Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

"Só Para Mulheres" (Just For Women): Alfonsina Storni's And Clarice Lispector's Transgression Of The Women's Page, Mariela Méndez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

This article considers the contributions of Argentinean poet Alfonsina Storni (1892–1938) and Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) to the women’s column of newspapers and journals in their respective countries. The women’s column or page was a section entirely dedicated to women’s concerns, addressed specifically to a female readership, and generally authored by a woman or a female persona. As such, it operated under specific parameters of form and content. This article argues that both writers’ transgression of this discursive space can be seen as resignifying gender meanings and potentially transforming readers’ perception of female subjectivity. Analyzing selected pieces from the …

Managing To Clear The Air: Stereotype Threat, Women, And Leadership, Crystal L. Hoyt, Susan E. Murphy

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

In this article, we explore the process and implications of stereotype threat for women in leadership, broadly construed. First, we provide a brief background on the phenomenon of stereotype threat generally. Next, we explore stereotype threat for women in leadership by reviewing a model of stereotype threat in leadership contexts that includes cues to stereotype threat, consequences of stereotype threat, and moderators of stereotype threat appraisals and responses. In this review, in addition to considering research focused squarely on leadership, we include the broader categories of research examining stereotype threat effects in the workplace and in tasks and domains relevant …

Women, Land & Justice In Tanzania (Book Review), Sandra F. Joireman

Political Science Faculty Publications

Among the many debates surrounding land in Africa, one that has endured through both colonization and independence is the argument over the merits of preserving customary land law. Human rights based approaches to property rights in Sub-Saharan Africa note women’s secondary or derivative rights to land under customary law, correctly identifying inequalities in rules and practice. Communitarian approaches, on the other hand, address the adaptability and accessibility of land regimes defined by customary law. This book contributes to the debates on women, land and law and, while it will be frustrating to some as it does not take a side …

Women's Gun Culture In America, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

A recent article in the New York Times focused on the possible increase in female gun ownership in the United States. This “new” phenomenon of women and guns is of course far from new: as early as the 1870s, trapshooting for women was publicized by gun manufacturers as yet another feminine activity, not far removed from shopping or club work. The ultra-feminine Annie Oakley, who in the 1880s became an international star in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, personally taught fifteen thousand women to shoot. By the turn of the twentieth century, gun manufacturers were promoting hunting as a healthful activity …

The Second Glass Ceiling Impedes Women Entrepreneurs, Douglas A. Bosse, Porcher L. Taylor Iii

Management Faculty Publications

The glass ceiling phenomenon that impedes the advancement of talented women professionals into senior executive roles inside large corporations is widely recognized in society, studied in the management literature, taught in business schools, and tangibly felt by many women executives. Outside the corporate setting, we show that a second glass ceiling exists for women entrepreneurs and women small business owners. This second glass ceiling is a gender bias that obstructs women-owned small firms from accessing the financial capital required to start new firms and fuel the growth of existing firms. This paper (1) defines the second glass ceiling phenomenon, (2) …

Waves Of Feminism: Discussions And Disruptions, Melissa Ooten, Emily Miller

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

As an educator and a student situated in women, gender and sexuality studies, we find it of great importance to analyze our relationship with each other and with our fellow students and teachers. As both student and teacher, we are already actively engaged in social justice work. As a teacher, Melissa wants not only to support and nourish the work of her students, but she also wants to give students the theoretical tools necessarily to fully analyze and frame their experiences. In other words, she wants them to understand the connections between theory and practice in order to be informed …

Women Home From War, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

The first time I heard a woman describe her deployment in glowing terms, I was taken aback. Marine Colonel Jenny Holbert told me that being in charge of public affairs for the second battle of Fallujah was "probably one of the biggest events of my life, other than birthing two children." I thought, cynically, that this enthusiasm was all part of her role as a public-affairs officer. It took me a while to understand how compelling the experiences of being in a combat zone could be for the women I talked with. Colonel Holbert's enthusiasm for deployment was only one …

Disorienting The Furniture: The Transgressive Journalism Of Alfonsina Storni And Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mariela Méndez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Drawing on the journalistic prose of two major literary figures of early-twentieth-century Argentina and the U.S., this article breaches cultural, national, and geographical frontiers by comparing the discursive gestures through which Alfonsina Storni and Charlotte Perkins Gilman re-appropriate for themselves the canonical genre of essay-writing to advance their feminist agendas. By undermining the presuppositions underlying so-called feminine publications of their time, both women carry out an intriguing disarticulation of the classic private/public divide that empowers their female readers to conceive of female subjectivity in new and innovative ways. Almost a mythic figure in the world of Latin American letters, Alfonsina …

