Showing papers in "Feminist Studies in 1979"

Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930

Abstract: If innate male aggression and dominance are at the root of female oppression, then the feminist program would logically require either the extermination of the offending sex, or else a eugenics project to modify its character. If sexism is a by-product of capitalism's relentless appetite for profit, then sexism would wither away in the advent of a successful socialist revolution. If the world historical defeat of women occurred at the hands of an armed

Servants, sexual relations, and the risks of illegitimacy in london, 1801-1900

Abstract: For Victorians, illegitimacy was a moral litmus test. Although less obviously censorious, historians have used the incidence of bastardy in a similar manner, as one of the few available means for exploring the otherwise obscure relationship between the sexes in past generations. Illegitimacy statistics provide the principal evidence for Edward Shorter's well-known thesis concerning female emancipation in the nineteenth century. His critics, including Joan Scott and Louise Tilly, use virtually the same evidence to come to the opposite conclusion that women, while acting in new ways dictated by their new industrial and urban circumstances, continued to be motivated by traditional values.1 What follows will not settle this dispute. On the contrary, the evidence presented here suggests that the above participants are wrong in assuming that there is a single general cause of illegitimacy. Concepts of "modernization," "urbanization," and "industrialization" will scarcely suffice as explanations for a phenomenon which has always been, and remains, immensely complex and diverse. In nineteenth-century Britain, bastardy varied enormously by region, culture, and by class; its character and implications differed according to the specific circumstances and values of the women and men involved. The experience of the pregnant Banffshire dairy maid differed strikingly from that of the unwed mother in a Lancashire cotton town. The events which added a London servant's child to the Registrar General's annual bastardy count had yet another configuration.2 In each case factors peculiar to the backgrounds, work, and class positions of the women and men shaped the outcome of sexual relations. The study of London servants suggests the limits of generalization. But at the same time, it provides a mode of analysis that, when applied to other groups of women, could ultimately provide a fuller understanding not only of the causes of historical

Invisible Women: The Legal Fiction of Marital Unity in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract: In Thaler v. Thaler, a 1977 New York divorce case awarding alimony to the husband, the judge had occasion to summarize the nineteenth-century shift in the legal status of married women. At common law, he asserted, "the husband and wife were orne and the husband was the one .... But with the advent of the married woman's property acts ... any previous justification for this one-way support duty faded."' In the same year, however, an unemployed Brooklyn construction worker aired his reservations about his wife's employment by evoking the old common law image of marriage. "When you get married," he said, "you figure it's gonna be like one. Only it's always the husband's one."2 The first of these comments suggests the focus of this essay: challenges to the common law doctrine of marital unity during a pivotal era of American law, roughly 1820-1860.3 The second comment reflects its emphasis: the uncanny persistence of that doctrine far beyond its Christian and common law origins. The judge in Thaler v. Thaler based his decision, in part, on an 1848 statute extending to married women the right to own their own property. He interpreted the statute as a significant legal alteration in the patriarchal family and implied that like the many other statutes passed in common law jurisdictions during this period, it marked the beginning of legal equality between wives and husbands.4 By contrast, this essay contends that the married women's property acts failed to make such a significant alteration. Admittedly, if one defines patriarchy in the husband-wife relationship as the reduction of the wife to the status of property owned and controlled by the husband, one could argue that it never existed in its purest form in the Anglo-American legal tradition.5 Yet, basic elements of that patriarchal construct underpinned all of Anglo-American domestic relations law, and they continued to exist long after the enactment of the married women's property acts of the mid-nineteenth century.

Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left

Abstract: 1. Prologue : cracks in the mold --2. Southern White women in a southern Black movement -- 3. Going south -- 4. Black power-catalyst for feminism -- 5. A reassertion of the personal -- 6. Let the people decide -- 7. The failure of success-women in the movement -- 8. The dam breaks -- 9. Personal politics

Little women: alcott's civil war

Abstract: When, toward the end of Little Women, Jo finds her "true style at last," her father blesses her with the prospect of inner peace and an end to all ambivalence: "You have had the bitter, now comes the sweet. Do your best and grow as happy as we are in your success." And Alcott adds her benediction: "So, taught by love and sorrow, Jo wrote her little stories and sent them away to make friends for themselves and her, finding it a very charitable world to such humble wanderers."' Finding her true style at last was not, however, such a peaceful arrival in safe waters for Alcott herself. She responded with alacrity to the opportunity afforded by the anonymous "No-Name Series" to write something not in her style, declaring that she was "tired of providing moral pap for the young" and enjoying the fun of hearing people say, "I know you didn't write it, for you can't hide your peculiar style.' "2 She prayed more than once for time enough to write a "good" book and realized that without it she would do what was easiest and succumb to the pressure of the "dears" who "will cling to the 'Little Women' style."3 And at the end of Jo's Boys, the last of her books on the March family, she longs to close with an "earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it." Alcott's commitment to her "true style" was evidently somewhat less a choice than a necessity, somewhat less generated from within than imposed from without. Her initial resistance to the proposal from Thomas Niles, a partner in Roberts Brothers Publishing Company, that she write a book for girls had its origins perhaps in an instinct for self-preservation; certainly the success of Little Women limited her artistic possibilities thereafter. Hard it was to deny the lucrative rewards attendant upon laying such golden eggs; hard to reconcile the authorial image inherent in Little Women with the personality capable of the sensational "Behind a Mask"; harder still

"The Men Are as Bad as Their Masters . . .": Socialism, Feminism, and Sexual Antagonism in the London Tailoring Trade in the Early 1830s

Abstract: “However loudly the men may bellow for their own liberties, they will never bestow what they obtain upon woman until she demands it from her masters, as they have done for theirs; and whenever that struggle arrives, the men will be as tenacious of giving up their absurd domination as is any other power of relinquishing its authority...

A brief history of women workers and hazards in the workplace.

Abstract: Lead, benzene, and ionizing radiation are examples of potentially dangerous health hazards for exposed workers. I will discuss these substances in connection with the history of protective/restrictive regulations and the exclusion of women from work settings in which exposure was possible. Each substance has been under scrutiny in relation to effects on the reproductive system of workers in the mid-1970s. The history of women's work and industrial hygiene demonstrates that women have always worked in industries in which exposure to these physical and chemical agents has been severe. It is their illnesses and deaths that have contributed the

Implementing safety and health regulations for women in the workplace.

Abstract: The acronym OSHA was introduced to the American public in December of 1970, bringing with it, for the first time, uniform safety and health protection for the worker in the occupational environment. Nearly seven years later, concerned students and faculty members at Smith College held a special conference to discuss the impact of this legislation on women. In a relatively short period of time, the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 has managed to challenge the advances won by women's rights groups over a long period of time. What was the intent of the Occupational Safety and Health Act? Was the legislation designed to protect or to restrict the worker? To some, the occupational safety and health legislation designed to protect the worker is actually being turned into a vehicle for restricting worker's rights-specifically those of females of childbearing age, working or aspiring to work in nontraditional roles. If societal groups, institutions, labor unions, and other concerned citizens do not monitor existing and potential regulations, great setbacks could occur to all special groups of workers, not only women. Olga Madar, president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, made the following statement at the March 1977 OSHA hearings on lead: "Industry prefers excluding a group with a problem rather than dealing with it. After the fertile women are removed, who will be next? Blacks who carry the sickle-cell anemia trait in their blood? Older male workers who have the highest probability of heart problems? The list of groups with special susceptibility goes on and on, until a strain of superworkers has been bred."' Currently, three federal regulatory agencies directly impact upon the issue of discrimination against women of childbearing age on the basis of reproductive hazards: OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), EPA (Environmental Protection