sign in sign up
<<
Home , Miss America protest

1

UNIT TWO READINGS

• “The waves of , and why people keep fighting over them, explained” 2 • “A Feminist? Definition Varies with the Woman” 9 • Interview Guide: Becoming Qualitative Researchers: An Introduction 10 • “Six demographic trends shaping the U.S. and world in 2019” 14 • Selected Writings 16 • “Women’s Revolt: Why Now and Where To” 23 • Handouts on Essay Development and Style 29

2

“The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained,” By Constance Grady, Vox, 2018 If you have no idea which wave of feminism we’re in right now, read this. If one thing’s for sure, it’s that the second-wave feminists are at war with the third-wave feminists. No, wait, the second-wavers are at war with the fourth-wave feminists. No, it’s not the second-wavers, it’s the Gen X-ers. Are we still cool with the first-wavers? Are they all racists now? Is there actually intergenerational fighting about feminist waves? Is that a real thing? Do we even use the wave metaphor anymore? As the #MeToo movement barrels forward, as record numbers of women seek office, and as the Women’s March drives the resistance against the Trump administration, feminism is reaching a level of cultural relevance it hasn’t enjoyed in years. It’s now a major object of cultural discourse — which has led to some very confusing conversations because not everyone is familiar with or agrees on the basic terminology of feminism. And one of the most basic and most confusing terms has to do with waves of feminism. People began talking about feminism as a series of waves in 1968 when a New York Times article by Martha Weinman Lear ran under the headline “The Second Feminist Wave.” “Feminism, which one might have supposed as dead as a Polish question, is again an issue,” Lear wrote. “Proponents call it the Second Feminist Wave, the first having ebbed after the glorious victory of suffrage and disappeared, finally, into the sandbar of Togetherness.” The wave metaphor caught on: It became a useful way of linking the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s to the women’s movement of the suffragettes, and to suggest that the women’s libbers weren’t a bizarre historical aberration, as their detractors sneered, but a new chapter in a grand history of women fighting together for their rights. Over time, the wave metaphor became a way to describe and distinguish between different eras and generations of feminism. It’s not a perfect metaphor. “The wave metaphor tends to have built into it an important metaphorical implication that is historically misleading and not helpful politically,” argued feminist historian Linda Nicholson in 2010. “That implication is that underlying certain historical differences, there is one phenomenon, feminism, that unites gender activism in the history of the United States, and that like a wave, peaks at certain times and recedes at others. In sum, the wave metaphor suggests the idea that gender activism in the history of the United States has been for the most part unified around one set of ideas, and that set of ideas can be called feminism.” The wave metaphor can be reductive. It can suggest that each wave of feminism is a monolith with a single unified agenda, when in fact the is a history of different ideas in wild conflict. It can reduce each wave to a stereotype and suggest that there’s a sharp division between generations of feminism, when in fact there’s a fairly strong continuity between each wave — and since no wave is a monolith, the theories that are fashionable in one wave are often grounded in the work that someone was doing on the sidelines of a previous wave. And the wave metaphor can suggest that mainstream feminism is the only kind of feminism there is, when feminism is full of splinter movements. And as waves pile upon waves in feminist discourse, it’s become unclear that the wave metaphor is useful for understanding where we are right now. “I don’t think we are in a wave right now,” gender studies scholar April Sizemore- Barber told Vox in January. “I think that now feminism is inherently intersectional feminism — we are in a place of multiple .” But the wave metaphor is also probably the best tool we have for understanding the history of feminism in the US, where it came from and how it developed. And it’s become a fundamental part of how we talk about feminism — so even if we end up deciding to discard it, it’s worth understanding exactly what we’re discarding. Here is an overview of the waves of feminism in the US, from the suffragettes to #MeToo. This is a broad overview, and it won’t capture every nuance of the movement in each era. Think of it as a Feminism 101 explainer, here to give you a framework to understand the feminist conversation that’s happening right now, how we got here, and where we go next.

3

The first wave: 1848 to 1920 People have been suggesting things along the line of “Hmmm, are women maybe human beings?” for all of history, so first-wave feminism doesn’t refer to the first feminist thinkers in history. It refers to the West’s first sustained political movement dedicated to achieving political equality for women: the suffragettes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For 70 years, the first-wavers would march, lecture, and protest, and face arrest, ridicule, and violence as they fought tooth and nail for the right to vote. As Susan B. Anthony’s biographer Ida Husted Harper would put it, suffrage was the right that, once a woman had won it, “would secure to her all others.”

The first wave basically begins with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848. There, almost 200 women met in a church in upstate

New York to discuss “the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” Attendees discussed their grievances and passed a list of 12 resolutions calling for specific equal rights — including, after much debate, the right to vote. Woman’s suffrage march in New York circa 1900. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images The whole thing was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were both active abolitionists. (They met when they were both barred from the floor of the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London; no women were allowed.) At the time, the nascent women’s movement was firmly integrated with the abolitionist movement: The leaders were all abolitionists, and Frederick Douglass spoke at the Seneca Falls Convention, arguing for women’s suffrage. Women of color like Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, and Frances E.W. Harper were major forces in the movement, working not just for women’s suffrage but for universal suffrage. But despite the immense work of women of color for the women’s movement, the movement of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony eventually established itself as a movement specifically for white women, one that used racial animus as fuel for its work. The 15th Amendment’s passage in 1870, granting black men the right to vote, became a spur that politicized white women and turned them into suffragettes. Were they truly not going to be granted the vote before former slaves were?

“If educated women are not as fit to decide who shall be the rulers of Portrait of African-American orator, abolitionist and women’s this country, as ‘field hands,’ then where’s the use of culture, or any rights activist Sojourner Truth circa 1860; Illustration of Truth preaching to a crowd from a lectern. Hulton Archive; Afro brain at all?” demanded one white womanwho wrote in to Stanton American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images and Anthony’s newspaper, the Revolution. “One might as well have been ‘born on the plantation.’” Black women were barred from some demonstrations or forced to walk behind white women in others.

Despite its racism, the women’s movement developed radical goals for its members. First-wavers fought not only for white women’s suffrage but also for equal opportunities to education and employment, and for the right to own property. And as the movement developed, it began to turn to the question of . In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the US, in defiance of a New York state law that forbade the distribution of contraception. She would later go on to establish the clinic that became Planned Parenthood. In 1920, Congress passed the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. (In theory, it granted the right to women of all races, but in practice, it remained difficult for black women to vote, especially in the South.) The 19th Amendment was the grand legislative achievement of the first wave. Although individual groups continued to work — for reproductive freedom, for equality in education and employment, for voting rights for black women — the

4 movement as a whole began to splinter. It no longer had a unified goal with strong cultural momentum behind it, and it would not find another until the second wave began to take off in the . The second wave: 1963 to the 1980s The second wave of feminism begins with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which came out in 1963. There were prominent feminist thinkers before Friedan who would come to be associated with the second wave — most importantly Simone de Beauvoir, whose Second Sex came out in France in 1949 and in the US in 1953 — but The Feminine Mystique was a phenomenon. It sold 3 million copies in three years. The Feminine Mystique rails against “the problem that has no name”: the systemic that taught women that their place was in the home and that if they were unhappy as housewives, it was only because they were broken and perverse. “I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor,” Friedan later quipped. But, she argued, the fault didn’t truly lie with women, but rather with the world that refused to allow them to exercise their creative and intellectual faculties. Women were right to be unhappy; they were being ripped off. The Feminine Mystique was not revolutionary in its thinking, as many of Friedan’s ideas were already being discussed by academics and feminist intellectuals. Instead, it was revolutionary in its reach. It made its way into the hands of housewives, who gave it to their friends, who passed it along through a whole chain of well- educated middle-class white women with beautiful homes and families. And it gave them permission to be angry. And once those 3 million readers realized that they were angry, feminism once again had cultural Betty Friedan (top row, fourth from left) with feminists at her home in 1973. at a momentum behind it. It had a unifying goal, too: not session of the International Feminist Conference and included Yoko Ono (second just political equality, which the first-wavers had fought row, center). Bettmann Archive/Getty Images for, but social equality.

“The personal is political,” said the second-wavers. (The phrase cannot be traced back to any individual woman but was popularized by .) They would go on to argue that problems that seemed to be individual and petty — about sex, and relationships, and access to abortions, and domestic labor — were in fact systemic and political, and fundamental to the fight for women’s equality. So the movement won some major legislative and legal victories: The Equal Pay Act of 1963 theoretically outlawed the gender pay gap; a series of landmark Supreme Court cases through the ’60s and ’70s gave married and unmarried women the right to use birth control; Title IX gave women the right to educational equality; and in 1973, Roe v. Wade guaranteed women reproductive freedom. The second wave worked on getting women the right to hold credit cards under their own names and to apply for mortgages. It worked to outlaw marital rape, to raise awareness about domestic violence and build shelters for women fleeing rape and domestic violence. It worked to name and legislate against sexual harassment in the workplace. But perhaps just as central was the second wave’s focus on changing the way society thought about women. The second wave cared deeply about the casual, systemic sexism ingrained into society — the belief that women’s highest purposes were domestic and decorative, and the social standards that reinforced that belief — and in naming that sexism and ripping it apart. The second wave cared about racism too, but it could be clumsy in working with people of color. As the women’s movement developed, it was rooted in the anti-capitalist and anti-racist civil rights movements, but black women increasingly found themselves alienated from the central platforms of the mainstream women’s movement.

5

The Feminine Mystique and its “problem that has no name” was specifically for white middle-class women: Women who had to work to support themselves experienced their oppression very differently from women who were socially discouraged from working. Earning the right to work outside the home was not a major concern for black women, many of whom had to work outside the home anyway. And while black women and white women both advocated for reproductive freedom, black women wanted to fight not just for the right to contraception and abortions but also to stop the forced sterilization of people of color and people with disabilities, which was not a priority for the mainstream women’s movement. In response, some black feminists decamped from feminism to create womanism. (“Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender,” Alice Walker wrote in 1983.) Even with its limited scope, second-wave feminism at its height was plenty radical enough to scare people — hence the myth of the burners. Despite the popular story, there was no mass burning of among second-wave feminists. But women did gather together in 1968 to protest the pageant and its demeaning, patriarchal treatment of women. And as part of the protest, participants ceremoniously threw away objects that they considered to be symbols of women’s objectification, including bras and copies of . That the Miss America protest has long lingered in the popular imagination as a bra-burning, and that bra-burning has become a metonym for postwar American feminism, says a lot about the backlash to the second wave that would soon ensue.

In the 1980s, the comfortable conservatism of the Reagan era managed to successfully position second-wave feminists as humorless, hairy-legged shrews who cared only about petty bullshit like bras instead of real problems, probably to distract themselves from the loneliness of their lives, since no man would ever want a (shudder) feminist.

“I don’t think of myself as a feminist,” a young woman told Susan Bolotin in 1982 for the New

York Times Magazine. “Not for me, but for the guy next door that would mean in I’m a lesbian and I 9/7/1968-Atlantic City Demonstrators from the National Women’s Liberation Movement hate men.” picketing the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City in 1968. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images Another young woman chimed in, agreeing. “Look around and you’ll see some happy women, and then you’ll see all these bitter, bitter women,” she said. “The unhappy women are all feminists. You’ll find very few happy, enthusiastic, relaxed people who are ardent supporters of feminism.” That image of feminists as angry and man-hating and lonely would become canonical as the second wave began to lose its momentum, and it continues to haunt the way we talk about feminism today. It would also become foundational to the way the third wave would position itself as it emerged. The third wave: 1991(?) to ???? It is almost impossible to talk with any clarity about the third wave because few people agree on exactly what the third wave is, when it started, or if it’s still going on. “The confusion surrounding what constitutes third wave feminism,” writes feminist scholar Elizabeth Evans, “is in some respects its defining feature.” But generally, the beginning of the third wave is pegged to two things: the Anita Hill case in 1991, and the emergence of the riot grrrl groups in the music scene of the early 1990s. In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her at work. Thomas made his way to the Supreme Court anyway, but Hill’s testimony sparked an avalanche of sexual harassment complaints, in much the same way that last fall’s Harvey Weinstein accusations were followed by a litany of sexual misconduct accusations against other powerful men.

