Women of the Upper Class

Women of the Upper Class

Author: Susan Ostrander

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2010-06-18

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1439905371

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Although these women are economically and socially powerful, they are for the most part unliberated.


The Power of Good Deeds

The Power of Good Deeds

Author: Diana Elizabeth Kendall

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780742519763

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The Power of Good Deeds allows us to see behind the media image of upper-class women and to observe how these women use their social power not only to benefit other, less-fortunate people, but also to benefit themselves and their families. The personal narratives of elite women as they describe their views on philanthropy, the need for exclusivity in their by-invitation-only volunteer organizations (such as the Junior League and The Links), their childhood experiences and college years in prestigious schools and sororities, and the debutante presentations and other upper-class rituals in which they participate are drawn from Kendall's ethnographic research. Participating in meetings and social functions with elite women in several Texas cities, along with conducting systematic interviews, the author gained unprecedented access to elite women across racial and ethnic categories. The Power of Good Deeds provides new insights and greater depth to our knowledge about the upper classes and how the charitable activities of privileged women contribute to the process of legitimation, maintaining an ideology of class-based and race-based segregation in the United States.


From Spinster to Career Woman

From Spinster to Career Woman

Author: Arlene Young

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2019-05-30

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0773558489

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The late Victorian period brought a radical change in cultural attitudes toward middle-class women and work. Anxiety over the growing disproportion between women and men in the population, combined with an awakening desire among young women for personal and financial freedom, led progressive thinkers to advocate for increased employment opportunities. The major stumbling block was the persistent conviction that middle-class women - "ladies" - could not work without relinquishing their social status. Through media reports, public lectures, and fictional portrayals of working women, From Spinster to Career Woman traces advocates' efforts to alter cultural perceptions of women, work, class, and the ideals of womanhood. Focusing on the archetypal figures of the hospital nurse and the typewriter, Arlene Young analyzes the strategies used to transform a job perceived as menial into a respected profession and to represent office work as progressive employment for educated women. This book goes beyond a standard examination of historical, social, and political realities, delving into the intense human elements of a cultural shift and the hopes and fears of young women seeking independence. Providing new insights into the Victorian period, From Spinster to Career Woman captures the voices of ordinary women caught up in the frustrations and excitements of a new era.


Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain

Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain

Author: K. D. Reynolds

Publisher: Oxford Historical Monographs

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780198207276

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This study of gender and power in Victorian Britain is the first book to examine the contribution made by women to the public culture of the British aristocracy in the 19th century. Based on a wide range of archival sources, it explores the roles of aristocratic women in public life, from their country estates to the salons of Westminster and the royal court. Reynolds also shows that a partnership of authority between men and women was integral to aristocratic life, thus making an important contribution to the "separate spheres" debate. Moreover, she reveals in full the crucial role that these women played at all levels of political activity--from local communities to the national electoral process. The book is both a lively portrait of women's experiences in modern Britain and a corrective to the view of the upper-class Victorian woman as a passive social butterfly.


Primates of Park Avenue

Primates of Park Avenue

Author: Wednesday Martin

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-05-31

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1476762716

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"Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe. After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place. She understood the other mothers' snobbiness at school drop-off when she compared them to olive baboons. Her obsessional quest for a Hermes Birkin handbag made sense when she realized other females wielded them to establish dominance in their troop. And so she analyzed tribal migration patterns; display rituals; physical adornment, mutilation, and mating practices; extra-pair copulation; and more. Her conclusions are smart, thought-provoking, and hilariously unexpected. Every city has its Upper East Side, and in Wednesday's memoir, readers everywhere will recognize the strange cultural codes of powerful social hierarchies and the compelling desire to climb them. They will also see that Upper East Side mothers want the same things for their children that all mothers want--safety, happiness, and success--and not even sky-high penthouses and chauffeured SUVs can protect this ecologically released tribe from the universal experiences of anxiety and loss. When Wednesday's life turns upside down, she learns how deep the bonds of female friendship really are. Intelligent, funny, and heartfelt, Primates of Park Avenue lifts a veil on a secret, elite world within a world--the exotic, fascinating, and strangely familiar culture of privileged Manhattan motherhood"--


