'Gilded Prostitution'

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 113621495X
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (362 download)

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Book Synopsis 'Gilded Prostitution' by : Maureen E. Montgomery

Download or read book 'Gilded Prostitution' written by Maureen E. Montgomery and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the marriages of British peers to American women within the context of the opening up of London and New York society and the growing competitiveness for high social status. In London, American women were often blamed for the growing hedonism and materialism of smart society and for poaching in the marriage market. They were invariably described as frivolous, vain and calculating – a description which points to the simmering anti-American sentiment in Britain. It was even suggested that titled Americans were having a detrimental effect on the British peerage because of their failure to produce male heirs. A brilliant analysis of the reasons why American women were viewed pejoratively not only in terms of anti-American feeling and the social transformation of the British upper class, but also the threat of women who did not appear to conform to aristocratic notions of a peeress’s duties as a wife and mother. Originally published in 1989, this book has unique appendices listing details of peer marriages in this 1870-1914 period.

Prostitution in the Gilded Age

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780974935249
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (352 download)

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Book Synopsis Prostitution in the Gilded Age by : Kevin Murphy

Download or read book Prostitution in the Gilded Age written by Kevin Murphy and published by . This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gilded Age is the only time in American history when prostitution was virtually legal. The Civil War proved such a grizzly affair that afterward, the average citizen was unmoved by a little vice. By the turn of the twentieth century, even small towns had dozens of bawdy houses, and countless saloons and cigar stores with backroom operations. Red light districts abounded and houses of ill fame operated freely. Jennie Hollister was one of the most successful madames of the Gilded Age. Every city in the land had a duplicate copy of Jennie. Fannie Porter's San Antonio, Texas, brothel was a frequent stop for outlaws, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In San Francisco, Sally Stanford outshone the other madames and eventually became the mayor of Sausalito. Josie Arlington, of New Orleans's "Storyville," opened her first bordello on Customhouse Street in 1895. Eleanora Dumont had bawdy houses in gold and silver boomtowns all over the Rockies. The differences between these madames, and their houses of ill fame, could be etched on a ladybug's nose. Jennie Hollister seemed the perfect madame-very attractive, stately, overflowing with personality, and possessed of a strong native intelligence. Jennie's parlor house-a seventeen-room Second French Empire home-rested elegantly on the east side of Bushnell Park in the center of Hartford, Connecticut. It was almost as roomy and comfortable as Governor Morgan Bulkeley's Italianate mansion on Washington Street or Mark Twain's huge "steamboat" manse-both just a few blocks away. Jennie entertained the finest collection of lawmakers and captains of industry extant. Men of the highest station, from all over the state, spent their spare time at Jennie Hollister's place. Without these houses of sin, streetwalkers would overrun the city, creating a terrible atmosphere for respectable women and businessmen alike. Elected officials, merchants, bankers, professional men, and even clerics, felt it best to allow the houses of ill fame to operate as long as they remained orderly. Throughout the 1890s, as wilder and more bizarre characters of the demimonde poured into the wide-open Capitol City of Connecticut, vice of all sorts ran on borrowed time. In 1895, the wooden covered bridge to East Hartford burned and a new bridge commission was formed with ex-Gov. Morgan Bulkeley at its head. When it came to individuals, Bulkeley had no prejudices of any kind, but he loathed the demimonde. At length, the overwhelming cost of the new bridge forced Bulkeley's hand. The bridge would be built, but the brothels had to go. Bulkeley bought up huge sections of the tenderloin, including vast stretches of the waterfront along the Connecticut River, and bulldozed old neighborhoods with abandon. Gone were the flophouses, flag taverns, and brothels that blighted the city from the earliest times. The toughs and the prostitutes had lost their homes and haunts. Meanwhile, just before traffic flowed over the new bridge in late 1907, Judge Edward Garvan of the city's police court sent ten madames to jail for three months. Up to that time, the madames had only paid fines. The demimonde was stunned. As their wide-open city closed down around them, they made plans to move on. America regained its social conscience and, almost overnight, vice disappeared. The luckiest madames were the ones who didn't live to see it all come crashing down. Jennie Hollister passed away in 1900, just a few years before the brothels closed. Though Jennie ran an elegant and orderly parlor house, it would never have survived society's return to righteousness.

