Journal of Women's History articles from September 2003

Journal of Women's History archives from September 2003

Editor's note.(Editorial)
September 22, 2003... As I write this, I have just finished my first year back in women's studies, after a sixteen-year hiatus spent full-time in a history department. It has been invigorating and challenging, and it has made me realize how profoundly women's...

Women's history in the new millennium: Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence:" a retrospective.
September 22, 2003... Almost since she came to work for the Journal, managing editor Stephanie Gilmore has been lobbying for a retrospective on Adrienne Rich's classic article, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." I knew from my partner, Verta Taylor,...

Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence (1980).(Editorial)
September 22, 2003... Foreword I want to say a little about the way "Compulsory Heterosexuality" was originally conceived and the context in which we are now living. It was written in part to challenge the erasure of lesbian existence from so much of scholarly...

Wars and thinking.
September 22, 2003... "What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion."--Radicalesbians, "The Woman-Identified Woman," 1970 "The realm of human sex, gender and procreation has been subjected to, and...

Asian American history and racialized compulsory deviance.
September 22, 2003... I am deeply honored to participate in this retrospective on Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Approximately fifteen years ago, I enrolled in an undergraduate course entitled "Women and Difference: Marginality,...

No more secrets, no more lies: African American history and Compulsory Heterosexuality.
September 22, 2003... Like many people, I first read Adrienne Rich's article, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," in college. I cannot remember if it was assigned or if I stumbled across it during one of my many trips to the library to find...

Compulsory bodies: reflections on heterosexuality and able-bodiedness.
September 22, 2003... Compulsory Heterosexuality, Compulsory Able-Bodiedness In preparing to write this essay, I stumbled across a 1992 special issue of Feminism and Psychology devoted to the topic of "heterosexuality." The editors had collected seventeen short...

Mothers and other workers: (re)conceiving labor, maternalism, and the state.
September 22, 2003... The current crisis of welfare states under transnational capitalism, as well as challenges to feminist thought internally by both poststructuralism and racial/ethnic/postcolonial diversity and externally by traditionalist backlash, mark the...

In the classroom: gender, genre, and political transformation--an interdisciplinary graduate research seminar.
September 22, 2003... Introduction: Teaching Feminisms, Feminist Teaching One of the most exciting developments to grow out of women's history has been scholarship that uses a gender perspective to reinterpret political history. Within this growing field,...

Flora Tristan and Peruvian feminists in the twentieth century.
September 22, 2003... This paper explores the ways in which Peruvian feminists appropriated the early-nineteenth-century French activist Flora Tristan as their symbol at two historical moments. In the 1940s, Magda Portal, a political activist and writer, claimed...

"Feminism is socialism, liberty and much more" (1): second-wave Chilean feminism and its contentious relationship with socialism.
September 22, 2003... Latin American women have used a variety of political strategies to engage and contest conventional social hierarchies and struggle against gender oppression. These different forms of resistance have gained visibility and become widespread...

"Coming-to-herself": diverging representations of female subjectivity in eastern and western German literary texts in the 1970s.
September 22, 2003... Reading literary texts as mere reflections of social reality ignores their aesthetic and poetic qualities, but reading works of art as autonomous ignores any external influences. This debate over how to appreciate literature has been...

A case study of local feminist mobilization in eastern Germany, 1990-2000.
September 22, 2003... This paper examines the development of the Beginenhof, a women's center in the eastern German city, Rostock, in the years since German reunification in 1990. The recent history of the center, and of the city's women's movement, point to the...

Women's political organizations in the transition to democracy: an assessment of the Spanish and Italian cases.
September 22, 2003... Narrow definitions of democracy, politics, and citizenship are of little use for understanding the place of gender in the process of democratization. Paying more attention to the study of Southern Europe's emerging social movements prior to the...

Whose state? The discourse of nation-state in European feminist perspectives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
September 22, 2003... In their important theoretical and historical interpretation of nationalism, both Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson avoid using metaphors of the masculinity in characterizing nationalism, and they try to include women in their historical...

Mother politics: anti-colonial nationalism and the woman question in Africa.
September 22, 2003... All nationalisms are gendered,... they represent relations to political power... legitimizing, or limiting, people's access to the rights and resources of the nation state. (1) Anne McClintock's comment on nationalism succinctly...

Politics, gender, and genre--the Kurds and 'the West': writings from prison by Leyla Zana.
September 22, 2003... Lyla Zana, the first female Kurdish parliamentarian in Turkey, was imprisoned in 1994 after having tried to call attention to the predicament of the Kurdish minority in Turkey for many years. In her memoirs Writings from Prison, she relates...

In praise of good breeding: pro-natalism and race in the British print media.
September 22, 2003... In March 2000, the United Nations released a report stating that the birthrate in the United Kingdom, Japan, and most of the countries in the European Union had fallen below replacement level (generally set at 2.0 to 2.4 children per woman.)...

In the classroom: a world of difference: Portland Women of the YWCA, 1901-2000--an undergraduate capstone experience.
September 22, 2003... Introduction to the project The essays in this symposium were produced by undergraduate students enrolled in Portland State University's "capstone" program. A capstone is a senior-year course for community-based learning, scholarship, and...

Uncovering "the real work" of the Portland YWCA, 1900-1923.
September 22, 2003... In January 1921, Mrs. Norman Christie, General Secretary of the Portland YWCA, delivered a speech about the Association's work to female students at nearby Linfield College. After the presentation, an audience member confessed to Mrs. Christie...

The best of intentions: upbuilding through health at the Portland YWCA, 1908-1959.
September 22, 2003... In the early twentieth century, the American Committee of the YWCA stated that the Health and Physical Department's mission was the "upbuilding of perfect womanhood." (1) But what was perfect womanhood? Who was allowed to be a "perfect woman"?...

The persistence of Black women at the Williams Avenue YWCA.
September 22, 2003... Despite the Portland YWCA Board's lack of direction in determining what "interracial" work really meant, Black women persisted in the long struggle to end racism and discrimination by bringing unity among races. According to the city of...

Japanese Americans at the Portland YWCA.
September 22, 2003... In Pre-World War II Portland, the Japanese and Japanese-American population constituted a community in transition as younger members laid claim to citizen rights and privileges in U.S. society. (1) Scholars have documented the development of...

From "industrial girls" to "career girls": postwar shifts in programs for wage-earning women in the Portland YWCA.
September 22, 2003... For the first half of the twentieth century, the YWCA actively struggled for the protection and rights of working-class women. In fact, labor issues were a major emphasis of the political and social work of both the national and Portland,...

The One Imperative and the Portland YWCA.
September 22, 2003... In January 1971, following the YWCA's adoption of the One Imperative to Eliminate Racism, the Board of Directors of the Portland, Oregon chapter met to discuss the new prerogative. The board faced the challenge with optimism, epitomized by one...

A silent and invisible history: queer experiences and heterosexism at the downtown Portland YWCA (1).
September 22, 2003... The history of gender and sexual minorities in the United States is a still a relatively young area of academic research. Much of the intellectual and political effort in local queer communities has been dedicated to the fight for basic civil...