scholarly journals "Saturated with Vice": Angelic White Children, Incorrigible Youth, and Reformable Subjects

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Anneliese Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
White Children ◽  
Property Ownership ◽  
White Girls ◽  
The Media ◽  
Eugenic Sterilization ◽  
Industrial School

This article looks at the eugenic sterilization in the United States in the twentieth century through the lens of race and property ownership. In Kansas specifically, sterilization was sensationalized in the media amidst two events that showcased contradictory understandings of white girlhood in the liberal eugenic era. Sterilization was championed in 1917 after a young white girl was raped and murdered, and then decried two decades later in 1937 when a senator uncovered a (legal) sterilization campaign at a girls' reformatory. I argue that these competing representations of white girlhood resulted from larger-scale societal anxieties about womens' expanding property ownership and voting rights in the twentieth century. Further, I analyze representations of race in the Girls' Industrial School in Beloit, Kansas to show how Black girls in the institution were understood as inherently criminal in a way that validated the ultimate "reformability" of white girls from eugenecist understandings of class and sexuality amongst white youth. 

Sex-Role Preference and Parental Imitation within Groups of Middle-Class Whites and Lower-Class Blacks

1972 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 651-654 ◽  
Author(s):  
William D. Ward
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Sex Role ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Second Grade ◽  
Black Boys ◽  
White Children ◽  
White Girls ◽  
Role Preference

32 second-grade children were assessed on measures of sex-role preference and parental imitation. The middle-class white boys were more masculine in preference than the middle-class white girls were feminine ( t = 3.43, p < .01), and lower-class black girls tended to be more mother imitative than the lower-class black boys were father imitative ( r = 2.09, p < .06). No such differences were found in sex-role preference for blacks or in imitation for whites. The results indicated that there was a dominant masculine influence in the development of sex-role preference among middle-class white children and a dominant feminine influence in parental imitation among lower-class black children.

Contrasting Patterns of Belonging and Believing

2019 ◽  
pp. 102-126
Author(s):  
Brian Stanley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Church Attendance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Orthodox Christian ◽  
The Media ◽  
Religious Body

This chapter analyzes the strikingly divergent trajectories of Christian belief and practice in Scandinavia and the United States. All Scandinavian countries in the twentieth century experienced a decline in regular church attendance that appears to have been consistent throughout the century, and that may have begun as soon as religious compulsion was lifted in the nineteenth century. This protracted decline mirrored the slow waning of orthodox Christian belief, but this was not a decline from a previous golden age of faith; rather there seems every likelihood that the adherence of many Scandinavian people to Christian faith had been quite tenuous ever since the region was first evangelized. Yet the Scandinavian countries also illustrate in a pointed way the possibility that in certain conditions, stable patterns of religious belonging can exist almost independently of personal religious belief. Meanwhile, the United States in the twentieth century was by some criteria a more “secular” nation than Sweden or Denmark. The American state from its inception has refused to give any religious body privileged status before the law. In consequence, religion in the United States has always been divorced from the apparatus of government and public institutions to a much greater extent than in the Scandinavian nations, and in the course of the twentieth century, that divorce became more absolute in certain spheres, notably in the universities, public education, and the media.

scholarly journals “Beyond the Pale”: Tainted Whiteness, Cognitive Disability, and Eugenic Sterilization

Hypatia ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Stubblefield
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Character ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cognitive Disability ◽  
White Race ◽  
White Ethnicity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Eugenic Sterilization ◽  
Insight Into

The aim of the eugenics movement in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century was to prevent the degeneration of the white race. A central tactic of the movement was the involuntary sterilization of people labeled as feebleminded. An analysis of the practice of eugenic sterilization provides insight into how the concepts of gender, race, class, and dislability are fundamentally intertwined. I argue that in the early twentieth century, the concept of feeblemindedness came to operate as an umbrella concept that linked off-white ethnicity, poverty, and gendered conceptions of lack of moral character together and that feeblemindedness thus understood functioned as the signifier of tainted whiteness.

Racial Rule

2018 ◽  
pp. 158-216
Author(s):  
David A. Bateman ◽  
Ira Katznelson ◽  
John S. Lapinski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Labor Policy ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Economic Program ◽  
American Policy ◽  
Political Foundation

This chapter turns to home rule, in particular southern evaluations of prospects for a new national labor policy and attention to voting rights protections. Southern success in defeating a renewed consideration of the franchise established the terms of the broad national accommodation that came to characterize American policy and politics for the first half of the twentieth century. The South would be left alone to determine the contours of black citizenship, while the economic program of the Republican Party would be placed on a stable political foundation. When the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898, the region's representatives provided fifteen of the nineteen votes cast against the initial war resolution in the House. Yet despite the region's anti-imperialist sentiment, the war with Spain became an occasion to affirm the South's definitive return to the Union.

