Sarah Lawrence College
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Settling the Sexual Dust: Portrayals and Restrictions of Female Sexuality in 1980s Lifestyle Magazines
Get PDFThis thesis explores the treatment of female sexual pleasure throughout the second half of the twentieth century, specifically through an analysis of women’s lifestyle magazines. I begin my discussion with an overview of important historical moments from the 1950s through the 1980s, highlighting their relationship to social constructs of sex and pleasure. Then, I examine the role of psychoanalysis, consumerism, and the culture of self-help. These influences created a cultural dependency on self-improvement, which lifestyle magazines relied on to maintain reader dependency. Not only did the magazines proliferate cultural sexual norms, but they had the power to determine them as well. To further support this argument, I refer to the importance of sex and marriage manuals from the 1950s to the 1970s. Ultimately, I discuss popular lifestyle magazines in the 1980s, including Cosmopolitan, Essence, and Playgirl. I analyze specific articles and determine how their conversations on sex and pleasure appropriated liberal tones of the previous decades as a way to strategically reprioritize restrictive and conservative sexual practices. I examine the treatment of race, gender, and sexual orientation within the magazines. The conversations in these magazines emphasized monogamy and heteronormativity, while also prioritizing male sexual pleasure
Border Stories: Reconstructing Migrant Narratives and Empathy for the Marginal
Get PDFVarious institutions in the United States have utilized oppressive systems in domestic and international spaces to build up immigrants as dehumanized tools of labor. Unauthorized immigrants (particularly from Mexico and Central America) have been classified legally and socially as undeserving of space by hegemonic forces such as politicians, capitalists, and mass media. These forces have aggressively tried to deny immigrants their dignity and human rights. The obfuscation of rights and voice takes place when these larger institutions create systems to separate human diversity and capitalize on the abjection of others. In this top-down perspective, one gains a greater awareness of how broader socio-political systems interact to affect large groups of people
Lessons Learned: The National Consumers\u27 League, The Fight for $15, and Their Battles to Raise the Minimum Wage
Get PDFIn 2019, workers in the United States often find themselves unable to support a family on the wages produced by one job, or even several, jobs. The pattern has obtained for more than a century. In this paper, I examine historical efforts to address this plight and discuss how nongovernment organizations may collaborate to combat the problem. I focus on the work of the National Consumers\u27 League, and its efforts during the first three decades of the twentieth century to promote protective labor legislation. Specifically, I examine the NCL\u27s work in connection with the Adkins v. Children\u27s Hospital case that reached the Supreme Court in 1923, and the League\u27s campaign to secure the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. I then explore the more recent Fight for $15, examine the ways in which the NCL is connected to this recent social movement, and look at how the movement might follow the examples of the organization to better effect a positive change to federal wage