10 The War on Women in the United States (Kim, 2001). Similarly, girls’ education in the United States has been infl u- enced by notions of empowerment that have fueled the proliferation of girls- only spaces in high schools and after-school programs. These programs use creativity, the arts, and community service to facilitate the sometimes radical voices of girls and young women and to present new possibilities for the role that those voices can play in overcoming societal stereotypes about gender, sexuality, power, and leadership (Edell, 2013 Lazarre-White, in press). Another example of girls’ empowerment in educational spaces in the United States is the growth of girls’ sports participation and sports teams over the past several decades. At the turn of the 20th century, girls’ sports teams in high schools and colleges were virtually nonexistent. However, in parallel with the expansion of women’s sports program, bolstered in part by the passing of Title IX in 1972, which prohibited sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions, the idea of the “female athlete” and indeed the very notion of the “strong woman” were transformed. The im- pact of such trends on women’s rights in the United States should not be overlooked: Organized sports have provided girls and young women with a space to express and exhibit traditionally masculine traits such as competi- tiveness and overt goal-directed behavior. These changes additionally have transformed our cultural understanding of what it means to be a girl, to be an athlete, and to value the female body for its physical strength and not just for its physical appearance. These notions in turn will likely have a signifi - cant impact on girls’ ideas about what they achieve through their strength and through striving against challenges. HISTORICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL CHALLENGES CONFRONTING THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT While the history of oppression and resistance in the United States has been infl uenced by such institutions as organized religion and education, we can look more broadly at trends that have shaped the women’s movement in this country through an analysis of ideologies that have over time trans- formed the lives of American women. The ideological context functions to defi ne and structure a country’s hierarchy of importance by prescribing roles of varying worth to different groups and populations such that people who belong to one group can be seen to matter more than people who belong to another group. In turn, additional roles and identities that are associated with undervalued groups come to matter less and less over time, resulting in a progressive devaluation of the people themselves—by others and, often, by group members themselves, as is the case with internalized racism and internalized homophobia (Jones, 2000 Newcomb & Mustanksi, 2010). It is imperative that we understand the workings of these dominant ideologies
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