Elvin Hatch
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520074729
- eISBN:
- 9780520911437
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520074729.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Global
Where do we get our notions of social hierarchy and personal worth? What underlies our beliefs about the goals worth aiming for, the persons we hope to become? This book addresses these questions in ...
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Where do we get our notions of social hierarchy and personal worth? What underlies our beliefs about the goals worth aiming for, the persons we hope to become? This book addresses these questions in this ethnography of a small New Zealand farming community, articulating the cultural system beneath the social hierarchy. It describes a cultural theory of social hierarchy that defines not only the local system of social rank, but personhood as well. Because people define respectability differently, a crucial part of the book's approach is to examine how these differences are worked out over time. The concept of occupation is central to the book's analysis, since the work that people do provides the skeletal framework of the hierarchical order. The book focuses in particular on sheep farming and compares a New Zealand community with one in California. Wealth and respectability are defined differently in the two places, with the result that California landholders perceive a social hierarchy different from the New Zealanders'. Thus the distinctive “shape” that characterizes the hierarchy among these New Zealand landholders and their conceptions of self reflect the distinctive cultural theory by which they live.Less
Where do we get our notions of social hierarchy and personal worth? What underlies our beliefs about the goals worth aiming for, the persons we hope to become? This book addresses these questions in this ethnography of a small New Zealand farming community, articulating the cultural system beneath the social hierarchy. It describes a cultural theory of social hierarchy that defines not only the local system of social rank, but personhood as well. Because people define respectability differently, a crucial part of the book's approach is to examine how these differences are worked out over time. The concept of occupation is central to the book's analysis, since the work that people do provides the skeletal framework of the hierarchical order. The book focuses in particular on sheep farming and compares a New Zealand community with one in California. Wealth and respectability are defined differently in the two places, with the result that California landholders perceive a social hierarchy different from the New Zealanders'. Thus the distinctive “shape” that characterizes the hierarchy among these New Zealand landholders and their conceptions of self reflect the distinctive cultural theory by which they live.
Derek B. Scott
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195309461
- eISBN:
- 9780199871254
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195309461.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
Nineteenth-century bourgeois values were abundant, as were their ideological functions (thrift set against extravagance, self-help against dependence, hard work against idleness) but, where art and ...
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Nineteenth-century bourgeois values were abundant, as were their ideological functions (thrift set against extravagance, self-help against dependence, hard work against idleness) but, where art and entertainment were concerned, the key value in asserting moral leadership was respectability. It was something within the grasp of all, unlike the aristocratic notion of “good breeding”. It followed that recreation should be rational, designed to be improving, and not merely idle amusement. The rational and the recreational were linked together in the sight-singing movement. There were, of course, other kinds of musical activities to worry about: for instance, the moral propriety of the waltz, or the innuendo to be found in songs of the café-concert and music hall, or political songs. Yet, not even Gilbert and Sullivan are morally unimpeachable. A respectable moral tone is at its strongest in the drawing-room ballad, but even sterner moral fiber is found in temperance ballads.Less
Nineteenth-century bourgeois values were abundant, as were their ideological functions (thrift set against extravagance, self-help against dependence, hard work against idleness) but, where art and entertainment were concerned, the key value in asserting moral leadership was respectability. It was something within the grasp of all, unlike the aristocratic notion of “good breeding”. It followed that recreation should be rational, designed to be improving, and not merely idle amusement. The rational and the recreational were linked together in the sight-singing movement. There were, of course, other kinds of musical activities to worry about: for instance, the moral propriety of the waltz, or the innuendo to be found in songs of the café-concert and music hall, or political songs. Yet, not even Gilbert and Sullivan are morally unimpeachable. A respectable moral tone is at its strongest in the drawing-room ballad, but even sterner moral fiber is found in temperance ballads.
Elisha P. Renne
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- April 2004
- ISBN:
- 9780199270576
- eISBN:
- 9780191600883
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0199270570.003.0015
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, History of Economic Thought
Compares characteristics associated with women's status commonly used in demographic surveys with women's status, matsayi mace, as it is defined by a group of Hausa Moslem women in the northern ...