The Freedom of the Streets

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Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807876534
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis The Freedom of the Streets by : Sharon E. Wood

Download or read book The Freedom of the Streets written by Sharon E. Wood and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-03-08 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gilded Age cities offered extraordinary opportunities to women--but at a price. As clerks, factory hands, and professionals flocked downtown to earn a living, they alarmed social critics and city fathers, who warned that self-supporting women were just steps away from becoming prostitutes. With in-depth research possible only in a mid-sized city, Sharon E. Wood focuses on Davenport, Iowa, to explore the lives of working women and the prostitutes who shared their neighborhoods. The single, self-supporting women who migrated to Davenport in the years following the Civil War saw paid labor as the foundation of citizenship. They took up the tools of public and political life to assert the respectability of paid employment and to confront the demon of prostitution. Wood offers cradle-to-grave portraits of individual girls and women--both prostitutes and "respectable" white workers--seeking to reshape their city and expand women's opportunities. As Wood demonstrates, however, their efforts to rewrite the sexual politics of the streets met powerful resistance at every turn from men defending their political rights and sexual power.

You'll Do

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Publisher : Steerforth
ISBN 13 : 1586423746
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (864 download)

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Book Synopsis You'll Do by : Marcia A. Zug

Download or read book You'll Do written by Marcia A. Zug and published by Steerforth. This book was released on 2024-01-09 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating and thought-provoking examination of the uniquely American institution of marriage, from the Colonial era through the #MeToo age Perfect for fans of Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Traister Americans hold marriage in such high esteem that we push people toward it, reward them for taking part in it, and fetishize its benefits to the point that we routinely ignore or excuse bad behavior and societal ills in the name of protecting and promoting it. In eras of slavery and segregation, Blacks sometimes gained white legal status through marriage. Laws have been designed to encourage people to marry so that certain societal benefits could be achieved: the population would increase, women would have financial security, children would be cared for, and immigrants would have familial connections. As late as the Great Depression, poor young women were encouraged to marry aged Civil War veterans for lifetime pensions. The widely overlooked problem with this tradition is that individuals and society have relied on marriage to address or dismiss a range of injustices and inequities, from gender- and race-based discrimination, sexual violence, and predation to unequal financial treatment. One of the most persuasive arguments against women's right to vote was that marrying and influencing their husband's choices was just as meaningful, if not better. Through revealing storytelling, Zug builds a compelling case that when marriage is touted as “the solution” to such problems, it absolves the government, and society, of the responsibility for directly addressing them.

A Court of Public Opinion

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (136 download)

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Book Synopsis A Court of Public Opinion by : Sarah Henkel

