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DOI: 10.1111/1471-6402.t01-2-00010_4
2003 27: 83 Psychology of Women Quarterly
Bernice Lott
Resurrecting an Old and Troubling Construct

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by Pepe Portillo on August 5, 2014 pwq.sagepub.com Downloaded from by Pepe Portillo on August 5, 2014 pwq.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Reviews 83
websites in the public domain. I encountered expired and out-
dated URLs when I searched for the websites cited, although in
most cases the organizations do have websites that were easy to
find. As noted above, there are times when the websites cited
do not appear to be feminist at all. For example, on page 90,
Wood refers the reader to the National Organization for Men
Against Sexism, an organization which is profeminist, gay af-
firmative, and antiracist, but instead of giving their website
www.NOMAS.org, she cites http://sh.lh.vix.com/throop/men/
orgs/writeups/nomas.html. This website has addresses to vari-
ous mens organizations, and links to mens issues web links,
which are supported by David R. Throop. Among these web
links (created and maintained by Throop) are http://sh.lh.vix.com/
throop/men/child-support/issues.html (retrieved on 5/11/02)
which appears to lobby against child support legislation. There
are also links to essays and resources by Throop on what to do
about false accusations of child abuse (see http://sh.lh.vix.com/
throop/men/falsereport/index.html, retrieved on 5/11/02) and
contact information for the False Memory Syndrome Founda-
tion, among others. The use of these websites leads me to ques-
tion whether Wood personally researched the sites or whether the
content changed drastically.
The author intended to provide an overview of the complex
area of gendered communications in the United States; unfortu-
nately, her aim was too broad and the message diluted through
overgeneralizations, simplifications, and inaccuracies regarding
complex areas of psychology and society.
REFERENCE
Russell, D. E. H. (1982). Rape in marriage. NewYork: Macmillan.
Cynthia de las Fuentes is an Associate Professor at Our Lady of the Lake
University in San Antonio, Texas. Her main areas of scholarship include
the intersection between race, culture, and ethnicity, with the study of
gender and feminist psychologies.
RESURRECTING AN OLD
AND TROUBLING CONSTRUCT
Through My Own Eyes: Single Mothers and the Cultures of
Poverty, SUSAN D. HOLLOWAY, BRUCE FULLER,
MARYLEE F. RAMBAUD, AND COSTANZA
EGGERS-PIEROLA. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1997. 245 pp., $18.95 (paper), ISBN0-674-
00180-X.
I was eager to read this report of newwork that brings the voices of
poor mothers themselves to the forefront as politicians and policy
formulators continue to ignore them in the rush to reduce and
eliminate public assistance. The authors intend to shed empirical
light on what happens inside impoverished households (p. 2).
And, indeed, the experiences and beliefs of the 14 Boston-area
women who are the focus of this book are well presented by the
research team to illustrate the richness, complexity, and diversity
of their lives.
When the research began, each woman was the mother of
at least one child under age five, had received AFDC benefits
for less than two years, and all but one had returned to work or
school. Four of the women were Latina, four were Anglo, and six
were African American. Each was formally interviewed at least
three times over the course of three years (19911994), with sup-
plemental information obtained from informal conversations and
visits in the homes and workplaces.
The interview protocols were treated to a form of grounded
theory analysis to identify major themes, around which the book
is organized. The reader learns how these mothers approached
child behavior issues and child rearing, their beliefs about disci-
pline and obedience, and models of education, and how childcare
and welfare supports were negotiated. The women are presented
in the detailed context of their own family, experiential, and eth-
nic background. This enhances the readers understanding of how
some of their ideas about family and work have developed, and the
variety of different skills eachwomanusedto deal withthe realities
of single motherhood in depressed, often violent, neighborhoods
with a minimum of resources.
