Women’s Work, Women’s Humor

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marian Wilson Kimber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
Women's Humor ◽  
Twentieth Century America

Nettie Arthur Brown’s The Red Fan (1896) was typical of the humorous spoken-word compositions in twentieth-century America. Due to female elocutionists’ performance traditions, women became the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, including a few modernist composers, such as Ruth Crawford Seeger and Marion Bauer. More typically, comic “musical readings” satirized gender expectations. Courtship, marriage, and domesticity were portayed as less than ideal. Performers sometimes adopted a rebellious boy persona, allowing for women’s further expression of gendered satire. Some compositions depicted grandmothers, and moral and religious works continued and modified nineteenth-century ideals. Piano accompaniments humorously quote well-known compositions and feature closing gestures that punctuate the narratives’ climactic “punch lines.” Ultimately, female composers feminized melodrama, creating genres to speak for and to women.

The Ideal Christmas Dinner

2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
cathy kaufman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
First Time ◽  
Twentieth Century America ◽  
The Ideal

Christmas dinner emerged for the first time as an important and distinctive meal in mid-nineteenth century America, fueled by changing attitudes towards the Christmas holiday, changing meal patterns, and the need to unify Americans after the Civil War and to assimilate waves of immigrants. Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol provided an ideal template for meals centering on turkey and plum pudding, and that model has continued to inform many middle and working class tables. But by the end of the nineteenth century, cookery writers for the more affluent market began to disdain turkey at Christmas, and the uniform tapestry of Christmas foods began to unravel. Christmas dinner in twentieth-century America became more a statement of class than of national identity.

Anglican Women and Social Service in Hong Kong

2018 ◽  
pp. 239-252
Author(s):  
Jane Lee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Women Leaders ◽  
Social Services ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
First Century ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Women And Children

This chapter explores the contribution of Anglican women, Chinese and British, in the promotion of welfare for women and children in Hong Kong from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The narrative covers four areas of progress in chronological order, which include: Elevating Social Status through Education, Advocating Women’s Rights through Social Movements, the establishment of the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui Women’s League, and women leaders in social services. It presents an account of change and continuity in the development of women’s work for women: from British women’s work of charity and evangelism to Chinese women’s assumption of leadership roles; from protection of girls and women in the nineteenth century, to pioneering nursery and child care in postwar rehabilitation, and providing holistic care to the elderly and marginalised in twenty-first century.

MIDWIFERY AND WOMEN'S WORK IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC: A RECONSIDERATION OF LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH'S A MIDWIFE'S TALE

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
TANFER EMIN TUNC
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Wage Earning

ABSTRACTTwenty years after its initial publication, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize winning monograph A midwife's tale: the life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812 (1990) still serves as a major benchmark in women's labour/economic history mainly because it provides scholars with a window into the life of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century lay American rural healer not through the comments of an outsider, but through the words of the healer herself. While, on the surface, Ballard's encoded, repetitive, and quotidian diary may seem trivial and irrelevant to historians, as Ulrich notes, ‘it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard's book lies … For her, living was to be measured in doing’ (p. 9). By piecing together ‘ordinary’ primary source material to form a meaningful, extraordinary socio-cultural narrative, Ulrich elucidates how American midwives, such as Martha Ballard, functioned within the interstices of the private and public spheres. A midwife's tale is thus not only methodologically significant, but also theoretically important: by illustrating the economic contributions that midwives made to their households and local communities, and positioning the organizational skill of multitasking as a source of female empowerment, it revises our understanding of prescribed gender roles during the early American Republic (1783–1848). Even though A midwife's tale is clearly limited in terms of time (turn-of-the-nineteenth century) and place (rural Maine), it deserves the renewed attention of historians – especially those interested in gender relations and wage-earning, the economic value of domestic labour, and women's work before industrialization.

scholarly journals Individuality, Freedom, and Community: Ella Flagg Young's Quest for Teacher Empowerment

2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-198
Author(s):  
Jackie M. Blount
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Educational Leadership ◽  
School Board ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Teacher Empowerment ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Leadership Positions ◽  
National Network ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Suffrage Movement

After teaching shifted from men's to women's work in the second half of the nineteenth century, women pushed into newly created realms of educational leadership. They earned appointments to principalships and, buoyed by the growing woman's suffrage movement, they began winning elected superintendencies and school board positions. However, fearing that women might overtake men in running the schools, a multifaceted backlash movement emerged to rein in women's advancements. A tightly organized national network of influential male educators sought to centralize power, standardize and mechanize practices, and otherwise push women out of leadership positions while simultaneously making teaching an increasingly servile profession. Ella Flagg Young, Chicago's superintendent of schools who had long advocated for expanding women's public service, staunchly resisted this disempowerment of teachers. Instead, through her leadership, she vividly illustrated how schools might work if freedom, individuality, and community were truly honored.

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