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Compares characteristics associated with women's status commonly used in demographic surveys with women's status, matsayi mace, as it is defined by a group of Hausa Moslem women in the northern Nigerian town of Zaria. Their assessments of appropriate gender roles and what constitutes ‘women's status’, which include the importance of respectability, mutunci, and seclusion, suggest that while distinctive cultural ideas and religious beliefs are essential in framing these definitions, there is no necessary congruence with the conventional ‘social indicators’, such as women's education and work, used in standardized surveys.Less
Compares characteristics associated with women's status commonly used in demographic surveys with women's status, matsayi mace, as it is defined by a group of Hausa Moslem women in the northern Nigerian town of Zaria. Their assessments of appropriate gender roles and what constitutes ‘women's status’, which include the importance of respectability, mutunci, and seclusion, suggest that while distinctive cultural ideas and religious beliefs are essential in framing these definitions, there is no necessary congruence with the conventional ‘social indicators’, such as women's education and work, used in standardized surveys.
Sean O'Connell
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199263318
- eISBN:
- 9780191718793
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199263318.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This introductory chapter outlines the themes that the book addresses, situating them within the existing historiography on credit and debt. The central importance of neighbourhood networks and the ...
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This introductory chapter outlines the themes that the book addresses, situating them within the existing historiography on credit and debt. The central importance of neighbourhood networks and the personal relationships established by agents (often female) in working class borrowing is outlined. It explains how the 19th-century tallymen became identified with debt and the county courts. The strategies adopted subsequently by borrowers and creditors to chart their way through the moral maze that surrounded the issue of debt are delineated. The oral history aspect of research is outlined, explaining how the social memory surrounding the topic was probed. Borrowers and the businesses that provided credit sought to portray their actions within the norms of respectability. The gendered nature of working class money management and its place in social memory is probed. The use of business sources and the National Archives is related, as are changing historical attitudes towards consumer credit.Less
This introductory chapter outlines the themes that the book addresses, situating them within the existing historiography on credit and debt. The central importance of neighbourhood networks and the personal relationships established by agents (often female) in working class borrowing is outlined. It explains how the 19th-century tallymen became identified with debt and the county courts. The strategies adopted subsequently by borrowers and creditors to chart their way through the moral maze that surrounded the issue of debt are delineated. The oral history aspect of research is outlined, explaining how the social memory surrounding the topic was probed. Borrowers and the businesses that provided credit sought to portray their actions within the norms of respectability. The gendered nature of working class money management and its place in social memory is probed. The use of business sources and the National Archives is related, as are changing historical attitudes towards consumer credit.
Karen W. Tice
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199842780
- eISBN:
- 9780199933440
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199842780.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Gender and Sexuality
This chapter traces the historical roots and class politics of campus pageantry from working-class nineteenth-century public exhibitions of women’s bodies to the subsequent legitimacy and popularity ...
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This chapter traces the historical roots and class politics of campus pageantry from working-class nineteenth-century public exhibitions of women’s bodies to the subsequent legitimacy and popularity of national beauty pageants for middle-class black and white women, such as the Miss America pageant and the Miss Golden Brown pageant. Cultural anxieties surrounding suffrage and women’s education, migration and immigration, consumerism, and the increased visibility of women in public spaces and new opportunities for self-expression and identities paradoxically helped to popularize beauty pageantry. The genealogy of campus pageants in the 1920s includes fierce debates over women’s education and fears that college attendance would result in the loss of women’s “natural” virtues, especially for white women. African American college women, in contrast, faced the burden of rewriting powerful texts about their presumed inferiority. The chapter examines how both groups used campus pageantry to respond to tensions around self-display, respectability, and gendered bodies.Less
This chapter traces the historical roots and class politics of campus pageantry from working-class nineteenth-century public exhibitions of women’s bodies to the subsequent legitimacy and popularity of national beauty pageants for middle-class black and white women, such as the Miss America pageant and the Miss Golden Brown pageant. Cultural anxieties surrounding suffrage and women’s education, migration and immigration, consumerism, and the increased visibility of women in public spaces and new opportunities for self-expression and identities paradoxically helped to popularize beauty pageantry. The genealogy of campus pageants in the 1920s includes fierce debates over women’s education and fears that college attendance would result in the loss of women’s “natural” virtues, especially for white women. African American college women, in contrast, faced the burden of rewriting powerful texts about their presumed inferiority. The chapter examines how both groups used campus pageantry to respond to tensions around self-display, respectability, and gendered bodies.
Bernard Cooke
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780195174519
- eISBN:
- 9780199835119
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195174518.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Fame and good reputation have long been recognized as powerful forces of motivation. A person's good name and credibility can be enhanced or damaged by report or rumours; to so influence one's public ...