These strengths, however, are undermined, in this reviewers
opinion, by the authors determination to place their work in the
dubious theoretical framework of cultures of poverty. They claim
to eschew the old culture of poverty ideas of Oscar Lewis and
others, who viewed poor people as stuck in poverty because of
their own limitations of vision, motivation, attitudes, and values
presumed to be transmitted from generation to generation. The
authors note that such thinking led us to concepts like cultural
deprivation, disadvantage, and an underclass, and to identi-
fying poor children as at risk. Yet, they reintroduce some of the
same problematic analysis in presenting their cultures of poverty
framework, focusing on deep-seated motivations and scripted be-
haviors (p. 8) while giving considerably less attention to the struc-
tural underpinnings of poverty. They urge the reader to see each
of the 14 women as part of a culture that influences her beliefs
and behavior, a laudable objective. Of course, past experiences
in the context of current circumstances help us to understand
what people think and do, but labeling the complex array of such
factors as cultures of poverty undermines the authors own data
and encourages narrowinterpretations that evoke stereotypes and
discredited myths, although these are not the authors intentions.
The authors indicate that they intended to reduce the tendency
for the nonpoor to see the poor as strangers who are very dif-
ferent from themselves. But while the material they present is
very effective in doing this, their cultures of poverty framework
does the opposite. All of us have a history of family and ethnic-
ity and other significant social groups (namely, culture) and all of
us function in a present context with particular stresses, barriers,
skills, resources, problems, needs, etc. The interaction between
the two is the complex stuff that influences behavior and makes
prediction so difficult. What distinguishes the present circum-
stances of poor mothers like those studied by the authors is a host
of factors over which they have little control. These factors are
produced and maintained by educational inequities, economic in-
justice (secondary labor market jobs of inadequate wages and no
advancement), and societal hostility, discrimination, and disregard
that ignores the consequences to people, families, and communi-
ties of inadequate access to health care, political influence, hous-
ing, and safe and attractive neighborhoods.
Efforts to place the lives of poor women in context have been
made by social scientists and journalists such as Dodson (1998),
Edin and Lein (1997), Newman (1999), Polakow (1993), Schein
(1995), and others. And Heather Bullock and I recently edited a
by Pepe Portillo on August 5, 2014 pwq.sagepub.com Downloaded from
84 REVIEWS
Journal of Social Issues volume entitled Listening to the Voices of
Poor Women (Lott &Bullock, 2001). Inthese reports, readers can
find important relevant work to supplement that of Holloway et al.
The valuable data in the book reviewed here reveal details of the
lives of a small sample of women who were pushing hard, despite
stark financial constraints, to achieve a better life, hold down a job,
andcare for their children (p. 11). As the authors note, anessential
lesson learned from their research is the variation among these
women in background and circumstances. Another lesson is the
concern they have to teach their children how to be resilient and
efficacious (p. 216), a concern shared with middle-class mothers.
Most of the women studied, the authors tell us, were the very
embodiment of traditional American values (p. 226).
Hopefully the new research attention being given to the poor
in the United States will be accompanied by strong advocacy for
public policy in the interests of economic justice. Resurrecting a
culture of poverty framework in the form of many such compet-
ing cultures does not seem to be a useful step in this direction.
REFERENCES
Dodson, L. (1998). Dont call us out of name: The untold lives of
women and girls in poor America. Boston: Beacon.
Edin, K., & Lein, L. (1997). Making ends meet: How single moth-
ers survive welfare and low-wage work. New York: Russell
Sage Foundation.
Lott, B., & Bullock, H. E. (Eds.) (2001). Listening to the voices
of poor women. Journal of Social Issues, 57(2).
Newman, K. S. (1999). No shame in my game: The working poor
in the inner city. New York: Knopf.
Polakow, V. (1993). Lives on edge: Single mothers and their chil-
dren in the other America. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Schein, V. E. (1995). Working from the margins: Voices of
mothers in poverty. Ithaca, NY: ILR.
