“Acting Victorian”

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-74
Author(s):  
Noelle Hedgcock
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
New Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Mixed Strategies ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Insightful Analysis

Contributor Noelle Hedgcock examines the tension the studios create when they market the stars of their prestige pictures—Betty Davis, Joan Crawford, Evelyn Venable, and Joan Fontaine, as "authentically-Victorian" even as the women themselves are demonstrating characteristics of an emerging class of modern women. The studio's mixed strategies result in an ideological strain that underscores the mediated nature of the “New Woman” in mid-twentieth century Hollywood and the United States. Images of the “New Woman” could circulate, but only when set in very specific conditions. Hedgcock's insightful analysis shows the studios allowed the “New Woman” to appear as a rich, young woman in an urban setting, but not in small-town, middle-class, conservative America. In this way, Hedgcock suggests, the studios appeal to the aspirations and anxieties of womanhood found in their audiences, but only if they also left space for their stars to fit the less sophisticated notions of womanhood.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Laura Harris
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual Artist

In Experiments in Exile, I explore and compare projects undertaken by two twentieth-century American intellectuals while they lived in voluntary exiles in the United States: the Trinidadian writer and revolutionary C. L. R. James and the Brazilian visual artist and counterculturalist Hélio Oiticica. James and Oiticica never met. They lived and worked in the United States at different moments. My focus is on James’s stay during the 1940s and on Oiticica’s stay during the 1970s. Given the significant differences between them—not just at the level of nationality but at the level of race (James was black, Oiticica was white), class (James was situated within a precarious middle class, Oiticica was firmly established within an upper middle class), sexuality (James was straight, Oiticica was gay), and disciplinary locations (James is generally situated in the history of radical social theory and practice, and Oiticica is generally situated in the history of avant-garde aesthetic theory and practice)—this is surely an unlikely combination. This study is itself an experiment, one that goes beyond the usual parameters of comparativist or transnational research, to identify, in the surprising resonances between the projects pursued by these two very disparate figures, a common project I believe they, together, bring into relief....

Nixon’s War

2020 ◽  
pp. 133-152
Author(s):  
Russell Crandall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Drug Abuse ◽  
Drug Use ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Orange County ◽  
The United States ◽  
Illegal Drug ◽  
Juvenile Arrests

This chapter recounts how drug use became commonplace among the American middle-class once again over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. It discusses the federal crackdown in the Progressive era and Harry Anslinger's ensuing anti-drug crusade that made it easy to forget that Americans had ever before flirted with mind-altering substances. It also cites President Richard Nixon's announcement of his national attack on narcotics abuse on July 14, 1969 as a campaign promise he had to uphold after speaking in southern California's conservative Orange County in September 1968. The chapter elaborates how Nixon's announcement decried the explosion in drug use as a growing menace to the welfare of the United States, causing the surge juvenile arrests for drug possession between 1960 and 1967. It talks about how Nixon was convinced that illegal drug abuse in America had reached epidemic levels and blamed the surge on several sources, such as the sympathetic media coverage.

scholarly journals Seeking the Dharma on the World Stage: Lü Bicheng and the Revival of Buddhism in the Early Twentieth Century

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 558
Author(s):  
Peng Liu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Space ◽  
New Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Animal Protection ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The New Woman

This article focuses on the Chinese woman writer Lü Bicheng 呂碧城 (1883–1943) and her relationship with the worldwide movement for the revival of Buddhism in the early twentieth century. Lü rose up in the context of the “new woman” ideal and transcended that ideal as she rejected the dualistic thinking that was prevalent in her time. She embraced both reason and religion, as well as both modern and traditional ideas. Her story demonstrates that religion and the creation of the “new woman” were not mutually exclusive in her life. In the 1920s and 1930s, Lü traveled extensively in the United States and Europe and eventually converted to Buddhism after she witnessed its popularity in the West. During this period, she successfully created a social space for herself by utilizing Buddhist sources to engage in intellectual dialogues on paranormal phenomena and animal protection. At the same time, she carved out a place for Buddhism in the discourse on the convergence and divergence of science and religion after the First World War (1914–1918).

