Dame unise,feminist maiden who fares well with the patriarchy: Jessica Amanda Salmonson's ‘the prodigal daughter’ and the emerging tradition in feminist speculative fiction

In her discussion of recent feminist utopias, Joanna Russ notes that the authors have likely read one another and that their ‘works form a remarkably coherent group in their presentation of feminist concerns and the feminist analyses which are central to these concerns’ (Russ, 1981: 71). My essay further explores the emerging tradition in feminist speculative fiction. It notes the common elements connecting three novels—Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong (1976), Suzy McKee Charnas' Motherlines (1978), and Elizabeth A. Lynn's The Northern Girl (1980)—and analyses Jessica Amanda Salmonson's ‘The prodigal daughter’ (1981) in terms of its relationship to these connections. References to Louise Bernikow's Among Women (1980) link these feminist imaginative works to feminist reality, reality which is more closely adhered to by Salmonson than by the authors of the novels. While the novels' feminist protagonists succeed in isolation from the patriarchy, Salmonson's feminist hero, Dame Unise, succeeds because she is able to cooperate with a patriarch. Positive images of patriarchy are absent from the novels; Salmonson's story emphasizes such positive images.     

At-risk factors for the adolescent mother and her infant

This article describes some at-risk features for the adolescent mother and her infant. The inadequacies of the adolescent mother may be manifest in her inability to provide for herself or her infant, and in difficulties in relating to a mate in a suitable fashion since she is still dependent on and, to some extent, symbiotic with her own mother. Complications, such as the increased possibility of having crises in pregnancy, a premature birth, giving up the baby for adoption, malnutrition, decreased stimulation, and divided mothering, are detailed. Compared to infants of adult mothers, offspring of adolescent mothers have a greater risk later on of conduct disorders, absence of both parents, and placement in foster homes or institutions. The adolescent mother's dynamics seem related to oedipal conflicts, wishes to mother and be mothered, and a predominance of symbiotic or other preoedipal conflicts. Becoming a mother in adolescence may be based on efforts to separate from infantile objects, an attempt to make up for the loss thereof, or substitution and avoidance of separation-individuation conflicts; or it might be an accident to avoid regression. At-risk factors are listed for the psychiatrist and pediatrician to observe in the adolescent mother and her infant in order to be alert to the possibilities of increased complications.Past President of American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry. Received his M.D. from the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine in 1948. Trained in psychiatry and child psychiatry in New Orleans. Main interests include group and family therapy, separation and attachment processes, and early child development, particularly in prematures.     

‘Quite the opposite of a feminist’: Phyllis McGinley,Betty Friedan and discourses of gender in mid-century American culture

This article examines the relationship between feminist and anti-feminist discourses in the period between World War II and the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963). It takes as its primary focus the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘housewife poet’ and self-proclaimed anti-feminist, Phyllis McGinley. McGinley was a successful poet who has disappeared from the record since the publication in 1964 of Sixpence in her Shoe—her best-selling retort to The Feminine Mystique. Her example is important because it gives voice to the much-maligned suburban housewife and offers a spirited alternative to Friedan's reading of white, middle-class domesticity as always and inevitably oppressive. The article offers a close reading of McGinley's work and situates it in relation to its historical and cultural contexts (specifically the highly charged domain of suburban domesticity) and to its wider readership. It compares her anti-feminism with that of other anti-feminist writers of the period, thereby illuminating the tensions and contradictions in contemporary debates.     

Toward a holistic paradigm for Asian American Women's Studies: A synthesis of feminist scholarship and women of color's feminist politics

In this paper I propose a Women's Studies method for an Asian American Studies curriculum by incorporating a women-centred feminist historical approach and a holistic feminist anthropological approach with American women of color's feminist politics with an emphasis on the interconnectedness of sexism, racism, classism and homophobia in the American social systems and cultural ideologies.My work is based on the belief that an Asian American Women's Studies method must be founded on a feminist politics which is specifically derived from their own definition of themselves and feminism which are based on multiple consciousness raising and multiple identities of gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality.     

