Showing papers in "Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society in 1982"

Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory

Abstract: Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one's own, yet most taken away Marxist theory argues that society is fundamentally constructed of the relations people form as they do and make things needed to survive humanly Work is the social process of shaping and transforming the material and social worlds, creating people as social beings as they create value It is that activity by which people become who they are Class is its structure, production its consequence, capital its congealed form, and control its issue

Feminism and science

Abstract: Over the past fifteen years, a new dimension to the analysis of science has emerged. Feminist theory, combined with the insights of recent developments in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, has raised a number of new and important questions about the content, practice, and traditional goals of science. Feminists have pointed to a bias in the choice and definition of problems with which scientists have concerned themselves, and in the actual design and interpretation of experiments, and have argued that modern science evolved out of a conceptual structuring of the world that incorporated particular and historically specific ideologies of gender. The seventeen outstanding articles in this volume reflect the diversity and strengths of feminist contributions to current thinking about science.

Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910-1918

Abstract: Female consciousness, recognition of what a particular class, culture, and historical period expect from women, creates a sense of rights and obligations that provides motive force for actions different from those Marxist or feminist theory generally try to explain. Female consciousness centers upon the rights of gender, on social concerns, on survival. Those with female consciousness accept the gender system of their society; indeed, such consciousness emerges from the division of labor by sex, which assigns women the responsibility of preserving life. But, accepting this task, women with female consciousness demand the rights that their obligations entail. The collective drive to secure those rights that result from the division of labor sometimes has revolutionary consequences insofar as it politicizes the networks of everyday life.

Early Feminist Theory and the "Querelle des Femmes", 1400-1789

Abstract: We generally think of feminism, and certainly of feminist theory, as taking rise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most histories of the Anglo-American women's movement acknowledge feminist "forerunners" in individual figures such as Anne Hutchinson, and in women inspired by the English and French revolutions, but only with the women's rights conference at Seneca Falls in 1848 do they recognize the beginnings of a continuously developing body of feminist thought. Histories of French feminism claim a longer past. They tend to identify Christine de Pisan (1364-1430?) as the first to hold modern feminist views and then to survey other early figures who followed her in expressing prowoman ideas up until the time of the French Revolution.1 Yet

Sexual Assault and Harassment: A Campus Community Case Study

Abstract: EDITORS' NOTE: Howz serious and widespread a problem is sexual harassment in our universities? What means will effectively diminish its incidence without violating the rights of individuals? Each of thefollowing essays answers one of these two questions. In the first, Bernice Lott, Mary Ellen Reilly, and Dale Howard describe the results of a 1979 survey that examined a sample of the entire University of Rhode Island population. Its purpose was to determine how many of the respondents in the sample group had personal knowledge of or had experienced any form of sexual assault, intimidation, or insult; how they had responded to assault; and their beliefs about harassment in general. In the second essay, Judith Berman Brandenburg delineates a response to the problem worked out at Yale University: the establishment of a grievance procedure administered through a specially selected board. The process of this honest search for answers uncovers other questions: Do we have a definition of sexual harassment upon which most people will agree? Is power thefactor that transforms what may be cajolery into harassment? If so, power in what forms? Do these forms make the problem invulnerable to any solution? With these essays we open a dialogue on such questions. We invite your letters in response, in the hope that through the exchange we canfurther advance feminist efforts to analyze-and to overcome-this pernicious form of sexual injustice.

Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture

Abstract: Cultural changes of the later Middle Ages were characterized by a shifting relationship between the laity and traditional religious institutions leading eventually to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The development of lay piety and the rise of vernacular literature were interrelated and were two of the more significant of these cultural changes. Expressions of lay piety have been attributed to a confluence of unsettling political, religious, demographic, and even climatological factors during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The breakdown of

For and about Women: The Theory and Practice of Women's Studies in the United States

Abstract: In 1977, a decade after the first women's studies courses appeared across the United States, the National Women's Studies Association was founded to promote and sustain "the educational strategy of a breakthrough in consciousness and knowledge" that would "transform" individuals, institutions, relationships, and, ultimately, the whole of society.' Insisting that the academic is political and the cognitive is affective, the NWSA's constitution clearly reflected the influence of the women's liberation movement on women's studies. Research and teaching at all educational levels and in all academic and community settings would be not

The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking

Abstract: ions, see Marks and Carolyn G Burke, "Report from Paris: Women's Writing and the Women's Movement," Signs 4, no 2 (Summer 1978): 843-55 The most important American theoretical texts prophesying a woman's language are Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon, 1973) and Gyn/Ecology (Boston: Beacon, 1978) Per contra, see Robin Lakoff, Language and Women's Place (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); Mary Hiatt, The Way Women Write (New York: Teacher's College Press, 1977); Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley, eds, Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance (Rowley, Mass: Newbury House, 1975); and the empirical studies referred to in Cheris Kramer, Barrie Thorne, and Nancy Henley, "Perspective on Language and Communication," Signs 3, no 3 (Spring 1978): 638-51 11 Here and in other essays on contemporary American women's poetry, I take 1960 as an approximate point of departure Among the breakthrough works appearing between 1959 and 1965 are Mona Van Duyn, Valentines to the Wide World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959); H D, Helen in Egypt (New York: New Directions, 1961); Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960) and All My Pretty Ones (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962); Denise Levertov, The Jacob's Ladder (New York: New Directions, 1961) and O Taste and See (New York: New Directions, 1964); Diane Wakoski, Coins and Coffins (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962); Adrienne Rich, Snapshots of a Daughter-inLawu (New York: Norton, 1963); Carolyn Kizer, "Pro Femina," in Knock upon Silence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963); Sylvia Plath, Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) It needs to be stressed, however, that the women's movement in contemporary poetry is not confined to these and other well-known poets but includes hundreds of writers whose work appears in small press and magazine publications 70 Ostriker This content downloaded from 1371401131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:18:58 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Variability Hypothesis: The History of a Biological Model of Sex Differences in Intelligence

Abstract: sociobiology, a prevailing theme in the scientific study of sex differences has been the assumption that biological structural properties have ineluctable behavioral consequences. The belief that \"biology is destiny\" was not invented by the Freudian theorists, nor is it exclusive to that model of human behavior. The precise biological mechanisms proposed to produce behavioral differences vary as a function of the cultural and scientific zeitgeist. Darwin's explanation of secondary sex characteristics, for example, is not equivalent to sociobiology's explanation of the same phenomena. Though the scientific form of the explanation may change radically from one generation to the next, there is traditionally a remarkable correspondence between prevailing scientific notions regarding gender differences and sociocultural definitions of genderappropriate behavior. Furthermore, beliefs about specific behavioral sex differences presumed to emerge from biological sex differences show great stability over time. Emotionality, nurturance, and dependencequalities ascribed to femaleness by psychodynamic theorists as well as sociobiologists-are qualities that were assigned to female nature in the earliest scientific studies of the psychology of gender. Until this century, male intellectual superiority was regarded by scientists as an established

Feminist Discourse and Its Discontents: Language Power, and Meaning.

Abstract: The feminist thinker who wishes to tackle the puzzles of power and take up questions of meaning must consider the nature of language itself. There are several reasons for this. First, debates over whether or not discourse is inevitably or necessarily domination, a form of "power over" others, provides much of the exciting interplay of diatribe and dialectic, polemic and philosophical argumentation, that characterize contemporary debates in social and political theory. Some writers on the text as power are feminists; others are not.1 But all who explore these issues are intrigued by the peculiar relationship between author-text-reader along some vector of power. A mild version of the thesis that power infuses discourse is stated by Paul Foss: "Discourse has become the arena for the generation and propagation of historically specified norms and socially adequate forms of power."2 Sheila Rowbotham puts the case more urgently: "Language conveys a certain power. It is one of the in-

