Before the second wave: College women, cultural literacy, sexuality and identity, 1940--1965 (original) (raw)
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Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2000
Wyatt illuminates the reader in this volume to the sociohistorical influences that impact African American women's sexuality in the twentieth century. This volume was designed to fill a void within the existing literature in sexology that documents the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion on the expression of sexuality among African American women. Through a discussion of sociohistorical influences, dating back to Africa, the middle passage through slavery, Jim Crow segregation, institutionalized racism, and the resulting internalized racism/sexism, Wyatt creates a vibrant mosaic of African American women's expression of sexuality. This discussion on African American female sexuality is filtered through a multicultural feminist framework. Brown (1995) defined multicultural feminism as "a multicultural, non-White and non-Western feminist database on the varieties of women's experiences" (p. 152). hooks (2000) expands multicultural feminism to cover a wide array of populations. Wyatt seeks to redefine and reframe African American female sexuality to be a tool of empowerment and self-identity through the presentation of material in three parts: (1) redefining our image; (2) understanding our sexuality; and (3) taking back our lives. Through a redefinition of women's image, Wyatt takes the reader back five centuries and discusses the long-standing survival skills and subsequent resiliency wherein African American families survived and thrived within the New World despite slavery and institutionalized racism (see Hill, 1999). Not too surprising, there exists long-term psychological effects among African American women who endured both acute and chronic minority stressors on a daily basis. Wyatt is world renowned for her empirical endeavors that illuminate these long-term psychological effects grounded within a sociocultural framework.
Revue d'études américaines. American Studies Journal, 2022
“Blinded by the Sunbonnet: The Long Shadow of the Pioneer Myth on American Womanhood.” The presentation explored white womanhood in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its impact on white feminists and activists. Paula Read presented the sunbonnet myth, the ideal pioneer woman on the frontier: a cheerful, civilized and civilizing woman, also known as the Madonna of the Prairies. Read insisted on the fact that in the United States the myth was created retroactively and passed on though cultural contents such as stories, novels or TV series, for example the famous Little House on the Prairie, that shaped childhood memories across the territory. She then underlined the necessity of de-centering the history of white women pioneers and of expanding the vantage points, something that still needs to be done.
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