Aerial roots

This poem was written at the request of Antomina Rumwaropen for a ceremony held on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra, Australia, to mark 40 days after the death of her mother Dina Kayukatui. Antomina left West Papua as a very young woman, and then, because of links to the independence struggle, fled Indonesia as a refugee, first to Holland and then to Vanuatu. She came to Australia in 1989, as a refugee with her extended family. Because of political sensitivities she was unable to return to West Papua before her mother’s death in 1995 in her home village of Ransiki near the Bird’s Head of West Papua. Along with several members of her family, Antomina became an Australian citizen in 1997.     

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches…’

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz chose to take the veil not only because she had no wish to marry but because in her time the convent was the only environment which sanctioned a woman's desire for a life of study and meditation. However, her brilliant mind ventured far beyond the parameters permitted by her church, for she devoted a large part of her literary activities to secular topics, dared to criticize the male Catholic establishment and questioned the Church's inconsistent—and to her, oppressive—treatment of women. In her autobiographical letter ‘The Reply to Sister Philotea’ (1691) she took her most radical feminist stance and artfully manipulated both Scripture and patristic texts to support her personal ends: the right of women to an education and to an intellectual life.     

The silencing of Simone de Beauvoir guess what's missing from the second sex

Inadequate, inaccurate English translations of works by feminist scholars can slow the advancement of international research in women's studies. We must begin to subject translations to the same critical attention we have focused on those sexist authoring and publishing practices that have defined women's interests as tangential to scholarly research.Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, one of the most widely known, classic essays on women's experience and a cornerstone of contemporary feminist theory, is available in only one English translation from the French. In that 1952 translation by a professor of zoology, Howard M. Parshley, over 10 per cent of the material in the original French edition has been deleted, including fully one-half of a chapter and the names of seventy-eight women in history. These unindicated deletions seriously undermine the integrity of Beauvoir's analysis of such important topics as the American and European nineteenth-century suffrage movements, and the development of socialist feminism in France.Compounding the confusion created by the deletions, are mistranslations of key philosophical terms. The phrase, ‘for-itself’, for example, which identifies a distinctive concept from Sartrean existentialism, has been rendered into English as its technical opposite, ‘in-itself’. These mistranslations obscure the philosophical context of Beauvoir's work and give the mistaken impression to the English reader that Beauvoir is a sloppy writer, and thinker.     

Echoes of Virginia Woolf

There was a central paradox in Virginia Woolf's life and art: experientially, emotionally and politically, women were her most valuable audience; artistically and critically, men seemed to her more serious and respectable. Who then should be the critical critic? She herself acknowledged that the male view of the world accorded little value to expressions of the female view of the world, yet it was the female view of the world that Virginia Woolf wanted to express. Were women ‘literarily reliable’ and valid, perhaps Virginia Woolf's ‘echoes’, her life and her work, would have been very different.     

Orwell's despair,Burdekin's hope: Gender and power in dystopia

George Orwell's 1984 bears a striking resemblance to a little-known anti-fascist dystopia, Swastika Night, that was published twelve years earlier. While the similarities between the two books are in some cases remarkable, of even greater interest is the different treatment of political domination and gender ideology in the two novels. Orwell's critique of power worship is inherently limited by his inability to perceive that preoccupations with power and domination are specifically associated with the male gender role. By contrast, Katherine Burdekin, a feminist writer who published Swastika Night using the pseudonym ‘Murray Constantine’, focuses her critique on the ‘cult of masculinity’ and the fascist dictatorship to which it can lead. Her novel is set 700 years in the future, after Hitlerism has been established in Europe as the official creed, and with it a ‘Reduction of Women’ to an animal level. This essay analyses the relationship between gender and power as understood by these two writers, one world-famous, the other forgotten.     

Love and Marriage: Ellen Key and Hiratsuka Raichō Explore Alternatives

This article provides a case study of how maternal feminist ideas traveled across national and cultural boundaries in the early twentieth century. It briefly examines Swedish feminist Ellen Key's (1849–1926) ideas on love, marriage, and motherhood and then explores the impact these ideas had on Japanese feminist Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971). Encountering Key's writings early in her career had a lasting impact on Raichō's thought, writing, and activism. It also shows how Raichō drew on the modern, universal aspects of Key's thought to promote women's rights and influence in an increasingly nationalistic Japan. The condition of all development is, not to be content with the present, but to have the courage to ask how everything can be made better and the good fortune to find a right answer to this question in thought or in action. —Ellen Key, Love and Marriage 3.     

