From Wikipedia: The New Woman was a feminist ideal that emerged in the late nineteenth century and had a profound influence on feminism well into the twentieth century.
“Shifts in gender relations at the turn of the century were a key factor in the emergence of Modernism. The period from 1880 to 1920, within which Modernism emerged and rose to preeminence as the dominant art form in the West (it remained dominant until the end of World War II), was also the heyday of the first wave of feminism, consolidated in the women suffrage movement. The protagonist of this movement was known as the “New Woman”: independent, educated, (relatively) sexually liberated, oriented toward more productive life I the public sphere than toward reproductive life in the home.” (“Modernism and Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, p. 174)
Fashioning the Body by
A witty and stylish look into the mechanics employed by men and women to sculpt their figures for fashion. This unique survey offers fascinating insights into the convoluted transformations employed by both men and women to accommodate the fickle dictates of fashion.
The Corset by
The corset is probably the most controversial garment in the history of fashion. Although regarded as an essential element of fashionable dress from the Renaissance into the twentieth century, the corset was also frequently condemned as an instrument of torture and the cause of ill health. Why did women continue to don steel and whalebone corsets for four hundred years? And why did they finally stop? This lavishly illustrated book offers fascinating and often surprising answers to these questions.
Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism by
Like the products of the "sea-change" described in Ariel's song in The Tempest, modernist writing is "rich and strange." Its greatness lies in its density and its dislocations, which have until now been viewed as a repudiation of and an alternative to the cultural implications of turn-of-the-century political radicalism. Marianne DeKoven argues powerfully to the contrary, maintaining that modernist form evolved precisely as a means of representing the terrifying appeal of movements such as socialism and feminism. Organized around pairs and groups of female-and male-signed texts, the book reveals the gender-inflected ambivalence of modernist writers. Male modernists, desiring utter change, nevertheless feared the loss of hegemony it might entail, while female modernists feared punishment for desiring such change. With water imagery as a focus throughout, DeKoven provides extensive new readings of canonical modernist texts and of works in the feminist and African-American canons not previously considered modernist. Building on insights of Luce Irigaray, Klaus Theweleit, and Jacques Derrida, she finds in modernism a paradigm of unresolved contradiction that enacts in the realm of form an alternative to patriarchal gender relations.
American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture by
Visual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. In American Archives, Shawn Michelle Smith offers a bold and disturbing account of how photography and the sciences of biological racialism joined forces in the nineteenth century to offer an idea of what Americans look like--or "should" look like. Her varied sources, which include the middle-class portrait, baby picture, criminal mugshot, and eugenicist record, as well as literary, scientific, and popular texts, enable her to demonstrate how new visual paradigms posed bodily appearance as an index to interior "essence." Ultimately we see how competing preoccupations over gender, class, race, and American identity were played out in the making of a wide range of popular and institutional photographs.
Gender in Modernism by
Gender in Modernism, conceived as a sequel to the now-classic volume The Gender of Modernism, selects the best from the fifteen years of feminist literary and modernist scholarship that has appeared since the original's publication. Its fresh and diverse texts examine new themes and reflect today's broader, more inclusive understanding of modernism. The collection's modernist works have been grouped into twenty-one thematic sections, with theoretical introductions to the primary texts provided by the scholars who have taken the lead in pushing both modernism and gender in new directions. The selections enhance our understanding of the complex intersections of gender with a large array of social identifications, including global location, ideas of race, passing, the queering of sexualities, medicine, and experiences of trauma and war. It sees continental modernism in a different light, and moves on to colonial and postcolonial sites. less-studied genres of modernism, including writers on the left, suffragists, authors of manifestos, mediums, authors dismissed as sentimental, artists, dancers, dramatists, and filmmakers. Gender in Modernism will quickly move from resource to springboard, furthering modernist study well into the twenty-first century. Contributors include Tuzyline Jita Allan, Ann Ardis, Nancy Berke, Julia Briggs, Pamela L. Caughie, Mary Chapman, Suzanne Clark, Patrick Collier, Diane F. Gillespie, Barbara Green, Leslie Kathleen Hankins, Suzette A. Henke, Katherine Kelly, Colleen Lamos, Bette London, Janet Lyon, Jayne Marek, Sonita Sarker, Carol Shloss, Susan Squier, Claire Tylee, and Gay Wachman.
Gendering the Fair by
This field-defining work opens the study of world's fairs to women's and gender history, exploring the intersections of masculinity, femininity, exoticism, display, and performance at these influential events. As the first global gatherings of mass numbers of attendees, world's fairs and expositions introduced cross-class, multi-racial, and mixed-sex audiences to each other, as well as to cultural concepts and breakthroughs in science and technology. Gendering the Fair focuses on the manipulation of gender ideology as a crucial factor in the world's fairs' incredible power to shape public opinions of nations, government, and culture. Established and rising scholars working in a variety of disciplines and locales discuss how gender played a role in various countries' exhibits and how these nations capitalized on opportunities to revise national and international understandings of womanhood. Spanning several centuries and extending across the globe from Portugal to London and from Chicago to Paris, the essays cover topics including women's work at the fairs; the suffrage movement; the intersection of faith, gender, and patriotism; and the ability of fair organizers to manipulate fairgoers' experience of the fairgrounds as gendered space. The volume includes a foreword by preeminent world's fair historian Robert W. Rydell. Contributors are TJ Boisseau, Anne Clendinning, Lisa K. Langlois, Abigail M. Markwyn, Sarah J. Moore, Isabel Morais, Mary Pepchinski, Elisabeth Israels Perry, Andrea G. Radke-Moss, Alison Rowley, and Anne Wohlcke.
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