My personal history fueled my historical curiosity about feminism. As the “second wave” of feminism washed over American culture in the 1970s, I could not imagine where all that energy had been stored for so long or why it had revived just then. Why had feminism seemingly waned in the 1920s, with so much unfinished […]
День: 03.09.2015
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY SINCE 1968
In parallel with the growth and diversification of feminism, the discipline of sociology was also changing. In the mid-1960s, the dominant American sociology, which therefore dominated the English-speaking world, was Parsonian structural functionalism. In 1971 Gouldner published an attack on this orthodoxy The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology which was savaged at the time but […]
POWER AND PUNISHMENT
The orthodox ideals of the church and state continually came up against attitudes that were more tolerant of illicit sex. These alternative views are, however, not easy to recover in detail. Because they were neither respectable nor very fully developed, they were rarely written down at length. In poetry and fiction, love was endlessly celebrated, […]
THE MISGUIDED FEMINISM
If we had to name the one cultural current that most characterizes America in the twentieth century, it might be the work of Freud and the disciplines that grew out of it. There is no one who remains unexposed to his vision of human life,, whether through courses in it (“psych”); through personal therapy, a […]
Security power
The prohibition against divorce gave a woman security in her workplace. Nothing gave a man security in his workplace. His source of income could fire him, her source of income could not fire her. Even today, if he quits his job, he doesn’t get severance pay; if she initiates divorce, she takes half the "corporate […]
Control-over-life power
Influence power, though, is not real power. If we told mothers, "The more children you have, the more power you will have,” they would laugh. If we then said, "The more children you have, the more everyone will love you and respect you,” the mother would feel pressured, not empowered. But when we tell men, […]
POSTMODERNISM, FEMINISM AND AGENCY
The clearest statement of feminism’s postmodernist character comes from Jane Flax (1990b), who argues (that feminist theory is typical ofpostmodern philosophy and, as such, reveals many of its characteristics. Flax maintains that feminist theory has contributed to the debates and growing uncertainty within Western intellectual circles about ‘the appropriate grounding’, and methods for explaining and […]
Culture, Neuroimaging, and Aging
Before we examine adaptive functioning and changes in the brain, we will look at another important area that is receiving growing attention: the interplay between culture and neurobiological aging as it affects the mind. Denise Park has spearheaded this approach by asking questions such as where we are likely to find neurocultural differences in the […]
The beginnings of the debate
In 1892 the comprador reformer Zheng Guanying (1842-1923) advocated women’s education for the specific purpose of cultivating ‘virtuous women, virtuous wives, and virtuous mothers’ (xian ’nu, xianqi, xianmu).26 An unsuccessful candidate in the lower-level degree examinations, Zheng in 1860 had entered the commercial profession in Shanghai, where he worked in the offices of the British […]
Identity and Community: Forging a Personal Politics
As much as my politics and scholarship reflect the formative experiences of the 1960s and the resurgence of women’s history, they also spring from my own background. From my current vantage point, I can reconstruct a personal genealogy that helps explain how I came to question hierarchy and value women. For one thing, growing up […]