Freedom Girls

Author(s):  
Alexandra M. Apolloni

Freedom Girls: Voicing Femininity in 1960s British Pop shows how the vocal performances of girl singers in 1960s Britain defined—and sometimes defied—ideas about what it meant to be a young woman in the 1960s British pop music scene. The singing and expressive voices of Sandie Shaw, Cilla Black, Millie Small, Dusty Springfield, Lulu, Marianne Faithfull, and P. P. Arnold reveal how vocal sound shapes access to social mobility and, consequently, access to power and musical authority. The book examines how Sandie Shaw and Cilla Black’s ordinary girl personas were tied to whiteness, and in Black’s case to her Liverpool origins. It shows how Dusty Springfield and Jamaican singer Millie Small engaged with the transatlantic sounds of soul and ska, respectively, transforming ideas about musical genre, race, and gender. It reveals how attitudes about sexuality and youth in rock culture shaped the vocal performances of Lulu and Marianne Faithfull, and how P. P. Arnold has re-narrated rock history to center Black women’s vocality. Freedom Girls draws on a broad array of archival sources, including music magazines, fashion and entertainment magazines produced for young women, biographies and interviews, audience research reports, and others to inform analysis of musical recordings (including such songs as “As Tears Go By,” “Son of a Preacher Man,” and others) and performances on television programs such as Ready Steady Go!, Shindig, and other 1960s music shows. These performances reveal the historical and contemporary connections between voice, social mobility, and musical authority and demonstrate how singers used voice to navigate the boundaries of race, class, and gender.

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 408-427
Author(s):  
Elaine Bell Kaplan

Sociology is being challenged by the new generation of students and scholars who have another view of society. Millennial/Gen Zs are the most progressive generation since the 1960s. We have had many opportunities to discuss and imagine power, diversity, and social change when we teach them in our classes or attend their campus events. Some Millennial/Gen Z believe, especially those in academia, that social scientists are tied to old theories and ideologies about race and gender, among other inconsistencies. These old ideas do not resonate with their views regarding equity. Millennials are not afraid to challenge the status quo. They do so already by supporting multiple gender and race identities. Several questions come to mind. How do we as sociologists with our sense of history and other issues such as racial and gender inequality help them along the way? Are we ready for this generation? Are they ready for us?


2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 630-630
Author(s):  
Glenn Perusek

For more than a generation, as the authors rightly point out, the impact of organized labor on electoral politics has been neglected in scholarly literature. Indeed, only a tiny minority of social scientists explicitly focuses on organized labor in the United States. Although the impact of the social movements of the 1960s appeared to heighten awareness of the importance of class, race, and gender, class and its organized expression, the union movement, has received less attention, while studies of race and gender have flourished.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-236
Author(s):  
Yu Jung Lee

Abstract This article considers the proliferation of Korean native camp shows and the roles of Korean women entertainers at the military service clubs of the Eighth United States Army in Korea in the 1950s and the 1960s. The role of the “American sweethearts” in USO camp shows—to create a “home away from home” and boost the morale of the American troops during wartime—was carried out by female Korean entertainers in the occupied zone at a critical moment in US-ROK relations during the Cold War. The article argues that Korean entertainers at military clubs were meant to perform the entertainment of “home” and evoke nostalgia for American soldiers by imitating well-known American singers and songs. However, what they performed as America was not simply the reproduction of American entertainment but often a manifestation of their imagination; they were constructing their own version of the American home. Their hybrid styles of American performance were indicative of how the discourse of the American home itself was constructed around ambivalence, the very site where women entertainers were enabled to exceed the rigid boundaries of race and gender, transcend their roles as imitators, and exercise their agency by productively negotiating this ambivalence.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003464462110367
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Kaknes

How do welfare programs affect beneficiaries' perceptions of social mobility? This paper uses the case of Brazil's Bolsa Família Program to assess whether, how, and to what degree the welfare program affects beneficiaries' views of their potential social mobility. It makes a key contribution to the understanding of social mobility by incorporating the role that race and gender play in beneficiary respondent's evaluation of social mobility. Use of an original field survey undergirds the finding that, in contrast to conventional understandings of Brazilian racial and social dynamics, beneficiary status operates differently for Afro-Brazilian and White beneficiaries, as well as for male and female beneficiaries. Specifically, that the program has significant empowerment effects for White women beneficiaries, but that it does not affect the evaluations of Afro-Brazilian women.


1997 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judit Durst

This article explores changes in childbearing practices among Gypsy (Roma) women in a small village in Northern Hungary. The author benefited from several years of ethnographic field research and data collected in this village, where the proportion of the out-of-wedlock births and births to teenage—mostly Gypsy—mothers have increased by a factor of three in the past 10 years as the population of the village has become more and more impoverished and the opportunities for geographic or social mobility declined sharply for the ethnic minority. The author argues that bearing children early is a sign of passage to adulthood in this group of women, a function which had been assigned to other social institutions before 1989. Early childbearing at the same time exacerbates the problem of Gypsy women: this is the first study which documents the consequences of poverty on women's and children's health by showing an increase in low birth weight babies in the community since 1989.


