Sociological Discourses on Color, Class, and Gender, from Depression to World War II

Brown Beauty ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 225-260
Author(s):  
Laila Haidarali
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
African American Youth ◽  
Black Belt ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Color Class ◽  
African America ◽  
And Gender

This chapter daws on three published sociological works: Franklin E. Frazier’s, Negro Youth at the Crossways (1940), Charles S. Johnson’s, Growing Up in the Black Belt (1941), and Charles H. Parrish’s, Color Names and Color Notions (1946). These sociological views on color showed brown identity as an emergent social ideal and image of African America, and in varying degrees drew crucial connections of brownness to values associated with an ascendant middle-class status. These sociologists are presented as racial liberals who offered concrete and critical assessments of the rising idealization of brown complexions among African American youth coming of age between the Great Depression and World War II.

The Great Depression and World War II

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Morris
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Major Elements ◽  
World War ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Social Security Act ◽  
Employment Programs ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Franklin Roosevelt

Although many American communities had erected an impressive array of charitable institutions by the 1920s, they crumbled under the unemployment and poverty generated by the Great Depression. President Franklin Roosevelt, elected in 1932, set aside the concerns of his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, about the dangers of federally provided relief, and presided over the creation of emergency public relief and employment programs as part of the New Deal. With the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, Roosevelt and his Congressional allies established a permanent basis for a federal role in social welfare provision. The benefits of these programs were substantial, but they were sharply influenced by the race and gender of their recipients. Hopes for more robust federal programs were dispelled by the economic recovery associated with World War Two. Instead, the war saw the expansion of private, workplace-based benefits destined to be major elements of postwar social provision.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Stephanie Vander Wel
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Cultural Tensions ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

The introduction presents an overview of the relationship between the larger cultural factors of place, class, and gender and the sonic and theatrical elements of women in country music. Locating musical and cultural meaning in the intersections of individual expression and musical conventions, this chapter focuses on the ways female vocalists drew on the practices of the popular stage (including barn-dance radio and its predecessors) and singing styles linked to southern vernacular and popular music idioms. Female country artists offered creative and varied versions of white working-class womanhood in their performances that articulated the cultural tensions arising from displacement and the shifts in gender roles and class during the Great Depression and during and after World War II.

The Formation of a Budding Man Alone: The God Boy (Murray Reece, 1976)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
World War ◽  
Value System ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
The Family

This chapter analyses the earliest of the New Zealand coming-of-age feature films, an adaptation of Ian Cross’s novel The God Boy, to demonstrate how it addresses the destructive impact on a child of the puritanical value-system that had dominated Pākehā (white) society through much of the twentieth century, being particularly strong during the interwar years, and the decade immediately following World War II. The discussion explores how dysfunction within the family and repressive religious beliefs eventuate in pressures that cause Jimmy, the protagonist, to act out transgressively, and then to turn inwards to seek refuge in the form of self-containment that makes him a prototype of the Man Alone figure that is ubiquitous in New Zealand fiction.

FromThere's Magic in MusictoThe Hard-Boiled Canary: Promoting “Good Music” in Prewar Musical Films

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-178
Author(s):  
GINA BOMBOLA
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Film Production ◽  
World War ◽  
Star Power ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Wide Debate ◽  
Good Music

AbstractIn 1941, Paramount releasedThere's Magic in Music, a film about a soprano who sings opera in burlesque and wins a scholarship to attend Interlochen. The movie's utopian view of art music, however, caused difficulties for the studio in regard to marketing, leading to a studio-wide debate over the film's title. Archival documents positionThere's Magic in Musicas a valuable case study for investigating the transitional period of musical film production between the Great Depression and the onset of World War II, particularly with respect to operatic musicals. Just prior to the United States’ entry into the war, Hollywood moved away from the escapist fantasy of 1930s cinema toward the realism that would mark the 1940s. To reboot fading interest in musicals, studios toyed with the formula of the backstage musical to focus more on dramatic narratives and star power.There's Magic in Musicthus serves as a lens through which we might examine changes both in musical film production and in notions of “good music” at the eve of World War II.

Negotiating 'Plainness' and Gender: Dancing and Apparel at Christian Weddings in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe, 1913-1944

2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Urban-Mead
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
North America ◽  
World War ◽  
Protestant Denomination ◽  
Brethren In Christ ◽  
Christ Church ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Brethren In Christ Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Teaching

AbstractThis article analyzes the phenomena of dancing and wedding apparel in weddings of rural members of an unusual Protestant denomination of Anabaptist origins in Matabeleland, colonial Zimbabwe. The focus is on gendered aspects of African Christian adaptation of mission teaching amongst Ndebele members of the Brethren in Christ Church. The church in North America was firm at home on the matter of dancing (it was forbidden), and internally conflicted regarding men's garb. In the decades preceding World War II, African members of the church embraced fashionable dress for grooms and dancing at wedding feasts as common practice at BICC weddings. However, in a gendered pattern reflecting Ndebele, colonial and mission ideas of women's subjection, African women's bridal wear adhered to church teaching on Plainness, while African men's did not.

War and the Next Lesson

Money ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith ◽  
James K. Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Monetary Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
The Great Depression

This chapter examines the lessons of World War II with respect to money and monetary policy. World War I exposed the fragility of the monetary structure that had gold as its foundation, the great boom of the 1920s showed how futile monetary policy was as an instrument of restraint, and the Great Depression highlighted the ineffectuality of monetary policy for rescuing the country from a slump—for breaking out of the underemployment equilibrium once this had been fully and firmly established. On the part of John Maynard Keynes, the lesson was that only fiscal policy ensured not just that money was available to be borrowed but that it would be borrowed and would be spent. The chapter considers the experiences of Britain, Germany, and the United States with a lesson of World War II: that general measures for restraining demand do not prevent inflation in an economy that is operating at or near capacity.

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.

New Deals

2017 ◽  
pp. 62-87
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Severs
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Gold Standard ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Great Society ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
The U.S

This chapter demonstrates the deep importance of Wallace’s collegiate study of U.S. economic policy, especially in the Great Depression, to his early short stories. What if, I ask, we locate Wallace’s “origins” not in the post-World War II moment or 1960s ironic postmodernism, but instead in the crash of 1929, a less predictable moment of cultural crisis in which he took a quieter but subsuming interest? Key elements that emerge in this chapter are the U.S. Treasury (surreally portrayed as the issuer of a post-gold-standard currency – and post-metaphysical meaning – in the uncollected gem “Crash of 69”) and, in “Westward,” the governmental remedies of social insurance and economic reconstruction in the New Deal. While attending more briefly to other stories in Girl With Curious Hair, this chapter also provides sustained readings of Dust-Bowl metaphysics in “John Billy” and Johnson’s Great Society in “Lyndon.”

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