In this article we investigate the role of parental and family characteristics as explanations for gender differences in children’s education using primary data collected from villages in West Bengal, India in 2007–08. We add to existing research by focusing on the importance of parental perceptions by distinguishing between the stated need for education in general and the need for education for girls to investigate the pathways through which girls’ education may be improved. Results show that while girls are being enrolled at the same rate as boys when young, they are being withdrawn at much higher rates as they get older, often for marriage or financial reasons. Multivariate analyses show significant gender bias in education among the older sample (17 years and over) and some important differences among predictors for male and female education for both samples. For the older sample, financial constraints are more important for curtailing a daughter’s education than a son’s education. Among the indicators of parental perception, the expectation of economic independence for girls has a positive effect on girls’ education, but parental expectation of the enhancement of traditional roles (as wives and mothers) through girls’ education has a beneficial effect on boys’ education.

This article examines Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun by exploring the conflict between a traditionally Southern, Afro-Christian, communitarian worldview and certain more destabilizing elements of the worldview of modernity. In addition to examining the socio-economic problems confronted by some African Americans in the play, this article investigates the worldviews by which these Black people frame their problems as well as the dynamics within the relationships of a Black family that lives at the intersection of racial, class, and gender inequality in Chicago during the latter 1950s.

Objectives: To explore health research needs of American Indian and Native Hawaiian (AIINH) transgender individuals. Methods: This qualitative study is composed of four focus groups and one informal meeting, totaling 42 AIINH transgender individuals in four major cities. The theoretical and methodological approaches combined grounded theory with the principles of community based participatory research. Results: Healthcare and resiliency are two main themes that emerged as research needs with important subcategories within them. Access to quality care from medical professionals and access to care that is unique to their trans gender status were subcategories within healthcare. Lived experiences, culture, and history were factors found to contribute to their resiliency. Conclusions: There are a number of factors that lead to health disparities among AIINH people. They include the lack of quality care due to the negative encounters with health providers, health care providers' limited knowledge of trans gender issues, and lack of transgender specific services. This must be researched further along with health provider care, attitudes, beliefs, and education. Understanding the lived lives of AIINH trans gender individuals and utilizing their culture and history in health interventions may improve their health and overall wellbeing.

The work of Ida B. Wells is examined not only from the standpoint of her anti-lynching writings, but from a perusal of her diaries and her efforts as a young woman. It is concluded that she exemplifies the best of the notion of a genuine democratic political force.

Conventionally, citizenship is understood as a legal category of membership in a national polity that ensures equal rights among its citizens. This conventional understanding, however, begs disruption when the histories and experiences of marginalized groups are brought to the fore. Equal citizenship in all its forms for marginalized populations has yet to be realized. For Asian Americans, rights presumably accorded to the legal status of citizenship have proven tenuous across different historical and political moments. Throughout U.S. history, “Asian American” or “Oriental” men and women have been designated aliens against whom white male and female citizenships have been legitimized. These categories of inclusion and exclusion-“citizen” and “alien”-are mutually constitutive; members are legitimate only when defined against the exclusion of “others.” Citizenship must be conceptualized as a broader set of social and cultural memberships and exclusions beyond political rights and legal status. This article examines how scholarly works engage citizenship formations of “Asian American” women and men. It also asks: Are there modes of citizenship, other than legal status and rights, to explain the experiences and histories of Asian American men and women, as well as provide anti-racist, feminist sites of resistance in the struggle for equality?

Both politicians and the mass public believe that identity influences political behavior yet, political scientists have failed to fully detail how identity is salient for all political actors not just minorities and women legislators. To what extent do racial, gendered, and race/gendered identities affect the legislation decision process? To test this proposition, I examine how race and gender based identities shape the legislative decisions of Black women in comparison to White men, White women, and Black men. I find that Black men and women legislators interviewed believe that racial identity is relevant in their decision making processes, while White men and women members of the Maryland state legislature had difficulty deciding whether their identities mattered and had even more trouble articulating how or why they did. African American women legislators in Maryland articulate or describe an intersectional identity as a meaningful and significant component of their work as representatives. More specifically, Black women legislators use their identity to interpret legislation differently due to their race/gender identities.

