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By the late 1970s and early 1980s, black and white women were developing ways of working together, often in conferences or in coalitions around emergencies, such as violence against women. They formed coalitions like the Coalition for Women's Safety in Boston, where they worked together. In a number of conferences, organized by the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA), racism in the women's movement was the topic. Through hard work over years, feminists had begun to understand and that differences divided them but that they could learn to work together in spite of them. Difference became a key word of feminism in this period.

Awareness of gender roles, and gender role conditioning, became increasingly prevalent in late twentieth‐century America. As an outgrowth of the civil rights movement and experiments in consciousness raising, the women's movement promoted gender consciousness as an essential part of women's liberation. The close connection between gender and religion became increasingly apparent, especially as academic courses in women's studies explored these connections. Focusing on the writings of Mary Daly and other pioneers in feminist theology, this chapter shows how gender awareness became an important element in twentieth‐century American spirituality.

This chapter analyzes the pedagogical effectiveness of a course titled the Moral Agency of Women, which was offered to graduate students in theological education, ethics, and women's studies. The course integrated classic descriptions of moral agency (such as Aristotle on voluntariness and constraint and Kant on autonomy), feminist theory, and contemporary cinematic portrayals of women who are facing moral dilemmas. Beginning with the assumption that Western moral thought does not resonate with women's experience, the course entertained several questions. What does women's moral agency look like? Does it differ from that which has been described traditionally? Additionally, given the plurality within women's experience, can we even speak in a monolithic way about their moral agency? The result was an appropriately complex study of moral agency with all of its varied expressions. This chapter expounds on the strengths and weaknesses of using film in this way and identifies some of the unanticipated questions that became central to our course.

The women presented here were all between the ages of thirty and thirty-nine at the time of the interview and come from a wide variety of racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds. Taken together these life narratives reveal a changing landscape of feminist activism. Far more of these activists were trained in women’s studies programs, which, by the late 1990s and early 2000s had become more prevalent in educational settings. Several discuss the complexities of reproductive justice frameworks that are starting to supplant a focus on reproductive rights. Street harassment is a major topic of activism. They reflect on the impact of 9/11 and the economic crash of 2008 on their lives, on the impact of social media on older feminist organizations, and on the fractiousness of the online feminist community. Several of these women live in the Twin Cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, and their interlocking stories reveal both the connections and the fractures within that vibrant feminist community. As this generation of activists seeks to make change, one theme that emerges in several of their stories is their sense that we need to change hearts and minds, and behaviors, not just laws.This conviction was forged at least in part through the horrors of police violence unfolding during the time of these interviews, and the Black Lives Matter movement that was taking shape in response.

American studies was one of the first academic fields to embrace the principle of interdisciplinarity. Chapter 8 reviews the history of the field since the late 1940s, summarizes its main intellectual currents and evolution. In organizational terms, American studies has been successful in terms of its endurance as a field, including the establishment of more than 30 journals and American studies programs in over 50 countries. On the other hand, American studies by no means unified the study of American society and culture. Instead, it helped to create the climate for the creation of additional interdisciplinary fields of inquiry, including African-American studies and women’s studies, thus contributing to the proliferation of new academic units. American studies programs rarely take the form of departments that control their own hiring decisions, and thus recipients of doctoral degrees in American studies must seek employment in neighboring departments such as English, history, film studies and other specialized studies programs.

In this chapter the author summarizes the historiography on Italian-American women within the context of women's studies generally, while emphasizing potential connections between this research and topics of interest to many Italian-Americanists. As is true of immigration studies generally, surveys of Italian-American life — from scholarly reviews to more popular accounts — have often failed to incorporate women's experiences extensively. This reflects something other than the paucity of research on Italian immigrant women and their descendants. Literary studies of Italian-American women have focused on autobiography, oral history, and fiction for insight into women's authentic experiences and subjectivity. Scholars in cultural studies raise troubling questions about the existence of any such self, with its own authentic subjectivity. As the fields change, so will Italian-American women's studies as well.

This chapter explores the institutionalization of the study of comparative, international, and transnational perspectives within the parameters of women's studies programs. The challenge for fields such as women's studies has long been how to institutionalize the study of difference in ways that do not reproduce formulaic or static understandings of complex identities, places, and contexts. One risk in the rise of the paradigm of transnationalism is that the transnational is often simply another racialized marker of difference and otherness. This raises a number of risks and issues for curricular practices and the definition of the field of women's studies. At one level, the racialization of the “transnational” reflects the domestication of the world within national models of U.S. multiculturalism. At another level, the substitution of transnationalism for race also raises dangers that global or transnational perspectives may sideline the systematic study of race within U.S. women's studies programs.

