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Full-Text Articles in Social Justice
Name-Based Demographic Inference And The Unequal Distribution Of Misrecognition, Jeffrey W. Lockhart, Molly M. King, Christin Munsch
Name-Based Demographic Inference And The Unequal Distribution Of Misrecognition, Jeffrey W. Lockhart, Molly M. King, Christin Munsch
Sociology
Academics and companies increasingly draw on large datasets to understand the social world, and name-based demographic ascription tools are widespread for imputing information that is often missing from these large datasets. These approaches have drawn criticism on ethical, empirical and theoretical grounds. Using a survey of all authors listed on articles in sociology, economics and communication journals in Web of Science between 2015 and 2020, we compared self-identified demographics with name-based imputations of gender and race/ethnicity for 19,924 scholars across four gender ascription tools and four race/ethnicity ascription tools. We found substantial inequalities in how these tools misgender and misrecognize …
The Pandemic Penalty: The Gendered Effects Of Covid-19 On Scientific Productivity, Molly M. King, Megan E. Frederickson
The Pandemic Penalty: The Gendered Effects Of Covid-19 On Scientific Productivity, Molly M. King, Megan E. Frederickson
Sociology
Academia serves as a valuable case for studying the effects of social forces on workplace productivity, using a concrete measure of output: scholarly papers. Many academics, especially women, have experienced unprecedented challenges to scholarly productivity during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The authors analyze the gender composition of more than 450,000 authorships in the arXiv and bioRxiv scholarly preprint repositories from before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis reveals that the underrepresentation of women scientists in the last authorship position necessary for retention and promotion in the sciences is growing more inequitable. The authors find differences between the …
Belle La Follette’S Fight For Women’S Suffrage: Losing The Battle For Wisconsin, Winning The War For The Nation, Nancy C. Unger
Belle La Follette’S Fight For Women’S Suffrage: Losing The Battle For Wisconsin, Winning The War For The Nation, Nancy C. Unger
History
A century ago, on May 21, 1919, the US House of Representatives voted difinitively (304 to 89) in support of women’s suffrage. Two weeks later, Wisconsinite Belle La Follette sat in the visitors’ gallery of the US Senate chamber. She “shed a few tears” when it was announced that, by a vote of 56 to 25, the US Senate also approved the Nineteenth Amendment, sending it on to the states for ratification.1 For Belle La Follette, this thrilling victory was the culmination of a decades-long fight. Six days later, her happiness turned to elation when Wisconsin became the first …
Legacies Of Belle La Follette’S Big Tent Campaigns For Women’S Suffrage, Nancy Unger
Legacies Of Belle La Follette’S Big Tent Campaigns For Women’S Suffrage, Nancy Unger
History
In countless speeches and articles in La Follette’s Magazine, Belle Case La Follette urged that women needed the vote to secure “standards of cleanliness and healthfulness in the municipal home,” and because “home, society, and government are best when men and women keep together intellectually and spiritually.” This range of often mutually exclusive arguments created an inclusive big tent. However, arguing that women were qualified to vote by their roles as wives and mothers while maintaining that gender was superfluous to suffrage also contributed to an uneasy combination that would continue the conflict over women’s true nature and hinder their …
Barren Lands And Barren Bodies In Navajo Nation: Indian Women Warn About Uranium, Genetics, And Sterilization, Marie Bolton, Nancy C. Unger
Barren Lands And Barren Bodies In Navajo Nation: Indian Women Warn About Uranium, Genetics, And Sterilization, Marie Bolton, Nancy C. Unger
History
Founded by Native American women in 1974, "Women of All Red Nations (WARN) insisted that the ongoing Indian public health crisis could not be properly understood exclusively within the context of the exploitation and pollution of the physical environment. It required as well an understanding of the larger context of Indian health issues evolving out of past and present cultural and political changes. This article focuses on selected health, threats affecting the Dine, or "the People," as Navajo Indians call themselves, living in Dine Bikeyah (Navajo Nation) during the mid to late 20th century. Navajo history is marked by …
Adda F. Howie: "America’S Outstanding Woman Farmer", Nancy Unger
Adda F. Howie: "America’S Outstanding Woman Farmer", Nancy Unger
History
