Essay

Gender Balancing in the Curriculum: Women, Minorities, and the "American Dream" Author(s): Nan Bauer Maglin Source: Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 3/4 (Fall - Winter, 1986), pp. 16-17 Published by: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40003818 Accessed: 12-11-2019 23:45 UTC

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Gender Balancing in the Curriculum: Women, Minorities, and the "American Dream"

Nan Bauer Maglin

The November 1983 issue of Ms.

magazine included an article by June Jordan entitled "Report from the Ba- hamas: Conflicts of a Black American Tourist." Sitting in the Sheraton British Colonial Hotel in the Bahamas, Jordan watches "Olive" clean her room and

wonders where their unity lies- if there is any at all. They are both black and both women; however, it is class that comes between them. Jordan muses on

her own race, class, and gender and that of the "usual women's studies cur- riculum." She says:

I am in the bathroom cleaned by "Ol- ive," who reminds me of the usual women's studies curriculum because

it has nothing to do with her or her job: you won't find "Olive" listed an- ywhere in the reading list. You will likewise seldom hear of Anzia Yezier- ska. But yes, you will find, from Flor- ence Nightingale to Adrienne Rich, a white procession of independently well-to-do women writers (Gertrude Stein/ Virginia Woolf /Hilda Doolittle: standard names among the "essen- tial" women writers).

In other words, most of the women of the world- black and Third World and white, who work because we must- most of the women of the world persist far from the heart of the usual women's studies syllabus.

Jordan's article and this project have pushed me to be more inclusive in my women's literature class: I have always taught Yezierska's Bread Givers, but I am working harder to include Puerto Rican American, Caribbean, Chinese- American, Chicana- American, and Na- tive American women's writing as well as the writings of white ethnic women. In addition, I have tried to include class as a perspective of analysis- I do that especially by an emphasis on the sub- ject of work.

There are many available books with which to balance women's literature

class or any literature class. Two an- thologies are excellent and especially readable for the community college stu- dent: Women Working: An Anthology of Stories and Poems edited by Nancy Hoffman and Florence Howe and Be-

tween Mothers and Daughters: Stories across a Generation edited by Susan Koppelman.

Women Working: An Anthology of Stories and Poems is a good collection to use for teaching about women's work in literature. In its 263 pages it shows women holding a variety of positions such as indentured servant, cow her- der, quill maker, kitchen servant, writer, button sewer in a sweatshop, bookbin- der, shirtwaist-factory worker, singer, waitress, farmer, business manager, pot maker, medical student, anthropolo- gist, runner, childcare worker, hat maker, mother, wife, bowl maker, woman/wife/mother cooking and cleaning and birthing and baking and selling, shopping and petitioning and letter writing, cheese maker, single mother hash slinger and ironer, tortilla maker, seller and trader, office worker, artificial flower maker, typist, rights ac- tivist/organizer/protestor, union organ- izer, strike supporter, demonstrator, uold maid" aunt/servant/quilter, kitchen worker, medical typist, moun- tain climber, homeworker. Not all of these jobs are done by different char- acters; rather, one woman often does several of these jobs.

It is hard to list all the work done in these stories for several reasons: Some

of it, until the feminist movement, has not been thought of as work. Much of the work that comes with the role of

mother/ wife is not easily named since there are no job titles for a great deal of this work. One quarter of the space in this anthology is devoted to stories and poems about "Family Work," empha- sizing that the labor women have al- ways done at home should be fully

counted as work; in addition, the inclu- sion of women's writings about family work validates one of the basic feminist

literary tenets that writings centered in and on the bed, the kitchen, the nurs- ery, and women's bodies are worthy of the label literature or art.

The three other sections of the book

are titled "Oppressive Work," "Satisfy- ing Work," and "Transforming Work"; but these divisions, like the division be- tween the public and private sphere, have never really been clear cut - as the fine introductions to each section point out, raising provocative questions about women and work around which an in-

structor could frame reading and dis- cussions. The introduction also provides historical perspective on the work women have done.

As well as including writing for differ- ent periods, the book is inclusive in rep- resenting many different women's voices in the United States: black women, Chicana women, Native American women, Jewish women. However, not all the women writing to- day are represented. Issues of class and race and issues related to unmarried

women and single mothers are covered in these stories; sexual orientation is not.

The second anthology I recommend, Between Mothers and Daughters, is one I am using this semester: It offers bril- liant introductions (to the book and to each story) by Susan Koppelman and a wonderful selection of stories by U.S. women, many of whom were popular in their own times and are no longer recognized- such as Fannie Hurst, He- len Martin, Caroline W. Healey Dall. The collection is arranged historically, from the anti-slavery story of 1848 by Dall to Ann Allen Shockley's story of a 1980 lesbian stepmother. Included are stories by women who are black (Sher- ley Anne Williams, Alice Walker, Ann Shockley), Japanese- American (Fannie

16 Women's Studies Quarterly XIV: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 1986)

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Hurst), Pennsylvania Dutch (Helen Martin), as well as lesbian women and women who spent their lives in the company of women (Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Alice Brown, Ann Shockley, James Tiptree/ Alice Sheldon, and Joanna Russ) . Many of these stories are written by working-class writers about working-class women. The multiple perspectives of gender, race/ethnicity, and class come to bear on the subject of the mother-daughter relationship in powerfully moving ways throughout the volume.

