Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture
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historical events:
Fever
(1989) described yellow fever in eighteenth-century Philadelphia,
while
Philadelphia Fire
(1990) touched on the aftermath of the 1984 police bombing o
f
the MOVE cult in West Philadelphia.
ROBERT GREGG
Wiesel, Elie
b. 1928
Émigré Jewish author, activist and historical consciousness. Born in Romania, both his
parents were killed in Auschwitz. His works, fiction, memoirs and non-fiction, have
p
oignantly explored the Holocaust and the Jewish experience. Wiesel became an
American citizen in 1963 and chaired the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. He
received the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1985 and the
Nobel
Peace Prize in 1986
for his work in promoting human rights. The next year he established the Elie Wiesel
Foundation for Humanity.
CINDY WONG
Wilder, Billy
b. 1906
Director and screenwriter. Nazis forced Wilder to abandon his native Austria in 1933.
In the US, he became a remarkably insightful auteur into American relationships. His
career as
director
and collaborative screenwriter included classics in noir (
D
ouble
I
ndemnity,
1944), gender farce (
Some Like it Hot,
1959) and savage depictions of media
frenzies
(The Big Carnival,
1951). In
Lost Weekend
(Oscar, 1945), Wilder also won
Oscars for directing and shared screenwriting, a feat repeated with the
The Apartment
(1961). He shared another screenwriting Oscar for his
Sunset Boulevard
(1950), a
haunting portrait of lost
Hollywood
.
GARY McDONOGH
wilderness
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 1216
s
ee
environmentalism; frontier; nature; parks, national and state
Williams, Hank
b. 1923; d. 1953
Hank Williams became a legendary
country music
star. Born in Montgomery
Alabama, he began a meteoric career after a spectacular Grand Old Opry debut in 1949.
Fame and fortune complicated Williams’ troubled personal life. He died at age thirty of a
combination of alcohol and drugs, in the back seat of his famous pink Cadillac during an
overnight road trip. An inspiration for numerous singer/writers, including Elvis
Presley,
Williams left behind some of the best-known and loved songs in all of country music,
including “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “Lovesick Blues.”
KENT BLASER
Williams, Tennessee (Thomas)
b. 1911; d. 1988
Powerful playwright whose works explored and exploded myths of the
South
. His
highly personal and poetic dramas are imbued with sensuality guilt, decay illusion and
the power of love. Works such as
The Glass Menagerie
(1945), the
Pulitzer
Prizewinning A Streetcar named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (l954) have
become staples of global as well as American theater (see Almodovar’s All About My
M
other, 1999). These, and other plays, have also been made into powerful movie and
television presentations, bringing Williams’ images and speeches into a wider public
realm of referēce. Williams’ life and work have also been influential in defining gay
expression in contemporary America.
GARY McDONOGH
CINDY WONG
Wilson, August
b. 1945
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Pittsburgh-
born
African American
playwright and winner of the
Pulitzer Prize
for
Drama in 1987 and 1990. Wilson’s plays often stem from impressions formed growing
up during the 1950s and 1960s in the city’s black community known as “The Hill.” In
Ma
R
aine
y
’s Black Bottom
(1985),
Two Trains Running
(1993) and
The Piano Lesson
(1990), Wilson builds dramas on the words and dreams of
working-class
African
Americans. Recently, Wilson has become embroiled in debate over the representation o
f
African Americans in theater. His manifesto for black artists in the American theater
argues that it is the responsibility of theaters to endeavor to understand the culture of non-
Europeans, rather than that of non-white artists to transform and compromise their work
for white audiences.
ROBERT GREGG
Wilson, Edmund
b. 1895; d. 1972
Poet, novelist, journalist and cultural and political essayist, Wilson was one of the most
p
rodigious writers of the twentieth century After attending Princeton University and
serving in the First World War, he became a theater critic, a book editor for
The New
R
epublic
and cultural critic for
The New Yorker
. During the Depression, he made his
name publishing essays such as those found in
The American Jitters,
which, influenced
by post-Second World War anti
-communism,
he edited and republished as
The American
E
arthquake
. His widely acclaimed history of European revolutions,
To the Finlan
d
Station
(1940), highlighted a shift among many American leftists away from socialism to
a more pragmatic liberalism, and shaped much of the discussion of Marxism among
American intellectuals for about thirty years.
ROBERT GREGG
Wilson, Pete
b. 1933
Elected
governor
of
California
in 1990 and reelected in 1994, Wilson supported
tough
welfare reform
and anti-crime measures. He gained national attention in 1994
with his backing of Proposition 187, a California referendum approved by the state’s
voters that prohibited illegal immigrants from receiving public education and other social
services. Wilson also opposed
affirmative action
. He supported a successful 1996
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California initiative, Proposition 209, that banned racial and gender preferences in state
and local public programs, including college admissions. Wilson was mayor of
San
Diego
from 1971 until 1983, when he became a United States senator.
