vol 25 - 1999
   
Preface
   

The articles in this particular issue of Feminist Studies work together to challenge us on several fronts: as a group they ask how far we have come, and they urge reflection on the complex ways in which women are constantly visible and invisible, always the same as men and always different. Despite the apparent prevalence of "gender" study as a research paradigm within many academic fields, exactly what is the nature of and how established is feminist historiography within the humanities? In what ways does the apparently commonplace visibility of white women and women of color within the public sphere shape current debates about equity, power, and labor? How are these issues articulated among women themselves, in the context of power differentials produced by race and class identifications? And how, both at home and abroad, do we understand the nature of feminist interventions in the political sphere?

The first two articles, "Cherished Classifications: Bathrooms and the Construction of Gender/Race on the Pennsylvania Railroad during World War II" by Patricia Cooper and Ruth Oldenziel and "The Hidden History of Affirmative Action: Working Women's Struggles in the 1970s and the Gender of Class" by Nancy MacLean, each bring a fresh historical perspective to the subject of American women, race, and work during the second half of the twentieth century. In examining the neglected records of a white middle-class female supervisor hired during World War II by the Pennsylvania Railroad to monitor bathroom conditions for (and thus the "hygiene" practices of) Black and white women laborers, Cooper and Oldenziel focus our attention on the crucially effective ways in which management attempted to enforce gender, class, and racial boundaries in the face of social transformations in the workplace that followed the outbreak of the war. Turning to the 1970s, Nancy MacLean locates women in the struggle for affirmative action via the forms of collective action that involved female workers in a variety of job settings. MacLean's goal is to recover "women's relationship to affirmative action . . . because women . . . are so often [mis]cast . . . as passive beneficiaries hiving off the labors of others."

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Contents
   

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Patricia Cooper and Ruth Oldenziel
Cherished Classifications: Bathrooms and the Construction of Gender/Race on the Pennsylvania Railroad during World War II

Nancy MacLean
The Hidden History of Affirmative Action: Working Women's Struggles in the 1970s and the Gender of Class

Erik Ludwig
Closing In on the "Plantation": Coalition Building
and the Role of Black Women's Grievances in Duke University Labor Disputes, 1965-1968

Ula Taylor
Proposition 209 and the Affirmative Action Debate on the University of California Campuses

Linda Briskin and Janice Newson
Making Equity a Priority: Anatomy of the York University
Strike of 1997

Frances R. Aparicio
Through My Lens: A Video Project about Women
of Color Faculty at the University of Michigan

Judith Strasser
Poetry

Glenda Gilmore
"But She Can't Find Her [V.O.] Key"

Susan Thomas
Poetry

Joanna L. Kao
Art Essay

M. Grazia Rossilli
The European Union's Policy on the Equality of Women

Danielle Haase-Dubosc
Sexual Difference and Politics in France Today

Tessa Bartholomeusz
Mothers of Buddhas, Mothers of Nations:
Kumaranatunga and Her Meteoric Rise to Power in Sri Lanka

Joy Parr
Homeworkers in Global Perspectives (Review Essay)

     
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