From Social Grace to Social Power: Changing Nineteenth-Century Gender Norms in Leadership and Rhetorical Performance at Western College for Women

Ohio History ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-46
Author(s):  
Renea Frey ◽  
Jacqueline Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Rhetorical Performance

Imperial Pressures, 1800–1812

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Interracial Relationships ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Institutional Pressures ◽  
High Class ◽  
Class Standing ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
The Caribbean

This chapter chronicles the institutional pressures put on mixed-race migrants in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Although families continued to assist relatives of color—which included helping get them into the East India Company to advance their social standing—constricting notions of kinship and political wariness of African-descended people made it challenging for Jamaicans of color to thrive in Britain. Their attempts to assimilate were made more difficult by the growing calls of abolitionists and pro-slavery supporters to curtail interracial relationships in order to create a demographic separation between blacks and whites in the Caribbean. Within this abolitionist debate, Trinidad’s governor Thomas Picton went to court for having tortured a mixed-race girl named Louisa Calderon. Her arrival in Britain prompted a flurry of accusations that she had become pregnant by a Scottish protector, escalating the general public’s concern about mixed-race migrants and their impact on British demography. This chapter contends that by the early nineteenth century, high class standing and genetic connections to prominent Britons were losing their social power for Jamaican migrants of color.

scholarly journals Brief History of Islamic Civilization from Its Genesis in the Late Nineteenth Century to Its Institutional Entrenchment

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-173
Author(s):  
Kevin Van Bladel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
General Education ◽  
Social Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Islamic Civilization ◽  
The University

This article sketches the early history of Islamic civilization from its genesis in the late nineteenth century to its institutionalization in the twentieth. Key moments include its enshrinement in journals and a monumental encyclopedia and the flight of European Semitists to the United States. Its institutionalization in the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Chicago in 1956 created a successful model for the subsequent dissemination of Islamic civilization. Working in a committee on general education (the core curriculum) in the social sciences at the University of Chicago, Marshall Hodgson inaugurated Islamic civilization as a subject of university study that was not just for specialists but available to American college students as fulfilling a basic requirement in a liberal arts education. Many other universities followed this practice. Since then, Islamic civilization has come to be shared by the educated public. Today it is an internationally accepted and wellfunded entity that confers contested social power but still lacks analytical power. 

Religion and Racial Violence in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Graber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Critical Importance ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Ongoing Development ◽  
Religious Lives ◽  
Religious Poetics

This chapter considers the ways in which racial violence in the nineteenth century proved formative to developments in the religious lives of people raced outside of whiteness. It draws on borderlands scholar Luís León’s description of marginalized communities transforming existing religious concepts and practices, as well as creating new religious options, a process he calls religious poetics. It also suggests the critical importance of debating and enacting racial violence for members of communities raced white. These actors engaged in a poetics of racial violence, in which they sought to interpret and reconfigure their worlds in relation to the violence that perpetuated America’s racial order. The chapter surveys justifications for and condemnations of racial violence, as well as responses to racial violence, in an effort to explore how religion and violence intersected in the ongoing development of racial classifications and the circulation of social power in nineteenth-century America.

Histrionics of the Pulpit

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-337
Author(s):  
Scott Larson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Form ◽  
The Masses

Abstract The eighteenth-century Atlantic world was swept with a radical new form of Christian preaching that aimed to engage the feelings and sensations of mass audiences. In the nineteenth century, this heart-centered preaching became a mainstream form of American Christianity, but in its first hundred years, it was widely regarded as perverse, effeminate, and depraved. Early evangelical Christianity threatened to destabilize social and political orders, to drive the masses “out of their senses,” and to throw gender norms into chaos. This article argues that attention to “trans tonality”—an investigation of trans at the level of tone, expression, and sensation—offers a surprising trans history of early American culture and opens up an archive rich with accounts of gender and sensory variance.

