In six pages this paper examines women's issues in a comparison and contrasting of Molly Ladd Taylor and Lauri Umansky's edited text 'Bad' Mothers: The Politics of Blame in the Twentieth Century America and Leora Tanenbaum's Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation. Three sources are cited in the bibliography.
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in the Twentieth Century America are obviously on different aspects of female sexuality, yet the texts are oddly parallel. Tanenbaum (2000) explores the ramifications to the psyche of a woman
to be labeled as a "slut." Likewise, editors Ladd-Taylor and Umansky (1998) have chosen essays that reflect the repercussions of being labeled as a "bad" mother. In both cases,
women are socially isolated, judged and punished more for threatening the perceived status quo than for any other action. While women in the US are more fortunate than their
Muslim sisters, who can be legally beaten and murdered for the appearance of sexual impropriety, Tanenbaum (2000) makes the point that American women are still punished for being overtly
sexual or for threatening the male-dominated status quo. For example, when New Mexico reporter Tama Stieber filed a sex discrimination lawsuit against her newspaper for paying her less than
men in similar positions, defense attorneys called her former lover to the stand to ask him how often theyd had intercourse (Tanenbaum, 2000). As this indicates, it seems in American
culture that when any woman "rocks the boat" for any reason, the first area of attack is not on the facts of the case, but rather on her sexuality. As
Tanenbaum points out, "Even today a common way to damage a womans credibility is to call her a slut" (2000, p. 2). In many ways, the two volumes parallel each
other. They each offer an historical look at how their particular topic has evolved over time, although each text concentrates on the twentieth century. While Ladd-Taylor and Umansky readily admit
that readily admit that some women do not make good mothers, they also argue that in the twentieth century the appellation of "bad mother" has been applied to far more