Women's history

About: Women's history is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5377 publications have been published within this topic receiving 101742 citations. The topic is also known as: Womens History & history of women.

Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color

Abstract: Identity-based politics has been a source of strength for people of color, gays and lesbians, among others. The problem with identity politics is that it often conflates intra group differences. Exploring the various ways in which race and gender intersect in shaping structural and political aspects of violence against these women, it appears the interests and experiences of women of color are frequently marginalized within both feminist and antiracist discourses. Both discourses have failed to consider the intersections of racism and patriarchy. However, the location of women of color at the intersection of race and gender makes our actual experience of domestic violence, rape, and remedial reform quite different from that of white women. Similarly, both feminist and antiracist politics have functioned in tandem to marginalize the issue of violence against women of color. The effort to politicize violence against women will do little to address the experiences of nonwhite women until the ramifications of racial stratification among women are acknowledged. At the same time, the anti-racist agenda will not be furthered by suppressing the reality of intra-racial violence against women of color. The effect of both these marginalizations is that women of color have no ready means to link their experiences with those of other women.

White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness

Abstract: This chapter seeks to explain the invisibility and modes of visibility of racism, race difference, and whiteness. It discusses a feminist commitment to drawing on women’s daily lives as a resource for analyzing society. The chapter draws on both theoretical and substantive analyses of race, racism, and colonialism in the United States and beyond. It argues that the discourse against interracial relationships entails specifically racialized constructions of white femininity in relation to racialized masculinities. The chapter suggests that white women and men were placed, respectively, as victim and rescuer in the discourse against interracial sexuality, vis-a-vis the supposed sexual threat posed by men of color toward white women. It also argues that both heterosexual and lesbian white women’s strategies for coping with the burdens that racism placed on interracial couples seemed at times to be distinctively “female” ones.

Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival

Abstract: In the last two decades one of the key questions that has occupied many feminist theorists is how should issues of historical and cultural specificity inform both the analytics and politics of any feminist project. Although this questioning has resulted in serious attempts at integrating issues of sexual, racial, class, and national difference within feminist theory, questions of religious difference have remained relatively unexplored in this scholarship. The vexed relationship between feminism and religious traditions is perhaps most manifest in discussions on Islam. This is due in part to the historically contentious relationship that Islamic societies have had with what has come to be called "the West," but in part to the challenges contemporary Islamic movements pose to secular-liberal politics of which feminism has been an integral (if critical) part. In particular, women's active support for a movement that seems to be inimical to their own interests and agendas, at a historical moment when more emancipatory possibilities would appear to be available to women, raises fresh dilemmas for feminists.' In this essay, I will probe some of the conceptual challenges that women's participation in the Islamic movement poses to feminist theorists and gender analysts through an ethnographic account of an urban women's mosque movement that is part of the larger Islamic revival in Cairo, Egypt. In this movement women from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds provide lessons to each other that focus on the teaching and studying of Islamic scriptures, social practices, and forms of bodily comportment considered germane to the cultivation of the ideal virtuous self.2 Even though Egyptian Muslim women have always had some measure of informal training in piety, the mosque movement represents an unprecedented engagement with scholarly materials and theological reasoning that had to date been the purview of learned men. Movements such as this one, if they do not provoke a yawning boredom among secular intellectuals, certainly conjure up a whole host of uneasy associations such as fundamentalism, the subjugation of women, social conservatism, reactionary atavism,

Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History

Abstract: Women's Words is the first collection of writings devoted exclusively to exploring the theoretical, methodological, and practical problems that arise when women utilize oral history as a tool of feminist scholarship. In thirteen multi-disciplin ary esays, the book takes stock of the implicit presuppositions , contradictions, and prospects of oral history at the hands of feminist scholars.

Do Muslim Women Need Saving

Abstract: Frequent reports of honor killings, disfigurement, and sensational abuse have given rise to a consensus in the West, a message propagated by human rights groups and the media: Muslim women need to be rescued Lila Abu-Lughod boldly challenges this conclusion An anthropologist who has been writing about Arab women for thirty years, she delves into the predicaments of Muslim women today, questioning whether generalizations about Islamic culture can explain the hardships these women face and asking what motivates particular individuals and institutions to promote their rights In recent years Abu-Lughod has struggled to reconcile the popular image of women victimized by Islam with the complex women she has known through her research in various communities in the Muslim world Here, she renders that divide vivid by presenting detailed vignettes of the lives of ordinary Muslim women, and showing that the problem of gender inequality cannot be laid at the feet of religion alone Poverty and authoritarianism--conditions not unique to the Islamic world, and produced out of global interconnections that implicate the West--are often more decisive The standard Western vocabulary of oppression, choice, and freedom is too blunt to describe these women's lives Do Muslim Women Need Saving? is an indictment of a mindset that has justified all manner of foreign interference, including military invasion, in the name of rescuing women from Islam--as well as a moving portrait of women's actual experiences, and of the contingencies with which they live