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Fame and good reputation have long been recognized as powerful forces of motivation. A person's good name and credibility can be enhanced or damaged by report or rumours; to so influence one's public esteem is to exert considerable power. Again, the power of propaganda has often been employed to influence public opinion and acceptance of a regime. Esteem of influential professional groups, such as clergy, doctors or lawyers, provides subtle power for members of those groups, provided they adhere to accepted norms of ‘respectability’. Special credibility attaches to those in ‘sacred’ offices or those with a reputation for sanctity.Less
Fame and good reputation have long been recognized as powerful forces of motivation. A person's good name and credibility can be enhanced or damaged by report or rumours; to so influence one's public esteem is to exert considerable power. Again, the power of propaganda has often been employed to influence public opinion and acceptance of a regime. Esteem of influential professional groups, such as clergy, doctors or lawyers, provides subtle power for members of those groups, provided they adhere to accepted norms of ‘respectability’. Special credibility attaches to those in ‘sacred’ offices or those with a reputation for sanctity.
LaKisha Michelle Simmons
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469622804
- eISBN:
- 9781469622828
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469622804.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
What was it like to grow up black and female in the segregated South? To answer this question, this book blends social history and cultural studies, recreating children's streets and neighborhoods ...
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What was it like to grow up black and female in the segregated South? To answer this question, this book blends social history and cultural studies, recreating children's streets and neighborhoods within Jim Crow New Orleans and offering a rare look into black girls' personal lives. The book argues that these children faced the difficult task of adhering to middle-class expectations of purity and respectability even as they encountered the daily realities of Jim Crow violence, which included interracial sexual aggression, street harassment, and presumptions of black girls' impurity.Less
What was it like to grow up black and female in the segregated South? To answer this question, this book blends social history and cultural studies, recreating children's streets and neighborhoods within Jim Crow New Orleans and offering a rare look into black girls' personal lives. The book argues that these children faced the difficult task of adhering to middle-class expectations of purity and respectability even as they encountered the daily realities of Jim Crow violence, which included interracial sexual aggression, street harassment, and presumptions of black girls' impurity.
Margot Minardi
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195379372
- eISBN:
- 9780199869152
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379372.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
This chapter centers on the private spaces of sociability and everyday life where memories were made in the context of personal relationships. Drawing on texts commemorating individual people of ...
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This chapter centers on the private spaces of sociability and everyday life where memories were made in the context of personal relationships. Drawing on texts commemorating individual people of color whom whites deemed exemplary and “respectable,” including Phillis Wheatley and Chloe Spear (a property‐owning Baptist woman in Boston), the chapter explores how the personal histories of freedpeople were appropriated by their white friends, neighbors, employers, and masters or masters' relatives. Especially prevalent in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, white‐authored memoirs, biographies, obituaries, and anecdotes about freedpeople engaged white Bay Staters' nostalgia for the “deference politics” of a previous generation. When nineteenth‐century white writers reminisced about former slaves, they perceived in this first generation of free black Bay Staters a model for black agency and respectability that accommodated racial hierarchy to the ideals of the American Revolution. There was a gender as well as a race dimension to these representations of black agency, which emphasized humility and deference (traits associated with femininity) as desirable for both women and men of color.Less
This chapter centers on the private spaces of sociability and everyday life where memories were made in the context of personal relationships. Drawing on texts commemorating individual people of color whom whites deemed exemplary and “respectable,” including Phillis Wheatley and Chloe Spear (a property‐owning Baptist woman in Boston), the chapter explores how the personal histories of freedpeople were appropriated by their white friends, neighbors, employers, and masters or masters' relatives. Especially prevalent in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, white‐authored memoirs, biographies, obituaries, and anecdotes about freedpeople engaged white Bay Staters' nostalgia for the “deference politics” of a previous generation. When nineteenth‐century white writers reminisced about former slaves, they perceived in this first generation of free black Bay Staters a model for black agency and respectability that accommodated racial hierarchy to the ideals of the American Revolution. There was a gender as well as a race dimension to these representations of black agency, which emphasized humility and deference (traits associated with femininity) as desirable for both women and men of color.
TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Samantha N. Sheppard, and Karen M. Bowdre (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781496807045
- eISBN:
- 9781496807083
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496807045.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
From Madea to Media Mogul examines multi-hyphenate media mogul Tyler Perry’s unique role in contemporary media culture. Unlike the discordant, popular, and limited range of academic responses to ...
