The experiences of women of color have challenged feminist scholarship to rethink the relationship between race and gender for everyone. Since the 1980s, women’s studies scholars have increasingly acknowledged that differences among women arise from inequalities of power and privilege. For African American women, Latinas, Asian American women, and Native American women, gender is part of a larger pattern of unequal social relations; how gender is experienced depends on how it intersects with other inequalities.

While women’s studies scholars are now seeking to emphasize the importance of diversity to understanding women’s lives, acknowledging diversity is not enough. Today we face...

Recent scholarship in the social sciences has focused on the integration of race, ethnicity, gender, and class, building on earlier feminist research that focused primarily on gender. The earliest feminist literature documented the role of patriarchal systems in oppressing women, such that women had little power in the home and few opportunities for success in the labor market. Because this early literature was based primarily on the experiences of White, middleclass women, recent contributions to the feminist literature have pointed out that it is not possible to generalize from these experiences to all women, particularly women of color. Women of...

Students attending public schools in the United States learn lessons that go far beyond the formal curriculum. Through the informal curriculum (sometimes termed the hidden curriculum) they learn about status relationships among persons of various race-gender groups in society (Chesler and Cave 1981; C. Grant and Sleeter 1986; L. Grant 1984, 1985; Sadker and Frazier 1973). The hidden curriculum consists of routine, everyday interchanges that provide students with information about the placement of persons of various race-gender groups. The informal social roles that students come to assume in schools closely parallel adult roles deemed appropriate for persons of their race-gender...

California’s famed high-tech industrial region, Silicon Valley, is renowned for the great opportunities it has provided to live out the American dream. Since the 1970s, thousands have flocked there in hopes of getting rich quick by hitching their wagons (computerized ones, of course) to the lucrative high-tech revolution. In fact, thousands have indeed become millionaires in the process. Thousands more have successfully turned to the industry in search of new and exciting professional careers, at a time when most other industries in the country are declining. But not every group has had equal access to the preponderance of riches fueled...

Chicanas (Mexican American women) and Mexicanas (immigrant women from Mexico)¹ confront many barriers to employment and job advancement. Securing decent jobs and promotions can be a difficult, if not impossible, task, considering structural features of the labor market (e.g., occupational segregation), social aspects of work, family responsibilities, and individual characteristics. This chapter brings the human dimension of this problem to life through an analysis of in-depth interviews with forty Chicana and Mexicana workers. I argue that labor market structure, particularly occupational segregation by race-ethnicity and gender, shapes Chicanas’ and Mexicanas’ experiences at work as well as their chances for job...

Myths and stereotypes about the success of educated Black women, many promoted by misleading news reports of major trends, mask important employment problems faced by members of this group (Sokoloff 1992). The limited social science research on the plight of middle-class Black women makes fertile ground for myths about their success and stereotypes about their abilities to handle all situations. In reality, this is not a population exempt from problems on the job. Research on the employment status of educated Black women can be important in addressing the nature of contemporary racism in America and how it impacts people of...

This chapter provides a brief overview of the sociocultural and historical conditions contributing to the health status of Puerto Rican women living in the mainland United States. It specifically examines quality-of-life indicators such as educational attainment, housing conditions, reproductive health, and related concerns in the Puerto Rican population. The primary sources used are empirical data collected by federal, state, and local agencies.¹ Since data are limited for this population group, I also draw from my own experiences, observations, and related work in the field on poverty and racial-ethnic women to discuss major areas of concern for this group, particularly in...

Race has been fundamental to the construction of families in the United States since the country was settled. People of color were incorporated into the country and used to meet the need for cheap and exploitable labor. Little attention was given to their family and community life except as it related to their economic productivity. Upon their founding, the various colonies that ultimately formed the United States initiated legal, economic, political, and social practices designed to promote the growth of family life among European colonists. As the primary laborers in the reproduction and maintenance of families, White¹ women settlers were...

