Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917

Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (1995)
By Gail Bederman

Synopsis: This book seeks to illuminate the ways in which "middle-class men and women worked to re-define manhood in terms of racial dominance, especially in terms of 'civilization'" (20). Focuses the bulk of the book on four different figures: Ida B. Wells (discussed race problem and lynching as "unmanly" and an act of barbarism, yet whites continued to link lynching with manliness); G. Stanley Hall (believed in "recapitulation" theory that each human lived entire evolutionary sequence, and that kids were going through "primitive/savage" stage, and this should be encouraged so they don't turn out as weak, overcivilized pansies); Charlotte Perkins Gillman (linked feminism to white supremacy of civilization); Theodore Roosevelt (obsessive view that white race was the manliest and most powerful, and that it would remain manly via the strenuous life and via imperialist expansion into Cuba, Philippines, and Puerto Rico; and that middle class whites must prevent "race suicide" by having more kids). Argues that race and gender are intricately linked, and that "gender - whether manhood or womanhood - is a historical, ideological process...[it's a] continual, dynamic process" (7). Because definitions of manliness are always shifting, we shouldn't see 1870-1910 as a time of "crisis" per se, but rather as another redefinition. The rise of leisure and the decline of self-employed men led to changing notions of "masculinity," and increased fears that the "feminine" Victorian era would emasculate men. Men basically felt that they were losing control. However, the rhetoric of "civilization" and "manliness" was so flexible that it could be used in an array of ways - often contradictory ways. At its core, "civilization" discourse was all about race, gender, and power. 1910 Jack Johnson (black)/Jim Jeffries (white) "fight of the century" all about "reclaiming" white male dominance (though Johnson won).

Interacts With:

Hope in a Jar, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man, Terrible Honesty (with idea that certain eras can be "feminine" or "masculine" - "masculine" modernity as a reaction against "feminine" Victorian era), All the World's A Fair (for discussion of white male superiority and racial dominance)

Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (1998)
By Kathy Peiss

Synopsis: This book is an examination of the rise of the cosmetics and make-up industry in the U.S., and the constantly reconfigured and renegotiated understanding of make-up use among women, and in American culture overall. Aim is to understand women's intentions as well as social and cultural forces surrounding them. She focuses mostly on imagery and general cultural trends, rather than on what individual women thought, and does this by analyzing the history of the cosmetics industry from the early nineteenth-century to today, with the bulk of the focus on 1900-1930. She shows the way the beauty industry evolved from a female-run business which ducked standard advertising and marketing efforts, to a big consumer culture phenomenon in the 1920s run by men. She also shows how make-up moved from the realm of hookers to average American women, and the way it ultimately came to be deeply connected to femininity and self-expression, identity and community. Argues that the beauty industry continues to be a contested thing - the African American side is especially political, i.e. what is the ideal beauty?
Peiss argues that beauty culture was a way for women to negotiate modernity - the artifice and performance aspect of it was appealing and appropriate for the modern era, yet men continuously had a hard time with this "artifice." Make-up as "skin improvement" vs. make-up as "paint" was an early and tight distinction. This is all still up for debate though - i.e. is this oppressive? "Hussy" outsold "Lady" by a lot, and these two types were seen as moods and not types of people (how postmodern!!) Transformative power of make-up. [The parts about failed attempts to get men to use make-up are fascinating - kind of reminds me of failed attempts to get people to drink coke for breakfast].

Interacts With:

Manliness and Civilization, Tarzan, Houdini, and the Perfect Man, Venus Envy, Where the Girls Are, Fraud in the Age of Barnum (for the discussion of artifice), anything that deals with the performance or charade aspect of Modernity/urban life: Confidence Men and Painted Women,

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994)
By George Chauncey

Synopsis: This book seeks to challenge the idea that a vibrant gay culture did not exist prior to WWII by refuting three myths: 1) the myth of isolation, 2) the myth of invisibility, 3) the myth of internalization. Chuancey does an amazingly thorough social history which reconstructs the gay subculture of 1890-1940 New York City by drawing from vice society records, police records, newspapers, and all variety of media in order to provide a rich ethnographic description of gay life. The book is divided into three parts: I: Male (Homo) Sexual Practices and Identities in the Early Twentieth Century; II: The Making of the Gay Male World; III: The Politics of Gay Culture. Chauncey provides both a portrait and analysis of the geography and symbolism of the gay male world in order to show that it was more restricted/hidden in the second third of the century. Basically, the hetero/homo binary and way of defining personhood as based on sexual object preference did not really happen until the 1930s-50s, when it replaced the then-dominant system of "fairie" vs. "normal men" which used gender behavior/identification as the main categorizer (fairies were effeminate, queers were not but liked men, "trade" were masculine and "normal" but would fuck men if approached). This shows a much more fluid range of sexual activity that was allowed to "normal"men then versus now. The book also maps the "sexual topography of the gay world," and shows the way gay culture flourished within urban spaces like streets, parks, bathhouses, boarding houses, and nightclubs. Urban space was thus essential to the development of this culture. Argues that the thriving of this culture was an act of resistance, and that gay and straight culture were defined dialectically. Gays especially flourished among the working class and ethnic/immigrant communities. Seems to show that a sort of utopia emerged during prohibition in which all classes/sexualities were thrown together in search of booze/revelry, and that the repeal of prohibition ultimately led to a rise in anti-gay policing. "Privacy could only be had in public" (198).