The Sexual Politics of the New Right: Understanding the "Crisis of Liberalism" for the 1980s

Abstract: This essay will explore the New Right's analysis of the "crisis of liberalism" both as an economic philosophy and as a political ideology. Its critique of liberalism, which amounts to an indictment of the welfare state, attributes this crisis to the changed relationship between the state and the family. Therefore the fundamental thrust of present New Right politics is directed at redefining this relationship. In some sense, the New Right thinks that the welfare state is responsible for undermining the traditional patriarchal family by taking over different family functions. The health, welfare, and education of individuals, it believes, should be the purview of the family. The New Right's critique of the welfare state in this way becomes closely linked to its understanding of the crisis of the family. I intend to ask whether this analysis is not a misreading of history. If, as I believe, the growth of the welfare state is as much a response to changes in family structure as it is a cause of those changes, then the New Right has wrongly identified the source of the crisis and as a result has provided us with anachronistic models of the family and the state for the 1980s. From the perspective of the New Right, the "problem" of the family-defined as the married heterosexual couple with children, the

Mexican American Women in the Social Sciences.

Abstract: The treatment of minority women in social science literature has long reflected the surrounding society's sexual and racial differentiation. Dorothy Smith's contention that women have been "outside the frame" of social science investigation is especially true of minority women.' As a consequence of erroneous assumptions and limited empirical research, Mexican-American women have been particularly misconstrued. The image of Chicanas in the social sciences has been narrow and biased. They have been portrayed as long-suffering mothers who are subject to the brutality of insecure husbands and whose only function is to produce children-as women who themselves are childlike, simple, and completely dependent on fathers, brothers, and husbands. Machismo and its counterpart of female submissiveness are assumed to be rooted in a distinctive cultural heritage.2

Lesbian Identity and Community: Recent Social Science Literature

Abstract: This article reviews recent social science literature on the relationship between lesbian identity and community Specifically, it considers how lesbian communities both affirm and challenge the individual lesbian's sense of self There is much in the autobiographical literature on lesbian experience that makes us aware that lesbian communities enhance that sense of self These communities provide a haven or home in a hostile or distrusting outside world They lend support for what is frequently a stigmatized life-style choice They command recognition of a distinctively lesbian sensibility-a sensibility that is unusual because of the value it places on intimacy between women Yet lesbian communities, along with their virtues, also pose crucial identity problems for their members At times, they seem to threaten as well as affirm individual identity The problems posed by lesbian communities are similar to those found in many other social groups and especially in minority groups, where efforts to achieve group solidarity and cohesiveness often conflict with efforts to foster individuality and to tolerate internal deviance

Women and the History of American Technology

Abstract: Only six years ago, when preparing a paper for the bicentennial meeting of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), Ruth Schwartz Cowan puzzled over a new question: "Was the female experience of technological change significantly different from the male experience?" Answering in the affirmative, Cowan accepted the challenge of charting what was largely terra incognita. She identified four areas of special concern for a feminist history of technology: technology's impingement

Sexual Harassment in the University: Guidelines for Establishing a Grievance Procedure

Abstract: A student doing well in her field of study begins to cut classes, postpone assignments, and avoid going to her instructor's office during office hours-even when she has questions. She considers dropping the course, changing her major, and perhaps transferring to another school. The reason? Unwanted sexual attention. Her professor, however, considers his interest in her a compliment. "Where is her sense of humor?" he wonders when charged with sexual harassment. This hypothetical case is not unusual. Increasingly, universities are being faced with the problem of sexual harassment. No longer considered isolated incidents or personal problems, cases of sexual harassment are being widely discussed. Consider, for example:

The Way of All Ideology

Abstract: I begin thinking about political theory by thinking about the way we think. I speculate about ideology. About form. And then about dialogue. The three phenomena occur to me at once. Forms: the forms of hierarchies, of institutions, of habits, the way things are done; the forms of language, gesture, art, of thought, and equally, of emotion. What we say to one another being often what it is predictable that we will say; what I will say, if you say that: Dialogue.