6

And Congress’s decision to send Thomas to the Supreme Court despite Hill’s testimony led to a national conversation about the overrepresentation of men in national leadership roles. The following year, 1992, would be dubbed “the Year of the Woman” after 24 women won seats in the House of Representatives and three more won seats in the Senate. And for the young women watching the Anita Hill case in real time, it would become an awakening. “I am not a postfeminism feminist,” declared Rebecca Walker (Alice Walker’s daughter) for Ms. after watching Thomas get sworn into the Supreme Court. “I am the Third Wave.” Early third-wave activism tended to involve fighting against workplace sexual harassment and working to increase the number of women in positions of power. Intellectually, it was rooted in the work of theorists of the ’80s: Kimberlé Crenshaw, a scholar of gender and critical race theory who coined the term intersectionality to describe the ways in which different forms of oppression intersect; and Judith Butler, who argued that gender and sex are separate and that gender is performative. Crenshaw and Butler’s combined influence would become foundational to the third wave’s embrace of the fight for trans rights as a fundamental part of intersectional feminism. Thousands of demonstrators gathered for the March for Women’s Lives, sponsored Aesthetically, the third wave is deeply influenced by the by the National Organization for Women (NOW), in Washington DC, on April 5, rise of the riot grrrls, the girl groups who stomped their 1992. Doug Mills/AP Doc Martens onto the music scene in the 1990s.

“BECAUSE doing/reading/seeing/hearing cool things that validate and challenge us can help us gain the strength and sense of community that we need in order to figure out how bullshit like racism, able-bodieism, ageism, speciesism, classism, thinism, sexism, anti-semitism and heterosexism figures in our own lives,” wrote Bikini Kill lead singer Kathleen Hanna in the Riot Grrrl Manifesto in 1991. “BECAUSE we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak.” The word girl here points to one of the major differences between second- and third-wave feminism. Second-wavers fought to be called women rather than girls: They weren’t children, they were fully grown adults, and they demanded to be treated with according dignity. There should be no more college girls or coeds: only college women, learning alongside college men. But third-wavers liked being girls. They embraced the word; they wanted to make it empowering, even threatening — hence grrrl. And as it developed, that trend would continue: The third wave would go on to embrace all kinds of ideas and language and aesthetics that the second wave had worked to reject: makeup and high heels and high-femme girliness. In part, the third-wave embrace of girliness was a response to the anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s, the one that said the second-wavers were shrill, hairy, and unfeminine and that no man would ever want them. And in part, it was born out of a belief that the rejection of girliness was in itself misogynistic: girliness, third-wavers argued, was not inherently less valuable than masculinity or androgyny. And it was rooted in a growing belief that effective feminism had to recognize both the dangers and the pleasures of the patriarchal structures that create the beauty standard and that it was pointless to punish and censure individual women for doing things that brought them pleasure. Third-wave feminism had an entirely different way of talking and thinking than the second wave did — but it also lacked the strong cultural momentum that was behind the grand achievements of the second wave. (Even the Year of Women turned out to be a blip, as the number of women entering national politics plateaued rapidly after 1992.) The third wave was a diffuse movement without a central goal, and as such, there’s no single piece of legislation or major social change that belongs to the third wave the way the 19th Amendment belongs to the first wave or Roe v. Wade belongs to the second.

7

Depending on how you count the waves, that might be changing now, as the #MeToo moment develops with no signs of stopping — or we might be kicking off an entirely new wave. The present day: a fourth wave? Feminists have been anticipating the arrival of a fourth wave since at least 1986, when a letter writer to the Wilson Quarterly opined that the fourth wave was already building. Internet trolls actually tried to launch their own fourth wave in 2014, planning to create a “pro-sexualization, pro-skinny, anti-fat” feminist movement that the third wave would revile, ultimately miring the entire feminist community in bloody civil war. (It didn’t work out.) But over the past few years, as #MeToo and Time’s Up pick up momentum, the Women’s March floods Washington with pussy hats every year, and a record number of women prepare to run for office, it’s beginning to seem that the long- heralded fourth wave might actually be here. While a lot of media coverage of #MeToo describes it as a movement dominated by third-wave feminism, it actually seems to be centered in a movement that lacks the characteristic diffusion of the third wave. It feels different. “Maybe the fourth wave is online,” said feminist Jessica Valenti in 2009, and that’s come to be one of the major ideas of fourth-wave feminism. Online is where activists meet and plan their activism, and it’s where feminist discourse and debate takes place. Sometimes fourth-wave activism can even take place on the internet (the “#MeToo” tweets), and sometimes it takes place on the streets (the Women’s March), but it’s conceived and propagated online. As such, the fourth wave’s beginnings are often loosely pegged to around 2008, when Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were firmly entrenched in the cultural fabric and feminist blogs like Jezebel and Feministing were spreading across the web. By 2013, the idea that we had entered a fourth wave was widespread enough that it was getting written up in the Guardian. “What’s happening now feels like something new again,” wrote Kira Cochrane. Currently, the fourth-wavers are driving the movement behind #MeToo and Time’s Up, but in previous years they were responsible for the cultural impact of projects like Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), in which a rape victim at Columbia University committed to carrying their mattress around campus until the university expelled their rapist. The trending hashtag #YesAllWomen after the UC Santa Barbara shooting was a fourth-wave campaign, and so was the trending hashtag #StandWithWendy when Wendy Davis filibustered a Texas abortion law. Arguably, the SlutWalks that began in 2011 — in protest of the idea that the way to prevent rape is for women to “stop dressing like sluts” — are fourth- wave campaigns. Like all of feminism, the fourth wave is not a monolith. It means different things to different people. But these tentpole positions that Bustle identified as belonging to fourth-wave feminism in 2015 do tend to hold true for a lot of fourth- wavers; namely, that fourth-wave feminism is queer, sex-positive, trans-inclusive, body-positive, and digitally driven. (Bustle also claims that fourth-wave feminism is anti-misandry, but given the glee with which fourth-wavers across the internet riff on ironic misandry, that may be more prescriptivist than descriptivist on their part.) And now the fourth wave has begun to hold our culture’s most powerful men accountable for their behavior. It has begun a radical critique of the systems of power that allow predators to target women with impunity. So is there a generational war between feminists? As the fourth wave begins to establish itself, and as #MeToo goes on, we’ve begun to develop a narrative that says the fourth wave’s biggest obstacles are its predecessors — of the second wave. “The backlash to #MeToo is indeed here,” wrote Jezebel’s Stassa Edwards in January, “and it’s liberal second-wave feminism.” Women’s March in Washington,2017. Eliza Barclay/Vox; Steve Exum/FilmMagic

8

Writing with a lot less nuance, Katie Way, the reporter who broke the Aziz Ansari story, smeared one of her critics as a “burgundy-lipstick, bad-highlights, second-wave-feminist has-been.” And there certainly are second-wave feminists pushing a #MeToo backlash. “If you spread your legs because he said ‘be nice to me and I’ll give you a job in a movie’ then I’m afraid that’s tantamount to consent,” second-wave feminist icon remarked as the accusations about Weinstein mounted, “and it’s too late now to start whingeing about that.” (Greer, who has also said on the record that she doesn’t believe trans women are “real women,” has become something of a poster child for the worst impulses of the second wave. Die a hero or live long enough to become a villain, etc.) But some of the most prominent voices speaking out against #MeToo, like Katie Roiphe and Bari Weiss, are too young to have been part of the second wave. Roiphe is a Gen X-er who was pushing back against both the second and the third waves in the 1990s and has managed to stick around long enough to push back against the fourth wave today. Weiss, 33, is a millennial. Other prominent #MeToo critics, like Caitlin Flanagan and Daphne Merkin, are old enough to have been around for the second wave but have always been on the conservative end of the spectrum. “In the 1990s and 2000s, second-wavers were cast as the shrill, militant, man-hating mothers and grandmothers who got in the way of their daughters’ sexual liberation. Now they’re the dull, hidebound relics who are too timid to push for the real revolution,” writes Sady Doyle at Elle. “And of course, while young women have been telling their forebears to shut up and fade into the sunset, older women have been stereotyping and slamming younger activists as feather-headed, boy- crazy pseudo-feminists who squander their mothers’ feminist gains by taking them for granted.” It is not particularly useful to think of the #MeToo debates as a war between generations of feminists — or, more creepily, as some sort of Freudian Electra complex in action. And the data from our polling shows that these supposed generational gaps largely don’t exist. It is perhaps more useful to think of it as part of what has always been the history of feminism: passionate disagreement between different schools of thought, which history will later smooth out into a single overarching “wave” of discourse (if the wave metaphor holds on that long). The history of feminism is filled with radicals and progressives and liberals and centrists. It’s filled with splinter movements and reactionary counter-movements. That’s part of what it means to be both an intellectual tradition and a social movement, and right now feminism is functioning as both with a gorgeous and monumental vitality. Rather than devouring their own, feminists should recognize the enormous work that each wave has done for the movement, and get ready to keep doing more work. After all, the past is past. We’re in the middle of the third wave now. Or is it the fourth? Women’s March in Washington, DC, 1/21/17. Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images

9

“A Feminist? Definition Varies with the Woman,” New York Times, 11/8/75

What is a feminist? There are probably as many definitions as there are women. There is, however, a certain unanimity of thought among women who are active feminists, or, who have spoken out on specific aspects of women's liberation. True equality between the sexes, development of women to their fullest potential and full partnership, freedom of choice, the breaking down of traditional stereotypes, the recognition of women's many needs, abilities and responsibilities, are common threads among the definitions offered by women well known in various fields, who were asked for their views. Here are some of their statements: “A liberated woman is one who feels confident in herself, and is happy in what she is doing. She is a person who has a sense of self. I think it all comes down to freedom of choice.” BETTY FORD (Mrs. Ford generally uses the word “liberated” rather than “feminist”) “A feminist is a woman who is conscious of what it means to be a woman in our society. She actively tries to change the way women are perceived by themselves and by men. She evaluates personal and work relationships, social, economic, cultural and political relationships, from the viewpoint of one who knows that throughout most of history, and including the present, women have been confined to stereotyped roles and ancillary positions in our society. She tries to break down these stereotypes in her personal and working life. she says, I want to live and be valued as a total human being, with many different abilities, needs and responsibilities not just as wife, lover, mother, sister, homemaker.” BELLA S. ABZUG, United States Representative “A feminist is one who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man. That equality of women with men can't be achieved with women alone … that the women's liberation movement is only a way station to human liberation, and the first stage in a sex role revolution in which man is not considered the enemy, but a fellow victim.” BETTY FRIEDAN “A feminist is someone who does everything it is necessary to do to win full human rights for women.” Editor, , and founding member, “A feminist is a woman who directly attacks, through the sum of her actions, the most primary and physical manifestations constituting the oppression of women; the State and nationalism, the Church, the family, marriage, , rape, ; and a woman who rejects the value concept of power.” TI‐GRACE ATKINSON Founding member, National Organization for Women, and author “A feminist has a particular perspective which helps to reveal the roots of oppression, and in doing so provides another handle to help us get out of the mess we are in. As a feminist, I see the problem of aging in America as a woman's issue. The poverty, loneliness and neglect of older women is the payoff for performing woman's traditional role. But as we grow stronger and move together, we can change that and build a bridge between mothers and daughters.” TISH SOMMERS “A feminist has a keen sense of outrage at injustice … is no silent supporter of equality for women; feminism requires action in some form—supporting legislation, helping women to progress, speaking out against discrimination.” MARLENE SANDERS, Writer, producer, ABC‐TV News “A feminist is a woman who knows she's oppressed, who responds to that oppression by fighting it, and who realizes that she can change nothing alone; she is sister. She believes in herSelf and the power of women, she sees the necessity for struggle and she likes to win, in other words, she is completely un‐feminine.” LIN FARLEY, Working Women United and a founder of Radicalesbians “A feminist believes that women, that men, that every individual has a right to define themselves—to decide what role to play in our society, who fights exploitation, of women by men, of men by women, of workers by employers, of individuals by society.” KATHERINE TODD President, Bronx NOW

10

Corrine Glesne, Becoming Qualitative Researchers: An Introduction. “Making Words Fly: Developing Understanding Through Interviewing,” 2014. . . . . Patton (2002) describes categories to consider when developing interview questions, including experience/behavior questions, opinion/values questions, feeling questions, knowledge questions, sensory questions, and background/ demographics questions. . . Experience/behavior questions are generally the easiest for respondents to answer and are good questions with which to begin an interview. Knowledge questions, in contrast, can give interviewees the impression of being tested. Respondents can readily feel embarrassed or at least uneasy when they have to say "I don't know" to a question that you assumed they would be able to answer. If a knowledge question is factual information that can be obtained from documents or from one person in the know, such as the department chair, get the information there and drop the question from your interview list for other respondents. Types of Interview Questions to Consider and to Reconsider

TYPES OF QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER TYPES OF QUESTIONS TO RECONSIDER AND REVISE

Grand Tour Questions Yes/No Questions Experience /Behavior Questions Leading Question Opinion/Value Questions Multiple Questions (phrased as one) Feelings Questions Factual Questions (get your facts elsewhere) Sensory Questions Uncomfortable Questions (early in interviews) Knowledge Questions (but not shaped Why Questions as a test question)

