Empowering prevention? Adolescent female sexuality, advocacy and schooling

Empowering Prevention examines how adult female educators working within the umbrella of pregnancy prevention services at an urban school district struggled to provide access to services and sexuality education for all young people in their district. This project analyzed interviews with students, teachers and administrators, sexual health curriculum and other institutional documents, and fieldwork across three sites--a school based health clinic, a high school sex education class, and daycare center for student parents--to examine how advocates made sense of their work, students\u27 needs, and their advocacy for inclusive and comprehensive sexual health services. Empowering Prevention argues that advocating for young people\u27s sexual health rights was complicated and more than a function of an individual\u27s good intentions. In this fairly comprehensive setting, even educators/advocates who felt they had great freedom to support the sexual health rights of young women could not successfully shape empowering educational contexts for all young women. The discourses of education and adolescent female sexuality framing their advocacy structured their support in ways that often undermined and subverted their intentions. In the end, I argue that the progressive policies and curriculum associated with sexuality education and pregnancy prevention efforts at Eastman School District worked not only to mask, but uphold institutionalized racism, sexism and heterosexism, despite advocates\u27 intentions to do otherwise. Increased access to services, information, and critical analysis skills for students, and enhanced collaboration and opportunities for critical analysis and planning for educators are important to facilitating more inclusive sexual health environments for youth

Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Perceptions of Fairness

In this article we examine the determinants of Black, Hispanic, and Anglo women\u27s and men\u27s views of the fairness of the division of housework. Using the 1987-1988 National Survey of Families and Households, we find that men\u27s proportional share of time spent on female-typed tasks affects both women\u27s and men\u27s views of how fairly housework is divided, although the effect is stronger for women. The frequency of arguments about housework also is positively associated with perceptions of fairness for both women and men, again with a stronger effect for women. Moreover, Black men are less likely to report that housework is divided unfairly than are Anglo men, suggesting that reference group comparisons among men by race and ethnicity may affect perceptions of family entitlement