In this issue of Feminist Studies, we present several articles that discuss aspects of what could be labeled women's rebellion—rebellion which occurred in unlikely places and ways and sometimes remained hidden. The first generation of Japanese-American women arrived in the United States to find domestic work, virtually the only wage work open to them. Although they were doing what was often considered the most menial and demeaning work, these women nevertheless found in domestic work sources of pride-pride in contributing to family income and their children's future, pride in performing physically demanding labor, pride in doing their jobs well. They were also able to use their work to assert some control over their family situations, for example, concealing their actual earnings from their husbands. Their stories of their work, collected and interpreted for us by Evelyn Nakano Glenn, are often poignant, often instructive, as they make us realize once again the phenomenal strength of women, even in the most oppressive situations. We owe the author a great debt for making their experiences visible to us.

Ida Bauer, the patient named Dora in one of Freud's best known cases, was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Maria Ramas offers an interpretation of Dora's hysteria at odds with Freud's own. Whereas Freud argued that Dora's hysteria grew out of her denial of her love for a man (the husband of her father's mistress), Ramas argues that Dora's hysteria was the tragic outcome of her denial of her love for a woman, of her repudiation of heterosexual love, her protest against the femininity it entailed, and her denial of patriarchy. She apparently resolved her oedipal crisis in favor of the mother. How much simpler and happier her life might have been had the sexual love of women seemed a plausible alternative to her.

{READ MORE AS PDF}

Evelyn Nakano Glenn
The Dialectics of Wage Work: Japanese-American Women andDomestic Service, 1905-1940

Maria Ramas
Freud's Dora, Dora's Hysteria:
The Negation of a Woman's Rebellion

Blanche Wiesen Cook
The Life of Lorena Hickok: ER's Friend by Doris Faber

Norma Smith
Love the Great Disrupter: Stories for Kerry

Meg Bogin
Poem

Audrey Flack
Art

Joanne Feit Diehl
"Cartographies of Silence": Rich's Common Language
and the Woman Poet

William Ray Arney
Maternal-Infant Bonding:
The Politics of Falling in Love With Your Child

Liz Kennedy and June Lapidus
Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism
by Zillah Eisenstein