The most enduring stereotypes about feminists is that they are manhaters. Interestingly, few empirical studies have examined this stereotype for its veracity. Chapter 4 critically examines the stereotype that feminists dislike men and that feminism is a movement against men. Social psychological research on women’s attitudes toward men is examined and finds that anti-feminists actually feel more hostility toward men than do feminists. The function and implication of the manhating feminist myth is critically examined in this chapter. The feminist manhater myth persists in order to undermine the feminist movement and to drive a wedge between traditional and non-traditional women. Related strategies to make feminism unpalatable, such as lesbian-baiting, are also critically examined. Chapter 4 ends with strategies to reduce the impact of the manhater stereotype and to foster gender equality. The empirical work measuring the effects of women/gender studies classes on students is presented, and teaching children about gender discrimination are some strategies presented.

The chapter traces the long, unheralded history of Black women electric guitarists in the United States from the 1940s to the present century. It identifies the unique challenges they face striving to work in an American music landscape that adores Black women as singers but largely overlooks them when they strap an electric guitar onto their bodies. It uses historical research and oral history interviews with intergenerational artists in blues, gospel, and rock to explore how race, gender, and genre conventions manifest and intersect to create barriers and opportunities.

Anorexia has a higher mortality rate than any other mental illness and most deaths occur in women. The feminist view is that we are all at risk of developing eating disorders and that the battle for control over the young woman’s life between mother and daughter is key in how anorexia begins. However, current evidence suggests mothers have been unfairly blamed, and that genetic factors play a powerful part in our vulnerability to eating disorders, with genes interacting with environmental factors. Services and expertise to treat young people with eating disorders are lacking and talk of ‘terminal anorexia’ is abhorrent. The fact that these disorders affect more women than men has influenced the level of clinical and research funding that they get. Services must move away from their reliance on BMI to decide who gets care, and their practice of only accepting those who fit into rigid diagnostic boxes. We all must all challenge, as feminism urged us, our society’s obsession with body image. However, feminism also needs to embrace the science that explains how some women are much more vulnerable to developing eating disorder than others, and why biology also matters.

Women figure prominently in Kerouac’s work, from novels explicitly about women he had encountered in his life (Maggie Cassidy and Tristessa), to short stories like “Good Blonde,” to the lengthy, often lyrical passages about women in The Subterraneans and On the Road. This chapter explores Kerouac’s controversial representations of women, which are often sexist, misogynist, essentialist, racist. Women in Kerouac’s works, even at their most indelible and dramatic, are, as the Beat writer Joyce Johnson termed them, “minor characters”; they catalyze or support action, struggle for recognition, then disappear from the story. Even when the female characters are presumptively protagonists, as in Maggie Cassidy or Tristessa or “Good Blonde,” they are still not much more than objects of narrative delectation or vehicles for emotional expression.

Bitch lurked in the English language for centuries, but then it emerged as an everyday word. Why? Bitch changed along with the changing social roles of women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the mid 1900s, the use of bitch had exploded; its meteoric rise was a backlash against feminism. In response it was reclaimed by feminists – to some extent, that is. In modern times, bitch is still an insult for a woman who is considered to be unpleasant, disagreeable, or malicious. But in the word’s evolution it has also come to mean a woman who is revered (or reviled) as tough, strong, and assertive. For better or for worse, bitch is interwoven with the history of feminism. It is a word that represents both feminism and anti-feminism at the same time.

The Montgomery Variations and Credo were not just timely musical masterpieces; they were also large-scale compositions dealing with racial justice and global equality that were penned by an African American woman, an individual to whom the doors of the classical music performance and publishing establishments were closed because of race and sex. Both works may thus be understood as compositions tendered from within a double application of the “veil” or “double-consciousness” that Du Bois had seminally discussed in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk – one application is that of race; the other, that of sex. Keenly aware of both of her doubly veiled existence and of the near-total absence of Black folk and women in orchestras, as well as their disproportionately small presence in choruses and audiences, Margaret Bonds undertook a gambit of dual perspective. She used the rhetoric of White Euro-American classical music to valorize contemporary African Americans and others who bravely fought against the system with which most performers and audiences of that music normally identified. The chapter closes with a reflection on the crucial role played by Bonds’s personal and professional affinities with Langston Hughes in inspiring her to this gambit.

