День: 25.09.2015
RACE AND FEMININITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITING
Class and ethnicity were by no means the exclusive or local concerns of women from Britain or Ireland, but qualified and complicated in different ways all the new femininities invented and narrated by women in the Anglophone societies of the 1920s and 1930s, where women were newly enfranchised. Moreover, to see how some of the […]
Conclusion
Even as mothers affirm some important ties—most prominently, kinship by blood—they undermine others by separating reproduction from marriage, intercourse, and love. The intimate accounts of these women afford glimpses into how these mothers and their children experience the contested terrain over family life, namely, the power of a two-parent ideology. In part motivated by a […]
The technoscientific gaze: a critique
There is a perceived tension between the detached, objective pursuit of knowledge about the world in ‘quality’ science programmes and the popular appeal of emotion, drama and storytelling. Yet this dichotomy is not as clear-cut as it might at first appear to be. I will be arguing here that science is not as ‘disinterested’ or […]
THE SCIENCE OF SEX
Science and wildlife documentaries occupy a pinnacle of respect in the rhetoric of public service broadcasting. They exemplify the epitome of ‘quality’ factual television in contrast to the docusoaps that dominated the schedules in the latter half of the 1990s. Although associated in the UK with the public service ethos of the BBC and the […]
FEMININITY AND FEELING 1790-1850
When historians explore the evolution of ‘modern’ ideas of gender, the eighteenth century is usually seen as the time when changes start to accelerate. Certainly from its last decades onwards femininity is a busy category, performing, in Mary Poovey’s useful formulation, a great deal of ‘ideological work’ in western culture, involved in the making and […]
Research instruments
The Future of Change
The varied forms of feminist activism that I have surveyed in this essay support one of the major themes of my book No Turning Back: that feminism is neither static nor monolithic. Indeed, I have found that much of the historical resilience of feminism derives from its malleability. As the following examples illustrate, feminism is […]
The genetic factor
If men had genetically superior immune systems, this would be our rationale for paying more attention to female health, women are fragile, women need protection. However, women’s double-X chromosomes give them a kind of genetic backup system 17 That is, if a woman has a defective gene along one thread of her X chromosome, the […]
Industrialization’s doubla standard
Industrialization pulled men away from the farm and family and into the factory, alienating millions of men from their source of love. Industrialization allowed women to be connected with the family and, as we discussed above, increasingly surrounded with fewer children and more conveniences to handle those children, more control over whether or not to […]