. . . . Developing different categories of questions (experience, feeling, background, etc.) is the first step. Then work carefully on shaping each question...... Look through your questions and reword any that are dichotomous yes/no questions ("Do you participate in volunteer activities?") because such questions guide respondents to give short answers. Rethink multiple questions ("Tell me about the last time you volunteered, how long you worked at the activity, and how you felt about doing so") because the respondent will most likely talk more fully about one of your several questions and forget the others. "Why" questions ("Why do you do volunteer work?") can also be problematic because respondents might answer from different perspectives, even though they could speak to several. . . . The following discussion is drawn from a study that Kelly Clark (1999) conducted with female academics who were among the first generation in their working-class families to attend college...... Clark began by asking each woman what she did for work and to describe a typical day. Spradley (1979) refers to this type of question as a grand tour question, a request to verbally take the interviewer through a place, a time period, a sequence of events or activities, or some group of people or objects. Grand tour questions are good starting points because they ask for experiential detail that a respondent can easily, comfortably, and readily answer. A common mistake in interviewing is to ask questions about a topic before promoting a level of trust that allows respondents to be open and expansive. Therefore, Clark followed up her first question with another easy-to-answer question about the women's work: "How is it that you became involved in the work that you do?" The answers to this question allowed her to gently transition into the area she was particularly interested in learning about during the first interview session: the language used and feelings expressed regarding what it had meant and continued to mean to be a first-generation female academic. . . . First-draft questions are often too vague to elicit comprehensive responses. Asking "What was attending college like for you?" is so broad that a respondent might be tempted to either give a short-answer "okay" or launch into experiential stories that don't necessarily pertain to your research interests. You can make such questions less vague by asking the respondent to recapture something by imagining it. Clark posed the following, "I'd like to have you go back to a time in your personal life that you've probably not thought about for a while. Remember when you were first introduced to the idea of going to college? There were likely many things you had to consider as the time drew nearer for you to spend your first day on campus. What did you imagine college to be like?" The idea is to provide mood and props for interviewees to recall something likely to be long unthought-about. You want to ask questions that will cause them to recapture the time, place, feeling, and meaning of a past event. Clark's next question was a sensory one that continued to prompt for reflection upon events in the past as she asked, "Suppose I were present with you during one of your visits home. What would I see happening? What would be going on? Describe to me what one of those visits would be like."

11

Interviewees readily participated in answering Clark's questions because doing so caused them to reflect upon their actions and perhaps to put pieces of their lives together in ways that they had not before ...... You don't want to make respondents feel uncomfortable by asking questions on topics that are too personal or sensitive before they are ready to talk about such things. . . . With some topics (e.g., controversial or very sensitive issues), however, it may not be easy to get a respondent's personal opinion. In asking questions, you have a choice of voices, and thus of degrees of directness and generality. You can ask, "Do you," "Do nurses like you," "Do nurses at your hospital," or "Do nurses in general." The scope of the voice increases with each example as, accordingly, the degree of personal disclosure decreases. Whenever you sense that your questions are too personal to be asked directly, you can expand the generality and assume that the longer respondent talk, the more likely they are to speak in a personal voice.. . . . When you are reasonably comfortable with the form and substance of your questions, give attention to their order. Which belong at the beginning because they are easy to answer and answering them will reassure respondents that your questions are manageable? Which belong at the beginning because they are foundational to what you will ask later, or because they will give you the time needed to promote rapport? Which questions should be asked in special sequence? Which should be kept as far apart as possible because you want to minimize how the answer to one question might affect the answer to another? Which should be asked at the end because they are of a summary, culminating, or reflective nature? Of course, we all know what happens to the best-laid plans of researchers. Your logical order may be sundered by the psychological order that emerges from your respondents' answers. . . . Questions to Ask of Your Interview Questions ✓ Are you asking yes/no questions? ✓ Are you asking relatively closed questions dis- guised as open-ended questions? ✓ Do you work at setting a conversational tone with your questions that, at the same time, prepares the interviewee to give you rich responses? ✓ Are you working to set up a conversational tone but end up with a leading question? ✓ Are your questions so broad that the respondent may feel overwhelmed instead of interested in answering? ✓ Are your questions asked on such a general level that respondents immediately have to qualify their answers in some way?

Revising and Piloting Interview Questions View the process of interview question construction as a continuing interaction among your topic, your questions, a few collaborators, and your reflective thoughts. First, think of it as a three-way interaction among the researcher, the tentatively formed topic, and interview questions-tentative because in so thinking you are optimally open to what is known to be most realistic: that interview questions will change. Write questions, check them against your topic, possibly revise your research statement, and reconsider the questions. . . . Finally, pilot your questions ...... Urge pilot respondents to be in a critical frame of mind so that they do not just answer your questions but, more important, they reflect critically on the usability of your questions ...... How a question is worded matters ...... The process of drafting and redrafting interview questions requires time, thought, and effort. Your research will benefit, however, with finely honed questions that elicit interesting and engaging information. The data you get are only as good as the questions you ask. . . . The Interactive Nature of Interviewing . . . . Interviewing, in short, brings together different persons and personalities. Gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, and age, and all their possible combinations, can make for very different interview exchanges. Depending on the topic, the location of the interview, and the temper of the times, the nature of the interaction will change as well. . . . To help you think through the possible interviewing effects of gender, race, sexual orientation, class, and other social locations, look at Inside Interviewing, an edited book by Holstein and Gubrium (2003). For examples, Reinharz and Chase (2003) describe how the gender of the interviewer can affect whether or not female interviewees reveal some information and where they feel comfortable being interviewed. Dunbar, Rodriguez, and Parker (2003) discuss ways in which factors associated with race interact with both the asking and the answering of interview questions ...... The major point is that the interview is an interaction that will vary depending upon the makeup of participants. You have no control over some aspects, but you can work to make the interaction comfortable and conducive to an exchange. You can be fully present to the other person, open to learning new ways of looking at and being in the world. A number of things occur simultaneously in interviewing. First and foremost is your listening. Interviewers are listeners incarnate; machines can record, but only you can listen. At no time do you stop listening, because without the data your

12 listening furnishes, you cannot make any of the decisions inherent in inter- viewing: Are you listening with your research purposes and eventual write-up fully in mind, so that you are attuned to whether your questi9fi.s are delivering on your intentions for them? If they are not, is the problem in the question, in the respondent, or in the way you are listening? Has your question been answered, and is it time to move on? If so, move on to what question? Should you probe now or later? What form should your probe take? Do you need to probe further the results produced by your probe? The spontaneity and unpredictability of the interview exchange precludes planning most probes ahead of time; you must, accordingly, think and talk on your feet, one of those many interview-related skills that improves with practice. You listen and you look, aware that feedback can be both nonverbal and verbal. You observe the respondent's body language to determine what effects your questions, probes, and comments are having. Do you see indicators of dis- comfort, and is the source of that discomfort in the physical conditions of your interview site or in the topic to which you are stimulating a response? Do you see signs of boredom, annoyance, bewilderment? What might be their source and their remedy, and is it within your means to provide a remedy? Although listening and looking are critical, you forgo their gains unless you remember. You want to remember your questions so you won't constantly look down at your list, and so you won't be taken off guard when your questions are being taken out of order. You want to remember what has been said- by you and by the respondent-in this session and in previous ones. You want to recall what you have heard, so that you can pick up on past points in order to make connections, see gaps and inconsistencies, avoid asking some questions, or rephrase other questions when your first attempt at questioning fell short of your expectations and needs. You must, of course, remember to bear in mind your research questions so that what you are listening to is being assessed in respect to your research needs. You must also remember your responsibility for the quality of the respondent's experience. Are you attending to aspects of the interview that make it comfortable and interesting for the respondent, even if the topic stirs difficult memories? How satisfied respondents are can affect their willingness to continue to talk to you, the effort they put into their talk, and what they may tell other interview candidates about being your interviewee. . . . Finally, remember to keep track of time when interviewing in time-conscious cultures. Then, time remains for you to make some usefully culminating statements, such as, "Here's the ground we covered today. I was pleased to learn about such and such. Would it be okay for next time if we went back to this point and that point before we turn to the next subject?" In this way, you review and pave the way for your next interview session. You keep track of time so you can keep your promise to use only an hour and avoid overstaying your welcome or causing interviewees to be late for their next commitment. Take the time to negotiate and verify details of your next meeting, and be punctual for each appointment. Listening, looking, and remembering in the comprehensive terms suggested here require developing your concentration. This means shutting off the myriad other aspects of your life so that you can fully attend to the needs of your interview. Achieving the appropriate level of concentration can be physically and emotionally draining, particularly in your early days as an interviewer. It is not excessively far-fetched to say that if you are not tired at the end of an interview session, then you might wonder about the quality of the session. Interviewing is a complex process. Because there are so many acts to orchestrate, effective interviewing should be viewed the way good teaching is: You should look for improvement over time-for continuing growth-rather than for mastery or perfection. Probing In-depth interviewing is conceived of as an occasion for patiently probing--for getting to the bottom of things in order to do justice to the complexity of the topic ...... You need to concentrate on being patient in order to give full unrushed attention and deliberation to the responses you elicit. Rush and the world rushes with you: If you communicate your satisfaction with short-shrift replies, then you teach respondents how minimal your expectations are. Say "Tell me more," and your interviewees will learn how to respond accordingly. You will find that the better you probe, the longer your interview time becomes. Short interview sessions are generally the mark of inexperienced or poor interviewers. With experience, the length...... increases. Your probes are requests for more: more explanation, clarification, description, and evaluation, depending on your assessment of what best follows an interviewee's words. Probes take numerous forms; they range from silence, to sounds, to a single word, to complete sentences. Learn which forms work best for you. Silence is easy to use, if you can tolerate it. Too little silence, and you fail to have made clear that you were inviting more talk; too much silence, and you may make the interviewee squirm. The magical right amount of silence indicates "Go on. Take your time. I'm not in a hurry." Silence leaves time for thought. It is better than a menu of choices, as is rephrasing the question if it elicits no answer, or saying, "We can come back to that later if nothing comes to mind." Used judiciously, silence is a useful and easy probe-as is the bunched utterance of "uh huh, uh huh," sometimes combined with a nodding head.

13

Longer, more directive probes take various forms. You might say, "I'm not sure I got that straight. Would you please run that by me again?" Or you could summarize what you thought you heard and then ask, "Did I understand you correctly?" Both types—invite a rethinking by the respondent, and with rethinking may come elaboration. The summary alternative can also be used to preface, "Is there anything more you'd like to add to this?" Probes also can be simple questions: "How did that happen?" "What made you feel that way?" And more complex conditional questions: "If you had returned to graduate school fifteen years ago, how might your life look different now?" Pelto (2013, p. 166) identifies the request, "Can you give me an example of that?" as one of the most useful probes. As he observes, when first asked a question, respondents often reply with abstractions or generalizations. Asking for an example gets at the experiences and details, the descriptive level, that you want in your interviews. Your field notebook can come in handy for some kinds of probes. If interviewees describe how something was set up, you might ask them to draw it for you in your notebook or you might sketch your perception of what the person is saying and then ask if you got it right. . . . Some Typical Problems in Interviewing Fortunately, it is only once that you can do something for the first time (or do we believe that because it is consoling?). . . . Remembering to check your recorder comes easier after your initiation. Beyond problems most commonly associated with the novice's early days are others that can occur to anyone at any time. For example, a respondent does not answer the question you ask. What is going on? The reason may simply be that the person has innocently (without a hidden agenda) taken a fancy to discussing something else. If you can listen as gracefully to off-target talk (in your terms) as you do to on-target talk, then the time you lose may lie more than offset by the enhanced quality of the respondent's answers. . . . When respondents show a pattern of turning away from your questions, they may be saying obliquely what they won't say directly: "I don't want to continue this interview." Other forms of resistance to being interviewed are missed appointments and short replies. Do not prematurely conclude that respondents' resistance is tantamount to a wish to terminate all further interviews. It may be, however, that your questions are treading on matters too sensitive for them to discuss with you. Be gently direct. If you observe resistance, ask about it: "It seems to me that you have not been comfortable Are there areas you'd rather not talk about?" You might even ask, "Do you think we ought to stop the interviews?" If you do not hear yes, then judge the quality of what you're hearing as you continue. If it is poor, shorten your list of questions and end the sessions sooner than planned. Far removed from the problem of resistance is the problem of the nonstop talker. Respondent fluency is wonderful if on- topic, but if not, then learn to redirect the flow of talk. Making a wordless sound or a physical sign, such as a slightly upraised hand, may stop the stream of words so you can apologize for your interruption and pick up on something the respondent has said that you can probe. Or summarize what the respondent has said, and then bridge to where next you wish to go. The idea is to avoid making an abrupt shift to a topic distant from where the respondent's talk had been. In interviews, as in ordinary conversations, people make contradictory statements. Consider the possibilities that contradictions connote: the evolution of the respondent's thinking about the topic; the respondent's confusion about the topic; the respondent's being comfortably of two minds about the topic. Is the topic generating the contradictions worthy of clarification? If so, then probe further into the respondent's most recent statement, right then and there. You can raise the topic again at your next session, inviting more thought on it. You could also take the two seemingly contradictory positions and put them into a question like the following: "I've heard some people say .... I've heard other people say What is your thinking about these two positions?" When the respondent has replied, you can continue: "Is it possible that both are right?" The point is that when you ask questions, especially about complex matters, you cannot reasonably expect complete, carefully considered responses to be readily at hand. If you allow respondents time to think, then you will get more reflective replies. It may also be that, when explained, the responses that at first appeared contradictory to you are not at all. Though not a problem in the same sense as those just stated, you may find it difficult to decide whether or not the interviews ..... went well. In one sense, "going well" means getting answers that fit the questions you ask and that you can visualize as part of your forthcoming report; careful listening will indicate whether this criterion is met. In another, more serious sense, going well means creating connection and trust so that the talk delves below the surface of things and is meaningful to interviewees as well as to you. Clearly, the more one deems a person trustworthy, the more he or she will speak fully and frankly to that person. Thus, judging how the interviews are going may be tentative at first-you feel good about the interview because the flow of talk was easy, smooth, uninhibited, and on target-and confirmed or challenged later as relationships develop (or don't), and as you continue to learn through your fieldwork.