This paper employs assimilation theory to examine the experiences of Chinese and Jewish immigrant women at similar stages of their encounters with America. By focusing on the letters in Dear Diane: Letters from Our Daughters (1983), and Dear Diane: Questions and Answers for Asian American Women (1983), and earlier in the century, the letters translated and printed in A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward (1971), this paper compares and contrasts the experiences of Chinese and Jewish women in America. It concludes that, though they have their own unique characteristics, both Chinese and Jewish women shared many common experiences, such as mother-daughter conflict and identity crisis, and both of them faced a difficult challenge in assimilating into American life.

Women of every culture face a similar problem: loss of voice. Their lives are permeated with silence. Whether their silence results from a patriarchal society that prohibits women from asserting their identity or from a social expectation of gender roles that confine women to an expressive domain-submissive, nurturing, passive, and domestic-rather than an instrumental role where men are dominant, affective and aggressive-women share the common bond of a debilitating silence. Maria Racine, in her analysis of Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God , reaffirms the pervasiveness of this bond: “For women, silence has crossed every racial and cultural boundary” (283). Indeed, Elaine Mar, a Chinese-American writer, in her memoir, Paper Daughter , elucidates the implications of silence for women, “Like Mother I was learning to disappear. Frequently, I sought refuge with her in the basement room, in the silence of empty spaces. But I was also learning to vanish in full sight of others, retreating into myself when physical flight wasn't possible. My voice withered. Silent desire parched my throat” (48). Silence and loss of voice debilitate and stifle women, as they are forced to sublimate their identity in order to survive in their worlds.

Every other year I teach a course entitled “The History of Asian Women in America,” which focuses on the experiences of East, South and Southeast Asian women as they journey to these shores and resettle. Using autobiographies, poetry, journal writings, interviews and academic texts, the students learn from the women what political, social, cultural, economic and ecological conditions prompted them to leave their homelands and why they chose the United States. We learn of their rich cultural backgrounds, their struggles to create a subculture based on their home and host experiences, and the cultural gaps that often appear between the first and subsequent generations. And we also learn how patriarchy affects their lives transnationally. In spite of all this information, inevitably one student always asks “why are Asian cultures so oppressive to women?”

The effect of race in the U.S. labor market has long been controversial. One posits that racial effects have been diminished since the civil rights movement of the 1960s (Alba & Nee, 2003; Sakamoto, Wu, & Tzeng, 2000; Wilson, 1980). Even if some disparities in labor-market outcomes among race groups are found, advocates of this “declining significance of race” thesis do not attribute these disparities to racial discrimination. They, instead, understand the racial gaps as a result of class composition of racial minority groups, classes represented by larger proportions of the working-class population (Wilson, 1980, 1997) as well as unskilled-immigrant workers (Borjas, 1994).

This study addressed the retention of Chicana/Latina undergraduates. The problem explored was one; how these women perceive campus climate as members of a marginalized student population and two; which strategies are used to “survive the system.” As a qualitative study, this work was guided by a confluence of methods including grounded theory, phenomenology and Chicana epistemology using educational narratives as data. The analysis indicated that Chicanas/Latinas do maintain a sense of being “Other” throughout their college experiences and this self-identity is perceived as a “survival strategy” while attending a mainstream campus. Further analysis also showed that Chicanas/Latinas begin their college careers with social/cultural capital and is used as a fluid source of support during their stay at the university.

As I was working on research into Indigenous community development, I wanted to get an overview of how things are going - are projects improving well-being? What is working and what isn't? I found I couldn't get a clear multi-dimensional picture. So I had to wonder, about evaluation criteria and what the alternatives were. How can we, as academics and researchers and allies, make sense of the available information in such a way that our work is meaningful to the Indigenous communities we work with?

The idea of the arranged marriage has always seemed “exotic” yet has fascinated the American public. Recent media coverage of arranged marriages is evident in popular periodicals such as the New York Times Online (August 17, 2000) and Newsweek (March 15, 1999). Foner highlights that the arranged marriage is an example of “the continued impact of premigration cultural beliefs and social practices” that South Asian immigrants have transported to the United States (Foner 1997, 964). She offers an interpretive synthesis by showing that “[n]ew immigrant family patterns are shaped by cultural meanings and social practices that immigrants bring with them from their home countries as well as by social, economic, and cultural forces in the United States” (Foner 2005, 157).