Interacts With:

All books that deal with public life/public space:
Sidewalk, Rudeness and Civility, Urban Masses and Moral Order, Land of Desire, Confidence Man and Painted Women, Horrible Prettiness (urban life and the particularities of urban spaces like the theatre),
Maybe de Certeau (transgressive power of small everyday acts, use of space),
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (not on lists, but connects on urban space and sex culture, and both have a sort of utopian bent to them), Cities on a Hill,
Could maybe contrast with books that focus more on private life, like Behind the Gates, Building Suburbia, The Levittowners, Middletown, Country of Exiles, etc
For books that focus on a different, mobility-based form of public life/space:
Learning from Las Vegas, Neon Metropolis,
Flourishing of gay culture as act of resistance (there's the pop culture list tie-ine!!)
Connects with Foucault, for idea that middle class tries to control sexuality by naming it and defining it.

**Still one of the best!** Tons of good info - See full notes for more details.

Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With The Mass Media

Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With The Mass Media (1994)
By Susan Douglas

Synopsis: An exploration of pop culture media representations of women, and the way such representations have led women to feel highly ambivalent about themselves and about feminism. Douglas looks at music, TV shows, film (a little bit), commercials, print ads, and general cultural effluvia connected to women. The tone is very casual and chatty and dated. Her argument is basically that the media has essentially cast women as brainless "bimbos" with microscopic waists who - as heroines - are always deferential to men or - as villains - are 'masculine' and gross and self-absorbed and evil. The media tried to put down women and the feminist changes taking place - a burden which feminism still bares today. She spends a bit of time on the domestic perkiness of sitcom women, though feels that girl groups - especially black girl groups - can be seen as at least somewhat empowering. Bottom line is that women continue to feel conflicted and ambivalent about the images they're presented with, and the best we can do is to teach out kids (and people in general) to be critical consumers of media - to talk back to it, question it, and make fun of it.

Interesting Specifics:

According to Disney, "vanity means a girl is probably evil and deserves to die" (30).

The Mickey Mouse Club was on from 1955-59.

The 1960 Shirells song "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" was the first #1 hit by a girl group.

Maude was great for focusing on a woman who talked back, but she also reinforced stereotypes of the feminist as "a strident, loud, unfeminine, bruiser" (203).

1976 = debut of The Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, and Charlie's Angels (212).

In reference to pop culture's obsession with the "catfight:" "It may be filled with ambivalence and compromise, tradition and rebellion, but the space between the two cats - the space where we, the girls, are - is what feminism is all about" (244). [Please!!]

"But on of capitalism's great strengths - perhaps its greatest - is its ability to co-opt and domesticate opposition, to transubstantiate criticism into a host of new, marketable products. And so it was with fitness" (260). [This connects with ideas in Cycle of Outrage - that youth culture was eventually "tamed" by media co-option].

Excessive working out, as embodied by a perfect ass, "doesn't reflect hard work or entitlement so much as mindless narcissism, unproductive self-absorption, and the media's ongoing distortion of feminism to further their own misogynistic, profit-maximizing ends" (265).

'The decision to get a face-lift or not is, inescapably, a political decision" (266).

Interacts With:

Golden State, Golden Youth, Cycle of Outrage (really just for its focus on youth - hmm, should compare their angle on the media)
Is a little different because although it talks about ambiguity on the part of the consumer, it doesn't really go so far as to say that consumers carve their own meaning and use what they are given for their own ends. To me, this book is a "fun" book that's more conversational than anything else. Has a very "Hey, remember that show/film/song?!" feel to it. Has the same baby-boomer circle-jerk/self-referentiality thing going on that Jennifer Price's Flight Maps has.

