Out in public : configurations of women's bodies in nineteenth-century America / Alison Piepmeier.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Piepmeier, Alison.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human body--Social aspects--United States--History--19th century.

Human body--Symbolic aspects--United States--History--19th century.

Women--Physiology--United States.

Women--Physiology.

Women in popular culture.

History.

Women.

Public opinion.

Human body--Symbolic aspects.

Human body--Social aspects.

United States.

Women--United States--History--19th century.

Women--United States--Public opinion.

Women in popular culture--United States--History--19th century.

Public opinion--United States--History--19th century.

Hale, Sarah Josepha Buell, 1788-1879.

Physical Description:

xi, 278 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2004]

Summary:

Images of the corseted, domestic, white middle-class female and the black woman as slave mammy or jezebel loom large in studies of nineteenth-century womanhood, despite recent critical work exploring alternatives to those images. In Out in Public, Alison Piepmeier focuses on women's bodies as a site for their public self-construction. Rather than relying on familiar binaries such as public/private and victim/agent, Piepmeier presents women's public embodiment as multiple, transitional, strategic, playful, and contested. Piepmeier looks closely at the lives and works of actress and playwright Anna Cora Mowatt (1819-1871), Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), abolitionist and feminist orator Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), antilynching journalist Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), and Godey's Lady's Book editor Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879). Piepmeier's analysis of these women places their written documents in conjunction with salient cultural contexts, including freak shows, scientific writing, tall tales, and popular visual images of athletic women. By destabilizing and complicating traditional binary categories, Piepmeier makes culturally obscured or unreadable aspects of women's lives visible, offering a more complete understanding of nineteenth-century female corporeality.

Contents:

The most thrilling sensations : Anna Cora Mowatt and sensational womanhood

Woman goes forth to battle with Goliath : Mary Baker Eddy, medical science, and sentimental invalidism

As strong as any man : Sojourner Truth's tall-tale embodiment

The supreme right of American citizenship : Ida B. Wells, the lynch narrative, and the production of the American body

We have hardly had time to mend our pen : Sarah Hale, Godey's lady's book, and the body as print.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [255]-272) and index.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Erpf Fund bookplate.

ISBN:

0807829048

0807855693

OCLC:

55078159