Beyond Respectability

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Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252099540
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Beyond Respectability by : Brittney C. Cooper

Download or read book Beyond Respectability written by Brittney C. Cooper and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2017-05-03 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.

Respectable

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Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520974514
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis Respectable by : Saida Grundy

Download or read book Respectable written by Saida Grundy and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The making of a culture of Black male respectability at Morehouse that underlines conservative notions of gender and class—by a former Spelman student who was once "Miss Morehouse." How does it feel to be groomed as the "solution" to a national Black male "problem"? This is the guiding paradox of Respectable, an in-depth examination of graduates of Morehouse College, the nation's only historically Black college for men. While Black male collegians are often culturally fetishized for "beating the odds," the image of Black male success that Morehouse assiduously promotes and celebrates is belied by many of the realities that challenge the students on this campus. Saida Grundy offers a unique insider perspective: a graduate of Spelman college and a former "Miss Morehouse," Grundy crafts an incisive feminist and sociological account informed by her personal insights and scholarly expertise. Respectable gathers the experiences of former students and others connected to Morehouse to illustrate the narrow, conservative vision of masculinity molded at a competitive Black institution. The thirty-two men interviewed unveil a culture that forges confining ideas of respectable Black manhood within a context of relentless peer competition and sexual violence, measured against unattainable archetypes of idealized racial leadership. Grundy underlines the high costs of making these men—the experiences of low-income students who navigate class issues at Morehouse, the widespread homophobia laced throughout the college's notions of Black male respectability, and the crushingly conformist expectations of a college that sees itself as making "good" Black men. As Morehouse's problems continue to pour out into national newsfeeds, this book contextualizes these issues not as a defect of Black masculinity, but as a critique of what happens when an institution services an imagination of what Black men should be, at the expense of more fully understanding the many ways these young people see themselves.

Remaking Respectability

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Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469611007
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis Remaking Respectability by : Victoria W. Wolcott

Download or read book Remaking Respectability written by Victoria W. Wolcott and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of African Americans arrived at Detroit's Michigan Central Station, part of the Great Migration of blacks who left the South seeking improved economic and political conditions in the urban North. The most visible of these migrants have been the male industrial workers who labored on the city's automobile assembly lines. African American women have largely been absent from traditional narratives of the Great Migration because they were excluded from industrial work. By placing these women at the center of her study, Victoria Wolcott reveals their vital role in shaping life in interwar Detroit. Wolcott takes us into the speakeasies, settlement houses, blues clubs, storefront churches, employment bureaus, and training centers of Prohibition- and depression-era Detroit. There, she explores the wide range of black women's experiences, focusing particularly on the interactions between working- and middle-class women. As Detroit's black population grew exponentially, women not only served as models of bourgeois respectability, but also began to reshape traditional standards of deportment in response to the new realities of their lives. In so doing, Wolcott says, they helped transform black politics and culture. Eventually, as the depression arrived, female respectability as a central symbol of reform was supplanted by a more strident working-class activism.

Righteous Discontent

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674254392
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis Righteous Discontent by : Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

Download or read book Righteous Discontent written by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1994-03-15 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Du Bois noted has gone largely unstudied until now. In this book, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham gives us our first full account of the crucial role of black women in making the church a powerful institution for social and political change in the black community. Between 1880 and 1920, the black church served as the most effective vehicle by which men and women alike, pushed down by racism and poverty, regrouped and rallied against emotional and physical defeat. Focusing on the National Baptist Convention, the largest religious movement among black Americans, Higginbotham shows us how women were largely responsible for making the church a force for self-help in the black community. In her account, we see how the efforts of women enabled the church to build schools, provide food and clothing to the poor, and offer a host of social welfare services. And we observe the challenges of black women to patriarchal theology. Class, race, and gender dynamics continually interact in Higginbotham’s nuanced history. She depicts the cooperation, tension, and negotiation that characterized the relationship between men and women church leaders as well as the interaction of southern black and northern white women’s groups. Higginbotham’s history is at once tough-minded and engaging. It portrays the lives of individuals within this movement as lucidly as it delineates feminist thinking and racial politics. She addresses the role of black Baptist women in contesting racism and sexism through a “politics of respectability” and in demanding civil rights, voting rights, equal employment, and educational opportunities. Righteous Discontent finally assigns women their rightful place in the story of political and social activism in the black church. It is central to an understanding of African American social and cultural life and a critical chapter in the history of religion in America.

Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800

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Author :
Publisher : Psychology Press
ISBN 13 : 0415933285
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (159 download)

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Book Synopsis Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800 by : Woodruff D. Smith

Download or read book Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800 written by Woodruff D. Smith and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tying together of several distinct cultural patterns during this century to create a culture of respectability and its impact on popular culture, trade, politics, social dynamics, and literature, this original and thoughtful work provides a comprehensive and much-needed understanding of the origins of modern consumption and all of its cultural implications.

The Rise of Respectable Society

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674772854
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (728 download)

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Book Synopsis The Rise of Respectable Society by : Francis Michael Longstreth Thompson

Download or read book The Rise of Respectable Society written by Francis Michael Longstreth Thompson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Rise of Respectable Society' offers a new map of this territory as revealed by close empirical studies of marriage, the family, domestic life, work, leisure and entertainment in 19th century Britain.

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.

American Misfits and the Making of Middle-Class Respectability

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Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691210713
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis American Misfits and the Making of Middle-Class Respectability by : Robert Wuthnow

Download or read book American Misfits and the Making of Middle-Class Respectability written by Robert Wuthnow and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How American respectability has been built by maligning those who don't make the grade How did Americans come to think of themselves as respectable members of the middle class? Was it just by earning a decent living? Or did it require something more? And if it did, what can we learn that may still apply? The quest for middle-class respectability in nineteenth-century America is usually described as a process of inculcating positive values such as honesty, hard work, independence, and cultural refinement. But clergy, educators, and community leaders also defined respectability negatively, by maligning individuals and groups—“misfits”—who deviated from accepted norms. Robert Wuthnow argues that respectability is constructed by “othering” people who do not fit into easily recognizable, socially approved categories. He demonstrates this through an in-depth examination of a wide variety of individuals and groups that became objects of derision. We meet a disabled Civil War veteran who worked as a huckster on the edges of the frontier, the wife of a lunatic who raised her family while her husband was institutionalized, an immigrant religious community accused of sedition, and a wealthy scion charged with profiteering. Unlike respected Americans who marched confidently toward worldly and heavenly success, such misfits were usually ignored in paeans about the nation. But they played an important part in the cultural work that made America, and their story is essential for understanding the “othering” that remains so much a part of American culture and politics today.

Respectability and Reform

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Publisher : Syracuse University Press
ISBN 13 : 0815654367
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (156 download)

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Book Synopsis Respectability and Reform by : Tara M. McCarthy

Download or read book Respectability and Reform written by Tara M. McCarthy and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century, an era in which women were expanding the influence outside the home, Irish American women carved out unique opportunities to serve the needs of their communities. For many women, this began with a commitment to Irish nationalism. In Respectability and Reform, McCarthy explores the contributions of a small group of Irish American women in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era who emerged as leaders, organizers, and activists. Profiles of these women suggest not only that Irish American women had a political tradition of their own but also that the diversity of the Irish American community fostered a range of priorities and approaches to activism. McCarthy focuses on three movements—the Irish nationalist movement, the labor movement, and the suffrage movement—to trace the development of women’s political roles. Highlighting familiar activists such as Fanny and Anna Parnell, as well as many lesser-known suffragists, McCarthy sheds light on the range of economic and social backgrounds found among the activists. She also shows that Irish American women’s commitment to social justice persisted from the Land War through the World War I era. In unearthing the rich and varied stories of these Irish American women, Respectablity and Reform deepens our understanding of their intersection with and contribution to the larger context of American women’s activism.

Respectability on Trial

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Author :
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438461968
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Book Synopsis Respectability on Trial by : Brian Donovan

Download or read book Respectability on Trial written by Brian Donovan and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2016-09-21 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a front row seat at critical courtroom battles over seduction, pimping, rape, and sodomy in early twentieth-century New York City, Brian Donovan uses verbatim trial transcripts to understand the city's history during the so-called "first sexual revolution." By tracing the revolutionary and repressive dimensions of this time period, Donovan reveals how conflicting ideas about sex and gender shaped the city's criminal justice system. He unearths stories of sexual violence and legal injustice that contradict the image of early twentieth-century America as a time of sexual revolution and progress. Police and courts often served the interests of the upper classes, men, and racial and ethnic majorities, but the trial transcripts included here reveal the considerable extent to which members of working-class and immigrant communities used the machinery of law enforcement for their own ends. Many previous books have fully documented and analyzed the sensational trials of turn-of-the-century New York City, but none have paid such close attention to the courtroom experiences of common city dwellers.

