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Hi~ 各位队友们，周日的文史哲来了~
今天终于推出feminism这个主题了，这个主题覆盖面蛮大的，我这次主要涉及的是history部分。速度和越障分别来自两篇文章，第一篇主要讲的是feminism history(侧重law方面)，而第二篇文章主要讲的是today's feminism，通过分析几个案例来论证。不过由于篇幅所限，第一篇我只节选了introduction部分，第二篇我选了introduction和conclusion，两篇essays的核心内容都没有摘录到，所以附上原文方便大家查阅。
另外，第一篇算是对于"Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and Law (NYU PRESS 2011)"这本书的一个摘要，我感觉像是一篇文献综述，内容丰富且浅显易懂，很适合像我这种入门级别的玩家。另外，虽然两篇文章都来自SSRN，但我认为难度不太大，希望大家enjoy~
Part 1 Speed
Article 1(Check the title later)
Law, History, and Feminism
Akron Research Paper No. 12-05
[warm up]
The introduction provides the context necessary to appreciate the essays in this book. It starts with an overview of the existing state of women’s legal history, tracing the core events over the past two hundred years. This history, while sparse, provides the common foundation for the authors, and establishes the launching point for the deeper and more detailed inquiries offered here. Following this history is an exploration of the key themes advanced in the book. In Part I, Contradictions in Legalizing Gender, the essays develop analyses of the law’s contradictory response to women’s petitions. The essays in this section provide evidence of how law operated as a barrier to limit women’s power, and challenge the assumptions that such barriers have been eliminated today. Yet the essays in part I also present a more nuanced historical picture. They show the law’s facilitation of women’s agency and power, often based on the same gendered norms that elsewhere produced limitations. Part II of the book, Women’s Transformation of the Law, shows women’s impact upon the law and illustrates how women changed the law to incorporate their own, gendered, perspectives. By “feminizing” the legal process and altering the substantive law to respond to women’s needs, women were able to shape the law in their own image.
[words: 212]
[TIME1]
Women’s Legal History Thus Far(The Introduction Part)
The history of women in the law is still a work in progress. The existing narrative of women’s legal history is somewhat skeletal, which is not surprising given that the field is relatively new.3 The research, however, shares a common foundation, even as that history is being re-imagined by ongoing scholarship. The conventional story in law tells of women’s linear progress from oppression under the law to equal opportunity in modern times. History is viewed as a series of small steps, as women slowly eradicate the legal barriers to their full empowerment. This collection shows that such incrementalism did not prevail in the law and that existing historical accounts of women’s legal rights are one dimensional.
The popular notion of women’s history is often expressed as first wave and second wave feminism. The first wave spans the seventy-five years when demands for suffrage were prominent, beginning with Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments in 1848 to adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution and women’s right to vote in 1920.“Second wave feminism” refers to the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s often symbolized in mass media representations by Gloria Steinem—the quintessential liberated “career woman”—and Betty Friedan, the iconic middle-class housewife who documented the dehumanizing effect of her experience in the influential book, The Feminist Mystique (1963). The feminism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, however, was composed of a more complex and diverse set of political, social, and cultural challenges to a patriarchal order than could be adequately represented by either Steinem or Friedan. And, the nineteenth century campaigns for the rights of “woman” were rent with racial and class tensions that remain hidden when recounted only from the point of view of Cady Stanton. Despite significant focus on these contentious issues in the scholarship produced by historians of women’s social history, official histories of law and women often continue to put white, middle-class, women with professional ambitions and economic privilege—whether living in the nineteenth or twentieth century—at the center of their analysis. Yet, it is important to recognize the intricacies of the way that race and class tempers and shapes gender inequities as well as hinders cross-race and class alliances among women in order to appreciate the complexities of women’s activism and legal situations over time.
