Category Archives: Women’s Studies

‘Women programmers’ and the gender bias in science

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—Sue V. Rosser

After reading the recent opinion piece “How to Be a ‘Woman Programmer’” by Ellen Ullman in the New York Times Sunday Review, I had two primary thoughts and reactions. Particularly as I neared the end of the article, where the barriers faced by women in technology were discussed, I was reminded of the interviews I had conducted in Silicon Valley and the metro New York area that reinforced exactly what Ullman said about why women patented at vastly lower rates than men. The percentage of women granted patents ranks significantly lower than that of their male peers in all disciplines, countries and sectors; it also ranks very low relative to the percentage of women in a specific scientific or technical field.

Ullman’s description of the encounters with sexist, clueless, or resistant men bosses brought to mind my interview with Rick Foot*. Rick Foot currently serves as president and founder of a very successful IT innovation company. In the past he has headed several research and development operations. Friendly and generous with his time for the interview, he began by explaining the patenting process.

He told me that he didn’t think there was a gender gap in patenting in the industry but that it must result from the persistently low numbers of women in the industry. When I explained the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) study and the data showing that women patented at much lower rates than their participation in the IT workforce, he challenged the data with other questions about sector, publication rates, incentives, and age.

When he finally accepted that the data for the gender gap might be solid, he said, “I’m pretty sure that the women in R&D in my company patent at the same rate as their many male counterparts.” He did admit though, that he had never thought about gender or checked the data for his company which now he was intrigued to examine. Rick Foot was quite convinced that his view of the world—that there could not be a gender gap in patenting or if a gap did exist, it was proportional to the low number of women in IT—was absolutely true.

In contrast to the men I interviewed, all of the women knew what I meant right away when I raised the issue of the gender gap in patenting. They also understood how the gap served as a deterrent for women’s career advancement. Software engineer Joan Jetma* expressed the impact particularly well.

Joan works at a very large global IT company that prides itself on innovation and rewards its employees for patenting innovative discoveries. She had observed that very few women in the company where she worked obtained patents. When she did some research to determine whether her observations were correct, she discovered that about 10 percent of the women obtained patents at her company. When her own patent came up for review, she realized that all of the reviewers were men.

Because of the impact that obtaining patents have on women’s careers, some interviewees described the positive steps they had taken to enhance opportunities for women to patent in their company. One woman I interviewed, after observing the gender gap in her own company, started a support community for women. She sent an e-mail to about twenty women in the company and received immediate responses. In two years, the community has grown to 600 women who represent all sectors and all countries where the company is located.

This positive approach reflects the other major reaction I had to the article by Ullman. Despite all of the obstacles she had faced and the clear recognition that many other women might not wish to remain in technology, Ellen Ullman showed a clear passion for technology.  Her love of software engineering made her lash back, tough it out or change jobs to be able to pursue programming, no matter what.

During the last thirty years my studies of women in STEM have enabled me to interview more than 450 women scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians. As shown in Breaking into the Lab, the overwhelming finding that emerges from these interviews is the love and passion most women have for their work. They love science and technology and will do whatever it takes to pursue their passion. Just imagine how much more productive and creative they could be if the barriers were removed.

Sue V. Rosser is Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Sociology at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Breaking into the Lab:  Engineering Progress for Women in Science (NYU Press, 2012).

* Names have been changed.

Do female candidates still face a “double-bind”? The answer is yes

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—Margaret S. Williams

The recent New York Times article discussing the branding of mayoral candidate Christine Quinn highlights the double-bind female candidates often face in American elections. Female candidates need to seem tough, but not too tough (see “Ms. Quinn is known to unleash anger easily” but also cared for her dying mother). Female candidates need to appear to represent women, but not too much (see the housing candidate who was slow to support paid sick leave). And, above all, the female candidate needs to be well-dressed (see references to her shoes, dress, and hairstyle).

The image female candidates promote is so delicate that revealing an eating disorder, or time in a rehab facility, could put the candidate’s front-runner status in jeopardy– more so than ties to the current establishment or a very public vote switch. Contrast this to Quinn’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Anthony Weiner…yes, that Anthony Weiner, of Twitter fame.

