Gender History Events at UCSB
current events | recent events

Current events:

2.14.2005
Gender History Brownbag
Monday, February 14 / 12:00 - 1:30 pm / HSSB 4020

S. Jay Kleinberg, Brunel University/UK
"Giving Middle Aged Women a History: Findings from the USA"

organized by the Hull Chair in Women's Studies and the Department of History

This paper comes from a new project: the making of the matron, women in mid-life from age 40 to age 65. Historians have neglected this historically specific stage in the life cycle, concentrating heretofore on girlhood, motherhood, and old age. This presentation will focus on employment. While men exhibited a smooth employment profile over the course of their working lives, women's was highly "heaped," that is, it seemed to peak on years ending in zero or five. This is significant for what it tells us about the factors impelling certain women into labor force participation and underscores the divisions among economically active and inactive women, especially by race and education. Thus, the analysis of age heaping helps historians to understand the dynamics of female employment. By providing a new baseline about middle aged women's employment, this paper illuminates a host of major policy questions addressed by feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, such as pension splitting and age discrimination. It provides a foundation for further exploration into the significance of this new identity of middle age for women themselves, public discourse, and social activism. After all, middle age women were the sparks of the second wave of feminism.

S. Jay Kleinberg is Professor of History, Brunel Business School Brunel University, London, England and Editor, Journal of American Studies, the journal of the British Association of American Studies. Among her books are The Shadow of the Mills: Working Class Families in Pittsburgh, 1870-1907 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989); Women in the United States, 1830-1945 (Rutgers University Press, 1999); and Widows and Orphans First: The Family Economy and Social Welfare in the United States, 1870-1939 (in press, University of Illinois Press, 2005). She is co-editing a collection, Re-visioning U.S. Women's History (Rutgers Univ.
Press) with Eileen Boris and Vicki Ruiz.

Recent events:

2.3.2005
Moolaadé
Thursday, February 3 / 7:30 pm / Campbell Hall

2.4.2005
Discussion of Moolaadé
Friday, February 4 / 4:00 PM / HSSB 6056

The Cultural Studies and Gender Research Focus Group, along with the African Studies Research Focus Group, invite you to participate in a discussion of the film Moolaadé led by Stephan Miescher, professor of History and co-convener of the African Studies Research Focus Group. Moolaadé is Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene’s latest work—the story of a strong-willed woman in a small African village fighting to end the tradition of female circumcision.

The Cultural Studies and Gender Research Focus Group is an interdisciplinary group of UCSB faculty and graduate students with diverse research interests in culture, gender, and critical theory, and a shared interest in the analysis of contemporary and twentieth century culture from a materialist and feminist perspective.

1.27.2005
Hull Chair of Women's Studies annual lecture:
Coerced Labor: Race, Gender and Caring
Evelyn Nakano Glenn (UC Berkeley)
Thursday, January 27 / 4:00pm / Mulitcultural Center

Evelyn Nakano Glenn's teaching and research interests focus on transdisciplinary methods, political economy of households, the intersection of race and gender, immigration, and citizenship. She is the author of Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor; Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service, and Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is Professor of Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies and founding director of the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley.

Sponsored by New Racial Studies Project and co-sponsored by the Women's Center, Multicultural Center, Sociology, Asian American Studies, Citizenship and Democracy in 21st Century Focus Group.

1.24.2005
"The Precious Raft of History: China's 'Women's Question' and the Politics of Time at the Turn of the 20th Century"
Professor Joan Judge (History Department, UCSB)
Monday, January 24 / 12:00-1:30pm / HSSB 2252

Presented by the East Asia Center and the East Asian Cultures Research Focus Group

11.10.2004
"Launching Wars, Counting Votes and Investigating Masculinities: Feminist Post-Election"
Cynthia Enloe (Clark University)
Wednesday, November 10 / 4:00 PM / Free / McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, 6th floor

At a time when electoral politics and processes are topics of intense concern and scrutiny, Cynthia Enloe will focus on the intersection between masculinities, militarism and democracy. One of America's pre-eminent theorists of gender and the military, Cynthia Enloe is currently Research Professor in the International Development, Community and Environment Dept at Clark University. She has published nine books including The Morning
After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (1993), Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (2000), and The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (2004).

This event is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Sexuality in the Military, The Center for Cold War Studies, the Department of Sociology, the East Asia Center, the Hull Chair of Women's Studies and the Women's Studies Program and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.