The Power of Femininity in the New South

The Power of Femininity in the New South PDF Author: Anastatia Sims
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570031786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
The Power of Femininity in the New South demonstrates how the legendary strength and moral authority of the South's "steel magnolias" inspired turn-of-the-century women to move from the parlor to the political arena. With a comprehensive examination of the women's voluntary associations that proliferated in North Carolina between 1880 and 1930, Anastatia Sims chronicles the emergence of women - both black and white - in a political terrain torn between the tyranny of white supremacy and the promise of Progressive reform. She tells how organized women, as they called themselves, came to terms with a sacred cultural icon of the antebellum South - the complex, often contradictory ideal of southern femininity - and how they explored the ideal's possibilities, discovered its limitations, and ultimately transformed it by their own actions.

The Power of Femininity in the New South

The Power of Femininity in the New South PDF Author: Anastatia Sims
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570031786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book

Book Description
The Power of Femininity in the New South demonstrates how the legendary strength and moral authority of the South's "steel magnolias" inspired turn-of-the-century women to move from the parlor to the political arena. With a comprehensive examination of the women's voluntary associations that proliferated in North Carolina between 1880 and 1930, Anastatia Sims chronicles the emergence of women - both black and white - in a political terrain torn between the tyranny of white supremacy and the promise of Progressive reform. She tells how organized women, as they called themselves, came to terms with a sacred cultural icon of the antebellum South - the complex, often contradictory ideal of southern femininity - and how they explored the ideal's possibilities, discovered its limitations, and ultimately transformed it by their own actions.

Chained in Silence

Chained in Silence PDF Author: Talitha L. LeFlouria
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469622483
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, Talitha L. LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia's prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women's presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women's lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.

Fashion, Women and Power

Fashion, Women and Power PDF Author: Denise N. Rall
Publisher: Intellect Books
ISBN: 1789384621
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This book addresses the relationships between fashion, women and power. One of the constants within the book is to question the enduring relationship between women and dress and how these inform and articulate the ways in which women remain represented as either suitable or not for public office and their behaviour is informed through dress when they are in power. The book critiques the interplays between politics, power, class, race and expectation in relation to the everyday practice of getting dress and the more performative and symbolic function of dress as embodiment. As never before, women are in positions of political power, and find themselves facing the maelstroms of mass media regarding their fashion, their deportment, and their right to govern. The contributors offer a wide set of perspectives on women and their roles, and their fashions when taking up powerful positions in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States. From the United Kingdom, the historical issues surrounding the movement towards ‘rational dress’ for women seeking their rights to vote and exercise are interrogated. The volume also explores viewpoints from East Asia, such as the constricting role for ‘common’ women upon entering the Imperial family in Japan. From the United States come the troublesome media stories engulfing two significant American Democratic First Ladies, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Michelle Obama. From New Zealand, the media reports on Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern upon her motherhood while serving in the office and on her clothing during the 2019 Christchurch massacre comprise a much-needed contribution to the literature on women, politics and dress. Further, the role of dress in politics broadly as a form of resistance, will be examined in Australia from recent skirmishes over ‘appropriate dress’ with ex-prime minister Julia Gillard and other Australian female politicians. The role of women and what their fashion selections mean continues via considerable debate during worldwide events. Finally, the theme of resistance and social media continues with an examination of protest dressing in the recent street battles in Hong Kong to how young Asian women have been influenced by the social media campaigns to encourage wearing the veil in Indonesia, to Asian women negotiating femininity in political dress. Primary readership will be among researchers, scholars, educators and students in the fields of fashion, dress studies, women and gender studies and media and history. It will be of particular value as at graduate level and as a supplementary resource. There may be some general appeal to those with an interest in the women or cultures at the centre of the discussions.

Women, Power, and Property

Women, Power, and Property PDF Author: Rachel E. Brulé
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108870600
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
Quotas for women in government have swept the globe. Yet we know little about their capacity to upend entrenched social, political, and economic hierarchies. Women, Power, and Property explores this question within the context of India, the world's largest democracy. Brulé employs a research design that maximizes causal inference alongside extensive field research to explain the relationship between political representation, backlash, and economic empowerment. Her findings show that women in government – gatekeepers – catalyze access to fundamental economic rights to property. Women in politics have the power to support constituent rights at critical junctures, such as marriage negotiations, when they can strike integrative solutions to intrahousehold bargaining. Yet there is a paradox: quotas are essential for enforcement of rights, but they generate backlash against women who gain rights without bargaining leverage. In this groundbreaking study, Brulé shows how well-designed quotas can operate as a crucial tool to foster equality and benefit the women they are meant to empower.

Women and Power in Post-Conflict Africa

Women and Power in Post-Conflict Africa PDF Author: Aili Mari Tripp
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107115574
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
This book explains why women's rights are improving more rapidly in post-conflict countries in Africa than elsewhere on the continent.

