scholarly journals Middle Class Union: Organizing the “Consuming Public” in Post-World War I America. By Mark W. Robbins

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 1437-1438
Author(s):  
Daniel Scroop
2018 ◽  
pp. 214-260
Author(s):  
Sujata S. Mody

Chapter 5 examines two landmark Hindi short stories that contested aspects of Dwivedi’s literary agenda. In ‘Dulāīvālī’ (quilt-woman), Banga Mahila used regional and domestic women’s speech in addition to Dwivedi’s preferred standard, Khari Boli prose. Her fictional exploration of the impact of nationalist ideals on middle-class Bengali women in the Hindi-belt further challenged the patriarchal authority with which Dwivedi and other nationalists sought to shape an emergent nation. Chandradhar Sharma ‘Guleri’, in ‘Usne kahā thā’ (she had said), employed regional/ethnic speech that was also gendered, as masculine and vulgar, once again flouting Dwivedi’s preferences for an upright, Khari Boli standard. His story, featuring a Sikh soldier fighting in Europe during World War I, upheld some nationalist ideals, but also defied conventional mores. Both stories underwent extensive editorial revisions, yet there remains a record in their final published versions of their authors’ defiance, and of Dwivedi’s strategic responses to such challenges.


Author(s):  
David Weir

Sociocultural integration occurred first in fin-de-siècle Vienna, where decadence underwent a “bourgeoisification” and where the taste for decadence, no longer limited to aristocrats or elites, found a middle-class audience, even as artists and writers actively sought out that audience rather than working to “shock” it. The sociocultural decadence of Vienna prior to World War I is exceeded after the war only by that of Weimar Berlin, where decadence became, almost, a mass movement, as Berliners of all social strata eagerly participated in forms of social behavior that challenged bourgeois norms and traditions. The rise of the Nazi regime forced a major reconsideration of the meaning of decadence.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Jensen Wallach

This chapter demonstrates that the push for voluntary rationing during World War I rendered foods like beef and wheat, which were once of enormous symbolic significance to black food reformers, as unpatriotic. Black food reformers had to choose between performing a U.S. patriotic food identity that demanded conservation and sacrifice and continuing to shun foods like pork and corn that were associated with the plantation South and thus with the history of slavery. Assimilationist eaters generally chose U.S. patriotism, a choice that inevitably muted some of the earlier antagonism that members of the middle class had shown toward the iconic southern foods they associated with the history of slavery. Ultimately, the economic pressures of the Great Depression worked to mute the machinations of even the most ardent food reformers as the community’s emphasis shifted from what to eat to the even more dire problem of having enough to eat.


Author(s):  
Cecelia Hopkins Porter

This chapter looks into the life of Baroness Maria Bach (1896–1978), her promising professional future, and her lifelong struggle to attract renown and respect as a “serious” woman composer. Born into Austria's late-nineteenth-century privileged “aristocracy”—the affluent upper middle class—the Viennese composer and pianist prided herself on her intellectual and artistic heritage. Her birth in 1896 set her solidly within the imperial capital's golden age—that brilliant constellation of the arts known as Viennese modernism. From the last decade of the nineteenth century to World War I, fin-de-siècle Vienna was a cultural mecca unequaled anywhere else in central Europe.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-18
Author(s):  
Kirsty Thorpe

The year 2017 is an important centenary for women in the Church. In 1917, in the darkness of World War I, a woman was ordained as a Congregational Minister for the first time in Britain. She was not a Congregationalist but a Presbyterian by upbringing. She would go on to serve a small church in one of the poorest parts of London, yet she was highly educated and from an upper middle-class family. She was a pacifist, a feminist, a wife, mother and someone of deep faith. Constance Coltman’s ordination was a quiet event which attracted little attention at the time but which continues to have an effect even today. This article outlines and considers the historical, ecclesial and personal contexts within which Constance Coltman’s ordained ministry began.


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