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From Madea to Media Mogul examines multi-hyphenate media mogul Tyler Perry’s unique role in contemporary media culture. Unlike the discordant, popular, and limited range of academic responses to Perry’s work, the essays here are engaged with neither celebrating nor condemning Tyler Perry. This collection demonstrates that there is something inherently political about the intersection between understanding the pleasure as well as displeasure surrounding black popular cultural expression. This intersection is crucial not only to understanding Tyler Perry but also to how we think about race and identity in the 21st Century. The collection is organized around a core set of key concepts, because Perry’s image and productions are an invitation to interrogate and transform some of our most familiar disciplinary terms, such as affect, cinephilia, platforms, mogul, rebrand, and niche. Other concepts that Perry prompts us to reconsider, like the politics of respectability, centrality, exceptionalism, and disguise are informed by cultural studies traditions, while new perspective on terms like chitlin and gospel broaden our grasp on thematic concerns from black cultural traditions. Above all, what this collection aims for in offering this rubric for reading Perry are paradigm-shifting approaches that embrace the unexpected. This is a collection that deliberately brings these diverse approaches and disciplinary traditions together by arguing that Tyler Perry’s productions are unintelligible without them and that these critical perspectives reveal Tyler Perry as perhaps one of the most important figures in American media history.Less
From Madea to Media Mogul examines multi-hyphenate media mogul Tyler Perry’s unique role in contemporary media culture. Unlike the discordant, popular, and limited range of academic responses to Perry’s work, the essays here are engaged with neither celebrating nor condemning Tyler Perry. This collection demonstrates that there is something inherently political about the intersection between understanding the pleasure as well as displeasure surrounding black popular cultural expression. This intersection is crucial not only to understanding Tyler Perry but also to how we think about race and identity in the 21st Century. The collection is organized around a core set of key concepts, because Perry’s image and productions are an invitation to interrogate and transform some of our most familiar disciplinary terms, such as affect, cinephilia, platforms, mogul, rebrand, and niche. Other concepts that Perry prompts us to reconsider, like the politics of respectability, centrality, exceptionalism, and disguise are informed by cultural studies traditions, while new perspective on terms like chitlin and gospel broaden our grasp on thematic concerns from black cultural traditions. Above all, what this collection aims for in offering this rubric for reading Perry are paradigm-shifting approaches that embrace the unexpected. This is a collection that deliberately brings these diverse approaches and disciplinary traditions together by arguing that Tyler Perry’s productions are unintelligible without them and that these critical perspectives reveal Tyler Perry as perhaps one of the most important figures in American media history.
Dúnlaith Bird
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199644162
- eISBN:
- 9780199949984
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199644162.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter traces how women travellers from 1850–1950 negotiate reader reception, skirting the issue of intelligibility and recognition in both home and host countries. The first section of this ...
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This chapter traces how women travellers from 1850–1950 negotiate reader reception, skirting the issue of intelligibility and recognition in both home and host countries. The first section of this chapter identifies the strategies used to generate instant reader recognition and cultural belonging, ranging from appeals to national pride, as in Olympe Audouard’s depiction of France’s mission civilisatrice, to the systematic denigration of the foreign Other in Isabella Bird’s descriptions of the Japanese people. It then examines how the identity of the traveller is established through the effacement of male competition. Writers from Jane Dieulafoy to Alexandra David-Néel use their insouciant, incompetent and even injured male counterparts as foils to their own perfect performance as travellers. The final section studies the moment of recognition between traveller and Oriental subject. Focusing on Isabelle Eberhardt’s depictions of Algerian vagabondes from maraboutes to madwomen, it questions whether it is possible to represent the culturally unintelligible without appropriating it.Less
This chapter traces how women travellers from 1850–1950 negotiate reader reception, skirting the issue of intelligibility and recognition in both home and host countries. The first section of this chapter identifies the strategies used to generate instant reader recognition and cultural belonging, ranging from appeals to national pride, as in Olympe Audouard’s depiction of France’s mission civilisatrice, to the systematic denigration of the foreign Other in Isabella Bird’s descriptions of the Japanese people. It then examines how the identity of the traveller is established through the effacement of male competition. Writers from Jane Dieulafoy to Alexandra David-Néel use their insouciant, incompetent and even injured male counterparts as foils to their own perfect performance as travellers. The final section studies the moment of recognition between traveller and Oriental subject. Focusing on Isabelle Eberhardt’s depictions of Algerian vagabondes from maraboutes to madwomen, it questions whether it is possible to represent the culturally unintelligible without appropriating it.