A Birth And A Death, Or Everything Important Happens On Monday, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

I was going to be a grandmother. It had taken all too long. I gave birth to my first child, Warren Dance Jr., when I was only twenty-one, but Warren Jr. was going to be almost thirty-six when his first child was born. As excited as I was, I decided to wait until a week after the July 4, 1995, appearance of my new grand to visit him in Houston, Texas. Other members of the family were going to be there for the birth, and I wanted time to enjoy this baby all by myself, so I planned to arrive …

Bridging The Divide: Connecting Feminist Histories And Activism In The Classroom, Holly Blake, Melissa Ooten

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

Learning about the historical traditions of social change movements is critical for today’s students. Students need social justice role models to understand what has changed as a result of people’s organized and individual efforts over time. Students need to learn from the successes and challenges of past movements in order to know that change is not only possible but that they, too, can be change agents. When exposed to the depth and breadth of activist histories – histories of which they usually have little to no knowledge of – students start to think more critically about their own education. They …

Radical Labor In A Feminine Voice: The Rhetoric Of Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones And Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mari Boor Tonn

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Two women in particular, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, earned stature as labor movement legends. Jones persists as an icon for contemporary champions of progressive causes. Separated in age by nearly six decades, both gained reputations for their “leather-lunged” and militant oratory, their disarming fearlessness, and their uncanny talent for captivating the minds and hearts of audiences regardless of sex or ethnicity. Some observers have linked the pair through what Marx termed “the feminine ferment” of the movement. “The fiery example of Mother Jones had one conspicuous follower,” note Lloyd Morris, “Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.”

Dangerous Bodies: The Regulation And Contestation Of Women's Sexuality At The Movies In Virginia, Melissa Ooten

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

In 1922, the General Assembly of Virginia created a motion-picture censorship board to regulate out of popular culture images its cultural arbiters ruled detrimental to state officials' attempts to modernize and "clean up" the image of Virginia. On-screen depictions of women's sexuality repeatedly fell prey to the board's "protectionist" ideology, by which censors argued that their work "protected" society's most vulnerable citizens. In reality, such an ideology served as an extension of state power to keep subjective, realistic portrayals of these already marginalized citizens out of popular culture in order to justify their continued status as "second-class" citizens within the …

Fiera, Guambra, Y Karichina!: Transgressing The Borders Of Community And Academy, Patricia Herrera

Theatre and Dance Faculty Publications

As Latinas with diverse biographies in and out of the university,¹ we share a commitment to actively engage with all of our communities. As students and teachers, we are expected to leave our personal lives out of our "intellectual" workspaces, causing feelings of isolation and fragmentation (hooks, 1994). We are concerned with the ways we can maintain a sense of connection and wholeness for our well-being and that of our communities. Our collaboration with the National Latina Health Organization's (NLH0)² Intergenerational Latina Health Leadership Project has enabled us to work toward this goal. This project provides a revolutionary …

Miss America Contesters And Contestants: Discourse About Social “Also-Rans”, Mari Boor Tonn

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Although feminism, of course, emerged out of the actual personal experiences of discrimination and other forms of subordination, ameliorating such obstacles required and requires a collective politics, most identifiable in liberal feminism’s focus on equality of opportunity in the public domain, such as Title IX or the push for the ERA I described. Whatever Debra Barnes’s individual achievements, those obviously neither did have nor could have had bearing on the eventual opportunity of young women to participate in intercollegiate athletics, as I did, or to make the legal reproductive decisions occasioned by Roe v.Wade. As Dow argues, the mobility or …

Operation Rescue, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

Operation Rescue, founded in 1986, became known as one of the most militant groups opposing a woman’s right to abortion as established in the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe vs. Wade.

Enhancing Women's Studies Action Research Projects Through Technology, Lucretia Mcculley

University Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

This article describes how library and Internet technology enhanced an action research assignment in a unique women’s studies program, Women Involved in Living and Learning (WILL), at the University of Richmond. The Women’s Studies Liaison Librarian and the Director of the WILL Program collaborated to provide a meaningful assignment that incorporated the use of online databases and the Internet. The main objective of the assignment was to provide a research opportunity whereby the students would learn to use electronic women’s studies resources and actually utilize the information into some type of social action, such as writing a letter, volunteering in …

Sharing The Light: Representations Of Women And Virtue In Early China, By Lisa Raphals (Book Review), Jane Geaney

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Lisa Raphals' Sharing the Light is a useful collection of the latest available information regarding the role of women in early Chinese history. In contrast to conventional interpretations, Raphals aims to demonstrate that in early China women were not as socially constrained as later periods portrayed them. The focus and the main virtue of her work lies in collating and interpreting a significant amount of information on this topic.