Download or read book A Court of Public Opinion written by Sarah Henkel and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late nineteenth-century sex workers in the United States left behind few written records. In contrast, men and women not involved in the sex work trade made their opinions well known. To peacefully exist in the public sphere of society, Gilded Age women relied on being perceived as good, moral, and pure. From the dawn of the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era, from approximately 1870 through 1920, the American public perceived a lack of goodness and morality within sex workers, making their visible presence in society unacceptable. This conclusion by the American public that sex workers lacked morality was based in part on religion but also on the legality of the profession and generally held notions of respectability. This perceived lack of morality and respectability led to sex workers growing more socially ostracized than ever before as the Gilded Age ended at the turn of the twentieth century. Using legal proceedings, widely circulated publications, private correspondence, and other forms of communication, sex workers were exploited by many individuals as tools for their personal political agendas and without sincere concern for sex workers’ well-being. During the Progressive Era, the crusade against sex work intensified as the solution to the problem of prostitution evolved from regulating the profession to seeking its extermination. Scholars can draw more nuanced conclusions concerning these discourses related to sex work by recognizing the lack of female-authored manuscripts in archives and by analyzing the male-authored sources that are available. Historians, including but not limited to Barbara Hobson, LeeAnn Whites, Judith Walkowitz, and Sharon Wood, have published landmark texts reflecting on nineteenth-century politics, prostitution, and social reform that closely relate to the topic of this thesis. The State Historical Society of Missouri, Missouri Valley Special Collections, and the Kansas Historical Society possess several collections containing materials reflecting on the American sex work industry during the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras. These materials include newspapers, ledgers, essays, correspondence, census records, pamphlets, and photographs. Though these materials were not the only primary sources consulted, they are the sources that most shaped the analysis of this topic. The purpose of this thesis is to identify how public opinion shaped the legal and social treatment of sex workers over an approximate fifty-year span, and whether early twentieth-century efforts at reform could ultimately be considered successful. After analyzing available primary sources and secondary literature related to this topic, this thesis concludes that sex workers in the United States were depicted by specific groups of individuals as sinful and inherently corrupt in an aggressive attempt to advance extensive social reforms, though in the end, these attempts at reform failed.

Love for Sale

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Publisher : Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 1555848087
Total Pages : 613 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (558 download)

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Book Synopsis Love for Sale by : Nils Johan Ringdal

Download or read book Love for Sale written by Nils Johan Ringdal and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[An] enlightening and entertaining . . . survey of the world’s oldest profession” from the Whore of Babylon to the modern sex-worker movement (Kirkus Reviews). From Eve and Lilith to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, the prostitute has been both a target of scorn and a catalyst for social change. In Love for Sale, cultural historian Nils Johan Ringdal delivers an authoritative and engaging history of this most maligned, yet globally ubiquitous, form of human commerce. Beginning with the epic of Gilgamesh, the Old Testament, and ancient cultures from Asia to the Mediterranean, Ringdal considers the varying way societies have dealt with and thought about prostitutes through history. He discusses how they were included in the priestess class in ancient Greece and Rome; how the rise of the courtesan in nineteenth-century Europe shaped literature, fashion, the arts, and modern sensibilities. He uncovers the first manuals on the art of sex and seduction, the British Empire’s campaigns against prostitution in India, and stories of the Japanese “comfort women” who served the armies in the Pacific theater of World War II. Ringdal closes with the rise of the sex-workers’ rights movement and ‘sex-positive” feminism, and a realistic look at the true risks and rewards of prostitution in the present day. Recalling Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae with its broad sweep across centuries and continents, Love for Sale “uses [its] subject as a springboard for exploring the ever-changing notions of love, sexual identity, morality and gender among various cultures” (Nan Goldberg, Newark Sunday Star-Ledger).

Sex Work in Popular Culture

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Author :
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1487537115
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (875 download)

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Book Synopsis Sex Work in Popular Culture by : Lauren Kirshner

Download or read book Sex Work in Popular Culture written by Lauren Kirshner and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2024-07-05 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sex Work in Popular Culture delves into provocative movies, TV shows, and documentaries about sex work produced in the last fifteen years – a period of debate and change around the meaning of sex work in North American society. From Oscar-winning films to viral YouTube videos, and from indie documentaries to hit series – many of which are made by women – the book reveals how sex work is being recognized as real work and an issue of human rights. Lauren Kirshner shares how popular culture has responded by producing the dynamic new figure of a sex worker who challenges tropes and promotes understanding of the key issues shaping sex work. The book draws on labour and feminist theory, film history, current news, and popular culture, all within the context of neoliberal capitalism and the rise of transactional intimate labour. Kirshner takes us from erotic dance clubs to porn sets, illuminating the professional lives of erotic dancers, massage parlour workers, webcam models, call girls, sex surrogates, and porn performers. Probing how progressive popular culture challenges stereotypes, Sex Work in Popular Culture tells the story of sex work as labour and how the screen can show us the world’s oldest profession in a new light.

