteenth century have to this point focused on the romantic socialist influences that shaped their activities, in particular the Saint-Simonian movement. Drawing primarily on individual letters, police interrogations and newspaper reports, a vision of republicanism emerges that includes the ability for women to sustain their families through waged as well as household labour. This concept of republican virtue based itself not in suffrage but in women's capacity to act as both producers and consumers under just and equitable conditions. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of the relationship between gender, class and notions of happiness. It draws on recent research conducted into the experiences of working class women who play the UK National Lottery. In particular, it explores the notion that gambling offers working class women the opportunity to dream of the ‘good life’ – of enhancing their lives and of making ‘improvements’ to their own and their families’ well-being. In this paper, the (...) discourse of happiness will be examined, and the tacit assumption that working class women in particular are prone to turning to gambling as a last ditch attempt to personal and emotional fulfilment will be challenged. The paper argues that developing understandings of culture and consumption practices is imperative for producing a more complex understanding of the subjective realities of working class women's everyday lives. By engaging with feminist accounts of respectability, daydream and fantasy, the paper will present a thorough exploration of National Lottery play in working class women's everyday experiences of happiness. (shrink)

The author wishes to thank Jane Hryshko, Bard College's Readers' Services Librarian, for her tireless efforts to acquire the books and articles reviewed here through inter-library loan.

This article had several purposes. First, I wanted to highlight the work of Esther Bubley, an American photographer whose documentary work for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information in the early 1940s is largely unknown. Second, I wanted to show how her images complicated and undermined the traditional themes of Depression era photography in the United States, Third, by looking at her images of women, my intention was to reveal how she worked against depictions of (...) femininity during the Depression, and in confrontation with one-dimensional portrayals of women as America entered the Second World Wan In conclusion, I contend that Bubley's images were fundamentally portrayals of working-class femininity represented as being an individual – rather than a symbolic – experience. Most specifically in the images I have examined, Bubley deconstructs an ideological image of female working-class identity which was central to documentary photography in 1930s America. For example, unlike in photographs by Dorothea Lange, Bubley did not portray working-class women as metaphoric sites of passive endurance which would eventually lead to the rejuvenation of American nationalism. Rather, she showed working-class women to be potentially subversive in the ways they defined themselves against the legacy of 1930s photography and in opposition to the ideological impositions of wartime propaganda. As a result, Bubley's images of working-class women waiting in bars for lonely soldiers, or looking for a future beyond the confines of their boarding house existences while remaining outside the middle-class boundaries defined by capitalist consumerism, set out a pictorial foundation for working-class female identity which exists beyond the context in which the photographs were taken. Consequently, Bubley's work highlights individual self-identity, personal empowerment and self-conscious desire in working-class women which was – and still is – confined and repressed by economic disadvantage and systematic marginalization from an American society defined from a middle-class point of view. (shrink)

Scholars have studied multiple femininities across different spaces by attributing variation to cultural/spatial contexts. They have studied multiple femininities in the same space by attributing variation to class/race positions. However, we do not yet know how women from the same cultural, class, and race locations may enact multiple femininities in the same context. Drawing on observations and interviews in a women-only bazaar in Pakistan, I show that multiple femininities can exist within the same space and be (...) enacted by the same individual. Working-class women workers in Meena Bazaar switched between performances of “pariah femininity” and “hegemonic femininity,” patching together contradictory femininities to secure different types of capital at the organizational and personal levels. Pariah femininities enabled access to economic capital but typically decreased women’s symbolic capital, whereas hegemonic femininities generated symbolic capital but could block or enable access to economic capital. The concept of a patchwork performance of femininity explains how and why working-class women simultaneously embody idealized and stigmatized forms of femininity. Furthermore, it captures how managerial regimes and personal struggles for class distinction interact to produce contradictory gender performances. By examining gender performances in the context of social stratification, I explain the structural underpinnings of working-class women’s gendered struggles for respectability and work. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how white working-class women reimagine gender in the face of social and economic changes that have undermined their ability to perform normative femininity. As blue-collar jobs have disappeared, scholars have posited that white working-class men and women have become increasingly isolated, disconnected from institutions, and hopeless about the future, leading to a culture of despair. Although past literature has examined how working-class white men cope with the inability (...) to perform masculinity through wage-earning and family authority, gender has been undertheorized in these discussions, treating working-class women’s and men’s despair interchangeably. Drawing on 37 in-depth interviews conducted in a former coal-mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania, we identify three overarching strategies that women deploy in their life histories to cope with disruption: embracing pain as an opportunity for self-growth; dispelling shame and striving for equality; and enduring suffering. These strategies allow women to feel hopeful and worthy as they confront enormous challenges, whether starting over following relationship dissolution, learning to be independent from men, or simply surviving hardship for the sake of their children. We explore the implications for recreating gender identity in each strategy and question how different strategies might serve to protect women from, or alternatively solidify, sentiments of despair. (shrink)

