Search Results

Conclusion: Projecting single mothers into the future

Rosanna Hertz

in Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women are Choosing Parenthood without Marriage and Creating the New American Family

Middle-class single mothers are here to stay, this chapter states. However, the future is less about women who chanced pregnancy or chose adoption and more about donor-assisted families. These women ... More

Middle-class single mothers are here to stay, this chapter states. However, the future is less about women who chanced pregnancy or chose adoption and more about donor-assisted families. These women are challenging norms of both family and reproduction. Women who choose single motherhood are most often at odds with their biological clocks, bumping up against the constraints of their fertility. More likely, women will turn to science in order to give birth to their own children rather than pursuing other routes to motherhood that involve large adoption fees and having to prove to social workers that they are qualified to be mothers. However, women still prefer to parent with one other parent, and the wish among heterosexual women for a dad for their children remains strong.Less

“Why Can’T I Have What I Want?”

Rosanna Hertz

in Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women are Choosing Parenthood without Marriage and Creating the New American Family

The women interviewed in this book, particularly the middle-class women, often state that they looked toward marriage and found themselves depressed by the dwindling odds of finding love that would ... More

The women interviewed in this book, particularly the middle-class women, often state that they looked toward marriage and found themselves depressed by the dwindling odds of finding love that would lead to children. They were hardened through horrible dates, failed relationships, and bad timing, and marriage took on an elusive quality that had been previously reserved for motherhood. As they believed marriage to be slipping further and further out of their reach, motherhood, on the other hand, moved closer, drawn in by their desire for children. Faced with the decision to choose one or the other in order to win, women found themselves making a difficult life decision. Single motherhood can be the solution to the dilemma for these women.Less

The Periodical as a Genre An Introduction

Shobna Nijhawan

in Women and Girls in the Hindi Public Sphere: Periodical Literature in Colonial North India

This chapter is divided into five sections. While the first section provides the participatory framework of Hindi women’s and girls’ periodicals, the second section discusses middle-class women in ... More

This chapter is divided into five sections. While the first section provides the participatory framework of Hindi women’s and girls’ periodicals, the second section discusses middle-class women in nationalist narratives. The third and fourth section examine gender, tradition, and the politics of nationalism and print capitalism and the participation of women in the Hindi public sphere respectively. The final section considers Gandhian politics and the nationalization of women’s and girls’ periodicals. Hindi women’s and girls’ periodicals emerged at the historical conjuncture marked by a shift in mainstream north Indian discourse from social reform to nationalism. During this period of social transition and political emancipation, Hindi women’s periodicals became a medium for elite and middle-class women to think in new idioms, communicate with strangers, and find a collective identity across local forms of connectedness.Less

‘A Car or a Wife?’ The Northern European Marriage System and the Sexual Revolution

Hera Cook

in The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975

This chapter re-analyses existing statistical sources to explain the underlying transformation and disruption of existing ways of living that occurred as a result of the astonishing reduction in risk ... More

This chapter re-analyses existing statistical sources to explain the underlying transformation and disruption of existing ways of living that occurred as a result of the astonishing reduction in risk of pregnancy brought about by the Pill and legal abortion, and the accompanying collapse of restraints on young women's sexual behaviour. It shows that the greater autonomy that female controlled contraception made possible reached directly into the lives of the vast majority of English women. Over 80% of British women of reproductive age since the early 1960s have taken the Pill.Less

Liminality And The Courage To Change: Making the Decision to Become a Single Mother

Rosanna Hertz

in Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women are Choosing Parenthood without Marriage and Creating the New American Family

A generation or two earlier, Gina Schecter might reasonably have assumed that the men she was dating were both potential partners and potential fathers. However, when her latest relationship ended, ... More

A generation or two earlier, Gina Schecter might reasonably have assumed that the men she was dating were both potential partners and potential fathers. However, when her latest relationship ended, she concluded that she faced two pursuits: one for a child and the other for a partner. In her case, as in most of the women interviewed, baby came first. She found herself in a series of relationships that were going nowhere if she wanted a child. Her account represents the experiences of many women in this study who were stuck without a partner willing to co-parent. Liminality creates a new context, riskily embraced by middle-class women who seek to establish a new family life.Less

Encouraging the Good, Weeding Out the Bad, and Teaching the Ignorant: Women's Organizations and Domestic Workers in New York City, 1870–1915

