The Wayward woman : progressivism, prostitution and performance in the United States, 1888-1917 / Barbara Antoniazzi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Antoniazzi, Barbara, 1972- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sex role--United States--History.

Sex role.

Prostitution.

History.

United States.

Prostitution--United States--History.

United States--Race relations--History.

Race relations.

Progressivism (United States politics).

Physical Description:

xii, 221 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Lanham, Maryland : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, [2014]

Summary:

The Wayward Woman takes a fresh look at the Progressive Era, recasting the turn-of-the-century debate on gender roles and prostitution. Recapitulating and transcending extant studies on female delinquency, prostitution literature, and progressive womanhood, this work understands "female waywardness" as the critical intersection between the rise of female emancipation and the panic inspired by the period's obsession with sexual enslavement. Concurrently, it explores the progressive ambivalence about compassion and control that unfolded alongside a war on prostitution that traversed the realms of law, medicine, literature, and politics. Drawings theories of performativity, Barbara Antoniazzi develops "the wayward woman" as a capacious analytical category that encompasses all women who, countering the residual injunction of domesticity, brought new forms of femininity into the light of the public sphere: not only the activist, the professional, and the divorcee, but also the female breadwinner, the charity girl, and the urban woman of color, among many others. This book investigates the continuum of waywardness that stretches from the high-minded New Woman to the ever-victimized "white slave" as a cultural battlefield where numerous women stepped across the boundaries of class, race, and respectability, to claim new public personas. At the same time it reads the preoccupation with white slavery both as a symptom of and an antidote to this wave of change. Through an innovating collection of sources that brings together sociological writings, novels, plays, movies, and legal documents, The Wayward Woman rearticulates the tensions of the Progressive Era between gender roles, blackness and whiteness, reformers and reformed, the citizens and the state. It will be of much interest to students and scholars in the fields of American studies, women's studies, and performance studies. Book jacket.

Contents:

Performing dissent : new women go public

Girls who act up : writing reform and the uses of abolition

In the theater of justice : white slavery, the law, and the color line

Staging waywardness : rachel crothers's ourselves

Staging remedies : doctors, patients, and the American plan.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781611476620

1611476623

9781611477115

1611477115

OCLC:

870991076