Diversifying the workforce is a major initiative throughout education environments in an effort to provide students and the community educators they can relate to. This case study explores discrimination in hiring practices and how it could be addressed.

This chapter focuses on the possibilities for pursuing change toward gender equity policy from the bottom up. Women are targeted beneficiaries of the gender equity initiatives (and therefore we expect their support to be relatively high); however, they comprise only 43 percent of student-athletes. Stronger majority coalitions thus require obtaining the support of male student-athletes. We theorize one route to coalitions via interpersonal contact. We build on the enormous extant literature on contact to identify conditions under which male student-athletes may become more supportive of policies for marginalized female student-athletes. These include when men understand the plight of the marginalized group (women) and when they trust the policymaking institutions (colleges and the NCAA). We argue that interpersonal contact is a mechanism by which the first condition is met. We provide clear evidence for our predictions with observational and experimental data. However, we also find that the sex-segregated institutions of college sports prevent significant contact between women and men, thereby vitiating the likelihood of such a coalition emerging to pursue change from the bottom up.

Chapter 5 delves into the presence of Black Consciousness as a powerful current of thought and praxis inside Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK). The period from 1977 to 1981 is generally agreed upon by scholars and activists as one in which MK was able to assert itself as the leading South African liberation movement. It was also clearly recognized that Soweto generation recruits who came to MK during the uprising were fundamental to this transformation. However, the details on how this generation brought its Black Consciousness politics into the armed wing of the ANC have been underemphasized. The Soweto generation recruits who dominated the rank-and-file and mid-level commanders in the immediate years after 1976 carried a politics of Black Consciousness into MK which temporarily enabled it to become a more radical organization. Building on Stephen Davis’s conception of Novo Catengue and other camps in Angola as spaces of both repression and the positive foundation of the newly re-forged MK, this chapter will attempt to interrogate the role Black Consciousness played within this space.

The chapter explores the workings of gender in genocidal processes. It frames the subject inclusively, to address women and men; masculinities and femininities; the specific vulnerabilities of LGBT people; survivor, victim and perpetrator experiences; and structural and institutional forms of sexualized violence alongside event-specific ones. The chapter encourages readers to rethink major categories of analysis and themes in genocide studies as gendered phenomena.

Although pervasive, gender is often overlooked for its role in how genocide is conceived, performed, and experienced. The chapter traces its influence in connection to other explanatory narratives and theories such as the roles of the state, militarism, war, imperialism, racism, and sexism. Was gender one of many facets or a primary force in escalating or de-escalating the violence over time and space? Variables of race and ethnicity, themselves typically intersecting with social class, crucially shape how gender identities are imposed, interpreted, and experienced. The interaction of gender with an age variable is also noted. The coverage spans case studies of genocide in Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa in order to illuminate the universal and particular. The authors also present on the role of courts in prosecuting mass rape and sexual violence as acts of genocide. The conclusion points out key intellectual, ethical and policy challenges ahead.

The purpose of this project was to develop a brief, integrated measure that combines two previously published critical consciousness (CC) measures; the Contemporary Critical Consciousness Measure (CCCM (Shin et al., 2016) and CCCMII (Shin et al., 2018). This new measure is intended to assess awareness and attitudes related to various systemic, institutionalized forms of discrimination. Data from 475 participants provided initial reliability evidence for the Contemporary Critical Consciousness Measure-S (CCCM-S). Results from exploratory factor analyses suggest that the final 24-item CCCM-S provides a general index of CC as well as assesses CC specifically associated with racism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, and sexism/cis-sexism. Results support the internal consistency and factor structure of the measure. Future directions for research, training, and counseling implications are discussed.

