Women and Inequality in the 21st Century

Brittany Slatton, Carla Brailey, Brittany Slatton, Carla Brailey, Brittany C. Slatton, Carla D Brailey, Brittany C. Slatton, Carla D Brailey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781315294957
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent books have drawn attention to an unfinished gender revolution and the reversal of gender progress. However, this literature primarily focuses on gender inequality in the family and its effect on women's career and family choices. While an important topic, these works? ?are critiqued for being particularly attentive to the concerns of middle-class, heterosexual, White women and ignoring or erasing the issues and experiences of the vast majority of women throughout the United States (and other countries). ?

Women and Inequality in the 21st Century is an edited collection that addresses this dearth in the current literature. This book examines the continued inequities navigated by women occupying marginalized social positions within a "nexus of power relations." It addresses the experiences of immigrant women of color, aging women, normative gender constraints faced by lesbian and gender non-conforming individuals assigned the female gender at birth, religious constraints on women's sexual expression, and religious and ethnic barriers impeding access to equality for women across the globe. Contributors to this collection reflect varying fields of inquiry—including sociology, psychology, theology, history, and anthropology. Their works employ empirical research methods, hermeneutic analysis, and narrative to capture the unique gender experiences and negotiations of diverse 21?st-century women.

Part I

AN UNREALIZED DEMOCRACY

GENDER SCHOLAR SPOTLIGHT: INTERVIEW WITH AMRITA CHAKRABARTI MYERS

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers is Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor of History and Gender Studies at Indiana University. She earned her doctorate in US History from Rutgers University and has been the recipient of several awards for scholarship, teaching, and activism, including a 2017 fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, the 2012 Julia Cherry Spruill Book Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians, and the 2016 Martin Luther King, Jr. Building Bridges Award from Indiana University. Her first book, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, was published in 2011. Myers is currently writing her second book, Remembering Julia: A Tale of Sex, Race, Power, and Place.

What led you to begin studying women’s inequality?

I began studying women’s inequality because of the gender dynamics I witnessed growing up in my own household. While both my parents worked long hours outside the home, and my mother earned more money than my father did after a certain point, she was still expected to perform all the domestic labor inside the home . . . simply because she was a woman. Whereas my father came home from work and sat in his easy chair, watching TV while waiting for dinner to be served, my mother came home after work and began preparing our dinner. These types of scenarios frustrated me as a child, and shaped my early interest in gender inequities.

How have your lived experiences shaped your research interests?

Growing up as a woman of color with immigrant parents in a predominantly White nation deeply shaped my research interests. I always felt like an outsider, both at home and at school and work. At home, I was daily chastised for being “too western” in my thoughts and behaviors, while out in the real world, my Canadian-ness was always in question because of the color of my skin and my “unusual” name. It is no surprise, then, that I gravitated towards studying Black women’s history. The field gave me a better understanding of my own history, provided me with the language to name the things that happened to me and around me, and explained my constant feelings of being an outsider, or what W.E.B. DuBois called “double consciousness.”

In your opinion, what scholarly works have been most impactful in your research on women and inequality?

The scholarly works that I found, and still find, most impactful in my own work on Black women include Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Darlene Clark Hine’s Hine Sight: Black Women and the Reconstruction of American History, Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, and Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Resistance in the Plantation South.

What has been most challenging about your field of work?

My field of work has presented me with several challenges. It meant leaving my home, family, friends, and country, for starters, and moving to the United States, first to attend graduate school and then, eventually, to pursue my career. It currently means extensive time away from home to do archival research in various facilities around the nation, an endeavor both costly and tiring. The kind of work I do takes a long time (I have been doing research on my new book on and off since 2010), real patience, and willingness to pursue every lead and not leave any stone unturned. It is definitely not for those looking for quick finishes and regular pats on the back.

Why is your work on women important?

I believe my work on women is important because it brings Black women to the center of US history. Not only does this reshape the narrative of our history and bring us closer to the “truth” of what happened, and what role people of color played in building this nation, it also gives young Black girls and boys a real sense of pride when they see their ancestors’ stories and voices in our history books. This makes them feel like they belong here, that they are a part of this nation, and that they, too, can help to move us forward and make this country a better place. I also believe that without historical context, we simply cannot comprehend what is happening in the world around us. In order to understand our current political moment, we must understand the path that brought us here. Black women’s history is this fundamental to understanding current, critical issues including the existence of rape culture, state-sanctioned violence against people of color, generational poverty, and more.

Which scholar(s) (and why) has been most influential in developing your perspective?

The scholar that I think has been most influential in developing my perspective on race and gender inequality is Kimberlé Crenshaw. Her pioneering work on, and coining the term, “intersectionality” is foundational to how I think and write about Black women, and how I understand the structural inequities I see around me in the very fabric of this nation. I also admire her for being both a scholar and an activist and am trying to follow in her footsteps as best I can.

What theoretical approach best guides your research?

My research is guided by a blend of theoretical approaches, particularly those of social history, Black feminist theory à la bell hooks, and critical race theory via Kimberlé Crenshaw and others.

What pedagogical approaches have you found most effective when teaching on women and inequality?

Over fifteen years of full-time teaching, I have found that small-group work is the most effective way to help students come to grips with issues of gender and race inequality and truly absorb, retain, and understand the material. I assign readings, provide contextual information via short lectures, and then have students work through each reading as a group, guided by pre-set discussion questions. We then come back together as a large class to address any confusions or questions that arose during small group time. While this method requires much more from the students, and from me, the result is papers that reflect a deeper and more nuanced understanding of women and issues of inequality than simple rote memorization.

In your opinion, what are the most pertinent issues facing the women in your area of research today?

