Battered Women and the Clergy: An Evaluation

1982 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 226-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee H. Bowker
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Family Violence ◽  
Battered Women ◽  
Marital Violence ◽  
Wife Beating ◽  
Women Ministers ◽  
Overall Evaluation ◽  
Working Class Women

Reports on a study of 146 marital violence victims in Milwaukee who were predominatly white and middle class. The overall evaluation of the helping efforts of clergy with those persons was more positive than negative, tending to be more successful with middle class than with working class women. Ministers were rated as more successful than priests in their interventions by women whereas husband reactions were initially just the opposite. Recommends that clergy raise the consciousness of their congregation about wife-beating and providing programs and funds for sheltering victims of family violence.

scholarly journals “They don't even look like women workers”: Femininity and Class in Twentieth-Century Latin America

2006 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Similar Process ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Eva Peron ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Key Resources

Recent research on consumer culture and working-class femininity in the United States has argued that attention to fashionable clothing and dime novels did not undermine female working-class identities, but rather provided key resources for creating those identities. In this essay I consider whether we can see a similar process of appropriation by working-class women in Latin America. There women employed in factories had to contend with widespread denigration of the female factory worker. Looking first at the employer-run “Centers for Domestic Instruction” in São Paulo, I argue that “proper femininity” in these centers—frequented by large numbers of working-class women—reflected middle-class notions of the skilled housewife, and situated working-class women as nearly middle class. What we see is a process of “approximation,” not appropriation. I then look at the case of Argentina (especially Greater Buenos Aires) where Peronism also promoted “traditional” roles for working-class women but where Eva Perón emerges as a working-class heroine. The figure of Evita—widely reviled by women of the middle and upper classes—becomes a means to construct an alternative, class-based femininity for working-class women.

scholarly journals Annie Kenney and the Politics of Class in the Women’s Social and Political Union

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Political Union ◽  
Building Relationships ◽  
Public Representation ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Significant Support

Abstract This article argues that an analysis of Annie Kenney’s public representation and private relationships offers a new way of evaluating how class was understood, experienced, and negotiated within the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Annie Kenney was a well-known suffrage activist from Lancashire, usually described as the only working-class woman to achieve prominence in the organization. This article analyses how the WSPU initially made much of Annie Kenney’s social origins, attracting significant press attention. However, it also demonstrates that their assumption that she could effectively speak for all working-class women was problematic, since it assumed a homogeneity of working-class experience. As the WSPU shifted its focus to recruiting more middle-class women, it sought instead to celebrate Annie Kenney’s commitment to the cause. Ironically, she was often more effective in building relationships with wealthier women, forming substitute families that provided significant support and benefits. Yet though the depth of these relationships was extraordinary in the context of contemporary class relations, they remained exceptional rather than typical. This article thus develops the work of scholars including Sandra Stanley Holton, Sue Thomas, and Laura Schwartz, who have analysed how class fragmented and shaped the women’s movement. It demonstrates that the significance of class within the WSPU was fluid and shifting rather than fixed and static and indicates both the potential for, and barriers to, meaningful and lasting cross-class collaboration.

Ministry with Working-Class Women

1991 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 343-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith L. Orr
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Individual Psychology ◽  
Alfred Adler ◽  
Practical Guide ◽  
Pastoral Care And Counseling ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The Individual

Presents generalizations and characteristics of working-class women and how these often deviate from the assumptions of caregivers, many of whom are guided by middle-class values. Notes the implications for pastoral care and counseling. Suggests that the Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler is particularly suited as a theoretical and practical guide for caregivers.

Women, Class, and Identity Politics

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-34
Author(s):  
Martha E. Gimenez
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Different Characteristics ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
General Conditions

The question of the oppression of women, the critique of which constituted feminism as an academic and political pursuit, has been feminism's enduring source of strength and appeal, yielding numerous critical theories and perspectives. This has produced continual conceptual shifts defining an evolving feminism, such as the shift from women to gender and from inequality to difference. It has also involved shifts from theorizing the general conditions of women's experience—oppressed at home and in the workplace, while juggling the conflicting demands of both—to theorizing the implications of the claim that, while gender may be the main source of oppression for white, heterosexual, middle-class women, women with different characteristics and experiences are affected by other forms of oppression as well. A possible way for Marxist feminism to remain a distinctive theoretical and politically relevant perspective might be to return to class, in the Marxist sense, theoretically reexamining the relationship between class and oppression, particularly the oppression of working-class women, within capitalist social formations.