14

Six demographic trends shaping the U.S. and world in 2019, Anthony Cilluffo and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Research Center, 4/11/19

1. Millennials are the largest adult generation in the United States, but they are starting to share the spotlight with Generation Z. This year, Millennials, those ages 23 to 38, will outnumber Baby Boomers (ages 55 to 73), according to Census Bureau projections. Now in their young adulthood, Millennials are more educated, more racially and ethnically diverse and slower to marry than previous generations were at the same age. But after growing up in the Great Recession, their economic picture is mixed: Young adult households are earning more than most older Americans did at the same age, but have less wealth than Boomers did at the same age, partly because they are more likely to have higher amounts of student loan debt. Although the nation’s 73 million Millennials are the largest living adult generation, the next one – Generation Z – is entering adulthood. Also known as the post-Millennials, Gen Zers (those born after 1996 – ages 7 to 22 for this analysis) are on track to be the best educated and most diverse generation yet. Nearly half of Gen Zers (48%) are racial or ethnic minorities. Socially and politically, their liberal-leaning opinions on key issues are similar to those of Millennials. 2. Hispanics are projected to be the largest racial or ethnic minority group in the U.S. electorate when voters cast their ballots next year. The number of eligible voters who are Hispanic (32 million) is projected to surpass that of black eligible voters (30 million) for the first time, according to Pew Research Center projections based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau. However, voter turnout will play an important role in the influence of different racial and ethnic groups. In past elections, black voter turnout substantially surpassed Hispanic voter turnout. The projections indicate that whites will account for two-thirds of the electorate, a declining share. . . . 3. The American family continues to change. A growing share of parents are unmarried. Among parents living with a child, the share who are unmarried increased from 7% in 1968 to 25% in 2017. Part of this increase is due to a growing share of unmarried parents cohabiting, as 35% of unmarried parents were in 2017. Over this period, the share of U.S. children living with an unmarried parent more than doubled, from 13% in 1968 to 32% in 2017. Stay-at-home parents account for about one-in-five parents (18%), which is roughly similar to 25 years ago, despite some fluctuation in the intervening years. For some parents, caring for a child isn’t their only responsibility: 12% of all parents with a child younger than 18 at home are also caring for an adult. Lifetime fertility for women is up. The share of women at the end of their childbearing years who have ever given birth is rising and is now similar to what it was in the early 1990s. While American women are having their children later in life than in the past, they are still doing so earlier (and have more children) than women in many other developed nations. 4. The immigrant share of the U.S. population is approaching a record high but remains below that of many other countries. The 44 million foreign-born people living in the U.S. in 2017 accounted for 13.6% of the population, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the American Community Survey. That is the highest share since 1910, when immigrants were 14.7% of the total population. The record share was in 1890, when immigrants were 14.8% of the total. According to United Nations data, 25 nations and

15 territories have higher shares of immigrants than the U.S. They include some Persian Gulf nations with high shares of temporary labor migrants, as well as Australia (29%), New Zealand (23%) and Canada (21%). The role of the U.S. in accepting refugees has diminished The number of refugees resettled in the U.S. – 33,000 in 2017 – decreased more than in any other country over the previous year. The same year also marked the first time since the 1980 U.S. Refugee Act that the U.S. resettled fewer refugees than all other countries combined (69,000). In most top destination countries for migrants, majorities of people say immigrants strengthen their countries rather than burden them, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey of 18 countries that host half of the world’s migrants. Immigrants were viewed positively in 10 of those nations, including the U.S., Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Australia. . . . 5. The U.S. unauthorized immigrant population is at its lowest level in more than a decade. There were 10.7 million unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. in 2016, the lowest total since 2004, according to the most recent Pew Research Center estimates. The decrease is due mainly to fewer Mexicans entering the U.S. without authorization. The only birth region with an increase in unauthorized immigrants since 2007 was Central America – mainly El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Only three of the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan areas had larger unauthorized immigrant populations in 2016 than in 2007. State populations of unauthorized immigrants vary widely. In some states, unauthorized immigrants represented one- third or more of all immigrants in 2016; in others, they accounted for less than one-in-ten. Nationally, unauthorized immigrants are one-quarter of all U.S. immigrants. The Mexican share of unauthorized immigrants also ranges widely, making up more than two-thirds of the total in the four states that border Mexico but far less in East Coast states. Nationally, Mexicans are about half of unauthorized immigrants. As with the total population, births to unauthorized immigrants have declined since 2007. About 250,000 were born to unauthorized immigrant parents in 2016, a decline of 36% from 390,000 in 2007, when the unauthorized immigrant population peaked. 6. Incomes are rising in the U.S., but the increase is not being felt equally by all Americans. Household income in the U.S. is at or near the highest level it has been in the last 50 years. At the same time, income inequality continues to grow, and the growth has been more pronounced among some racial and ethnic groups than among others. For example, the gap between Asians at the top and bottom of the income ladder nearly doubled between 1970 and 2016. Over that period, Asians went from being one of the groups with the lowest income inequality to the highest. A separate analysis found that, among Hispanics, the median income of foreign- born workers – but not U.S.-born workers – had returned to its pre-Great Recession peak in 2017. The share of Americans who are in the middle class has fallen over the last several decades. About half (52%) of adults were considered middle class in 2016, down from 61% in 1971. The share of adults in the middle class has stabilized around half since 2011. Median incomes have grown more slowly for middle-class households than for upper- or lower-class households. More broadly, the public also sees differences by race and ethnicity when it comes to getting ahead in the U.S. today. A majority of Americans (56%) say that being black hurts a person’s ability to get ahead a lot or a little, while 51% say being Hispanic is a disadvantage, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. In contrast, about six-in-ten (59%) say being white helps a person’s ability to get ahead in the U.S. today. Views on the impact of being Asian are more mixed. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/11/6-demographic-trends-shaping-the-u-s-and-the-world-in-2019/

16

Audre Lorde: A self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Lorde was born in to West Indian immigrant parents. She attended Catholic schools before graduating from Hunter High School and published her first poem in Seventeen magazine while still a student there. Of her poetic beginnings Lorde commented in Black Women Writers: “I used to speak in poetry. I would read poems, and I would memorize them. People would say, well what do you think, Audre. What happened to you yesterday? And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem would be a line or a feeling I would be sharing. In other words, I literally communicated through poetry. And when I couldn’t find the poems to express the things I was feeling, that’s what started me writing poetry, and that was when I was twelve or thirteen.” From Lourde’s Poetry Foundation Bio

“Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist's Response,” by Audre Geraldine Lorde. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, by Audre Geraldine Lorde. (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984). This article is not a theoretical discussion of Lesbian Mothers and their Sons, nor a how-to article. It is an attempt to scrutinize and share some pieces of that common history belonging to my son and to me. I have two children: a fifteen- and-a-half-year-old daughter Beth, and a fourteen-year-old son Jonathan. This is the way it was/is with me and Jonathan, and I leave the theory to another time and person. This is one woman's telling. I have no golden message about the raising of sons for other lesbian mothers, no secret to transpose your questions into certain light. I have my own ways of rewording those same questions, hoping we will all come to speak those questions and pieces of our lives we need to share. We are women making contact within ourselves and with each other across the restrictions of a printed page, bent upon the use of our own/one another's knowledges. The truest direction comes from inside. I give the most strength to my children by being willing to look within myself, and by being honest with them about what I find there, without expecting a response beyond their years. In this way they begin to learn to look beyond their own fears. All our children are outriders for a queendom not yet assured. My adolescent son's growing sexuality is a conscious dynamic between Jonathan and me. It would be presumptuous of me to discuss Jonathan's sexuality here, except to state my belief that whomever he chooses to explore this area with, his choices will be nonoppressive, joyful, and deeply felt from within, places of growth. One of the difficulties in writing this piece has been temporal; this is the summer when Jonathan is becoming a man, physically. And our sons must become men — such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among. Our sons will not grow into women. Their way is more difficult than that of our daughters, for they must move away from us, without us. Hopefully, our sons have what they have learned from us, and a howness to forge it into their own image. Our daughters have us, for measure or rebellion or outline or dream; but the sons of lesbians have to make their own definitions of self as men. This is both power and vulnerability. The sons of lesbians have the advantage of our blueprints for survival, but they must take what we know and transpose it into their own maleness. May the goddess be kind to my son, Jonathan. Recently I have met young Black men about whom I am pleased to say that their future and their visions, as well as their concerns within the present, intersect more closely with Jonathan's than do my own. I have shared vision with these men as well as temporal strategies for our survivals and I appreciate the spaces in which we could sit down together. Some of these men I met at the First Annual Conference of Third World Lesbians and Gays held in Washington D.C. in October, 1979. I have met others in different places and do not know how they identify themselves sexually. Some of

17 these men are raising families alone. Some have adopted sons. They are Black men who dream and who act and who own their feelings, questioning. It is heartening to know our sons do not step out alone. When Jonathan makes me angriest, I always say he is bringing out the testosterone in me. What I mean is that he is representing some piece of myself as a woman that I am reluctant to acknowledge or explore. For instance, what does "acting like a man" mean? For me, what I reject? For Jonathan, what he is trying to redefine? Raising Black children — female and male — in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive. And in order to survive they must let go. This is what mothers teach — love, survival — that is, self-definition and letting go. For each of these, the ability to feel strongly and to recognize those feelings is central: how to feel love, how to neither discount fear nor be overwhelmed by it, how to enjoy feeling deeply. I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called power by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine. I wish to raise a Black man who will recognize that the legitimate objects of his hostility are not women, but the particulars of a structure that programs him to fear and despise women as well as his own Black self. For me, this task begins with teaching my son that I do not exist to do his feeling for him. Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly "inferior" capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear. As a Black woman committed to a liveable future, and as a mother loving and raising a boy who will become a man, I must examine all my possibilities of being within such a destructive system. Jonathan was three-and-one-half when Frances, my lover, and I met; he was seven when we all began to live together permanently. From the start, Frances' and my insistence that there be no secrets in our household about the fact that we were lesbians has been the source of problems and strengths for both children. In the beginning, this insistence grew out of the knowledge, on both our parts, that whatever was hidden out of fear could always be used either against the children or ourselves — one imperfect but useful argument for honesty. The knowledge of fear can help make us free. for the embattled there is no place that cannot be home nor is.

For survival, Black children in america must be raised to be warriors. For survival, they must also be raised to recognize the enemy's many faces. Black children of lesbian couples have an advantage because they learn, very early, that oppression comes in many different forms, none of which have anything to do with their own worth. To help give me perspective, I remember that for years, in the namecalling at school, boys shouted at Jonathan not — "your mother's a lesbian" — but rather — "your mother's a nigger." When Jonathan was eight years old and in the third grade we moved, and he went to a new school where his life was hellish as a new boy on the block. He did not like to play rough games. He did not like to fight. He did not like to stone dogs. And all this marked him early on as an easy target. When he came in crying one afternoon, I heard from Beth how the corner bullies were making Johathan wipe their shoes on the way home whenever Beth wasn't there to fight them off. And when I heard that the ringleader was a little boy in Jonathan's class his own size, an interesting and very disturbing thing happened to me. My fury at my own long-ago impotence, and my present pain at his suffering, made me start to forget all that I knew about violence and fear, and blaming the victim, I started to hiss at the weeping child. "The next time you come in here crying...," and I suddenly caught myself in horror. This is the way we allow the destruction of our sons to begin — in the name of protection and to ease our own pain. My son get beaten up? I was about to demand that he buy that first lesson in the corruption of power, that might makes right. I could hear myself beginning to perpetuate the age-old distortions about what strength and bravery really are.