Women and Work: Issues of the 1980s

Abstract: The volume of research by economists on the economics of women's work continues to grow.1 One of the things that is becoming increasingly clear is the interdependence of what at one time were considered separate topics, namely, women's role within the family and their role in the labor market.2 The division of this review into two separate sections, then, is somewhat artificial. Nonetheless, most studies emphasize one or the other of these areas, which encourages such a format. The first section of this essay focuses on women's nonmarket work, the second on labor market earnings-particularly on various explanations and remedies for the earnings gap between men and women. Such compartmentalization must not, however, imply the absence of interaction between these two aspects of women's work. Other topics could be included in a review of recent economic re-

Lighting the Cave: The Relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

Abstract: Katherine has been dead a week, & how far am I obeying her "do not quite forget Katherine" which I read in one of her old letters? Am I already forgetting her? It is strange to trace the progress of one's feelings. Nelly said in her sensational way at breakfast on Friday "Mrs Murray's dead! It says so in the paper!" At that one feels-what? A shock of relief?-a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little-then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine wont read it. Katherine's my rival no longer.1

Storming the Toolshed

Abstract: Sections II and III of this article reflect their occasions. "Lupine Criticism" was given as a talk at the Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting in San Francisco in 1979. Florence Howe chaired the session with panelists Mary Helen Washington, Sydney Janet Kaplan, Suzanne Juhasz, and Tillie Olsen.' There was a large and enthusiastic audience, and the session was remarkable historically for discussion of race, class, and sexual identity, particularly lesbianism, and for vocal criticism and participation from the audience. The sparse audience for feminist sessions the following year in Houston, the current debate in the National Women's Studies Association over the primacy of the issues of racism and lesbian identity,2 and the concurrent minimization of differences in feminist literary criticism itself by Annette Kolodny and others in recent

The American Anthropological Association Resolution on the Employment of Women: Genesis, Implementation, Disavowal, and Resurrection

Abstract: Women's issues marked domestic affairs in the United States during the 1970s much as the Vietnam War dominated foreign affairs in the 1960s. Both left their impress on academia. In the 1960s anthropologists protested the role of social science in support of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. The decade ended with the "Thailand Controversy" in the American Anthropological Association (AAA), but the association backed off from a forthright stand against anthropological research that contributed to American strategic goals in Southeast Asia. Several anthropologists who had fought for public condemnation of such research by the association found their position rejected by the association's leadership. Part of that story was told in the New York Review of Books by Eric Wolf and Joseph Jorgenson.1 The issue of discrimination against women in employment had a similar history in the anthropological profession in the 1970s. The AAA passed a strong resolution, one with teeth, in 1972. In 1979 it was disavowed by the association's executive board. Only in 1981, following a

Studying the Changing Roles of Women in Rural India

Abstract: Resultats et problemes d'une recherche sur le terrain conduite entre 1965 et 1979 en milieu rural dans la region de Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh (Inde). Etude du role et des responsabilites des femmes, et de la pratique du purdah, reclusion et port du voile, qui caracterise tant les femmes hindoues que musulmanes.

Changing Attitudes toward Work and Marriage: Turkey in Transition

Abstract: The concept of modernization assumes numerous dichotomies between traditional and modern societies, which have been analyzed by social scientists since the nineteenth century. Although theorists differ on the number of stages in modernization and on the factors that determine \"modern\" society, they generally agree about the process of societal transformation as well as about the core structure of a modern society. The major elements in a modern society have been identified as the culture, personality, social structure, and economy-in order of their causal significance. As Stanley DiViney and John Crowley have noted, \"This causal ordering also works to explain the purported universality of the modernization process and outcome due to the global penetration of the causal variable-modern values.\"' Social scientists who subscribe to this theory of modernization consider development to be a universally consistent phenomenon that entails not only the formation of an industrial structure but the total sociocultural transformation of a society. In recent years, however, many social scientists have begun to dispute the assumption that changes in individual attitudes and values will necessarily accompany sociostructural change.2 In fact, it has been suggested that a disjuncture between values and structure may occur in the modernization process. Modernization, often viewed as a struggle to