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975)
By Laura Mulvey

Synopsis: Utilizing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to analyze the role of desire in the act of looking at/consuming film, Mulvey seeks to deconstruct the ease of narrative film and and visual pleasure, to "break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire" (30). Describes scopophilia (the love of looking at objects/people) as one of the biggest pleasures of cinema. In traditional cinema, this "gaze" has usually been focused on a woman, and thus the woman becomes objectified and fetishized while the male onscreen (and supposedly as embodied by the viewer too) becomes the one in control. The female becomes both an object of desire, and a representative of castration (hence, a threat). Because film is a medium which controls so much of the visual experience, "cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire" (39). We must break down these codes if we are to challenge the pleasures it provides. Bottom line: women are fetishized in film, while also embodying castration fears; the male gaze is the gaze of power.

Interesting Specifics:

"It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this essay" (30).

"Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing) cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire" (39).

Interacts With:

This is seen as one of the most famous film criticism essays ever written. She did introduce the idea of "the gaze," and the gaze as a symptom of power asymmetry.

Again, this annoys. Why does the gaze have to be male? Is this an inherently "male" way of looking, or is it just a "person in power" way of looking? This is problematic, and essentializes gender.

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)
by Judith Butler

Synopsis: Asks, how do certain bodies come to matter at all? Butler examines the fact that "'sex' is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time," and that "performativity "produces the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (2). This is a mostly theoretical work which relies heavily of psychoanalytic Lacanian theory to postulate about power and hegemony and the heterosexual regime. Butler is very interested in "the body" and materiality and naming and heterosexist images. Basic argument seems to be that the heterosexual regime tries to impose itself on the materiality of bodies. She is interested in the "lesbian phallus" and all things phallocentric. She argues that the way things are named is imbibed with power and gender issues. "Performing" gender re-enforces some kind of heterosexist regime; performative acts as authoritative speech.

Interesting Specifics:

Performativity "produce[s] the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (2).

When things are not clearly gendered, they seem almost "unhuman" (8).

"Matter" linked to "materiality" linked to productive capacity linked to womb linked to female.

"...there is no sexuality outside of power" (95).

Says she seeks in this book "to recast performativity as a specific modality of power as discourse" (187). She seems especially concerned with "the real" and with the construction of power relations.

"To the extent that gender is an assignment, it is an assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate" (231).

Interacts With:

Honestly, this book was nearly impossible to understand, and I'm not sure if I even have a basic understanding of it yet. I realize basically that she is obsessed with gender in a fairly paranoid way, and is also obsessed with idea of "performing" gender.

Apparently, she takes a "poststructuralist" approach. According to some review in Gender and Society, Butler sees sex as "not simply a factual/natural category...rather, it is a normative one." Supposedly her theory is meant as an improvement on social constructionism.

Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society

Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (1986)
By Harvey Green

Synopsis: This book is a history of the culture of American health reform, 1830-1940, and examines the ways in which ideas about health and fitness changed over the century and were tied to larger cultural events. Utilizes sources like catalogues, ads, diaries, letters, journals, medical books, and advice books, and divides health reform into three major periods: Part I: Millennial Dreams and Physical Realities, 1830-1860 (in which body/health reforms were strongly tied to religion and millennial beliefs that the second coming of Christ would only happen is people had reached a state of perfection); Part II: The Price of Civilization, 1860-1890 (reforms based on increased focus on nervous disorders and neurasthenia due to increased urbanization and brainwork; increased focus on "water cure" and "muscular Christianity" and athletics; U.S. increasingly strives to become world power); Part III: Regeneration, 1890-1940 (increased racism and nationalism and fears of race suicide and the decrease of vigorous manliness; leads to rise of "strenuous life"). Many reforms dealt with diet (especially meat-eating versus vegetarianism), and electricity and devises designed to increase energy/efficiency. There was a lot of concern with, even paranoia over, decreased energy and conservation of energy (within the person). Argues that all of these body reforms were acts of individualism, yet the popularity of sports shows our continued desire for community and emotional bonding.

Interesting Specifics:

Self-help books were big by the 1830s.

Some reformers warned against the dangers of spiced and salted foods, and of too many condiments.

Was a lingering fear that passions might get out of control, and that "stimulation" was harmful because it drained away the body's energy.

Sylvester Graham advocated a vegetarian diet of bran bread, water, and vegetables; "Grahamism" was popular among radical communities which sought to separate themselves from the great mass.

Argues that vegetarianism never really took off in U.S. because it is passive, an avoidance of something instead of an active use of something else (53).

By 1850s, children were seen as pure and not wicked, marking a big shift.

George Beard was the neurologist obsessed with neurasthenia.