[words: 392]
[TIME2]
Conventional legal histories of women tend to begin in the period before the first feminist wave with studies of coverture and women’s legal invisibility inherited from English common law. From the earliest times of American law, married women were “protected” by the law of coverture which provided that a woman was covered legally by her husband and thus “relieved” of rights to property, wages, child custody, or suffrage. The English treatise writer, William Blackstone, summarized the existing common law. “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.”4 In practice this meant that a married woman could not own or control her own property or earnings, devise property by will, enter into contracts, have custody of her children, be liable for her own debts, or sue or be sued in court. A husband was permitted to provide physical correction or “domestic chastisement.” The law allowed and even obligated him to control his wife since he was liable both for her civil debts and criminal misdemeanors. Blackstone explained that the legal disabilities of coverture were “for the most part intended for her protection and benefit. So great a favorite is the female sex of the laws of England.” Historians, however, have found some evidence of women’s autonomy during these early times. As Mary Beth Norton demonstrated in her book, Founding Mothers and Fathers, women exercised social and legal power in colonial America as midwives and on women’s juries constituted for paternity determinations.
[words: 281]
[TIME3]
The dominant gender ideology of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries evolved into one of separate spheres for men and women. The law embraced the popular cultural notion that women were relegated to the private sphere of home and family, while men dominated the public spheres of work and politics. Women’s political role as a citizen of the new republic was cast in terms of domestic responsibility. Under this view of republican motherhood, women were entrusted to educate their sons as virtuous republican citizens. Linda Kerber in her classic book, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980), wrote of the ways women took advantage of their duty to raise civically responsible children by learning to read and taking seriously their role as educators of the young. This domestic role was intensified and sentimentalized in the first half of the nineteenth century by the promotion of a “cult” of domesticity. “True women,” according to the “cult” focused all their efforts on the home and were protected from public responsibilities. In Barbara Welter’s often cited delineation, in addition to domesticity they evinced piety, purity, and submission to the men of their family and community. This ideology of course was neither an accurate description of women generally speaking nor was it an attainable ideal for any but the small strata of white middle-class women in this rapidly industrializing period. It was an aspiration applicable only to those women who did not have to labor at farm work, enter into commercial relations at market, work as servants in other family’s homes, or work for remuneration outside their homes—for example, in the burgeoning textile industry. Though the ideology was full of contradictions, it was widely remarked upon and worked to justify and endorse the lack of political rights for women in the public sphere by presumably elevating them as the treasured “angels” of the private sphere.
[words: 317]
[TIME4]
Challenges to this idea of women’s need for protection the law of coverture began with the Married Women’s Property Acts in the 1840s. They changed some of the express legal restrictions on women’s rights to property and limited husband’s prerogatives over that property. The first series of enactments barred the creditors of husbands from seizing the property of married women. Later acts allowed married women to retain their personal property and earnings, sign contracts, and sue and be sued. The acts were motivated as much by the credit crises and wealthy fathers protecting their daughters as from feminist motivations to reform the law. The new statutes were also part of the larger codification movement which sought to restrict the discretion of judges by reducing common law rules and equitable practices to express statutory terms. Most of this legislation was limited in scope. It did not, for example, provide wives with joint ownership of all property accumulated during marriage. Nonetheless, the reforms were the first steps toward recognizing women’s economic and familial status.
Women’s demands for equality in the family sometimes extended to claims for political rights. On July 19 and 20, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York, Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented her Declaration of Sentiments which contained 18 demands for social, political, and legal equality. The first demand on the list of claims for equal property, custody of children, and employment, was the right to vote. The movement for women’s equal political and public rights became part of the nation’s social discourse, led by Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s National Association for Woman’s Suffrage and Lucy Stone’s American Association for Woman’s Suffrage. The organizations differed on the legal tactics for suffrage—the American pursuing a state-by-state approach and the National seeking federal action. They also disagreed about the involvement of men as officers (American allowed) and on support for the Fifteenth Amendment mandating suffrage for black men, but not women (National opposed).