Today three forces threaten to limit speech. The first pits guns against words, creating a showdown between the Second Amendment and the First. The second sees powerful speakers invoking their right to speak in order to silence other people’s speech. Third, and perhaps the most subtle, the monitoring of our digital speech by government and business chills our ability to say what we want online. Free speech will survive provided we remain vigilant in defending the speech rights of the minority against what has been called the tyranny of the majority.

This chapter critiques a tendency by masculine critics and writers in the 1980s toward binary framing that led to a misassignment of responsibility and misreading of Black women’s literary production.The framework reduces our capacity to read Black literature of this era through its intelligence about gender, to appreciate that Black literature in the 1980s might be read for its attention to and expansion of gender as a category for racial analysis. This chapter animates the gender-thinking in Black male writers’ representations of masculinity by collating the work of Essex Hemphill with that of Ernest J. Gaines. By pairing these two writers, the chapter exemplifies a gender study that refuses the simplistic rejection of Black women’s writing, and instead amplifies the legacy of Black feminist intersectional thought. This comparative reading moves away from pitting Black men against Black women, since to do so is to marginalize writers and their work. Furthermore, it rectifies the general exclusion of queer writers from the category “Black male writers,” akin to the canonical categorization of Black women’s writing that often includes queer women and scenes of queerness.

In 1983, a Black woman from Detroit, Michigan, Alice Randall, moved to Nashville determined to spotlight Black contributions to country music, become a novelist, and support herself by writing and publishing country songs. Forty years later, the company she founded and eventually sold, Midsummer Music continues to thrive. Randall, the only Black woman to co-write a song, “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl),” that topped the country charts for two weeks running now teaches a course on Black Country at Vanderbilt University. Reflecting on four decades of navigating complex layers of sexism and racism; a business community that guarded itself against outsiders with a culture that included unique vocabulary, clothing, and calendar; and profound changes in how the country audience accesses music and pays for music, Randall offers a memoir of economic intention and ambition that makes visible the invisible work or certain Black women working on the row before her.

In September 2007, Rissi Palmer’s debut single “Country Girl” entered Billboard’s Hot Country Song (HCS) chart, making her the first Black female artist to chart in twenty years and one of just seven Black women in the history of the industry. With short life cycles on the chart, their songs left faint data trails making their time in the industry. As a result, their careers received limited attention from the press, their music was not widely distributed, their contributions went unrecognized by the industry, and, as a result, they remain unknown to country music fans. In an industry tightly centered around documenting, preserving, and promoting its heritage, these women have been largely expunged from the genre’s historical narrative. Drawing on intersectional theory and feminist scholarship on institutional discrimination (Collins 1990; Ahmed 2014, 2019), this chapter analyzes sixty years of chart and award history data, to offer a framework for considering how industry data shapes cultural heritage, dictating whose stories get preserved.

Chapter 3 offers an empirical examination of how adherence to American religious exceptionalism influences national identity attachments. Empirical analyses show how adherence to American religious exceptionalism promotes national devotion and shapes citizens’ perceptions of the “ideal American.” Statistical evidence corroborates the main theoretical presumptions, which is that American religious exceptionalism’s disciples are strongly attached to the nation and largely reject any form of criticism toward their beloved America. American religious exceptionalism’s disciples are more likely than dissidents of the laity to view the national “us” in ethnocultural terms, and equally likely as dissidents and laity to subscribe to liberalism-based traditions of national identity attachment. Overall, disciples endorse a very narrow definition of what it means to be an American that favors Whites, Christians, and men. Disciples are also shown to be fierce defenders of the cultural status quo: They are skeptics of the existence of racism and sexism and are fierce defenders of maintaining Christian and White male dominance in all facets of American society.