Gender and Culture in America

9780130613288

0130613282

"More time should be spent on gender in the United States." This is a student evaluation we both frequently received from our respective sections of the anthropology course Gender and Culture, a class that focuses on the anthropology of gender in non-Western societies. Although this course inevitably draws contrasts between gender in non-Western societies and in the United States, students over a ten-year period eventually convinced us that devoting more class time specifically to gender in America was a good suggestion that reflected a genuine concern on the part of students. It was to meet this need that we wrote this book. There is, of course, a rich literature on gender in the United States from a variety of disciplines. There are also edited readers covering anthropological works on gender in the United States.Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture(Ginsburg and Tsing 1990) andSituated Lives: Gender and Culture in Everyday Life(Lamphere, Ragone, and Zavella 1997) are two that come to mind. But we felt that a single book on gender in the United States written specifically for undergraduates and from an anthropological perspective was absent. We sought to write a book that did not focus primarily on contemporary gender issues in the United States (sexual harassment, violence against women, gender inequity in the workforce, and so on), all of which are well covered in Innumerable other texts. We wanted, rather, a book that focuses on cultural constructions of gender, one that invites the reader to see America as a set of interacting cultural beliefs and values, much as students of our Gender and Culture classes are encouraged to view societies of Asia, Africa, or Latin America: The book is intended to open a new perspective for students, moving attention away from American gender inequality as a problem to be dealt with through new legislation or policy reform, into a deeper view of American gender as enmeshed in our own distinctive and varied cultural traditions. The book seeks to challenge students to consider that addressing gender inequality in America involves not just activism or new laws and policies, but new modes of thought, a rethinking of our deepest, most accepted premises about the world. Our book, then, is designed for undergraduate anthropology courses like our own Gender and Culture. We recommend it especially for the last few weeks of such a class, after students have been exposed to the study of gender in any number of non-Western societies, and after they are familiar with basic concepts and theories in the anthropology of gender. Students can then approach gender in American culture comparatively, within a framework of the cross-cultural study of gender already developed in the course. The book will also be useful in sociology, history, or women's studies courses that cover the United States. The book approaches American gender through a historical and multicultural framework. Two chapters following the introductory chapter focus on the culturally dominant white middle class. These two chapters also present material on alternative gender constructions among gay men and lesbians. The next two chapters cover a history of gender constructions among ethnic minorities (specifically Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanic groups, and Asian Americans). Chapter 6 then moves to a subject we think will be of particular interest to students, "Gender on the College Campus." In this chapter we include results of our own study of gender and students' perceptions of their futures on a campus in the Northwest, as well as the results of a smaller subsequent study we conducted on eight other campuses around the country. This study shows important variation by gender in how students perceive and plan for their future world of work, marriage, and reproduction. As part of this research we administered a questionnaire to students on all campuses. Appendix A provide