Vanessa H. May

in Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870-1940

This chapter shows how high the stakes were for middle-class women in the public debate over domestic service. Unless and until female employers confronted the labor problem festering in their ... More

This chapter shows how high the stakes were for middle-class women in the public debate over domestic service. Unless and until female employers confronted the labor problem festering in their kitchens, experts and public observers agreed, they had no business committing themselves to other benevolent reform missions. Inez Godman, a muckraking journalist who disguised herself as a domestic for a series of investigative magazine articles, pointed to the hypocrisy of a National Consumers' League member signing petitions demanding chairs for store clerks “when her own maid is on her feet for at least 11 hours a day out of a working day of 14.” Home economist and social worker Jane Seymour Klink sympathetically described the suffering of one domestic who was never allowed to go to church, although her “employer subscribes liberally to foreign missions.”Less

Introduction

Vanessa H. May

in Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870-1940

This book focuses on what's rotten in the kitchens of America's middle class. Whenever Vassar College historian Lucy Maynard Salmon was in the company of women, talk always turned to the problem of ... More

This book focuses on what's rotten in the kitchens of America's middle class. Whenever Vassar College historian Lucy Maynard Salmon was in the company of women, talk always turned to the problem of paid household labor. At parties and in quiet social gatherings, Salmon observed, “with whatever topic conversation begins,” discussion among middle-class women “sooner or later gravitates towards the one fixed point of domestic service.” This conversation did not take place just in middle-class parlors. In the late nineteenth century, the popular press printed these private whisperings and invited experts on domesticity, labor, and morality to parse the labor relations of the private home for the benefit of a voracious readership.Less

Families: It Is (Not Always) Difficult Once You Have a Family Work, Life, and Balance

Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen

in Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility among India's Professional Elite

This chapter traces the role of families and life course in determining the unlikely gender outcomes found in large law firms. The advantage of the legal profession is that the career trajectory ... More

This chapter traces the role of families and life course in determining the unlikely gender outcomes found in large law firms. The advantage of the legal profession is that the career trajectory allows for a more progressive work–family balance. In particular, women in elite law firms typically start their careers in their early twenties and are in a position to become partner in their early thirties — this timeline for promotion allows women to be in positions of power while they negotiate childcare and maternity leave, whereas women in other elite professions tend to be junior colleagues when they make agentic life-course choices and are penalized accordingly. Yet, the fact remains that the structural career trajectory in these law firms was not introduced to make women more competitive candidates for partnership, but instead, emerged as a response to a concentrated, high-growth legal services market. The chapter then highlights the ways in which this unprecedented success for Indian middle-class women in the workforce depends on two existing inequalities in the grander Indian system: a ready, caste-dependent labor force that supplies affordable housework support and childcare; and a penultimate generation of close female family members who are not in the workforce and are available to provide free and ready household support systems.Less

The Chic Interior: Marketplace Modernism in the Bourgeois Home

Lisa Tiersten

in Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siecle France

This chapter focuses on marketplace modernism in the bourgeois home in Paris, France, during the late nineteenth century. It discusses the feminization of interior decorating and explains that the ... More

This chapter focuses on marketplace modernism in the bourgeois home in Paris, France, during the late nineteenth century. It discusses the feminization of interior decorating and explains that the bourgeois home had become the epicenter of artistic consumption and marketplace modernism by the 1880s and 1890s. It argues that the concept of the consumer as disinterested agent was most fully realized in the bourgeois home of the fin de siècle, where the middle-class woman's role in the market converged with her domestic identity.Less

Black Women, Romance and the Indiewood Rom Coms of Sanaa Hamri

Shelley Cobb

in Indie Reframed: Women's Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema

This chapter explores Sanaa Hamri's innovations on the mainstream genre of the postfeminist romantic comedy in her Indiewood productions Something New (2006) and Just Wright (2010). Compatible with ... More

This chapter explores Sanaa Hamri's innovations on the mainstream genre of the postfeminist romantic comedy in her Indiewood productions Something New (2006) and Just Wright (2010). Compatible with a trend for ‘feel-good’ films about middle-class blacks, Hamri’s films are neither formally innovative nor politically progressive and therefore ignored in studies of contemporary black film and women’s cinema alike. Yet simply in existing, as films about black women made by black female filmmakers who are thereby made visible, Hamri’s films intervene in a pervasively white postfeminist media culture. They also transfigure the black romantic comedy by challenging the dominant stereotype of the middle-class black woman’s negotiation of love and career in which she must give up one to have the other.Less

