Women in the Political Economy – serie

Analyzing bureaucrats and clients as the "second sex"

In a unique departure from the usual stereotypes, Susan Ostrander gained access to this elite community and interviewed the women in one U.S. region to study their roles, activities, and self-images. Among her conclusions, Ostrander shows that although these women are economically and socially powerful, they are for the most part, unliberated, being subservient to their husbands and to their duty to bear and raise children.In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.

Case studies of community and workplace organizing that redefine our notions of "the political"

"Lesbian feminism began and has fueled itself with the rejection of liberalism.... In this rejection, lesbian feminists were not alone. They were joined by the New Left, by many blacks in the civil rights movement, by male academic theorists.... What all these groups shared was an intense awareness of the ways in which liberalism fails to account for the social reality of the world, through a reliance upon law and legal structure to define membership, through individualism, through its basis in a particular conception of rationality."In tracing how lesbian feminism came to be defined in uneasy relationships with the Women's Movement and gay rights groups, Shane Phelan explores the tension between liberal ideals of individual rights and tolerance and communitarian ideals of solidarity. The debate over lesbian sado-masochism—an expression of individual choice or pornographic, anti-feminist behavior?—is considered as a test case.Phelan addresses the problems faced by "the woman-identified woman" in a liberal society that presumes heterosexuality as the biological, psychological, and moral standard. Often silenced by laws defining their sexual behavior as criminal and censured by a medical establishment that persists in defining homosexuality as perversion, lesbians, like blacks and other groups, have fought to have the same rights as others in their communities and even in their own homes. Lesbian feminists have also sought to define themselves as a community that would be distinctly different, a community that would disavow the traditional American obsession with individual advancement in the world as it is.In this controversial study of political philosophy and the women's movement, Phelan argues that "the failure to date to produce a satisfying theory and program for lesbian action is reflective of the failure of modern political thinking to produce a compelling, nonsuspect alternative to liberalism."In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.

In this lively critical analysis, Diane Barthel reveals the previously overlooked and underestimated depth of cultural meaning behind contemporary American advertising. Focusing mainly on ads for beauty products directed at women, she demonstrates how stereotypical gender identities are emphasized and how advertising itself creates a gendered relationship with the consumer. She explores psychological, sociological, and cultural messages in advertising to show how Putting on Appearances is anything but a purely personal matter, and how the social realities in which we are forced to live are conditioned by the personal appearances we choose to create.Most advertisements are not sexually obvious, but rely instead on sexual story-telling in which seduction, deception, and passion are portrayed as acceptable means for achieving selfhood. Advertisements that proclaim, "Now is the time to paint your knees" speak with one form of authority: those that present the voice of the all-knowing scientist or the nurturing mother rely on others. Celebrities figure as professional beauties and wise older sisters, sharing their secrets with the consumer. "The Gentle Treatment Great Model Search Made Me a Star. Now it's your turn."Inseparable from the clothes we wear and the products we use are our ideas and fantasies about our bodies. Beauty products present beauty rituals as transcendent occasions, and diet products call up religious imagery of guilt and salvation. The body itself is to be anxiously manipulated and systematically worked over until the consumer "turns her body into...an advertisement for herself, a complicated sign to be read and admired."In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.

Since 1970, women have made widely publicized gains in several customarily male occupations. Many commentators have understood this apparent integration as an important step to sexual equality in the workplace. Barbara F. Reskin and Patricia A. Roos read a different lesson in the changing gender composition of occupations that were traditionally reserved for men. With persuasive evidence, Job Queues, Gender Queues offers a controversial interpretation of women's dramatic inroads into several male occupations based on case studies of "feminizing" male occupation.The authors propose and develop a queuing theory of occupations' sex composition. This theory contends that the labor market comprises a "gender queue" with employers preferring male to female workers for most jobs. Workers also rank jobs into a "job queue." As a result, the highest-ranked workers monopolize the most desirable jobs. Reskin and Roos use this queuing perspective to explain why several male occupations opened their doors to women after 1970. The second part of the book provides evidence for this queuing analysis by presenting case studies of the feminization of specific occupations. These include book editor, pharmacist, public relations specialist, bank manager, systems analyst, insurance adjuster, insurance salesperson, real estate salesperson, bartender, baker, and typesetter/compositor.In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.

