Respectability And Reform

Author : Tara M. McCarthy
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
ISBN 13 : 0815654367
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Respectability and Reform written by Tara M. McCarthy and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century, an era in which women were expanding the influence outside the home, Irish American women carved out unique opportunities to serve the needs of their communities. For many women, this began with a commitment to Irish nationalism. In Respectability and Reform, McCarthy explores the contributions of a small group of Irish American women in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era who emerged as leaders, organizers, and activists. Profiles of these women suggest not only that Irish American women had a political tradition of their own but also that the diversity of the Irish American community fostered a range of priorities and approaches to activism. McCarthy focuses on three movements—the Irish nationalist movement, the labor movement, and the suffrage movement—to trace the development of women’s political roles. Highlighting familiar activists such as Fanny and Anna Parnell, as well as many lesser-known suffragists, McCarthy sheds light on the range of economic and social backgrounds found among the activists. She also shows that Irish American women’s commitment to social justice persisted from the Land War through the World War I era. In unearthing the rich and varied stories of these Irish American women, Respectablity and Reform deepens our understanding of their intersection with and contribution to the larger context of American women’s activism.

Author : Victoria W. Wolcott
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469611007
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Remaking Respectability written by Victoria W. Wolcott and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of African Americans arrived at Detroit's Michigan Central Station, part of the Great Migration of blacks who left the South seeking improved economic and political conditions in the urban North. The most visible of these migrants have been the male industrial workers who labored on the city's automobile assembly lines. African American women have largely been absent from traditional narratives of the Great Migration because they were excluded from industrial work. By placing these women at the center of her study, Victoria Wolcott reveals their vital role in shaping life in interwar Detroit. Wolcott takes us into the speakeasies, settlement houses, blues clubs, storefront churches, employment bureaus, and training centers of Prohibition- and depression-era Detroit. There, she explores the wide range of black women's experiences, focusing particularly on the interactions between working- and middle-class women. As Detroit's black population grew exponentially, women not only served as models of bourgeois respectability, but also began to reshape traditional standards of deportment in response to the new realities of their lives. In so doing, Wolcott says, they helped transform black politics and culture. Eventually, as the depression arrived, female respectability as a central symbol of reform was supplanted by a more strident working-class activism.

Author : Cheryl D. Hicks
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807834246
Total Pages : 390 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Talk with You Like a Woman written by Cheryl D. Hicks and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this book, Cheryl Hicks brings to light the voices and viewpoints of black working-class women, especially southern migrants, who were the subjects of urban and penal reform in early twentieth-century New York. Hicks compares the ideals of racial upl

Author : Brittney C. Cooper
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252099540
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Beyond Respectability written by Brittney C. Cooper and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2017-05-03 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.

Author : Woodruff D. Smith
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351600141
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Respectability as Moral Map and Public Discourse in the Nineteenth Century written by Woodruff D. Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the fact that respectability is universally recognized as a feature of nineteenth-century society, it has seldom been studied as a subject in itself. In this path-breaking book, Woodruff D. Smith interprets respectability as a highly significant cultural phenomenon, incorporating both a moral imaginary or map and a distinctive discourse. Respectability was constructed in the public spheres of Europe and the Americas and eventually came to be an aspect of social life throughout the world. From its origins in the late eighteenth century, it was a conscious response to what were perceived as undesirable aspects of modernity. It became a central feature of concepts of "the modern" itself and an essential part of the processes that, in the twentieth century, came to be called modernization and cultural globalization. Respectability – though typically associated with the bourgeoisie – existed independently of any particular social class, and strongly affected modern constructions of class in general and of gender. Although not an ideology, respectability was overtly embedded in several political discourses, especially those of movements such as antislavery which claimed to transcend politics. While it may no longer be a coherent entity in culture and discourse, respectability continues to affect contemporary public life through a fragmentary legacy.

Author : Michele Mitchell
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807875945
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Righteous Propagation written by Michele Mitchell and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-10-12 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1877 and 1930--years rife with tensions over citizenship, suffrage, immigration, and "the Negro problem--African American activists promoted an array of strategies for progress and power built around "racial destiny," the idea that black Americans formed a collective whose future existence would be determined by the actions of its members. In Righteous Propagation, Michele Mitchell examines the reproductive implications of racial destiny, demonstrating how it forcefully linked particular visions of gender, conduct, and sexuality to collective well-being. Mitchell argues that while African Americans did not agree on specific ways to bolster their collective prospects, ideas about racial destiny and progress generally shifted from outward-looking remedies such as emigration to inward-focused debates about intraracial relationships, thereby politicizing the most private aspects of black life and spurring race activists to calcify gender roles, monitor intraracial sexual practices, and promote moral purity. Examining the ideas of well-known elite reformers such as Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. DuBois, as well as unknown members of the working and aspiring classes, such as James Dubose and Josie Briggs Hall, Mitchell reinterprets black protest and politics and recasts the way we think about black sexuality and progress after Reconstruction.