Sidewalks and Streetcars

Jessica Ellen Sewell

in Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915

This chapter examines women’s behavior on the streets from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. During the late nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, we see a significant ... More

This chapter examines women’s behavior on the streets from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. During the late nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, we see a significant increase in women’s use of public transport as a result of city-wide expansions and neighborhood gaps. Women, when out in public, were supposed to be just about visible to strangers yet more prominently visible towards acquaintances. This type of attitude connotes middle class status. The chapter presents how women were classified into two: visible working-class women and discreet middle-class women.Less

Feminine Habitus: Rhetoric and Rituals of Conversion and Commitment among Contemporary South Korean Evangelical Women

Kelly H. Chong

in The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism

This chapter explores middle-class women's experiences and encounters with evangelicalism and patriarchy in South Korea, which is renowned for the phenomenal success of its evangelical churches. It ... More

This chapter explores middle-class women's experiences and encounters with evangelicalism and patriarchy in South Korea, which is renowned for the phenomenal success of its evangelical churches. It focuses on a female, small-group culture to study the ways women become constituted as new feminine subjects through the development of a novel evangelical habitus—one that is constituted by new dispositions, both embodied and linguistic, and is developed through ritualized rhetorical, bodily, and spiritual practices. Through participation in cell groups, the chapter reveals how women sought healing for experiences of “intense domestic suffering,” notably when attempts at other solutions failed, such as psychotherapy or shamanistic intervention. Yet in spite of the empowered sense of self that many achieved through these therapeutic, charismatically oriented communities, women were still resubjugated to the structures of social and religious patriarchy.Less

The Ideology of Separate Gender Spheres

Frank M. Turner

Richard A. Lofthouse (ed.)

in European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Nietzsche

This chapter considers the intellectual forces that came to place women in the situation of remaining in the home looking out on the world of male activity. It discusses the ideology or set of ideas ... More

This chapter considers the intellectual forces that came to place women in the situation of remaining in the home looking out on the world of male activity. It discusses the ideology or set of ideas that contributed to the widespread social outlook among the middle and upper classes across the Western world during the nineteenth century—that the lives of men and women by nature pertained to distinct social spheres. In examining this set of ideas, it emphasizes that there was considerable discrepancy between the ideals and realities of the lives of women and the ideology of the separate spheres. Furthermore, much of this outlook informed the lives of middle-class women and what were regarded as respectable working-class women. There were millions of very poor women and women living in rural areas upon whom these ideas had only a minimal impact.Less

A Different Kind of Welfare State: California’s Child Care Coalition in the Age of Protest, 1966–71

Natalie M. Fousekis

in Demanding Child Care: Women's Activism and the Politics of Welfare, 1940-1971

This chapter looks at the new voices that began speaking for child care, both in California and across the nation: black mothers in the welfare rights movement and white middle-class women in the ... More

This chapter looks at the new voices that began speaking for child care, both in California and across the nation: black mothers in the welfare rights movement and white middle-class women in the feminist movement. While black and white poor mothers organized in CPACC and around welfare rights, a more visible women's movement developed among predominantly the white middle class. In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) emerged out of frustration over the government's unwillingness to enforce Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made discrimination by sex as well as by race illegal. With seasoned women's rights, labor feminists, and a few black women at its helm, NOW quickly moved to the forefront of the struggle for women's equality.Less

Reflections: Promises of Freedom and Feminism

Carolyn Martin Shaw

in Women and Power in Zimbabwe: Promises of Feminism

This book has investigated feminism's contribution to women's power/empowerment as well as conventional feminine powers in Zimbabwe. It has argued that feminism, the development of consciousness of ... More

This book has investigated feminism's contribution to women's power/empowerment as well as conventional feminine powers in Zimbabwe. It has argued that feminism, the development of consciousness of sexism and the willingness to join with others to end discrimination against women, is not always quiet. Sometimes it is very much evident as in the liberation war or in street protests. At other times it is unobtrusive, as in women's inklings that something is wrong at work, without having the words to name that something. The book has also addressed cruel optimism as a promise of a future good life that is thwarted by the political economy, state spectacles of violence, and conventional attachments. This concluding chapter reflects on some of the important lessons that can be learned about middle-class women in Zimbabwe, and more specifically on the promises of freedom and feminism. It suggests that feminism stirs the promise of a better life, but the economy, politics, and society often do not conjoin to realize that promise.Less