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 […]
Месяц: Сентябрь 2015
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 […]
THE BILL COLLECTOR
In some ways the jobs of the bill collector and the flight attendant are similar. Each represents an opposite pole of emotional labor. In a work-a-day sense, each job expands and contracts in response to economic conditions, though inversely: when times are bad the flight attendant has fewer passengers to cope with, but the bill […]
Piaget’s Theory
According to Piaget (1970, 1980), intellectual development is adaptation through activity. We create the very ways in which our knowledge is organized and, ultimately, how we think. Piaget believed that the development of intelligence stems from the emergence of increasingly complex cognitive structures. He organized his ideas into a theory of cognitive development that changed […]
THE ‘POLITICAL AMBITIONS’ OF POSTFEMINISM AND. POST-COLONIALISM
Postfeminism and post-colonialism have both theorised the politics of oppression and repression. As Ashcroft etal. (1995:249) note, ‘women, like colonised subjects, have been relegated to the position of “Other”, “colonised” by various forms of patriarchal domination’. They go on to note that, despite the similarities in feminist and post-colonial theoretical discourses, there have been few […]
Escalating Relationships: The Donor as Dad
Despite contractual agreements, the relationship between the known donor and the child may escalate. These known donors become “bio dads.” That is to say, fatherhood grows out of their genetic contribution to the child; being a dad, the social part of fatherhood, is an afterthought. They set out to become not dads but fathers in […]
Nontraditional Academics
At Home with Children and a PhD susan bassow, dana Campbell, and liz stockwell Every year, PhDs leave academia to raise their children; many, perhaps even most, find fulfilling, nontraditional ways to remain intellectually productive. It is difficult to track those who leave for family reasons, since most lose any formal institutional affiliation. Social scientists […]