Michael Clegg (1933–1995): from naturalist to environmental correspondent in the multi-media age

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Biodiversity Conservation ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Scientific Background ◽  
The Media ◽  
Multi Media

The coverage of natural history in British newspapers has evolved from a “Nature notes” format – usually a regular column submitted by a local amateur naturalist – to professional, larger-format, presentations by dedicated environmental correspondents. Not all such environmental correspondents, however, have natural-history expertise or even a scientific background. Yorkshire's Michael Clegg was a man who had a life-long love of nature wedded to a desire to communicate that passion. He moved from a secure position in the museum world (with a journalistic sideline) to become a freelance newspaper journalist and (subsequently) commentator on radio and television dealing with, and campaigning on, environmental issues full-time. As such, he exemplified the transition in how natural history coverage in the media evolved in the final decades of the twentieth century reflecting modern concerns about biodiversity, conservation, pollution and sustainable development.

The Rain Calls of Frogs and the Reigning Paradigm of American Herpetology

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Gordon L. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Animal Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Breeding Sites ◽  
Gradual Disappearance ◽  
The Times ◽  
Traditional Natural ◽  
Breeding Seasons ◽  
The Comparative Study

American zoologists and herpetologists during the past fifty years have successfully deciphered the mating calls of frogs and toads with ever increasing precision and sophistication. However, the vocalizations most commonly termed “rain calls,” which typically occur beyond both normal breeding seasons and breeding sites, have remained a persistent puzzle. This article traces the gradual disappearance of rain calls, along with a corresponding decline in any mention of emotional states, from herpetological studies of anuran vocalizations in the United States from the middle of the twentieth century to the present and examines the historical roots of this disappearance. This evaporation of rain calls is indicative of a much larger change in the scientific climate of the times involving the transition from traditional natural history to the Neo-Darwinian, adaptationist paradigm of contemporary biology. Rain calls thus increasingly became anomalous, thereby eliminating a possibly fruitful line of inquiry in the comparative study of human-animal communication, in this case with evolution's earliest vocalizers. The contours and benefits of a more encompassing paradigm, envisioned by some leading early twentieth-century zoologists, are briefly discussed.

Gertrude Stein's Transmasculinity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Coffman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
False Consciousness ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Carl Van Vechten ◽  
The Media ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Opening Up

By reading written and visual artefacts of Gertrude Stein’s life, Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity reframes earlier scholarship to argue that her gender was transmasculine and that her masculinity was positive rather than a self-hating form of false consciousness. This book considers ways Stein’s masculinity was formed through her relationship with her feminine partner, Alice B. Toklas, and her masculine homosocial bonds with other modernists in her network. This broadens out Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account of “male homosocial bonding” to include all masculine persons, opening up the possibility of examining Stein’s relationship to Toklas; masculine women such as Jane Heap; and men such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Carl Van Vechten. The Introduction and first four chapters focus on surfacings of Stein’s masculinity within the visual and the textual: in others’ paintings and photographs of her person; her hermetic writings from the first three decades of the twentieth century; and her self-packaging for mass consumption in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Whereas the chapter on The Autobiography underscores Toklas’s role in the formation of Stein’s masculinity and success as a modernist, the final three register the vicissitudes of the homosocial bonds at play in her friendships with Picasso, Hemingway, and Van Vechten. The Coda, which cross-reads Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) with the media attention two museum exhibits about her attracted between 2011 and 2012, points to possibilities for future work on the implications of her masculine homosocial bonds with Vichy collaborator Bernard Fäy.

Liberating Afghan Women

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 70-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Afghan Women ◽  
The Media ◽  
Policy Priority

Public opinion in the United States and elsewhere celebrated the liberation of Afghan women following the defeat of the Taliban government. The United States promised to stay in Afghanistan and foster security, economic development, and human rights for all, especially women. After years of funding various anti- Soviet Mujahidin warlords, the United States had agreed to help reconstruct the country once before in 1992, when the Soviet-backed government fell, but had lost interest when the warlords began to fight among themselves. This time, however, it was going to be different. To date, however, conditions have not improved for most Afghan women and reconstruction has barely begun. How did this happen? This article explores media presentations of Afghan women and then compares them with recent reports from human rights organizations and other eyewitness accounts. It argues that the media depictions were built on earlier conceptions of Muslim societies and allowed us to adopt a romantic view that disguised or covered up the more complex historical context of Afghan history and American involvement in it. We allowed ourselves to believe that Afghans were exotic characters who were modernizing or progressing toward a western way of life, despite the temporary setback imposed by the Taliban government. In Afghanistan, however, there was a new trope: the feminist Afghan woman activist. Images of prominent Afghan women sans burqa were much favored by the mass media and American policymakers. The result, however, was not a new focus on funding feminist political organizations or making women’s rights a foreign policy priority; rather, it was an unwillingness to fulfill obligations incurred during decades of American-funded mujahidin warfare, to face the existence of deteriorating conditions for women, resumed opium cultivation, and a resurgent Taliban, or to commit to a multilateral approach that would bring in the funds and expertise needed to sustain a long-term process of reconstruction.

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