Working-Class and Peasant Women in the Russian Revolution, 1917-1923

Abstract: Scholars studying the history of women in revolutions, especially in twentieth-century Marxist revolutions, have usually begun by examining the ideology of the revolutionary leaders and the programs they established to accomplish women's emancipation.' This is a logical and easily justifiable approach. But crucial also is an analysis of the attitudes and behavior of women themselves. The female masses play an often overlooked part in shaping a revolution's course and results; and, equally important, women's responses to revolution reveal much about their beliefs, loyalties, and fears and about their position and roles in the social system. The study of the female masses in the Russian Revolution is only beginning. Published materials and archives that hold the record of women's experience in the years 1917-21 have yet to be explored in depth. This article therefore offers a preliminary examination of some of these documents, suggesting interpretations that may prove useful as guides to deeper analysis. The period of the Russian Revolution was for women, as for men, a time of paradox, in which the lavish promises of the new government were accompanied by enormous deprivation and frightening social disintegration. However, the chaos of revolution held a particular danger

"Women's Studies": A Note on the Perils of Markedness

Abstract: Signs welcomes comments on articles. They will be considered if received within three months of the appearance of the article to which they are addressed. In selecting them for publication, we will consider the importance of the issues being discussed, length (which should be as short as possible), and the freshness of the perspective offered. We will try to publish comments within four issues of the publication of the original article. The author of that article will have the right to reply.

Displacing the Phallic Subject: Wittig's Lesbian Writing

Abstract: Though Monique Wittig's first two books, L'opoponax (The Opoponax) and Les guerilleres (Les Guerilleres), have been the focus of considerable attention, her last two, which have the word "lesbian" in the title, have been relatively ignored. The present essay analyzes one of these neglected works, Le corps lesbien, which I consider an important contribution to the epistemological revolution now being carried out by feminist thought, especially the aspect of the revolution that attacks the semiological problem of "phallogocentrism." Wittig's reorganization of metaphor around the lesbian body represents an epistemological shift from what seemed until recently the absolute, central metaphor-the phallus.2

Biorhythms in Human Reproduction: The Not-so-Steady States

Abstract: One of the first concepts one learns in biology is that of homeostasis: the internal environment of both plants and animals must be kept very constant. In order for a cell to survive, any disturbance of its internal milieu must be readjusted quickly. This concept dominated the early days of endocrinology as well. Most hormones were thought to be kept constant in level, with two exceptions: insulin, secreted in response to high sugar levels, and the hormones of the female reproductive system. The monthly occurrence of menstruation in nonpregnant women, sometimes accompanied by physical discomfort and/or changes in mood, was assumed to be, and later proven to be, linked with the periodic waxing or waning of "female" hormone levels. Men, on the other hand, were thought to be in a "steady state" of hormonal balance because they did not appear to undergo these cyclic changes. This supposed constancy was considered a virtue and a basis for the reputedly greater emotional strength and stability of the human male.

Comment on Rosaldo's "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology"

Abstract: Finally, Cooper indicts the sex researchers for having no real appreciation for the quality of human relationships: \"Masters and Johnson seem to have lost any sense of what human relationships are apart from their sexual functions.\" Less than a paragraph's breath earlier, however, he accuses them of maintaining \"prejudice,\" of exerting \"moral judgment,\" because \"they favor being couples over being single, commitment over cruising.\" I conclude that Cooper has written a review that proves the truth of a statement made by Thomas Szaz in Sex by Prescription (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1980): \"The unremitting hostility of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to homosexuals is, in my opinion, now greatly underestimated, especially by homosexual organizations and their leaders.