Author : Thomas Adam
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253002842
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Buying Respectability written by Thomas Adam and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 19th-century Leipzig, Toronto, New York, and Boston, a newly emergent group of industrialists and entrepreneurs entered into competition with older established elite groups for social recognition as well as cultural and political leadership. The competition was played out on the field of philanthropy, with the North American community gathering ideas from Europe about the establishment of cultural and public institutions. For example, to secure financing for their new museum, the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized its membership and fundraising on the model of German art museums. The process of cultural borrowing and intercultural transfer shaped urban landscapes with the building of new libraries, museums, and social housing projects. An important contribution to the relatively new field of transnational history, this book establishes philanthropy as a prime example of the conversion of economic resources into social and cultural capital.

Author : Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674254392
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Righteous Discontent written by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1994-03-15 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Du Bois noted has gone largely unstudied until now. In this book, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham gives us our first full account of the crucial role of black women in making the church a powerful institution for social and political change in the black community. Between 1880 and 1920, the black church served as the most effective vehicle by which men and women alike, pushed down by racism and poverty, regrouped and rallied against emotional and physical defeat. Focusing on the National Baptist Convention, the largest religious movement among black Americans, Higginbotham shows us how women were largely responsible for making the church a force for self-help in the black community. In her account, we see how the efforts of women enabled the church to build schools, provide food and clothing to the poor, and offer a host of social welfare services. And we observe the challenges of black women to patriarchal theology. Class, race, and gender dynamics continually interact in Higginbotham’s nuanced history. She depicts the cooperation, tension, and negotiation that characterized the relationship between men and women church leaders as well as the interaction of southern black and northern white women’s groups. Higginbotham’s history is at once tough-minded and engaging. It portrays the lives of individuals within this movement as lucidly as it delineates feminist thinking and racial politics. She addresses the role of black Baptist women in contesting racism and sexism through a “politics of respectability” and in demanding civil rights, voting rights, equal employment, and educational opportunities. Righteous Discontent finally assigns women their rightful place in the story of political and social activism in the black church. It is central to an understanding of African American social and cultural life and a critical chapter in the history of religion in America.

Author : Tommie Shelby
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674970500
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dark Ghettos written by Tommie Shelby and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-11 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do American ghettos persist? Scholars and commentators often identify some factor—such as single motherhood, joblessness, or violent street crime—as the key to solving the problem and recommend policies accordingly. But, Tommie Shelby argues, these attempts to “fix” ghettos or “help” their poor inhabitants ignore fundamental questions of justice and fail to see the urban poor as moral agents responding to injustice. “Provocative...[Shelby] doesn’t lay out a jobs program or a housing initiative. Indeed, as he freely admits, he offers ‘no new political strategies or policy proposals.’ What he aims to do instead is both more abstract and more radical: to challenge the assumption, common to liberals and conservatives alike, that ghettos are ‘problems’ best addressed with narrowly targeted government programs or civic interventions. For Shelby, ghettos are something more troubling and less tractable: symptoms of the ‘systemic injustice’ of the United States. They represent not aberrant dysfunction but the natural workings of a deeply unfair scheme. The only real solution, in this way of thinking, is the ‘fundamental reform of the basic structure of our society.’” —James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review

Author : Freeden Blume Oeur
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452957533
Total Pages : 383 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Boys Apart written by Freeden Blume Oeur and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How neoliberalism and the politics of respectability are transforming African American manhood While single-sex public schools face much criticism, many Black communities see in them a great promise: that they can remedy a crisis for their young men. Black Boys Apart reveals triumphs, hope, and heartbreak at two all-male schools, a public high school and a charter high school, drawing on Freeden Blume Oeur’s ethnographic work. We meet young men who felt their schools empowered and emasculated them, parents who were frustrated with co-ed schools, teachers who helped pave the road to college, and administrators who saw in Black male academies the advantages of privatizing education. While the two schools have distinctive histories and ultimately charted different paths, they were both shaped by the convergence of neoliberal ideologies and a politics of Black respectability. As Blume Oeur reveals, all-boys education is less a school reform initiative and instead joins a legacy of efforts to reform Black manhood during periods of stark racial inequality. Black male academies join long-standing attempts to achieve racial uplift in Black communities, but in ways that elevate exceptional young men and aggravate divisions within those communities. Black Boys Apart shows all-boys schools to be an odd mix of democratic empowerment and market imperatives, racial segregation and intentional sex separation, strict discipline and loving care. Challenging narratives that endorse these schools for nurturing individual resilience in young Black men, this perceptive and penetrating ethnography argues for a holistic approach in which Black communities and their allies promote a collective resilience.