The differential treatment of women and men in politics could not clearly be more spelled out. She needs to make herself more relatable, so people will like her more.  She may have gone too far by divulging she had an eating disorder and a problem with alcohol before she was a public official. He does not appear to care what people think of him (I think that is a safe assumption, given his past tweeting behavior), nor do his past scandals while in office appear to affect his political future. And we don’t even know if his suit was Prada or Dolce & Gabbana.

It would be nice to pin all of this differential treatment on the media, but social science studies demonstrate voters judge female candidates more harshly than male candidates for the same behavior. What does all this mean for women with political ambitions? How can they overcome biases against women, both in the media and in the public’s perception of them?

Outside the United States, female candidates do not receive the same treatment—perhaps the results of elections that are more party-centered and less candidate centered. (Margaret Thatcher may be the best example of some backlash against strong female leaders.)  Different styles of election undoubtedly play a role, as they do in the electoral prospects of female candidates as well.  In our book, Contagious Representation, Frank Thames and I show how proportional representation (as opposed to single-member districts seen in the U.S.) fosters women’s participation.  But it is also possible that gender quotas, also found outside the United States, play a role here as well. Would we really focus so much on a single woman acting to represent women, or on what she was wearing, or how relatable she is if there were more than one woman in the race?

Margaret S. Williams is the co-author (with Frank C. Thames) of Contagious Representation: Women’s Political Representation in Democracies around the World (NYU Press, 2013).

One Day in December: Starred review in Library Journal

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One Day in December casts a spotlight on the remarkable “missing actor” of the Cuban Revolution, Celia Sánchez. Based on ten years of original research, the biography draws on interviews with Sánchez’s friends, family, and comrades in the rebel army, along with countless letters and documents.

Alice Walker “loved the book;” Sapphire, author of Push, called it “a damn good read;” and most recently, the book has received a much-deserved starred review in Library Journal!

From Library Journal, May 1, 2013

Stout, Nancy. One Day in December: Celia Sanchez and the Cuban Revolution. Monthly Review. 2013. 457p. illus. bibliog. index. ISBN 9781583673171. $28.95. BIOG

The Cuban revolution so closely associated with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara also involved those such as Camilo Cienfuegos, Eloy Menoyo, Frank Pais, and Celia Sanchez, all revolutionary heroes in their own right. Sanchez was Castro’s supporter, confidante, and—depending on the source—his lover. In this impressive biography Stout (reference librarian, Fordham Univ. Libs.; Havana: La Habana) utilizes interviews, Cuban archives (to which she was granted special access by Castro himself), letters, and other documents to provide an accurate portrait of Sanchez, who ran the planning organization of the revolution after the death of Pais in 1957. Slight in stature, Sanchez saw combat and was arguably the most influential among Castro’s cadre of revolutionary leaders. Her role during and after the revolution was remarkable, and Stout’s biography tells her story as well as offering insights into other revolutionaries and their contributions. Sanchez’s death from cancer in 1980 shook Castro and all of Cuba but her legacy remains in buildings and projects that bear her name. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers and scholars of Cuban history. With a foreword by Alice Walker.—Boyd Childress, formerly, Auburn Univ. Libs., AL.

Want more? Read the introduction by Alice Walker or an excerpt from the book—and watch our exclusive interview with author Nancy Stout.

Outlawing abortion won’t help children with Down syndrome

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—Alison Piepmeier

My daughter, like all kids, is a delight and a lot of work. Now 4, she talks nonstop, although her speech isn’t always comprehensible. She reads. She performs class conversations for me: “What does a cow say? Moo. Great work, Maybelle!” This evening she sang me “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No” from “Oklahoma!” (a song that, in my daughter’s case, is clearly untrue because she excels at saying no).

Maybelle has Down syndrome, a condition I knew almost nothing about before she was born. During the four years she has been alive, I have been repeatedly surprised by her curiosity, her individual sense of humor and how much she has accomplished. She doesn’t fit the stereotypes at all. For this reason, it is troubling to me that rates of termination for pregnancies where Down syndrome is identified are extremely high. The most recent researchsuggests that for every child born with Down syndrome, another is terminated. With the increasing availability of noninvasive prenatal tests that can take place within the first few weeks of pregnancy, many in the Down syndrome and disability rights communities fear that abortion rates will skyrocket, that a process often identified as eugenic will escalate, and that Down syndrome will essentially be eliminated — at least among those with the resources for prenatal testing and the desire to terminate.

