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,

Sidewalk

Sidewalk (1999)
By Mitchell Duneier

Synopsis: This book is an examination of the "invisible social structure of the sidewalk," which asks how the various street vendors, etc "live in a moral order" in "the face of exclusions and stigmatization on the basis of race and class," and wonders how "their acts intersect with a city's mechanisms to regulate its public spaces" (9). Book is based-on first-person ethnographic research conducted from 1996-97 (and a bit from 1998-99), which included participant observation on the sidewalks of certain Greenwich Village streets, following the street economy of many unhoused or marginally-housed Black street vendors who sell recycled magazines and books fished from the trash. Hakin Hasan was the main street vendor Duneier focused on. The book is divided into five sections: Part One: The Informal Life of the Sidewalk, Part Two: New uses of the Sidewalks, Part Three: The Limits of Informal Social Control; Part Four: Regulating the People Who Work the Streets, Part Five: The Construction of Decency. This book draws largely from Jane Jacobs and her discussion of the importance of "public characters." It also argues that sidewalk space allows struggling people "to engage in legal entrepreneurial activity that helps them maintain respect for others and for themselves" (179). Refers to Zimbardo's "broken windows" study and says that physical disorder shouldn't necessarily be equated with social disorder. What is the social disorder equivalent of a broken window, and how do we know when people are really broken rather than actually on their way up? Just because people are forced to do everything in public (i.e. "use the bathroom"), doesn't mean people are actually less decent than those who don't have to.

Interacts With:

Jane Jacobs, Edge City (could a community like this ever thrive in an Edge City? Don't think so. Couldn't really "thrive" in any non-walking city)
I guess a criticism of this book is that the author may have gotten too close to his subjects - i.e. was not "tough" enough on them. In that way, this book can be a good example of methodological questions, though personally I think the author was fair enough. It's true he didn't really adequately deal with gender issues, but I think that's a minor point.
Seems to say that capitalism is a noble effort. See, at least these guys were trying to act like respectable capitalists.

Orientalism

Orientalism - Intro Only (2003 [1978])
By Edward Said

Synopsis: Said examines the exteriority of Orientalism - that is, its visible representation - in order to get at the origins of the use of Orientalism in the West, particularly as it relates to world political relationships and webs of power. He does this by looking at "style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, [and] not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to come great original" (21). Said argues that the Orient has helped to define Europe (and the West) via its position as a contrasting "image, idea, personality, experience" (2), hence the development of a dichotomy between the Orient and the Occident. This Western use of the Orient has allowed the West to dominate, restructure, and otherwise have authority over the Orient, a phenomena which has aesthetic, political, economic, sociological, historical, and philological dimensions.

Interesting Specifics:

Says "non-political" knowledge (such as literature) should not really be seen in such an apolitical way (10).

Orientalism is shaped by political, intellectual, cultural, and moral power (12).

Said is very interested in British, French, and American uses of the concept.

Interacts With:

In prioritizing only the image/representation, this book seems to be a straight-up myth symbol book.
References Gramsci's notion of hegemony.

A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003)
By Lizabeth Cohen

Synopsis: Cohen makes an argument that the postwar period (1945-1975) embodied the rise of the "Consumer's Republic" - that is, "an economy, culture, and politics built around the promises of mass consumption, both in terms of material life and the more idealistic goals of greater freedom, democracy, and equality" (7). Utilizing government sources, sociological surveys, marketing research, and historical monographs, Cohen provides a dense history of this era as it connects with the "consumers' republic" notion. The book is divided into: Origins of the Postwar CR (1930s, New Deal and war efforts); Birth of CR (consumption as the American way of life; continuous push for more purchasing and ownership; Black purchasing and boycotting power to voice discontent; The Landscape of Mass Consumption (suburbanization, commercialization, and privatization; feminization of public space via suburban shopping centers usurping downtowns; decline of legal redlining leads to rise of more covert segregation); Political Culture of Mass Consumption (rise of market segmentation and splintering off into more specialized groups; rise of the consumer movement). Cohen argues that the rise of the "consumers' republic" was just as influential as other Cold War issues, in that it was the belief that mass consumption could bring increased prosperity and equality. While it did do some good, it resulted in increased market segmentation and overall fragmentation.

