I'm a high school teacher. A student of mine is writing a paper arguing that the "standard narrative" of women in the workplace -- that the labor needs of WWII brought women in and changed cultural mores about their participation -- overlooks the experiences of black women, who had been working outside the home in large numbers since Reconstruction.
She'd like to talk about the problem of "normalizing" the experiences of white women, by which she means assuming that white experience is the "default" or "normal" experience, such that the story of white women becomes in popular understanding the story of women as a whole. I am trying to help her by locating sources that will discuss that issue, but I don't know where to look, and "normalize" doesn't seem to be the right term for this sort of discussion.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center would be an excellent place to start. It's definitely readable from an advanced high school perspective and a great intoduction to feminist thought in general, with strong attention to race and class.
Your student will in general probably do best by looking for womanist and black feminist perspectives, either theorists criticizing white/mainstream feminism (especially Friedan's Feminine Mystique) or outright historians. "Normative" will probably get her farther as a search term than "normalize."
What a neat student with a neat topic. :)
Wow. Thank you all enormously, for two things. First, between /r/askhistorians and /r/asksocialscience, I have a wealth of resources that are spot on. I'm grabbing chapter 1, "Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory" from bell hooks's Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, chapter 1 from Richard Dyer's "The Matter of Whiteness," Kimberly Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex," and "The Black Women's Manifesto" as a historical primary source.
Second, the warm encouragement in these comments will be great for her to hear, and I will pass it along to her.