That is why some parents of children with Down syndrome are celebrating the news that North Dakota has become the first state to outlaw abortion for fetal conditions like Down syndrome. One parent wrote that “it felt like a small victory seeing that abortions based on Down syndrome were banned — like saying, see, individuals with Down syndrome are valued and protected.”

But outlawing abortion is not a reasonable response to this situation. A woman who does not want to be pregnant won’t stay pregnant if there are any mechanisms in place for her to have an abortion.

As part of my research for a book on prenatal testing and reproductive decision-making, I have talked with women who terminated their pregnancies when they learned that the fetus had Down syndrome. For most of these women, abortion was an incredibly painful decision. These were wanted pregnancies in which the fetus was already identified as a child, and often even named.

Repeatedly women told me that they ended the pregnancy not because they wanted a “perfect child” (as one woman said, “I don’t know what ‘perfect child’ even means”) but because they recognized that the world is a difficult place for people with intellectual disabilities.

One woman told me, “The thing is I could not, in good conscience, from the get-go, know that my child has these setbacks in life.” Another identified adulthood as the challenge: “There is no part of caring for an infant or school-aged child with Down syndrome that we didn’t think we could handle. We chose to terminate mostly on the basis of our understanding of the challenges and quality of life he and our family would face if/when he lived to be over age 21: his middle age, and end of life.”

Another woman talked quite a bit about rape. She was assaulted as a child, she knew that the statistics for sexual abuse were high for people with intellectual disabilities, and she was determined that her daughter would not experience that, so that was one of the reasons she terminated her pregnancy. She referred to her abortion several times as “the protective choice.”

All these women grieved, but did not regret, their abortions. A state law banning abortion would not have stopped them from terminating their pregnancies, it would just have made an incredibly difficult process even more difficult for them. Indeed, more than one mother I spoke with traveled out of state for her abortion because the pregnancy was too advanced for her to have an abortion in her home state.

If North Dakota really does want it to be “a great day for babies in North Dakota” and wants to prove that “a civil society does not discriminate against people … for their sex or for disability,” it should make the state a welcoming place for people with disabilities. The state could take the cash reserves it has put aside for legal challenges to its laws and use those funds to train public schools to be meaningfully inclusive (as all the best research shows is the way to go). It could provide easily accessible medical care and early intervention. The state could develop independent — but supported — housing for adults with intellectual disabilities so that there are not waiting lists years long. It could improve criminal justice responses to rape — indeed, North Dakota could become a state that works to prevent rape by training men not to be rapists.

Let women have abortions for whatever reason they choose, but make it a world they would like to bring a child into — even a child with an intellectual disability.

Alison Piepmeier is the director of the women’s and gender studies program at the College of Charleston in South Carolina and the author of Girl Zines (NYU Press, 2009).

[This article originally appeared on the New York Times Motherlode blog. Read it here.]

Wrapping up Women’s History Month with Jill Norgren

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Over the last few weeks, we’ve invited a variety of authors and thinkers to share their thoughts on Women’s History Month here on our blog—and the pieces have been spectacular!

With the last days of March in sight, we thought we’d end the month not with a final word, but with a reflection on the progress that women have made over the past two centuries, and an invitation to open up the conversation further. For Women’s History Month is not meant to contain the achievements of women within 31 days, but rather, to provide a platform through which these stories can be revived.

On that note, then, we turn to Jill Norgren, who spoke with us about her book, Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America’s First Women Lawyers (NYU Press, 2013). In the video below, Norgren meditates on the shifting landscape of the field of law, which has increasingly allowed space for women—and points to the “bold, feisty” ladies who have served as the rebellious pioneers in the legal arena.

Check it out, and don’t forget to follow our channel!

Crime and (coerced) punishment in domestic violence cases

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—Leigh Goodmark

Worried that your complaining witness won’t follow through with her domestic violence complaint? New York police have a new weapon to use in such situations: running criminal checks on women who allege abuse in order to have “leverage” if they decide not to press charges.

