Elizabeth Higginbotham

RACE AND CLASS BIAS IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH ON WOMEN

Exploratory studies employing volunteer subjects are especially vulnerable to race and class bias. This article illustrates how inattention to race and class as critical dimensions in womens lives can produce biased research samples and lead to false conclusions. It analyzes the race and class background of 200 women who volunteered to participate in an in-depth study of Black and White professional, managerial, and administrative women. Despite a multiplicity of methods used to solicit subjects, White women raised in middle-class families who worked in male-dominated occupations were the most likely to volunteer, and White women were more than twice as likely to respond to media solicitations or letters. To recruit most Black subjects and address their concerns about participation required more labor-intensive strategies involving personal contact. The article discusses reasons for differential volunteering and ways to integrate race and class into qualitative research on women.

MOVING UP WITH KIN AND COMMUNITY: Upward Social Mobility for Black and White Women

The major aim of this research is to reopen the study of the subjective experience of upward mobility and to incorporate race and gender into our vision of the process. It examines evidence from a social science study of upward mobility among 200 Black and white professional-managerial women in the Memphis, Tennessee metropolitan area. The experiences of the women paint a different picture from the image of the mobility process that remains from scholarship conducted 20 to 30 years ago on white males. Relationships with family of origin, partners, children, friends, and the wider community shaped the way these women envision and accomplish mobility and the way they sustain themselves as professionals and managers.

The Costs of Exclusionary Practices in Women's Studies

As women who came to maturity during the social upheavals of the late sixties and early seventies, we entered academia to continue-in a different arena-the struggles that our foreparents had begun centuries earlier. We sought to reveal untold tales and unearth hidden images, and we believed (or at least hoped) that, once illuminated, the truths of the lives of our people-Black, brown, and working-class white-would combat the myths and stereotypes that haunted us. We were, in that sense, scholars with a special mission. In the tradition of W. E. B. DuBois, Oliver Cox, Joyce Ladner, and other pioneers, we sought to use the tools of history and social science and the media of literature and the arts to improve our peoples future and more accurately portray their past. We each had developed critical perspectives on society and sought theoretical explanations for the continued poverty and oppression of our people. We had different but related foci for our research: on Chicanos and the impact of outside resources on family structure and ethnicity; on working-class consciousness and class conflict; on Black women achieving a college education; and on the relationship of work and family for Black women private household workers. In the process of conducting it, we became acutely aware of the limitations of traditional social science with

Getting All Students to Listen: Analyzing and Coping with Student Resistance.

The new scholarship on race, class, and gender is exciting, but teaching this to students can be a complex process. Faculty can prepare for various reactions from students by thinking about issues of power and privilege as they relate to the selection of course materials that address inequality, the various interactions within the classroom between faculty and students and among students, and establishing a classroom atmosphere that is safe for exploring issues of inequality. Yet there are still students who may initially resist learning new material; these students can be vocal, silent, or absent in their resistance. Various teaching strategies are suggested for responding to resistance in ways that are respectful of students and also promote positive classroom interactions.

Black women in nineteenth-century American life : their words, their thoughts, their feelings

Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life presents selections from the writings of two dozen representative black women leaders of the past century, with a general introduction relating them to their forebears in colonial times and to their descendants in the twentieth century. Each selection is introduced with a biographical headnote, and the book contains a bibliography of works by or about these women and other black women. The selections are grouped in four parts, emphasizing respectively family relationships, religious activities, political and reformist movements, and education. The women represented in this book comprise a cross section of historically significant black women in the nineteenth century. Ten were born free, eight were freed before the Civil War, and six were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation; eight were born in the North and sixteen in the South. Their names are Annie Louise Burton, Anna Julia Cooper, Fanny Jackson Coppin, Cornelia, Ellen Craft, Silvia Dubois, Elleanor Eldridge, Elizabeth, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Elizabeth Keckley, Lucy Craft Laney, Jarena Lee, Louisa Picquet, Ann Plato, Nancy Prince, Sarah Parker Remond, Amanda Berry Smith, Maria Stewart, Susie King Taylor, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells-Barnett, and Fannie Barrier Williams.

FROM THE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

1. To promise dissemination of quality research 2. To facilitate academic exchanges between faculty and students of TESOL/Applied Linguistics and members of the profession worldwide.