Drawing on a qualitative study of women who cared for their elderly mothers, this article explores women's experiences of feeling responsible for elderly relatives. The minimal provision of public services for old people and the relative absence of brothers and husbands from family caregiving emerge as material constraints shaping women's sense of obligation. This is affirmed by ideologies and assumptions about women's association with caring and family ties that permeate subjects' accounts of their situations. Translating their sense of obligation into (...) their lives is a contradictory process characterized by ambivalence and guilt that stifle complaint. Further exploration of the social processes that sustain the inequitable division of caring labor can contribute to interpretations, practices, and policies that benefit rather than constrain women. (shrink)

Feminist scholarship has advanced our understanding of the family's relationship to the economy and the state over different historical periods. Theorizing about gender, class, and family life has led us to conclude that global explanations of the family are false. Our knowledge about the meaning of racial stratification for family life, however, still remains fragmented. This article asks, What does including race have to offer the study of the family? Analysis of two streams of revisionist family scholarship demonstrates the need (...) for reconceptualizing racial diversity in a way that embraces the experiences of White families as well as racial ethnic families. Family upheavals created by industrialization and deindustrialization offer concrete examples of the importance of race in theorizing family life throughout American society. (shrink)

Using in-depth interviews with women in the Puerto Rican community of Chicago, this article explores how migration emerged as a strategy for families across class backgrounds and how gender relations within the family mediate the migration of married working-class and middle-class Puerto Rican women. The women who followed their husbands to Chicago participated in another form of labor migration, since some wives joined their husbands in the paid economy and those who did not contributed with the reproductive work that supported (...) their husbands and families. This article also explores how Puerto Rican women confront the basic duality of reproductive and productive work. (shrink)

In a Different Voice is the little book that started a revolution, making women's voices heard, in their own right and with their own integrity, for virtually the first time in social scientific theorizing about women. Its impact was immediate and continues to this day, in the academic world and beyond.

Borderlands/La Frontera deals with the psychology of resistance to oppression. The possibility of resistance is revealed by perceiving the self in the process of being oppressed as another face of the self in the process of resisting oppression. The new mestiza consciousness is born from this interplay between oppression and resistance. Resistance is understood as social, collective activity, by adding to Anzaldúa's theory the distinction between the act and the process of resistance.

This article examines how gender shapes the migration and settlement experiences of Mexican immigrant women and men. The article compares the experiences of families in which the husbands departed prior to 1965 to those in which the husbands departed after 1965 and argues that the lengthy spousal separations altered patterns of patriarchal authority and the traditional gendered household division of labor. This induced a trend toward more egalitarian conjugal relations upon settlement in the United States. Examining the changing contexts of (...) migration illuminates the fluid character of patriarchy's control in Mexican immigrant families. (shrink)

This book presents an alternative view of adult education, exploring the poverty of its analyses and the narrowness of its approaches to work and education.

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity.Borderlands / La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a "border" is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a (...) new introduction by scholars Norma Cantú and Aída Hurtado as well as a revised critical bibliography. Gloria Anzaldúa was a Chicana-tejana-lesbian-feminist poet, theorist, and fiction writer from south Texas. She was the editor of the critical anthologyMaking Face/Making Soul: Haciendo Caras, co-editor ofThis Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and winner of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. She taught creative writing, Chicano studies, and feminist studies at University of Texas, San Francisco State University, Vermont College of Norwich University, and University of California Santa Cruz. Anzaldúa passed away in 2004 and was honored around the world for shedding visionary light on the Chicana experience by receiving the National Association for Chicano Studies Scholar Award in 2005. Gloria was also posthumously awarded her doctoral degree in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. A number of scholarships and book awards, including the Anzaldúa Scholar Activist Award and the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award for Independent Scholars, are awarded in her name every year. (shrink)