GENDER AND SELF-PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL POWER

2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 553-568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca S. Powers ◽  
Christa Reiser
Keyword(s):  
Social Skills ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
Emotional Intimacy ◽  
Gender Stratification ◽  
Physical Strength ◽  
Self Perceptions ◽  
Using Data

Using data from undergraduates we found that financial resources, intelligence and having responsibility were important sources of social power. Consistent with traditional gender norms, women were more likely than were men to perceive social power from emotional intimacy, social skills and parenting. Men were more likely than were women to perceive having a lot of social power due to physical strength and social status. Unexpected was that more men than women chose sexuality as a source of power. An awareness of gender stratification was found in the reports that “women in general” do not have a lot of social power and women were more likely than were men to say that “men in general” had a lot of social power.

Hidden Dangers

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Sexual Deviance ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Female Prostitute ◽  
City Mysteries ◽  
The City ◽  
The Ideal

By the late 1840s, a new genre of literature revealed deep concerns with corruption in the growing urban centers. City mysteries exposed a dark underworld of the metropolis, leading readers through smoky saloons, gambling dens, and brothels. More than any other “sin of the city,” urban gothic literature focused on prostitution. The female prostitute embodied the greatest antithesis to the ideal or “true” woman. Anticonvent literature often compared nuns to prostitutes, convents to brothels, priests to seducers, and Mother Superiors to madams. City mysteries mirrored convent narratives in their description of women being seduced into lives of misery and sexual deviance. Both convent narratives and city mysteries promised to unveil a hidden world of sin and debauchery for an eager readership. This chapter compares convent tales and city mysteries, focusing on the nun-prostitute figure and the ways in which this female archetype threatened nineteenth-century female gender norms.

The Rhetoric of Ellen Terry's Alter Ego: Lessons From Nance Oldfield

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-313
Author(s):  
Rachael Zeleny
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bram Stoker ◽  
Professional Life ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Alter Ego ◽  
Rhetorical Performance ◽  
At Home

While Ellen Terry's Shakespearean roles are commonly discussed in considerations of her work, the actress's involvement with the comic play Nance Oldfield is glossed over if not entirely overlooked. However, Terry bought the rights to this play, revised the script with Bram Stoker, performed the leading role, and invoked this semi-fictional figure across the latter part of her career. This essay examines public theatrical ephemera in conjunction with personal photographs of Terry dressed up as Oldfield at home and the extensive marginalia on Terry's copy of the script to argue that Terry's assumption of ‘Nance Oldfield’ was a rhetorical performance. Terry's alliance with this character, as an on-stage character and an off-stage alter ego, led her to speak with greater confidence about her own professional life and about women's public role in nineteenth-century England.

Charlotte Russe in the Afternoon

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Erby
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Women's Associations ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Fundamental Challenge ◽  
Gender Ideals ◽  
The Public Sphere

The third chapter presents that nineteenth-century dining venues, including eating houses, were male spaces and typically inaccessible to women. But middle- and upper-class women, through their expanding roles as the main consumers for their families and their participation in women's associations and reform activities, increasingly found themselves downtown in the middle of the day and in need of dining options of their own. In this chapter, the author turns to the growing number of dining establishments earmarked specifically for respectable, affluent women. These ladies’ dining venues strove to uphold mainstream gender ideals and distinguish themselves as appropriate for female use through their location, décor, and menu, all gendered as feminine. Nevertheless, by providing semipublic spaces for women to patronize, ladies’ eateries helped to draw women into the public sphere, thus posing a fundamental challenge to gender norms. The public and commercial dining activities of respectable women also became a vehicle for the discussion of anxieties associated with the rise of consumer pleasures.

Hunting Foreigners

Manhunts ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grégoire Chamayou ◽  
Steven Rendall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Foreign Workers ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Political Program

This chapter discusses the hunting of foreigners. It argues that the hunt for foreigners is a hunt for foreign workers. Xenophobic hunts arise from competition for wages. Their logic involves interpredation: the exploited against the exploited, the poor against the poor, workers against workers. Although capitalism did not invent xenophobic violence, it has channeled it toward the powerful interpredatory dynamics that characterizes it. In so doing, it has also endowed it with a redoubtable social power. Certain political movements soon understood this. Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, the conservative and nationalist right sought to extend protectionism from products to workers to transform popular xenophobia into a political program.

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