Close Kin and Distant Relatives

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Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813935512
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (139 download)

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Book Synopsis Close Kin and Distant Relatives by : Susana M. Morris

Download or read book Close Kin and Distant Relatives written by Susana M. Morris and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "black family" in the United States and the Caribbean often holds contradictory and competing meanings in public discourse: on the one hand, it is a site of love, strength, and support; on the other hand, it is a site of pathology, brokenness, and dysfunction that has frequently called forth an emphasis on conventional respectability if stability and social approval are to be achieved. Looking at the ways in which contemporary African American and black Caribbean women writers conceptualize the black family, Susana Morris finds a discernible tradition that challenges the politics of respectability by arguing that it obfuscates the problematic nature of conventional understandings of family and has damaging effects as a survival strategy for blacks. The author draws on African American studies, black feminist theory, cultural studies, and women’s studies to examine the work of Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, and Sapphire, showing how their novels engage the connection between respectability and ambivalence. These writers advocate instead for a transgressive understanding of affinity and propose an ethic of community support and accountability that calls for mutual affection, affirmation, loyalty, and respect. At the core of these transgressive family systems, Morris reveals, is a connection to African diasporic cultural rites such as dance, storytelling, and music that help the fictional characters to establish familial connections.

Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic

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Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807180726
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic by : Cassander L. Smith

Download or read book Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic written by Cassander L. Smith and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2023-10-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic examines the means through which people of African descent embodied tenets of respectability as a coping strategy to navigate enslavement and racial oppression in the early Black Atlantic world. The term “respectability politics” refers to the way members of a minoritized population adopt the customs and manners of a dominant culture in order to gain visibility and combat negative stereotypes about their subject group. Today respectability politics can be seen in how those within and outside Black communities police the behavior of Black celebrities, critique protest movements, and celebrate accomplishments by people of African descent who break racial barriers. To study the origins of the complicated relationship between race and respectability, Cassander L. Smith shows that early American literatures reveal Black communities engaging with issues of respectability from the very beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. Concerns about character and comportment influenced the literary production of Black Atlantic communities, particularly in the long eighteenth century. Uncovering the central importance of respectability as a theme shaping the literary development of cultures throughout the early Black Atlantic, Smith illuminates the mechanics of respectability politics in a range of texts, including poetry, letters, and life writing by Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and expatriates on the west coast of Africa in Sierra Leone. Through these early Black texts, Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic considers respectability politics as a malleable strategy that has both energized and suppressed Black cultures for centuries.

Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136793941
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (367 download)

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Book Synopsis Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800 by : Woodruff Smith

Download or read book Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800 written by Woodruff Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-06-28 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tying together of several distinct cultural patterns during this century to create a culture of respectability and its impact on popular culture, trade, politics, social dynamics, and literature, this original and thoughtful work provides a comprehensive and much-needed understanding of the origins of modern consumption and all of its cultural impl

Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000642445
Total Pages : 167 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London by : Joshua G. Stuart-Bennett

Download or read book Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London written by Joshua G. Stuart-Bennett and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-10 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London explores a largely obscured marketplace of motherhood that provided ways for women to manage the stigma of illegitimacy and their respectable identities within Victorian and Edwardian society. It focuses on the extent of women’s ‘dirty work’, when maternal problem management was fundamental to the general maintenance of respectability and, by extension, to Empire and Civilisation. Despite its intrigue, history has struggled to understand and represent an uncomfortable but significant artefact of Western modernising society: ‘baby-farming’. During a period when ideologies of respectability and civilisation arguably mattered most, the ‘right’ kind of parenthood – especially motherhood – became paramount. As the ‘wrong’ offspring could jeopardise a woman’s chances of being respectable, a wholesale, informal, and somewhat clandestine marketplace emerged that catered to various maternal difficulties. Within this marketplace, a pregnancy or newborn child who may have compromised a woman’s respectability could be ‘disposed’ of through different means, for a fee. From the Victorian period to the present, the commercialised maternal practices associated with baby-farming have become firmly established within collective consciousness as being synonymous with child murder, female pathology, and ‘infanticide for hire’. This book provides a revised, far more complex, and nuanced narrative history which reveals all that was associated with baby-farming – including all possible outcomes – to be entirely natural, rational, and even necessary products of their time; an understandable outcome of the period’s ‘civilising offensive’. Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, history, and gender studies.

