Author: Mary Louise Roberts Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226721272 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
In the raucous decade following World War I, newly blurred boundaries between male and female created fears among the French that theirs was becoming a civilization without sexes. This new gender confusion became a central metaphor for the War's impact on French culture and led to a marked increase in public debate concerning female identity and woman's proper role. Mary Louise Roberts examines how in these debates French society came to grips with the catastrophic horrors of the Great War. In sources as diverse as parliamentary records, newspaper articles, novels, medical texts, writings on sexology, and vocational literature, Roberts discovers a central question: how to come to terms with rapid economic, social, and cultural change and articulate a new order of social relationships. She examines the role of French trauma concerning the War in legislative efforts to ban propaganda for abortion and contraception, and explains anxieties about the decline of maternity by a crisis in gender relations that linked soldiery, virility, and paternity. Through these debates, Roberts locates the seeds of actual change. She shows how the willingness to entertain, or simply the need to condemn, nontraditional gender roles created an indecisiveness over female identity that ultimately subverted even the most conservative efforts to return to traditional gender roles and irrevocably altered the social organization of gender in postwar France.
Author: Gail Bederman Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226041492 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
When former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries came out of retirement on the fourth of July, 1910 to fight current black heavywight champion Jack Johnson in Reno, Nevada, he boasted that he was doing it "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a negro." Jeffries, though, was trounced. Whites everywhere rioted. The furor, Gail Bederman demonstrates, was part of two fundamental and volatile national obsessions: manhood and racial dominance. In turn-of-the-century America, cultural ideals of manhood changed profoundly, as Victorian notions of self-restrained, moral manliness were challenged by ideals of an aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Bederman traces this shift in values and shows how it brought together two seemingly contradictory ideals: the unfettered virility of racially "primitive" men and the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. Focusing on the lives and works of four very different Americans—Theodore Roosevelt, educator G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—she illuminates the ideological, cultural, and social interests these ideals came to serve.
Author: David F. Noble Publisher: Knopf ISBN: 0307828522 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 477
Book Description
In this groundbreaking work of history, David Noble examines the origins and implications of the masculine culture of Western science and technology. He begins by asking why women have figure so little in the development of science, and then proceeds—in a fascinating and radical analysis—to trace their absence to a deep-rooted legacy of the male-dominated Western religious community. He shows how over the last thousand years science and the practice and institutions of higher learning were dominated by Christian clerics, whose ascetic culture from the late medieval period militated against the inclusion of women in scientific enterprise. He further demonstrates how the attitudes that took hold then remained more or less intact through the Reformation, and still subtly permeate out thinking despite the secularization of learning. Noble also describes how during the first millennium and after, women at times gained amazingly broad intellectual freedom and participated both in clerical activities and in scholarly pursuits. But, as Noble shows, these episodic forays occurred only in the wake of anticlerical movements within the church and without. He suggest finally an impulse toward “defeminization” at the core of the modern scientific and technological enterprise as it work to wrest from one-half of humanity its part in production (the Industrial Revolution’s male appropriation of labor) and reproduction (the millennium-old quest for the artificial womb). An important book that profoundly examine how the culture of Western Science came to be a world without women.
Author: Adam C. Stanley Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 9780807134894 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
In the turbulent decades after World War I, both France and Germany sought to return to an idealized, prewar past. Many people believed they could recapture a sense of order and stability by reinstituting traditional gender roles, which the war had thrown off balance. While French and German women necessarily filled men's roles in factories and other jobs during the war, those who continued to lead active working lives after World War I risked being called "modern women." Far from a compliment, this derogatory label encompassed everything society found threatening about women's new place in public life: smoking, working women who preferred independence and sexual freedom to a traditional role in the home. Society felt threatened by the image of the "modern woman," yet also realized that conceptions of femininity needed to accommodate the cultural changes brought about by the Great War. In Modernizing Tradition, Adam C. Stanley explores how interwar French and German popular culture used commercial images to redefine femininity in a way that granted women some access to modern life without encouraging the assertion of female independence. Examining advertisements, articles, and cartoons, as well as department store publicity materials from the popular press of each nation, Stanley reveals how the media attempted to convince women that--with the help of newly available consumer goods such as washing machines, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners--being a mother or a housewife could be empowering, even liberating. A life devoted to the home, these images promised, need not be an unmitigated return to old-fashioned tradition but could offer a rewarding lifestyle based on the wonders and benefits of modern technology. Stanley shows that the media carefully limited women's association with modernity to those activities that reinforced women's traditional roles or highlighted their continued dependence on masculine guidance, expertise, and authority. In this cross-national study, Stanley brings into sharp relief issues of gender and consumerism and reveals that, despite the larger political differences between France and Germany, gender ideals in the two countries remained virtually identical between the world wars. That these concepts of gender stayed static over the course of two decades--years when nearly every other aspect of society and culture seemed to be in constant flux--attests to their extraordinary power as a force in French and German society.