John Harvey Kellogg another big advocate of the water cure, etc. Water cure involved lots of submersion, etc, and led to therapeutic spas and resorts.

Some thought that meat-eating was linked with human progress and "racial nationalism" (165) - i.e. idea that meat-eaters were more evolved.

Post-Civil War = increased focus on sports and calisthenics, etc.

Ideal male body type gets bulkier in 1880s (198).

View of the body as a machine (late nineteenth century), and need for internal cleanliness.

The Olympic games were reinstated in 1896.

By 1920, Bernarr McFadden's Physical Culture magazine was crammed with self-help and advice.

In the 1920s, there was a fear that blondes would decrease (i.e. due to floods of immigrants, etc.).

Horace Fletcher invents "Fletcherism" - way to lose weight by chewing food endlessly before swallowing it.

Interacts With:
Books dealing with perfectionism
Manliness and Civilization,
Seems very much a product of the 1980s, which were obsessed with body image and fitness.
This book is awesome, but it covers an impossible amount of stuff.

The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England

The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (1987)
By Carol Karlsen

Synopsis: This book seeks to answer the question: why were most accused witches women? It does this by tracing the rise of witchcraft accusation in New England from 1620-1725, and utilizes some case studies as well as providing a general in order to detect patterns and to extract evidence. Taking a feminist perspective, Karlsen argues that it was their situation (as victims of demographic accidents) rather than their behavior that led women to be accused as witches. The biggest constant was that most of the accused witches were women in positions to inherit property (i.e. through an absence of male heirs). Most accused women were over 40, and the three main sins accused of were: "1) explicitly religious sins directed against God or his emissaries on earth - the church and ministers, 2) sins of a mixed religious and sexual nature committed against other members of the community, and 3) predominantly sexual sins against order and processes of nature" (120). Most accused witches were those who challenged their lot in life - they challenged authority. Puritans felt that "women who failed to serve men failed to serve God" - hence accusations of witchcraft were hurled at independent women.

Interesting Specifics:

"Most accused witches were women who symbolized the obstacles to property and prosperity" (217).

"The New England possessed were rebelling against pressures to internalize stifling gender and class hierarchies" (250-51).

Interacts With:
Salem Possessed ("troublesome" women as targets), Entertaining Satan
Challenges to consensus/homogeneity; threat to the stable order results in witchcraft accusations

Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture

Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (1991)
By Robert C. Allen

Synopsis: Asks how burlesque moved from a movement of bold female transgression to one of mere spectacle. This book traces the history of burlesque in the U.S. via a history of theatre in the 1820s-30s, the wild chaos of the "lower class" crowds with their participatory nature, to the bourgeois-ification of burlesque in the 1850-60s, to the relegation of burlesque back to the working classes 1880-1920s, to its last-ditch efforts by taking over failed legit theatres in Times Square which only brought it increased public scrutiny and the moral outrage that led to its demise in the 1930s. Burlesque is complicated and complex, and its "decline" into pure female sexual spectacle at the end partly silenced the transgressive nature it had earlier when female performers actually talked and joked too. In those days, burlesque was largely about the bottom-up inversion of social order, with a focus on the grotesque and on the mockery of the power system in place.

Interesting Specifics:

Burlesque in the U.S. was tied to the "spectacular female performer" and raised "questions about how a woman should be 'allowed' to act on state, about how femininity should and could be represented, and about the relationship of women on stage to women in the outside, 'real' world" (21).

Burlesque as monstrous, grounded in the "aesthetics of transgression, inversion, and the grotesque" (26) - in "the low other."

Ordination = "the exercise of power bound by the limits of discourse;" Insubordination = "resistance contained by discourse" (35).
Argues that struggles over burlesque are about ordination and insubordination rather than domination and resistance (35).

In the late 18th-early 19-century there were many anti-theatrical laws because theatricality was said to "disrupt" the natural order of things; that to disguise oneself and act as something else was seen as mocking nature and God's order of things (47).

The third tier of the theatre was always reserved for prostitutes and their clients.

1820s-30s, theatre gets popular in the U.S.; 1850s marked huge shift in theatre - it became increasingly "feminized" and respectable and less rowdy.

Lydia Thompson Troupe huge.

Dyed blonde hair very popular, and became popular with middle class by 1860s.

Burlesque paralleled and/or joined minstrelsy a bit in the 1870s.

Vaudeville combined most of the other show types one one stage and was appealing to the middle class (tried not to offend); 1890s. Became first place women really attended alone.

Benjamin Franklin Keith largely responsible for creating this brand of clean, family-friendly egalitarian vaudeville, and vaudeville banned any kind of humor that relied on difference (i.e. that caricatured or drew attention to otherness in any way - was the opposite of burlesque).

