final-project

Jade Matthews

1. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2017, July 6). National Council of Negro Women. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/National-Council-of-Negro-Women This source is important to my topic because the National Council of Negro Women is all about the quality of life for black women. They advocate for and provide information on issues affecting women of color and ways to help us advance. This information will help me with the intervention tactics of my project.
2. Norwood, A. (2017, March). Dorothy Height. Retrieved from https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/dorothy-height Dorothy Height was a social worker in Harlem, NY and later became a leader at the Young Women’s Christian Association organization. In 1963 she helped organize the March on Washington for jobs and freedom. This is an important source because Dorothy is one of the women who sparked my interest for the topic I chose. It also led me to research more about the YWCA which leads me to my next source.
3. Young Women’s Christian Association. (n.d.). About the YW. Retrieved from http://www.ywcanyc.org/about-the-yw/  This is the official website for the Young Women’s Christian Association which is an organization whose mission is to improve the welfare of girls and women who need assistance with housing, job training, sex education classes, and more. This is important to my project because my focus is women’s job rights and the YWCA has done extensive work in job training and was the first employment bureau for women. This information will help me with the intervention tactics of my project.
4. Pedrianna, N. (2004). Help Wanted NOW: Legal Resources, the Women’s Movement, and the Battle Over Sex-Segregated Job Advertisements. Social Problems, 51(2), 182-201. This source discusses the history of sex-segregated help wanted signs in the 1960’s. Even though the law prohibited racial and gender discrimination after the civil rights act of 1964, employers placed help wanted signs in sex-segregated columns in the newspapers. This is relevant to my topic because the issue of sex-segregated help wanted signs speaks to the misogynistic mindset that is rooted systemically in history. This will help me bring attention to the causes of my final project.   
5. Banks , N. I. (2019, February 19). Black women’s labor market history reveals deep-seated race and gender discrimination. Retrieved from https://www.epi.org/blog/black-womens-labor-market-history-reveals-deep-seated-race-and-gender-discrimination/ This is a very meaningful article that discusses how employer practices and government policies create a disadvantage for black women when compared to white women and men. This information is relevant and beneficial to my project because I plan to discuss the disadvantages black women have had to face in the work force for years and how we can improve the outcome of these effects.

My project has to do with women’s rights including women’s job rights. This topic concerns race and gender because there is a long history around black women being less likely to get jobs due to the fact that they were black and/or a woman, and these issues are still relevant today. My topic also concerns the history of misogyny and racism in the United Stated and how those factors effect women’s job rights.   

The three posts that were most impactful to me were posts # 4, 9 and this post. 🙂 Post # 4 and 9 resonated with me because it taught me something new. Watching a movie of our choice then relating it to the class gave us full creativity and I appreciated that. But it also allowed me to analyze the movie and find the meaningful points about feminism. Post #9 taught me about what it means to disidentify with something, and I really found a connection in my life how I disidentified with one half of my culture. Writing this reflection post has allowed me to look back to the beginning of the semester and remember how I knew very little about the topics revolving around feminism and now I have so much knowledge about the subject. I would say that my definition remains the same, I would just add that feminism is also about race, political views, gender, the environment around us and so much more.

Main Characters: Florens, Blacksmith, Lina, Sorrow, Rebekka and Jacob Vaark.

A Mercy is a story about a young black slave girl living on the D’Ortega plantation. Jacob Vaark, a trader, goes to Maryland to settle a debt with the plantation owner. The owner is unable to pay the debt so offers one of his slaves instead. Jacob makes known he wants a female slave. Florens gets sent off with Jacob and she feel abandoned by her mother. At the Vaark farm, Florens meets Jacob’s wife, Rebekka, and their servants Lina and Sorrow. Jacob begins accumulating wealth and starts to build a large home similar to the one on the D’Ortega plantation. Florens falls in love with the blacksmith, who is a freed African man. later on sorrow gets ill with smallpox and eventually Jacobs contracts it as well, right when the house is almost finished. His last wish was to be taken to his new house to die. After his funeral, Rebekka falls ill as well. Florens sets out to find the blacksmith so that he can heal Rebekka the way he did Sorrow. While the blacksmith goes to heal Rebekka, Florens stays at his place to watch over a little boy he has adopted. While she is with the boy she grows jealous of him, thinking that the Blacksmith will love the little boy more than her. She accidentally breaks the boys arm and when the blacksmith returns he kicks her out the house, and Florens goes back to the Vaarks. When she returns, everyone has changed and has new outlooks on life. Florens never finds out the real reason her mother gave her up, which was to save her from a lifetime of sexual abuse from the D’Ortega’s.

Material feminists explore interactions of culture, history, environment, discourse and technology, and provide their political views on these different societal elements. Material feminism provides an approach to ethics that takes over the current political settings. It is a way to reintroduce ethical responses to material consequences in society. This idea of material feminism also highlights capitalism and patriarchy and deems it important in understanding women oppression.

The idea of gender as a performance, refers to the daily application of beliefs that were learned and applied, based on cultural norms of what gender is. Norms of what femininity and masculinity look like. I think what Butler is getting at, is that gender is not completely natural. It is a performance or application of beliefs that become normalized over a period of time. It has to do with what we think validates being a man or being a woman. An example would be something like, being a man or woman has to do with the type of clothes you wear or type of haircut you have.

From the Heywood reading I gathered that, Culture Wars has to do with third wave feminism or “post feminist” and how they define themselves against second wave feminists. Culture wars also can refer to different social groups or particular institutions voicing very different opinions and challenging each other.

From my understanding, to disidentify with something means to not identify with something, or to separate yourself from a group or identity. Although I was born in America, I come from a Caribbean background. When I was a teenager there was a time when i disidentified with American culture and only wanted to deal with my Caribbean roots. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, I just wanted to be more connected to my family’s heritage. Since then I’ve learned to combine both cultures into who I am.

https://hyp.is/z6la4osxEeqKaPt4BiecQQ/wgs1001shaw20.commons.gc.cuny.edu/files/2020/03/Moraga_Cherrie_Anzaldual_Gloria_eds_This_Bridge_Called_My_Back_Writings_by_Radical_Women_of_Color-Kitchen_Table_Women_of_Color_Press.pdf

“Racism is an ideology. Everyone is capable of being racist whatever their color and condition. Only some of us are liable to racist attack. Understanding the racist ideology – where and how it penetrates – is what is important for the feminist movement, not “including” women of color or talking about “including” men. Guilt is a fact for us all, white & colored: an identification with the oppressor and oppressive ideology. Let us, instead, identify, understand, and feel with the oppressed as a way out of the morass of racism and guilt.”

What this section means to me, is that racism is a set of ideas solely based on political theory and policy. Some of us women of color are predisposed to racial attack in ways some might not understand. And with that being said, understanding racism is very important to discuss in the feminist movement. A lot of the stories written here, from women of color, are expressing racial issues in feminist movements, so i thought this excerpt was important to emphasize.