In 1873 in Rochester, New York, Susan B. Anthony tried to vote, arguing that the newly-enacted Fourteenth Amendment granted women this right in federal elections. She was jailed, yet her sentence was stayed thus prohibiting her from challenging the law on appeal. The following year, in Minor v. Happersett, Virginia Minor pursued the legal argument in the courts arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection for the “privileges and immunities of citizenship” guaranteed women the right to vote. The Supreme Court rejected her claim, narrowly interpreting the new amendment to hold that voting was not a privilege of citizenship and blocking women’s juridical strategies to secure suffrage.7 A suffrage amendment was introduced into Congress in 1878, and endlessly reintroduced, until it emerged from committee in 1914 and was quickly and easily defeated. A few states like Wyoming and Utah granted women the right to vote by the end of the century but, in the absence of a federal mandate, most continued to deny women this right until 1920.
[words: 489]
[TIME5]
In the late nineteenth century, the suffrage movement gained new traction with the additional support of socially conservative groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. These organizations, originally established to oppose the sale and consumption of alcohol, endorsed the ideology of “true womanhood” by reiterating women’s purity and relative insulation from the amorality of the marketplace. They sought the vote for women on grounds that they were morally and spiritually superior to men and thus better suited to caretake society. They specifically argued that female leadership was best able to attend to social problems sparked by the increasing pace of immigration and urbanization, such as a rise in alcohol consumption which threatened the home as a protected haven for women and children. This application of “true womanhood” logic to promote women as “social housekeepers” was a powerful and effective new strategy of female reformers producing new roles and even professions for women, but nonetheless did not produce widespread acceptance of putting the vote in the hands of women.
The final impetus for women’s suffrage would not come until after the turn of the new century when more radical logic demanding women’s political equality to men pushed aside conservative “true woman” ideology, and more subversive measures demanding women’s right to vote finally won the day. In 1917 while Carrie Chapman Catt, as representative of the merged National-American Woman’s Suffrage Association, engaged President Woodrow Wilson in discussion, Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and other members of the National Woman’s Party led silent pickets and protests in front of the White House. They continued these protests for six months until they were jailed on the charge of obstructing the sidewalk. In prison Paul led hunger strikes and endured forced feedings and inhumane treatment. The events triggered a public and political outcry sufficient to push the dormant suffrage amendment to the forefront. Meanwhile, additional congressional alliances were secured by recourse to racially divisive strategies that garnered the support of conservative southern congressmen happy to swell the ranks of white voters by adding white women to the rolls. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, a combination of powerful rhetorics invoking modernity, democracy, and national and racial superiority tipped the scales in favor of woman suffrage.8 The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing women’s right to vote was finally passed in 1920.
[words: 388]
Source: SSRN
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2031057
Part 2 Obstacle
Article 2(Check the title later)
Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Obama: Performing Gender, Race, and Class on the Campaign Trail
Denver University Law Review 709 (2009)
[TIME6]
INTRODUCTION
In Our First Unisex President?: Black Masculinity and Obama’s Feminine Side, Frank Rudy Cooper posits that President Obama consciously performed a feminine identity in order to navigate the tricky waters of race and gender in the presidential election. Cooper notes that white popular culture perceives black masculinity as bipolar: there are“good blacks” and “bad blacks.” According to white popular culture, the “Bad Black Man is animalistic, sexually depraved, and crime prone.” His counterpart, the “Good Black Man distances himself from black people and emulates white views.”
Because of the image of the Bad Black Man, black men must take care not to show excessive anger. Obama is known for his “cool,” a somewhat feminine identity performance that comforts white citizens and distances him from the “dangerous” Bad Black Man. His conciliatory empathic style and willingness to negotiate with “evil” foreign powers made him appear more feminine than his female rival, Hillary Clinton, who performed a more masculine demeanor and espoused a tough stance toward Iran.