Robert Wuthnow
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691176864
- eISBN:
- 9781400888092
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691176864.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
How did Americans come to think of themselves as respectable members of the middle class? Was it just by earning a decent living? Or did it require something more? And if it did, what can we learn ...
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How did Americans come to think of themselves as respectable members of the middle class? Was it just by earning a decent living? Or did it require something more? And if it did, what can we learn that may still apply? The quest for middle-class respectability in nineteenth-century America is usually described as a process of inculcating positive values such as honesty, hard work, independence, and cultural refinement. But clergy, educators, and community leaders also defined respectability negatively, by maligning individuals and groups—“misfits”—who deviated from accepted norms. This book argues that respectability is constructed by “othering” people who do not fit into easily recognizable, socially approved categories. It demonstrates this through an in-depth examination of a wide variety of individuals and groups that became objects of derision. We meet a disabled Civil War veteran who worked as a huckster on the edges of the frontier, the wife of a lunatic who raised her family while her husband was institutionalized, an immigrant religious community accused of sedition, and a wealthy scion charged with profiteering. Unlike respected Americans who marched confidently toward worldly and heavenly success, such misfits were usually ignored in paeans about the nation. But they played an important part in the cultural work that made America, and their story is essential for understanding the “othering” that remains so much a part of American culture and politics today.Less
How did Americans come to think of themselves as respectable members of the middle class? Was it just by earning a decent living? Or did it require something more? And if it did, what can we learn that may still apply? The quest for middle-class respectability in nineteenth-century America is usually described as a process of inculcating positive values such as honesty, hard work, independence, and cultural refinement. But clergy, educators, and community leaders also defined respectability negatively, by maligning individuals and groups—“misfits”—who deviated from accepted norms. This book argues that respectability is constructed by “othering” people who do not fit into easily recognizable, socially approved categories. It demonstrates this through an in-depth examination of a wide variety of individuals and groups that became objects of derision. We meet a disabled Civil War veteran who worked as a huckster on the edges of the frontier, the wife of a lunatic who raised her family while her husband was institutionalized, an immigrant religious community accused of sedition, and a wealthy scion charged with profiteering. Unlike respected Americans who marched confidently toward worldly and heavenly success, such misfits were usually ignored in paeans about the nation. But they played an important part in the cultural work that made America, and their story is essential for understanding the “othering” that remains so much a part of American culture and politics today.
James H. Murphy
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199596997
- eISBN:
- 9780191723520
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199596997.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Most historical fiction set before 1800 had a religious, or at least had a religio-ethno-political, basis. Early historical novels were either about justifying the Protestant settlement in Ireland or ...
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Most historical fiction set before 1800 had a religious, or at least had a religio-ethno-political, basis. Early historical novels were either about justifying the Protestant settlement in Ireland or are evangelical novels. As the century wore, on Catholic writers took to composing historical novels, but mostly about the 1798 rebellion and in more political than religious terms. The historical novels of Emily Lawless in the 1890s saw the end of historical fiction as religious propaganda. On the Catholic side there was no significant religious fiction as writers were intent on asserting Irish-Catholic respectability in ways consonant with Victorian mores. By the twentieth century, in the work of James Joyce and others, Catholicism had become an inclusive way of life against which the assertive individual often needed to define him or herself, mostly by way of rebellion. Yet many of the tropes of that later fiction relied on the earlier anti-Catholic writing, the two being bridged, from her own eccentric position, by May Laffan.Less
Most historical fiction set before 1800 had a religious, or at least had a religio-ethno-political, basis. Early historical novels were either about justifying the Protestant settlement in Ireland or are evangelical novels. As the century wore, on Catholic writers took to composing historical novels, but mostly about the 1798 rebellion and in more political than religious terms. The historical novels of Emily Lawless in the 1890s saw the end of historical fiction as religious propaganda. On the Catholic side there was no significant religious fiction as writers were intent on asserting Irish-Catholic respectability in ways consonant with Victorian mores. By the twentieth century, in the work of James Joyce and others, Catholicism had become an inclusive way of life against which the assertive individual often needed to define him or herself, mostly by way of rebellion. Yet many of the tropes of that later fiction relied on the earlier anti-Catholic writing, the two being bridged, from her own eccentric position, by May Laffan.
