This article analyzes the development of Girls’ Studies as a field of critical inquiry. Although scholars from across the academy and around the world currently conduct girl-centered research, considerable barriers prevented the coalescence of Girls’ Studies until the late twentieth century. The first section of the essay explores the marginalization of girls in youth research and feminist scholarship prior to the 1990s, two fields where one would expect girls, girlhood, and girls’ culture to be of interest. The second section focuses on transformations within and outside the academy that led to the rapid growth of girl-centered research in recent years. The third section provides a map of Girls’ Studies scholarship to date, including a survey of topics explored in specific disciplines and those that deserve more attention, as well as an analysis of broader trends in such research across the academy over the past fifteen years.
This essay examines the ways in which Margaret Mead’s research findings in New Guinea were transmitted to a Chinese-speaking audience through Yang Mei-hui’s annotated Chinese summary of part IV of Mead’s Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). In so doing, Yang served as a cultural intermediary who transmitted Mead’s concept of cultural relativism on gender-role formation to her Chinese-speaking audience. Yang’s annotated summary (1973) serves as a case study of the ways in which a cultural intermediary’s injections of her personal commentaries within a specific cross-cultural context can facilitate her audience’s understanding of the arguments made in the original English text. In this essay, I undertake a textual comparison of Yang’s Chinese annotated summary with Mead’s original English text for the purpose of evaluating Yang’s effectiveness in conveying Mead’s main arguments. In the 1970s and thereafter, Taiwanese feminists applied Mead’s concept of cultural relativism of socially constructed gender to subvert the rigid gender roles in Taiwanese society. In so doing, they contributed to women’s self-determination during the era of Taiwan’s democratization.
This article analyzes pro-life feminist claims with particular attention to how the pro-life feminist movement attempts to shape college students’ attitudes about abortion and understandings of feminism. I explore the messages within pro-life feminist literature and Feminists for Life of America’s (FFL) College Outreach Program activist strategies since the mid–1990s, focusing on its campus visits and “Question Abortion” poster campaign launched in 2000–01. Pro-life feminism represents a small social movement, yet offers a focus for critical analysis of how pro-life feminists seek to frame abortion politics and contest the scope of feminism as it influences younger women. FFL’s campaign defines their anti-abortion ideology as the truly woman-centered, historically feminist position. Pro-life feminists claim to represent best the interests of younger women and feminism, and demonstrate an anti-abortion strategy framed both as a challenge to and an embracing of the contested field of feminism.
The events of 9/11 shifted into prominent view the interconnected discourses of security and finance. The role of individuals and corporations in securing the state in its political and economic dimensions appears to some to be changing. This change is one of dominance and demand in identity terms, shifting back and forth between gendered citizen-consumer, citizen-investor, and citizen-soldier. Participation in the formal market is patriotic, trading is a defense of a way of life against outside threats, and in the first few days after the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, investors/consumers/workers were the first to be in a position to demonstrate their resolve. The dominant discourse reinvests meaning in such a way that reinterprets the actions of individuals and corporations as heroic, "defensive" and patriotic. "Real" men and women are made heroes because of their actions and because of what they represent—they are at once workers/investors/consumers, all soldiers in the "civilizational fight" for an American-led “market civilization” (Gill 1995).
In this article we share teaching strategies that feminist teachers can use to respond to anti-abortion and anti-choice arguments. We also provide teaching techniques that feminist instructors can adopt in their classroom to teach about abortion and reproductive health. This article identifies common students’ arguments and enumerates possible responses. We address religious arguments against abortion (that is, legal abortions increase sexual promiscuity, abortion is morally wrong) and students’ view of abortion as racial genocide.
This article compares early texts from feminist ethicists (Nel Noddings and Sara Ruddick) that focus on care and/or mothering as the basis for ethical models with literary works by two German authors (Christa Wolf and Ingeborg Drewitz) which challenge these models and reveal their structural problems. Although the literary works appeared generally shortly before the feminist scholarship, they all participate in a discussion of how women’s experiences as mothers and caregivers can and/or should factor into the construction of ethical models. Furthermore, the conflicts that come to the fore in the literary texts foreshadow the directions that feminist ethicists themselves went in a continuing dialogue about feminist contributions to the study of ethics. Specifically, the article 1) explores how these two authors illustrate the potential problems with an ethics based either on “maternal thinking” or on a more abstract notion of caring; 2) discusses the directions in which their work points us; and 3) also uses feminist scholarly discussions on ethics as conceptual tools to illuminate more fully the central conflicts in the literary texts themselves.
This article examines how a popular CBS radio comedy about a fictional female high school English teacher, Our Miss Brooks, presented conflicting conceptions of femininity and professionalism in the postwar United States. Our analysis of one hundred episodes broadcast between 1948–57 reveals that the depiction of Miss Brooks focused primarily on her personal life, extracurricular activities, and maternal, caregiving role, while it downplayed her autonomy and intellectual competence. Overworked and underpaid, Miss Brooks was ruled by her male principal. In highlighting this female teacher’s constant quest to find a husband, and through jokes about her financial instability, this radio program suggested that only marriage, with the implied end of her teaching, would complete her identity and allow upward social and economic mobility. In considering commercial sponsorship as well as commentary in the print media, we conclude that many Americans perceived this fictional character as a realistic depiction of a female teacher, and its gender role messages resonated with most audiences. Our Miss Brooks so privileged women’s domestic roles that even within the culturally accepted female career of teaching, it informed audiences that androcentric conceptions of womanhood would still circumscribe women’s career identities in the postwar era.
Pregnancy makes visible and immediate many critical issues in introductory courses in gender, including compulsory heterosexuality, balancing work and family life, and the processes by which we become gendered subjects. The pregnant professor appears to have a body that upholds normative beliefs about marriage and reproduction, an appearance that softens students’ introduction to the critical interrogation of such beliefs. Yet the pregnant body also takes up too much space—both literally and metaphorically—potentially undermining the teacher’s institutional authority by aligning her with “mom” in a setting that has historically depended upon the absence of the (female) body. This essay thus considers the ways that both the classroom and the university are pregnant with opportunities to reconsider power dynamics surrounding the body.