The Respectability of Late Victorian Workers

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443825301
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis The Respectability of Late Victorian Workers by : Charles Walter Masters

Download or read book The Respectability of Late Victorian Workers written by Charles Walter Masters and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of the working classes of York in the late Victorian period places respectability at the heart of the interpretation of working-class culture, drawing attention to its distinctive role within working-class daily life while eschewing a class-based analysis. Through an investigation of workers’ actions, choice-making and personal testimony, and using a wide range of textual and non-textual sources, a picture is produced of what it meant to be respectable in working-class communities and respectability’s role in personal and community identity formation. Not only is the importance of gender-based notions of the male breadwinner and female homemaker explored, but fresh light is cast on how respectability was engaged with and negotiated in everyday contexts. Respectability is shown to be a dynamic and culturally creative process with workers building their identities within the confines of “structural” constraints, including street and neighbourhood based mores and institutions, but with a measure of self-generated cultural, social and organisational space. Far from respectability being a function of socio-economic differentiation, even the poorest are shown to have aspired to join self-help organisations and become worthy citizens. Crucially, “working-class respectability” is shown to have been moral and Christian in character—underpinned by a form of diffusive Christianity that was robust and vital rather than some kind of legacy cultural and religious phenomenon. Although different attributes of respectability could be prioritised within working-class circles, respectability is seen as a distinctive and essentially pan-class culture centred on a set of universal values which distinguished and defined the respectable citizen and separated him from imagined or real rough “Others.” This study will appeal to readers interested in social and cultural history, gender studies and material culture. York inhabitants are given their own voice through hitherto unpublished, as well as published, oral and written testimony. Worker and family attitudes are analysed in the everyday contexts of work, home, neighbourhood and leisure, and as part of the wide-ranging discussion, attention is paid to the cultural significance of what working people ate and wore, and what goods they bought to furnish their often very modest homes. The emphasis throughout is on a “grass-roots” analysis, showing clearly how and why respectability answered the needs and aspirations of most ordinary Victorian and Edwardian workers and their families.

Respectability as Moral Map and Public Discourse in the Nineteenth Century

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351600141
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (516 download)

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Book Synopsis Respectability as Moral Map and Public Discourse in the Nineteenth Century by : Woodruff D. Smith

Download or read book Respectability as Moral Map and Public Discourse in the Nineteenth Century written by Woodruff D. Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the fact that respectability is universally recognized as a feature of nineteenth-century society, it has seldom been studied as a subject in itself. In this path-breaking book, Woodruff D. Smith interprets respectability as a highly significant cultural phenomenon, incorporating both a moral imaginary or map and a distinctive discourse. Respectability was constructed in the public spheres of Europe and the Americas and eventually came to be an aspect of social life throughout the world. From its origins in the late eighteenth century, it was a conscious response to what were perceived as undesirable aspects of modernity. It became a central feature of concepts of "the modern" itself and an essential part of the processes that, in the twentieth century, came to be called modernization and cultural globalization. Respectability – though typically associated with the bourgeoisie – existed independently of any particular social class, and strongly affected modern constructions of class in general and of gender. Although not an ideology, respectability was overtly embedded in several political discourses, especially those of movements such as antislavery which claimed to transcend politics. While it may no longer be a coherent entity in culture and discourse, respectability continues to affect contemporary public life through a fragmentary legacy.

The Blight of Respectability

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Author :
Publisher : DigiCat
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 78 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (596 download)

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Book Synopsis The Blight of Respectability by : Geoffrey Mortimer

Download or read book The Blight of Respectability written by Geoffrey Mortimer and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-29 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The respectable man is a slave to convention, and therefore a stick-i'-the-mire. He is fearful of being deemed a crank, so fearful that he succeeds in becoming a nonentity." - says the author of the book, Geoffrey Mortimer, about the trait of society that was so characteristic of the Victorian era.