Diseases of the Body Politic: White Slavery in Jane Addams' A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil and Selected Short Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
JANET BEER ◽  
KATHERINE JOSLIN
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Social Pathology ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
North Side ◽  
Hull House ◽  
The City

Charlotte Perkins Gilman travelled from California to Chicago in 1896, spending three months at Hull House with her friend Jane Addams. Their discussions that summer resulted in a curious cross-pollination, each woman borrowing from the other, although neither, as it turns out, finding the exchange quite comfortable. Gilman, gratified by the intellectual audience at Hull House, was repelled by the day-to-day visceral contact with the poor. When Addams arranged for her to run a settlement on Chicago's North Side, known as “Little Hell,” Gilman eyed the grim prospect: “The loathly river flowed sluggishly near by, thick and ill-smelling; Goose Island lay black in the slow stream. Everywhere a heavy dinginess; low, dark brick factories and gloomy wooden dwellings often below the level of the street; foul plank sidewalks, rotten and full of holes; black mud underfoot, damp soot drifting steadily down over everything.” Poverty, in her description, infects both nature and culture, fouling the city and infesting it with literal and metaphorical disease. She soon handed her job over to Helen Campbell and moved on to write her theoretical analysis of the disease of middle-class marriage, Women and Economics (1899); “my interest was in all humanity, not merely the under side of it,” she mused, “in sociology, not social pathology.”

‘The Party with God’: Michel Foucault, the Gay Left and the Work of Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Maynard
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Socialist Feminism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sexual Theory ◽  
The City

Revisiting Foucault's month-long stay in Toronto in June 1982, this article explores the reception and appropriation of the first volume of The History of Sexuality by activist-intellectuals associated with the Toronto-based publication, The Body Politic, and some of their fellow travelers. Reading Foucault's introductory volume through the intersecting frameworks of social constructionism, historical materialism, and socialist feminism, gay-left activists forged a distinctive relationship between sexual theory and political practice. If Foucault had a significant impact on activists in the city, Toronto also left its mark on Foucault. Based on the recently rediscovered and unedited transcript of a well-known interview with Foucault in Toronto, along with an interview with one of Foucault's interlocutors, the article concludes with Foucault's forays into Toronto's sexual and political scenes, particularly in relation to ‘bodies and pleasures’ and resistance to the sex police.

scholarly journals Claire Weeda, 'Cleanliness, Civility, and the City in Medieval Ideals and Scripts'

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Weeda
Keyword(s):  
Physical Health ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Conduct Manuals ◽  
Concepts Of Health ◽  
The City ◽  
The Ideal

Latin and vernacular urban panegyrics, describing the ideal city and its residents, mushroomed in the twelfth century. Painting a utopian view of the city that mirrors the heavenly Jerusalem, they rhetorically conveyed ideals of urbanity for aspiring members of the body politic to emulate. This chapter explores the ways in which the cityscape constructed in these texts, and residents’ behaviour (as influenced by conduct manuals and regimes of health), appear embedded in a natural environment reflected through the lens of Galenic medicine. Evoking the benefits of cleanliness and beauty, these concepts of health and hygiene accorded closely with issues of social status. The disciplined quest for moderation and balance offered spiritual and physical health, as well as enhanced personal repute.

Ethnicity and the city: the Kurdish quarter of Damascus between Ottoman and French rule, c. 1724–1946

Urban History ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
NELIDA FUCCARO
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Spatial Organization ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Public Action ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This article concentrates on the Kurdish quarter of Damascus and investigates the relationship between communal/ethnic identity, spatial organization and the socio-political structures of the city. It challenges the notion of quarter as an ‘ethnic cluster’ by examining historical processes of integration of the Kurdish community in the body politic of Damascus. In the colonial period the emergence of new arenas of public action for the Kurdish community are analysed with reference to the emergence of new ideas of class and community.

All for the Union

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifton Hood
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
The Social ◽  
Democratic Nation ◽  
The City

For all the social chaos that phenomenal economic growth and heavy immigration had produced earlier in the century, upper-class New Yorkers had generally been optimistic that hoi polloi possessed enough self-control and independence to take direction from their betters and accept their proper place in the body politic. But the New York City draft riots of 1863 – the worse urban disorder in American history – seemed to show that entire communities lacked the self-discipline and orderliness required of the citizenry of a democratic nation and instead were prone to a savagery that had ripped the city apart. Drawing on their memories of the draft riots and on Victorian cultural values, the upper class utilized the Civil War to counter the blurring of class boundaries and social credentials caused by urban growth of the first half of the century. They came to classify came to classify many workers and immigrants as dangerous classes that threatened the social order- and themselves as a community of heritage and feeling that provided leadership in government, the economy, and society. At bottom these representations involved social control, and upper-class people used them to help harden class lines and gain an understanding of themselves and the rest of urban society that was coherent and compelling.

Catholic–Anglican Relations: Archbishop Downey, Bishop David and the Decree Ne Temere, 1930–1931

2008 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-123
Author(s):  
John Davies
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Public Perception ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The City ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

... in no English city is there a greater need for prudence in ecclesiastical matters than in the great city of Liverpool. That world famous seaport has too often heard the cries of religious factions and has too often seen violence and bloodshed as the result of clashes between professing Christians. There is every reason why the heads and leaders of the various denominations should teach their people both by precept and example, to wipe out the old stain on Liverpool's good name and to gild the city's escutcheon with nobler usages.Richard Downey on becoming Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool in 1928 seems to have anticipated The Tablet’s admonition. Downey indeed seems to have begun his episcopate (1928–1953) with a determination to change the public perception of Catholicism in his diocese and in the city of Liverpool in particular. In late twentieth century terminology he engaged in a ‘re-branding exercise’. He withdrew support for a specifically Catholic political party in Liverpool, which had been favoured by his predecessor Archbishop Keating. He emphasised the civic commitment and the ‘Englishness’ of the Catholic community, moderating the impression that the Catholic community in Liverpool was essentially Irish. Thus although St. Patrick’s Day would continue to be celebrated, so would St. George’s Day. Additionally the blessings conferred on the world by the British Empire would be fulsomely acknowledged. Catholics would be seen to be part of the mainstream community contributing to its fullness and development. They would cease to be perceived as an alien irritant in the body politic.

Francisco Suárez on Consent and Political Obligation

Vivarium ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
Close Inspection ◽  
Francisco Suarez ◽  
Social Contract Theorist ◽  
The City

AbstractInterpreters disagree on the origin that Francisco Suárez assigns to political obligation and correlative political subjection. According to some, Suárez, as other social contract theorists, believes that it is the consent of the individuals that causes political obligation. Others, however, claim that for Suárez, political obligation is underived from the individuals' consent which creates the city. In support of this claim they invoke Suárez's view that political power emanates from the city by way of "natural resultancy". I argue that analysis of Suárez's less studied De voto and De iuramento reveals that, for Suárez, consent causes both the city and the citizen's political obligation. Moreover, close inspection of the notion of causation by natural resultancy within Suárez's metaphysics shows that what emanates from the body politic in this fashion is not, as claimed, political subjection and political obligation, but rather the city's right to self-mastership. Because for him political obligation does originate in consent it is not incorrect to regard Suárez as a social contract theorist.

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