18

And no, Jonathan didn't have to fight if he didn't want to, but somehow he did have to feel better about not fighting. An old horror rolled over me of being the fat kid who ran away, terrified of getting her glasses broken. About that time a very wise woman said to me, "Have you ever told Jonathan that once you used to be afraid, too?" The idea seemed far-out to me at the time, but the next time he came in crying and sweaty from having run away again, I could see that he felt shamed at having failed me, or some image he and I had created in his head of mother/woman. This image of woman being able to handle it all was bolstered by the fact that he lived in a household with three strong women, his lesbian parents and his forthright older sister. At home, for Jonathan, power was clearly female. And because our society teaches us to think in an either/or mode — kill or be killed, dominate or be dominated — this meant that he must either surpass or be lacking. I could see the implications of this line of thought. Consider the two western classic myth/models of mother/son relationships: Jocasta/Oedipus, the son who fucks his mother, and Clytemnestra/Orestes, the son who kills his mother. It all felt connected to me. I sat down on the hallway steps and took Jonathan on my lap and wiped his tears. "Did I ever tell you about how I used to be afraid when I was your age?" I will never forget the look on that little boy's face as I told him the tale of my glasses and my after-school fights. It was a look of relief and total disbelief, all rolled into one. It is as hard for our children to believe that we are not omnipotent as it is for us to know it, as parents. But that knowledge is necessary as the first step in the reassessment of power as something other than might, age, privilege, or the lack of fear. It is an important step for a boy, whose societal destruction begins when he is forced to believe that he can only be strong if he doesn't feel, or if he wins. I thought about all this one year later when Beth and Jonathan, ten and nine, were asked by an interviewer how they thought they had been affected by being children of a feminist. Jonathan said that he didn't think there was too much in feminism for boys, although it certainly was good to be able to cry if he felt like it and not to have to play football if he didn't want to. I think of this sometimes now when I see him practising for his Brown Belt in Tae Kwon Do. The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive, or threatening voices from outside, pressuring him to be what the world wants him to be. And that is hard enough. Jonathan is learning to find within himself some of the different faces of courage and strength, whatever he chooses to call them. Two years ago, when Jonathan was twelve and in the seventh grade, one of his friends at school who had been to the house persisted in calling Frances "the maid." When Jonathan corrected him, the boy then referred to her as "the cleaning woman." Finally Jonathan said, simply, "Frances is not the cleaning woman, she's my mother's lover." Interestingly enough, it is the teachers at this school who still have not recovered from his openness. Frances and I were considering attending a Lesbian/Feminist conference this summer, when we were notified that no boys over ten were allowed. This presented logistic as well as philosophical problems for us, and we sent the following letter: Sisters: Ten years as an interracial lesbian couple has taught us both the dangers of an oversimplified approach to the nature and solutions of any oppression, as well as the danger inherent in an incomplete vision. Our thirteen-year-old son represents as much hope for our future world as does our fifteen-year-old daughter, and we are not willing to abandon him to the killing streets of New York City while we journey west to help form a Lesbian- Feminist vision of the future world in which we can all survive and flourish. I hope we can continue this dialogue in the near future, as I feel it is important to our vision and our survival.

19

The question of separatism is by no means simple. I am thankful that one of my children is male, since that helps to keep me honest. Every line I write shrieks there are no easy solutions. I grew up in largely female environments, and I know how crucial that has been to my own development. I feel the want and need often for the society of women, exclusively. I recognize that our own spaces are essential for developing and recharging. As a Black woman, I find it necessary to withdraw into all-Black groups at times for exactly the same reasons — differences in stages of development and differences in levels of interaction. Frequently, when speaking with men and white women, I am reminded of how difficult and time-consuming it is to have to reinvent the pencil every time you want to send a message. But this does not mean that my responsibility for my son's education stops at age ten, any more than it does for my daughter's. However, for each of them, that responsibility does grow less and less as they become more woman and man. Both Beth and Jonathan need to know what they can share and what they cannot, how they are joined and how they are not. And Frances and I, as grown women and lesbians coming more and more into our power, need to relearn the experience that difference does not have to be threatening. When I envision the future, I think of the world I crave for my daughters and my sons. It is thinking for survival of the species — thinking for life. Most likely there will always be women who move with women, women who live with men, men who choose men. I work for a time when women with women, women with men, men with men, all share the work of a world that does not barter bread or self for obedience, nor beauty, nor love. And in that world we will raise our children free to choose how best to fulfill themselves. For we are jointly responsible for the care and raising of the young, since that they be raised is a function, ultimately, of the species. Within that tripartite pattern of relating/existence, the raising of the young will be the joint responsibility of all adults who choose to be associated with children. Obviously, the children raised within each of these three relationships will be different, lending a special savor to that eternal inquiry into how best can we live our lives. Jonathan was three-and-a-half when Frances and I met. He is now fourteen years old. I feel the living perspective that having lesbian parents has brought to Jonathan is a valuable addition to his human sensitivity. Jonathan has had the advantage of growing up within a nonsexist relationship, one in which this society's pseudo- natural assumptions of ruler/ruled are being challenged. And this is not only because Frances and I are lesbians, for unfortunately there are some lesbians who are still locked into patriarchal patterns of unequal power relationships. These assumptions of power relationships are being questioned because Frances and I, often painfully and with varying degrees of success, attempt to evaluate and measure over and over again our feelings concerning power, our own and others'. And we explore with care those areas concerning how it is used and expressed between us and between us and the children, openly and otherwise. A good part of our biweekly family meetings are devoted to this exploration. As parents, Frances and I have given Jonathan our love, our openness, and our dreams to help form his visions. Most importantly, as the son of lesbians, he has had an invaluable model — not only of a relationship — but of relating. Jonathan is fourteen now. In talking over this paper with him and asking his permission to share some pieces of his life, I asked Jonathan what he felt were the strongest negative and the strongest positive aspects for him in having grown up with lesbian parents. He said the strongest benefit he felt he had gained was that he knew a lot more about people than most other kids his age that he knew, and that he did not have a lot of the hang-ups that some other boys did about men and women. And the most negative aspect he felt, Jonathan said, was the ridicule he got from some kids with straight parents. "You mean, from your peers?" I said. "Oh no," he answered promptly. "My peers know better. I mean other kids."

20

“The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” by Audre Geraldine Lorde. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, by Audre Geraldine Lorde. (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984). I HAVE COME to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a Black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less than two months ago I was told by two doctors, one female and one male, that I would have to have surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that the tumor was malignant. Between that telling and the actual surgery, there was a three-week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and the growth was benign. But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women, by some of you here today. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action. In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else's words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength. I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living. The women who sustained me through that period were Black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence. They all gave me a strength and concern without which I could not have survived intact. Within those weeks of acute fear came the knowledge — within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not — I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior. What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours? And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, "Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside." In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear — fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women's movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson — that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that

21 which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid. In my house this year we are celebrating the feast of Kwanza, the African-american festival of harvest which begins the day after Christmas and lasts for seven days. There are seven principles of Kwanza, one for each day. The first principle is Umoja, which means unity, the decision to strive for and maintain unity in self and community. The principle for yesterday, the second day, was Kujichagulia — self-determination — the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others. Today is the third day of Kwanza, and the principle for today is Ujima — collective work and responsibility — the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together. Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation. For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth. And it is never without fear — of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective. And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own. For instance, "I can't possibly teach Black women's writing — their experience is so different from mine." Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, "She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?" Or, "She's a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?" Or again, "This woman writes of her sons and I have no children." And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other. We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

21

Audre Larde

BLACK MOTHER WOMAN

I cannot recall you gentle. Through your heavy love I have become an image of your once delicate flesh split with deceitful longings. When strangers come and compliment me your aged spirit takes a bow jingling with pride but once you hid that secret in the center of furys hanging me with deep and wiry hair with your own split flesh and long suffering eyes buried in myths of no worth.

But I have peeled away your anger down to its core of love and look mother I am a dark temple where your true spirit rises beautiful and tough as a chestnut stanchion against your nightmares of weakness and if my eyes conceal squadrons of conflicting rebellions I learned from you to define myself through your denials.

The Massachusetts Review, 1972

222

22

The women’s revolt: Why now, and where to Christina Pazzanese and Colleen Walsh, 2017 The Harvard Gazette

Since millions took to the streets across the U.S. for the Women's March in January, women have begun speaking out about their experiences as victims of sexual harassment or abuse in what’s become known as the #MeToo Movement.

Photo by Ronen Tivony/NurPhoto

The #MeToo surge against sexual abuse provides opportunities for pivotal societal change, but challenges too. When allegations of serial sexual misconduct by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein broke in October, they triggered a cascading national reckoning over sexual harassment and assault in the workplace and beyond. In the weeks since, women have leveled charges against many high-profile men in entertainment and media, business and politics. As the accusations continue to erupt through the burgeoning #MeToo social media movement, many observers are wondering if the nation is finally beginning to deal with gender inequity. Recognizing inappropriate behavior as harassment was a radical concept in 1979, when activist and attorney Catharine MacKinnon published “Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination,” a groundbreaking book that tackled sexual discrimination in the workplace head-on. Seven years later, MacKinnon was co-counsel in the U.S. Supreme Court case that recognized such harassment as a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Today the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School tells the Gazette she is “inspired by the brilliance, heart, and grit of all the survivors who are speaking out and reflecting on their experiences of sexual violation, and being listened to.” And she said the downfall of so many powerful men is stunning, “especially given decades of stonewalling and recalcitrance and siding with abusers.” To gauge the sweep of the emerging movement, the Gazette in recent days interviewed University scholars across a range of disciplines, asking them to assess the repercussions and reactions that are redefining the sexual landscape and to explain how society might change in the process. Here are their thoughts on some key aspects. The power of narrative in the post-Weinstein era Why did the Weinstein story open the floodgates to a movement when similar revelations about comedian Bill Cosby, Fox News chief Roger Ailes, and then-presidential candidate Donald Trump did not? Ann Marie Lipinski, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, said she suspects the response is a combination of women simply having “had enough,” along with the celebrity of many of Weinstein’s accusers, including actors Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan, and Angelina Jolie. Their status drew widespread attention to the issue, but it’s a “frustrating fact” that famous women were deemed more credible and were more readily heard than the mostly unknown accusers of Cosby or Trump, Lipinski said. “For all those women working night shifts in hospitals or stocking things in grocery stores or working in a lot of industries where there is more anonymity and not the same level of public scrutiny or, in many cases, fame, it must be pretty frustrating to feel that your complaints are not being taken with similar seriousness,” she said. Anyone’s personal story can prove a powerful tool for change. The #MeToo movement has inspired countless women, and some men, to share their experiences with sexual assault or harassment. Historian Tim McCarthy isn’t surprised at the outpouring. Narrative has been a unifying and mobilizing force through history, said the director of Culture Change & Social Justice Initiatives at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS).

23

Source: NPR/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, “Discrimination in America: Experiences and Views of American Women.” This survey was conducted Jan. 26–April 9, prior to the country’s widespread discussions in the fall regarding sexual assault and harassment. These national conversations may have affected how people viewed or responded to their own experiences, or their willingness to disclose these experiences in a survey.

