Lois W. Banner

Fashion and eroticism : ideals of feminine beauty from the Victorian era to the Jazz Age

The traditional image of the Victorian woman presents her as strait-laced and prudish, her clothing an outward sign of her sexual repression and exploitation. This situation supposedly persisted until the Womens Rights Movement and World War I forced the world to acknowledge that women were liberated individuals with legs. Yet Valerie steele demonstrates that eroticism formed the basis for the Victorian ideal of feminine beauty and fashion--indeed, that the concepts of beauty and fashion are essentially erotic. She shows that, far from being passive sex objects, Victorian women, like their modern counterparts, themselves chose to emulate an erotic ideal as an aspect of their own self-fulfillment. Even the notorious corset was neither fetishistic nor an unhealthy instrument of torture, she argues, although its comlex and ambivalent sexual symbolism aroused controversy. Fashion and Eroticism shows how the New Look of sexy modern naturally from within the pre-war world of fashion and not as part of an intifashion movement. Steeles conclusions are based on prodigious documentary evidence, including visual and material research, in costume collections in the United States, Great Britain, Europe, and even Japan. Fashiona and Eroticism is not only a radical revision of the Conventional understanding of Victorian fashion; it is a major contribution to the histyory of women and sexuality. About the Author: Valerie steele received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1983, and was the 1984 First Ladies Fellow at the Division of Costume, National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian Institution.

Religious Benevolence as Social Control: A Critique of an Interpretation

AMONG social historians of the last two decades it has become standard to classify the post-Revolutionary generation of religious humanitarians as conservative and self-serving. Fearful of rising currents of secularism and egalitarianism in the new nation, these churchmen, so many students would have it, mounted a campaign of religious evangelism and created a system of local and national religious and benevolent societies in order to preserve their own declining status and to regain their earlier colonial position as the moral arbiters of American society. Such a conclusion about the nature of religious humanitarianism was first advanced in 1954 by John R. Bodo and Charles C. Cole. Charles I. Foster and Clifford S. Griffin offered in 1960 important variations on the main theme. Each approached the subject from a different perspective. While Bodo and Cole organized their studies around individual representatives from the clergy and focused on sermons as their sources, Foster and Griffin centered on both ministerial and lay members of the interdenominational societies and focused on the societies reports. Yet all agreed that when these religious humanitarians founded Bible and tract societies, or promoted temperance and Sabbath observance, or tried to aid the urban poor, what they wanted in reality was to gain power over society for their own conservative, if not reactionary, ends. It was the desire for social control, not social improvement, which lay behind their seemingly benevolent schemes., Moreover, it has recently been customary to stress the differences rather than

Mannish women, passive men, and constitutional types: Margaret mead's sex and temperament in three primitive societies as a response to Ruth Benedict's patterns of culture

T he relationship between Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead might be viewed as a conversation, one carried on in poems and letters, through phone calls and personal encounters, over many years. They met in 1922 in a class in anthropology at Barnard College. Mead, then twentyone, was a student in the class, and Benedict, fifteen years older and a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Columbia, was the teaching assistant. Their friendship—as teacher and student, fictive mother and daughter, professional colleagues, and lovers—reached its initial intellectual culmination in two books, Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) and Mead’s Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies ([1935] 1963). Published only a year apart, both books reached a large audience among academics and the general public. Foundational for anthropology, they were also reform texts that addressed a number of current issues. Each author focused on three tribal societies: Benedict on the Zunis of New Mexico, the Dobus of Melanesia, and the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island, Canada; Mead on the Arapesh, the Mundugumor, and the Tchambuli—all in New Guinea. In both books, one society is peaceful (the Zunis for Benedict, the Arapesh for Mead), and the other two are more violent (the Dobus and the Kwakiutl for Benedict, the Mundugumor and the Tchambuli for Mead). Both authors identified the dominant “pattern” in the societies they examined, while they also pointed out social deviants to

A Reply to "Culture et Pouvoir" from the Perspective of United States Women's History

One of the major directions in the historiography of United States womens history during the past several years has been a multifaceted critique of the separate sphere of women argument which had previously been the single most important organizing principle in the field. (This argument was most powerfully enunciated by Carrol Smith-Rosenberg in her 1975 Signs article, The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.)1 Thus the implicit critique of this idea by the authors of Culture et Pouvoir des Femmes will not seem a novelty to their sister historians across the Atlantic who will, I think, welcome the subtlety of their exposition. Nor will any of us take exception to their notion that women should be studied in the context of relationships with men, for this idea, too, has recently garnered support in important historiographical essays. Nancy Hewitt, for example, has noted the failure to take class into account within the separate sphere argument: nineteenth-century working women, she points out, much more frequently formed alliances across gender lines with working-class men than they did with middle-class women.2 Linda Kerber has outlined the ways in which the separate culture of women, and by implication, that of men, was not a fixed entity but rather was continually negotiated within and across gender lines by the women who formed it.3 In her germinal 1975 essay on womens history methodology, Gerda Lerner argued that separate histories of women and of men would have to be written before a universal, gender-integrated history could be essayed. It is debatable whether or not that separate history of men has been written. * Still, after two decades in which United States womens historians, I would submit, have focused on women as exclusive subjects much more than have European womens historians, we may, in fact, be moving into Lerners final phase. In this new womens history aborning, I agree with the authors of Culture et Pouvoir that the issue of power is crucial. In working out an implicit theoretics of hierarchy and domination/subordination, historians of American women have not fully faced the implications of the notion of power. In assuming that all Western culture is androcentric, we have avoided the question of agency, of who is responsible for what has happened to women. In a sense, Culture et Pouvoir has opened the Pandoras box of our pursuit, the possibility, in fact, that women have been oppressors as well

The Irony of Memory: Finding a Los(t) Angeles

a huge tract of land, one which stretches southward to the Palos Verdes peninsula. This tract, part of two of the grants which Spanish and Mexican rulers awarded to private owners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was purchased in the 1870s by Canadian Daniel Freeman.1 Freeman built a grand Victorian mansion in the middle of his land, in the city of Inglewood, which he founded. And it was in a house across from the