Bodies, Sexuality and the “Modernization” of the British Working Classes, 1920s to 1960s

2006 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
Sexual Pleasure ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Working Class Women

A neglected aspect of the perceived “embourgeoisement” of the British working-classes in the 1950s was the representation of a blurring of class difference around questions of sexuality. In different ways, female bodies and sexuality in the postwar period became a means of talking about changing class identity and the modernization of society. In the 1920s and 1930s, the working-class body and working-class sexuality served as counterpoints to largely middle-class ideas of modern femininity and sexuality. Working-class women's inability to control their reproduction was portrayed as one cause of the deprivation experienced by the working classes. In the fifties, by contrast, working-class bodies and sexuality had become signifiers of the modernization of British class society. Working-class women were perceived as being able to control the size of their families. Such control was, with full employment and better housing, a mark of a modern, affluent working class. At the same time, working-class marriage was represented as increasingly incorporating notions of companionability and sexual pleasure previously only seen in middle-class life. “Embourgeoisement” in postwar Britain was thus represented as having a sexual aspect.

Working-Class Women, Middle-Class Women, and Models of Childbirth

1983 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret K. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women

Revolutionary Spaces: Photographs of Working-class Women by Esther Bubley 1940–1943

1996 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Farm Security Administration ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
American Nationalism ◽  
Boarding House ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
American Society

This article had several purposes. First, I wanted to highlight the work of Esther Bubley, an American photographer whose documentary work for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information in the early 1940s is largely unknown. Second, I wanted to show how her images complicated and undermined the traditional themes of Depression era photography in the United States, Third, by looking at her images of women, my intention was to reveal how she worked against depictions of femininity during the Depression, and in confrontation with one-dimensional portrayals of women as America entered the Second World Wan In conclusion, I contend that Bubley's images were fundamentally portrayals of working-class femininity represented as being an individual – rather than a symbolic – experience. Most specifically in the images I have examined, Bubley deconstructs an ideological image of female working-class identity which was central to documentary photography in 1930s America. For example, unlike in photographs by Dorothea Lange, Bubley did not portray working-class women as metaphoric sites of passive endurance which would eventually lead to the rejuvenation of American nationalism. Rather, she showed working-class women to be potentially subversive in the ways they defined themselves against the legacy of 1930s photography and in opposition to the ideological impositions of wartime propaganda. As a result, Bubley's images of working-class women waiting in bars for lonely soldiers, or looking for a future beyond the confines of their boarding house existences while remaining outside the middle-class boundaries defined by capitalist consumerism, set out a pictorial foundation for working-class female identity which exists beyond the context in which the photographs were taken. Consequently, Bubley's work highlights individual self-identity, personal empowerment and self-conscious desire in working-class women which was – and still is – confined and repressed by economic disadvantage and systematic marginalization from an American society defined from a middle-class point of view.

scholarly journals Mapping Working-Class Activism in Reconstruction St. Louis

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-375
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Belanger
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Geographical Information Systems ◽  
Geographical Information ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Collective Activism

Blending the tools of micro-history with historical Geographical Information Systems (GIS) permits us to chart the social networks and everyday journeys of black working-class women activists and the middle-class men with whom they came into contact in Reconstruction St. Louis. Social and spatial ties shaped the activism of St. Louis’ working-class women; mapping these ties reveals the links between everyday acts of resistance and organized efforts of African Americans to carve out a space for themselves in the restructuring city and make visible a collective activism that crossed class and racial boundaries.

Constructing Expertise: Inequality and the Consequences of Information-Seeking by Breast Cancer Patients

2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Clark
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Support Groups ◽  
Information Seeking ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Breast Cancer Patients ◽  
Cancer Support ◽  
Illness Experiences ◽  
Working Class Women

The present study looks at women who joined breast cancer support groups to cope with the emotional fallout of the disease. Three support groups were studied, two composed of middle-class women, and one composed of working-class women. Data derive from 24 months of field observation and 35 in-depth interviews. Analysis shows how class-based inequalities led the women to seek therapeutic information about breast cancer in different ways. Women in the middle-class groups had the resources to gather and interpret information on their own, in effect becoming lay experts on the disease. Women in the working-class group lacked these resources, and thus collaborated in constructing their doctors as experts. These divergent strategies affected the women's illness experiences. Middle-class women interacted more assertively with their care providers and were more satisfied with treatment decisions. Working-class women, who were invested in trusting the expertise of their doctors, were subject to medical paternalism and pressured into making decisions that they later questioned.

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