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 alternative 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.