In 1894, forty-two-year-old Milwaukee socialite Adda F. Howie seemed a very unlikely candidate to become one of the most famous women in America. And yet by 1925, Howie, the first woman to serve on the Wisconsin State Board of Agriculture, had long been “recognized universally as the most successful woman farmer in America.”1 Howie’s rise to fame came at a time when the widely accepted ideas about gender were divided into the “man’s world” of business, power, and money, and the “woman’s world” devoted to family and home. Yet Howie, rather than being vilified for succeeding in the male …
That The Worst Shooting In Us History Took Place In A Gay Bar Is Unsurprising, Nancy Unger
That The Worst Shooting In Us History Took Place In A Gay Bar Is Unsurprising, Nancy Unger
History
The selection of Pulse, a gay Orlando nightclub, as the site for a murderous homophobic rampage makes the killer’s crime a special outrage in view of the role that nightclubs have played in this nation’s LGBTQ history. Like many popular LGTBQ clubs, Pulse serves not only as a welcoming place to party, but also as a community partner, hosting a variety of social and educational events including, for example, Breast Cancer Awareness and HIV/AIDS prevention. According to its website, Pulse Orlando serves as “a driving force within the GLBT community” and strives to “to make strides towards equality awareness, and …
The Unexpected Belle La Follette, Nancy Unger
The Unexpected Belle La Follette, Nancy Unger
History
Although the New York Times eulogized Belle Case La Follette in 1931 as perhaps "the most influential of all American women who have had to do with public affairs in this country," she faded quickly from popular memory.1 And when she is recalled, it's usually in relation to her husband and sons. This minimization of her own accomplishments began with progressive reform giant Robert M. La Follette famously calling her "my wisest and best counselor." He openly deferred to his wife's judgment throughout his storied professional life: as a district attorney, three-term congressman (1885-1891), lawyer (1891—1900), three-term governor of Wisconsin …
Gay And Lesbian Culture And Politics, John C. Hawley
Gay And Lesbian Culture And Politics, John C. Hawley
English
As laws change and we move several generations away from the times of greatest struggle, the atmosphere that created the contemporary scene for gay and lesbian citizens, their culture and politics, becomes increasingly remote and potentially forgotten. As recent historians have recalled, though, “This was a population too shy and fearful to even raise its hand, a group of people who had to start at zero in order to create their place in the nation’s culture,” –an “invisible people” (Clendinen, 11). The movement for gay and lesbian rights in the United States, considered by many to have originated with the …
Women And Gender: Useful Categories Of Analysis In Environmental History, Nancy Unger
Women And Gender: Useful Categories Of Analysis In Environmental History, Nancy Unger
History
In 1990, Carolyn Merchant proposed, in a roundtable discussion published in The Journal of American History, that gender perspective be added to the conceptual frameworks in environmental history. 1 Her proposal was expanded by Melissa Leach and Cathy Green in the British journal Environment and History in 1997. 2 The ongoing need for broader and more thoughtful and analytic investigations into the powerful relationship between gender and the environment throughout history was confirmed in 2001 by Richard White and Vera Norwood in "Environmental History, Retrospect and Prospect," a forum in the Pacific Historical Review. Both Norwood, in her provocative contribution …
In Search Of A Jewish Audience: New York’S Guild Art Gallery, 1935-1937, Andrea Pappas
In Search Of A Jewish Audience: New York’S Guild Art Gallery, 1935-1937, Andrea Pappas
Art and Art History
How did Jewishness affect the relationships among artists, galleries, artists’ groups and collectors?” Scholars have scrutinized the Jewish presence in American art in the twentieth century over the last fifteen years or so in essays, monographs and surveys. Studies of Jewish artists and their works continue to proliferate, and scholars have even examined the connections between art history as a discipline and Jewishness, contributing to both the history and the sociology of art history and to the range of Jewish studies. The re-evaluation of the work of artists such as Raphael Soyer, Theresa Bernstein, Jack Levine, Mark Rothko, Audrey Flack …
Distancing The Past: New Forms Of Discomfort With Aids In The U.S, John C. Hawley
Distancing The Past: New Forms Of Discomfort With Aids In The U.S, John C. Hawley
English
In his Introduction to this collection, Gustavo Subero makes reference to the AIDS Quilt, a reference made especially significant since the year 2012 marked its 25th anniversary. The whole quilt had been last displayed in 1996; in the summer of 2012, 8.000 panels were rotated each day in the National Mall in Washington, DC. The quilt, composed of thousands of 3’ x 6’ panels (intentionally the size of a human grave), currently consists of over 48.000 panels honoring more than 94.000 individuals who have died of AIDS. In the early days of the quilt, in the 1980s and 1990s, the …
