Getting into the game: American women writers and the radical tradition

This essay outlines the contours of a socialist feminist tradition in women's fiction in the United States. From Elizabeth Stewart Phelp's The Silent Partner (1971) to contemporary works by writers like Marge Piercy, Alice Walker, and Mary Lee Settle, this literature often embodies a common central drama: the growth of social consciousness as an essential dimension of the quest for individual identity. Phelp's The Silent Partner and Settle's Killing Ground, published 110 years apart, exemplify this thematic continuity, though Settle places her protagonist's quest in a modernist frame of reference. Obviously, the works of different historical eras differ from one another in the institutions they question and the forms of activism they advocate. They may differ most from one another, though, in their construction of aspects of the ‘private’ sphere—sexuality, reproduction, motherhood. Left feminist writers today resist a severance of public and private and insist on the necessity of transforming all our social relations.     

Whispers and triumphs: Latin American women writers today

Due to the many authoritarian regimes that have dominated the Latin American scene and continue to do so in Chile and Paraguay, writers, especially women writers, have been confronted with censorship, repression and fear. But many women writers have emerged to become the brave voice of a voiceless people.This paper deals with two such writers and their novels: Conversation in the South (1981) by Marta Traba speaks of the Argentine regime of terror during the seventies and particularly of how this government of fear affects every day reality; Isabel Allende, in The House of The Spirits, creates a fictional and historical account of Chile's history from the turn of the century until the Pinochet regime. Both writers defy authority and silence and refuse to allow us to forget the ‘dirty years’ of Latin America's hardest dictatorshiops. This paper also focuses on the female protagonists in both novels and their ways of coping with tyranny.     

Stories of night and dawn: Latin American women today

Latin America: surrounded by blue, intemperate and at times macabre oceans; enclosure of enormous mountain ranges, volcanos, glaciers, rivers, jungles; land of poets who have come from tiny little villages to reveal the secrets of their far-off regions and to sing of them to other men. Let us recall the rural school teacher, Gabriela Mistral, and Pablo Neruda, both from Chile, and Gabriel García Márquez, of Colombia, who taught us that yellow butterflies are magical and that a woman hanging out sheets in the garden can indeed ascent to heaven.It is worth noting that all three of these writers were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in recent decades: Mistral in 1945; Neruda in 1971; and García Márquez in 1982. Latin America's other winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Miguel Angel Asturias, of Guatemala, in 1967. All these splendid writers were from an area said to be Third World, said to be underdeveloped, or in the new parlance, ‘developing’.And then we have the other Latin America: a land of absences; of sudden deaths that never occur by accident; a continent of the ones who have disappeared; of the Madwomen of the Plaza de Mayo, the women who, for years now, gather every Thursday in the deserted Plaza de Mayo of Buenos Aires to weep, to scream and to beseech heaven and earth for news of their missing loved ones.Where is this Latin America? What is it really like?     

Black American women and work: A historical review—1619–1920

This paper reviews the work experience of Black American women from the Slave Period to World War I. However, the paper begins the discussion with the work of West African women because this is the area of Africa from which most African Americans came. As slaves they worked in the tobacco, rice, indigo and cotton fields and were skilled artisans, midwives, industrial workers and business women. Although Black women gained freedom after the Civil War their capabilities were not recognized and they were limited to the same work opportunities afforded them during slavery. In spite of the limitation and against unsurmountable odds a few Black American women during and after slavery achieved success in professions such as education, law, medicine, the arts and various businesses. It is clear from the presentation that Black American women have always been a part of the workforce of America and have contributed to its growth and development in the world. The work experience of the present day African American women has been influenced by these past generations of Black women and examplify the efforts of Black women to acquire freedom and options in their work opportunities.     

Black American women and work: Historical and contemporary strategies for empowerment—II

The American historical record shows that Black women heve been part of the American work force longer than any other group of women in the United States. Though consistently undereducated, underemployed, and underpaid, these women have endured and, in doing so, have created strategies for survival and change that have given them ‘cultural flexibility’ in the areas of socialization patterns for male and female children; interpersonal, kinship and marital relations; and professional and community involvement. The effects of both institutionalized racism and sexism on women's economic and personal choices are explored as well as the long range effect of labor market participation on family and community life.     

American anti-feminist women: Comparing the rhetoric of opponents of the equal rights amendment with that of opponents of women's suffrage

This paper examines the rhetoric of American women opponents of the Suffrage Amendment 1890 to 1919 and of the Equal Rights Amendment 1970 to 1984. Basic to the rhetoric of those opponents is a belief that men and women are so different from each other that they must be treated differently under the law.     

Creation and healing: an empowering relationship for women artists

Healing has conventionally been discussed in the disciplines of the medical sciences. Yet, everyone speaks of the ‘art of healing’. Today women artists in many media of expression are reclaiming their legitimacy as artists and as healers. Symbolically, through the creative arts, they are wresting healing away from the professionalization of the sciences and returning it to the arts where it once belonged when women were midwives and shamans, holistic healers of the mind-body totality.     

Field-faring women: the resistance of women who worked in the fields of nineteenth-century England

In nineteenth-century England, women worked on farms at many different tasks. They frequently did laborious, repetitive work in the fields. In the 1860s this labour was defined as unfeminine by the middle class. The women who did it were described as unsexed and immoral. Working-class radicals took up and adopted this imagery in order to demand a male breadwinning wage when they fought their employers. However, the women also directly challenged their employers' authority and were frequently at odds with the development of that new male working-class respectability which stressed women's role as wives and mothers. This paper looks at the resistances of the field women and the response to their action by the radical, mainstream and feminist press of the second half of the nineteenth century. It highlights the complex relationship between class and gender.     

New markets,old struggles: Large and small farmers in the export agriculture of coastal Peru

Although the output of high-value crops in Peru has increased during the era of ‘globalization’, producers still tend to contextualize this development in relation to the 1969 agrarian reform. Considered here is how large and small farmers in the Cañete region perceive the changes that have occurred in agriculture since a generation ago, with particular reference to market competition and the implications of the new economic conditions for environmental sustainability. Despite the fact that farmers located at each end of the rural hierarchy experience the economic impact of globalization differently, small cultivators exporting their produce to the international market being particularly vulnerable to its laissez faire regime, they nevertheless share a common belief in the importance of agriculture for the well-being of the nation. The latter, it is suggested, is a discourse that reproduces much of the ideology associated historically with the agrarian and foundation myths.     

By women for women: Caring for the frail elderly

The care of the frail elderly should be a subject of especial and growing importance to the women's movement. Two-thirds of the 75+ age group in England and Wales are women, who, when subject to the disabilities of advancing age, are usually assisted or cared for by other women. Current government policies emphasize care at home and assume the availability of unpaid female labour. Care in residential institutions depends largely upon the low paid labour of women. How can the dilemmas posed by different policy options be resolved? Can modes of care be devised which do not rely on exploiting women's labour and which offer choice to elderly women?