The authors examine the experiences and ideals of African American working-class mothers through 20 intensive interviews. They focus on the women's negotiations with racialized norms of motherhood, represented in the assumptions that legal marriage and an exclusively bonded dyadic relationship with one's children are requisite to good mothering. The authors find, as did earlier phenomenological studies, that the mothers draw from distinct ideals of community-based independence to resist each of these assumptions and carve out alternative scripts based (...) on nonmarital relationships with male partners and shared care of children. (shrink)

Scholars see the gendered division of household labor as a stronghold of gender inequality. We explore changes in household labor and gender relations when conservative, working-class families experience employment disruptions. Using data from 49 qualitative interviews conducted with men and women following the forced unemployment of breadwinning husbands, we observe some change in gendered household labor but conclude that a significant degendering of housework is thwarted by institutional-, interactive-, and individual-level processes. At the institutional level, the lack (...) of well-paying jobs and the persistent gendering of household tasks discourage change. At the individual level, challenges to gendered identities encourage a reinforcement of traditional gender ideologies. At the interactional level, women’s responsibility for care work and the meaning of paid work for unemployed husbands forestall the adjustment of tasks. (shrink)

‘Femininity’ is a concept formed by structures of class difference: to be ‘feminine’ is to fit into an idealised higher-class position. Working-class women, without the financial or cultural capital to successfully perform femininity, are regularly cast down into the realms of the grotesque. This ‘fall from grace’ has repercussions on the representation and lived experiences of women who are then defined negatively. Contemporary British media stories are full of demonising depictions of working-class (...) women deemed grotesque for not presenting themselves with sufficiently ‘classy’ femininity. This article provides a rereading of the images made by British photographer Richard Billingham of his mother Liz, against the grain of much classist and misogynistic critical writing. The author discusses what happens when women reject the aspiration to transcend their supposedly faulty working-class femininity, and instead of trying to ‘better themselves’ through class-passing choose to present aspects of a working-class identity that firmly situate them within an undesirable class position. By employing an auto-ethnographic approach, the author offers new receptions of such images that have often been dismissed and discussed derogatorily, by bringing to bear her own lived experience of being a woman from a working-class background to offer narratives rarely explored in academic texts. The author shows that by thinking through an alternative femininity, via an ‘Anti-Pygmalion’ aesthetic, we can reclaim the negative descriptions of working-class women as grotesque, and begin to question the constructions of femininity itself. (shrink)

L’objet de cet article est de se demander comment les assistantes sociales de l’entre-deux-guerres envisagent les enjeux de la relation de care qui les lie aux usagers des services sociaux. Les assistantes ont en effet un rôle double : prendre soin des familles populaires mais aussi les surveiller et les contrôler. Comment concilient-elles ces impératifs paradoxaux en cherchant la « bonne distance » avec leur public? Pour répondre à cette question, nous nous tournons vers les archives de la formation professionnelle. (...) En effet, les écoles de service social contribuent à définir les attentes de la relation de care et à établir le cadre dans lequel prennent place ces interactions. Nous nous penchons dans un premier temps sur le discours de la vocation chez les postulantes au métier d’assistante, puis sur la manière dont la formation professionnelle régule ces aspirations. Nous concluons sur la force de la notion de care, qui permet de penser l’imbrication entre rapports de domination et bienveillance envers autrui. (shrink)