Introduction: Sex, Sexuality, And Gender As Useful Categories In Environmental History, Nancy Unger
Introduction: Sex, Sexuality, And Gender As Useful Categories In Environmental History, Nancy Unger
History
This book is an effort to explain these kinds of extreme gendered divisions and to offer an enriched understanding of the powerful interplay between environment and sex, sexuality, and gender. The synergy produced by that interplay has been significant throughout American history, but it cannot be adequately understood and appreciated as long as those fields are discussed as discrete entities. The fields of gender and environment are growing, but scholars have seldom joined them together in analysis or heeded historian Carolyn Merchant's call that a gendered perspective be added to conceptual frameworks in environmental history.5 They have not offered a …
"I Enter Into Its Burning": Yvonne Vera's Beautiful Cauldron Of Violence, John C. Hawley
"I Enter Into Its Burning": Yvonne Vera's Beautiful Cauldron Of Violence, John C. Hawley
English
Commentators inevitably remark upon Yvonne Vera's prose and upon its startling application to the violent episodes she recounts. Some find it inappropriate, self-conscious, more suited to poetry than to prose. Others (and sometimes the same folks) describe it as by far her strongest suit, wherein descriptive powers overtake narration and plot becomes inevitably amorphous - but lovely. In this essay I wish to analyze why this conflicted response would not have concerned the author and why, in fact, she would have sought to discomfort the reader while bringing pleasure. Many writers before Vera have struggled over the applicability of art …
From Jook Joints To Sisterspace: The Role Of Nature In Lesbian Alternative Environments In The United States, Nancy Unger
From Jook Joints To Sisterspace: The Role Of Nature In Lesbian Alternative Environments In The United States, Nancy Unger
History
Despite the depth and breadth of Catriona Sandilands's groundbreaking "Lesbian Separatist Communities and the Experience of Nature," with its emphasis on communities in southern Oregon, Sandilands does not consider her article, published in 2002, to be "the last one on the topic." Instead she hopes "fervently that other researchers will enter into the ongoing conversation [about queer landscapes)" (136). This essay is an answer to her invitation to draw further "insight from queer cultures to form alternative, even transformative, cultures of nature" (135). It examines the role of place in the history of American lesbians, particularly the role of nonhuman …
Women For A Peaceful Christmas: Wisconsin Homemakers Seek To Remake American Culture, Nancy Unger
Women For A Peaceful Christmas: Wisconsin Homemakers Seek To Remake American Culture, Nancy Unger
History
In the autumn of 1971, sixteen Madison homemakers, including Nan Cheney and Sharon Stein, began "Women for a Peaceful Christmas" (WPC), a unique attempt to do nothing less than remake American culture. Under the slogan "No More Shopping Days 'Til Peace," WPC organized ostensibly powerless homemakers into a "quiet revolt against 'an economy which thrives on war and the destruction of our earth's resources.'' WPC urged the public (especially women, the sex that did the vast bulk of holiday shopping) to take economic, political, and environmental matters into their own hands. "If you don't want your Christmas celebrations to be …
Introduction To Lgbtq America Today, John C. Hawley
Introduction To Lgbtq America Today, John C. Hawley
English
l was born in Los Angeles in 1947 and learned from my classmates in seventh grade that boys who wrote with their left hand or wore green and yellow on Thursdays were homos. Because I did both, I knew I was in deep trouble from the start and might have some pretending to do. Such was the atmosphere for LGBTQ folks in the United States throughout the 1950s. Things loosened just a bit in the 1960s, when hippies were shaking society up. Then, in the 1970s, gay folks seemed to be-a lot more visible--disturbingly so, in the minds of many-and …
The Role Of Gender In Environmental Justice, Nancy Unger
The Role Of Gender In Environmental Justice, Nancy Unger
History
Environmental Justice incorporates an inclusive definition of its subject matter, exploring the environmental burdens impacting all marginalized populations and communities. This expansive definition allows for the possibility that populations conventionally viewed as privileged can nevertheless be marginalized and suffer uniquely from environmental injustices. Employing such a definition can also reveal how an ostensibly powerless group can fight for environmental justice on its own terms—and win. Gender has played an important role in environmental justice (and injustice) throughout the history of the United States. Excerpts from my current book project, Beyond “Nature’s Housekeepers”: Gendered Turning Points for American Women in Environmental …