On March 5, NYPD Chief of Detectives Phil Pulaski ordered officers to perform criminal background checks on complaining witnesses as well as alleged perpetrators in domestic violence cases. A police source told the New York Post that reminding women of their open warrants “force[s] them to remain cooperative.” Don’t want to prosecute your partner? You can go to jail instead. Advocates for women subjected to abuse are predictably outraged by the policy, arguing that it will prevent women from seeking assistance from the police. I’m outraged, too, but not surprised—this kind of policy is just another manifestation of the legal system prioritizing its needs and goals over those of women subjected to abuse.

For years, advocates for women subjected to abuse have sought to increase police involvement in domestic violence cases.  Reacting to police directives to essentially ignore domestic violence, advocates fought for mandatory arrest policies, which required police to make arrests in domestic violence cases whenever they had probable cause to do so.

New York City’s new background check policy is the logical outgrowth of such measures. If police are required to intervene, they want those interventions to be “meaningful” in the way that meaning is measured in police practice—that is, through arrest and prosecution.  When women subjected to abuse decline to press charges, they keep police from fulfilling the function that they’ve been asked to play for the last thirty years.

It’s not surprising that police would look for ways to ensure that their efforts come to fruition in some way. And in a system that routinely marginalizes women subjected to abuse by refusing to allow them to decide whether (and how) they want the state to intervene in their lives, it’s not surprising that a policy such as this one emerges.

Leigh Goodmark is Professor of Law, Director of Clinical Education, and Co-Director of the Center on Applied Feminism at the University of Baltimore School of Law. She is the author of A Troubled Marriage: Domestic Violence and the Legal System (NYU Press, 2011).

Another kind of women’s work

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—Melissa R. Klapper

The current media fascination with women and power, sparked by elaborate controversies over Yahoo executive Marissa Mayer and Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, might seem both disappointing and amusing to the legions of American women engaged in social and political activism during the first decades of the twentieth century. The disappointment is easy to understand. Why, they might ask, after more than 100 years of feminism, are we still disconcerted by women in positions of authority? And why do we still have to confront systemic conflicts between work and family? And why don’t women support each other more, and better?

The amusement may require more explanation. Much of the commentary in recent weeks has assumed that there was once upon a time a golden age when women didn’t work, when men provided for the families women took care of. Only after the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s did everything fall apart as women entered the workforce. Any undergraduate in a women’s history class can tell you how very wrong this understanding is. Women have always worked, out of both necessity and desire; not all women have had a male provider in their lives; one individual’s wages have rarely been sufficient to support a family.

Apart from this critical perspective, I think there is another element of the historical record that demands attention. There is no denying that some women, typically of middle and upper class status, did not work for wages. That does not mean, however, that they did not work. During the early twentieth century, the mostly unpaid but extremely professional women who belonged to voluntary organizations affected every level of public life in the United States.

In my new book Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940, I explore the many roles Jewish women played in the suffrage, birth control, and peace movements. Whether as individuals committed to a cause, members of inevitably politically active Jewish women’s organizations like the National Council of Jewish Women, or members of international women’s activist groups like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Jewish women accomplished with pen and paper and the occasional telegram or phone call what huge NGOs strive to do today.

The millions of American women who participated in social movements traveled constantly, lobbied public officials, attended innumerable meetings, read voraciously and participated in study groups, drew up position papers and set policies, monitored the press and wrote frequent letters to editors, and sustained voluminous correspondences, usually without secretarial help. Freedom from paid labor enabled these women to do this kind of work, and they often began by trying to improve the circumstances of other women who had fewer choices.

Civil society depended on women’s volunteer efforts, and the success of these women in making change in government at every level from municipal to federal played a critical role in the development of the responsive government and social welfare provisions we take for granted today. So I think that the activist women of the early twentieth century would also be amused by today’s controversies. Why, they might ask, would anybody think that women have not always grasped the opportunity to shape the world they live in?

Melissa R. Klapper is a professor of history, Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ. She is the author of Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940 (NYU Press, 2013).