Lydia Becker's ‘school for science’: a challenge to domesticity

Lydia Becker (1827-1890) is known as a leader of the Women's Suffrage Movement but little is known about her work to include women and girls in science. Before her energy was channelled into politics, she aimed to have a scientific career. Mid-Victorian Britain was a period in which women's intellect and potential were widely debated, and in which the dominant ideology was that their primary role in life was that of wife and mother. Science was widely regarded as a ‘masculine’ subject which women were deliberately discouraged from studying. The author concentrates on the two main areas in which important contributions were made, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Manchester School Board     

'The fact that possesses my imagination': Rachel Carson,Science and Writing

Rachel Carson is a famous but unknown writer. She is remembered as a pioneering heroine of the ecological movement, but even her Silent Spring is hardly read and the great books about the sea that made her name are unknown to the public. Recent biographical accounts have focused on the problems Carson faced as a woman entering the male-dominated scientific community, and the sexist reception of her books. But her real life was plainly in her writing. Although the accounts of geology in The Sea around Us and of genetics in Silent Spring are outdated, her books remain classics, not only for their lucidity and beauty, but for a vision of the impersonal processes of evolution and geological time comparable to Darwin's. This is especially true of her trilogy of books on the sea: The Sea around Us , describing the biochemistry, history and geography of the oceans and their tides, Under the SeaWind, focusing on the interdependent lives of sea-creatures, while The Edge of the Sea deals with the lives, great and microscopically small, of the intertidal world. The corresponding theme of Silent Spring is the death of nature through man's folly.     

Tracing the voice: Pandita Ramabai's life through her landmark texts

‘The silence of a thousand years is broken’ exulted Rachel Bodley's introduction to Pandita Ramabai's feminist manifesto The High‐caste Hindu Woman, which was published in 1887 and sold 9,000 copies internationally within a year.1 Rachel L. Bodley, ‘Introduction’ in Pandita Ramabai, The High‐caste Hindu Woman (Maharahstra State Board of Literature and Culture) Bombay, 1887, reprinted 1977, pp. i–xix (reference p. i). The 1888 reprint of the book in the United States mentions that it is the ‘tenth thousand’. View all notes Its author was instantly made into an icon in Western countries from the United States to Australia, to linger on in their collective memories, even as she was relegated to ‘silence’ in the social histories and discourses of India. This conundrum, pivotal to an understanding of her life and, I submit, rooted in her feminism, is still to be addressed. The numerous and informative biographies of Ramabai (23 April 1858–5 April 1922) have been located within two distinct paradigms: one projects her life, sometimes almost hagiographically, as a triumphant expression of the Christian impulse;2 Ramabai's Christian biographies in English include S.M. Adhav, Pandita Ramabai (The Christian Literature Society) Madras, 1979; Bodley, ‘Introduction’; Rajas K. Dongre and Josephine F. Patterson, Pandita Ramabai: a Life of Faith and Prayer (The Christian Literature Society) Madras, 1963; Nicol McNicol, Pandita Ramabai (Association Press) Calcutta, 1926; and Padmini Sengupta, Pandita Ramabai Saraswati: Her Life and Work (Asia Publishing House) Bombay, 1970. Her best‐known Marathi Christian biography is Devadatta Tilak, Maharashtrachi Tejaswini Pandita Ramabai (Nagarik Prakashan) Nashik, 1960. View all notes and the other valorises her advocacy of women's education while sidestepping the issue of religion.3 Ramabai's Hindu (or non‐Christian) biographies include Tarabai Sathe, Aparajita Rama (D.P. Nagarkar) Pune, 1975, and K.S. Thackeray, Pandita Ramabai (V.R. Baum) Mumbai, 1905 (both in Marathi); and A.B. Shah, ‘Introduction’ in A.B. Shah (ed.), The Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai (Maharashtra State Board of Literature and Culture) Bombay, 1977, pp. xi–xxxvi (in English). View all notes Both elide her feminism. Recent feminist scholarship on Ramabai has impressively interwoven multiple disciplinary and ideological strands, but tended to focus either on her passage to Christianity,4 Susan Glover, ‘Of Water and of the Holy Spirit’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1995; Gauri Viswanathan, ‘Silencing Heresy’ in Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Oxford University Press) Delhi, 1998, pp. 118–52. View all notes or her reverse gaze at the West during international travels.5 Antoinette Burton, ‘Restless Desire’ in A. Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late‐Victorian Britain (University of California Press) Berkeley, 1998, pp. 72–109; Inderpal Grewal, ‘Pandita Ramabai and Parvati Athavale’ in I. Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Duke University Press) Durham, NC and London, 1996, pp. 179–229. Kumari Jayawardena, ‘Going for the Jugular of Hindu Patriarchy’ in Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (eds), Unequal Sisters, 3rd edition (Routledge) New York and London, offers a variation on Ramabai's interaction with American women, in terms of American aid to her educational project in India and its inherent tensions. View all notes The parameters of her life and of her feminism have rarely been clearly outlined.6 I have tried to do this in Meera Kosambi, ‘Introduction’ in M. Kosambi (ed.), Pandita Ramabai through Her Own Words: Selected Works (Oxford University Press) Delhi, 2000, pp. 1–32; and Meera Kosambi, ‘Returning the American Gaze: Situating Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter' in M. Kosambi (ed.), Pandita Ramabai's American Encounter: ‘The Peoples of the United States’, 1889, M. Kosambi (trans.) (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 2003, pp. 1–46. View all notes In this article I propose to analyse her feminism by tracing her multiple ideological trajectories mainly through a discussion of some of her landmark writings, and then indicate the problematic of her representation of the highly troped ‘oppressed Indian woman’.     