The exploration of family care for disabled elderly people

An in-depth look at the sizeable population of women who are domestic workers in Latin America and the Caribbean

A report on the social, political, and spiritual changes for Catholic nuns in the U.S. since Vatican II

A report on the social, political, and spiritual changes for Catholic nuns in the U.S. since Vatican II

Original research on the changing roles of women in Japan and Korea

An in-depth examination of contemporary Chicana writers

'So this is where the brain starts to shut down and that which we treasure most, our personal identities, begins to slip away...I suppose I should be thankful; it's a paycheck'. With this disturbing sentiment, Kevin Henson begins a voyage into the world of 'the temp'. For several years while a graduate student, Henson logged in thousands of hours as a temporary worker in offices throughout Chicago's Loop. Those experiences, and numerous interviews with other temps and temporary counselors, create a vivid and often disheartening picture of working 9 to 5 behind the receptionist's desk, telephone console, or data-entry terminal. In their own voices, the temps in this book lament the frequently demeaning and mundane nature of many assignments: 'You're not paid to think'. 'Temps don't have names; they are just 'the temp.' 'They always harass me...because I just wear a sweater and slacks'. 'The worst part is telling people what you do. They always ask, 'When are you going to get a real job?'Where the temporary service industry is quick to extol the virtues of temp work mainly its flexibility Henson and his cast of temps reveal the tacit pressure to persevere through an unpleasant assignment, to accept every assignment offered, and to readjust personal lives to do so. Outsiders to the established office culture and hierarchy, most temps are asked to do low-skill work and leave more detailed or complicated tasks for the return of the permanent employee. Whether temp life is a preferred choice or grudgingly accepted as the last option when 'real' or permanent work is unavailable, all temps must confront issues of gender, identity, and self-esteem. Henson examines these issues, documenting the concerns and interpretations of temp workers about their own work lives. Author note: Kevin D. Henson is a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

A fiesty story of women entering Australia's government and successfully using state power for social change

This book, the second of two volumes, examines the pressing issues that affect women-pornography, prostitution, battery, rape, pay equity, sexual harassment, motherhood, abortion, adoption, new reproductive technologies-and considers them through the lens of feminist legal theory. It features more than sixty articles by well-known legal scholars and feminists. The contributions are arranged thematically and include an introduction and comprehensive literature review by the editor. Applications of Feminist Legal Theory to Women's Lives will be a valuable text for students, a resource for scholars and policy makers, and a useful introduction for general readers.

In the last twenty-five years the U.S. military has seen the abolition of women's separate corps, the appointment of women generals, and an unprecedented increase in the ratio of women to men. Also, women are now permitted to serve on combat planes and ships. Despite these developments, most civilians know very little about women in the military. This collection includes unusual accounts by women on active duty, retired officers, women who have worked for the armed forces in a civilian capacity, and civilian academics. The book offers insights on a variety of pressing issues including minority women, lesbians, combat, the role of gender in weapons design, and the changing mission of the military. Through personal accounts and commentaries, this book dispels many of the myths about women and the military and explores the reasons for the persistence of misconceptions in the face of increased female participation. This comprehensive effort will be of interest to anyone who wants to know the truth about women in the armed forces and will be a wake-up call to women who feel that the military is irrelevant to them.Author note: Judith Hicks Stiehm is Visiting Professor, Peacekeeping Institute, U.S. Army War College, and Professor of Political Science, Florida International University.