Many authors argue that middle-class lesbians present themselves as butch or fem less than working-class lesbians and that butch and fem were discouraged by 1970s feminist stigma but are reemerging in postfeminist decades. By analyzing “women seeking women” personal ads, this study provides a longitudinal, quantitative analysis of the validity of these assumptions. The results suggest that middle-class lesbians were less likely to present themselves as butch or fem than working-class lesbians but (...) no less likely to be seeking a butch or fem partner. Also, butch and fem were found to be much more prevalent in the 1990s than in the 1970s or 1980s. Generational cohorts of lesbians based on feminist political ideologies about butch and fem were not found. Prevailing cultural norms within lesbian communities appear to affect all lesbians in an era. (shrink)

This study is the first to explicitly assess the connections between welfare state spending and the gendered and classed dimensions of unpaid care work across 29 European nations. Our research uses multi-level model analysis of European Quality of Life Survey data, examining childcare and housework burdens for people living with at least one child under the age of 18. Two key findings emerge: First, by disaggregating different types of unpaid care work, we find that childcare provision is more gendered than (...) classed—reflecting trends toward “intensive mothering”. Housework and cooking, on the contrary, demonstrate both gender and class effects, likely because they are more readily outsourced by wealthier individuals to the paid care sector. Second, while overall social expenditure has no effect on hours spent on childcare and housework, results suggest that family policy may shape the relationship between gender, income, and housework. Specifically, family policy expenditure is associated with a considerably smaller gender gap vis-à-vis the time dedicated to housework: This effect is present across the income spectrum, but is particularly substantial in the case of lower income women. (shrink)

The working class has been interpreted within various disciplines and conceptual frameworks, some pointing to the gap between the depiction of the working class as a potentially active social force in the neoliberal deregulated global market and its portrayal as a suffering class of the marginal and excluded. In this text, I move behind this dichotomy to explore the everyday experiences of working-class men and women. Based on ethnographic research at the Bata (...) shoe factory in the Czech Republic, I examine the meanings factory workers attach to their working classness. I investigate their sense of place in society in general. I argue that class matters in the workers’ perceptions of the self. On the one hand, the workers adopt the awareness of subalternity in relation to the educational and further the labor field that ranks them among the lowest positions. On the other hand, they take individual pride in their endurance of the hard work that shoemaking is believed to be. The committed work and emphasis on collectivity turn the microorganism of the factory into a place of mutual discipline, where the praised collectivity functions also as a tool for enhancing work effectivity, also in the interest of the management. By pointing to the concrete dimensions in which they balance the feelings of pride and shame, belonging, and symbolic displacement, I contribute to the sociological understanding of contemporary working classness. (shrink)

This article documents a moment in history when poor and working-class white boys and men are struggling in their schools, communities, and workplaces against the “Other” as a means of framing identities. Drawing on two independent qualitative studies, the authors investigate distinct locations where poor and working-class boys and men invent, relate to, and distance from marginalized groups in an effort to create self. First the authors look at an ethnography of “the Freeway boys,” a community (...) of urban white working-class high school boys who must deal with the economic ravagement of their neighborhood and their insecure place in a world different than that of their fathers. Next, the authors draw from a large-scale survey of young adults to hear how a combined sample of urban poor and working-class white men narrate identities that are carved explicitly out of territory bordered by white women and African American men. Across sites, the authors theorize how high schools and workplaces both, in part, create white masculinities and interrupt them, at a time when white working-class boys and men feel under siege. (shrink)

This article explores the process and meaning of occupational mobility among a selected sample of 40 immigrant and nonimmigrant women of Mexican descent in the San Francisco Bay Area who entered the secondary labor market of semiskilled clerical, service, and operative jobs in 1978-1979 and 1980-1981. This labor market was segmented along race and gender lines with few promotional ladders available as the work force became more nonwhite and female. When Chicanas and Mexicanas obtained jobs with fewer Chicano coworkers (...) and greater avenues for advancement, they reported escalating conflictual social relations at work. Occupational mobility contained both objective and subjective dimensions for the respondents. Often a woman felt mobile in a job that lacked the means for advancement because she compared herself to a local Chicano or Mexicano working-class reference group and a self-concept rooted in her class, race, and gender. (shrink)

