Powerful women aren't just men walking around in dresses! As women continue to assume positions of social leadership in increasing numbers, the dynamics of the social construction of power need to be examined. Have women adopted traditionally male patterns of behavior in an effort to gain and maintain power in business, industry, politics, academics, etc.? And if not, what kind of power are women practicing? The authors of Women, Power, and Ethnicity: Working Toward Reciprocal Empowerment endeavored to find out by conducting a research study on how women from various racial and ethnic backgrounds compare and contrast the attributes associated with existing power paradigms (traditional, empowerment, personal authority) with an alternate model of power--reciprocal empowerment. Reciprocal empowerment is a discursive and behavioral style of interaction grounded in reciprocity initiated by people who feel a sense of personal authority. Reciprocal empowerment enables people with mutual self-interests to rise above obstacles based on social and political structures and to use personal authority to discuss and act on issues openly and honestly in order to effect change. Using a qualitative methodology, Women, Power, and Ethnicity includes the results of surveys and interviews with women from seven different ethnic groups in the United States to determine if the concept or reciprocal empowerment resonates with them. The answer: Yes! Women, Power, and Ethnicity is organized by surveys and interview findings on women from seven cultural groups living in the United States (African, Asian, Caribbean, European, Latin, Middle Eastern, Native American). Each chapter includes: analyses of ethnographic findings, surveys, and interviews concise historical information effects of immigration, where applicable tables and diagrams direct quotes and much more! Women, Power, and Ethnicity examines women's attitudes toward power in several social forums--home, job, religion, politics, and society in general. The book is an essential resource for teachers and students of communication studies, women studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, and social sciences.

The relationship between ethnic identity and power has important consequences in a modern world that is changing rapidly through global immigration trends. Studies of ethnic/racial conflict of ethnic identity and power become necessarily studies of political power, social status, school achievement, and allocation of resources. The recognition of power by an ethnic group, however, creates a competition for control and a rivalry for power over public arenas, such as schools. In this context this book provides interesting and important insights into the dilemmas faced by immigrants and members of ethnic groups, by school personnel, and by policy makers. The first part of the book consists of comparative studies of ethnic identity. The second part focuses directly on some of the lessons learned from social science research on ethnic identification and the critical study of equity, with its implications for pedagogy. An interdisciplinary group of scholars offers profoundly honest and stimulating accounts of their struggles to decipher self-identification processes in various political contexts, as well as their personal reflections on the study of ethnicity. A powerful message emerges that invites reflection about self-identification processes, and that allows a deeper understanding of the empowering consequences of a clear and strong personal, cultural, ethnic, and social identity. These pages offer a keen grasp of the undeniable political contexts of education.

From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women. “Angela Davis is herself a woman of undeniable courage. She should be heard.”—The New York Times Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions. While Black women were aided by some activists like Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the suffrage cause found unwavering support in Frederick Douglass, many women played on the fears of white supremacists for political gain rather than take an intersectional approach to liberation. Here, Davis not only contextualizes the legacy and pitfalls of civil and women’s rights activists, but also discusses Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till, and Margaret Sanger’s racism. Davis shows readers how the inequalities between Black and white women influence the contemporary issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care in this bold and indispensable work.

The shock waves from Anita Hill's testimony at the Senate confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas continue to reverberate. Race, Gender, and Power in America is a powerful and deeply felt collection of essays that examines the context and consequences of that controversy. Edited by Hill andEmma Coleman Jordan, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, and including the first published essay on the episode written by Hill herself, these essays explore the volatile politics of race and gender, and the unique challenges faced by African American women. Among the distinguished contributors are Eleanor Holmes Norton, playwright and actress Anna Deveare Smith, Chief Judge Emeritus A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals, and four members of Hill's legal team during the Thomas hearings: her lead counsel, Harvard's Charles J.Ogletree, Jr.; Judith Resnik of the University of Southern California Law Center; Susan Deller Ross, a sex discrimination expert at Georgetown Law Center; and volume co-editor Emma Jordan. Jordan's essay probes the cultural mindset of African Americans who accused Hill of "airing dirty linen" inpublic, as though by not remaining silent she had betrayed her race. In "She's no lady; she's a nigger," Adele Logan Alexander scrutinizes the devastating, centuries-old stereotypes of African American women as mindless, untrustworthy, and sexually insatiable. Hill examines the institutions ofpatronage and marriage, demonstrating how, as a professional African American woman with no official Senate sponsor, she confounded the assumptions by which lawmakers are accustomed to assigning credibility and status. "In going before the Committee, I came face to face with a history of exclusionfrom power," she writes. Charles R. Lawrence views the controversy as Act One in a three act morality play starring Clarence Thomas, William Kennedy Smith, and Mike Tyson, and Harvard's Orlando Paterson maintains that it is black men, even more than black women, who suffer the consequences ofstrained gender relations. Looking to the future, Robert L. Allen describes his encouraging work with the Oakland Men's Project, and offers a prescription for ending sexual harassment and the system of sexism that underpins it. Penetrating, bold, and ultimately empowering, Race, Gender, and Power is provocative reading for everyone concerned about the fault lines of race and gender threatening to rupture our society.

In the 1960s thousands of poor women of color on the (post)colonial French island of Reunion had their pregnancies forcefully terminated by white doctors; the doctors operated under the pretext of performing benign surgeries, for which they sought government compensation. When the scandal broke in 1970, the doctors claimed to have been encouraged to perform these abortions by French politicians who sought to curtail reproduction on the island, even though abortion was illegal in France. In The Wombs of Women—first published in French and appearing here in English for the first time—Françoise Vergès traces the long history of colonial state intervention in black women’s wombs during the slave trade and postslavery imperialism as well as in current birth control politics. She examines the women’s liberation movement in France in the 1960s and 1970s, showing that by choosing to ignore the history of the racialization of women’s wombs, French feminists inevitably ended up defending the rights of white women at the expense of women of color. Ultimately, Vergès demonstrates how the forced abortions on Reunion were manifestations of the legacies of the racialized violence of slavery and colonialism.

A thought-provoking contribution to the emerging field of white studies, this book argues that whiteness is an influential racial category, not a form of invisibility. Looking at white femininity in particular, the discussion examines the ways in which white women are compelled to demonstrate an allegiance to whiteness through their choice of intimate partners, sexual orientation, participation in racial inequality, and complicity with white feminine beauty standards.

Kathleen Brown examines the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia. But the rise of racial slavery also transformed gender relations, including ideals of masculinity. In response to the presence of Indians, the shortage of labor, and the insecurity of social rank, Virginia's colonial government tried to reinforce its authority by regulating the labor and sexuality of English servants and by making legal distinctions between English and African women. This practice, along with making slavery hereditary through the mother, contributed to the cultural shift whereby women of African descent assumed from lower-class English women both the burden of fieldwork and the stigma of moral corruption. Brown's analysis extends through Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, an important juncture in consolidating the colony's white male public culture, and into the eighteenth century. She demonstrates that, despite elite planters' dominance, wives, children, free people of color, and enslaved men and women continued to influence the meaning of race and class in colonial Virginia.