Why gender bias in science matters

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—Sue V. Rosser

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published an article last September that caused quite a stir around the country. In it, a group of researchers at Yale reported groundbreaking findings from a recent study on gender bias in science. The September 24, 2012 New York Times article, “Bias Persists for Women of Science, a Study Finds”, emphasized the major points of similar media reports of the Yale study:  chemistry, biology and physics professors at six U.S. research universities rated a male applicant for a laboratory manager position as significantly more competent and hirable than the identical female applicant. The bias was pervasive, resulting from cultural influences rather than overt discrimination; and women professors were just as biased against the women students as were the men professors, although age, field or tenure status did not appear to affect the results.

To date, at least thirty-five colleagues have e-mailed me a copy of the article, knowing my work and interest in attracting and retaining women in science and engineering. Many asked whether I was surprised that such bias still existed after all of these years of attention to the general issue of women in science, as well as the particular training of scientists to be rational in analysis of data.

I had to tell them that regrettably, I was not surprised at all. In Breaking into the Lab:  Engineering Progress for Women in Science, I revealed my experiences as both a woman scientist and dean at a doctoral research extensive institution who has worked in women’s studies for thirty years. My experiences are complemented with data from interviews of current scientists in response to the questions about why there are so few women scientists, especially at elite research institutions, what happens to successful women as they become senior and consider going into administration, and whether women are excluded from leading edge work in commercialization of science and technology transfer.

The data from the responses and interviews of current women scientists, some junior and some about ten to twenty years younger than I, document that although the pipeline of women in most STEM fields has increased substantially, many of the same issues for women in science and engineering persist today.

Overt sexual harassment from a supervisor has become less frequent, yet the structures of institutions and science make junior women question whether they can balance career and family. Time management, isolation, lack of camaraderie, poor mentoring, gaining credibility and respectability from colleagues and superiors, as well as issues for dual-career couples in science remain as problems. Sexual harassment and gender discrimination still occur all too frequently.

Why does the loss of women from every level of the science pipeline from student to head of the laboratory to president of the university matter? The importance of the leadership of women in science has been illustrated in other areas such as health; not until a substantial number of women had entered the professions of biology and medicine were biases from androcentrism exposed. Once the possibility of androcentric bias was discovered, the potential for distortion on a variety of levels of research and theory was recognized: the choice and definition of problems to be studied, the exclusion of females as experimental subjects, bias in the methodology used to collect and interpret data, and bias in theories and conclusions drawn from the data.

This realization uncovered gender bias, which had distorted some medical research.  Excessive focus on male research subjects and definition of cardiovascular diseases as “male” led to under-diagnosis and under-treatment of the disease in women. These studies led Bernadine Healy, a cardiologist and first woman director of the National Institutes of Health, to characterize the diagnosis of coronary heart disease in women as the Yentl syndrome: “Once a woman showed that she was just like a man, by having coronary artery disease or a myocardial infarction, then she was treated as a man should be” (Healy, 1991, p. 274).  The male-as-norm approach in research and diagnosis, unsurprisingly, was translated into bias in treatments for women.  Women exhibited higher death rates from angioplasty and coronary bypass surgery because the techniques had been pioneered using male subjects.

Particularly with the increased emphasis upon translation of basic research into applications, the presence of diversity in the STEM workforce becomes more critical. More than in basic research, applications for technology and inventions depend upon the experiences and ideas of the designers. Excessive dominance of one group, such as the overwhelming percentage of males in engineering and the creative decision-making sectors of the technology workforce, may result in bias in the technologies produced, such as the air bag fiasco suffered by the U.S. auto industry. More women, as well as more diversity in general, in the composition of the STEM workforce not only helps to guard against such bias but may increase the numbers of new ideas that will help people in their daily lives and improve society.

Sue V. Rosser is Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Sociology at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Breaking into the Lab:  Engineering Progress for Women in Science (NYU Press, 2012).

Women’s history and the challenges of global politics

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—Leela Fernandes

The celebration of Women’s History Month usually raises the opportunity to ask whose histories we are honoring and how we are representing histories of feminism and women’s leadership. From an international perspective, histories of women’s struggles and movements for justice are varied and complex. However, contemporary media images in the United States still tend to portray women’s rights as a property being given to poor or victimized women in other countries. These images often dovetail with the geopolitical trends of the contemporary moment – of war, intervention and economic anxiety. Images of oppressed women in regions such as the Middle East and South Asia displace long and complex histories of women’s struggles and achievements in these regions. It appears then as if the history of women’s movements originates in the United States and is transmitted to other regions of the world.

