The Season: A Social History of the Debutante

The Season: A Social History of the Debutante PDF Author: Kristen Richardson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393608743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A Smithsonian Best History Book of 2019 “Sparkling.” —Genevieve Valentine, NPR Kristen Richardson traces the social seasons of debutantes on both sides of the Atlantic, sharing their stories in their own words, through diaries, letters, and interviews conducted at contemporary balls. Richardson takes the reader from Georgian England to colonial Philadelphia, from the Antebellum South and Wharton’s New York to the reimagined rituals of African American communities. Originally conceived as a way to wed daughters to suitable men, debutante rituals have adapted and evolved as marriage and women’s lives have changed. An inquiry into the ritual’s enduring cultural significance, The Season also reveals the complex emotional world of the girls at its center, whose every move was scrutinized and judged, and on whose backs family fortunes rested.

The Season: A Social History of the Debutante

The Season: A Social History of the Debutante PDF Author: Kristen Richardson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393608743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Smithsonian Best History Book of 2019 “Sparkling.” —Genevieve Valentine, NPR Kristen Richardson traces the social seasons of debutantes on both sides of the Atlantic, sharing their stories in their own words, through diaries, letters, and interviews conducted at contemporary balls. Richardson takes the reader from Georgian England to colonial Philadelphia, from the Antebellum South and Wharton’s New York to the reimagined rituals of African American communities. Originally conceived as a way to wed daughters to suitable men, debutante rituals have adapted and evolved as marriage and women’s lives have changed. An inquiry into the ritual’s enduring cultural significance, The Season also reveals the complex emotional world of the girls at its center, whose every move was scrutinized and judged, and on whose backs family fortunes rested.

Disciplining Girls

Disciplining Girls PDF Author: Joe Sutliff Sanders
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421403773
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
At the heart of some of the most beloved children’s novels is a passionate discussion about discipline, love, and the changing role of girls in the twentieth century. Joe Sutliff Sanders traces this debate as it began in the sentimental tales of the mid-nineteenth century and continued in the classic orphan girl novels of Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. M. Montgomery, and other writers still popular today. Domestic novels published between 1850 and 1880 argued that a discipline that emphasized love was the most effective and moral form. These were the first best sellers in American fiction, and by reimagining discipline as a technique of the heart—rather than of the whip—they ensured their protagonists a secure, if limited, claim on power. This same ideal was adapted by women authors in the early twentieth century, who transformed the sentimental motifs of domestic novels into the orphan girl story made popular in such novels as Anne of Green Gables and Pollyanna. Through close readings of nine of the most influential orphan girl novels, Sanders provides a seamless historical narrative of American children’s literature and gender from 1850 until 1923. He follows his insightful literary analysis with chapters on sympathy and motherhood, two themes central to both American and children’s literature, and concludes with a discussion of contemporary ideas about discipline, abuse, and gender. Disciplining Girls writes an important chapter in the history of American, women’s, and children’s literature, enriching previous work about the history of discipline in America.

Windows and Words

Windows and Words PDF Author: Susan-Ann Cooper
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
ISBN: 0776605569
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Windows and Words is a collection of seventeen essays that confirms and celebrates the artistry of Canadian Children's Literature. There are essays that survey a wealth of English language fiction, from the internationally acclaimed work of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the aboriginal adolescent novel, to the increasingly multi-cultural character of children's books. Others examine book illustration, visual literacy, and the creative partnership seen in the picture book and its art design. With contributions by two Governor General's Award winning authors, Janet Lunn and Tim Wynne-Jones, and a final commentary by Elizabeth Waterson, the heart of this collection offers a unique perspective on the artistry of writing for children and claims a rightful place for Canadian children's literature as literature.

The Cute and the Cool

The Cute and the Cool PDF Author: Gary Cross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195348132
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The twentieth century was, by any reckoning, the age of the child in America. Today, we pay homage at the altar of childhood, heaping endless goods on the young, reveling in memories of a more innocent time, and finding solace in the softly backlit memories of our earliest years. We are, the proclamation goes, just big kids at heart. And, accordingly, we delight in prolonging and inflating the childhood experiences of our offspring. In images of the naughty but nice Buster Brown and the coquettish but sweet Shirley Temple, Americans at mid-century offered up a fantastic world of treats, toys, and stories, creating a new image of the child as "cute." Holidays such as Christmas and Halloween became blockbuster affairs, vehicles to fuel the bedazzled and wondrous innocence of the adorable child. All this, Gary Cross illustrates, reflected the preoccupations of a more gentle and affluent culture, but it also served to liberate adults from their rational and often tedious worlds of work and responsibility. But trouble soon entered paradise. The "cute" turned into "cool" as children, following their parental example, embraced the gift of fantasy and unrestrained desire to rebel against the saccharine excesses of wondrous innocence in deliberate pursuit of the anti-cute. Movies, comic books, and video games beckoned to children with the allures of an often violent, sexualized, and increasingly harsh worldview. Unwitting and resistant accomplices to this commercial transformation of childhood, adults sought-over and over again, in repeated and predictable cycles-to rein in these threats in a largely futile jeremiad to preserve the old order. Thus, the cute child-deliberately manufactured and cultivated--has ironically fostered a profoundly troubled ambivalence toward youth and child rearing today. Expertly weaving his way through the cultural artifacts, commercial currents, and parenting anxieties of the previous century, Gary Cross offers a vibrant and entirely fresh portrait of the forces that have defined American childhood.