Chicanas and Mexican women share a history of colonialism that has (a) sustained oppressive constructions of gender roles and sexuality, (b) produced and reproduced them as racially inferior and as able to be silenced, conquered, and dominated physically and mentally, and (c) contributed to the exploitation of their labor. Given that colonialism has also come to shape the way young women of Mexican heritage learn in mainstream US schools, informal education from everyday women's conviviality and solidarity becomes (...) a pivotal context in which they can learn how to reconstitute colonial legacies. We examine how a group of Mexican working-class immigrant women at home and in a sweatshop fashion a girl named Ana, the main character in the popular film Real Women Have Curves, into a confident young woman who engages in what Pérez (1999, 2003) refers to as empowering and dynamic decolonial ways of seeing, knowing, doing, being, and reconstituting. In spite of its contradictions that, at times, assist in reproducing Ana as an oppressed laborer, it is their doing that helps produce her as a woman who engages in decolonial practices by facilitating her to deftly negotiate an oppressive economic and patriarchal space, a mainstream feminist space, and a space where their embodiments and creative cultural discourse, practices, and beliefs shine. As such, the film provides a powerful counterstory (Delgado 1989) that disrupts the chokehold of the logic of colonialism and how it seeks to classify, stereotype, and control young women like Ana. (shrink)

Feminist thinkers have appropriated the central concepts of the early Frankfurt School thinker Theodor W. Adorno, such as his concept of the non-identical, and pointed at his problematic depictions of the feminine. However, despite the growing literature on the latter, there is so far no scholarship that shows how the feminine interacts with class in Adorno’s works. Working-class women appear in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and his later works in the three figurations of the phallic, castrating, (...) and castrated woman. I draw on the theoretical framework of the French psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan to grasp the deeper desires and fears that implicate Adorno in the very same instrumental rationality he aims to counter with his critical theory. (shrink)

Based on data from participant observation and in-depth interviews with women who live in a relatively homogeneous small, rural town, this article examines how women act to produce social class representations. By presenting symbols of socioeconomic positions, including behaviors, tastes, and values, during their work, the women in the town present themselves as working, middle, or upper class women. Through these representations, they secure a place within the town's subjective social class system.

This article examines the cross-generational continuity of community work performed by women living and working in low-income communities and demonstrates the complex ways in which gender, race-ethnicity, and class contribute to the social construction of mothering. The analysis of low-income women's community work challenges definitions of mothering that are limited to biological and legal expressions, thus neglecting the significance of community-based nurturing work for geographic communities and racial-ethnic and class-based groups. The analysis utilizes a broadened (...) understanding of labor and contests the divisions between paid and unpaid work traditionally used to discuss women's work. The article compares and contrasts the experiences of African-American and Latina community workers from low-income communities in New York City and Philadelphia. The findings of the research further demonstrate the ways that knowledge generated from the standpoint of women from different classes and racial-ethnic backgrounds transforms our understanding of politics, labor, and mothering. (shrink)

This paper discusses the ways in which a methodological approach evolved through research work with young women (aged 14-17) living in the Rhondda Valley of South Wales. The project was an investigation of their cultural geographies and micro-geographies and was informed by feminist geography's conceptualisation of gender. The qualitative methods were developed in conjunction with the young women. The methodology developed in a format which was in keeping with the politics of Penygraig Community Project and also with what (...) the young women themselves wanted to do - talk as friendship groups. In such a way, the politics and ethics of working with the young people were central because of the ways in which the young women themselves constructed the research that was conducted and ensured that their voices were heard as they discussed what they felt was important to them at that particular time. (shrink)

This paper discusses the ways in which a methodological approach evolved through research work with young women living in the Rhondda Valley of South Wales. The project was an investig...