Although Obama’s more feminine presentation downplayed white fear, it was also risky to his candidacy because it raised the question of whether he is masculine enough for the job. Ironically, perhaps it was his blackness that imbued Obama with sufficient masculinity to successfully walk the tightrope between being too masculine and too feminine, too black and too white. Cooper theorizes that Obama’s success may actually have a gender- and race-bending effect, by removing stigma from “the feminine” and opening space for all persons, especially men who do not conform to masculine gender norms, to perform their identities in unconventional ways.
While Cooper’s essay does not directly address women in the political spotlight, its focus on Obama’s feminization provokes the question of how white women and women of color can successfully perform their gender and racial identities in the public arena. The 2008 Presidential campaign highlighted three strong, interesting, and very different women—Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama—who negotiated identity performances in the political limelight. Because of their diverse backgrounds, experience,10 and ages, an examination of how these three women performed their identities and the public response to them offers a rich understanding of the changing nature of gender, gender roles, age, sexuality and race in our culture. This study suggests that Professor Cooper’s optimism that Obama’s race and gender performances may have removed the stigma from “the feminine” may be misplaced, at least when it comes to women aspiring to high public office. Indeed, a review of the public’s reaction to the gender, race, and class performances of these three women confirms that women aspiring to high public office continue to suffer intense public scrutiny of their gender performances.
Part I provides background for my analysis of these three women’s identity performances and the public reactions to them. It discusses contemporary theories of identity performance, gender and leadership. PartII applies the theory and research to the public careers of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama and observes that although women still face significant obstacles in the public arena, there may be more acceptance of women as political candidates than in the past. The essay concludes that the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin and the public appearance of Michelle Obama as a successful career woman, who is also a wife of the winning candidate, have moved women one step further toward equality in the national political scene. Moreover, the public may be more willing to consider women’s identities to include a mix of both traditional family values and competence in one’s career. By the same token, women’s identities as aspiring political leaders continue to be problematic, and require women to negotiate a double bind: if they are too feminine, they are deemed incompetent. If they are too masculine, they are considered not likeable.
CONCLUSION
The stories of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama raise many questions about whether the country is ready to accept women as equal players in the highest political offices. Clinton lost her bid to a strong candidate, but she received more votes than any other woman in the history of the nation. And, her ability to connect with blue collar workers in the industrial states of the Northeast and Midwest demonstrates that the voters were able to overcome their unconscious or conscious biases that rate women as less qualified than men to lead. Contrary to the research results, many appeared to find Clinton both competent and likeable as her candidacy progressed, and she connected with voters on economic issues.
Palin’s candidacy eventually imploded because of her lack of experience and readiness to be president, but the initial excitement about her candidacy suggests that the electorate may accept a woman who performs her identity by proudly displaying her family and acknowledging her roles as wife and mother. If Palin’s failed candidacy demonstrates that the country will not accept women as tokens, but will apply the same standards of knowledge, competence and experience to women as to men, that is a good message.
Although she did not run for high office, Michelle Obama’s experience during the campaign and after indicates that the country still wishes to see a traditional family in the White House. Her ultimate popularity, however, may result not only from her performance as a traditional wife and mother, but also from the comfortable manner in which she appears to embrace both her family and her professional lives.
If the country is ready for a woman President, the important question is whether the country will accept women without requiring performances that volley back and forth between feminine warmth and masculine toughness. Hillary Clinton’s, Sarah Palin’s and Michelle Obama’s experiences indicate that, even today, women have to perform their identities in particular ways. They still suffer from the double bind, and must negotiate the fine line of acceptable identity behaviors. One thing we do know: “second wave” feminism is dead, rejected not only by men but also by women in the electorate. To the extent that “second wave” feminism imposed rigid restrictions on women to behave like men, perhaps this is not a bad thing. But to the extent that a masculine style is comfortable or natural for a particular woman, the new order may represent a rigid restriction as well. Moreover, with the demise of feminism, what is left? Will the electorate give women the opportunity to be themselves? This is unlikely, even if we could agree upon what “being oneself” would mean.
[words: 1081]
Source: SSRN
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1375743
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发表于 2013-7-28 22:49:16
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