The Husband Hunters

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Publisher : Orion
ISBN 13 : 1474601464
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (746 download)

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Book Synopsis The Husband Hunters by : Anne de Courcy

Download or read book The Husband Hunters written by Anne de Courcy and published by Orion. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Towards the end of the nineteenth century and for the first few years of the twentieth, a strange invasion took place in Britain. The citadel of power, privilege and breeding in which the titled, land-owning governing class had barricaded itself for so long was breached. The incomers were a group of young women who, fifty years earlier, would have been looked on as the alien denizens of another world - the New World, to be precise. From 1874 - the year that Jennie Jerome, the first known 'Dollar Princess', married Randolph Churchill - to 1905, dozens of young American heiresses married into the British peerage, bringing with them all the fabulous wealth, glamour and sophistication of the Gilded Age. Anne de Courcy sets the stories of these young women and their families in the context of their times. Based on extensive first-hand research, drawing on diaries, memoirs and letters, this richly entertaining group biography reveals what they thought of their new lives in England - and what England thought of them.

Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain

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Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 9780198206989
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (69 download)

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Book Synopsis Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain by : Geoffrey Russell Searle

Download or read book Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain written by Geoffrey Russell Searle and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1998 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How could Victorian capitalist values be harmonized with Christian beliefs and concepts of public morality and social duty? This book explores ideas about citizenship and public virtue and how public morality was reconciled with the market.

Consumers' Imperium

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Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807888885
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Consumers' Imperium by : Kristin L. Hoganson

Download or read book Consumers' Imperium written by Kristin L. Hoganson and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Histories of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era tend to characterize the United States as an expansionist nation bent on Americanizing the world without being transformed itself. In Consumers' Imperium, Kristin Hoganson reveals the other half of the story, demonstrating that the years between the Civil War and World War I were marked by heightened consumption of imports and strenuous efforts to appear cosmopolitan. Hoganson finds evidence of international connections in quintessentially domestic places--American households. She shows that well-to-do white women in this era expressed intense interest in other cultures through imported household objects, fashion, cooking, entertaining, armchair travel clubs, and the immigrant gifts movement. From curtains to clothing, from around-the-world parties to arts and crafts of the homelands exhibits, Hoganson presents a new perspective on the United States in the world by shifting attention from exports to imports, from production to consumption, and from men to women. She makes it clear that globalization did not just happen beyond America's shores, as a result of American military might and industrial power, but that it happened at home, thanks to imports, immigrants, geographical knowledge, and consumer preferences. Here is an international history that begins at home.

Deviance

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Publisher : SAGE Publications
ISBN 13 : 1071876643
Total Pages : 537 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (718 download)

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Book Synopsis Deviance by : Leon Anderson

Download or read book Deviance written by Leon Anderson and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2024-04-15 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deviance: Social Constructions and Blurred Boundaries is designed for courses on social deviance that take a strong sociological perspective. The book draws on up-to-date scholarship across a wide spectrum of deviance categories, providing a symbolic interactionist analysis of the deviance process. The book addresses positivistic theories of deviant behavior within a description of the deviance process that encompasses the work of deviance claims-makers, rule-breakers, and social control agents. Students are introduced to the sociology of deviance and learn to analyze several kinds of criminal deviance that involve unwilling victims-such as murder, rape, street-level property crime, and white-collar crime. Students also learn to examine several categories of "lifestyle" and "status" deviance and develop skills for critical analysis of criminal justice and social policies. Overall, students gain an understanding of the sociology of deviance through cross-cultural comparisons, historical overview of deviance in the U.S., and up-close analysis of the lived experience of those who are labeled deviant as well as responses to them in the U.S. today

Exploring Downton Abbey

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Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 0786476885
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (864 download)

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Book Synopsis Exploring Downton Abbey by : Scott F. Stoddart

Download or read book Exploring Downton Abbey written by Scott F. Stoddart and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The BBC television series Downton Abbey (2010-2016), highly rated in the UK, achieved cult status among American viewers, harking back to the days when serial dramas ruled the airwaves. The show's finale was one of the most watched in all of television history. This collection of new essays by British and American contributors explores how a series about life in an early 20th century English manor home resonated with American audiences. Topics include the role of the house in literature and film, the changing roles of women and the servant class, the influence of jazz and fashion, and attitudes regarding education and the class system.