JAMES DEVITT
Wilson, Robert
b. 1941
Trained in painting and architecture, Robert Wilson has become a pre-eminent theater
artist whose visionary stagings of standard and original work has transformed both
scenography and directorial technique. He is best known for the groundbreaking
Einstein
on the Beach,
a collaboration with composer Philip Glass and choreographer Lucinda
Childs, first performed in 1976. This nonlinear, abstract 4–5 hour musing on the scientist
was stark, abstract and pictorial: Wilson used graphical, architectural and multiple
p
erforming arts. Resoundingly multimedia, Wilson has staged operas in Europe and has
collaborated with artists such as Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsburg and Red Grooms. He has
worked again with Glass on
Monsters of Grace
(1998), based on the works of the
fourteenth century Sufi poet Rumi.
EDWARD MILLER
wine
s
ee
alcohol
Winfrey, Oprah
b. 1954
Through her
talk show,
syndicated since 1986, and her active production company
Winfrey has become one of the most influential and wealthy
African Americans
in
history with a power to make media as well as appear in them. Her gender, aggressive yet
intimate style as an interviewer and her ability to shape middle-class tastes through her
p
rogram and book club, while surviving tabloid reports on her loves and diet, make this
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more remarkable. Although nominated for an Oscar for
The Color Purple
(1985) her later
acting career proved less striking;
Beloved
(1998) was a confusing failure for Toni
Morrison’s
novel.
GARY McDONOGH
Wise Use movement
An ideological consortium that opposes federal authority over rural public lands. Most
adherents reside in the far
West,
where the federal government exercises substantial
ownership and control of public land. Wise Use proponents are an offshoot of the larger
Patriot anti-government movement. Specifically their activists support the return o
f
federal land to individuals and local governments and an end to most environmental and
rural zoning regulations.
BRIAN LEVIN
witchcraft (Wicca)
In late twentieth-century America this referred primarily to a postwar religious
movement, also known as Wicca, or The Craft.
Wicca
is said to derive from Anglo-Saxon
wicce
meaning “wise” or alternatively “to bend,” although its actual provenance is
unknown. Modern witches worship both male and female deities, often represented by
the Horned God and the Triple Goddess (Maiden, Mother and Crone). Major holidays
occur at regular points in the year: February 2 (Imbolc); Spring Equinox; May 1
(Beltane); Summer Solstice; August 2 (Lammas or Lughnasa); October 31 (Samhain);
and Winter Solstice. In addition, many witches also celebrate the new and full moons.
Modern witchcraft is a nature religion in the sense that all nature is considered to be
sacred.
Wicca developed in Great Britain in the 1950s, and its earliest practitioners claimed its
beliefs and rituals were the survivals of pre-Christian agricultural religions of Northern
and Western Europe. While in Britain, Wicca has developed as a predominantly nativist
movement maintaining an emphasis on its British cultural roots, in the US its growth
since the 1970s has been strongly influenced by left-wing social movements,
environmentalism and feminism. In the 1970s the traditional image of the witch as a
marginalized yet wise and powerful figure was “reclaimed”
b
y feminists. Furthermore, a
religion which emphasized a female deity and had women in positions of power was
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naturally attractive to feminists. This combination of religion and politics gave rise to a
feminist witchcraft, which by the 1980s and 1990s was becoming incorporated into the
wider “Goddess Movement.”
As modern witchcraft becomes more high profile in the United States, more witches
are working to ensure that their practices and beliefs are accepted as valid religious
expression. Organizations such as the Witches Anti Discrimination League have been
founded to ensure that witches receive full freedom of religious expression under United
States Law. Salem, Massachusetts, where the infamous witch trials of 1692 took place
during which twenty people were executed, is now home to a thriving community o
f
modern witches.
AMY HALE
Wolfe, Tom
b. 1931
Wolfe came into prominence in the 1960s as a young, particularly passionate exponent
of the
“New Journalism
.
”
In 1972 Wolfe wrote a now-famous piece for
N
ew Yor
k
magazine propounding New Journalistic principles and declaring the traditional novel
dead. Ironically Wolfe would later write a bestselling novel on yuppie New York,
Bonfire
of the Vanities
(1987). Often writing in a coolly detached voice, Wolfe’s singular genius
has been to capture the spirit of a time or place in a single work (
The Electric Kool-Ai
d
A
cid Test,
1968) or even a phrase, such as the term “radical chic” to describe the romance
between well-heeled liberals and militant revolutionaries in the late 1960s and early
1970s. A number of Wolfe’s books have become
Hollywood
movies, including
Bonfire
and
The Right Stuff
(1994), exploring the first generation of American astronauts.