In this chapter, I examine processes of criminalization experienced by young Black girls and explanations for sustained criminal involvement by adult Black women. I argue that (1) the process of criminalization for many young Black girls is initiated by gender oppression and class oppression in conjunction with a criminal justice system that blames the victim, and that (2) sustained criminal involvement, continuing from girlhood into adulthood, is a rational coping strategy, a response to alienation and structural dislocation from the primary socializing institutions of family, education, and work. The chapter is informed by scholarship on female criminality in general (Price...

Prior to their conquest and subsequent colonization, Indian women in most tribes held important positions as healers, teachers, and leaders. Moreover, because of their resourcefulness and ability to gather and store seeds, roots, and berries, and to hunt small game, they were able to feed their families when big game was scarce and hunting was poor. In some tribes, the women were the agriculturists and thereby provided the major food source for their families. The European conquest, however, greatly altered the world of most Native Americans.

The erosion of the role and position of Indian women began with missionization and...

The workplace is an important social setting, one that closely links the macro level of labor market and work organization with the micro process of personal interaction, and one that demonstrates how the interlocking of race, class, and gender affects the work lives of Asian working women in particular and of women of color in general. On the one hand, the hierarchical nature of the workplace provides structural conditions that often determine opportunities, job options, and work dynamics for the workers. On the other hand, it institutionalizes discrimination of various forms in the work process to which people of color,...

Many sociologists who studied the relationships between dominant and subordinate racial-ethnic groups in the 1960s and 1970s stress the creative ways in which individuals and groups enable communities to articulate their own needs and challenge oppressive structures in the wider society (Morris 1984). Other sociologists, such as Stanford Lyman (1972), emphasize the historical experience of racial-ethnic groups in the data used for sociological interpretation. The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, and the American Indian Movement, along with diverse movements within Asian American, Puerto Rican, and Chicano communities, challenged sociologists to explore historically rooted conflicts over power, labor, economic...

Ethnicity is a gender-contested realm. It is an arena of conflict between men and women and one over which they struggle to gain control. Recent feminist scholarship has emphasized the utility of ethnic¹ bonds and institutions for immigrant women. Thus immigrant families and communities are seen as vehicles by which immigrant women resist and cope with their disadvantaged status as racial-ethnics in the dominant society, rather than as sources of gender oppression. The focus on the role of ethnicity as a mode of resistance has provided important insights into the dynamics of racial-ethnic oppression in immigrant lives. However, by making...

In wondering at the way in which class and race mediate gender for African-American women, W.E.B. Du Bois, who so eloquently portrayed the double consciousness characterizing the “soul of black folks,” described another conflicting duality: the freedom and constraint that mark the experience of gender for African-Americans. The fetters of racism leave them bereft of the “protection of private patriarchy” (Dill, in this volume) but also mitigate some of the constraints of gender, inadvertently creating a small measure of freedom.

But this window of freedom, narrow and equivocal as it is, poses a problem, a threat to the dominant society’s...

A great debate stirred my undergraduate college seminar, “Women and Justice.” At midsemester, William Jones, an honors student from a rural, Southern, African-American community, stood up and addressed the class. “What,” he questioned, “is gender all about?” With some reluctance, he continued. “If Carol Gilligan is right, my brothers and I were raised to be girls as much as boys, and the opposite goes for my sisters. We were raised in a large family with a morality of care as well as justice. We were raised to be responsible to kin, and to be able to face injustices at an...

Understanding diversity remains a pressing challenge for family scholars. Innumerable shortcomings in dominant social science studies render much thinking ill-suited to the task. The growing diversity movement in women’s studies, together with new thinking on racial-ethnic groups, holds the promise of a comprehensive understanding of family life.

Two decades of feminist thinking on the family have demystified the idea of the natural and timeless nuclear family. “By taking gender as a basic category of analysis” (Thorne 1992:5), feminist theory has produced new descriptions of family experience, new conceptualizations of family dynamics, and identified new topics for investigation. The following themes...