Burlesque was mostly an East Coast, Midwest, and San Francisco urban phenomenon.

Burlesque posters depicted huge, all-powerful women "playing" wealthy men (i.e. "gold-diggers" riding huge lobsters in mockery of the fancy lobster palaces of the day). This prob didn't offend its mostly working-class audience because the men being lampooned were wealthy men.

Cooch dance merges in 1890s (with the Chicago Expo), a direct precursor to striptease. Runways were invented in 1917, and stripping didn't become standard part until 1920s.

By the 1890s, female burlesque dancers were silent on stage, and was now just about the sexual display of their bodies.

Depression of the 1930s caused many "legit" theatres to close, allowing burlesque to move into those spaces. This however hastened its demise as those in power didn't like them and sought to shut them down.

Interacts With:
Bakhtin; Manliness and Civilization; Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man;

In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression

In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression
By Tim Cresswell (1996)

Synopsis: Looks at the ways space and place are used to construct normativity and "common sense," and shows that transgression of space can be a tool with which to question the normative world. This book is thus an examination of the "the way in which ideas about what is right, just, and appropriate are transmitted through space and place" (8). Place and geography are thus crucial in out understandings of social relations as "social power and social resistance are always already spatial" (11). Prefers the term transgression to "resistance" as resistance implies intentionality. Focuses on three case studies: graffiti in NYC in the 1970s (representing disorder and madness and disease); hippies converging on Stonehenge (transgressive mobility, blurs line between home and work and leisure, indecent because decency implies property ownership); Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (a group of women set-up a protest site outside a military base and weapons site; media focused on the "horrible stench" and "dirtiness" of the women there - clearly they had transgressed social bounds in some way). Basically, "transgressive events prompt responses that define and seek to reproduce established geographies" (104).

Interesting Specifics:

"Society produces space and space reproduces society" (12).

Cresswell considers himself part of the new cultural geography.

"'Dirt,' then, is a mismatch of meanings - meanings that are erroneously positioned in relation to other things" (38). "Dirt" is something that is out of place.

"Mobility as a way of life involves being permanently out of place" (95).

"...place, as a phenomenological-experiential entity combines elements of nature (elemental forces), social relations (class, gender, and so on), and meaning (the mind, ideas, symbols)" (157). Place always combines all three elements, in that it links action and thought, concrete and abstract.

"The unintended consequence of making space a means of control is to simultaneously make it a site of resistance" (163).

Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Made Sense on the World

Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Made Sense on the World (2001)

By Mona Domosh and Joni Seager

Synopsis: Place and gender are inextricably linked. This book explores issues of power, and brings feminism and gender to geography by pointing out the importance of examining the link between gender and place. Shows that ideals of gender do inform our use of space and affect out sense of mobility. Discusses home space and the gendering of public and private space within Victorian homes; female design tastes and the way male-dominated “modernist” movement (1890s-1930s) sought to streamlines and usurp home decoration which had previously been a female domain; discussion of middle-class women as “Americanizers” to “foreign”-types; Charlotte Perkins Gillman and other feminist efforts to collectivize female labor; fact that much female labor is not counted in GDP/work averages; idea that feminine implies natures and chaos, while masculine implies order/control/city [connects here with Terrible Honesty]; suburban space and the attempt to limit female mobility as cars are seen as “male;” rugged nature as male; women’s building at Columbia Expo; feminist environmentalism and scary male view of earth as a “mother” who will clean-up our mess.

Interesting Specifics:

Postwar females’ design tastes in home interiors were castigated by “taste” experts as middle-low brow kitsch, thus challenging and belittling female power (28).

Increased female presence in cities in the 1850s led such spaces to be increasingly “feminized” so as to be more appropriate for women. Example is the fancy arches of shopping arcades (93).

Suburban growth really increased in the 1920s

Gays and lesbians often lead gentrification efforts (102)

“Mobility is greatest at the extreme ends of the socioeconomic spectrum” (110).

Rise of masculine rugged farmer ideal in 1930s as way to counteract effeminate dependency of govt. aid during Depression (166).

Gender is the biggest determiner of attitudes towards animals (185)

Ecofeminism is concerned with control of resources, power relations, different way of viewing the environment, systems of oppression, etc.

Trivia:

First toilets were designed to look like parlor chairs, but were changed in the 1920s due to hygiene concerns (16)

Women, whether married with kids or not, tend to work closer to their homes than men [is this because women’s work tends to be more “low-level” and hence easier to find stuff anywhere/less justification for traveling far distances to work?].

Interacts With:

Terrible Honesty,