Revisiting The "Men Problem" In Introductory Women's Studies Classes, Glyn Hughes

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Outside women's studies classrooms, discourses of white masculinity under siege are proliferating with devastating consequences for women and people of color. Indeed, in each of the most reactionary domestic political events and trends of the past five or so years the social group most united in the support of reaction has been young white men, from the 1994 "Republican revolution," to California's propositions 187 and 209. Yet, against the backdrop of globalized labor markets and diffusing corporatization, the manifest destiny of being young, white, and male in the United States now seems to many like a cruel promise; in the …

The Shell Seekers And Working Women Readers’ Search For Serenity, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

For the last decade feminist literary critics have convincingly argued that bestselling novels from Gone with the Wind (1936) and Forever Amber (1944) to The Valley of the Dolls (1966) and The Flame and the Flower (1972) reveal the psychic needs of twentieth-century middle-class American women, and that these needs have as much to do with desire for the emotional sustenance they once received from their mothers as with desire for heterosexual romance. However, as more and more women have moved from the private to the public workplace, their psychic needs have changed somewhat. Based on the American popularity of …

Cinderella, Marie Antoinette, And Sara: Roles And Role Models In A Little Princess, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Role-model criticism, the easiest and often most logical form of criticism for children’s literature, has fallen out of favor in our more theoretically sophisticated times. Toril Moi, surveying the state of feminist criticism in 1985, devoted a chapter to “Images of Women” criticism, finding it overly prescriptive and frequently self-contradictory in its calls for a “realistic” or accurate depiction of women’s lives simultaneously with the desire for “strong, impressive female characters” (47). Since many real women (and men!) are neither strong nor impressive, the effort is doomed from the start. And the specific call for “role models” is problematic in …

Feminist Empowerment Through The Internet, Lucretia Mcculley, Patricia Patterson

University Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

The University of Richmond's upper division Political Science course, "Women and Power in American Politics," has several ambitions. Among these is an exploration of the power of information technology to foster political research by and about women and to advance feminist political aims.

Women's Studies Student Questionnaire, Lucretia Mcculley, Patricia Patterson

University Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

The University of Richmond Women's Studies program developed a student questionnaire in 1996 as part of larger program assessment project from 1993-1996.

Seeking Polly, Pretty Polly, Poor Polly, Or The Granddaughter Seeks To Remember What The Grandfathers Sought To Forget, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

My great-great-great-grandmother is so special to me because I found her despite the fact that she was deliberately written out of my his-tory. And this is the story of our meeting.

Feminists Face The Job Market: Q & A (Questions & Anecdotes), Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

When I began work on this paper I designed a questionnaire to be filled out by women who had recently been on the job market. It asked for fairly detailed information: titles of accepted articles, writing samples, and dissertation, number of MLA interviews, other interviews, campus visits, kinds of questions asked, etc. I had hoped, I think, to develop a magic formula—twelve writing sample requests divided by three interviews multiplied by two publications equals an 87% chance of getting a job, for example. But I had trouble developing the formula; no common patterns emerged. The first thing I did learn …

Absolute Margaret: Margaret More Roper And "Well Learned" Men, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

This article suggests that Margaret More Roper's 1534 letter to Alice Alington is an important witness to Tudor ideas of patriarchy and the history of gender identity. In 1557 William Ras tell was the first of many to question not only Margaret's authorship of the letter, but also her acquiescence to authorities and opposition to her father. Evidence suggests, however, that Margaret was a part of Erasmus's humanist network of friendship, remained so after More's refusal to swear the oath and his imprisonment, and that her appeals to her father were genuine. By the time Margaret and More debated conformity, …

Zora Neale Hurston, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Some new information is occasionally being ferreted out that may help to cast additional light on some of these issues, but quite clearly Zora Neale Hurston will remain something of an enigma - too complex a figure to reach any easy conclusions about, except perhaps that she defies simple characterization. People responded to her (and still do) very emotionally: her detractors despise her bitterly; her defenders love her passionately. All agree that she was eccentric, colorful, entertaining, humorous, and unforgettable.

Perhaps the most crucial question to pose about her is why one of the most important figures in the Harlem …

Black Eve Or Madonna? A Study Of The Antithetical Views Of The Mother In Black American Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Within these two extreme views of woman - the mother who brings death and destruction versus the mother who brings life and salvation - where does the Black American mother stand? It seems to me that it would not be inappropriate to look at the literature, not as mere fiction, but rather as an interpretation and compilation of history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and a host of other areas. Thus the true literary artist reveals life more accurately and with more insight than any historical facts and statistical details, because he deals with the truth of the human heart, with the …