Author: Louis Crompton Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674030060 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 652
Book Description
How have major civilizations of the last two millennia treated people who were attracted to their own sex? In a narrative tour de force, Louis Crompton chronicles the lives and achievements of homosexual men and women alongside a darker history of persecution, as he compares the Christian West with the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, Arab Spain, imperial China, and pre-Meiji Japan. Ancient Greek culture celebrated same-sex love in history, literature, and art, making high claims for its moral influence. By contrast, Jewish religious leaders in the sixth century B.C.E. branded male homosexuality as a capital offense and, later, blamed it for the destruction of the biblical city of Sodom. When these two traditions collided in Christian Rome during the late empire, the tragic repercussions were felt throughout Europe and the New World. Louis Crompton traces Church-inspired mutilation, torture, and burning of sodomites in sixth-century Byzantium, medieval France, Renaissance Italy, and in Spain under the Inquisition. But Protestant authorities were equally committed to the execution of homosexuals in the Netherlands, Calvin's Geneva, and Georgian England. The root cause was religious superstition, abetted by political ambition and sheer greed. Yet from this cauldron of fears and desires, homoerotic themes surfaced in the art of the Renaissance masters--Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Sodoma, Cellini, and Caravaggio--often intertwined with Christian motifs. Homosexuality also flourished in the court intrigues of Henry III of France, Queen Christina of Sweden, James I and William III of England, Queen Anne, and Frederick the Great. Anti-homosexual atrocities committed in the West contrast starkly with the more tolerant traditions of pre-modern China and Japan, as revealed in poetry, fiction, and art and in the lives of emperors, shoguns, Buddhist priests, scholars, and actors. In the samurai tradition of Japan, Crompton makes clear, the celebration of same-sex love rivaled that of ancient Greece. Sweeping in scope, elegantly crafted, and lavishly illustrated, Homosexuality and Civilization is a stunning exploration of a rich and terrible past.
Author: Richard Manning Publisher: North Point Press ISBN: 1466823429 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
In this provocative, wide-ranging book, Against the Grain, Richard Manning offers a dramatically revisionist view of recent human evolution, beginning with the vast increase in brain size that set us apart from our primate relatives and brought an accompanying increase in our need for nourishment. For 290,000 years, we managed to meet that need as hunter-gatherers, a state in which Manning believes we were at our most human: at our smartest, strongest, most sensually alive. But our reliance on food made a secure supply deeply attractive, and eventually we embarked upon the agricultural experiment that has been the history of our past 10,000 years. The evolutionary road is littered with failed experiments, however, and Manning suggests that agriculture as we have practiced it runs against both our grain and nature's. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, and philosophers, along with his own travels, he argues that not only our ecological ills-overpopulation, erosion, pollution-but our social and emotional malaise are rooted in the devil's bargain we made in our not-so-distant past. And he offers personal, achievable ways we might re-contour the path we have taken to resurrect what is most sustainable and sustaining in our own nature and the planet's.
Author: Peter Thompson Publisher: National Geographic Books ISBN: 0500251703 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
The history of civilization told through the story of man’s relation to and use of seeds. Seeds have influenced evolution, and for millennia they have influenced and sometimes determined where and how we live. This is an epic tale, given added enchantment by the fact that to most of us seeds mean little more than tiny objects in paper packets: who thinks first of rice, wheat, coffee, nuts, peas, beans, or olives? Here, Peter Thompson unfolds the absorbing history of how, after centuries of investigation, we finally discovered what seeds do and how they work. This is a scientific detective story with heroes and heroines following clues and finding answers. Thompson brings to life the eccentrics, explorers, amateurs, and highly dedicated professionals who have accumulated our knowledge. Some are well known, such as Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel; others, like the Russian geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, are less so. The seeds also have a story and appear to have personalities, ambitions, and “stratagems” of their own. The book concludes with a chapter by Stephen Harris on current debates about genetically modified crops, seed conservation, and plant ownership in the contemporary world.
Author: Tyler Edward Stovall Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 9780739106471 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 390
Book Description
What happens when the study of French is no longer coterminous with the study of France? French Civilization and Its Discontents explores the ways in which considerations of difference, especially colonialism, postcolonialism, and race, have shaped French culture and French studies in the modern era. Rejecting traditional assimilationist notions of French national identity, contributors to this groundbreaking volume demonstrate how literature, history, and other aspects of what is considered French civilization have been shaped by global processes of creolization and differentiation. This book ably demonstrates the necessity of studying France and the Francophone world together, and of recognizing not only the presence of France in the Francophone world but also the central place occupied by the Francophone world in world literature and history.
Author: W. Scott Haine Ph.D. Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 0313060444 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
The French are of perennial interest, for, among other things, their style, their cuisine and wine, and their cultural output. Culture and Customs of France is a thoroughly jam-packed narrative through the glories that France continues to offer the world. The volume is a boon for preparing country reports, a must-read for travelers, and perfect for culture studies. Chapters on the land, people, and history, religion, social customs, gender, family, and marriage, cinema and media, literature, food and fashion, architecture and art, and performing arts are current and pleasurable to read.
Author: Mary Louise Roberts
Author: Joseph Daniel Unwin
Author: Gail Bederman
Author: David F. Noble
Author: Adam C. Stanley
Author: Louis Crompton
Author: Richard Manning
Author: Peter Thompson
Author: Tyler Edward Stovall
Author: W. Scott Haine Ph.D.