MARK BREWIN
women and film-making
Hollywood
has long lavished attention on female
stars
and sex goddesses. Marketing
strategies have simultaneously targeted the female consumer by narrative, genre or other
intertextual appeals. This entry explores instead the women behind the camera. Here,
women achieved some early success in fields such as editing and also took on
stereotypically “feminine” tasks (interior design, costume, etc.) as well as clerical roles.
Women in various guises have also been deeply involved in writing scripts, although
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often in subordinate roles. A 1980 survey by the Directors Guild of America, however,
listed only fourteen features directed by women out of 7,332. The picture has changed
somewhat in subsequent years with directors like Barbra
Streisand,
Penny Marshall,
Susan Seidelman, Jodie
Foster,
Julie Dash, Kathryn Bigelow, Martha Coolidge, Nora
Ephron, Amy Heckerling and Sondra Locke. Besides women
directors
for feature films,
women have been independent directors, producers and animators. Yet, this remains a
male-dominated world where even the enrollment in film schools has stood at a 2:1 ratio
for a long time. Hence, since 1972, the American Film Institute has set up Directing
Workshop for Women, whose alumni include Maya
Angelou
and Randa Haines, a token
gesture to increase the representation of women in directing.
While women’s films through the history of Hollywood have sometimes presented
women with their own agencies and contradictions, the history of women directors
suggests common threads and diverse contributions—and how this relates to images on
screens and beyond them.
In the formative year of movies, when movies were smaller businesses, women were
actually important players. Alice Guy Blache (1875–1968) ran Solax Studio in Fort Lee,
New Jersey Lois Weber (1882–1939), a top-salaried director of the silent era, made
social-realist films, with subjects ranging from prostitution to capital punishment. With
the transition to sound, Dorothy Arzner (1900–79) was the only woman working in the
male-dominated Hollywood mainstream. She made seventeen films between 1927 and
1943. Her heroines were strong working women, and female relationships and bonding
were recurring themes in her movies. Ida Lupino, first an actor in noir films in the 1940s,
formed her own company and directed six films for it between 1949 and 1954. The route
from actor to director has proven a common path.
Breaking into the all-male Hollywood proved even harder for women of color trying to
break into feature film-making. In 1989 Martinican Euzhan Palcy became the first black
woman to direct a Hollywood film—
A Dry White Season
. Christine Choy, an Asian
American film-maker, is known for her political documentaries. Julie
Dash’s
D
aughters
of the Dust
was a critical success, but it had taken her years to complete—and fund—this
period piece about a Gullah family in South Carolina.
While Hollywood poses a great barrier to women directors, women directors have
accomplished a great deal as independent and avantgarde film-makers. Maya Deren
(1917–61) was the first to receive a Guggenheim grant to engage in motion picture. She
saw her films as poetry not prose. Yvonne Rainer has made films that challenge the
notion of the female gaze in Hollywood films. Toni Cade
Bambara
combined literature
with film and community activism. Lesbian film-makers have also combined activist
explorations with a growing screen presence.
Yet the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies list released and voted on in 1998 does not
include a single feature movie directed by a woman. These movies were chosen from a
list of 400, including only five films directed by women, all produced between 1986 and
1993. While
Prince of Tides
was nominated for Best Picture at the 1991 Oscars, the Best
Director nomination eluded even Barbra
Streisand
. Hence, the struggle and recognition
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 1222
accorded to women behind the camera comments on the gains and limits of gender and
equality in the late twentieth century.
Further reading
Acker, A. (1991)
Reel Women,
New York: Continuum.
CINDY WONG
women in politics
Women have influenced and participated in American politics as voters, symbols,
activists, campaigners and elected officials. Since the Second World War, women have
b
roadened the definition of political work, though they did not begin winning numerous
electoral contests until the 1980s.
The non-
p
artisan League of Women Voters, founded after the ratification of the 19th
Amendment, has long advocated good government and informed voter participation. In
1960 the League began sponsoring its popular televised election-year presidential
debates.
Direct activism in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s around international peace, human
rights, civil rights, education, labor unions, anti-nuclear issues and general environmental
p
rotection brought formative political experience to women, including Fannie Lou
Hamer,
Jessie Lopez De La Cruz and Jane Fonda, who would otherwise have been
excluded from politics. Increasing participation in waged labor politicized many middle-
class women by making systematic wage disparities, open sex discrimination in job
p
lacement and training, and choices in family life and reproduction into political issues.
These economic changes and the reinvigorated
feminism
of the 1960s and 1970s helped
b
ring female experiences to the center of political debates and produced some successful
electoral campaigns by women.