In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston tells the story of her immigrant family and their efforts to rise above their working-class status in America, which optimistic Chinese regard as the Golden Mountain. The Hongs' experience is not unlike that of other immigrants who come to America to escape hardship in their homeland and hope to live the American Dream. The road to American success has numerous obstacles, and immigrants encounter many conflicts on their journey. One conflict relates to their cultural identities. Gloria Anzaldúa uses the word “borderland” to refer to the meeting of two cultures, and she defines the borderland as a “place of contradictions. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape” (n.p.). While Anzaldua's discussion focuses on the borderland encountered by Mexican Americans, she believes that many share this painful experience:

In her work Methodology of the Oppressed, Chela Sandoval claims that although inequities in material sources and subordination by race, class, nation, gender and sex continue to operate under the protection of law and order, a new kind of psychic penetration that respects no previous boundaries is evolving. She argues that “Mutation in culture, today, makes new forms of identity, ethics, citizenship, aesthetics and resistance accessible” (36.7).

I can't tell the most frightening story I know, because stories are made of words, and once I was without them. I was trekking in Nepal and ended up with amnesia. Later I stumbled into a mission hospital with a bruised jaw. A bad fall? I can't say. I had no words. No words for this thing that was wrenching and crying, in which “I” - a bundle of terror - seemed trapped. No words for where I began, stopped, or the mud stubble terrace on which I sat. No words to map, no words to define, no words to possess. No words for the blobs of light and shadow shifting or parking before me. No words to rank or relate the garbage - my own memories - blasting against my consciousness, randomly, insistently. Names shouted inside my head - my family, my lover, my own name; places - my hometown in America, the name of the mission hospital I'd eventually find my way to. An eleven-thousand foot mountain rose in front of me. A backpack pulled at my shoulders. A Nepali woman stroked my arm. I had no words to weave any of these into a safety net of story or meaning. All were uncontrollable, unpredictable, stimuli, which somehow, suddenly, had complete, and therefore sinister, power, and struck again and again against - some other thing - me - a thing I couldn't name or inhabit, for I had no words. I remember this sensation now when I want to know what it must have been like for my immigrant mother when, as an eight-year-old Slovak peasant child, she first arrived in America in 1929.

It is not just that the limits of our language limit our thoughts; the world we find ourselves in is one we have helped to create, and this places constraints upon how we think the world anew.

This study of scenes from the films Daughters of the Dust and Malcolm X, describes images of myth, gender, and resistance familiar to African-American interpretive communities. Key thematic and technical elements of these films are opposed to familiar Hollywood practices, indicating the directors' effort to address resisting spectators. Both filmmakers, Julie Dash and Spike Lee respectively, chose subjects with an ideological resonance in African-American collective memory: Malcolm X, eulogized by Ossie Davis as “our living black manhood”(i) and the women of the Gullah Sea Islands, a site often celebrated for its authentically African cultural survivals. Both films combine images of an African past with an American present using a pattern of historically specific myths and tropes.

Laura Esquivel's 1989 Mexican novel Like Water for Chocolate, neither translated into English nor published in the United States until 1992, was both an American bestseller and the basis for an acclaimed motion picture. Interestingly, though, Esquivel's work also seems to be receiving glimmers of the type of critical attention generally reserved for less “popular” works. Two particular critical studies composed in English, one by Kathleen Glenn and the other by Cecelia Lawless, have been devoted entirely to Chocolate, and both of the scholar/authors grace the faculties of reputable American institutions of higher learning. As a student whose academic experience has been replete with elitist attitudes and expressions of disdain for anything that smacks of an appeal to the masses, I was intrigued by Chocolate for this very reason; in a world where scholarly boundaries seem unalterably fixed, a work that appears capable of crossing these rigid lines is, in my opinion, both rare and admirably refreshing. In my studies, I have often hoped for more communication between “popular” and “scholarly” literature; Esquivel's novel provides not only opportunities for this dialogue but for other cross-genre discussions as well.

Hollywood films play a significant role in constructing and reinforcing inter-ethnic tensions through negative representations of Asian Americans and African Americans. While white males are most often depicted as smart and romantically desirable, thereby reinforcing an ideology of white male dominance, Asian Americans and Blacks are typically diminished to demeaning and secondary status. Thi[this] article explores these racist steretotypes [stereotypes] in director Michael Cimino's 19985[1985] film Year of the Dragon (as well as a number of other Hollywood films), arguing that such race and gender-specific imagery is functional; for while it promotes race/gender stereotypes, it also serves to rationalize white dominance as necessary to sustain the status-quo.