The Introduction presents the book’s main argument that Madam C.J. Walker was not simply a charitable entrepreneur, but rather a great African American and American philanthropist who practiced a distinctive racialized and gendered approach to giving that simultaneously relieved immediately felt needs in her community and thwarted the systemic oppression of the Jim Crow system. The chapter begins by articulating Walker’s embodied philosophy of philanthropy as a “gospel of giving” that started in her twenties when she was a poor, suffering migrant in St. Louis and expanded as she gradually acquired wealth and other resources over time. Her model of giving contrasted greatly with prevailing contemporary approaches by elite white male and female philanthropists who waited until late in their lives to give after accumulating or acquiring wealth. The chapter explores reasons for the absence of Walker and African American donors from major historical fields that have examined philanthropic giving in America. It uses black women’s history to overcome this omission by situating Walker within the larger context of the activism, community work, and fundraising of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black clubwomen, churchwomen, and educators. The chapter constructs generosity as a framework for naming and reclaiming black women as philanthropists. It concludes by noting how Walker, as an example of black women’s giving, challenged core assumptions about the relationship between philanthropy and wealth, women, African Americans, and business. The result is a presentation of black women’s generosity as a long-standing, deeply rooted historical tradition of philanthropy that is alive and well today.

The overall inquiry of Jane Chin Davidson and Deepa S. Reddy essay can be understood as an investigation of the tyranny of dismissing women of color in women's studies communities by silencing them. This essay looks empirically at specific experiences in women's studies for what they are—attempts to delimit voice, speech, naming, and ultimately, contestations made by minority women in the community. Chin Davidson and Reddy conceive of "dismissal" as a practice that is inextricable from the speech act and through a consideration of Kimberely Crenshaw and Derrida seek to renegotiate actions that subordinates expression, participation, and membership in a community that is called "women's studies," the name itself signifying a particular, narrow membership that fails to recognize the shifting constituencies that make up its community.

This chapter examines women and labor, largely organized around twentieth-century economic refigurings and political movements. As yet, little has been done to create a bridge to the emergent literature on the late imperial (or early modern) period, with its studies by Francesca Bray (1997), Susan Mann (1997), Kenneth Pomeranz (2005), and others suggesting that patterns of women's work were no more timeless than those of marriage. Studies of women workers have also paid attention to gendered themes salient to women's studies scholarship outside the China field: daily survival strategies, sexual vulnerability, operative notions of womanly virtue, a gendered division of labor in which women consistently have been undervalued, work histories prominently shaped by marriage and childrearing, and state policies directed at women.

Here, Jones-Katz reveals the routinely overlooked though essential contributions that a cadre of feminists made to the American institution of deconstruction. Informed by post-sixties second-wave feminist teachings and writings as well as the politics of the gay liberation movement, Yale’s feminist deconstructive wing, composed of Judith Butler, Margaret Ferguson, Shoshana Felman, Margaret Homans, Barbara Johnson, Mary Poovey, Jack Winkler, Eve Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, and others, overcame the formalist methodological impasse by rigorously redirecting deconstructive reading toward the paradoxes that undermined the metaphysical hierarchies of gender, sexual difference, race, and psychoanalysis. During the second half of the 1970s, despite opposition from Yale colleagues and threat of retrenchment, feminist deconstructionists and their subversions of the masculine metaphysics of (literary) humanism effectively aided not only fellow feminists’ curricula and scholarship, including the establishment of a Women’s Studies program, but also, by the early 1980s, altered fields of inquiry, such as Mary Shelley studies, Romantic studies, Lacan studies, and Subaltern studies, and established others, such as trauma studies, queer theory, and gender studies. Yale’s feminist deconstructionists were fellow travelers in the larger academic cultural left, expanding the cognitive limits of the humanities and helping to advance a postmodern feminist cultural program across the country.