Teaching “Straight” Gay And Lesbian History, Nancy Unger
Teaching “Straight” Gay And Lesbian History, Nancy Unger
History
The importance of offering a lesbian and gay American history course was initially impressed upon me in 1986. A newly minted Ph.D., I was teaching my very first class: a U.S. history survey at San Francisco State University (sfsu). The course required each student to review a book of his or her choice on any topic in U.S. history. One student chose John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 from my list of suggested titles and wrote a thoughtful, enthusiastic review.1 At the bottom of the review was a handwritten …
The ‘We Say What We Think’ Club: Rural Wisconsin Women And The Development Of Environmental Ethics, Nancy Unger
The ‘We Say What We Think’ Club: Rural Wisconsin Women And The Development Of Environmental Ethics, Nancy Unger
History
The “We Say What We Think” Club: This article discusses the radio program “We Say What We Think Club” which aired on WIBA radio from 1937 to 1957. Though aimed at a female audience, it did not focus on homemaking tips or relationship advice but rather featured a topic-of-the-day. These included a wide range of subjects, such as "Better Clubs for Women" or "Feeding the Family in War Time,” about which the women held a folksy discussion. The author contends that the program reflected an increasing separation of gender spheres that emerged on farms during that era. The five Dane …
Gendered Approaches To Environmental Justice: An Historical Sampling, Nancy Unger
Gendered Approaches To Environmental Justice: An Historical Sampling, Nancy Unger
History
While race and class are regularly addressed in environmental justice studies, scant attention has been paid to gender. The environmental justice movement formally recognized in the 1980s in no way, however, marks the beginning of the central role played by women in the long history of its concerns.' Abuses based in gender as well as race and class have subjected women to a variety of environmental injustices. However, women's responses to the ever-shifting responsibilities prescribed to their gender, as well as to their particular race and class, have consistently shaped their abilities to affect the environment in positive ways. Especially …
How Did Belle La Follette Resist Racial Segregation In Washington D.C., 1913-1914?, Nancy Unger
How Did Belle La Follette Resist Racial Segregation In Washington D.C., 1913-1914?, Nancy Unger
History
Beginning in 1913, progressive reformer Belle Case La Follette wrote a series of articles for the "women's page" of her family's magazine, denouncing the sudden racial segregation in several departments of the federal government. Those articles reveal progressive efforts to appeal specifically to women to combat injustice, and also demonstrate the ability of women to voice important political opinions prior to suffrage.
Evolving Tenure Rights And Agricultural Intensification In Southwestern Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane, Leslie C. Gray
Evolving Tenure Rights And Agricultural Intensification In Southwestern Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane, Leslie C. Gray
Economics
Popular and official representations of the environment in Burkina Faso present soils as fragile and potentially subject to catastrophic collapse in fertility. In the cotton growing zone of southwestern Burkina Faso, researchers and policy makers attribute changes in land cover and land quality to population growth. This paper presents evidence questioning the dominant "population-degradation narrative" as applied to Burkina. We find that farmers are intensifying their production systems. While population has led to land scarcity, farmers are responding to both the resulting uncertainty in land rights and reductions in soil quality by intensifying the production process. Investments are used both …
The Two Worlds Of Belle La Follette, Nancy Unger
The Two Worlds Of Belle La Follette, Nancy Unger
History
Case La Follette, it has been frequently noted, was deemed "my wisest and best counselor" by her husband, Wisconsin progressive great Roberi M. La Follette. She chose to fulfill that counselor's role in remarkable ways throughout their forty-three years of married life, perhaps most significantly by earning a law degree, yet never practicing law herself. This decision was one of many that allowed her to function as her husband's equal in the professional matters that affected him publicly, while reserving for herself a more private and personal role. Belle Case La FoUette's lifetime of decisions reflect her wish to fulfill …