Sylvia Plath and White Ignorance

Janus Head ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-155
Author(s):  
Ellen M. Miller ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
White Woman ◽  
White Women ◽  
Phenomenological Study ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Color Terms ◽  
Women Writing ◽  
White Ignorance

Sylvia Plath wrote in the midst of growing racial tensions in 1950s and 1960s America. Her work demonstrates ambivalence towards her role as a middle-class white woman. In this paper, I examine the racial implications in Plath's color terms. I disagree with Renee Curry's reading in White Women Writing White that Plath only considers her whiteness insofar as it affects herself. Through a phenomenological study of how whiteness shifts meaning in this poem, I hope to show that Curry's negative estimation is only partly right. I suggest that embodiment is a problem for Plath in general, and this contributes to her inability to fully examine other bodies.

From Ni putes ni soumises to #metoo in the French press: Between the hegemony of Whiteness and the Otherness of Muslims

2021 ◽  
pp. 095715582110217
Author(s):  
Marion Dalibert
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
White Women ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Media ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
Majority Groups ◽  
Feminist Movements

By questioning the media coverage of the seven feminist movements that have received most publicity in the French mainstream media since the 2000s, this article shows that the media narrative regarding feminism perpetuates the national metanarrative produced in generalist newspapers. This metanarrative reinforces the power of majority groups by portraying them as inherently egalitarian, while those with the least economic, social, political and cultural power, such as Muslim men, are portrayed as the most sexist. It also highlights that racialised collectives are still socially invisible or limited to a visibility that is framed by representations rooted in a (post) colonial imaginary. Non-white women are in fact presented as fundamentally submissive, while (upper)-middle-class white women are the only ones associated with emancipation, which is significant of white and bourgeois hegemony at work in the French news media.

Never Happier in Her Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 176-192
Author(s):  
Allison Dorothy Fredette
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
White Women ◽  
Social Ethic ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Border Culture ◽  
Poor White

This chapter explores the lives of working-class and poor white women of the border South. Their story reveals the potential of border culture—how it gave a voice and agency to women whose stories could be more easily suppressed in a less fluid community. The border created fertile ground for ideas of mutuality and individualism. While this led many to pursue friendship, love, and partnership in their relationships, elite and middle-class husbands and wives of the border South still often adhered to a social ethic which dictated certain gendered behaviors to men and women. In working-class society, however, these philosophies gave women a greater sense of independence and authority, allowing them to push the boundaries of the household and assert themselves in new ways.

WHITE WOMEN WRITING IN THE CONTACT ZONE

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (73) ◽  
pp. 249-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Sheridan
Keyword(s):  
Contact Zone ◽  
White Women ◽  
Women Writing

scholarly journals Racialism on the Left E.D. Morel and the “Black Horror on the Rhine”

1968 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Reinders
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Young Women ◽  
White Woman ◽  
White Women ◽  
Front Page ◽  
French Government ◽  
Demilitarized Zone ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
Serious Injury

On April 6, 1920 the French government, in reprisal for the entry of German troops into the demilitarized zone of the Ruhr, occupied Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Hanau, and Homburg. During the occupation French Moroccan soldiers fired on a German mob in Frankfurt and killed several. In covering the event the Daily Herald, alone among English newspapers, called special attention to the “race” of the French troops. It headlined:FRANKFURT RUNS WITH BLOODFRENCH BLACK TROOPS USEMACHINE GUNS ON CIVILIANSOn April 10, the Herald followed its accounts of events on the Rhine by a front page article by Edmund Dene Morel under banner leads:BLACK SCOURGE IN EUROPESEXUAL HORROR LET LOOSE BY FRANCE ON RHINE DISAPPEARANCE OF YOUNG GERMAN GIRLSFrance, Morel wrote, “is thrusting her black savages …into the heart of Germany.” There “primitive African barbarians”, carriers of syphilis, have become a “terror and a horror” to the Palatinate countryside. The “barely restrainable beastiality of the black troops” has led to many rapes, an especially serious problem since Africans are “the most developed sexually of any” race and “for well-known physiological reasons, the raping of a white woman by a negro is nearly always accompanied by serious injury and not infrequently has fatal results.…” Morel had reports of rapes, “some of them of an atrocious character”, and of “dead bodies of young women discovered under manure heaps and so on”. German municipalities were forced to provide bordellos and white women, and even young boys, for these over-sexed blacks. Master-minding this effort to “ruin, enslave, degrade, dismember [and] reduce to the lowest depths of despair and humiliation a whole people” was a “ruthless” and militaristic French government. Furthermore Morel warned his working class readers, “If the manhood of these races, not so advanced in the forms of civilisation as ourselves, are to be used against the Germans, why not against the workers here or elsewhere?”

scholarly journals "The Coloured Lady Knows Better": Marketing the "New Century Washer" in Canadian Home Journal, 1910-1912

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Kinahan
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
White Woman ◽  
Technological Progress ◽  
White Women ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Advertising Campaign ◽  
Washing Machines

This article is a small-scale study of eight advertisements that appeared in Canadian Home Journal between March 1910 and June 1912. Marketing a range of washing machines manufactured by Cummer-Dowswell, Ltd., a Hamilton-based company, the ads are significant for their racialized representations of women’s labour. Featuring a White woman in four ads and “Aunt Salina,” a Black “wash woman,” in four ads, their visual address hinges on racialized dichotomies. I analyze how this advertising campaign employed “race” to “sell” an ideological view of gender, labour, and the myth of technological progress through the linking of Black women to pre-industrial technologies and White women to technological progress.Cet article est une étude à petite échelle de huit annonces qui sont parues dans le  Canadian Home Journal entre mars 1910 et juin 1912. Ces annonces faisaient la promotion d’un éventail de machines à laver manufacturées par Cummer-Dowswell Ltée, une compagnie située à Hamilton, et sont significatives par l’accent qu’elles mettent sur la race dans leurs représentations des femmes au travail. Quatre des annonces montrent une femme blanche tandis que les quatre autres montrent « tante Salina », une femme de ménage noire. Leurs apparences divergentes se fondent sur une dichotomie raciale. J’analyse comment cette campagne publicitaire a utilisé la race pour promouvoir une perspective idéologique du sexe, du travail et du mythe du progrès technologique en rapprochant la femme noire aux technologies préindustrielles et la femme blanche au progrès technologique.

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