In Pursuit of Privilege

In Pursuit of Privilege

Author: Clifton Hood

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-11-08

Total Pages: 509

ISBN-13: 023154295X

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A history that extends from the 1750s to the present, In Pursuit of Privilege recounts upper-class New Yorkers' struggle to create a distinct world guarded against outsiders, even as economic growth and democratic opportunity enabled aspirants to gain entrance. Despite their efforts, New York City's upper class has been drawn into the larger story of the city both through class conflict and through their role in building New York's cultural and economic foundations. In Pursuit of Privilege describes the famous and infamous characters and events at the center of this extraordinary history, from the elite families and wealthy tycoons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the Wall Street executives of today. From the start, upper-class New Yorkers have been open and aggressive in their behavior, keen on attaining prestige, power, and wealth. Clifton Hood sharpens this characterization by merging a history of the New York economy in the eighteenth century with the story of Wall Street's emergence as an international financial center in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the dominance of New York's financial and service sectors in the 1980s. Bringing together several decades of upheaval and change, he shows that New York's upper class did not rise exclusively from the Gilded Age but rather from a relentless pursuit of privilege, affecting not just the urban elite but the city's entire cultural, economic, and political fabric.


Emancipating the Female Sex

Emancipating the Female Sex

Author: June Edith Hahner

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780822310518

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June E. Hahner’s pioneering work,Emancipating the Female Sex,offers the first comprehensive history of the struggle for women’s rights in Brazil. Based on previously undiscovered primary sources and fifteen years of research, Hahner’s study provides long-overdue recognition of the place of women in Latin American history. Hahner traces the history of Brazilian women’s fight for emancipation from its earliest manifestations in the mid-nineteenth century to the successful conclusion of the suffrage campaign in the 1930s. Drawing on interviews with surviving Brazilian suffragists and contemporary feminists as well as manuscripts and printed documents, Hahner explores the strategies and ideological positions of Brazilian feminists. In focusing on urban upper- and middle-class women, from whose ranks the leadership for change arose, she examines the relationship between feminism and social change in Brazil’s complex and highly stratified society.


Psychological Perspectives on Women's Health

Psychological Perspectives on Women's Health

Author: Vincent J. Adesso

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9781560323358

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An overview of psychological and psychobiological work on a number of contemporary issues relating to women's health. Each chapter focuses on a particular area - stress, cancer detection, cardiovascular illness and substance abuse - examining treatment and methodological issues.


Women and the Work of Benevolence

Women and the Work of Benevolence

Author: Lori D. Ginzberg

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1990-01-01

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780300052541

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Nineteenth-century middle-class Protestant women were fervent in their efforts to "do good." Rhetoric--especially in the antebellum years--proclaimed that virtue was more pronounced in women than in men and praised women for their benevolent influence, moral excellence, and religious faith. In this book, Lori D. Ginzberg examines a broad spectrum of benevolent work performed by middle- and upper-middle-class women from the 1820s to 185 and offers a new interpretation of the shifting political contexts and meanings of this long tradition of women's reform activism. During the antebellum period, says Ginzberg, the idea of female moral superiority and the benevolent work it supported contained both radical and conservative possibilities, encouraging an analysis of femininity that could undermine male dominance as well as guard against impropriety. At the same time, benevolent work and rhetoric were vehicles for the emergence of a new middle-class identity, one which asserts virtue--not wealth--determined status. Ginzberg shows how a new generation that came of age during the 1850s and the Civil War developed new analyses of benevolence and reform. By post-bellum decades, the heirs of antebellum benevolence referred less to a mission of moral regeneration and far more to a responsibility to control the poor and "vagrant," signaling the refashioning of the ideology of benevolence from one of gender to one of class. According to Ginzberg, these changing interpretations of benevolent work throughout the century not only signal an important transformation in women's activists' culture and politics but also illuminate the historical development of American class identity and of women's role in constructing social and political authority.