2. Race and Gender in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 21-56
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender

Blackface Minstrelsy and the Reception of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-320
Author(s):  
Julia J. Chybowski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Black Swan ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThis article explores blackface minstrelsy in the context of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's singing career of the 1850s–1870s. Although Greenfield performed a version of African American musicality that was distinct from minstrel caricatures, minstrelsy nonetheless impacted her reception. The ubiquity of minstrel tropes greatly influenced audience perceptions of Greenfield's creative and powerful transgressions of expected race and gender roles, as well as the alignment of race with mid-nineteenth-century notions of social class. Minstrel caricatures and stereotypes appeared in both praise and ridicule of Greenfield's performances from her debut onward, and after successful US and transatlantic tours established her notoriety, minstrel companies actually began staging parody versions of Greenfield, using her sobriquet, “Black Swan.” These “Black Swan” acts are evidence that Greenfield's achievements were perceived as threats to established social hierarchies.

scholarly journals A Legal History of the New Zealand Jury Service - Introduction, Evolution, and Equality?

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 283
Author(s):  
Michèle Powles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Jury Service ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jury System ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Service Introduction

This article traces the development of the New Zealand jury system. Most noteworthy in thisdevelopment has been the lack of controversy the system has created. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the pursuit of equality in the legal system generally led to debate and reform of juries in relation to representation, race and gender.

scholarly journals Testing the Truth of Phrenology: Knowledge Experiments in Antebellum American Cultures of Science and Health

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-374
Author(s):  
Carla Bittel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Experimental Environment ◽  
Marriage Partner ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Mind

In the first half of the nineteenth century, many Americans visited phrenological practitioners. Some clients were true believers, who consulted phrenology to choose an occupation, select a marriage partner and raise children. But, as this article demonstrates, many others consumed phrenology as an ‘experiment’, testing its validity as they engaged its practice. Consumers of ‘practical phrenology’ subjected themselves to examinations often to test the phrenologist and his practice against their own knowledge of themselves. They also tested whether phrenology was true, according to their own beliefs about race and gender. While historians have examined phrenology as a theory of the mind, we know less about its ‘users’ and how gender, race and class structured their engagement. Based on extensive archival research with letters and diaries, memoirs and marginalia, as well as phrenological readings, this study reveals how a continuum of belief existed around phrenology, from total advocacy to absolute denunciation, with lots of room for acceptance and rejection in between. Phrenologists’ notebooks and tools of salesmanship also show how an experimental environment emerged where phrenologists themselves embraced a culture of testing. In an era of what Katherine Pandora has described as ‘epistemological contests’, audiences confronted new museums, performances and theatres of natural knowledge and judged their validity. This was also true for phrenology, which benefited from a culture of contested authority. As this article reveals, curiosity, experimentation and even scepticism among users actually helped keep phrenology alive for decades.

Chicano/a Challenges to Nineteenth-Century History

2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 566-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raúúl A. Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Northern Mexico ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The U.S

This article explores the usefulness of Chicano/a history to teaching and representing the nineteenth-century history of northern Mexico, U.S. imperial expansion, and the constructed nature of borders. Typically considered a twentieth-century discipline, Chicano/a historians have a long history of engaging the subject in the nineteenth century. This focus dovetails with recent critical works on race and gender in the U.S. West as well as transnational approaches to history. This article makes the case that the perspective on the nineteenth century provided by Chicano/a historians forces readers to reframe their understanding of the sweep of U.S. history.

Discourses of Legitimacy: A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves

2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-216
Author(s):  
Alice A. Filmer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Family Language ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Hernan Cortes ◽  
Narrative Account