In the first half of the 19th century, slave narratives — stories that bore witness to the brutality committed against people treated as property — “were incredibly powerful in terms of moving public opinion of a culture that was increasingly literate and increasingly divided” over abolition, said McCarthy, who lectures on history, literature, education, and public policy. Similarly, the violent images that filled newspapers and American TV screens during the Civil Rights Movement a century later brought entrenched racism into vivid, visceral relief for audiences outside of the South, he said. In recent decades, the stories of gay men and women eager for the same rights and protections afforded heterosexuals have helped advance the LGBTQ movement and the recognition of same-sex marriage. “All of these movement moments that changed hearts and minds and moved a nation in the direction of justice have been rooted in storytelling,” McCarthy said. Centuries of untold stories For centuries, women have struggled with sexual harassment and abuse at work and at home. But often they have had to forgo battling against it or telling their stories to make other gains, said Phyllis Thompson, a cultural historian and lecturer on studies of women, gender, and sexuality. In the 1800s, suffragists were reluctant to talk about sex crimes of all kinds, in part because the topic was considered “indelicate.” In addition, “to have a discussion of sex crimes in the workplace requires that one have an understanding that all genders legitimately belong in the workplace, and that was just simply not the case in the 19th century. There was no sense of a right for women to have workplace treatment on a par with men,” Thompson said. In the end, Thompson said, even suffragists like Lucy Stone, who complained of “crimes against women,” dropped the divisive issue so they could focus on establishing a right-to-vote platform that would have “mass buy-in.” Second-wave feminists concentrated on securing equal pay for equal work and on access to jobs typically reserved for men. “There was so much initial focus on making sure issues of access to work were resolved, it took a while before people started having the wherewithal to tear apart routine sexist practices within the workplace,” said Thompson, who teaches the College course “The History of Feminism: Narratives of Gender, Race and Rights.” The second-wave feminists opposed sexual assault at home and on the job and helped push through an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibited gender discrimination in the workplace. Pivotal texts on sexual , such as ’s 1975 “Against Our Will,” moved the topic of sexual assault and rape further into the national discourse. “[Brownmiller’s] argument, that the threat of sexual abuse is a tool of domination, was important for this moment,” said Thompson. “It was a crucial piece of theoretical thinking for the second wave.” As to the current moment and the countless stories of harassment being told online and in person, Thompson said she hopes they will produce lasting change, but she worries about diversity. “Insofar as what some call third-wave feminism has been broadly critiqued for the individualism of its politics (‘To each her own feminism’), the #MeToo moment is a kind of corrective in that its presumptive ethos is one of solidarity,” she said. “But, unless feminists (and the media, and the national audience) start doing a better job of highlighting and listening to the voices of people who have been doubly marginalized, such as women of color and those of lower socioeconomic status, there will be important limits on what can be accomplished.” Men need to take greater responsibility for creating a more equitable culture and for helping move the conversation well beyond heterosexual harassment and assault to include broader, fundamental reform of institutions, education, and justice, said Thompson.

24

“The movement for women’s equality that we need — and that I believe would have long-term traction — is one in which the dignity and rights of all human beings are honored, one that insists on an anti-racist politics, and that doesn’t tolerate structural sexism,” she said. The power of culture in a culture of power . . . Francesca Gino, the Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at HBS, studies why dishonesty and other unethical behavior persists in organizations. She has found that people who are serially dishonest often behave unethically, feeling little or no guilt when they can convince themselves that what they’re doing isn’t immoral. “For years, I’ve explored the gap between people’s actual dishonest behavior and their desire to maintain a positive moral self-image. To explain this apparent gap, my research illustrates how even subtle forces divert us from our ‘moral selves’ … and that even good people often engage in behavior that violates their own ethical goals,” Gino said in an email exchange. Gino’s work suggests that creative and innovative people are more likely to be “morally flexible” because they can create rationales that shift how they view and justify unethical actions. In a series of experiments involving advertising agency workers, Gino’s team found that a creative mindset was a better predictor of dishonesty than intelligence. In addition, people who act unethically often rationalize their behavior afterwards — or forget it entirely — and so are more likely to repeat it. “This work helps explain why unethical behavior is so pervasive in organizations and in society more broadly,” she said. The different ways that men and women tend to handle power may account for why so many male industry titans have been accused, and almost no women leaders so far. Gino’s work shows that men tend to unconsciously associate sex and power more readily and frequently than women do, and that men who link the two are more likely to use coercion to get sex, she said. One study found that such men are also more likely to say they would sexually harass a woman in a hypothetical workplace. Other research found that powerful men often inaccurately convince themselves that others are more sexually interested in them than they are, prompting them to act out. But high-status men are not always the bad guys. When insecure, low-status men suddenly acquire power, such as in the tech world, they are more likely to take advantage of that newfound power and be sexually aggressive than high-status men are, according to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. HBS’ Ely, who studies gender relations and power dynamics within organizations, says that for women of her era, sexual misconduct in the workplace was an ugly fact of life with no clear remedy. “We entered the workforce long before sexual harassment was very well understood. I know for myself, with the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, that’s when I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, yes, I’ve been sexually harassed.’ I’d never really thought about it that way; it was just kind of an annoyance. But then I became more aware of it.” . . . . Soltes said that while recent media coverage has focused on the fall of powerful and high-profile figures, sexual misconduct at lower levels of the workplace is widespread. “It’s not explained by one or two executives at each firm. That doesn’t make sense” given data showing that a majority of women report that they have experienced some form of sexual assault, harassment, or other sexual misconduct, he said. Everyday comments, gestures, or looks from colleagues are a “gray area” of mistreatment that falls short of a crime but is nevertheless unwanted and is, over time, corrosive. “It’s amazing to see how men get this notion of consent: ‘If no one says it’s wrong, it means someone is consenting to it.’ That seems to be what’s happened,” said Soltes. “It’s going to be a difficult next phase for many men, recognizing that you’re not necessarily Harvey Weinstein or some of these people doing truly, truly egregious things [but you are still making women uncomfortable],” he said. “I think, frankly, many of the men engaging in that behavior are probably overall reasonable, well-intentioned individuals who just simply don’t see the consequences of their actions, and things that they might think are compliments are actually not interpreted that way.” . . . . “I’m not impatient for the quick fixes,” she said. “I’m impatient for fundamental change … a more equitable management division [between men and women], and cultural changes. That is going to take a little time, and anyone who thinks there’s a pill we can give everybody to fix this overnight is being naïve.”

25

Cultural historian Thompson said she would like to see the energy of change focus on “something we haven’t tried yet”: ensuring that women are proportionally represented in positions of authority across society. “But in the meantime, if you wonder whether this thing you’re about to say or do may be offensive: a) maybe don’t do it, and b) ask a colleague,” Lipinski suggested. “Have an open conversation. In newsrooms, asking questions is a really tried- and-true and highly respected form of engagement … In some ways, we can make this more complicated than it is. I think we know what to do. I don’t think people are that confused.” Many abuse cases display a similar power dynamic in how men respond to their accusers, a pattern defined by Jennifer Freyd, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon who studies the impact of interpersonal violence and institutional betrayal on mental and physical health, behavior, and society. Freyd developed the term DARVO, which stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” That scenario has played out in courtrooms and boardrooms for decades, as attorneys and executives have repeatedly turned to a “nuts and sluts” defense to cast doubt on accusers, said Diane Rosenfeld, a lecturer at Harvard Law School whose courses include “Gender Violence, Law and Social Justice.” “When you take a higher view of everything that’s going on, a meta-analysis, you can see that that is absolutely the way that defense works. Anytime somebody comes forward, there’s an attempt to discredit her,” said Rosenfeld. “If you look back to the Anita Hill case and her accusations against Clarence Thomas, the attorneys defending Thomas were absolutely employing the ‘she’s a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty’ tactic to break down Hill’s claims. “I am really hoping this is our moment where women don’t allow that and don’t discredit one another. Finally, all of these extremely credible women with proof have come forward and more are coming forward every day. And I think we need to believe women at least as a starting point to investigating these cases.” Moving toward meaningful change Though the scope of the problem is staggering, there are lessons to take from this moment of reckoning. Harvard scholars offered up an array of suggestions for how to cope with and move forward through the ongoing wave of revelations. Dealing with emotions can be an important first step. How to manage our feelings when confronted by ongoing press reports of sexual assaults and allegations is complicated, challenging, and charged, said Stephanie Pinder-Amaker, director of McLean Hospital’s College Mental Health Program and an instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School. Victims, perpetrators, and those who feel complicit by their silence or simply stunned by revelations about people they know will cope differently. But common frameworks can help guide those struggling with a range of difficult emotions. Parsing the language is one place to start. Instead of saying “moving on,” Pinder-Amaker suggests the term “moving through” as a way to think about navigating the emotional terrain as revelations continue. She also suggests looking to theories of grief that encompass emotions such as shock, denial, anger, sadness, even bargaining or the urge to strike a deal to “make this all go away and not be the nightmare I just woke up to,” that are common when people face the death of a loved one or friend. “Those are very real, typical and expected feelings associated with a grief reaction and tremendous feelings of loss. These are all part of the stages of grieving, and they are perfectly valid,” said Pinder-Amaker. “Often it’s reassuring just to know these feelings are typical, they are to be expected, and you might feel a range of these within a day and that’s OK.” Sharing feelings with a trusted friend or family member and taking a break from the 24-hour news cycle are other useful coping strategies, she said. And knowing sexual assault statistics, such as the fact that a majority of sexual assaults are committed by acquaintances and that most of those go unreported, can help promote awareness and ease fears. “Believing these facts will put all of us in a better position to be empowered to take preventive action and ultimately to protect ourselves, our children, and each other,” she said. What should businesses do? Analysts say that sexual harassment training can help but is no silver bullet. Most companies have formal policies against harassment in their employee handbooks, and many require staffers to attend classes, yet research suggests the training can be ineffective if it doesn’t address real-world scenarios or offer credible solutions. In addition, company leaders may signal to subordinates that training is a mandatory human resources hurdle to endure and then forget, rather than an important, expectation-setting mandate.

26

“The training around sexual harassment is terrible,” said HBS’ Soltes. “There are people who grope people in elevators. That does happen. Training is not going to change that. However, that’s what training focuses on. That’s not the major problem. The major problem is people saying things that they think are a compliment when they’re not. “I think this is the next step, where firms are going to really need to think very carefully. I’m hoping as researchers we can play a part [in] thinking about how to devise the kind of training that will resonate more deeply with people, so it’s not simply legal cover but is actually trying to nudge people to treat one another respectfully in the workplace,” he said. “But I think we have a long way to go before that occurs.” Ely believes that addressing the work environment is essential. “The way I look at all gender issues in companies in general is that it’s always a problem of the workplace culture, whether we’re talking about sexual harassment or sexual assault or even just the implicit, inadvertent acting on biases,” she said. Research has found that some organizations become places where behavior that was once outrageous slowly becomes normalized, “because it’s just one thing leads to another and people feel like, ‘Well, nothing ever happens, so I’m not going to report anything,’” she said. “And once in a while, there’s a case that comes up, and then it’s like, ‘Oh well, there’s a bad apple.’ It’s not a bad apple. It’s a culture that’s giving rise to this kind of behavior and letting it persist, not necessarily consciously, but …” . . . . Using data to change behavior The Women and Public Policy Program at HKS works to identify data-driven ways to reduce gender inequality, especially in the workplace. Because many work environments — whether in offices, on factory floors, or in classrooms — were originally developed for a predominantly male population and men still far outnumber women in supervisory positions, bias against women can be built into the systems that shape who gets hired, who gets promoted, how much they’re paid, and how they’re treated. Because implicit bias is unseen, researchers are studying how to remove it from workplaces through “nudges” that help organizations operate with less gender mistreatment. A nudge can involve blind evaluations that remove demographic characteristics when reviewing resumés, helping overcome assumptions about who might succeed in a job and who wouldn’t. In addition, having men help with harassment training increases their support and understanding of its import, research has found. “It’s really difficult to change people’s mindsets. It’s much easier to change environments that make it easier for people to make the right decisions,” said Nicole Carter Quinn, the program’s director of research and operations. . . . Education appears to have a central role in changing attitudes as well. The #MeToo movement has shown how sharing personal experiences can promote conversations leading to change. According to a recent Harvard survey, another kind of frank dialogue is needed, one that has parents and educators talk with their children and students about harassment, as well as about what it means to have healthy, loving romantic relationships. Compiled by Making Caring Common, an initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), the 2017 report is based on surveys of more than 3,000 young adults, including college and high school students, and aims to create a better understanding of how young people think about and develop romantic and sexual experiences. The study included information gathered from conversations with 18- to 25-year-olds, parents, teachers, coaches and counselors. According to the findings, sexual harassment and misogyny are pervasive among young people. The report suggested that such behaviors and

27

attitudes often go unchecked because parents, educators, and peers don’t intervene. “I think it’s an epic educational failure, really a staggering educational failure,” said Richard Weissbourd, senior lecturer at HGSE, faculty director of the Making Caring Common project, and the study’s lead author. He hopes the report will act as “a real wake-up call.” Some 87 percent of young women surveyed reported being sexually harassed. Forty-eight percent of respondents either agreed with or were neutral about the statement “Society has reached the point where there is no more double standard against women.” Roughly three-quarters of respondents said they had never had a conversation with a parent about what constitutes sexual harassment. Parents, the report said, engage in a “dumbfounding abdication of responsibility” by delegating their children’s knowledge of romantic and sexual relationships to popular culture, where song lyrics, movies, television, video games, and magazines are rife with misogynistic messages and content, and harmful notions of romantic love. The researchers found that degrading language is prevalent in school hallways and classrooms, where words like “bitch,” “slut,” and “ho” are so common that they are “part of the background noise,” said Weissbourd. The report also said that boys regularly divide young women into “good girls” and “bad girls” and binge on internet pornography. “That reinforces just about every unhealthy and degrading notion about sexuality there is. It’s the degradation, the objectification, the idea for boys that what’s pleasurable for you is pleasurable for women. The idea that women are there to service you, the sense of entitlement that it can engrain,” said Weissbourd. He said that parents and teachers need to go well beyond platitudes like “be respectful” to others or discussions of abstinence and safe sex, and instead, engage young people in meaningful discussions. Reframing the definition of masculinity, Weissbourd said, is another important step in the way forward. “Young men need to learn that there can be real courage and honor in learning how to have a healthy love relationship with somebody else — the tender, generous, subtle, courageous, demanding work of learning how to love and be loved. I really think that we’ve got to push a very different definition of manhood here.”