Since the 1960s, academic and activist women have been challenging the conventional wisdom about political life and the study of politics. Organizing her book by standard political concepts -- the mobilization and participation of the mass public; the recruitment, policy preferences, and political style of public officials; agenda-setting; and coalition-building -- Janet Flammang subjects these concepts to a withering feminist critique based on the insights of feminist theory and the empirical evidence of hundred of studies of women's distinctive politics. This book accomplishes four major tasks: *It provides a comprehensive critical history of the changing research on politics and the changing nature of the political science discipline. *It analyzes the course of women's political activism in the United States. *It develops a rich case study of women's politics in Northern California's Silicon Valley, an area once nicknamed \u0022the feminist capital of the nation.\u0022 *It examines coalitions and divisions within the women's movement with sensitivity to minority politics, as in the chapter subtitled, \u0022The Hard Work of Sisterhood.\u0022 Women's Political Voice record the transformative politics of the women's movement and, simultaneously, urges political scientists to ask new questions and to adopt new methods.

Many new mothers and fathers are surprised at how they change as individuals and as couples after a baby is born. Susan Walzer's interviews explore the tendency for men and women to experience their transitions into parenthood in different ways -- a pattern that has been linked to marital stress. How do new mothers and fathers think about babies, and what is the influence of parental consciousness in reproducing motherhood and fatherhood as different experiences? The reports of new parents in this book illustrate the power of gendered cultural imagery in how women and men think about their roles and negotiate their parenting arrangement. New parents talk about what it means to them to be a \u0022good\u0022 mother or father and how this plays out in their working arrangements and their everyday interactions over child care. The author carefully unravels the effects of social norms, personal relationships, and social institutions in channeling parents toward gender-differentiated approaches to parenting.

When she began work on this collection, Barbara Ellen Smith was asked, 'Why work on a book about women in the South? Nobody writes books about women in the Midwest'. In an era of intensified globalization, when populations, cultures, and capital move across the boundaries of nation-states in multiple forms and directions, the concept of a subnational region seems parochial and out-of-date. 'But', Smith argues, 'it is precisely because of the historical construction of the secessionist South as an embattled region when all manners of social problems tend to be blamed on poor women and children and those whose skin is anything but white, that the experiences of racially diverse women in a region legendary for both white supremacy and male supremacy are important to explore'. Collecting in one volume the work of such well-known scholars on Appalachia and the South as Carol Stack, Mab Segrest, and Sally Maggard, among others, "Neither Separate Nor Equal" analyzes the complex and dramatic developments in the lives of contemporary Southern women.Case studies vividly portray women's diverse circumstances and activities from rural African American women in the Mississippi Delta taking on new roles as community builders to female textile workers in North Carolina contending with automation and reorganization of the mills. Focusing on the South's historical legacies as they are manifested and contested in the lives of women today, including the tensions between long-lasting patterns of regional distinctiveness and the disruptions of globalizations, this collection approaches differences of race and class not as forms of separation among women, but as social be they often contentious, difficult, or exploitative relationships. Unifying around a theme of relationality, "Neither Separate Nor Equal" offers searching empirical studies of Southern women and a conceptual model for feminist scholarship as a whole. Barbara Ellen Smith is Director of the Center for Research on Women and Associate Professor of Sociology at The University of Memphis.

When she began work on this collection, Barbara Ellen Smith was asked, 'Why work on a book about women in the South? Nobody writes books about women in the Midwest'. In an era of intensified globalization, when populations, cultures, and capital move across the boundaries of nation-states in multiple forms and directions, the concept of a subnational region seems parochial and out-of-date. 'But', Smith argues, 'it is precisely because of the historical construction of the secessionist South as an embattled region when all manners of social problems tend to be blamed on poor women and children and those whose skin is anything but white, that the experiences of racially diverse women in a region legendary for both white supremacy and male supremacy are important to explore'. Collecting in one volume the work of such well-known scholars on Appalachia and the South as Carol Stack, Mab Segrest, and Sally Maggard, among others, "Neither Separate Nor Equal" analyzes the complex and dramatic developments in the lives of contemporary Southern women.Case studies vividly portray women's diverse circumstances and activities from rural African American women in the Mississippi Delta taking on new roles as community builders to female textile workers in North Carolina contending with automation and reorganization of the mills. Focusing on the South's historical legacies as they are manifested and contested in the lives of women today, including the tensions between long-lasting patterns of regional distinctiveness and the disruptions of globalizations, this collection approaches differences of race and class not as forms of separation among women, but as social be they often contentious, difficult, or exploitative relationships. Unifying around a theme of relationality, "Neither Separate Nor Equal" offers searching empirical studies of Southern women and a conceptual model for feminist scholarship as a whole. Barbara Ellen Smith is Director of the Center for Research on Women and Associate Professor of Sociology at The University of Memphis.

