‘Frail but Fearless’: Dichotomies of femininity and strength at the New York Hippodrome, 1905‐17

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Merriman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
The Body ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Critical Responses

This article examines two women who performed athletic feats at the New York Hippodrome between 1905 and 1917, arguing that their approaches to costume and bodily display were integral to their widespread critical and public acclaim. The women examined are lion tamer Claire Heliot and swimmer and diver Annette Kellerman. I contend that these performers occupied a difficult position within the early-twentieth-century entertainment industry. The type of mainstream spectacle that the Hippodrome provided, combined with strict societal ideas of what constituted femininity and masculinity, created an environment that was not conducive to the success of athletic women.Their unusual acts therefore required them to negotiate their public image in such a way that emphasized their inherent femininity. Their costume was an essential element of this negotiation as it exposed the audience to a kind of woman with whom they were already familiar. Claire Heliot did this by occupying a traditional domestic womanhood that sharply contrasted with her dangerous lion-taming act, and Annette Kellerman emphasized her beauty through the sexually charged display of her body in form-fitting costumes and swimsuits. In addition to analyses of their costumes, critical responses to their performances are taken into consideration as evidence of these women’s success as performers. This article highlights how costume and the body can be used as tools to alter identity and reinforce gender norms for the purposes of subverting the physical expectations of women.

scholarly journals Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
HALLIE LIEBERMAN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Household Appliance ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Sex Toys

The electromechanical vibrator originated in the late nineteenth century as a device for medical therapy. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, however, marketing of vibrators as consumer appliances became pervasive. Ads appeared in the pages ofThe New York TimesandScientific Americanand plastered street cars. Companies marketed vibrators to grandparents, mothers, infants, and young adults. Vibrators are widely sold today, however, as instruments for masturbation, a use that was rarely mentioned but well known before World War II. How was vibrator advertising able to become so ubiquitous during the early twentieth century, despite draconian antiobscenity laws and antimasturbation rhetoric? This article argues that companies achieved this result by shaping the meaning of vibrators through strategic marketing. This marketing overtly portrayed vibrators as nonsexual while covertly conveying their sexual uses through imagery and the sale of phallic, dildo-like attachments.Companies positioned vibrators within two major consumer product categories in the early 1900s: labor-saving household appliances and electrotherapeutic devices. By advertising the vibrator as both a labor-saving household appliance and a sexualized health panacea, companies could slip vibrator ads past the censors, while supplying user manuals that clued consumers into specific sexual uses. In household appliance ads, companies drew on traditional gender roles to present vibrators as emblems of domesticity and motherhood, whereas in electrotherapeutic ads they presented vibrators as symbols of progressive gender roles, the sexualized new woman and the body-conscious “self-made man.”

Between Poland and Germany: Jewish Religious Practices in Illustrated Postcards of the Early Twentieth Century

2003 ◽  
pp. 137-166
Author(s):  
Shalom Sabar
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
The Public ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Common ◽  
Social Message

This chapter assesses the production of Jewish postcards in the early twentieth century. The fact that the Jews in this period wanted to participate in the postcard phenomenon carries an important social message, and, as is implied in the common Hebrew term for the postcard at the time, mikhtav galui (open letter), this desire was clear for all to see. The printing and acquisition of postcards signified acceptance of and support for the public image portrayed upon them. They are therefore a mirror of the ideology and values of turn-of-the-century Jewish society as that society wished to present them. At the same time, the postcards contain valuable ethnographic information about the lives of Jews during those years. The production of Jewish postcards was concentrated in three centres: two in Europe (Germany and Poland) and one in the United States (primarily New York). Germany may be considered the birthplace of the Jewish illustrated postcard: the earliest examples known were produced there in the 1880s. The chapter then considers the portrayal of Jewish religious practices in the postcards.

Authenticity and Ethnicity

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Ray Herzogenrath
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Young Women ◽  
The Body ◽  
Folk Dance ◽  
Settlement House ◽  
Settlement Houses ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Settlement Movement

During the Progressive Era, settlement workers attempted to regulate dance both within and outside settlement house walls as a method to instill proper “American” body behaviors, particularly in immigrant bodies. This essay examines the paradoxes of folk dance as encouraged by settlement workers in early-twentieth-century Chicago and New York. Settlement workers aimed to assimilate immigrants to American ideals of health, refinement, and respectability through the body; in folk dance they found a satisfying mode of nonsexualized dance, which also acted out a romanticized desire for simplicity in the midst of rapid modernization. The evidence reveals that folk dance in settlement houses traveled two paths: ethnic clubs devoted to the practice of immigrant traditions and structured classes offered to girls and young women. These developments fulfilled the project of Americanization prescribed by the settlement movement and provided a means for immigrants to continue folk practices from their home countries.

Revaluations through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Mind

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.

Shaping Jazz

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damon J. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Long Run

There are over a million jazz recordings, but only a few hundred tunes have been recorded repeatedly. Why did a minority of songs become jazz standards? Why do some songs—and not others—get re-recorded by many musicians? This book answers this question and more, exploring the underappreciated yet crucial roles played by initial production and markets—in particular, organizations and geography—in the development of early twentieth-century jazz. The book considers why places like New York played more important roles as engines of diffusion than as the sources of standards. It demonstrates why and when certain geographical references in tune and group titles were considered more desirable. It also explains why a place like Berlin, which produced jazz abundantly from the 1920s to early 1930s, is now on jazz's historical sidelines. The book shows the key influences of firms in the recording industry, including how record labels and their executives affected what music was recorded, and why major companies would re-release recordings under artistic pseudonyms. It indicates how a recording's appeal was related to the narrative around its creation, and how the identities of its firm and musicians influenced the tune's long-run popularity. Applying fascinating ideas about market emergence to a music's commercialization, the book offers a unique look at the origins of a groundbreaking art form.

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