Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

At The Same Time African Women And Mothers Resisted: Dialectical Constructions Of Race And Gender In The Black Atlantic And Early Colonies Of The New World, Anna L. Biesecker-Mast

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

We find the rough beginning of this story in the dynamic and contingent scene of the early Atlantic. I say contingent because it is these early complex transatlantic (political and cultural) encounters that fundamentally shaped and shape the trajectory of modernity. At the heart of this development of modernity are constructions of race and gender. And given the contingency of history, it must be noted that, if responses to these encounters had been different, perhaps we would be living with a different modernity—maybe one with different or less harmful notions of race and gender difference.

Understanding how these conceptualizations came …

Protofeminist Freedom To Choose Colonialism, Josie Forsthoff

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

Intersectionality has been a legal and socio-cultural term since 1998 thanks to Kimberlé Crenshaw who put a name to the particular phenomenon of oppression. Her naming of culminating and connected marginalizations also provides an approach to address them. Nevertheless, feminisms that neglect intersectionality persist. The individualist feminist who prioritizes personal choice as the ultimate act of autonomy rarely evaluates the intersections of identity, even their own. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre presents a protofeminist protagonist whose choices to advance her own freedom often contradict the freedom of those who live and labor outside of white and Western society. She is free …

Theories In The Flesh: Latina Feminist Philosophy Approaches To Identity, Sofia Garcia

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

The idea of identity is thoroughly debated by a plethora of philosophers, and it is also a subject that non-scholars question and battle within themselves as well. For those in marginalized communities, whether they are Hispanic, African American, LGBTQ, identity is extremely complex and comes with extreme political, socio-economic, and physiological implications as well. In our current climate these identity questions play out in discussions over critical race theory, immigration policies like DACA, and so many other grave issues. Latinx philosophers take conversations about identity seriously and ask questions such as what is Latina identity really? Is Latina mestiza identity …

Navigating Body, Class, And Disability In The Life Of Agnes Burns Wieck, Caroline Waldron Merithew

History Faculty Publications

The concerns expressed in Burns Wieck’s letter to Hapgood typify many of the issues that occupied her during the course of her life. She, like many Americans in the early twentieth century, thought that there were economic disparities as well as great cultural divisions between the working and middle classes in a capitalist system. Burns Wieck worried about how nature and environment shaped physical and emotional existence for her as a woman and as a worker.4 A question she asked about childbirth in her letter—“Why, oh why, can’t they find some way to humanize that experience?”—is one that she might …

'We Were Not Ladies': Gender, Class, And A Women’S Auxiliary’S Battle For Mining Unionism, Caroline Waldron Merithew

History Faculty Publications

“We Were Not Ladies” uses the 1930s dual union fight between the United Mine Workers of America and the Progressive Miners to challenge the historiography on women’s auxiliaries in the United States. While most labor and women’s historians have focused on the traditional and supporting roles that non-wage-earning women played in male unions, I show a more radical side to working-class housewives’ activism. Through the Women’s Auxiliary of the Progressive Miners, coal miners’ daughters and wives recognized that conventional gender roles could neither gain them political and economic power in their communities, nor could these roles encompass their evolving political …