Women’s History Month gives us a moment to pause and consider how we come to know about women’s issues when we gaze outside of the borders of the United States. What point of origin do we assume when we learn about women? Do we hear about women in Afghanistan or Iraq through the rhetoric of saving women – one that is implicated in complex ways with war and intervention? Do we know about the life of women in India through the spectacle of one graphic gang rape in Delhi? And what do we not know or ask about when it comes to nations, cities, towns and villages that are not invoked through our particular national preoccupations with war, crisis and conflict?

Such questions provoke us to think about what kinds of histories are presumed through the politics and spectacles of the present. It allows us to grapple with the challenges of “knowing” the world in ways that are ethical. The process of becoming unfettered from the particularities of our own social and national locations is difficult but also critical for the ideals of justice that have inspired women’s movements. These challenges turn Women’s History Month into an ongoing struggle for the future as much as a memorialization of a record of the past.

Leela Fernandes is Professor of Women’s Studies and Political Science at the University of Michigan, and author of Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, and Power (NYU Press, 2013).

Ordinary women making history

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—Ava Chamberlain

One powerful woman’s voice has dominated Women’s History Month this year. Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, has appeared on television and radio programs, magazine covers and websites, flogging her new book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Her solution to women’s continuing inequality in the workplace focuses on the internal barriers that hold women back, that make us pull back instead of “lean in.” She calls us to be ambitious, assertive, self-confident, unafraid; to ask for higher pay, to look for better jobs, to demand equal marriages, to aspire to leadership. To reach the top, she chides, we must get out of our own way.

At first glance, Sandberg appears to be repeating a lesson that has animated women’s history and gender studies for several decades: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” However, this well-worn slogan reveals both the truth and the flaw of Sandberg’s message.

Women often do lack the self-confidence to lean in, and this reluctance does hinder our advancement. But Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the slogan’s original author, did not intend her words to be a call for women to misbehave, to step out of place, to lean in. She was observing how hard it is to study—and to value—the lives of ordinary women. Misbehaving women attract attention; ordinary women, by comparison, appear uninteresting, when they are noticed at all. To address this problem of invisibility we can join Sandberg’s call to lean in, or we can embrace Ulrich’s challenge to attend to the ordinary, a much more difficult task.

​Women’s historians have risen to this challenge in many creative ways. We have edited diaries revealing how ordinary women from the past lived rich and interesting lives. We have discovered letters and poetry that provide a glimpse of the interiority of women’s experience. And we have celebrated women who have broken gender barriers and fought for women’s rights.

In The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards, I have reconstructed the life of a woman who, like most ordinary women of the past, left behind no first-person texts at all, not even a signature on a document. Because Elizabeth Tuttle was the paternal grandmother of colonial America’s greatest theologian, she has attracted attention, predictably, for her alleged misbehavior. She has been cast as a small villain in a large—and very male—story, who, by her mad threats and uncontrolled sexuality, drove her long-suffering husband, Richard Edwards, to petition for divorce. To complicate this construction I start at a different place—her ordinariness.

Viewing Elizabeth Tuttle as an ordinary puritan woman transforms her into a tragic figure whose life was fractured by a series of devastating losses and inconsolable griefs. ​Elizabeth Tuttle’s story helps us see that Lean In is flawed not because it reflects the elitist experience of an over-privileged woman but because it devalues the struggles of ordinary women, who should be recognized not just when they speak out but also when they quietly go about their daily lives.

Ava Chamberlain is Associate Professor of Religion at Wright State University and author of The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards (NYU Press, 2012).

Rebel girls rising

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—Jessica K. Taft

There is a poster on the wall of my office that reminds me of the long history of girls’ activism. The image is of two girls, wearing roller skates and sashes that proclaim “don’t be a scab.” They have pamphlets in their hands and bows in their hair. Taken during the 1916 New York City street car strike, this photograph speaks to the fact that girl activists have been participating in social movements for quite some time, and that they have been involved in a wide variety of struggles.