The most important issues facing Black women in the US today are sexual assault, domestic violence, HIV-AIDS, drug addiction, state-sanctioned police violence, systemic poverty, and a lack of access to quality health care. All of these problems are bolstered by a national, stereotyped image of Black women as loud, angry, ugly, lazy, unintelligent, gold-digging, amoral, hypersexual Jezebels who are bad mothers, an image crafted during slavery and continually reinforced through to the present by the media, educational structures, and popular culture.

1

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST OF INEQUALITY

A Historical Synopsis of Women’s Images as Barriers in American Labor, Politics, and Entertainment

Kimberly Brown Pellum

“The stronger women became politically, the heavier the ideals of beauty would bear down on them, mostly in order to distract their energy and undermine their progress.” Naomi Wolf, feminist writer and former advisor to President Bill Clinton, published this poignant observation in her sociological critique The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (Wolf 1990). Wolf’s text assists in recognizing the beauty ideal, together with its unattainability, as a political apparatus designed to tighten around the necks of women as they advance in society. Consequently, as recent years have extended new privileges and higher platforms to women, the chokehold of the beauty ideal and its oppressive disadvantages have in many ways intensified for the contemporary woman. As evidence of the severity of the phenomenon, Wolf points to the long-lasting and rapidly expanding dieting industry, an increased number of women who undergo elective surgery for facial and body enhancements, and those with eating disorders that have led to death (Wolf 1990).

Ironically, feminist scholar bell hooks, once named Wolf a symbolic beneficiary of America’s racially driven and size-sensitive beauty caste. hooks remarked, “[As a White woman,] Naomi Wolf is allowed to be both intellectual and sexy. Whenever a Black woman is attractive and sexy, she must be a whore” (Trescott 1999). Today, even as a renowned African American author, hooks remains convinced that publishers and audiences perceive her very differently from Wolf, as a consequence of her image first and then perhaps the content of her writings. Negative perceptions lead to palpable challenges, professional and otherwise, not just for hooks, but for women from all walks of life. The phenomenon is not new, but rather carries origins in the nation’s founding. In fact, critics of Wolf’s work found her challenging of the beauty ideal “not only unfeminine but almost un-American” (Wolf 1990). This chapter provides historical context essential to explicating how a general public could arrive at such a limiting conclusion and how femininity and American identity became so intricately linked. It will also integrate and expand hooks’s argument that American-made images are deeply racialized and sexualized for the purpose of upholding both White supremacy and capitalism. Finally, it will succinctly consult the spheres of American labor, politics, and entertainment in which women’s images, and the manipulation and exploitation thereof, have obstructed them from securing full equality since the formation of the United States until now.

hooks’s Black Looks: Race and Representation summarizes, “From slavery on, white supremacists have recognized that control over images is central to the maintenance of any system of racial domination” (hooks 1992: 7). Indeed, early America’s constitutional structure and economic livelihood rested on racial domination, and history proves the entire system was framed by patriarchy. Thomas Jefferson, and similarly minded White men, inserted these constructs into their crafting of the Declaration of Independence, which states, “All men are created equal,” but offers no consideration to women. According to historian Kenneth Hafertepe, Jefferson’s “aesthetic theory was informed by his understanding of the human mind” (Hafertepe 2000: 216–231). In Jefferson’s only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1781, he broadcast his thoughts on “the circumstance of superior beauty” (Jefferson 1787). He identified color as a primary factor in distinguishing value between the races. He designated Europeans’ “flowing hair and more elegant symmetry of form” as reasoning for what he believed was Africans’ “own judgment in favor of the whites, declared by their preference of them.” Jefferson stretched his beauty hypothesis further, stating that there existed a “preference of the orangutan for the Black women over those of his own species” (Jefferson 1787). Although it is a ludicrous assertion meant to equate African women with animals, acceptance of the image itself was critical in enforcing and standardizing breeding norms at the expense of Black women for the purpose of driving the nation’s principal moneymaker: slavery. Even those founding fathers such as John Adams, who avoided direct ownership of Africans, led efforts normalizing these ideas. In 1765, Adams had written that God had never intended the American colonies “for Negroes . . . and therefore never intended us for slaves” (Hine et al. 2007: 7). The textbook African American Odyssey contends, “Jefferson, Adams, and other Patriot leaders were so convinced that Black people could not claim the same rights as white people, they felt no need to qualify their words proclaiming universal liberty” (Hine et al. 2007: 73). Jefferson commented, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind” (Jefferson 1787). His inclusion of the “body” is of sobering importance as a marker for establishing White superiority, since the “mind” in many circumstances might prove more difficult to substantiate as a European advantage. Here, the body operates as an easily readable visual aid to hierarchal ideology.

The most impolite deliberations on beauty and ugliness, such as those in Jefferson’s Notes that likened some women to monkey species, stress the female gender, which literally leaves men free. While assigning African women to the lowest end of ugliness and White women to the highest end of beauty, White men altogether escaped serious unwarranted societal ridicule and constant critique, and instead experienced the privilege of upward mobility without those handicaps. As for White women in both colonial and antebellum America, they found themselves confined by men’s manufacturing and regulation of their image too. Men regularly projected both their idealistic aesthetic, sexual, and behavioral expectations for women into public discourse. In 1789, a male essayist proclaimed modesty “adds charms to their beauty and gives a new softness to their sex” (Norton 1980: 112). Another postulated, “When a woman loses her native modesty . . . she loses all her charms, she loses all her virtue, and is undone forever” (Norton 1980: 112). Such severe cautions burdened women to chase pe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Contributors
• Introduction: Inequality and the Complex Positionalities of 21st-Century Women
• Part I An Unrealized Democracy
• Part II Negotiating Inequitable Terrain
• Part III Psychosocial Effects of Inequality
• Part IV Key Debates Around Women’s Inequality
• Part V Pushing Back: Activism and Resistance
• Index