28

HANDOUTS ON ESSAY DEVELOPMENT AND STYLE Introductions & Conclusion

There is no formula for writing effective introductions and conclusions, but below I have listed some strategies that you may find helpful.

What Should an Introduction Do? • An introduction has two main purposes: to catch the reader’s interest and to indicate the subject of the paper. It needs to perform both of these purposed smoothly, as an awkward introduction will only confuse your reader. Be sure to engage your reader as quickly as possible and to orient them to your attitude toward your subject. Your introduction should draw your readers into your paper and convince‖ them to continue reading it. • Your introduction should also, of course, include your thesis statement, as well as set out a “roadmap” for your reader. Your thesis statement, usually the last sentence or two of the introduction, should be a clearly articulated statement outlining the specific argument that the rest of your paper will develop. Be the time your reader finishes reading your introduction, they should know what you are going to argue and should have an understanding of how you are going to prove your argument. • Do not think of your introduction as an umbrella‖ paragraph under which all other points of your essay must fall. Rather, think of your introduction as a “doorway” to the more involved analysis and evidence you provide in the rest of your paper. Make sure that the points that you raise in your introduction relate directly to the subject of your paper. This is not the place to make broad generalizations about society, the world, human beings, etc • If you find writing your introduction difficult, try writing it last. Sometimes it is easier to write your introduction after you have written the body of your paper. Often an effective introduction will be easier to write after you have developed your ideas during the course of writing the paper itself.

What Should a Conclusion Do? Unfortunately, there is no formula for writing conclusions. It is one of the hardest things to do well. Some strategies you might find useful are listed below: ▪ Don’t just repeat what you’ve already said. If your conclusion says almost exactly the same thing as your introduction, it may indicate that you have not done enough critical thinking during the course of your essay (since you ended up right back where you started). By the end of your essay, you should have worked through your ideas enough so that your reader understands what you have argued and is ready to hear the larger point (i.e. the big so what) that you want to make about your topic. Your conclusion should create a sense of development or movement to a more complex understanding of the subject of your paper. ▪ Try to pull everything together. Your conclusion should serve as the climax of your paper. So, save your strongest analytical points for the end of your essay, and use them to drive your conclusion. ▪ Don’t be afraid to say something new. It is fine to introduce new information or quotations in your conclusion, as long as the new points grow from your argument. New points might be more general, answering the so what‖ question; they might be quite specific. Just avoid making new claims that need additional support. ▪ Go out with a “bang.” Vivid, concrete language is as important in a conclusion as it is elsewhere—perhaps more essential, since the conclusion determines the reader’s final impression of your essay. Do not leave them with the impression that your argument was vague or unsure.

29

Paragraph Development Development

A well written paragraph in the academic style must have two components: 1. a main idea and 2. support.

In general, the main idea comes first and is followed by sentences that explain it by presenting supporting ideas and concrete details. Within the American style of academic writing, it is more common to place the main idea at the beginning of the paragraph. However, it is possible to put the supporting material first and then end with the main idea. A tool to help you write in this pattern of main idea - support is downshifting.

Downshifting Downshifting means developing a paragraph from a high level of generality down to lower levels. The writer makes a rather broad statement, or assertion, in the first sentence, and in the following sentences enriches and expands that statement by giving more specific and concrete details. The process is like dividing a topic into smaller and smaller pieces. For example, if we label a sentence at the highest level of generality as 10, here is how a writer might develop a paragraph based by moving to lower levels of generality. 10. There are signs that women are finding their way into the world of computing, despite its male bias. 9. A large proportion of the current enrollment in college computing classes is female. 8. For example, at Mount Holyoke, a women's college, 50 percent of this year's graduates have used computers in their courses---up from 15 percent seven years ago. 7. According to John Durso, professor of computer studies, the number of terminals available to Mount Holyoke students has increased from one to 40 over the same period. 7. "The basic course in computing, taught twice a year, has quadrupled in enrollment from 30 students seven years ago to 120 today." ---Sara Kielser, Lee Spoull, and Jaquelynne S. Eccles, "Second Class Citizens?" in Psychology Today, March, 1983, p.47. The two sentences marked 7 are at the same level of generality

Downshifting is a good cure for paragraphs made up of several sentences all on the same level of generality. Here is an example of that kind of problem. The 1980s may be remembered as the era when millions of Americans became obsessed with fitness. For most people, this was the decade in which they thought continually about how their bodies functioned. A preoccupation with one's body was a sign of the times. It was very fashionable to talk about how important it is to be fit.

This paragraph doesn't go anywhere; it merely repeats the same generality four different ways, and that's not paragraph development. If, however, the writer starts with the main idea and develops it by downshifting to lower levels of generality and adding specific details, it can become interesting. 10. The 1980s may be remembered as the era when millions of Americans became obsessed with fitness. 9. Ambitious young people took up aerobics and weight lifting as a flat belly and sloping shoulders became assets. 9. Others took up running, as comparing race times became common talk on dinner dates. 8. Even the dinners themselves were affected. 7. Women and men alike no longer ordered huge steak and potato meals at restaurants, 7. instead they ordered pasta with low-fat sauce and salads with no dressing. 7.People also began ordering Perrier instead of white wine, and really hard drinks like martinis brought raised eyebrows from one's date. 7. Even more frowned upon was lighting up a cigarette after dinner. This second version of the paragraph uses details to SHOW the reader the main idea. These details not only lead the reader to the same thought as the writer, but they also provide the reader with concrete images from real life experience that can make the reader feel more a part of the writer's explanations. As you write paragraphs, think about how one sentence explains something about the one before it. You shouldn't write your paragraphs with the numbers and indentations as shown above unless you are assigned to write them this way, but THINK in this way so that each sentence in your paragraph has a clear "thought" connection to another sentence.

Laurie Mason: http://mason.gmu.edu/~llmiller/notes/downshifting.html

30

Excerpts From Craig Waddell’s Basic Prose Style and Mechanics

1 and 2. Avoid Nominalizations by Writing in the Active Voice Unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, avoid nominalizations. A nominalization is a noun derived from and communicating the same meaning as a verb or adjective. It is usually more direct, vigorous and natural to express action in verbs and qualities in adjectives. no: Our expectation was that we would be rewarded for our efforts. yes: We expected to be rewarded for our efforts. . . . Joseph Williams neatly sums up these first two principles (write in the active voice and avoid nominalizations): "Try to state who's doing what in the subject of your sentence, and try to state what that who is doing in your verb. . . . Get that straight, and the rest of the sentence begins to fall into place" (Style, 1st ed., p. 8)

4. Place the Emphatic Words at the End of the Sentence Joseph Williams offers two complementary principles of order and emphasis (Style, 1st ed.): 1. Whenever possible, express at the beginning of a sentence ideas already stated, referred to, implied, safely assumed, familiar—whatever might be called old, repeated, relatively predictable, less important, readily accessible information. 2. Express at the end of a sentence the least predictable, least accessible, the newest, the most significant and striking information. no: Peter Laslett writes about how family structure has changed in his article, "The World We Have Lost." yes: In his article, "The World We Have Lost," Peter Laslett writes about how family structure has changed. 6. Vary Sentence Patterns A series of sentences that follow the same general pattern (e.g., a series of three or four simple sentences or a series of three or four compound sentences) can be tedious. Avoid monotony by varying sentence patterns. One of the best ways to avoid a tedious series of simple sentences is to use subordination (or embedding) to combine the information presented in these sentences into a single, complex sentence. For example, FLIST is a utility program used to assist in file management. FLIST displays a scrollable, full-screen list of selected files. The user may execute any CMS command from this list. becomes FLIST, a utility program used to manage files, displays a scrollable, full-screen list of selected files from which the user may execute any CMS command. 9. Clarify the Logical Relationship Between Your Ideas In order to make your writing coherent and the transitions between your ideas smooth, you must clearly express or imply the logical relationships between your ideas. If you fail to do so, one idea is simply juxtaposed with another, and readers are left to make the logical connections for themselves...... The table below (taken from the Harbrace College Handbook) lists eight logical relationships and some of the transitional devices that may be used to indicate each of them: 1. Addition: moreover, further, furthermore, besides, and, and then, likewise, also, nor, too, again, in addition, equally important, next, first, second, third, in the first place, in the second place, finally, last 2. Comparison: similarly, likewise, in like manner 3. Contrast: but, yet, and yet, however, still, nevertheless, on the other hand, on the contrary, even so, notwithstanding, for all that, in contrast to this, at the same time, although this may be true, otherwise 4. Place: here, beyond, nearby, opposite to, adjacent to, on the opposite side 5. Purpose: to this end, for this purpose, with this object 6. Result: hence, therefore, accordingly, consequently, thus, thereupon, as a result, then 7. Summary, repetition, exemplification, intensification: to sum up, in brief, on the whole, in sum, in short, as I have said, in other words, that is, to be sure, as has been noted, for example, for instance, . . . 8. Time: meanwhile, at length, soon, after a few days, in the meantime, afterward, later, now, in the past.

10. Prune Deadwood Deadwood is material that adds nothing to the meaning of the sentence ...... When you edit your writing, eliminate any words or phrases that can be removed without damaging the meaning of the sentence or paragraph: no: I spent my first six weeks on the job in a state of shock, but today I have a completely different perspective on the company in general, as compared to when I first started. yes: I spent my first six weeks on the job in a state of shock, but today I have a completely different perspective on the company. . . .

31

Basic Punctuation 1. Commas 1.1 (a) Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (and, but, or, for, nor, yet, so) that joins two independent clauses (compare 2.1). (An independent or main clause is a clause that can stand by itself as a separate sentence.): The children escaped the fire without harm, but their mother was not so lucky. (b) If the clauses are short and closely related, a comma is not required: Frank typed and Matt watched. (c) If the coordinate clauses are long or themselves contain commas, you can often avoid confusion by separating them with semicolons: Paul went to his car, got a gun, and returned to the lake; but Bill, unfortunately, refused to be intimidated. 1.2 Use a comma to separate an introductory element (clause, phrase, conjunctive adverb, or mild interjection) from the rest of the sentence: If you refuse to leave, I'll call the police. (clause) To prepare for her exam, Lynn reread all of her notes. (phrase) Nevertheless, much work still remains to be done. (conjunctive adverb) Well, I was surprised to achieve these results. (interjection) 1.3 (a) Use commas to set off parenthetical elements or interrupters (including transitional adverbs): The report, which was well documented, was discussed with considerable emotion. (nonrestrictive clause) They were, however, still able to meet their deadline.(transitional adverb) An important distinction must be made here between restrictive and nonrestrictive modifiers. Restrictive modifiers are essential to the meaning of the sentence in that they restrict that meaning to a particular case. Hence, restrictive modifiers are not parenthetical and cannot be removed without seriously damaging the meaning. Since they are necessary to the meaning, restrictive modifiers are not set off by commas: All soldiers who are overweight will be forced to resign. Nonrestrictive modifiers are parenthetical. That is, they digress, amplify, or explain, but are not essential to the meaning of the sentence. These modifiers simply provide additional information for the reader—information which, although it may be interesting, does not restrict the meaning of the sentence and can be removed without changing the sentence's essential meaning: Sgt. Price, who is overweight, will be forced to resign. . . . 12. Quotation Marks 12.3 Use single quotation marks to enclose a quotation within a quotation: At the beginning of the class, the professor asked, "What does Kuhn mean by 'paradigm shifts,' and what is their relationship to normal science?" . . . . 12.5 Do not use quotation marks with indirect discourse, or with rhetorical, unspoken, or imaginary questions: Frank said he was sorry he couldn't be here. Why am I doing this? she wondered.

13. Punctuating Quotations 13.1 Do not use a comma to mark the end of a quoted sentence that is followed by an identifying tag if the quoted sentence ends in a question mark or an exclamation point: "Get out!" he screamed. 13.2 Commas and periods go inside closing quotation marks; semicolons and colons go outside closing quotation marks: Peter's response was "Money is no object," but the lawyer was still unwilling to accept his case. The senator announced, "I will not seek reelection"; then he left the room. 13.3 Place a question mark or an exclamation point inside the closing quotation marks only if it belongs to the quotation rather than to the larger sentence: Lenin's question was "What is to be done?" Should the U.S. support governments that it considers "moderately repressive"? Wherever you use the question mark or exclamation point, do not use a period with it (see 18.1). 13.4 Use square brackets to enclose interpolations, corrections, or comments in a quoted passage. . . .

