Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology

264 Pages·2001·1.19 MB·English

by  Roberta Rosenberg (ed.)

Women’s Studies
PETER LANG
New York • Washington, D.C./Baltimore (cid:127) Bern
Frankfurt am Main (cid:127) Berlin (cid:127) Brussels (cid:127) Vienna (cid:127) Oxford
Women’s Studies
AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ANTHOLOGY
Roberta Rosenberg,
EDITOR
PETER LANG
New York (cid:127) Washington, D.C./Baltimore (cid:127) Bern
Frankfurt am Main (cid:127) Berlin (cid:127) Brussels (cid:127) Vienna (cid:127) Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Women’s studies: an interdisciplinary anthology /
edited by Roberta Rosenberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Women’s studies. I. Rosenberg, Roberta.
HQ1180 .W6754 305.4’07—dc21 00-049733
ISBN 0-8204-4443-X
Die Deutsche Bibliothek-CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Women’s studies: an interdisciplinary anthology /
ed. by: Roberta Rosenberg. −New York; Washington, D.C./Baltimore; Bern;
Frankfurt am Main; Berlin; Brussels; Vienna; Oxford: Lang.
ISBN 0-8204-4443-X
Cover and author photo by Terry Lee
Cover design by Lisa Dillon
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council of Library Resources.
© 2001 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York
All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
Printed in the United States of America
For My Children,
Leah and Jacob

Contents
List of Tables ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Roberta Rosenberg
I. Social and Philosophical Issues in Women’s
Experience 13
1. Reconstructing Site as Insight: Reflections of a
Feminist Ethnographer 15
Helen Johnson
2. The Feminist Center of Global Labor Movements 31
Torry D. Dickinson
3. Gender and the Challenge of Social Construction: Mary,
the Mother of Jesus 49
Maurice Hamington
II. Language and Gender Theory 65
4. Feminist Theory and Its Implications for Women and
Language Study 67
Jace Condravy
5. Stirring Women into Adventure 89
Jackie Kiewa
6. “Busting the Masculine Mystique”: Failure as Empowerment
in Men in Late Twentieth-Century American Literature 107
Terry Lee
VIII Contents

III. Women’s Psychological and Biological Issues 125
7. Death and Society: A Feminist Perspective 127
Rebecca Reviere and Robyn W. West
8. Abortion and Pornography: Issues of Symbolic Politics 143
Marilyn Mote-Yale
IV. Women’s Popular Culture and Performing Arts 161
9. Popular Culture: An Introduction 163
Aeron Haynie
10. Representations of the Feminine Ideal in Women’s
Popular Periodicals from 1920 to1996:
Considerations of Race and Class 181
Judith Jackson Pomeroy
11. What the Wise Men Say: Moral Modernization and
Cultural Contradictions in The Snapper 207
Anne McLeer
V. Literature and Gender Relations 219
12. “I’ th’ posture of a whore”: Shakespeare and the
Female Hero 221
Alycia Smith-Howard
13. “The Thing That Really Counts”: Gender Identity in
Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper 235
Julie Sims Steward
14. Latin American Women Writers and the Construction
of a National Patrimony 247
Adriana Rosman-Askot
Contributors 261
Index 265

List of Tables
Chapter 10 Representations of the Feminine Ideal in Women’s
Popular Periodicals from 1920 to1996:
Considerations of Race and Class
Table 1 Grooming Themes on Femininity: The “Looks” 186
Table 2 Two Paradigms of Femininity: “Other” and
“Self” Focused 187
Table 3 Grooming Themes within the Paradigms
of Femininity 189

Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the University Press of New England for the per-
mission to reprint from Lee Edwards, excerpts from pp. 4, 5, 11, and 16
of Psyche as Hero: Female Heroism and Fictional Form © 1984 by
Lee R. Edwards, Wesleyan University Press, by permission of University
Press of New England. The excerpts appear in Alycia Smith-Howard’s
essay.
We would also like to thank Mademoiselle Magazine for permission
to reprint from different issues of the magazine that are included in the
essay by Judith Jackson Pomeroy.

Introduction
Roberta Rosenberg
Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old
text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural
history: it is an act of survival.
—Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.”1
We need to recover and explore the aspects of social relations that have been
suppressed, unarticulated, or denied within dominant male viewpoints. We need
to recover and write the histories of women and our activities into the accounts
and stories that cultures tell about themselves.
—Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Politics.”2
Women’s studies has always had as one of its goals the “re-vising” or re-
seeing of human experience from a different, gendered perspective. In
fact, the history of feminist inquiry in the twentieth century has included
the recovery, exploration, and revising of knowledge that was once thought
“objective” and is now seen to be biased or at least culturally constructed.
The first phase of feminist inquiry (early twentieth century) had three
specific goals according to social historian Maggie Humm: “education,
emancipation and politics.”3 This “first-wave” feminism concentrated on
women’s personal identity and victimhood in a patriarchal society. How-
ever, distinctions among women (race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation)
were often bypassed as writers like Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir
believed women were viewed as “objects” by dominating men. First-wave
writers, therefore, sought to revise and re-see a monolithic category called
“woman” in new ways that would provide equality and equal opportunity.
The second phase of feminist analysis that extends through the mid-
1980s includes a more “woman-centered inquiry” according to Elaine
Showalter in her essay “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.”4 Typical of
this period is historian Gerda Lerner’s question in her book The Majority