In this article I present a discussion about the purpose of education of, for and with black, working class, young women within an inner-London, twenty-first century college, and explore the complex and imperfect ways that educational purpose translates into educational practice. I discuss the respective value of two contrasting discourses of education that operate in this college: firstly, a neoliberal discourse of education and educational success; secondly, a critical tradition of education, as traced through the work of (...) Paulo Freire, feminist critics of his work and, ultimately, the work of bell hooks. I argue that a neoliberal rhetoric surrounding education, and the ways it translates into the practice of educating, plays a particular role in Black British, working class girls’ continuing educational marginalization. I thus articulate a more liberatory approach to teaching and learning with young, black women, drawing specifically on a hooksian vision of education as it emerges primarily through the work of, Ruth Nicole Brown and Stephanie D. Sears. Within these discussions, I explore dance as a potentially liberatory pedagogic practice, and articulate a possible approach here as an, always imperfect, embodied pedagogy of hope. (shrink)

Using in-depth interviews with women in the Puerto Rican community of Chicago, this article explores how migration emerged as a strategy for families across class backgrounds and how gender relations within the family mediate the migration of married working-class and middle-class Puerto Rican women. The women who followed their husbands to Chicago participated in another form of labor migration, since some wives joined their husbands in the paid economy and those who did not (...) contributed with the reproductive work that supported their husbands and families. This article also explores how Puerto Rican women confront the basic duality of reproductive and productive work. (shrink)

This paper explores the motivations and experiences of British women working as lap dancers in the tourist resorts of southern Tenerife, with a particular focus on the subjective choices and processes undertaken by working-class women in the embodiment of positively evaluated identities. It uses Skeggs’ theoretical framework of ‘becoming respectable’ (1997) alongside other debates on ‘identity management’ in order to begin mapping the ways in which migrant British lap dancers produce themselves, negotiate gender and (...) class='Hi'>class, and seek forms of respectability, reputability and honour through their work. Drawing on empirical data, it will discuss how strong disassociations with the Other are formed, and how and why important binaries, particularly distinctions between lap dancing and prostitution and lap dancing and other ‘degraded’ forms of work and lifestyle are drawn in the dancers’ own stories of themselves. It will look at notions and processes of gaining ‘respectability’ through part of a wider migrant discourse, exploring how being a migrant lap dancer can serve as a vehicle for reproducing a ‘respectable’ and otherwise positively evaluated self on several levels. (shrink)

Drawing on data from 100 qualitative interviews with the recently unemployed, this study examines how participants made decisions about attempting to return to work and identifies how class and gender shape these decisions. Middle-class men were most likely to take time to attempt to return to work, middle-class women were most likely to begin a deliberate job search, working-class men were most likely to report an urgent search, and working-class women were (...) most likely to have diverted searches. Financial resources, gendered labor force attachments, and family responsibilities shaped decision making. Ultimately, those in the middle-class appear doubly advantaged—both in their financial capabilities and in their ability to respond to the crisis with greater gender flexibility. (shrink)

When a professor from Middle Europe teaches Computer Ethics in the Middle East using a textbook from the US, cultural differences become apparent. A main challenge lies in avoiding cultural imperialism during teaching. In order to meet this challenge, personal portfolios have been used for course work. The course design as well as portfolio tasks are presented and experiences are discussed. Based on our experiences we recommend applying this approach to equally overcome effects of group dynamics in similar courses as (...) well as to bridge the generational gap that normally exists between students and professors. (shrink)

Exploratory studies employing volunteer subjects are especially vulnerable to race and class bias. This article illustrates how inattention to race and class as critical dimensions in women's lives can produce biased research samples and lead to false conclusions. It analyzes the race and class background of 200 women who volunteered to participate in an in-depth study of Black and White professional, managerial, and administrative women. Despite a multiplicity of methods used to solicit subjects, White (...) women raised in middle-class families who worked in male-dominated occupations were the most likely to volunteer, and White women were more than twice as likely to respond to media solicitations or letters. To recruit most Black subjects and address their concerns about participation required more labor-intensive strategies involving personal contact. The article discusses reasons for differential volunteering and ways to integrate race and class into qualitative research on women. (shrink)

This paper recovers and investigates the work of two forgotten figures in the history of American philosophy: Ella Lyman Cabot and Mary Parker Follett. It focuses on Cabot's work, developed between 1889 and 1906. During this period, Cabot took several classes given by Josiah Royce at Radcliffe College. Cabot's work creatively extends Royce's early thinking on the issues of growth, unity, and loyalty. This paper claims that Cabot's writing serves as a valuable type of Roycean interpretation—an interpretation that sheds light (...) on Royce's philosophy while redeploying his thinking in ways that explore its ethical and social implications. Cabot is an important figure in the community of classical American thinkers, a figure who deserves greater attention. This analysis concludes with a brief discussion of Cabot's legacy as it is carried on by Mary Parker Follett's progressive and feminist writings published in the early decades of the 1900s. Follett's contribution to the field of organizational management reveals her affinity with Cabot and variety of other American thinkers. (shrink)

