“White Trash” Meets the “Little Brown Monkeys”: The Taxi Dance Hall as a Site of Interracial and Gender Alliances between White Working Class Women and Filipino Immigrant Men in the 1920s and 30s

1998 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
White Trash ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site ◽  
Immigrant Men

White Working-Class Women and the Race Question

1998 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 80-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Frank
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
White Men ◽  
The Other ◽  
White Trash ◽  
White Writers ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women

In Towards the Abolition of Whiteness David Roediger tells the story of Covington Hall, the editor of a newsletter published by the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in Louisiana in 1913 and 1914. Roediger deftly analyzes efforts by Hall and other white writers in the brotherhood to construct cross-racial unity within an otherwise racially torn working class. He shows how Hall redrew the lines of solidarity: On one side were the degraded, of any race.On the other were enlightened workers who eschewed racial divisions, racist language, and stereotypes. “There are white men, Negro men, and Mexican men in this union, but no niggers, greasers or white trash,” proclaimed Ed Lehman, a soapbox speaker for the Brotherhood. A headline in the newsletter similarly asked readers to choose, “SLAVES OR MEN, WHICH?” Still more graphically, a cartoon commanded, “Let all white MEN and Negro MEN get on the same side of this rotten log.”

Uncomfortable stains: Cleaning labour, class positioning and moral worth among working-class Chilean women

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 847-865
Author(s):  
Valentina Álvarez-López
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Moral Worth ◽  
Mature Women ◽  
Self Worth ◽  
Domestic Labour ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
A Site ◽  
Paid Domestic Labour

This article explores ethnographically the ways in which working-class elderly and mature women position themselves in class and gender terms through the cleaning practices they carry out in their own households. Following contemporary research, it understands domestic labour as a site of production and negotiation of classed, gendered and ‘raced’ subject positions. Scholars researching on paid domestic labour have emphasised cleaning labour as devalued; however, this article argues that the unpaid cleaning labour the women carry out in their own households might become a source of self-worth. It does so by briefly depicting how the twentieth-century Chilean modernisation and processes of class formation were coupled with an emphasis on hygiene and cleanliness. It also provides an ethnographic description of working-class women’s cleaning practices, attending to the classed and gendered meanings and value the women attach to these practices, and discussing their negotiation of expected standards in relation to material conditions and the multiple demands and values of everyday life. It shows that the margin of negotiation is much reduced when the results of cleaning practices are more open to public view. It also argues that the women not only express their subjectivities through everyday negotiations of cleaning standards, but also produce particular modes of being working-class women.

Voices of Angels

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-174
Author(s):  
Stephanie Vander Wel
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Single Mother ◽  
Country Music ◽  
World War ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Representations Of Women

Chapter 6 traces the musical and lyrical developments of honky-tonk in the late 1930s and 1940s with Al Dexter, Ernest Tubb, and Hank Williams and remained a predominant mode of country music after World War II, right when Kitty Wells, Goldie Hill, and Jean Shepard contributed to the musical discourse. These female artists, taking over male-defined and often parodic representations of women, developed narratives that articulated class-specific voices couched in the metaphors of sexual and material desire, heartache, and loss juxtaposed with 1950s ideals of domesticity. Examining the particulars of musical style and vocal expression, this chapter argues that female artists in their various enactments of the honky-tonk angel, the angry, jilted housewife, the single mother, and the forsaken lover disclosed the paradoxes of class and gender and helped to lift the cloak of invisibility shrouding working-class women.

If All We Did Was to Weep at Home: A History of White Working-Class Women in America

1980 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 653
Author(s):  
Alice Kessler-Harris ◽  
Susan Estabrook Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
At Home

Disability, Race, and Gender on the Stage in Antebellum America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenifer L. Barclay
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Freak Shows ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
And Gender

Antebellum Americans confronted anxieties about many issues, such as industrialization, immigration, and urbanization, that found expression in blackface minstrelsy and freak shows. In these performances, racial fears, gender worries, and the insecurities of an emergent working class combined with the specter of disability to assuage the concerns of white, working-class audiences partly by reinforcing whiteness, masculinity, and nondisability as markers of citizenship. From the “laughable limp” of an elderly, enslaved groom who inspired Thomas “Daddy” Rice to craft his infamous Jim Crow character to displays of the supposedly 161-year-old disabled body of Joice Heth, minstrelsy and freak shows routinely conflated race, gender, and disability on the antebellum stage. This practice reached its pinnacle with Thomas “Japanese Tommy” Dilward, one of only two black men to perform in blackface before the Civil War.

Job Opportunities of Black and White Working-Class Women

1975 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 510-533
Author(s):  
Sally Hillsman Baker ◽  
Bernard Levenson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Job Opportunities ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women

Earnings Prospects of Black and White Working-Class Women

1976 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Hillsman Baker ◽  
Bernard Levenson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Black And White ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women
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