Interesting Specifics:

Discusses the postwar "return to normalcy" push, and thrift as almost "un-America."

The national output of goods and services doubled between 1946 and 1956, and would double again by 1970" (121).

Between 1947 and 1953, the suburban population increased by 43 percent (195).

1948 Supreme Court ruling of Shelley vs. Kraemer found restrictive covenants unconstitutional.

In 1953, 70,000 person Levittown was biggest community in U.S. with no black residents.

Interacts With:

Actually, does kind of interact with books about the rise of mass production in the late nineteenth century and the hopes that this would democratize goods and put everyone on equal footing. Also is kind of connected to the republican ideal that we will all be united by our (relatively) equal access to stuff. It's a very "common man"/anti-elitist kind of idea that Americans seem to love.
Also, can be seen as another example of increased fragmentation of the modern era.
This is what most of my 1950s lecture is derived from.
This book has tons of good info, but is extremely dry and not American studies enough for me.

The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape

The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (1996)
By Don Mitchell

Synopsis: "This book explores...the connection between the material production of landscape and the production of landscape representations, between work and the 'exercise of the imagination'..."(1). It basically seeks to "connect the shape of the CA landscape to the process of work that made it...and to wed a literature on landscape with that on labor history" (ix). One of main purposes is to interrogate the difference between representation and reality, and to put the reality of labor specifically back in to our understanding of landscape. Book begins around 1913 and travels through to 1930s through a series of vignettes and discussions of various bad working conditions, workers revolts, and the various attempts to disempower workers. Argument is that in order to make something a landscape, the work and labor behind it must be erased (and this has been particularly true of California which was created as a rural agricultural idyll). Landscape is thus inseparable from capitalist geographies based on commodifications of the land. Pain and work is hidden to produce a pretty image. California is shorthand for American Dream. Mitchell wants to reinsert workers' lives into the landscapes, highlighting their struggles. This is a Marxist labor history of California.

Interesting Specifics:

This book is essentially a labor history of the California landscape.

Follows Denis Cosgrove's line of thinking in that the history of landscape was "inseparable from the construction of capitalist geographies based on the full commodification of the land...and the subsequent need to represent ownership (or non-ownership) as a natural order of society" (4).

Says New Cultural Geographers have gotten too wrapped-up in representation and have abandoned "traditional concerns of geographers with material form" (5).

Landscape is "both a work and an erasure of work" (6).

Takes a very Marxist approach in his belief in labor as one of the defining features of humanity.

[I don't fully understand why the production of landscape should specifically hide labor more than other types of goods. Isn't the labor process hidden from the everything?? I guess this alienation is the central point of Marxism - but anything you don't make yourself is a repository of hidden labor.]

Has a great explanation of Carl Sauer and his view of landscape, that landscape "was the sum of its morphological components" - i.e. its buildings, populations, etc - and that one could understand a people by interpreting the landscape they created (24).

Says Denis Cosgrove led the shift in geography toward ideology and image (26).

Landscape as both a thing and a process/struggle (30).

Wheatland Riots of 1913 resulted when Durst farm workers rioted due to horrid living and working conditions; served to made workers visible and to bring labor problems to the public eye. Led to the formation of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing. The CCIH also held to the belief that bad environments led "triggered" innate bad genetic behavior, so they sought to "environmentally correct" for any such "outbreaks." Sought to hinder the anonymous mobility of workers (so common to the rotating crop pattern of CA) by watching them and increasing their feelings of accountability. A way to strip the power of mobility.

In CA, workers have to remain extremely militant in order not to be naturalized into the landscape.

Interacts With:
Ed Soja, Denis Cosgrove, William Cronon (Changes in the Land), "The Reinvention of Cultural Geography,"
This is a corrective both of "new cultural geography" and its focus on image, and of the "old" cultural geography of Sauer and its obsession with untheoretical morphology.