Relative Intimacy

Relative Intimacy PDF Author: Rachel Devlin
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876321
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Celebrated as new consumers and condemned for their growing delinquencies, teenage girls emerged as one of the most visible segments of American society during and after World War II. Contrary to the generally accepted view that teenagers grew more alienated from adults during this period, Rachel Devlin argues that postwar culture fostered a father-daughter relationship characterized by new forms of psychological intimacy and tinged with eroticism. According to Devlin, psychiatric professionals turned to the Oedipus complex during World War II to explain girls' delinquencies and antisocial acts. Fathers were encouraged to become actively involved in the clothing and makeup choices of their teenage daughters, thus domesticating and keeping under paternal authority their sexual maturation. In Broadway plays, girls' and women's magazines, and works of literature, fathers often appeared as governing figures in their daughters' sexual coming of age. It became the common sense of the era that adolescent girls were fundamentally motivated by their Oedipal needs, dependent upon paternal sexual approval, and interested in their fathers' romantic lives. As Devlin demonstrates, the pervasiveness of depictions of father-adolescent daughter eroticism on all levels of culture raises questions about the extent of girls' independence in modern American society and the character of fatherhood during America's fabled embrace of domesticity in the 1940s and 1950s.

Pinay Power

Pinay Power PDF Author: Melinda L. De Jesus
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415949828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Changing Portrayal of Adolescents in the Media Since 1950

The Changing Portrayal of Adolescents in the Media Since 1950 PDF Author: Patrick Jamieson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019534295X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
Scholars analyze the emergence of youth culture in music and powerful trends in gender and ethnic-racial representation, sexuality, substance use, and violence in the media in this text. It shows the evolution of teen portrayal, the potential consequences, and the ways policy-makers and parents can respond.

Real Phonies

Real Phonies PDF Author: Abigail Cheever
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336017
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The epithet "phony" was omnipresent during the postwar period in the United States. It was an easy appellation for individuals who appeared cynically to conform to codes of behavior for social approbation or advancement. Yet Holly Golightly "isn't a phony because she's a real phony," says her agent in Breakfast at Tiffany's. In exploring this remark, Abigail Cheever examines the ways in which social influence was thought to deform individuals in midcentury American culture. How could a person both be and not be herself at the same time? The answer lies in the period's complicated attitude toward social influence. If being real means that one's performative self is in line with one's authentic self, to be a real phony is to lack an authentic self as a point of reference--to lack a self that is independent of the social world. According to Cheever, Holly Golightly "is like a phony in that her beliefs are perfectly in accordance with social norms, but she is real insofar as those beliefs are all she has." Real Phonies examines the twinned phenomena of phoniness and authenticity across the second half of the twentieth century--beginning with adolescents in the 1950s, like Holly Golightly and Holden Caulfield, and ending with mid-career professionals in the 1990s, like sports agent Jerry Maguire. Countering the critical assumption that, with the emergence of postmodernity, the ideal of "authentic self" disappeared, Cheever argues that concern with the authenticity of persons proliferated throughout the past half-century despite a significant ambiguity over what that self might look like. Cheever's analysis is structured around five key kinds of characters: adolescents, the insane, serial killers, and the figures of the assimilated Jew and the "company man." In particular, she finds a preoccupation in these works not so much with faked conformity but with the frightening notion of real uniformity--the notion that Holly, and others like her, could each genuinely be the same as everyone else.

Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women

Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women PDF Author: Cheris Kramarae
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135963150
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 2050

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Book Description
For a full list of entries and contributors, sample entries, and more, visit the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women website. Featuring comprehensive global coverage of women's issues and concerns, from violence and sexuality to feminist theory, the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women brings the field into the new millennium. In over 900 signed A-Z entries from US and Europe, Asia, the Americas, Oceania, and the Middle East, the women who pioneered the field from its inception collaborate with the new scholars who are shaping the future of women's studies to create the new standard work for anyone who needs information on women-related subjects.

Encyclopedia of Women's Folklore and Folklife [2 volumes]

Encyclopedia of Women's Folklore and Folklife [2 volumes] PDF Author: Pauline Greenhill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313088136
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 864

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Book Description
From the stone age to the cyber age, women and men have experienced the world differently. Out of a cosmos of goddesses and she-devils, earth mothers and madonnas, witches and queens, saints and whores, a vast body of women's folklore has come into bloom. International in scope and drawing on more than 130 expert contributors, this encyclopedia reviews the myths, traditions, and beliefs central to women's daily lives. More than 260 alphabetically arranged entries cover the lore of women across time, space, and life. Students of history, religion and spirituality, healing and traditional medicine, literature, and world cultures will value this encyclopedia as an indispensable guide to women's folklore. In addition, there are entries on women's folklore and folklife in 15 regions of the world, such as the Caribbean, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe. Entries provide cross-references and cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected bibliography of print and electronic resources. Students learning about history, world cultures, religion and spirituality, healing and traditional medicine, and literature will welcome this companion to the daily life of women across time and continents.