Sylvia D. Hoffert
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807828816
- eISBN:
- 9781469603612
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807875889_hoffert
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Nineteenth-century newspaper editor Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884) was an unconventionally ambitious woman. While she struggled in private to be a dutiful daughter, wife, and mother, she publicly ...
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Nineteenth-century newspaper editor Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884) was an unconventionally ambitious woman. While she struggled in private to be a dutiful daughter, wife, and mother, she publicly critiqued and successfully challenged gender conventions that restricted her personal behavior, limited her political and economic opportunities, and attempted to silence her voice. As the owner and editor of newspapers in Pittsburgh, St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C., and as one of the founders of the Minnesota Republican Party, Swisshelm negotiated a significant place for herself in the male-dominated world of commerce, journalism, and politics. How she accomplished this feat; what expressive devices she used; what social, economic, and political tensions resulted from her efforts; and how those tensions were resolved are the central questions examined in this biography. The book arranges the book topically, rather than chronologically, to include Swisshelm in the broader issues of the day, such as women's involvement in politics and religion, their role in the workplace, and marriage. Rescuing this prominent feminist from obscurity, it shows how Swisshelm laid the groundwork for the “New Woman” of the turn of the century.Less
Nineteenth-century newspaper editor Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884) was an unconventionally ambitious woman. While she struggled in private to be a dutiful daughter, wife, and mother, she publicly critiqued and successfully challenged gender conventions that restricted her personal behavior, limited her political and economic opportunities, and attempted to silence her voice. As the owner and editor of newspapers in Pittsburgh, St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C., and as one of the founders of the Minnesota Republican Party, Swisshelm negotiated a significant place for herself in the male-dominated world of commerce, journalism, and politics. How she accomplished this feat; what expressive devices she used; what social, economic, and political tensions resulted from her efforts; and how those tensions were resolved are the central questions examined in this biography. The book arranges the book topically, rather than chronologically, to include Swisshelm in the broader issues of the day, such as women's involvement in politics and religion, their role in the workplace, and marriage. Rescuing this prominent feminist from obscurity, it shows how Swisshelm laid the groundwork for the “New Woman” of the turn of the century.
Julia Bryan-Wilson
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816677252
- eISBN:
- 9781452947440
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816677252.003.0005
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter focuses on the costumes of gender-bending performers affiliated with the San Francisco-based groups the Cockettes and its offshoot the Angels of Light, in the 1970s. These collectives ...
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This chapter focuses on the costumes of gender-bending performers affiliated with the San Francisco-based groups the Cockettes and its offshoot the Angels of Light, in the 1970s. These collectives were equal parts experiments in communal living, theater troupes, and active promoters of radical new modes of queer and feminist self-fashioning. Category-defying in every sense, the Cockettes and the Angels of Light were known for their outrageous performances wearing handmade outfits both in the theater and in the street. The chapter investigates the handmade costumes of the Cockettes and the Angels of Light to propose that the upsurge in crafting in the late 1960s and early 1970s overlapped in provocative ways with a simultaneous emergence of gay and feminist culture in northern California in the post-Stonewall era. It examines the historical moment when the actual outfits were part and parcel of a utopian vision in which smashing normative gender conventions seemed entirely possible. It focuses on the specific material practices that went into constructing these garments and ornamentations, and how the Cockettes and Angels of Light aligned handmaking with countercultural world-making—both as an individualist practice of differentiation and a larger, if somewhat inchoate, communalist project.Less
This chapter focuses on the costumes of gender-bending performers affiliated with the San Francisco-based groups the Cockettes and its offshoot the Angels of Light, in the 1970s. These collectives were equal parts experiments in communal living, theater troupes, and active promoters of radical new modes of queer and feminist self-fashioning. Category-defying in every sense, the Cockettes and the Angels of Light were known for their outrageous performances wearing handmade outfits both in the theater and in the street. The chapter investigates the handmade costumes of the Cockettes and the Angels of Light to propose that the upsurge in crafting in the late 1960s and early 1970s overlapped in provocative ways with a simultaneous emergence of gay and feminist culture in northern California in the post-Stonewall era. It examines the historical moment when the actual outfits were part and parcel of a utopian vision in which smashing normative gender conventions seemed entirely possible. It focuses on the specific material practices that went into constructing these garments and ornamentations, and how the Cockettes and Angels of Light aligned handmaking with countercultural world-making—both as an individualist practice of differentiation and a larger, if somewhat inchoate, communalist project.
Edith Sparks
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781469633022
- eISBN:
- 9781469633046
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469633022.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
To become a “boss lady” in the middle of the twentieth century was to fly in the face of a popular set of ideas about the proper roles for men and women in the business world. The term “office girl” ...
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To become a “boss lady” in the middle of the twentieth century was to fly in the face of a popular set of ideas about the proper roles for men and women in the business world. The term “office girl” used to describe one in three working women in the U.S. in the 1960s infantilized women at precisely the moment when a small but impactful group of female executives, including Tillie Lewis, Olive Ann Beech and Margaret Rudkin, rose to the upper echelons of the business world. In contrast to the legions of female clerical workers, women who led businesses in the middle of the twentieth century were transgressors whose very presence seemed a threat to those anxious to preserve men’s power. Navigating a business world that viewed them as fundamentally different because they were women was a key challenge. To succeed they needed to find a path into a professional world deeply ingrained with male privilege and steeped in rigid gender conventions that shaped both obstacles and opportunities.Less
To become a “boss lady” in the middle of the twentieth century was to fly in the face of a popular set of ideas about the proper roles for men and women in the business world. The term “office girl” used to describe one in three working women in the U.S. in the 1960s infantilized women at precisely the moment when a small but impactful group of female executives, including Tillie Lewis, Olive Ann Beech and Margaret Rudkin, rose to the upper echelons of the business world. In contrast to the legions of female clerical workers, women who led businesses in the middle of the twentieth century were transgressors whose very presence seemed a threat to those anxious to preserve men’s power. Navigating a business world that viewed them as fundamentally different because they were women was a key challenge. To succeed they needed to find a path into a professional world deeply ingrained with male privilege and steeped in rigid gender conventions that shaped both obstacles and opportunities.