Civil War as a Crisis in Gender

Civil War as a Crisis in Gender PDF Author: LeeAnn Whites
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820322091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Gender is the last vantage point from which the Civil War has yet to be examined in-depth, says LeeAnn Whites. Gender concepts and constructions, Whites says, deeply influenced the beliefs underpinning both the Confederacy and its vestiges to which white southerners clung for decades after the Confederacy's defeat. Whites's arguments and observations, which center on the effects of the conflict on the South's gender hierarchy, will challenge our understanding of the war and our acceptance of its historiography. The ordering principle of gender roles and relations in the antebellum South, says Whites, was a form of privileged white male identity against which others in that society were measured and accorded worth and meaning--women, wives, children, and slaves. Over the course of the Civil War the power of these men to so arbitrarily construct their world all but vanished, owing to a succession of hardships that culminated in defeat and the end of slavery. At the same time, Confederate women were steadily--and ambivalently--empowered. Drawn out of their domestic sphere, these women labored and sacrificed to prop up an apparently hollow notion of essential manliness that rested in part on an assumption of female docility and weakness. Whites focuses on Augusta, Georgia, to follow these events as they were played out in the lives of actual men and women. An antebellum cotton trading center, Augusta was central to the Confederacy's supply network and later became an exemplary New South manufacturing city. Drawing on primary sources from private family papers to census data, Whites traces the interplay of power and subordination, self-interest and loyalty, as she discusses topics related to the gender crisis in Augusta, including female kin networks, women's volunteer organizations, class and race divisions, emancipation, Sherman's invasion of Georgia, veteran aid societies, rural migration to cities, and the postwar employment of white women and children in industry. Whites concludes with an account of how elite white Augustans "reconstructed" themselves in the postwar years. By memorializing their dead and mythologizing their history in a way that presented the war as a valiant defense of antebellum domesticity, these Augustans sought to restore a patriarchy--however attenuated--that would deflect the class strains of industrial development while maintaining what it could of the old Southern gender and racial order. Inherent in this effort, as during the war, was an unspoken admission by the white men of Augusta of their dependency upon white women. A pioneering volume in Civil War history, this important study opens new debates and avenues of inquiry in culture and gender studies.

Closer to Freedom

Closer to Freedom PDF Author: Stephanie M. H. Camp
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807875767
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Recent scholarship on slavery has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition. Camp discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper. She brings new depth to our understanding of the lives of enslaved women, whose bodies and homes were inevitably political arenas. Through Camp's insight, truancy becomes an act of pursuing personal privacy. Illegal parties ("frolics") become an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their slave cabins (even if they could not read them) become the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts. The culture of opposition created by enslaved women's acts of everyday resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. Ultimately, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.

New Women of the New South

New Women of the New South PDF Author: Marjorie Spruill Wheeler
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195082451
Category : Suffragists
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This is a comprehensive history of the Woman's Suffrage Movement in the American South. Focusing on 11 of the movement's most prominent women, it explores the range of opinions within this group on many subjects, with a particular emphasis on race and states' rights.

War, Women, and Power

War, Women, and Power PDF Author: Marie E. Berry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108246893
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Rwanda and Bosnia both experienced mass violence in the early 1990s. Less than ten years later, Rwandans surprisingly elected the world's highest level of women to parliament. In Bosnia, women launched thousands of community organizations that became spaces for informal political participation. The political mobilization of women in both countries complicates the popular image of women as merely the victims and spoils of war. Through a close examination of these cases, Marie E. Berry unpacks the puzzling relationship between war and women's political mobilization. Drawing from over 260 interviews with women in both countries, she argues that war can reconfigure gendered power relations by precipitating demographic, economic, and cultural shifts. In the aftermath, however, many of the gains women made were set back. This book offers an entirely new view of women and war and includes concrete suggestions for policy makers, development organizations, and activists supporting women's rights.

Remaking Black Power

Remaking Black Power PDF Author: Ashley D. Farmer
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469634384
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
In this comprehensive history, Ashley D. Farmer examines black women's political, social, and cultural engagement with Black Power ideals and organizations. Complicating the assumption that sexism relegated black women to the margins of the movement, Farmer demonstrates how female activists fought for more inclusive understandings of Black Power and social justice by developing new ideas about black womanhood. This compelling book shows how the new tropes of womanhood that they created--the "Militant Black Domestic," the "Revolutionary Black Woman," and the "Third World Woman," for instance--spurred debate among activists over the importance of women and gender to Black Power organizing, causing many of the era's organizations and leaders to critique patriarchy and support gender equality. Making use of a vast and untapped array of black women's artwork, political cartoons, manifestos, and political essays that they produced as members of groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Congress of African People, Farmer reveals how black women activists reimagined black womanhood, challenged sexism, and redefined the meaning of race, gender, and identity in American life.