In American culture, the image of balancing work and family life is often represented in the glossy shot of the executive-track woman balancing cell-phone, laptop, and baby. In Weaving Work and Motherhood, Anita Ilta Garey focuses not on the corporate executives so frequently represented in American ads and magazines but, rather, on the women in jobs that typify the vast majority of women's employment in the United States. A sociologist and work and family expert, Garey situates her research in the health service industry. Interviewing a racially and ethnically diverse group of women hospital workers -- clerical workers, janitorial workers, nurses, and nurse's aids -- Garey analyzes what it means to be at once a mother who is employed and a worker with children. Within the limits of the resources available to them, women integrate their identities as workers and their identities as mothers by valuing their relation to work while simultaneously preserving cultural norms about what it means to be a good mother.Some of these women work non-day shifts in order to have the right blocks of time at home, including, for example, a registered nurse who explains how working the night shift enables her to see her children off to school, greet them when they return, and attend school events in the way she feels \u0022good mothers\u0022 should -- even if she finds little time for sleep. Moving beyond studies of women, work, and family in terms of structural incompatibilities, Garey challenges images of the exclusively \u0022work-oriented\u0022 or exclusively \u0022family-oriented\u0022 mother. As women talk about their lives, Garey focuses on the meanings of motherhood and of work that underlie their strategies for integrating employment and motherhood. She replaces notions of how women \u0022balance\u0022 work and family with a better understanding of how women integrate, negotiate, and weave together their identities as both workers and mothers. Breaking new ground in the study of work and family, Weaving Work and Motherhood offers new insights for those interested in sociology, gender and women's studies, social policy, child care, social welfare, and health care.

Today, when fifty percent of couples who marry eventually get divorced, it's clear that we have moved from a culture in which \u0022marriage is forever\u0022 to one in which \u0022marriage is contingent.\u0022 Author Karla Hackstaff looks at intact marriages to examine the impact of new expectations in a culture of divorce. Marriage in a Culture of Divorce examines the shifting meanings of divorce and gender for two generations of middle-class, married couples. Hackstaff finds that new social and economic conditions both support and undermine the efforts of spouses to redefine the meaning of marriage in a culture of divorce. The definitions of marriage, divorce, and gender have changed for all, but more for the young than the old, and more for women than for men. While some spouses in both generations believe that marriage is for life and that men should dominate in marriage, the younger generation of spouses increasingly construct marriage as contingent rather than forever.Hackstaff presents this evidence in archival case studies of couples married in the 1950s, which she then contrasts with her own case studies of people married during the 1970s, finding evidence of a significant shift in who does the emotional work of maintaining the relationship. It is primarily the woman in the '50s couples who \u0022monitors\u0022 the marriage, whereas in the '70s couples both husband and wife support a \u0022marital work ethic,\u0022 including couples therapy in some cases. The words and actions of the couples Hackstaff follows in depth - the '50s Stones, Dominicks, Hamptons, and McIntyres, and the '70s Turners, Clement-Leonettis, Greens, Kason-Morrises, and Nakatos -- reveal the changes and contradictory tendencies of married life in the U.S. There are traditional relationships characterized by male dominance, there are couples striving for gender equality, there are partners pulling together, and partners pulling apart.Those debating \u0022family values\u0022 should not forget, Hackstaff contends, that there are costs associated with marriage culture as well as divorce culture, and they should view divorce as a transitional means for defining marriage in an egalitarian direction. She convincingly illustrates her controversial position, that although divorce has its cost to society, the divorce culture empowers wives and challenges the legacy of male dominance that previously set the conditions for marriage endurance.