Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper explains how a free-trade agenda survived a wave of protectionist sentiments in the early 1970s in the United States. I argue that internationalists maintained the liberal agenda by establishing new institutional arrangements which constrained the political influence of protectionist industries. While the argument follows a historical institutionalist logic, it attempts to use the case-study to offer a new conceptualization of the nature of institutions by considering the interaction between political actors and institutions as embodied not only in the political actors, but also in the institutions themselves, and by considering temporality while analyzing the impacts of such interactions. Three arguments follow. First, institutions are the solidified reflection of the balance of social forces at the moment of their creation. This implies that the uneven distribution of benefits across social groups by institutions is an intended outcome of those who had designed the institutions. Second, the causal effectiveness of institutions is not a result of their independence from social forces as much as their ability to intensify relations of power or to reflect a balance of social forces that no longer exists. Third, unanticipated effects within given institutional arrangements are not the outcome of “unintended consequences” but of intended strategies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: As the feminist movement gained exposure in the late 1960s and early 1970s, television searched for ways to capitalize on women’s liberation while making it palatable to advertisers and mainstream tastes. Though often overlooked, television shows of this era that dealt with the trials and tribulations of teenage girls were no exception. Just as That Girl and The Mary Tyler Moore Show addressed how assertive and independent middle-class women could be, shows starring teenagers explored what it meant for teenage girls to be “liberated.”

In this paper, I examine the ways that two popular television series, The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family, intertwined ideas about the new, feminist womanhood with notions of traditional femininity. Specifically, I explore how two plot themes—the battle of the sexes and the public protest—were used in these series to tap into changing ideas about gender roles and gender politics while containing the threat posed by those changes. In the battle of the sexes and protest narratives, teenage girls appear every bit as mentally and physically capable as their male counterparts, but their strict adherence to beauty culture and heterosexual dating norms undermines their ability to achieve equality with boys. In the end, the threat of liberation rendering girls socially and sexually undesirable leads them to embrace a tenuous, middle ground between the new feminism and traditional femininity.

I conclude with a discussion of how discourses in ’Teen and Seventeen magazines from the late 1960s and early 1970s further encouraged girls to strike a compromise between feminist ambitions and the ideals of feminine beauty. Ultimately, teen television shows and teen magazines’ struggle over how to represent girls during the era of liberation can be seen in relation to tensions in the culture at the time, including struggles to define feminism and feminist goals as well as debates about girls’ and women’s place in public and private spheres.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Using both the Bettina Aptheker Archive (housed in Special Collections at the University of California, Santa Cruz) and other related archival and secondary sources this paper will begin to interrogate the rhetoric of illegitimacy and ridicule, and the methods of intimidation that were used to marginalize, silence, and/or expel gay and lesbian members of the U.S. Communist Party between the 1940s and 1970s. The paper will also begin a discussion of the struggles of gay and lesbian comrades for acceptance within the Party, and the ways in which they attempted to introduce a Marxist perspective on the political and theoretical connections between women’s liberation and the gay and lesbian liberation movements.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: To what extent do mass opinion and traditions shape economic policy? This paper provides an alternative to approaches which attribute large-scale policy changes to exogenous shocks or elite-driven socialization. Such frameworks fail to recognize that even major crises must be interpreted in a social context, and that interpretive struggles over their meanings cannot be confined to the purview of elite academic scribblers. Instead, socialization is better seen as occurring along a two way street, as mass-based varieties of liberalism and elite-based paradigms are synthesized in ways that promote stability or as normative dissonance between them increases spur the construction of crises. In this paper, developing notions of normative dissonance more fully, I examine Carter administration constructions of the late 1970s stagflation, suggesting that the failure of Carter attempts at establishing an incomes policy to stabilize wages, prices, and the dollar, reflected the building tensions between a mass libertarianism and the egalitarian or communitarian sense of the common interest necessary to wage-price accord.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This article uses data from the 1973-2006 General Social Survey to assess the interactive impact of race and gender on respondents’ reported levels of marital happiness over a four-decade period. Findings indicate that race and gender each continue to have independent and statistically significant effects on our dependent variable, with white and male respondents reporting greater levels of marital happiness than their black and female counterparts. Comparing responses of four subgroups (white males, white females, black males and black females), results indicate that white male respondents report the highest levels of marital happiness, whereas black females report the lowest. The findings suggest that race has a more potent effect on marital happiness than gender, with black males and females consistently reporting lower levels of marital happiness than white males and females. Assessing trends from the early 1970s to the mid 2000s, however, revealed a convergence in marital happiness among the four groups; although white males continue to report greater levels of marital happiness. These findings are discussed in the historical context of the family and broader societal changes.