"the history of 20th-century AMerican women and feminism."
As a topic, that's kind of, well, ENORMOUS. You mention that it's a project "to graduate," are you talking high school?
I think there's just way too much to cover in that topic. In the 20th century you had two major waves of feminism, although the first wave began in the late 1800s. Second wave feminism is usually what people think of when they think of feminism in the 20th century, and that's the wave that started in the 1960s.
You might want to focus on a specific feminist icon and look at how her work resonates or doesn't resonate today. Take Margaret Sanger, the birth control activist from the early 1900s, for instance. It would be very interesting to compare the government's silencing Sanger and forbidding her to even talk to (in most cases poor) women about birth control and the current US government's silencing of discussion of birth control and abortion in countries receiving US aid for population health.
You could compare Margaret Sanger then to, say, Patricia Heaton today, the celebrity figurehead of the the so-called "Feminists for Life," who said in the Times recently that if it were up to her there would be no termination of pregnancy at any time for any reason. Can imposing one's beliefs on someone else who may not even share them actually be considered feminist? Or is that something else entirely?
Similarly, and I think this might be more resonant to your personal experience even here on this board the past couple of days, how about an examination of the exceedingly dangerous move in the 1980s wherein anti-sex "feminists" (I put that in quotes because I refuse to believe that actual feminsts can possibly be so vocally anti-sex) Catherine MacKinnon and poor, dead, miserable Andrea Dworkin worked with conservative and repressive legislators in their efforts to "stamp out" pornography. Did the so-called "Feminists Against Pornography" make a major misstep by aligning with the radical right on this one issue while choosing to ignore their myriad other policies that oppress women on a daily basis?
You've been kind of reminding me of those gals lately with your attempts to stamp out t-shirts because they offend your sensibilities and you "know what's good" for other women.
ETA: I kinda forgot what this thread topic was, sorry about that. I would like to add that my brother is a BIG Rachel Ray fan and his wife, who is Italian, says "You just love her because of her big Italian jugs." I'd like to point out how amusing and with what good humor they share that point. And how in a stark, no shades of grey analysis, there is no room for such playful exchanges.
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Updated On: 1/6/07 at 12:44 PM
