In the decade following World War I, nineteenth-century womanhood came under attack not only from feminists but also from innumerable "ordinary" young women determined to create "modern" lives for themselves. These young women cut their hair, wore short skirts, worked for wages, sought entertainment outside the home, and developed new attitudes toward domesticity, sexuality, and their bodies. Historians have generally located the origins of this shift in women's lives in the upheavals of World War I. Birgitte Søland's exquisite social and cultural history suggests, however, that they are to be found not in the war itself, but in much broader social and economic changes. Søland's engrossing chronicle draws on a rich variety of sources--including popular media and medical works as well as archival records and oral histories--to examine how notions of femininity and womanhood were reshaped in Denmark, a small, largely agrarian country that remained neutral during the war. It explores changes in the female body and personality, the forays of young women into the public sphere, the redefinition of female respectability, and new understandings of married life as evidenced in both cultural discourses and social practices. Though specific in its focus, the book raises broad comparative questions as it challenges common assumptions about the social and sexual upheavals that characterized the Western world in the postwar decade. In a remarkably engaging fashion, it shows why the end of World War I did not lead to the return of "normal" life in the 1920s.

Explores the imagery of woman in Mexican art and visual culture. Examines how woman signified a variety of concepts, from modernity to authenticity and revolutionary social transformation, both before and after the Mexican Revolution.

Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture is a literary and cultural history of love and female identity in Japan during the 1910s-30s.

"It is one thing to report a news story and another to use the same material in one's art - and Cather did intend that her literary works become "art" and that they achieve lasting fame. This volume details how Cather came to transform the office routine of memos and deadlines, linotypes and the business trip, into the artistry of her early stories, poems, biographies, and novels."--BOOK JACKET.

This title offers an interdisciplinary look at the rise of the slaughterhouse in 19th-century Europe and the Americas. Over the course of this period, the factory slaughterhouse replaced the hand slaughter of animals by individual butchers. A wholly modern invention, the municipal slaughterhouse was a political response to public concerns.

Birgitte Soland's social and cultural history suggests, however, that they are to be found not in the war itself, but in much broader social and economic changes."--BOOK JACKET.