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Fall 2024

Gender studies

Spring 2011

Mexican Women and the Other Side of Immigration: Engendering Transnational Ties

mexicanwomen-cover

Luz Maria Gordillo
University of Texas Press, 2010

There are communities of people who live their lives in two places at once. Residents of Detroit, Michigan, and the small town of San Ignacio, Mexico, for example. In her book, historian Luz Maria Gordillo sets out to explain the history of this phenomenon, which dates back to the 1940s when the Bracero Program started bringing temporary Mexican laborers into the Midwest.

She hones that focus to … » More …

Fall 2006

Two female athletes, two public falls

In the first three months of 2006, two images of female athletes and their subsequent media interpretations played on television and front pages across the country. The first one showed Lindsey Jacobellis during the 2006 Winter Olympic Snowboard Cross competition falling after a jump near the end of her run. Headlines such as “Showboating Costs Snowboarder Gold” suggested that she tried for a “hotdog” finish which led to her subsequent second place. Apparently, with no one close behind her lead, Lindsey grabbed her snowboard in a showy move and lost control. In interviews, Lindsey claimed “I was having fun. Snowboarding is fun. I was ahead. … » More …

Fall 2006

The coming of age of teen films

As a teen, Sarah Hentges had Wonder Woman and Princess Leia as her pop culture role models. One flew an invisible plane, and the other lived in another galaxy. Neither offered much of an idea of how a young American woman should be.

As a Washington State University graduate student, Hentges is on the trail of other American teen icons like Natalie Wood’s Deanie, who suffers sexual repression in the 1961 Splendor in the Grass, and Lindsay Lohan’s 2004 Lola, who is  striving to be the center of attention in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. She has dedicated much of her post-graduate education to … » More …

Fall 2007

Their place in history: WSU women athletes made their mark

One day in 1948 four Washington State College students tugged on their white rubber swim caps, adjusted their nose plugs, and plunged into a cold swimming pool. Three of them locked together head to foot to form a vertical underwater ring, and the fourth swam through it toward a photographer who captured the maneuver on film.

Last year Ryli Clark ’06 found that picture-one of a series of photos of the Fish Fans, WSC’s swimming club-and she was stunned. “At first I couldn’t tell what or where it was,” says the alumna who had just graduated from WSU with a degree in digital technology and … » More …

Winter 2007

History was made…The fight for equity for women’s athletics in Washington

Back in the late 1960s, when Jo Washburn was athletic director for women’s intramural sports at Washington State University, she had to stretch $1,200 to cover all the expenses of the volleyball, gymnastics, basketball, field hockey, skiing, and tennis teams.

Women’s athletics was a second-class affair. The athletes had to carpool to away games and sleep four to a hotel room to save money. They had to buy their own uniforms. They helped set up spectator seating for their meets. And they trained only when the facilities weren’t being used by the men’s teams. Few, if any, received athletic scholarships.

Meanwhile, their male counterparts traveled … » More …

Summer 2004

Competing Devotions: Career and Family Among Women Executives

To be or not to be a devoted mother, corporate executive—or both? These are the choices and challenges facing career women more than ever. In Competing Devotions: Career and Family Among Women Executives, former Washington State University sociology professor Mary Blair-Loy examines the lifestyles of two groups of women and the decisions they made regarding the delicate balance of raising children along with—or versus—the long hours they spend behind an executive’s desk.

The first group, made up of 56 predominantly white female finance executives, was called the career-committed group. The second group, the family-committed group, was made up of 25 white women who left full-time, … » More …

Winter 2004

Chicana Leadership: The Frontiers Reader

This collection of inspired and thoughtful articles, originally published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies from 1980 to 1999, examines not only Chicana leadership, but also Chicana activism, history, and identity. According to the primary editor, Yolanda Flores Niemann, chair, Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University, Chicanas are virtually invisible to U.S. society and oftentimes even to their own communities. Nevertheless, from leading boycotts, challenging injustice, and shaping the creative and performing arts to carving out sexual, cultural, political, and national identities in public and not-so-public ways, Chicanas are ubiquitous.

The problem is that we do not see Chicanas’ work, their … » More …

Fall 2008

During the War Women Went To Work

How often have you heard a group of women in their eighties reminisce about their service in World War II? My guess is—never. Out of all the interviews, books, films, and commemorations about World War II, female voices have seldom been heard. This video, funded by the Washington State legislature for use in the schools, and created by Bristol Productions under the direction of Karl Schmidt ’81, remedies this oversight. In it, more than 50 Washington women talk about their service in the state’s shipyards and aircraft factories, as WASP (Women Aircraft Service Pilots), in the Army (WACs), and the Navy (WAVES), as nurses, and … » More …

Spring 2002

Feminae Romanae!

“. . . but Roman women rule the Romans”

 

Femina gladiatrix?  Femina medica?

Historians typically ascribe household or family roles to women of ancient Rome or ignore them altogether. Accounts of male emperors, male military leaders, male scholars, and male religious leaders traditionally shape the history of the Roman Empire.

However, by carefully scouring standard classical texts like Livy, Tacitus, and Cicero and sifting through archaeological records of inscriptions on tombstones, statues, and buildings, Washington State University history professor Kathryn Meyer and science fiction writer and former WSU librarian Mary Jane Engh have found examples of female counterparts to all … » More …