Understanding Multiple Group Identities: Inserting Women into Cultural Transformations

The study of cultural transformations in the United States has been studied predominantly from an assimilation/ acculturation framework. There are several drawbacks to this theoretical perspective, chief among them being the exclusion of gender in examining what happens to different ethnic/racial groups when they come into contact. Feminist writings in the last twenty years provide a rich discussion of how inserting women into this social process would enrich our knowledge about human behavior in general and cultural change specifically. This paper reviews the literature on the assimilation/acculturation framework and integrates the most recent developments in feminist theory to provide a new altemative to studying cultural transformations. The social engagement model takes into account gender as well as other significant social identities like ethnicity/race, class, and sexuality to study how groups change as they come into contact with each other. "What happens 'when peoples meet,' as the phrase goes? Such meetings in the modem world are likely to take place under a variety of circumstances: colonial conquest, military conquest, military occupation, redrawing of national boundaries to include diverse ethnic groups, large-scale trade and missionary activity, technical assistance to underdeveloped countries, displacement of an aboriginal population, and voluntary immigration which increases the ethnic diversity of a host country, ln the American continental experience, the last two types have been the decisive ones" (Gordon, 1964, p. 60). Gordon (1964) indicates that "sociologists and cultural anthropologists have described the processes and results of ethnic 'meetings' under such terms as 'assimilation' and 'acculturation,'" terms that many times have been used interchangeably. In the United States the "ethnic meetings" have resulted in cultural transformations