Louis Moore
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041341
- eISBN:
- 9780252099946
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041341.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Sport and Leisure
At its heart, I Fight for a Living is a book about black men who came of age in the Reconstruction and early Jim Crow era--a time when the remaking of white manhood was at its most intense, placing ...
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At its heart, I Fight for a Living is a book about black men who came of age in the Reconstruction and early Jim Crow era--a time when the remaking of white manhood was at its most intense, placing vigor and physicality at the center of the construction of manliness. The book uses the stories of black fighters’ lives, from 1880 to 1915, to explore how working-class black men used prizefighting and the sporting culture to assert their manhood in a country that denied their equality, and to examine the reactions by the black middle class and white middle class toward these black fighters. Through these stories, the book explores how the assertion of this working-class manliness confronted American ideas of race and manliness. While other works on black fighters have explored black boxers as individuals, this book seeks to study these men as a collective group while providing a localized and racialized response to black working-class manhood. It was a tough bargain to risk one’s body to prove manhood, but black men across the globe took that chance.Less
At its heart, I Fight for a Living is a book about black men who came of age in the Reconstruction and early Jim Crow era--a time when the remaking of white manhood was at its most intense, placing vigor and physicality at the center of the construction of manliness. The book uses the stories of black fighters’ lives, from 1880 to 1915, to explore how working-class black men used prizefighting and the sporting culture to assert their manhood in a country that denied their equality, and to examine the reactions by the black middle class and white middle class toward these black fighters. Through these stories, the book explores how the assertion of this working-class manliness confronted American ideas of race and manliness. While other works on black fighters have explored black boxers as individuals, this book seeks to study these men as a collective group while providing a localized and racialized response to black working-class manhood. It was a tough bargain to risk one’s body to prove manhood, but black men across the globe took that chance.
Lisa I. Knight
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199773541
- eISBN:
- 9780199897353
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199773541.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
Baul women are caught between having to meet the expectations of potential sponsors, who seek Bauls who act unencumbered (as described in Chapter 2), and the expectations of neighboring non-Baul ...
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Baul women are caught between having to meet the expectations of potential sponsors, who seek Bauls who act unencumbered (as described in Chapter 2), and the expectations of neighboring non-Baul community members, who view such Baul behavior as antithetical to the good Bengali wife and mother (the focus of this chapter). Chapter 3 looks specifically at how Baul women describe patriarchal discourses of feminine respectability, paying particular attention to the ways in which Baul women compare their own lives and behaviors with those of their neighbors. It also compares gendered norms and expectations with Baul discourses about the value and respect due women.Less
Baul women are caught between having to meet the expectations of potential sponsors, who seek Bauls who act unencumbered (as described in Chapter 2), and the expectations of neighboring non-Baul community members, who view such Baul behavior as antithetical to the good Bengali wife and mother (the focus of this chapter). Chapter 3 looks specifically at how Baul women describe patriarchal discourses of feminine respectability, paying particular attention to the ways in which Baul women compare their own lives and behaviors with those of their neighbors. It also compares gendered norms and expectations with Baul discourses about the value and respect due women.
Sarah H. Case
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041235
- eISBN:
- 9780252099847
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041235.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Education
This study analyzes the educational objectives of the founders, faculty, students, and alumnae of two Georgia schools that sought to prepare young women for the new circumstances of the post-war ...
