Sisterhoods

Chapter 3 first traces how Grace built a public career for herself in the SWP, working as Minnesota state organizer and running for US Senate in 1940. The chapter also examines how Grace became one of the eighteen Trotskyists who was convicted of violating the Smith Act in 1941. Of vital importance to Grace’s experiences within the SWP and to her survival at Alderson prison in 1944 was her sisterhood of women comrades, which included her biological sister, Dorothy Schultz. Grace’s rich correspondence during the year she spent in prison reveals not only the connections and concerns shared by her and her women friends but also Grace’s relationship with the mostly poor and very young women incarcerated with her at Alderson. Both these experiences served as the inspiration for the working-class Marxist feminism that Grace came to articulate in her writings for the Militant and in her 1945 “Women in Prison” speaking tour. Grace’s experiences and writings were part of the Left’s answer to the woman question during the 1940s. Her story adds to the history of feminisms on the left during the 1940s and early 1950s, the period between the first and second waves.

‘Working for/from Home’: An Interdisciplinary Understanding of Mothers in India

Situated in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, this paper begins by looking at the recent advertisement by Amul praising mothers who are ‘working from home’ and ‘working for home’ during the lockdown, with an accompanying cartoon visualizing the iconic Amul girl sitting beside her mother who is working on her laptop while keeping an eye on her daughter; in a juxtaposed cartoon, the mother is cooking in the kitchen while simultaneously scrolling through her smartphone. Amongst my groups of women friends, the advertisement elicited strong and contradictory responses: ranging from approval of the appreciation for maternal work to disapproval at the missing father. In order to critique this advertisement, I would use the lens of Motherhood Studies, an emerging area of scholarship that is inherently interdisciplinary. Reading the advertisement as a cultural text, I will attempt to locate the maternal stereotypes embedded in it: the merging of the stay-at-home mother and the working-mother into the ideal neoliberal mother-worker, the supermom who effortlessly balances work and home, even in extraordinary times like the pandemic and lockdown. These entangled maternal stereotypes have been reified in popular consciousness through mythic, religious, literary and filmic artefacts. A cross-disciplinary tracing of the stereotypes will reveal the motherhood constructs and the cultural expectations that mothers encounter, and also attempt to explain why and how these constructs and expectations operate. The paper will look at the possibilities of resistance to these stereotypes, germinating in feminist, or posthuman, or matricentric approaches to motherhood. I will use the critical distinction between motherhood-as-ideology and mothering-as-agency to understand maternal resistances, some of which may be located in the responses to the Amul advertisement. The paper will conclude by assessing the emergence of Motherhood Studies as a legitimate field of interdisciplinary humanities and/or social sciences.

Reason, Season, or Life? Heterorelationality and the Limits of Intimacy between Women Friends

Studies of personal life over the past three decades have provided rich accounts of new forms of togetherness, with some pointing to a loosening of hierarchical lines between friends, kin, family, and long-term sexual partnership. While acknowledging the importance of these queering perspectives, I suggest that asking how people use ‘traditional’ relationship distinctions remains valuable. Reporting on research centred on practices of intimacy between women friends in early midlife, I examine how the competing demands of long-term sexual partnerships and family are managed alongside friendship, asking what forms of intimacy between friends are sanctioned or disparaged. I show that the organising logics of heteroromantic orders prevail, working through the contemporary cultural pushes of postfeminism and individualisation. As a result, friendships become constructed as bonus entities in relational life – necessary, but always supplementary to the mainstays of sexual partnership and familial relationships.

Quaker Women in Lenape Country

This chapter examines the central role of Quaker women during the years 1675–1710 in developing the first colony founded by members of the Society of Friends in North America. As individuals, women Friends helped to fashion a multicultural society consistent with Quaker beliefs in religious liberty and pacifism by maintaining amicable relations with the Lenape Indians and non-Quaker European settlers. At the same time, however, Friends failed to acknowledge the inconsistency of exploiting enslaved African Americans with Quaker ideals. As leaders of the Salem, Burlington, Chesterfield, and Newton (later Haddonfield) monthly meetings, Quaker women also helped to shape West New Jersey society by strengthening rules of discipline to prevent their children and other Friends from marrying non-Quakers and adopting ‘outward vanities’.

Stock Characters with Stiff-Brimmed Bonnets

This chapter examines continuity and change in representations of women Friends by non-Quakers in the first 150 years of Quakerism’s existence. Unsurprisingly, given their active role, including the unusual position of female travelling preachers, a large amount of attention, often negative, was paid to Quaker women by male non-Quakers. Analysis of such depictions reveals that stereotyping of female Friends served a number of different ends: it sought to titillate non-Quaker men with depictions of young Quaker women, and to reinforce non-Quaker men’s self-appointed role as moral guardians with religious, moral, and gendered superiority over Quaker women. The chapter considers how such responses were likely driven by anxious hegemonic masculinity, identified by several scholars as central to mainstream male identity, which led Quaker women to initially be viewed as a potent threat and later as stock figures, created to belittle female Friends’ growing moral and political influence.

New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650-1800

There has never been an interdisciplinary collection of essays that focuses specifically on the women of the Quaker movement—their experiences and their voices, their bodies and their texts. This book, an essential addition to the studies of Quakerism, religion, and gender, offers groundbreaking archival research and analysis about women Friends that ranges from the movement’s British origins to early American revolutions. The fourteen contributors illuminate the issues and challenges early Quaker women faced, addressing such varied topics as the feminization of religion; dissent and identity; transatlantic scribal and print culture; abolitionism and race; and the perception of women Friends by anti-Quaker spectators. Divided into three sections entitled ‘Revolutions’, ‘Disruptions’, and ‘Networks’, this collection explores the subversive and dynamic ways that Quaker women resisted persecution, asserted autonomy, and forged barriers through creative networks. It enhances and expands the position of Quaker women in the early transatlantic world, accentuating their difference from other religious orthodoxies—across time, across cultures, and across continents.

Lest We Forget

This chapter presents Alice Walker's reflections on the America of her youth compared to the promise of the campaign, which reflects the view of many older African Americans who never expected to see the day a Black man would occupy the White House. She says that she is a supporter of Obama because she believes that he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. She expresses deep sadness that many of her feminist white women friends cannot see him and what he stands for. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans—black, white, yellow, red, and brown—choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to her.