The conclusion brings together the lessons and insights provided by examining Walker’s philanthropic life. After summarizing the origins, evolution, and character of Madam Walker’s gospel of giving, it underscores the historical importance of black women’s philanthropy in undermining and resisting Jim Crow and its enduring role in ultimately dismantling the institution. Further, it suggests an approach to theorizing black women’s generosity as being based on five characteristics: proximity, “resourcefull-ness,” collaboration, incrementalism, and joy. It also affirms philanthropy as a powerful interpretive and analytical lens through which to examine African American life in general and black women in particular. It urges collaboration between scholars interested in philanthropy and black women to mutually strengthen intellectual inquiry and understanding of who counts as a philanthropist and what counts as philanthropic giving. It contends that Walker’s gospel of giving is more accessible as a model of generosity than the prevailing examples offered by today’s wealthiest 1 percent. It is certainly the direct inheritance of African Americans today, but relevant to all Americans, regardless of race, class or gender, interested in taking voluntary action in the twenty-first century.

This chapter looks at how the concept of gender, one of the most popular feminist terms in Women's Studies circles in China during the 1990s, traveled into and then throughout China. It focuses on issues pertaining to why and how the ideas and knowledge of feminism and Women's Studies travel from “here” (the west) to “there” (China). From whom and to whom do they flow; how and for what reasons? In what form are they received, understood, and localized? This chapter recognizes an ongoing tendency to see translation routes for the terms of “feminisms” as traveling in a one-way direction, from west to east. Yet a closer look at specific Chinese examples of conceptual travel and global translations suggests a more complex story.

This chapter, as an epilogue, offers suggestions about the study of women in recent Chinese history, made in a spirit of creeping discomfort. The project of “engendering China” has entailed enormous excitement and inspiration for several generations of scholars Gender has pried open earlier historical conventions and narratives, disrupted them, troubled them, and made visible some of the integuments that enclosed a discursive world in which “human” generally meant unmarked male. This chapter suggests that people should cultivate several alternative habits of mind in thinking about gender in China's recent history.

This introductory chapter presents the central themes and structure of the book, providing a background of transnationalism and transnational feminism. Interdisciplinary paradigms such as transnationalism are located within and shaped by national imaginations in nuanced ways in U.S. interdisciplinary scholarship. In the 1980s, transnational approaches to the study of feminism emerged through critical engagements with existing ways of addressing global feminism. These emerging approaches sought to move away from understandings of global feminism that ignored inequalities and differences between women. The book thus examines the possibilities and the limits of the paradigm of transnational feminism that has arisen in interdisciplinary fields of study that have specifically been committed to break from nation-centric visions of the world. It focuses on unsettling the nationalization of the paradigm of transnationalism, and to use this discussion of transnationalism to open up questions about interdisciplinarity, finding ways to unsettle the disciplinary mechanisms that posit interdisciplinary fields such as women's studies.

Grey Osterud completed Putting the Barn before the House: Women and Family Farming in Early Twentieth-Century New York, which was supported by the Prelinger Award, twenty years after her first study of gender and generational relationships in a rural community. This chapter reflects on the constraints and opportunities of being a public historian, as well as the dynamic connections between feminist activism and grassroots-oriented research and education programs. It traces Osterud’s trajectory from Boston’s Bread and Roses through living-history museums and labor union workshops to her current vocation as a freelance editor helping authors in African American and women’s history reach wider audiences.

Chapter 6 addresses the question, is a feminist identity good for women? Psychological theory and research on the role that feminism plays in women’s lives in terms of their well-being is examined. Self-efficacy, mental health, body image, and romantic relationships are considered. Do women differ in these areas depending on whether or not they hold traditional gender role attitudes or identify as feminists? Does a feminist identity operate as a protective identity? In addition, the empirical research on the role of women’s/gender studies courses on women’s and men’s attitudes is explored. There is a growing body of research on the benefits of women’s/gender studies courses ranging from increases in critical thinking skills to open mindedness, participatory learning, and self-efficacy. Gaining an understanding of the role these courses play in students’ intellectual and political development will inform larger curricular questions, as well as aid those instructors who teach these courses.

This chapter focuses on Pauli Murray’s contributions to Second Wave Feminism. Murray served on the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, campaigned to retain the sex amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and cofounded the National Organization for Women. She also became the first African American to complete a law doctorate at Yale. Murray gained employment at Benedict College in South Carolina before moving to Brandeis University where she clashed with Black Power student activists over the establishment of Black Studies programs. Murray also won a teaching award and innovated Women’s Studies courses.