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This study analyzes the educational objectives of the founders, faculty, students, and alumnae of two Georgia schools that sought to prepare young women for the new circumstances of the post-war South: Spelman Seminary of Atlanta, founded to provide a Christian education for African American women and girls, and Lucy Cobb Institute of Athens, established to educate young white ladies. Focusing on the years 1880 and 1925, an examination of these two private secondary schools provides a way to explore beliefs about women’s roles and duties, racial and class divisions between women, and changes in expectations of women’s citizenship rights and duties. The book demonstrates the importance of secondary-level female education in creating women’s identity, and analyzes the significance of race, gender, sexuality, and region in shaping that education. It identifies the social and ideological backgrounds of founders and influential faculty members, such as Lost Cause and antisuffrage activist Mildred Lewis Rutherford of Lucy Cobb, and also examines motivations and accomplishments of students and alumnae. It highlights the schools’ attention to modesty and sexual restraint, and argues that concerns about female sexuality and respectability united the two schools despite the racial and class differences of students. By examining the actions of women as teachers, students, and alumnae, it analyzes how southern women used their education to negotiate the political, economic, and social upheavals of the New South.Less
This study analyzes the educational objectives of the founders, faculty, students, and alumnae of two Georgia schools that sought to prepare young women for the new circumstances of the post-war South: Spelman Seminary of Atlanta, founded to provide a Christian education for African American women and girls, and Lucy Cobb Institute of Athens, established to educate young white ladies. Focusing on the years 1880 and 1925, an examination of these two private secondary schools provides a way to explore beliefs about women’s roles and duties, racial and class divisions between women, and changes in expectations of women’s citizenship rights and duties. The book demonstrates the importance of secondary-level female education in creating women’s identity, and analyzes the significance of race, gender, sexuality, and region in shaping that education. It identifies the social and ideological backgrounds of founders and influential faculty members, such as Lost Cause and antisuffrage activist Mildred Lewis Rutherford of Lucy Cobb, and also examines motivations and accomplishments of students and alumnae. It highlights the schools’ attention to modesty and sexual restraint, and argues that concerns about female sexuality and respectability united the two schools despite the racial and class differences of students. By examining the actions of women as teachers, students, and alumnae, it analyzes how southern women used their education to negotiate the political, economic, and social upheavals of the New South.
Michael R. Watts
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198229681
- eISBN:
- 9780191678905
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198229681.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
Respectability had become, by the mid-19th century, the great idol of the middle and upper working classes. The obsession with respectability was the product of a hierarchical yet mobile society in ...
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Respectability had become, by the mid-19th century, the great idol of the middle and upper working classes. The obsession with respectability was the product of a hierarchical yet mobile society in which substantial sections of every class sought to emulate the lifestyle and manners of those above them and to distance themselves from those they imagined to be beneath them. The working-class correspondents to the Nonconformist in 1848 despised the cult of respectability, but to many skilled workers respectability was as much the goal of their endeavours as it was of the bourgeoisie. The conventions of respectability were flouted at one end of the social scale by members of the upper class whose wealth, social position, and self-confidence obviated the need to imitate anyone else, and at the other end by those people whose economic conditions were so depressed that they despaired of ever being able to improve their lot.Less
Respectability had become, by the mid-19th century, the great idol of the middle and upper working classes. The obsession with respectability was the product of a hierarchical yet mobile society in which substantial sections of every class sought to emulate the lifestyle and manners of those above them and to distance themselves from those they imagined to be beneath them. The working-class correspondents to the Nonconformist in 1848 despised the cult of respectability, but to many skilled workers respectability was as much the goal of their endeavours as it was of the bourgeoisie. The conventions of respectability were flouted at one end of the social scale by members of the upper class whose wealth, social position, and self-confidence obviated the need to imitate anyone else, and at the other end by those people whose economic conditions were so depressed that they despaired of ever being able to improve their lot.
Brandon K. Winford
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780813178257
- eISBN:
- 9780813178264
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813178257.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Social Groups
Chapter 1 examines the Wheeler family in the decades after emancipation and highlights their educational accomplishments, which put them on a path toward middle-class respectability in the early part ...
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Chapter 1 examines the Wheeler family in the decades after emancipation and highlights their educational accomplishments, which put them on a path toward middle-class respectability in the early part of the twentieth century. It underscores how their middle-class status and economic independence provided the Wheeler children with more of a level playing field when compared to the black masses, or as much as possible given the limitations of the Jim Crow South. Moreover, it argues that the ideological underpinnings of the industrial “New South” at the end of the nineteenth century offered black business leaders a similar vision of racial uplift through economic independence as a way to reclaim full citizenship. This first chapter sets the stage for understanding the close proximity Wheeler had to black business from an early age—the result of his father becoming an executive with NC Mutual—and why he chose a career in banking.Less
Chapter 1 examines the Wheeler family in the decades after emancipation and highlights their educational accomplishments, which put them on a path toward middle-class respectability in the early part of the twentieth century. It underscores how their middle-class status and economic independence provided the Wheeler children with more of a level playing field when compared to the black masses, or as much as possible given the limitations of the Jim Crow South. Moreover, it argues that the ideological underpinnings of the industrial “New South” at the end of the nineteenth century offered black business leaders a similar vision of racial uplift through economic independence as a way to reclaim full citizenship. This first chapter sets the stage for understanding the close proximity Wheeler had to black business from an early age—the result of his father becoming an executive with NC Mutual—and why he chose a career in banking.
