Attitudes Toward Sex in Antebellum America
Title | Attitudes Toward Sex in Antebellum America PDF eBook |
Author | Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz |
Publisher | Macmillan Higher Education |
Pages | 208 |
Release | 2006-02-06 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1319242839 |
With this colorful collection of documents, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz overturns the monolithic picture of Victorian sexual repression to reveal four contending views at play during the antebellum period: earthy American folk wisdom, the anti-flesh teachings of evangelical Christianity, moral reform grounded in science, and the utopian free love movement. Horowitz's introduction discusses how these diverse views shaped the antebellum conversation about the moral, social, and physical implications of sex and reflected the larger cultural and economic changes of this period of rapid industrialization and urban migration. Helpful headnotes contextualize this selection of hard-to-find documents, which includes scientific manuals, religious pamphlets, advertisements, and popular fiction. Contemporary illustrations, a chronology, and a bibliography foster students' understanding of antebellum sexual attitudes.
Rewriting Sex: Sexual Knowledge in Antebellum America
Title | Rewriting Sex: Sexual Knowledge in Antebellum America PDF eBook |
Author | NA NA |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 193 |
Release | 2016-04-30 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1137054131 |
The public discussion of sexuality in America first came about in the 1820s. Predictably, Americans diverged considerably on how to approach the controversial topic. Folk wisdom, current scientific beliefs, and the teachings of evangelical Christianity all shaped the antebellum conversation about the moral, social and physical implications of sex. In her introduction, Professor Horowitz takes American sexual history beyond the boundaries of the twentieth century and elucidates the complex issues surrounding nineteenth-century debates and dialogue. Helpful headnotes contextualize this colorful selection of hard-to-find documents, which includes medical articles, religious pamphlets, advertisements and propaganda, and popular literature. Contemporary illustrations, a chronology, and a bibliography foster students understanding of antebellum sexual knowledge.
Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature
Title | Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature PDF eBook |
Author | David Greven |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 276 |
Release | 2016-04-22 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1317130111 |
Expanding our understanding of the possibilities and challenges inherent in the expression of same-sex desire before the Civil War, David Greven identifies a pattern of what he calls ’gender protest’ and sexual possibility recurring in antebellum works. He suggests that major authors such as Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne consciously sought to represent same-sex desire in their writings. Focusing especially on conceptions of the melancholia of gender identification and shame, Greven argues that same-sex desire was inextricably enmeshed in scenes of gender-role strain, as exemplified in the extent to which The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym depicts masculine identity adrift and in disarray. Greven finds similarly compelling representations of gender protest in Fuller’s exploration of the crisis of gendered identity in Summer on the Lakes, in Melville’s representation of Redburn’s experience of gender nonconformity, and in Hawthorne’s complicated delineation of desire in The Scarlet Letter. As Greven shows, antebellum authors not only took up the taboo subjects of same-sex desire and female sexuality, but were adept in their use of a variety of rhetorical means for expressing the inexpressible.
The Early Republic and Antebellum America
Title | The Early Republic and Antebellum America PDF eBook |
Author | Christopher G. Bates |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 1453 |
Release | 2015-04-08 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1317457404 |
First Published in 2015. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.
The World of Antebellum America
Title | The World of Antebellum America PDF eBook |
Author | Alexandra Kindell |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing USA |
Pages | 840 |
Release | 2018-09-20 |
Genre | History |
ISBN |
This set provides insight into the lives of ordinary Americans free and enslaved, in farms and cities, in the North and the South, who lived during the years of 1815 to 1860. Throughout the Antebellum Era resonated the theme of change: migration, urban growth, the economy, and the growing divide between North and South all led to great changes to which Americans had to respond. By gathering the important aspects of antebellum Americans' lives into an encyclopedia, The World of Antebellum America provides readers with the opportunity to understand how people across America lived and worked, what politics meant to them, and how they shaped or were shaped by economics. Entries on simple topics such as bread and biscuits explore workers' need for calories, the role of agriculture, and gendered divisions of labor, while entries on more complex topics, such as aging and death, disclose Americans' feelings about life itself. Collectively, the entries pull the reader into the lives of ordinary Americans, while section introductions tie together the entries and provide an overarching narrative that primes readers to understand key concepts about antebellum America before delving into Americans' lives in detail.
Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America
Title | Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America PDF eBook |
Author | Nancy Isenberg |
Publisher | Univ of North Carolina Press |
Pages | 342 |
Release | 2000-11-09 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0807866830 |
With this book, Nancy Isenberg illuminates the origins of the women's rights movement. Rather than herald the singular achievements of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, she examines the confluence of events and ideas--before and after 1848--that, in her view, marked the real birth of feminism. Drawing on a wide range of sources, she demonstrates that women's rights activists of the antebellum era crafted a coherent feminist critique of church, state, and family. In addition, Isenberg shows, they developed a rich theoretical tradition that influenced not only subsequent strains of feminist thought but also ideas about the nature of citizenship and rights more generally. By focusing on rights discourse and political theory, Isenberg moves beyond a narrow focus on suffrage. Democracy was in the process of being redefined in antebellum America by controversies over such volatile topics as fugitive slave laws, temperance, Sabbath laws, capital punishment, prostitution, the Mexican War, married women's property rights, and labor reform--all of which raised significant legal and constitutional questions. These pressing concerns, debated in women's rights conventions and the popular press, were inseparable from the gendered meaning of nineteenth-century citizenship.
Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture
Title | Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture PDF eBook |
Author | Sarah N. Roth |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 331 |
Release | 2014-07-21 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1139992805 |
In the decades leading to the Civil War, popular conceptions of African American men shifted dramatically. The savage slave featured in 1830s' novels and stories gave way by the 1850s to the less-threatening humble black martyr. This radical reshaping of black masculinity in American culture occurred at the same time that the reading and writing of popular narratives were emerging as largely feminine enterprises. In a society where women wielded little official power, white female authors exalted white femininity, using narrative forms such as autobiographies, novels, short stories, visual images, and plays, by stressing differences that made white women appear superior to male slaves. This book argues that white women, as creators and consumers of popular culture media, played a pivotal role in the demasculinization of black men during the antebellum period, and consequently had a vital impact on the political landscape of antebellum and Civil War-era America through their powerful influence on popular culture.