The Feminine Ideal
The Feminine Ideal

Author: Marianne Thesander

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 9781861890047

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Why, at a time when women's liberation was gaining force and momentum, did the corset become more cinched and restricting than at any time during the entire preceding century? Why was bra burning a political statement for the feminists of the 1970s? How far is the harnessed and restricted female form an outward symbol of Victorian and middle-class ideas of discipline and self-control? In what ways are women forced to conform to a "feminine ideal"? In The Feminine Ideal, Marianne Thesander examines the significance of the female body, beauty and culture. She shows how the female body is constantly being changed, and by various sometimes punishing means made to fit in with current feminine physical ideals. The use of corsets, bras, make-up, cosmetics and body decoration either emphasizes or plays down specific aspects of the female form. Marianne Thesander considers: sin and virtue; the forbidden, the concealed, the alluring body; woman as object, fetish and erotic sign. With extensive use of illustrative material, she examines the fashion history of underwear from the eighteenth century to the present day, exploring the significance of changing 'models' of the feminine."

The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal
The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal

Author: Deborah Gorham

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-12-12

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1136248102

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In Victorian England, the perception of girlhood arose not in isolation, but as one manifestation of the prevailing conception of femininity. Examining the assumptions that underlay the education and upbringing of middle-class girls, this book is also a study of the learning of gender roles in theory and reality. It was originally published in 1982. The first two sections examine the image of women in the Victorian family, and the advice offered in printed sources on the rearing of daughters during the Victorian period. To illustrate the effect and evolution of feminine ideals over the Victorian period, the book’s final section presents the actual experiences of several middle-class Victorian women who represent three generations and range, socioeconomically, from lower-middle class through upper-middle class.

20th-century Fashion Illustration
20th-century Fashion Illustration

Author: Rosemary Torre

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 0486469638

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A captivating retrospective of 20th-century styles, this original survey explores the social context of fashion with informative text and over 70 striking images. Profiles include the newly emancipated woman of the 20s, WWII-era glamour girls, flower children of the 60s, the 80s cult of fitness and perfection, and the dawn of the 21st-century obsession with celebrity styles.

Citoyennes
Citoyennes

Author: Annie Smart

Publisher: University of Delaware

Published: 2011-12-23

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1611493552

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Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did. While previous scholarship has emphasized the ideal of domestic motherhood or the image of the republican mother, Smart argues persuasively that many pre-revolutionary and revolutionary texts created another ideal for women – the ideal of civic motherhood. Smart asserts that women were portrayed as possessing civic virtue, and as promoting the values and ideals of the public sphere. Contemporary critics have theorized that the eighteenth-century ideal of the Republic intentionally excluded women from the public sphere. According to this perspective, a discourse of “Rousseauean” domestic motherhood stripped women of an active civic identity, and limited their role to breastfeeding and childcare. Eighteenth-century France marked thus the division between a male public sphere of political action and a female private sphere of the home. Citoyennes challenges this position and offers an alternative model of female identity. This interdisciplinary study brings together a variety of genres to demonstrate convincingly that women were portrayed as civic individuals. Using foundational texts such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or on Education (1762), revolutionary gouaches of Lesueur, and vaudeville plays of Year II of the Republic (1793/1794), this study brilliantly shows that in text and image, women were represented as devoted to both the public good and their families. In addition, Citoyennes offers an innovative interpretation of the home. Through re-examining sphere theory, this study challenges the tendency to equate the home with private concerns, and shows that the home can function as a site for both private life and civic identity. Citoyennes breaks new ground, for it both rectifies the ideal of domestic Rousseauean motherhood, and brings a fuller understanding to how female civic identity operated in important French texts and images.

The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe
The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe

Author: Kevin J. Hayes

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-04-25

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9780521797276

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This collection of specially-commissioned essays by experts in the field explores key dimensions of Edgar Allan Poe's work and life. Contributions provide a series of alternative perspectives on one of the most enigmatic and controversial American writers. The essays, specially tailored to the needs of undergraduates, examine all of Poe's major writings, his poetry, short stories and criticism, and place his work in a variety of literary, cultural and political contexts. They situate his imaginative writings in relation to different modes of writing: humor, Gothicism, anti-slavery tracts, science fiction, the detective story, and sentimental fiction. Three chapters examine specific works: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 'The Fall of the House of Usher', 'The Raven', and 'Ulalume'. The volume features a detailed chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading, and will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