Gary Dorrien
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780300205602
- eISBN:
- 9780300216332
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300205602.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Richard R. Wright, Jr., epitomized the second generation of black social gospel leaders that earned graduate degrees in Northern schools, specialized in social science, wrote prolifically, and won an ...
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Richard R. Wright, Jr., epitomized the second generation of black social gospel leaders that earned graduate degrees in Northern schools, specialized in social science, wrote prolifically, and won an audience for the social gospel in black churches. Wright specialized in refuting the culture of denigration, and in building strong black institutions. He also became a symbol of the limits of the “Talented Tenth” strategy and its “politics of respectability.”Less
Richard R. Wright, Jr., epitomized the second generation of black social gospel leaders that earned graduate degrees in Northern schools, specialized in social science, wrote prolifically, and won an audience for the social gospel in black churches. Wright specialized in refuting the culture of denigration, and in building strong black institutions. He also became a symbol of the limits of the “Talented Tenth” strategy and its “politics of respectability.”
Joseph R. Fitzgerald
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780813176499
- eISBN:
- 9780813176529
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813176499.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, Social History
This chapter continues to detail the history of the social justice–focused Cambridge movement and white politicos’ use of laissez-faire gradualism to thwart it. It discusses Richardson’s growing ...
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This chapter continues to detail the history of the social justice–focused Cambridge movement and white politicos’ use of laissez-faire gradualism to thwart it. It discusses Richardson’s growing influence in the Cambridge movement, particularly her ideas about who should be involved in the movement, what its goals should be, and what strategies and tactics should be used to achieve them. She rejected the politics of respectability, which stressed adherence to certain dress and personal behavior standards, and presented herself to white leaders, including Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, as an unflinching advocate for black liberation. This chapter also covers Richardson’s role in the “Treaty of Cambridge,” a formal agreement between city leaders and CNAC that outlined the steps white leaders would take to address the city’s racial issues.Less
This chapter continues to detail the history of the social justice–focused Cambridge movement and white politicos’ use of laissez-faire gradualism to thwart it. It discusses Richardson’s growing influence in the Cambridge movement, particularly her ideas about who should be involved in the movement, what its goals should be, and what strategies and tactics should be used to achieve them. She rejected the politics of respectability, which stressed adherence to certain dress and personal behavior standards, and presented herself to white leaders, including Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, as an unflinching advocate for black liberation. This chapter also covers Richardson’s role in the “Treaty of Cambridge,” a formal agreement between city leaders and CNAC that outlined the steps white leaders would take to address the city’s racial issues.
Jon Stobart
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199577927
- eISBN:
- 9780191744884
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577927.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History, Economic History
This chapter focuses on the spatiality of the shop and how this related to processes of buying and selling. The chapter begins by drawing on inventory and visual evidence to examine the ways in which ...
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This chapter focuses on the spatiality of the shop and how this related to processes of buying and selling. The chapter begins by drawing on inventory and visual evidence to examine the ways in which shop fixtures varied across space and time, arguing that grocers' shops were part of broader processes which placed increasing emphasis on the display of goods. Building on this, the chapter examines the reasons for the apparent growth in emphasis on the display of wares — even of what may seem to be visually unremarkable commodities. This was in part to promote sales, but also to send key messages about the retailer's knowledge and business acumen, and to facilitate and encourage new modes of buying and selling. The chapter argues that the grocer's shop was a respectable space and that grocers played an important part in constructing respectability through consumption.Less
This chapter focuses on the spatiality of the shop and how this related to processes of buying and selling. The chapter begins by drawing on inventory and visual evidence to examine the ways in which shop fixtures varied across space and time, arguing that grocers' shops were part of broader processes which placed increasing emphasis on the display of goods. Building on this, the chapter examines the reasons for the apparent growth in emphasis on the display of wares — even of what may seem to be visually unremarkable commodities. This was in part to promote sales, but also to send key messages about the retailer's knowledge and business acumen, and to facilitate and encourage new modes of buying and selling. The chapter argues that the grocer's shop was a respectable space and that grocers played an important part in constructing respectability through consumption.
