Purity

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Helena Liu
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
White Women ◽  
Women In Leadership ◽  
Professional Women ◽  
White Masculinity ◽  
White Femininity ◽  
Feminine Subject

Having interrogated hegemonic white masculinity in the previous chapter, this chapter presents a critique of white femininity and the rise of postfeminism. Entrenched in imperialist notions of beauty, delicacy and purity, this chapter examines the fraught performances of white femininity in our current age as it attempts to balance between asserting dominance and maintaining an idealised innocence. The chapter investigates the ways organisations prioritise a white patriarchal feminine subject, for example, how research of women in leadership has overwhelmingly focussed on the needs and interests of elite professional women at the expense of queer, working-class and non-white women. Consequently, organisations waving the banner for ‘gender equality’ can often end up reproducing heterosexism, classism and racism. Carolyn McCall and Sheryl Sandberg’s media profiles are analysed to explore white femininities in leadership.

Dictating with Dollars

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Marie Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Financial Independence ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Wealthy Women

Wealthy women’s understanding of financial independence and sisterhood are themes that are crucial to the ideas of women wealthy throughout the book. The Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) largely failed to effectively develop a cross-class coalition of wealthy women and labor women. By studying the WTUL in comparison to Grace Dodge’s working girls clubs and YWCA work, and the support of wealthy women for the 1909 Shirtwaist Strike, the chapter explores why many wealthy women sought gender equality. Their interactions with working-class women and their desire to control their own finances drove them to link financial independence with political equality. When the wealthy held the purse strings, cross-class cooperation, while potentially empowering to laboring women, was also a potent source of conflict. Working women resented the fact that Margaret Dreier Robins and Mary Dreier dominated the funding for the WTUL and insisted on having their way, despite the sisters’ deep commitment to feminism and their professed desire for cross-class coalition.

Never Happier in Her Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 176-192
Author(s):  
Allison Dorothy Fredette
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
White Women ◽  
Social Ethic ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Border Culture ◽  
Poor White

This chapter explores the lives of working-class and poor white women of the border South. Their story reveals the potential of border culture—how it gave a voice and agency to women whose stories could be more easily suppressed in a less fluid community. The border created fertile ground for ideas of mutuality and individualism. While this led many to pursue friendship, love, and partnership in their relationships, elite and middle-class husbands and wives of the border South still often adhered to a social ethic which dictated certain gendered behaviors to men and women. In working-class society, however, these philosophies gave women a greater sense of independence and authority, allowing them to push the boundaries of the household and assert themselves in new ways.

Border Crossing: A Black Woman Superintendent Builds Democratic Community in Unfamiliar Territory

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 771-788
Author(s):  
Susan J. Katz
Keyword(s):  
School District ◽  
Women Leaders ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
White Women ◽  
Women In Leadership ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
School Superintendents ◽  
Community Values ◽  
Democratic Community ◽  
Suburban School District

Much of the earlier research on women in leadership has told the stories of White women. Since there are very low numbers of superintendents of color both male and female nationwide, there have been very few stories reported of women leaders of color (Brunner & Grogan, 2007). This article describes the leadership issues involved when one Black woman crossed a border (geographically and culturally) to lead a school district. Delia (pseudonym) became the first woman and the first person of color to lead a small suburban school district whose population was very different from what she was and what she knew. Delia was a participant in a study designed to investigate how women school superintendents promote and support social justice and democratic community building in their school districts. Six women participated in that study: three were African American, one was American Indian, and two were White. This article briefly describes that study and then focuses on Delia, one participant in it who took a risk to apply for her first superintendency in a district not far from her old district in miles but miles apart in population, ideology, and community values.

scholarly journals A Tendency to Essentialism? Discourses about Women’s Leadership

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 130
Author(s):  
Maria Medina-Vicent
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Women's Leadership ◽  
Professional Women ◽  
Appraisal Theory ◽  
Homo Oeconomicus ◽  
Leadership Model ◽  
Leadership Models ◽  
Management Literature ◽  
Initial Hypothesis

The main objective of this research is to identify the women’s leadership model diffused through management literature in order to determine if there is a pre-eminence of essentialist and exclusionary principles in its sense. Through the Appraisal Theory and by analyzing a recent management literature sample, the values associated with the women’s leadership model are identified, and a conclusion about their essentialist character is reached. The initial hypothesis is that the women’s leadership model, disseminated to professional women through management literature, contains an essentialist character that reproduces gender dichotomies and the rational homo oeconomicus model by hindering gender equality and the development of egalitarian leadership models from being accomplished.

The Timothy 0. Webster Papers and the Pearce Civil War Collection: Using Civil War Military Collections for Women's History

Collections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-381
Author(s):  
Julie L. Holcomb
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
Final Part ◽  
American Women ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civil War Era

Working-class and rural white women and free and enslaved African American women left few material traces, making it difficult for scholars to document their experience of the Civil War. This three-part article uses the story of the Timothy O. Webster Papers, which is part of the Pearce Civil War Collection at Navarro College in Corsi-cana, Texas, to examine the possibilities and limitations of recovering women's experience of the war from military collections. The first part examines the practice of collecting Civil War documents, the history of the Pearce Civil War Collection, and the collection and preservation of the Webster letters. In the second part, I begin to reconstruct Harriet's story using letters from the Webster Papers. The final part returns to the archive to consider how archivists might aid scholars in recovering the story of Civil War-era women from military collections.