exorcizing the past: the slave narrative as historical fantasy

Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred is a hybrid text: part historical novel, part science fiction/fantasy and part slave narrative. The story transports a contemporary black heroine into 19th-century Maryland in order to explore, recreate and connect with African American narratives of identity. Providing two narrative strands, one in 19th-century Maryland and the other in 20th-century California, the text is able to juxtapose the realities of slavery with its legacy. Conflating these time-periods, Kindred aims to interrogate the marginalization of African American history, but specifically the role black women played in that history, in America's bicentennial year. While Butler adapts what has been regarded as the quintessential African American literary mode of the slave narrative, her fiction consciously draws upon a literary heritage that foregrounds narratives written by black women. Consequently, Kindred highlights the issues and concerns that directly affect the construction of black femininity and its role in the community of slaves as well as examining the historical pressure brought to bear on the configuration of contemporary African American womanhood. In doing so, Butler's fiction articulates the right of black women to intervene in their own construction and to inscribe the existence of black women in stories of originary identity. What this article seeks to explore is how Butler's fiction develops and extends the traditional slave narrative, how this is utilized in order to interrogate the ‘realities’ of both slavery and contemporary US society, and how effective the text is in challenging stereotypical representation of white and black femininity.     

Alcohol Use, Outcome Expectancies, and HIV Risk Status among American Indian Youth: A Latent Growth Curve Model with Parallel Processes

Alcohol use is cited as a risk factor for exposure to HIV infection through risky sexual behavior, especially among adolescents. From Social Cognitive Theory, positive outcome expectancies about the use of alcohol have often been presented as a critical aspect of alcohol use. Yet little is known about how they might be related to different aspects of HIV risk. Using latent growth curve modeling with data from 292 American Indian youth across seven years, both alcohol use and positive expectancies increased significantly; a lower-risk group showed significantly slower increases in both. Changes in alcohol use and outcome expectancies were significantly interrelated, providing support for reciprocal influence between the two constructs. Positive alcohol outcome expectancies may provide a preventive intervention point worthy of further consideration as influencing alcohol use and lowering HIV sexual risk among adolescents.Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center. She received her Ph.D. in Community Psychology from Michigan State University. Her major research interests are adolescent development among minority youth with an emphasis on positive and problem behaviors.Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan. Her major research interests are in areas of American Indian mental health and services research.Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan. Her primary research interests are in demography and contextual effects of individual health behavior, with a special emphasis on adolescent development.In addition to the above people, the Project Team included Sonia Bauduy, Cathy A.E. Bell, Cecelia K. Big Crow, Dedra Buchwald, Nichole Cottier, Amy D. Dethlefsen, Ann Wilson Frederick, Ellen M. Keane, Shelly Hubing, Natalie Murphy, Angela Sam, Jennifer Settlemire, Jennifer Truel, and Frankee White Dress.     

