In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She not only provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde, but she shows the importance of self-defined knowledge for group empowerment. In the tenth anniversary edition of this award-winning work, Patricia Hill Collins expands the basic arguments of the first edition by adding (...) several important new themes. A new discussion of heterosexism as a system of power, an expanded treatment of images of Black womanhood, U.S. Black feminism's connections to Black Diasporic feminisms, and more attention to the importance of social class and nationalism all appear in the new edition. In addition, the new edition includes recent developments in black cultural studies, especially black popular culture, as well as recent events and trends such as the Anita Hill hearings and the backlash against affirmative action. (shrink)

To reduce sex differences in employment outcomes, we must examine them in the context of the sex-gender hierarchy. The conventional explanation for wage gap—job segregation—is incorrect because it ignores men's incentive to preserve their advantages and their ability to do so by establishing the rules that distribute rewards. The primary method through which all dominant groups maintain their hegemony is by differentiating the subordinate group and defining it as inferior and hence meriting inferior treatment. My argument implies that neither sex-integrating (...) jobs nor implementing comparable worth will markedly improve women's employment status because men can subvert these mechanisms or even change the rules by which rewards are allocated. As evidence, I show that occupational integration has failed to advance women appreciably, and I argue that comparable worth is not likely to be much more effective. Instead, we must seek political analyses and political solutions. (shrink)

Analysis of the local implementation of paternity establishment and child support policy in four Wisconsin counties suggests that these policies reproduce some aspects of patriarchal gender relations. The counties' information-collecting practices focused on nonmarital mothers' sexual activity and nonmarital fathers' employment and income. Women were questioned far more extensively than men about their sexual practices and partners; women's accounts of their sexual activity were used to evaluate their overall truthfulness, and administrative practices in effect encouraged alleged fathers to state whether (...) they were convinced of the mother's sexual fidelity. By demonstrating the gendered nature of the terms under which public assistance is granted, the findings highlight the significance of the process of policy implementation for understanding the gendered character of state systems of social provision. (shrink)