Bernice Lott is Professor Emerita of Psychology and Womens Studies at
the University of Rhode Island. She received her universitys Excellence
Award for scholarly achievement, served as president of APAs Division
35, and has been honored for scholarly, publication, teaching, and social
policy contributions by APAs Committee on Women, Division 35 (the
Sherif Award), and the Association for Women in Psychology. She is the
author of numerous theoretical and empirical articles, chapters, and books
in the areas of social learning, gender, and social issues and is a Fellow of
APAand of Divisions 1, 8, 9, and 35. Her areas of interest are interpersonal
discrimination; the intersections among gender, ethnicity, and social class;
the social psychology of poverty; and multicultural issues. In 1999, the
University of Rhode Island awarded her an honorary degree, Doctor of
Humane Letters.
GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS: BEYOND
THE STRAIGHTJACKET OF FEMININITY
The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really DoSex
Play, Aggression, and Their Guilt, SHARON LAMB.
NewYork: The Free Press, 2002. 272 pp., $24.00, (hard-
cover), ISBN 0-7432-0107-8.
The Secret Lives of Girls is a timely and provocative foray into the
opensecret of girls sexual play andaggression. Basedoninterviews
with 122 women and girls from across the United States, Sharon
Lambretells numerous stories of sex play as well as meanness, mis-
chievousness, and aggression. Few are shocking, but collectively
they disrupt the stifling smugness of both feminist and nonfem-
inist commonsense portrayals of girls. As we always suspected,
even if we were good girls, we were a lot more interesting and
less one-dimensional than we were made to appear.
Lambs message is clear. We need to actively resist two of
the strongest prohibitions for girls todaythose against sex and
aggression. As the title of her concluding chapter suggests, she
wants us to welcome sex, power, and aggression in the lives of
girls. On many fronts, for different reasons, this call might sound
heretical. But Lamb does a good job of arguing why it is so impor-
tant. For example, she maintains that unless we respondmore con-
structively and positively to girls sexual play and their engagement
with their own bodies, we teach them to become ready-made for
adult sexual relations with men that privilege androcentric norms
of sexuality and relegate womens sexual desires and pleasures to
second-place. We might also help to nurture lifetimes of shame
and guilt.
Both a strength and a weakness of the book is that it is crafted
for a popular audience. For the academic reader, this makes for
some frustrations, where stylistic conventions for a good read fly
in the face of the kind of excruciating nuance and qualifications to
our claims that perhaps make for a more intellectually satisfying
journey. With that caveat noted, however, this is nevertheless a
book that delivers in straightforward terms an original and cutting
edge thesis. That Lamb takes advantage of this popular format is
also good news for a feminist social change agenda. This is the
kind of book, I suspect, that will make a difference; it has caused
me to reflect more on the dilemmas of how to respond to the
young girls in my life when they talk, act, and display their bodies
in ways that I feel obliged to reign in, because I know they will
not be tolerated in public as they grow up. As Lamb argues, the
challenge is to respond in ways that do not distance them from
their own bodies, pleasures, desires, power, and agency.
Although Lamb basks for a while in the glory of girl-power, she
certainly doesnt pretend that this is the only truth, nor deny the
ways in which gendered power can enter girls lives in destructive
ways. While challenging some of our newfeminist orthodoxies, her
feminist agenda is always clear and strong. Brave in her suggestion
that, ironically, we live in an era during which it is easier for
women to tell each other about their sexual victimization than
their sexual delights (p. 121), Lamb does not ignore the reality of
childhood sexual abuse and exploitation, nor does she paper over
the important differences in girls lives depending on social class
and race/ethnicity.
The book chips away wonderfully at gender essentialism, but
there does remain an irksome (to me) implicit reference to some
underlying naturalized sexuality and aggressiveness, as simply
part of life. For instance, I am not particularly comfortable with
the claim that girls (and boys) are deeply sexual (p. 9) creatures.
I dont even like the concept of childrens sexuality, because I
think the term incorporates too much inappropriate conceptual
freight. It implies something about the sensations, emotions, and
desires that accompany sexual behavior or behavior that mimics
sexuality. And I would suggest that these other aspects of experi-
ence that turn sexual play into sexuality are not always a part of
young childrens curiosity-driven behavior. When a 5-year-old girl
approaches her mother with a wide-open mouth and begs her to
kiss her like an adult, is this sexuality any more than her loving
attentiveness to her dolls is motherhood? If were not careful
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