Displaying Women

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134952864
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (349 download)

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Book Synopsis Displaying Women by : Maureen E. Montgomery

Download or read book Displaying Women written by Maureen E. Montgomery and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Displaying Women explores the role of women in the representation of leisure in turn-of-the-century New York. To see and be seen--on Fifth Avenue and Broadway, in Central Park, and in the fashionable uptown hotels and restaurants--was one of the fundamental principles in the display aesthetic of New York's fashionable society. Maureen E. Montgomery argues for a reconsideration of the role of women in the bourgeois elite in turn-of-the-century America. By contrasting multiple images of women drawn from newspapers, magazines, private correspondence, etiquette manuals and the New York fiction of Edith Wharton, Henry James and others, she offers a convincing antidote to the long-standing tendency in women's history to overlook women whose class affiliations have put them in a position of power.

Buying Respectability

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Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253002842
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis Buying Respectability by : Thomas Adam

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.

Dressing Up

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262365561
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Dressing Up by : Elizabeth L. Block

Download or read book Dressing Up written by Elizabeth L. Block and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How wealthy American women--as consumers and as influencers--helped shape French couture of the late nineteenth century; lavishly illustrated. French fashion of the late nineteenth century is known for its allure, its ineffable chic--think of John Singer Sargent's Madame X and her scandalously slipping strap. For Parisian couturiers and their American customers, it was also serious business. In Dressing Up, Elizabeth Block examines the couturiers' influential clientele--wealthy American women who bolstered the French fashion industry with a steady stream of orders from the United States. Countering the usual narrative of the designer as solo creative genius, Block shows that these women--as high-volume customers and as pre-Internet influencers--were active participants in the era's transnational fashion system. Block describes the arrival of nouveau riche Americans on the French fashion scene, joining European royalty, French socialites, and famous actresses on the client rosters of the best fashion houses--Charles Frederick Worth, Doucet, and Félix, among others. She considers the mutual dependence of couture and coiffure; the participation of couturiers in international expositions (with mixed financial results); the distinctive shopping practices of American women, which ranged from extensive transatlantic travel to quick trips downtown to the department store; the performance of conspicuous consumption at balls and soirées; the impact of American tariffs on the French fashion industry; and the emergence of smuggling, theft, and illicit copying of French fashions in the American market as the middle class emulated the preferences of the rich. Lavishly illustrated, with vibrant images of dresses, portraits, and fashion plates, Dressing Up reveals the power of American women in French couture. Winner of the Aileen Ribeiro Grant of the Association of Dress Historians; an Association for Art History grant; and a Pasold Research Fund grant.

Edith Wharton in Context

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107010195
Total Pages : 423 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Edith Wharton in Context by : Laura Rattray

Download or read book Edith Wharton in Context written by Laura Rattray and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-08 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays examines the various social, cultural and historical contexts surrounding Edith Wharton's popular and prolific literary career.

Henry James in Context

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316154203
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (161 download)

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Book Synopsis Henry James in Context by : David McWhirter

Download or read book Henry James in Context written by David McWhirter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-16 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long misread as a novelist conspicuously lacking in historical consciousness, Henry James has often been viewed as detached from, and uninterested in, the social, political, and material realities of his time. As this volume demonstrates, however, James was acutely responsive not only to his era's changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity, but also to changing conditions of literary production and reception, the rise of consumerism and mass culture, and the emergence of new technologies and media, of new apprehensions of time and space. These essays portray the author and his works in the context of the modernity that determined, formed, interested, appalled, and/or provoked his always curious mind. With contributions from an international cast of distinguished scholars, Henry James in Context provides a map of leading edge work in contemporary James studies, an invaluable reference work for students and scholars, and a blueprint for possible future directions.