Some of the themes raised in the sto- ries in Between Mothers and Daughters focus on the institution of the hetero-

sexual, patriarchial nuclear family, on the lives of mothers/mothering and on the power of fathers to use (especially sexually) and exchange daughters. In my courses, discussion has always come round to the question of what is natural for men and women; are men and women born or made (socially con- structed)? For instance, is rape inherent in men's nature? I use an article, "Rape Free or Rape Prone," (Science, Oct. 1982) which reviews anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday's research which classifies 156 societies as rape-free or rape-prone. Sanday lists the character- istics common to each kind of society and the material conditions that are true

to each kind of society. Her conclusion is that "rape is not inherent in men's nature but results from their image of that nature; it is a product of a certain set of beliefs, which in turn derive from particular social circumstances." An an- thropological perspective providing characteristics of rape-free and rape- prone societies helps one understand particular social constructions of gender in fiction.

Similarly, literature by women such as I have described could be included as reading in an anthropology class or a sociology class interested in the na- ture and varieties of families and the so-

cial construction of gender in different cultures. In other words, I am turning around what I do: suggesting that the disciplines of anthropology and sociol- ogy could use women's fiction in their courses.

Another major theme focused on in my women's literature class is women's work inside and outside the family. We are now reading Emmeline by Judith Rossner, a historical novel about the early 1840s in the cotton mills of Fay-

ette, Massachusetts. We compare it to the Yezierska novel Bread Givers, which is about four daughters in an im- migrant Jewish family on the Lower East Side in the 1920s. We ask about

the relationships in the literature among women, their families, and work: Why is Emmeline, the daughter, sent out to work and not her brothers? We contrast

Emmeline's family-centered preindus- trial values with the individualist, com- petitive values of the bosses and the potential working-class/sisterhood con- sciousness in formation in the factory. In Bread Givers we look at the willing- ness of the daughters (except one) to work for the family and to marry as the father wishes, at the conflict between Sara's (the youngest daughter) individ- ualist New World perspective about her rights especially to an education and her mother's silence and father's Old World perspective. In order to generalize about the social situations, especially to un- derstand the historical contexts of the

particular pieces of fiction, I use as frame two scholarly essays: "Women's Work and the Family in Nineteenth- Century Europe" by Joan W. Scott and Louise A. Tilly; and "A Mother's Wages: Income Earning among Mar- ried Italian and Black Women 1896-

1911" by Elizabeth H. Pleck. Similarly, the novels (Emmeline and Bread Giv-

ers) along with the anthology of short fiction (Women Working) could be as- signed in history courses on work and the family in the United States. For here, in the literature, are recorded the experiences and perceptions of women, so hard to find in the historical record.

In brief, then, using two anthologies as basic texts, I address June Jordan's call that women's studies take into ac- count race, ethnicity, and class and the parallel call from feminists that the dis- ciplines incorporate the content and is- sues, the texts and understandings of women's studies. What does this have to do with the "American Dream"? It is about the demand for equality in aca- demia- the right of all voices to be rec- ognized and read.D

Readings

Hoffman, Nancy and Florence Howe, eds. Women Working: An Anthology of Stories and Poems. Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1979.

Koppelman, Susan, ed. Between Mothers and Daughters: Stories across a Generation. Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1985.

Pleck, Elizabeth H. "A Mother's Wages: Income Earning among Married Italian and Black Women 1896-1911." In A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of Ameri- can Women. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979, pp. 367-392.

Rossner, Judith. Emmeline. New York: Pocket Books, 1981. Scott, Joan W. and Louise A. Tilly. "Women's Work and the Family in Nine- teenth-Century Europe." In The Family in His- tory, Charles Rosenberg, ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975, pp. 145-178.

Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers: A Struggle be- tween a Father of the Old World and a Daugh- ter of the New World. New York: Persea Books, 1975.

Nan Bauer Maglin is Associate Profes- sor in the English Department of the Borough of Manhattan Community College of The City University of New York. This essay was originally pre- sented as a talk at the Joint Meeting of the Eastern Community College Social Science Association and the Commu-

nity College Humanities Association. It was developed as part of a project with the Center for the Study of Women and Society, Graduate School, The City University of New York, which was supported by a grant from The Ford Foundation.

Women's Studies Quarterly XIV: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 1986) 17

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