The mutual interaction and interdependence of race, class, and gender create profound political dilemmas for feminist activists. How can we create coherent, inclusive political movements when the very oppressions we seek to dismantle also divide us internally? This article seeks answers to this question by exploring the history of the Southeast Women's Employment Coalition, which throughout the 1980s sought to unify working-class women in the South across the divide of race. The article concludes that gender (...) is insufficient to effect political unity among racially diverse women, but that a “politics of solidarity,” based on an appreciation of the intersections of race, gender, and class, is possible. (shrink)

Drawing on the narratives of young lower-middle-class women employed in cafés, call centers, shopping malls, and offices in Delhi, India, in this paper I identify malleability or “plasticity” of the body as an important feature of contemporary service work. As neophyte service professionals, young women mold themselves to the middle-/upper-class milieu of their workplaces through clothes, makeup, and body language. Such body plasticity can be experienced as enabling: Identifying with the image of the “New Indian Woman,” (...) young women enter the bourgeoning service economy. However, they also experience this body plasticity as threatening; bodily changes to meet the requirements of work can, at times, feel inauthentic as well as be read as promiscuous by others. I draw attention to how women appraise plastic bodies as both generative of change and a site of labor discipline, thus offering insights into the relationship among bodies, social inequalities, and contemporary service work. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the ways in which women narrate a move from a ‘working-class’ position to a position marked (in however fragmentary and complex a way) as ‘middle class’. While such a move might be seen in terms of a straightforward escape from a disadvantaged social position, I argue here that what has to be analysed is the pain and the sense of estrangement associated with this class movement. Drawing on the class (...) narratives of a group of seven white British women, the article uses Bourdieu's concepts of symbolic capital and habitus to explore the cultural and symbolic configurations of class. These configurations may be inscribed into the self, so that the self, itself, is class marked. Since working-class selves are frequently marked in pathological terms, this raises particular difficulties for the idea of an ‘escape’ from such a position. Class in this sense is embedded in people's history and so cannot be so easily ‘escaped’. The usual conventions of life-narratives – in which the self remains the same entity from birth to death and later events are a culmination of earlier ones – are also disrupted in this case. But if a working-class position is marked as pathological, so too is taking on the markers of middle-class existence. To do so is not only to risk ‘getting it wrong’, but it is also to risk the scorn attached to ‘pretentiousness’. There is a particular jeopardy here for women, since it is women who have been especially associated with desires for artefacts associated with bourgeois existence. The article argues for a focus for classed desires and class envy, not in pathological terms, but in terms of a coherent response to political and social exclusions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Programs aimed at increasing women’s entrepreneurship are a rapidly proliferating class of CSR initiatives across the globe with participation by many of the world’s largest corporations. The gendered nature of this phenomenon suggests that feminist approaches to CSR may offer a particularly salient mode of their analysis. In this article, I argue that insights from feminist economics regarding the historically prevalent—but narrow and gendered—definition of work, which artificially separates production from reproduction, provide fruitful tools for theory building when (...) conceptualizing gender through the lens of CSR. I demonstrate that the gendered separation of production and reproduction is typicallytaken as givenin entrepreneurship, and that mainstream CSR research has not sufficiently challenged this perspective. I present a conceptual framework of what is to be gained by examining the CSR, entrepreneurship, and feminist economics literatures in combination, and demonstrate how researchers might use this framework for future research. (shrink)