32

HANDOUTS ON ESSAY DEVELOPMENT AND STYLE Introductions & Conclusion

There is no formula for writing effective introductions and conclusions, but below I have listed some strategies that you may find helpful.

What Should an Introduction Do? • An introduction has two main purposes: to catch the reader’s interest and to indicate the subject of the paper. It needs to perform both of these purposed smoothly, as an awkward introduction will only confuse your reader. Be sure to engage your reader as quickly as possible and to orient them to your attitude toward your subject. Your introduction should draw your readers into your paper and convince‖ them to continue reading it. • Your introduction should also, of course, include your thesis statement, as well as set out a “roadmap” for your reader. Your thesis statement, usually the last sentence or two of the introduction, should be a clearly articulated statement outlining the specific argument that the rest of your paper will develop. Be the time your reader finishes reading your introduction, they should know what you are going to argue and should have an understanding of how you are going to prove your argument. • Do not think of your introduction as an umbrella‖ paragraph under which all other points of your essay must fall. Rather, think of your introduction as a “doorway” to the more involved analysis and evidence you provide in the rest of your paper. Make sure that the points that you raise in your introduction relate directly to the subject of your paper. This is not the place to make broad generalizations about society, the world, human beings, etc • If you find writing your introduction difficult, try writing it last. Sometimes it is easier to write your introduction after you have written the body of your paper. Often an effective introduction will be easier to write after you have developed your ideas during the course of writing the paper itself.

What Should a Conclusion Do? Unfortunately, there is no formula for writing conclusions. It is one of the hardest things to do well. Some strategies you might find useful are listed below: ▪ Don’t just repeat what you’ve already said. If your conclusion says almost exactly the same thing as your introduction, it may indicate that you have not done enough critical thinking during the course of your essay (since you ended up right back where you started). By the end of your essay, you should have worked through your ideas enough so that your reader understands what you have argued and is ready to hear the larger point (i.e. the big so what) that you want to make about your topic. Your conclusion should create a sense of development or movement to a more complex understanding of the subject of your paper. ▪ Try to pull everything together. Your conclusion should serve as the climax of your paper. So, save your strongest analytical points for the end of your essay, and use them to drive your conclusion. ▪ Don’t be afraid to say something new. It is fine to introduce new information or quotations in your conclusion, as long as the new points grow from your argument. New points might be more general, answering the so what‖ question; they might be quite specific. Just avoid making new claims that need additional support. ▪ Go out with a “bang.” Vivid, concrete language is as important in a conclusion as it is elsewhere—perhaps more essential, since the conclusion determines the reader’s final impression of your essay. Do not leave them with the impression that your argument was vague or unsure.

33

Paragraph Development Development

A well written paragraph in the academic style must have two components: 1. a main idea and 2. support.

In general, the main idea comes first and is followed by sentences that explain it by presenting supporting ideas and concrete details. Within the American style of academic writing, it is more common to place the main idea at the beginning of the paragraph. However, it is possible to put the supporting material first and then end with the main idea. A tool to help you write in this pattern of main idea - support is downshifting.

Downshifting Downshifting means developing a paragraph from a high level of generality down to lower levels. The writer makes a rather broad statement, or assertion, in the first sentence, and in the following sentences enriches and expands that statement by giving more specific and concrete details. The process is like dividing a topic into smaller and smaller pieces. For example, if we label a sentence at the highest level of generality as 10, here is how a writer might develop a paragraph based by moving to lower levels of generality. 10. There are signs that women are finding their way into the world of computing, despite its male bias. 9. A large proportion of the current enrollment in college computing classes is female. 8. For example, at Mount Holyoke, a women's college, 50 percent of this year's graduates have used computers in their courses---up from 15 percent seven years ago. 7. According to John Durso, professor of computer studies, the number of terminals available to Mount Holyoke students has increased from one to 40 over the same period. 7. "The basic course in computing, taught twice a year, has quadrupled in enrollment from 30 students seven years ago to 120 today." ---Sara Kielser, Lee Spoull, and Jaquelynne S. Eccles, "Second Class Citizens?" in Psychology Today, March, 1983, p.47. The two sentences marked 7 are at the same level of generality

Downshifting is a good cure for paragraphs made up of several sentences all on the same level of generality. Here is an example of that kind of problem. The 1980s may be remembered as the era when millions of Americans became obsessed with fitness. For most people, this was the decade in which they thought continually about how their bodies functioned. A preoccupation with one's body was a sign of the times. It was very fashionable to talk about how important it is to be fit.

This paragraph doesn't go anywhere; it merely repeats the same generality four different ways, and that's not paragraph development. If, however, the writer starts with the main idea and develops it by downshifting to lower levels of generality and adding specific details, it can become interesting. 10. The 1980s may be remembered as the era when millions of Americans became obsessed with fitness. 9. Ambitious young people took up aerobics and weight lifting as a flat belly and sloping shoulders became assets. 9. Others took up running, as comparing race times became common talk on dinner dates. 8. Even the dinners themselves were affected. 7. Women and men alike no longer ordered huge steak and potato meals at restaurants, 7. instead they ordered pasta with low-fat sauce and salads with no dressing. 7.People also began ordering Perrier instead of white wine, and really hard drinks like martinis brought raised eyebrows from one's date. 7. Even more frowned upon was lighting up a cigarette after dinner. This second version of the paragraph uses details to SHOW the reader the main idea. These details not only lead the reader to the same thought as the writer, but they also provide the reader with concrete images from real life experience that can make the reader feel more a part of the writer's explanations. As you write paragraphs, think about how one sentence explains something about the one before it. You shouldn't write your paragraphs with the numbers and indentations as shown above unless you are assigned to write them this way, but THINK in this way so that each sentence in your paragraph has a clear "thought" connection to another sentence.

Laurie Mason: http://mason.gmu.edu/~llmiller/notes/downshifting.html

34

Excerpts From Craig Waddell’s Basic Prose Style and Mechanics

1 and 2. Avoid Nominalizations by Writing in the Active Voice Unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, avoid nominalizations. A nominalization is a noun derived from and communicating the same meaning as a verb or adjective. It is usually more direct, vigorous and natural to express action in verbs and qualities in adjectives. no: Our expectation was that we would be rewarded for our efforts. yes: We expected to be rewarded for our efforts. . . . Joseph Williams neatly sums up these first two principles (write in the active voice and avoid nominalizations): "Try to state who's doing what in the subject of your sentence, and try to state what that who is doing in your verb. . . . Get that straight, and the rest of the sentence begins to fall into place" (Style, 1st ed., p. 8)

4. Place the Emphatic Words at the End of the Sentence Joseph Williams offers two complementary principles of order and emphasis (Style, 1st ed.): 1. Whenever possible, express at the beginning of a sentence ideas already stated, referred to, implied, safely assumed, familiar—whatever might be called old, repeated, relatively predictable, less important, readily accessible information. 2. Express at the end of a sentence the least predictable, least accessible, the newest, the most significant and striking information. no: Peter Laslett writes about how family structure has changed in his article, "The World We Have Lost." yes: In his article, "The World We Have Lost," Peter Laslett writes about how family structure has changed. 6. Vary Sentence Patterns A series of sentences that follow the same general pattern (e.g., a series of three or four simple sentences or a series of three or four compound sentences) can be tedious. Avoid monotony by varying sentence patterns. One of the best ways to avoid a tedious series of simple sentences is to use subordination (or embedding) to combine the information presented in these sentences into a single, complex sentence. For example, FLIST is a utility program used to assist in file management. FLIST displays a scrollable, full-screen list of selected files. The user may execute any CMS command from this list. becomes FLIST, a utility program used to manage files, displays a scrollable, full-screen list of selected files from which the user may execute any CMS command. 9. Clarify the Logical Relationship Between Your Ideas In order to make your writing coherent and the transitions between your ideas smooth, you must clearly express or imply the logical relationships between your ideas. If you fail to do so, one idea is simply juxtaposed with another, and readers are left to make the logical connections for themselves...... The table below (taken from the Harbrace College Handbook) lists eight logical relationships and some of the transitional devices that may be used to indicate each of them: 1. Addition: moreover, further, furthermore, besides, and, and then, likewise, also, nor, too, again, in addition, equally important, next, first, second, third, in the first place, in the second place, finally, last 2. Comparison: similarly, likewise, in like manner 3. Contrast: but, yet, and yet, however, still, nevertheless, on the other hand, on the contrary, even so, notwithstanding, for all that, in contrast to this, at the same time, although this may be true, otherwise 4. Place: here, beyond, nearby, opposite to, adjacent to, on the opposite side 5. Purpose: to this end, for this purpose, with this object 6. Result: hence, therefore, accordingly, consequently, thus, thereupon, as a result, then 7. Summary, repetition, exemplification, intensification: to sum up, in brief, on the whole, in sum, in short, as I have said, in other words, that is, to be sure, as has been noted, for example, for instance, . . . 8. Time: meanwhile, at length, soon, after a few days, in the meantime, afterward, later, now, in the past.

10. Prune Deadwood Deadwood is material that adds nothing to the meaning of the sentence ...... When you edit your writing, eliminate any words or phrases that can be removed without damaging the meaning of the sentence or paragraph: no: I spent my first six weeks on the job in a state of shock, but today I have a completely different perspective on the company in general, as compared to when I first started. yes: I spent my first six weeks on the job in a state of shock, but today I have a completely different perspective on the company. . . .

35

Basic Punctuation 1. Commas 1.1 (a) Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (and, but, or, for, nor, yet, so) that joins two independent clauses (compare 2.1). (An independent or main clause is a clause that can stand by itself as a separate sentence.): The children escaped the fire without harm, but their mother was not so lucky. (b) If the clauses are short and closely related, a comma is not required: Frank typed and Matt watched. (c) If the coordinate clauses are long or themselves contain commas, you can often avoid confusion by separating them with semicolons: Paul went to his car, got a gun, and returned to the lake; but Bill, unfortunately, refused to be intimidated. 1.2 Use a comma to separate an introductory element (clause, phrase, conjunctive adverb, or mild interjection) from the rest of the sentence: If you refuse to leave, I'll call the police. (clause) To prepare for her exam, Lynn reread all of her notes. (phrase) Nevertheless, much work still remains to be done. (conjunctive adverb) Well, I was surprised to achieve these results. (interjection) 1.3 (a) Use commas to set off parenthetical elements or interrupters (including transitional adverbs): The report, which was well documented, was discussed with considerable emotion. (nonrestrictive clause) They were, however, still able to meet their deadline.(transitional adverb) An important distinction must be made here between restrictive and nonrestrictive modifiers. Restrictive modifiers are essential to the meaning of the sentence in that they restrict that meaning to a particular case. Hence, restrictive modifiers are not parenthetical and cannot be removed without seriously damaging the meaning. Since they are necessary to the meaning, restrictive modifiers are not set off by commas: All soldiers who are overweight will be forced to resign. Nonrestrictive modifiers are parenthetical. That is, they digress, amplify, or explain, but are not essential to the meaning of the sentence. These modifiers simply provide additional information for the reader—information which, although it may be interesting, does not restrict the meaning of the sentence and can be removed without changing the sentence's essential meaning: Sgt. Price, who is overweight, will be forced to resign. . . . 12. Quotation Marks 12.3 Use single quotation marks to enclose a quotation within a quotation: At the beginning of the class, the professor asked, "What does Kuhn mean by 'paradigm shifts,' and what is their relationship to normal science?" . . . . 12.5 Do not use quotation marks with indirect discourse, or with rhetorical, unspoken, or imaginary questions: Frank said he was sorry he couldn't be here. Why am I doing this? she wondered.

13. Punctuating Quotations 13.1 Do not use a comma to mark the end of a quoted sentence that is followed by an identifying tag if the quoted sentence ends in a question mark or an exclamation point: "Get out!" he screamed. 13.2 Commas and periods go inside closing quotation marks; semicolons and colons go outside closing quotation marks: Peter's response was "Money is no object," but the lawyer was still unwilling to accept his case. The senator announced, "I will not seek reelection"; then he left the room. 13.3 Place a question mark or an exclamation point inside the closing quotation marks only if it belongs to the quotation rather than to the larger sentence: Lenin's question was "What is to be done?" Should the U.S. support governments that it considers "moderately repressive"? Wherever you use the question mark or exclamation point, do not use a period with it (see 18.1). 13.4 Use square brackets to enclose interpolations, corrections, or comments in a quoted passage. . . .