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History in the Making

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Ideologies surrounding gender and sexuality have shifted drastically within the past several decades as cultural perspectives broaden to be more inclusive of individuals belonging to communities, all with unique lived experiences. Recent discourses around womanhood and who is considered as “woman enough” have caused intercommunal tensions between White women, women of color, and LGBT+ women. This essay will explore how the rhetoric around who is and who is not a ‘real’ woman has remained the same but not which groups it has targeted, as well as examine the history of the conditional nature of womanhood from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Beginning with Indigenous American women, who have had their traditionally respected status as women stripped from them, and Black women, who have had to fight for their humanity since the nation’s “founding”, the concept of womanhood has been weaponized to exclude women of color. Since the 1960s when LGBT+ people began to fight for recognition, transgender women have had to prove their womanhood and fight on all sides against the narrative of who was allowed to be a woman.

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