Author: Sarah N. Roth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139992805
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331
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Book Description
In the decades leading to the Civil War, popular conceptions of African American men shifted dramatically. The savage slave featured in 1830s' novels and stories gave way by the 1850s to the less-threatening humble black martyr. This radical reshaping of black masculinity in American culture occurred at the same time that the reading and writing of popular narratives were emerging as largely feminine enterprises. In a society where women wielded little official power, white female authors exalted white femininity, using narrative forms such as autobiographies, novels, short stories, visual images, and plays, by stressing differences that made white women appear superior to male slaves. This book argues that white women, as creators and consumers of popular culture media, played a pivotal role in the demasculinization of black men during the antebellum period, and consequently had a vital impact on the political landscape of antebellum and Civil War-era America through their powerful influence on popular culture.
Author: Sarah Nelson Roth
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781316004333
Category : African American men
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
Argues that white women, as creators and consumers of popular culture media, played a pivotal role in the demasculinization of black men during the antebellum period.
Author: Elizabeth R. Varon
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807846964
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
Over the past two decades, historians have successfully disputed the notion that American women remained wholly outside the realm of politics until the early twentieth century. Still, a consensus has prevailed that, unlike their Northern counterparts, wom
Author: Corinne T. Field
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146961815X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
In the fight for equality, early feminists often cited the infantilization of women and men of color as a method used to keep them out of power. Corinne T. Field argues that attaining adulthood--and the associated political rights, economic opportunities, and sexual power that come with it--became a common goal for both white and African American feminists between the American Revolution and the Civil War. The idea that black men and all women were more like children than adult white men proved difficult to overcome, however, and continued to serve as a foundation for racial and sexual inequality for generations. In detailing the connections between the struggle for equality and concepts of adulthood, Field provides an essential historical context for understanding the dilemmas black and white women still face in America today, from "glass ceilings" and debates over welfare dependency to a culture obsessed with youth and beauty. Drawn from a fascinating past, this book tells the history of how maturity, gender, and race collided, and how those affected came together to fight against injustice.
Author: Carol Faulkner
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580465072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
Explores gender and race as principal bases of identity and locations of power and oppression in American history.
Author: Bridget T. Heneghan
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781934110997
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
A study of how material goods and antebellum consumption defined whiteness
Author: Keri Leigh Merritt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110718424X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 373
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Book Description
This book examines the lives of the Antebellum South's underprivileged whites in nineteenth-century America.
Author: Bruce Dorsey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801472886
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
Before the Civil War, the public lives of American men and women intersected most frequently in the arena of religious activism. Bruce Dorsey broadens the field of gender studies, incorporating an analysis of masculinity into the history of early American religion and reform. His is a holistic account that reveals the contested meanings of manhood and womanhood among antebellum Americans, both black and white, middle class and working class.Urban poverty, drink, slavery, and Irish Catholic immigration--for each of these social problems that engrossed Northern reformers, Dorsey examines the often competing views held by male and female activists and shows how their perspectives were further complicated by differences in class, race, and generation. His primary focus is Philadelphia, birthplace of nearly every kind of benevolent and reform society and emblematic of changes occurring throughout the North. With an especially rich history of African-American activism, the city is ideal for Dorsey's exploration of race and reform.Combining stories of both ordinary individuals and major reformers with an insightful analysis of contemporary songs, plays, fiction, and polemics, Dorsey exposes the ways race, class, and ethnicity influenced the meanings of manhood and womanhood in nineteenth-century America. By linking his gendered history of religious activism with the transformations characterizing antebellum society, he contributes to a larger quest: to engender all of American history.
Author: Shirley Samuels
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195362527
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
Samuels's collection of critical essays gives body and scope to the subject of nineteenth-century sentimentality by situating it in terms of "women's culture" and issues of race. Presenting an interdisciplinary range of approaches that consider sentimental culture before and after the Civil War, these critical studies of American literature and culture fundamentally reorient the field. Moving beyond alignment with either pro- or anti-sentimentality camps, the collection makes visible the particular racial and gendered forms that define the aesthetics and politics of the culture of sentiment. Drawing on the fields of American cultural history, American studies, and literary criticism, the contributors include Lauren Berlant, Ann Fabian, Susan Gillman, Karen Halttunen, Carolyn L. Karcher, Joy Kasson, Amy Schrager Lang, Isabelle Lehuu, Harryette Mullen, Dana Nelson, Lora Romero, Shirley Samuels, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Lynn Wardley, and Laura Wexler.
Author: Lori Merish
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822373319
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
In Archives of Labor Lori Merish establishes working-class women as significant actors within literary culture, dramatically redrawing the map of nineteenth-century US literary and cultural history. Delving into previously unexplored archives of working-class women's literature—from autobiographies, pamphlet novels, and theatrical melodrama to seduction tales and labor periodicals—Merish recovers working-class women's vital presence as writers and readers in the antebellum era. Her reading of texts by a diverse collection of factory workers, seamstresses, domestic workers, and prostitutes boldly challenges the purportedly masculine character of class dissent during this era. Whether addressing portrayals of white New England "factory girls," fictional accounts of African American domestic workers, or the first-person narratives of Mexican women working in the missions of Mexican California, Merish unsettles the traditional association of whiteness with the working class to document forms of cross-racial class identification and solidarity. In so doing, she restores the tradition of working women's class protest and dissent, shows how race and gender are central to class identity, and traces the ways working women understood themselves and were understood as workers and class subjects.