Using data from 80 in-depth qualitative interviews with women randomly sampled from New York City, I ask: how do women develop expectations about their future workforce participation? Using an intersectional approach, I find that women’s expectations about workforce participation stem from gendered, classed, and raced ideas of who works full-time. Socioeconomic status, race, gender, and sexuality influenced early expectations about work and the process through which these expectations developed. Women from white and Latino working-class (...) families were evenly divided in their expectations about their future workforce participation, while the vast majority of white, Asian, African American, and Latina middle-class women expected to work continually as adults. Unlike their working-class white and Hispanic peers, all of the working-class Black respondents developed expectations that they would work continuously as adults. The intersections of race, class, and gender play a central role in shaping women’s expectations about their participation in paid work. (shrink)

Ackelsberg investigates women’s activist participation in the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, a Brooklyn association established in 1974–75, which she treats as a model of democratic civic engagement that incorporated differences while avoiding the exclusions of the past. The NCNW assisted poor and working class women in organizing to better meet their needs and those of their communities. It arose in response to the ways women were either ignored or belittled when they attempted to (...) engage in political work both in their communities and beyond. In working with each other, the women found that they needed to address issues of diversity. The programs they created to help build bridges across differences that helped facilitate their successful activism while, simultaneously, broadening their understanding of what constitutes “politics.”. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the question of how to reconceptualize “women” in order to do a more intersectional feminism. Intersectionality—the idea that gender, race, class, sexuality, and so on operate not as separate entities but as mutually constructing phenomena—has become a gold standard in contemporary feminist scholarship. In particular, intersectionality has achieved success in showing that the old conception of women as a single, uniform concept marginalizes women and others who exist at the intersecting axes of multiple (...) oppressions (e.g., women of color, women in the global South, working-class women, and/or queer and trans people), and thus, demonstrating the need to develop a new way of conceptualizing women. However, the question of what such a new conception would be remains unanswered. Specifically, if feminist theory today is to destabilize the old notion of “women” that relegates multiply oppressed women to the margin of feminism, and yet still needs to use some notion of “women” to critically analyze how the social structure of sexist oppression operates to subordinate women and to dismantle this oppression, how should the concept “women” be reformulated? In this dissertation, I argue that we need to understand women as a concept that is open to constant redefinition, which is socio-historically situated in the actualities of oppression. This is what I refer to as the “situated redefinition” model of women, which is formulated in more detail as follows: -/- The Situated Redefinition Model of Women (SR) – The concept “women” should be always open to being redefined in a way that it could better serve political goals grounded in the actual, daily lives of the marginalized. That is, “women” should be always open to new meanings and provisional definitions that the marginalized would find more useful to achieve political goals, which grow out of their concrete experiences in the current intersecting structures of oppression. -/- My central argument is that we need to understand the concept “women” according to the situated redefinition model, in order to employ this concept for doing intersectional feminism. To support this thesis, the dissertation is divided into two main parts. By engaging with the intersectionality literature, critical race feminisms, Asian/American feminisms, and recent critiques of intersectionality, the first part of the dissertation elucidates what exactly it means for feminism to be more “intersectional.” The second part develops the situated redefinition model and articulates why this model is needed to do intersectional feminism, drawing on the social/political philosophy literature on non-ideal theory, postmodern discussions of universality, and feminist discussions of identity politics. Broadly, this dissertation seeks to shed new light on how we understand and use the concept women for feminist ends. My conceptual model offers a way for feminist scholar-activists to subvert the essentialist/exclusionary notion of “women” without abandoning altogether feminist-political deployments of the concept “women” for the purpose of ending sexist and intersecting oppressions. (shrink)

Abstract:AbstractWomen's Liberation was a radical, multiracial feminist movement that grew directly out of the New Left, civil rights, antiwar, and related freedom movements of the 1960s. Its insight that “the personal is political,” its intentionally decentralized structure, and its consciousness raising method allowed it to grow so fast and with such intensity that it swept up liberal feminist organizations in a wildfire of change. Though women's liberation was fundamental to the emergence of a mass feminist movement, the persistent stereotypes (...) of this feminist upsurge as white, middle-class, anti-motherhood, and anti-sex have obscured the creative radicalism of this early period and erased the presence of women of color and working class women. In a period of extreme racial polarization, feminist efforts to articulate the intersections of gender with race, class, and sexuality were often deeply flawed, but they began a conversation on which later generations could build. As scholars unearth the complex history of this dynamic and revolutionary moment they complicate narratives of the so-called “second wave.”. (shrink)