‘A whisper in the assembly of nations’ United States' participation in the International Movement for Women's Rights from the League of Nations to the United Nations

This work examines North American feminist activities in the international arena from the end of the First World War to the early days of the United Nations. Led by Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party of the United States, feminists attempted to obtain greater equality for women by having nations agree to an Equal Rights Treaty and an equal Nationality Treaty. But they ran into opposition from more moderate social reform women's organizations. Believing protective legislation for women in industry to be more important than legal equality, and antagonistic to the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States' Constitution, reformers objected to the international feminists on ideological grounds. They also disapproved of the radicals' militant tactics and active publicity seeking, thereby extending the quarrel to the realm of personality differences. Thus the divisiveness caused by the ERA in the United States disrupted the international women's movement as well. Working through Pan American Congresses and the League of Nations, and continuing into the United Nations, feminists devoted more than a quarter of a century to fighting for equal rights world-wide. While their actual achievements were not notable, in the end their equalitarian ideas proved to have more enduring value than reform theories.     

The meaning and effect of the UN decade for women on black women in America

Thirty Black women activists within different age categories, from varied educational and occupational backgrounds, and representing Black women's organizations from different regions of the U.S. were interviewed to determine their views on the meaning and effect of the UN Decade for Women on the lives of Black American women. Their responses to questions about the Decade indicate that the masses of Black women are poorly informed or totally uninformed about the UN Decade for Women. And, among that segment of the Black female population which is well informed about the Decade, positive views on the benefits of the Decade for Black women correlate strongly with employment in a national women's organization or governmental agency dealing with women's issues, and personal involvement in UN Conferences. Many Black women feel that the opportunity to network with third-world women is the major benefit that Black American women gained from the Decade. They also feel that American racism and class bias effectively prevent equitable implementation of a national plan of action to improve the status of women in the United States.     

Black woman professor—White university

Black people, as a group, have been the victims of exclusion in almost all areas of the dominant American cultural life. Black women, in particular, have suffered because of race and sex. The result of these oppressions has been a general cultural silence and invisibility of all black people. Challenges to the racial status quo reached momentous dimensions in the 1960s—the era of the black revolution, and touched all areas of the national life in the U.S.A. However, when the smoke cleared, black women discovered that despite their efforts in the struggle, few of them reaped rewards. In the wake of the women's liberation movement that followed, the general consensus among women of color was that black meant black men and women meant white women. This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs, and one which black women have vowed to fight against. The university is one of the arenas for this confrontation. This paper looks at the experiences of one black woman in a prestigious Midwestern university and documents the nature of her experiences as a double minority. She voices the opinion that black women intend to struggle on to their rightful places in the academy. They can't go back, and they aim to stay.     

Women's experience of world war one: Suffragists,pacifists and poets

The period of 1914–1918 was a time of immense change for women in Britain. The Suffragist movement, begun in 1867, gained irresistible force, culminating in the Act of 1918 in which women were given the vote at thirty and men at twenty-one. It was not until the 1928 Act that for the first time in the history of Britain there was full adult suffrage, granting the vote to both sexes at twenty-one. The picture is a complex one; Mrs Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel identified their movement with the war effort, indeed their pre-war militancy became militarism. Mrs Fawcett, an avowed non-militant suffragist before the war, who believed in the verbal power of argument over revolutionary tactics, also supported the war effort and nationalism. However, there were other suffragists such as Sylvia Pankhurst, Emily Hobhouse, Catherine Marshall, Helena Swanwick, Olive Schreiner and Kate Courtney, who were opposed to the war. Mrs Pankhurst believed if women couldn't fight, they shouldn't vote. The pacifists believed that this view simply gave in to the argument for physical force. They also saw militarism as yet another version of the strong oppressing the weak and thus an emphatic form of patriarchy. However, although the suffragists were bitterly divided in their moral view of the war, they were united in the cause of women's emancipation.The war itself provided all classes of women with important opportunities to work outside the home, as munition workers, land-army workers, police-women, doctors and nurses. The experience of change caused by the suffrage movement, together with the effect of the war upon women's lives, transformed women's image of themselves in radical and irreversible ways.My paper draws on some 125 poems by 72 women poets; Scars Upon My Heart is the first anthology of its kind and testifies to women's involvement in the war and the impact it had upon their lives. The anthology is necessary reading, together with the soldier poets like Owen, Sassoon, Blunden and Rosenberg, whose war poetry has been known to us for the past sixty years, for a full understanding of the significance of war for women and men.