Home, Nature, and the Feminine Ideal
Home, Nature, and the Feminine Ideal

Author: Elaine Stratford

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-01-11

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1783485108

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Take three things: the home, nature, and the feminine ideal—a notional and perfected femininity. Constitute them as inexorably and universally connected. Enrol them in diverse strategies and tactics that create varied anatomo-politics of the body and biopolitics of the population. Enlist those three things as the “handmaidens” of the government of individuals and groups, places and spaces, and comings and goings. Focus some effort on the periodical press, and on producing and disseminating narratives, discourses, and practices that relate specifically to health and well-being. Deploy those texts and shape those contexts in ways that affect flesh and bone, psychology and social conduct, and the spatial organization and relational dynamics of dwellings and streets, settlements and regions, and states and empires. Stretch these activities over the Anglophone world—from the epicentres of the United Kingdom and the United States to Australia or Canada, New Zealand or India—and extend their reach over the whole of the long nineteenth century. Such are the subjects of this work, in which Elaine Stratford draws from governmentality, the geohumanities, and geocriticism to converse with an extensive archive that profoundly shaped our engagements with home, nature, and the feminine ideal, deeply influenced our collective capacity to flourish, and powerfully constituted diverse geographies of the interior and of empire that still affect us.

Women In Changing Japan
Women In Changing Japan

Author: Joyce C Lebra

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-20

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1000011070

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It is a time when women in many parts of the world are questioning the roles, life styles, and values by which women have lived for centuries. The contributors are American women engaged in studying various aspects of the life patterns of Japanese women in many walks of life and have published their findings in this volume. We come from a variety

Shaping Femininity
Shaping Femininity

Author: Sarah Bendall

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-10-07

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1350164135

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Highly Commended, Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Book Prize 2022 In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, the female silhouette underwent a dramatic change. This very structured form, created using garments called bodies and farthingales, existed in various extremes in Western Europe and beyond, in the form of stays, corsets, hoop petticoats and crinolines, right up until the twentieth century. With a nuanced approach that incorporates a stunning array of visual and written sources and drawing on transdisciplinary methodologies, Shaping Femininity explores the relationship between material culture and femininity by examining the lives of a wide range of women, from queens to courtiers, farmer's wives and servants, uncovering their lost voices and experiences. It reorients discussions about female foundation garments in English and wider European history, arguing that these objects of material culture began to shape and define changing notions of the feminine bodily ideal, social status, sexuality and modesty in the early modern period, influencing enduring Western notions of femininity. Beautifully illustrated in full colour throughout, Shaping Femininity is the first large-scale exploration of the materiality, production, consumption and meanings of women's foundation garments in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. It offers a fascinating insight into dress and fashion in the early modern period, and offers much of value to all those interested in the history of early modern women and gender, material culture and consumption, and the history of the body, as well as curators and reconstructors.

Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman
Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman

Author: Tabitha Kenlon

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2020-03-31

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1785273159

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The longest-running war is the battle over how women should behave. “Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman” examines six centuries of advice literature, analyzing the print origins of gendered expectations that continue to inform our thinking about women’s roles and abilities. Close readings of numerous conduct manuals from Britain and America, written by men and women, explain and contextualize the legacy of sexism as represented in prescriptive writing for women from 1372 to the present. While existing period-specific studies of conduct manuals consider advice literature within the society that wrote and read them, “Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman” provides the only analysis of both the volumes themselves and the larger debates taking place within their pages across the centuries. Combining textual literary analysis with a social history sensibility while remaining accessible to expert and novice, this book will help readers understand the on-going debate about the often-contradictory guidelines for female behavior.

If I Had Your Face
If I Had Your Face

Author: Frances Cha

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2020-04-21

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0593129474

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A riveting debut novel set in contemporary Seoul, Korea, about four young women making their way in a world defined by impossible standards of beauty, after-hours room salons catering to wealthy men, ruthless social hierarchies, and K-pop mania “Powerful and provocative . . . a novel about female strength, spirit, resilience—and the solace that friendship can sometimes provide.”—The Washington Post NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • NPR • Esquire • Bustle • BBC • New York Post • InStyle Kyuri is an achingly beautiful woman with a hard-won job at a Seoul “room salon,” an exclusive underground bar where she entertains businessmen while they drink. Though she prides herself on her cold, clear-eyed approach to life, an impulsive mistake threatens her livelihood. Kyuri’s roommate, Miho, is a talented artist who grew up in an orphanage but won a scholarship to study art in New York. Returning to Korea after college, she finds herself in a precarious relationship with the heir to one of the country’s biggest conglomerates. Down the hall in their building lives Ara, a hairstylist whose two preoccupations sustain her: an obsession with a boy-band pop star, and a best friend who is saving up for the extreme plastic surgery that she hopes will change her life. And Wonna, one floor below, is a newlywed trying to have a baby that she and her husband have no idea how they can afford to raise in Korea’s brutal economy. Together, their stories tell a gripping tale at once unfamiliar and unmistakably universal, in which their tentative friendships may turn out to be the thing that ultimately saves them.