A small early group of elected leaders, including US representatives Bella Abzug and
Shirley
Chisholm
and senators Margaret Chase Smith and Nancy Kassebaum, grew
substantially after 1980. EMILY’s List, an organized fundraising group created in 1985
to elect pro-choice Democratic female candidates, has helped especially to bring high-
level financing to women’s campaigns. Between 1975 and 1995, women went from 4 to
10 percent of the US Congress and from 8 to 21 percent of state legislators.
Beginning with Eleanor
Roosevelt,
who bridged suffrage and feminism in her own
life,
First Ladies
have been lightning rods for cultural debates and have helped to shape
the image of political womanhood. Some worked on timely national issues, for example
Lady Bird Johnson’s tireless efforts at highway beautification and Nancy Reagan’s
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championing of her husband’s “War on Drugs.” Pat Nixon’s very low, and loyal, public
profile in the 1970s enhanced the
Republican
Party’s appeal to what her husband called
the “Silent Majority” of social conservatives. Nixon’s successors, Betty
Ford
and
Rosalyn Carter, acted more independently and were admired for it. Ford encouraged
many to seek help with addiction problems by publicly admitting her own. Carter’s
controversial role as her husband’s advisor set the stage for the even more controversial
1990s White House career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Between
Democrats
Carter and
Clinton, Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush tried to re-establish a more formal role for the
First Lady echoing the growing conservatism of the Republican political platform.
American women, from famous First Ladies to individual activists, have helped define
modern politics as well as influence it, galvanizing voters as well as representing them.
Further reading
Chisholm, S. (1990)
Unbought and Unbossed,
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Jetter, A., Orleck, A. and Taylor, D. (1997)
The Politics of Motherhood,
Hanover:
Dartmouth University Press.
Kunin, M. (1994)
Living a Political Life,
New York: Knopf.
Schneir, M. (ed.) (1994)
Feminism in Our Time,
New York: Vintage.
SHARON ANN HOLT
women’s liberation
Betty
Friedan
inspired this political and cultural movement for women’s rights by
writing
The Feminine Mystique
in 1963. Supporters, calling themselves “feminists,”
borrowed ideas from the
Civil Rights movement
and also pioneered techniques like
consciousness-raising to persuade women that personal experiences had political
significance. While independent, feminist-inspired activity erupted in many arenas o
f
American life, the organized movement itself struggled with a bias towards white,
middle-class women. The defeat of the
Equal Rights Amendment
somewhat obscured
the movement’s success in passing sportsequity legislation, legalizing
abortion,
increasing educational and professional opportunities for women and weakening
fashion
hegemony.
SHARON ANN HOLT
Wonder, Stevie
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 1224
b. 1950
Born Steveland Morris and blind since birth, Stevie Wonder became one of the biggest
artists on the
Motown
label until he terminated this contract in 1971. By the mid-1970s
he was the bestselling American singer/songwriter, with successes like
Talking Boo
k
(1972),
Innervisions
(1973) and
Songs in the Key of Life
(1976). Mastering many
instruments at an early age, he led the way in embracing the new electronic synthesizers
and recording techniques, and often played all the instruments on his records. His songs
have combined different musical traditions—gospel,
blues,
reggae and
rap
—with strong
social commitment, as in the songs “Living for the City” (1973), about a migrant new to
New York City caught up in a drug deal, and “Happy Birthday” (1980), advocating the
nationwide adoption of the Martin Luther
King
holiday.
ROBERT GREGG
Woods, Tiger
b. 1975
Already believed by many to be the greatest player to have played
golf,
regularly
breaking records for lowest scores on the world’s courses, and at the age of twenty-four
becoming the youngest player to win a career Grand Slam—1997 Masters, 1999 PGA
tournament, 2000 US Open, the 2000 British Open (two years earlier than Jack
Nicklaus
achieved this feat). He has brought record numbers of viewers to televised golf, and, as
the son of an
African American
father and a Thai mother, has opened up the sport to
p
reviously excluded or uninterested minorities. Now largely competing against himself,
he sets new goals to achieve: tournaments without making a bogey; the first Grand Slam
in a single year; and Nicklaus’ achievement of eighteen major career victories.
ROBERT GREGG
Woodstock
Rock and art festival in 1969 in Bethel, New York, that became a symbol of
baby-boom
dreams. For three days in August, an unexpected crush of 500,000 plus participants
adapted to freedom, music, drugs and a lack of sanitation. In addition to performances by
Jimi
Hendrix,
Janis Joplin, the Who, the Grateful Dead,
Santana,
the Band, Jefferson
Airplane and others, the celebration itself became myth, aided by the film and soundtrack
Woodstock
(1969). Nonetheless, this was a commercially organized concert, charging
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