The girl activists I wrote about in Rebel Girls do not just address what we might think of as ‘girls’ issues,’ such as teens’ reproductive rights, access to education, or body politics. Like the girls in this early photograph, today’s girl activists in North and South America also fight for labor rights, economic justice, racial equality, environmental sustainability, peace, human rights, and indigenous sovereignty. Girls’ lives, and therefore girls’ politics, are not just defined by their “girl-ness” but are also shaped by their different experiences with neoliberal globalization, political repression, poverty, racism, militarism, and heterosexism.

From my perspective, an analysis of the multiple historical and social contexts of girls’ lives and girls’ activism is what is most notably missing from the current popular celebrations of girls’ capacities to “change the world” (i.e. The Girl Effect and Girl Rising). As girls become increasingly visible figures in discourses on development and economic growth, we desperately need to understand how girls are impacted by the structures of global capitalism and the histories of colonialism and imperialism (not just by local iterations of gender inequality). And, as girls are praised for their individual strengths and their capacity to overcome adversity, we need to learn about the ways they have collectively resisted these forces as participants in social movements.

I too believe that girls can change the world. However, I see this happening not just through individualized economic and educational empowerment but through collective activist projects.  Women’s History Month—and the public discourse on girls as agents of change—should not just applaud individual girls and their educational achievements, but should acknowledge the many generations of girls who have strapped on their roller skates, taken to the streets, and worked together to stand up for social and economic justice.

Jessica K. Taft is assistant professor of sociology at Davidson College and is the author of Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas (NYU Press, 2010).

Celebrating women of color, one girl at a time

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—Andreana Clay

Last month, when The Onion magazine posted a tweet calling nine year old Quvenzhané Wallis the c-word, I tweeted a reply, “No Black girl is safe.”  And that’s how I felt, and often do feel, even though it’s a bit bleak. But, let’s think about this: in addition to the ways that adult women are denigrated in society, it has become acceptable to make jokes about a (Black) girl. The safety of young girls from sexism is something that I became familiar with as a researcher/working with teenagers in Oakland, CA. Half of the youth activists I worked closely with in The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back were young women, many of whom led the efforts.

This Women’s History Month, I think it’s important to turn our attention to young women, particularly young women of color. The Onion comment aside, young women of color are simultaneously heavily scrutinized and ignored. Take, for instance, the dual experience of some of the young Black and Latina women I worked with who were singled out for being presumed to be on the road to (teenage) pregnancy, so they were not taken seriously as students. Literally, one teacher commented that “I don’t really call on Latina or African American females. . . They’re gonna get pregnant and drop out anyways, so what’s the point?”

This discourse, as NYU author Lorena Garcia has pointed out, exists both in and outside of the classroom and has significant impacts on young women of color. This is something I urge us to think about during Women’s History Month: the ways that “women” as a universal term continues to privilege white, heterosexual, cis women; a long-standing feminist critique. However, the discourse around women primarily and solely focuses on adult women. The women we celebrate during this month, the women’s issues we collectively organize around, and the laws we pass are targeted at and specifically benefit adult women.

For example, the recent passage of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was celebrated because of its inclusion of Native American, lesbian, queer, and transgender women. However, a notable absence and hard-fought exclusion was the protection and decriminalization of human trafficking subjects—many of whom are minors and young women of color. More specifically, this group often includes women who are runaways, homeless, or thrown out of their homes as teenagers for their emerging sexuality.

And these young women are no different than the young women in my book: a young queer Latina who was routinely thrown out of her home and once boarded a bus to New York for a week, just so she’d have a place to stay; another queer Chicana, who was often threatened by boys for “looking like a white boy” when she was out with her African American girlfriend; still another young, African American woman, who had to take out a restraining order against her boyfriend for beating her up, a restraint he often ignored.

And these are the young women that we think are “protected” or “safe” because they are involved in organizing activities, ones specifically addressing the surveillance they experience as it relates to racism, sexism, and homophobia. However, we need to step into this battle with these young women in order to make our lives, as women, better. We must fight for the Quvenzhané Wallis’ of the world, the young women we have in our lives and know, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the ones that we don’t. And while we may want to think of these women as “our future,” let’s make this Women’s History Month about contributing to the history they—and we—are making now.

Andreana Clay is Associate Professor of Sociology at San Francisco State University and author of The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back: Youth, Activism, and Post-Civil Rights Politics (NYU Press, 2012).