White Femininity in the Nation, the Nation in White Femininity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raka Shome
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
White Women ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
White Femininity ◽  
Global North ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
New Britain

This book examines how the narrative of white femininity transformed Princess Diana into a simultaneous signifier of a national and global popular. Situating the discussion of white femininity and national modernity in the New Labor cultural scape of 1997 that promoted the rhetoric of a New Britain, the book analyzes the different facets of white femininity that the Diana phenomenon mobilized and stabilized in the production of a (new) national narrative of Britishness in the 1990s and beyond. It also considers a constellation of images of privileged white women in order to illustrate a larger formation of white femininity through which many neoliberal logics of national identity and citizenly belonging were being rewritten in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; how national identity intersects with celebrity culture, cultural politics, and global struggles over (what constitutes) modern subjectivity; and how representations, articulations, and actions of privileged white women of the Global North impact, inform, and intersect with larger geopolitics.

scholarly journals Racialism on the Left E.D. Morel and the “Black Horror on the Rhine”

1968 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Reinders
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Young Women ◽  
White Woman ◽  
White Women ◽  
Front Page ◽  
French Government ◽  
Demilitarized Zone ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
Serious Injury

On April 6, 1920 the French government, in reprisal for the entry of German troops into the demilitarized zone of the Ruhr, occupied Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Hanau, and Homburg. During the occupation French Moroccan soldiers fired on a German mob in Frankfurt and killed several. In covering the event the Daily Herald, alone among English newspapers, called special attention to the “race” of the French troops. It headlined:FRANKFURT RUNS WITH BLOODFRENCH BLACK TROOPS USEMACHINE GUNS ON CIVILIANSOn April 10, the Herald followed its accounts of events on the Rhine by a front page article by Edmund Dene Morel under banner leads:BLACK SCOURGE IN EUROPESEXUAL HORROR LET LOOSE BY FRANCE ON RHINE DISAPPEARANCE OF YOUNG GERMAN GIRLSFrance, Morel wrote, “is thrusting her black savages …into the heart of Germany.” There “primitive African barbarians”, carriers of syphilis, have become a “terror and a horror” to the Palatinate countryside. The “barely restrainable beastiality of the black troops” has led to many rapes, an especially serious problem since Africans are “the most developed sexually of any” race and “for well-known physiological reasons, the raping of a white woman by a negro is nearly always accompanied by serious injury and not infrequently has fatal results.…” Morel had reports of rapes, “some of them of an atrocious character”, and of “dead bodies of young women discovered under manure heaps and so on”. German municipalities were forced to provide bordellos and white women, and even young boys, for these over-sexed blacks. Master-minding this effort to “ruin, enslave, degrade, dismember [and] reduce to the lowest depths of despair and humiliation a whole people” was a “ruthless” and militaristic French government. Furthermore Morel warned his working class readers, “If the manhood of these races, not so advanced in the forms of civilisation as ourselves, are to be used against the Germans, why not against the workers here or elsewhere?”

scholarly journals Women in Leadership

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (04) ◽  
pp. 238-242
Author(s):  
Katerina Wells ◽  
James W. Fleshman
Keyword(s):  
Gender Bias ◽  
Women In Leadership ◽  
Professional Women ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
Female Representation ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
The Past ◽  
Young Professional ◽  
Relationship Of

AbstractThe role of a surgeon is inherently that of a leader and as women become a larger minority in surgical specialties, the next step becomes greater representation of women in positions of surgical leadership. Leadership is a relationship of granting and claiming wherein society must accept that women are deserving of leadership and women must realize their rightfulness to lead. Implicit gender bias undermines this relationship by perpetuating traditional gender norms of women as followers and not as leaders. Though female representation in academia and leadership has increased over the past few decades, this process is unacceptably slow, in part due to manifestations of implicit bias including discrimination within academia, pay inequality, and lack of societal support for childbearing and childcare. The women who have achieved leadership roles are testament to woman's rightfulness to lead and their presence serves to encourage other young professional women that success is possible despite these challenges.

Towards a Fairer Future

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 52-68
Author(s):  
Courtney Cook
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
White Women ◽  
Nonprofit Sector ◽  
Leadership Skills ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Women In Leadership ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
Female Leaders ◽  
Black And White

In the study on which this article is based, I examine the correlation between the number of Black girls in leadership programs and the number of Black female leaders in nonprofit organizations. I carried out research on Black girl leadership to understand the shortcomings of programs meant to teach Black girls appropriate leadership skills and I conducted interviews with female leaders to determine the hurdles faced by Black women trying to obtain leadership roles in the nonprofit sector. My findings show that there is a disconnect between Black and white women in leadership roles and that impediments for Black women affect leadership prospects for Black girls. This article is a call to create an activist model that supports the professional trajectories of Black girls.

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