The Myth of the Gender Gap

Taking their cue from anti-feminist leader Phyllis Schlafly, the GOP celebrated traditional gender roles and demonized feminism as part of a Long Southern Strategy. The Republican Party dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from its platform in 1980, which many feminists believed would cost the party women voters. When the gender gap emerged during the next election cycle with more women than men voting for Democrats, a myth took hold. However, the gender gap is not universal because anti-feminism and Modern Sexism remain deeply burrowed into southern white identity where they have been reinforced religiously and politicized continually by the GOP. When geography and identity are brought to bear on the myth of the gender gap, it looks remarkably different. Where it does not disappear completely, it is reversed, with southern white women proving more conservative than southern white men and dramatically more so than white American women as a whole.

Are White Women Showing Up for Racial Justice? Intergroup Contact, Closeness to People Targeted by Prejudice, and Collective Action

Although scholars have suggested that relationships with people of color can enhance White people’s commitment to racial justice, many women of color have questioned whether White people, and White women in particular, actually “show up” to protest for racial justice. Focusing on the contact experiences and closeness White women have with people from racial and ethnic groups different from their own, we tested how these relationships may predict their reported motivations to engage in protests for racial justice. With a broad online sample of White American women (Study 1), and White women who attended the 2017 Women’s March (Study 2), our results showed that both positive contact and closeness to people targeted by prejudice predicted White women’s willingness to participate in protests for racial justice (Studies 1 and 2). Only closeness to people targeted by prejudice significantly predicted actual participation in collective action for racial justice (Studies 1 and 2) and also predicted motivation for racial justice among those who attended the 2017 Women’s March (Study 2). Findings suggest that White women’s inclinations to protest for racial justice may be linked to the close relationships they have with people targeted by prejudice, while more general forms of positive contact may not be related to such action. Additional online materials for this article are available on PWQ ’s website at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0361684319840269 . Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available on PWQ' s website at http://journals.sagepub.com/page/pwq/suppl/index

“America’s Gunpowder Women”

This article uncovers the little-known story of how the novelist Pearl S. Buck used her authority as a popular expert on China to pose a direct challenge to her white middle-class American readers in the post-suffrage era. Through provocative comparisons between Chinese and white American women, Buck alleged that educated white women had failed to live up to their potential, and she demanded that they earn social equality by advancing into male-dominated professions outside the home. Although many of her readers disagreed, the novelist’s challenge was welcomed by the National Woman’s Party (NWP), which sought to abolish all gender-based discrimination and preferential treatment through the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). This story revises our understanding of the post-suffrage era by showing the vibrancy of feminist debates in the final years of the Great Depression, and it provides a new way into seeing how racialized thinking shaped American conceptions of women’s progress between first- and second-wave feminist movements.

‘Sleeping with the enemy’: Non-monogamy and 1970s lesbian-feminists

Many white American women who came out as lesbians in the 1970s in the context of the feminist movement saw their lesbianism as part of their core identity. A tenet of that movement was that sexual/romantic involvements with men were incompatible with being a ‘true’ lesbian. Women who did were often ostracized. Changes in the lesbian-feminist community and larger society, including the viability and visibility of bisexuality and non-monogamy, have allowed some of these women to explore sexual and romantic involvement with men while holding onto the feminist aspects of their lesbian identification because of non-monogamy’s feminist potential. This analysis supports the work of van Anders in critiquing the primacy of genital configuration as a means of defining sexual orientation.