In an intervention that blurs methodological boundaries traditionally separating the researcher from the researched, history from poetry, and the personal from the political, the author weaves a narrative account of her Euro-American family's early history in California into a larger set of social and historical events taking place during the nineteenth century. She employs the metaphor of ‘legitimacy’ to trace her growing awareness of the physical, psychological, and political parallels at work in the colonization of lands, cultures, and bodies in the ‘New World’. Providing context for the mid-nineteenth century war between the USA and Mexico, she analyzes discursive constructs such as hybridity, impurity, and ‘mongrelization’ as they are evoked in the legend of Malinche – the sixteenth-century, indigenous translator and lover of the Spanish conquistador, Hernan Cortés. Four centuries later, echoes of that ‘intermarriage’ and the transgression of many other kinds of boundaries can be heard in the author's unconventional relationship with her son's Mexican father. She offers a ‘post-critical’ perspective in the conclusion by bringing her own voice into dialogue with those of several post-colonial theorists. This ethnography integrates autoethnography, voices from history, and textual analysis into seldom-heard conversations about the conventional and unconventional workings of power and identity. In so doing, both the fixity and fluidity of concepts such as culture, nation, family, language, social class, race, and gender are revealed.

Molding Nineteenth-century Girls in the Cape Colony into Respectable Christian Women

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-140
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Dillenburg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Christian Women ◽  
White Children ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Location Class ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Dutch Reformed Church

S. E. Duff. 2015. Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhoods, 1860–1895. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.In Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhoods, 1860–1895 (hereafter Changing Childhoods), S. E. Duff explores shifting notions of childhood and, more specifically, the emergence of new ideas about white childhood in the Cape Colony, South Africa, during the late nineteenth century by examining various efforts to convert and educate children, especially poor white children, and improve their welfare. As indicated in the title, Changing Childhoods draws attention to the multiplicity of experiences of children who existed alongside each other in the Cape Colony and how they were shaped by a variety of factors, including religion, location, class, race, and gender. While many histories of childhood elide the experiences of boys and girls, Duff pays careful attention to the different constructions of girlhood and boyhood and how gender shaped the lives of boys and girls, men and women. Throughout the book, girls appear not as passive observers but as complex agents shaping and participating in broader social, political, cultural, and economic transformations in the Cape.

Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon A Case Study from the Twenties

1991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Lauter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
White Men ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
The Status ◽  
And Gender

In its original form this chapter was delivered at a late-1970s forum sponsored by the Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession of the Modern Language Association. It had a kind of underground, mimeographed existence for a few years before seeing print in Feminist Studies in 1983. It has made its way and continues, I think, to be useful for those studying the canon. I have therefore not undertaken to change it. Judith Fetterley has raised one important criticism of the piece. In her fine introduction to Provisions: A Reader From 19th-century American Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 18–19) she argues that the exclusion of nineteenth-century women writers from the literary canon began far earlier than the 1920s, in fact during the nineteenth century itself. There is significant evidence to support that contention. John Macy’s 1911 volume The Spirit of American Literature, for example, devotes its sixteen chapters to sixteen white men, though his “Preface” expresses admiration for the work of Jewett, Freeman and Wharton, and even passingly for Stowe. Brander Matthews’ similar volume, An Introduction to the Study of American Literature (1896, rev. 1911), focuses fifteen chapters on individual white men and then devotes one to “other writers,” including Whitman and Stowe. These very likely reflected the state of much academic opinion, though volumes like An American Anthology, 1787–1900 (ed., Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1900) and Mildred Cabell Watkins’ young adult primer, American Literature (1894) offer countervailing evidence. And, of course, as I outline in the article, other older academics like Fred Lewis Pattee and Arthur Hobson Quinn offered a far wider version of American letters. Fetterley thus provides what I think is a useful corrective to broad generalizations about academic canons, especially with respect to early and mid-nineteenth-century writers. But the central point, in my view, is that dominantly male academic accounts of the American canon were far less weighty around the turn of the century than they became in and after the 1920s.

A “Vacant Receptacle”? Blind Tom, Cognitive Difference, and Pedagogy

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 552-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Krentz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Mental Disability ◽  
Cognitive Disability ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Intellectually Disabled ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Better Than

If disability studies is often overlooked at universities today, cognitive disability is often overlooked by scholars in disability studies. How should we think and talk about mental difference? Our academic enterprise privileges intellect, as is appropriate. But how should we properly account for human beings who are intellectually disabled? How does mental disability relate to other disabilities or to more familiar identity categories like race and gender? Perhaps no one illustrates these questions better than an intriguing figure who captivated audiences in nineteenth-century America: Thomas Wiggins, also known as Thomas Bethune but most popularly known as Blind Tom.

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