Bøker i Gender and American Culture-serien

Pursuing the meaning of gender in nineteenth-century urban American society, Ladies, Women, and Wenches compares the lives of women living in two distinctive antebellum cultures, Charleston and Boston, between 1820 and 1850. In contrast to most contemporary histories of women, this study examines the lives of all types of women in both cities.

Delinquent Daughters explores the gender, class, and racial tensions that fueled campaigns to control female sexuality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Mary Odem looks at these moral reform movements from a national perspective, but she also undertakes a detailed analysis of court records to explore the local enforcement of regulatory legislation in Alameda and Los Angeles Counties in California. From these legal proceedings emerge overlapping and often contradictory views of middle-class female reformers, court and law enforcement officials, working-class teenage girls, and working-class parents. Odem traces two distinct stages of moral reform. The first began in 1885 with the movement to raise the age of consent in statutory rape laws as a means of protecting young women from predatory men. By the turn of the century, however, reformers had come to view sexually active women not as victims but as delinquents, and they called for special police, juvenile courts, and reformatories to control wayward girls. Rejecting a simple hierarchical model of class control, Odem reveals a complex network of struggles and negotiations among reformers, officials, teenage girls and their families. She also addresses the paradoxical consequences of reform by demonstrating that the protective measures advocated by middle-class women often resulted in coercive and discriminatory policies toward working-class girls.

This work reaches across the colour line to examine how race, gender, class and individual subjectivity shaped the lives of black and white women in the 19th- and 20th-century American South. Through six essays, Nell Irvin Painter explores such themes as interracial sex and white supremacy.

Investigates the reasons for women's literary professionalism in the nineteenth century, highlighting the experiences of E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gail Hamilton, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. Coultrap-McQuin examines the cultural milieu of women writers, the ideals of the literary marketplace, and the characteristics of women's literary activities.

This critical, historical, and theoretical study looks at a little-known group of novels written during the 1930s by women who were literary radicals. Arguing that class consciousness was figured through metaphors of gender, Paula Rabinowitz challenges the conventional wisdom that feminism as a discourse disappeared during the decade.

Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America

Many early-nineteenth-century slaveholders considered themselves ""masters"" not only over slaves, but also over the institutions of marriage and family. According to historians, the privilege of mastery was reserved for white males. But slaveholding widows enjoyed material, legal, and cultural resources to which most southerners could only aspire.

In eighteenth-century America, fashion served as a site of contests over various forms of gendered power. Kate Haulman explores how and why fashion - both as a concept and as the changing style of personal adornment - linked gender relations, social order, commerce, and political authority during a time when traditional hierarchies were in flux.

Barbara Ransby chronicles Ella Baker's long political career as an organizer, intellectual and teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. She paints a picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with progressive struggles worldwide in the 20th century.

Places familiar, often politicized questions about the crisis of African American marriage in conversation with a rich cultural archive that includes fiction by Terry McMillan and Sister Souljah, music by Anita Baker, and films such as The Best Man.

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.

Throughout World War II, when Saturday nights came around, servicemen and hostesses forgot the war for a little while as they danced in USO clubs, which served as havens of stability. This book shows that in addition to boosting soldier morale, the USO acted as an architect of the gender roles and sexual codes that shaped the greatest generation.

Offers an innovative reexamination of selected texts by major figures in American literature: Benjamin Franklin, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Charles Brockden Bown from the early national period, and James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Alan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville from the romantic period.

Native American philosophy has enabled Native American cultures to survive more than five hundred years of attempted cultural assimilation. This revised edition has been expanded to include extensive discussion of Native American philosophy and culture in the United States as well as Canada.

A study of women in vaudeville. It reveals how female performers, patrons and workers shaped the rise and fall of the most popular live entertainment at the turn of the century. Once a sign of vaudeville's refinement, Kibler says, women became associated with the decay of vaudeville.

This volume presents a portrait of the life and work of writer Lillian Smith (1897-1966), a leading southern white liberal of the mid-20th century. The author has selected 145 of Smith's 1500 extant letters for the book, with subjects including her lesbian relationship with Paula Snelling.

Contains 17 personal narratives by leading black women historians at various stages in their careers. The essays in this book show how - first as graduate students and then as professional historians - they entered and navigated the realm of higher education, a world concerned with and dominated by whites and men.

In this richly detailed and imaginatively researched study, Victoria Bynum investigates "unruly" women in central North Carolina before and during the Civil War. Analysing the complex and interrelated impact of gender, race, class, and region on the lives of black and white women, she shows how their diverse experiences influenced the changing social order and political economy of the state.