New Women in the New Pacific: Japanese–American Romances in the Context of U.S. Empire

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 395-418
Author(s):  
Gretchen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
The West ◽  
Japanese Men ◽  
New Women ◽  
Cultural Status ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Influential Book

In the title of a 1903 American Journal of Sociology essay, Ernest W. Clement announces a new phenomenon: “The New Woman in Japan.” By this title, he quickly explains, he does not mean to satirically compare this Japanese sociological development to the American “parody of man” usually associated with the phrase, because “such a creature as that called the ‘new woman’ in the Occident has not yet appeared to any great extent among the Japanese.” Although sometimes in Japan “the process of the new woman's evolution may be disfigured by some accident” producing “a sickening sort of person,” Clement's interest is not in particular aberrations, but rather in “the abstract, legal new woman” created by recent changes in Japan's civil code. In this abstraction Clement sees improvement on previous Japanese laws that “relegat[ed] woman to an abnormally inferior position.” Clement thus assures readers that, although Japan's modernization hinges upon its women's legal and cultural status, female advancement in Japan will not approach the “abnormal” excesses of the United States. Quoting Alice Mabel Bacon's influential book Japanese Girls and Women to stress this point, Clement explains that Japanese men are adopting many Western habits and opinions, but they still “shrink aghast, in many cases, at the thought that their women may ever become the forward, self-assertive, half-masculine women of the West.” Yet still, many of these Japanese men express “a growing dissatisfaction with the smallness and narrowness of the lives of their wives and daughters — a growing belief that better educated women make better homes.”

“That Magnificent Land of Sunshine, Health, and Wealth”: How U.S. Entrepreneurs Sold Cuba's Isle of Pines

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 575-611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Neagle
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chronic Illness ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Citrus Production ◽  
Foreign Land ◽  
Returns On Investment ◽  
White Settlement

At the start of the twentieth century, U.S. citizens began settling and investing on the Isle of Pines off the coast of Cuba. U.S. entrepreneurs who believed the Isle was or would become U.S. territory bought vast tracts from Spanish and Cuban landowners. They then subdivided the land and marketed it to farmers and middle-class Americans still in search of opportunity on a disappearing frontier. These landholding companies' promotions helped shape the assumptions and expectations of thousands of Americans who settled on the Isle over the next few decades. Companies portrayed the Isle as a tropical paradise safe for white settlement and ripe for development. They promised high returns-on-investment for those looking to engage in citrus production for export, as well as a healthful climate for those plagued by chronic illness. Some of these settlers publicly echoed landholding companies' portrayal and remained on the Isle for years. Others found the Isle's promise to be grossly exaggerated and returned to the United States feeling swindled by unscrupulous entrepreneurs. Although set in a foreign land, U.S. interest in the Isle reveals much about life in the United States, including the changing nature of expansion, the growing power of advertising, and middle-class discontent.

Whose Evidence? Which Account?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koritha Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Opportunities ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
New Negro ◽  
The New Woman

This introductory chapter contends that lynching plays served as mechanisms through which African Americans survived the height of mob violence—and its photographic representation—still believing in their right to full citizenship. Lynching plays survive in the archive to enhance our understanding of the United States at the turn into the twentieth century; the genre was developed by African Americans aware of their communities' strategies for living with lynching—strategies that required a keen understanding of U.S. culture. As a genre, black-authored lynching drama sheds unique light on the New Negro, the New South, and the New Woman. As African Americans who had never known legal bondage came of age, they laid claim to unprecedented educational opportunities, and like other Americans, they went about the business of defining the contours of their modern identities.

From Memory to Research: German Popular Genealogy in the Early Twentieth Century

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Tebbe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
The United States ◽  
Family Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Middle Class Families

Today genealogy enjoys a wide range of enthusiastic practitioners, and almost every extended family has a self-appointed family historian. Along with professional historians, genealogists are ubiquitous at archives both in Germany and the United States. Of course this was not always so; until about one hundred years ago genealogy was the almost exclusive purview of nobles and aristocrats who had rather immediate concerns driving their inquiries into their families' pasts. That changed around 1900 in Germany, when in the words of a “how-to” guide for amateur researchers written in 1920, genealogy underwent a transformation from a “nobleman's sport” to a bourgeois “science.” This meant that, “today the middle class constitutes four fifths, nay nine tenths, of the biggest genealogical societies.” According to the growing corpus of genealogical literature, the middle class had marked family research with superior values and a greater dedication to truth and knowledge. Beyond the rhetoric, the bourgeois acceptance of genealogy altered the ways that middle-class families saw and remembered the past.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

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