PMLA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta E. Sánchez

Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets (1967) challenges binary notions of whiteness and blackness by valorizing a third term—mestizaje. And yet the novel enlists dominant views of female gender and sexuality to affirm the protagonist's ethnic male identity. In my Chicana feminist reading of this Puerto Rican text, I import the reinterpreted figure La Malinche and its companion figure La Chingada—prevailing tropes in Chicano and Chicana literature and discourse of the 1960s—to illuminate the complex intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. These intersections are key to social analyses that transcend binary conceptions of race and paradigms of dominant and subaltern.


Author(s):  
Simon Wendt

The chapter explores the organization’s post–World War II history. This period saw major challenges to its conservative vision of America’s “imagined community.” Despite these challenges, the DAR’s views on race, immigration, gender, and the nation’s past remained virtually unchanged. It continued to embrace ethnic nationalism, opposing racial integration and a liberalization of America’s immigration laws, and upheld the very same ideals of femininity and masculinity that its campaigns had emphasized prior to 1945. The organization regarded the social movements of the 1960s, including the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and second wave feminism, as a grave danger to the nation. Although the DAR began to admit black members in 1977 and finally acknowledged African Americans’ patriotic contributions to American independence in the 1980s, its public rhetoric of civic tolerance frequently belied the DAR’s conservative views on race and gender.


Author(s):  
Morton Keller ◽  
Phyllis Keller

What place did Harvard College have in the modern University, with its expansive central administration, research-driven faculty, ambitious and high-powered professional schools? A much more important one than this litany of potential threats might suggest. The College remained the most conspicuous and prestigious part of the University. It produced the most generous donors; it outclassed its rivals in attracting the most sought-after students; it exemplified Harvard in the public mind. And it shared in the worldly ambience of the late-twentieth-century University. For decades, Harvard College admissions was a battleground over who would be accepted and on what grounds access would be granted. The admission of Jews was a touchstone issue in the conflict between the Brahmin and meritocratic impulses from the 1920s to the 1950s. Then another problem came to the fore: how to choose a freshman class from a swelling number of qualified applicants. As selection became ever more complex and arcane, the sheer size and quality of the applicant pool enabled the dean of admissions and his staff, rather than the faculty, to define the terms of entry. The result was that classes were crafted to be outstanding in more than purely academic-intellectual terms. Intellectual superstars were a small group of near-certain admits. After that, a solid level of academic ability set an admissions floor, above which character, extracurricular activities, artistic or athletic talent, “legacy” status, and geographical diversity figured in the admissions gene pool. After the 1960s, diversity came to embrace race and gender. Chase Peterson, who was dean of admissions during the tumultuous years from 1967 to 1972, thought that during his time the criteria for selection broadened to include tenacity, perseverance, having learned something deeply and well, social generosity, intellectual openness, and strength of character. A statement on admissions desiderata in the 1990s included “honesty, fairness, compassion, altruism, leadership, and initiative” and stressed: “We place great value in a candidate’s capacity to move beyond the limits of personal achievement to involvement in the life of the community at large.” One of Dean of Admissions Wilbur Bender’s 1950s ideal admits, a “Scandinavian farm boy who skates beautifully,” had better have headed his local skating club or taught skating to inner-city youth if he hoped to get into Harvard at the century’s end.


2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Taylor

There has been an increasingly common trend in the UK to identify character skills and traits as the basis for various individual successes and achievements. In education policy and employment services, character has been linked to the making of successful, morally aware, employable and socially mobile citizens. This article explores the late-19th-century use of character discourses, focusing on the economist Alfred Marshall. During this period character was associated with future-oriented subjects – those displaying provident and thrifty habits and dispositions – and held particular class, race, and gender prejudices. The article draws parallels between this late-Victorian approach to character and the ‘return’ of character in 21st-century education and welfare-to-work policy, in particular, where cultivating character is linked to improving employability and social mobility. We can make productive comparisons between character’s Victorian legacy and its re-emergence more recently amid increasingly moralised discourses around poverty, inequality, and unemployment. In doing so, we might better understand the historical antecedents to stigmatising character discourses today, insofar as they leave the burden of responsibility for particular social outcomes in life and the labour market with individuals and their ability to cultivate their own human capital.


Author(s):  
Dorothy Pawluch ◽  
Samuel Schotland

Although interest in the health, illnesses, and well-being of the young dates back to Antiquity, the term pediatrics is relatively modern, originating in the latter half of the 19th century with the emergence of a distinct and organized specialty within medicine. The literature covering that development, and the history of medical interest in children more generally, is vast, characterized by contributions from clinician-historians and, especially after the 1960s, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and other social scientists. The tendency in the earlier literature was to produce largely descriptive works celebrating the great men (less so women) of pediatrics and their triumphs. Since the 1960s, however, appreciation has grown of the need to look beyond a simple chronicling and honoring of individuals and their scientific and technological achievements. The trend has been toward more analytical histories that pay attention to the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts within which pediatrics developed, and to the role of such factors as class, race, and gender. Both types of contributions—those generated by clinician-historians and those by critical analysts writing from vantage points outside of medicine—are reflected here. Drawing clear boundaries around the subject of pediatric history is difficult. The literature cited inevitably overlaps to a greater or lesser extent with other Oxford Bibliographies articles, such as “Children and Social Policy and “Ethics in Research with Children.” An effort has been made to include sources where pediatrics as a specialty features centrally or that cover developments that have been pivotal to the evolution of the specialty.


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