Books in the Gender and American Culture series

This work reaches across the colour line to examine how race, gender, class and individual subjectivity shaped the lives of black and white women in the 19th- and 20th-century American South. Through six essays, Nell Irvin Painter explores such themes as interracial sex and white supremacy.

Places familiar, often politicized questions about the crisis of African American marriage in conversation with a rich cultural archive that includes fiction by Terry McMillan and Sister Souljah, music by Anita Baker, and films such as The Best Man.

Pursuing the meaning of gender in nineteenth-century urban American society, Ladies, Women, and Wenches compares the lives of women living in two distinctive antebellum cultures, Charleston and Boston, between 1820 and 1850. In contrast to most contemporary histories of women, this study examines the lives of all types of women in both cities.

Throughout World War II, when Saturday nights came around, servicemen and hostesses forgot the war for a little while as they danced in USO clubs, which served as havens of stability. This book shows that in addition to boosting soldier morale, the USO acted as an architect of the gender roles and sexual codes that shaped the greatest generation.

Offers an innovative reexamination of selected texts by major figures in American literature: Benjamin Franklin, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Charles Brockden Bown from the early national period, and James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Alan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville from the romantic period.

Native American philosophy has enabled Native American cultures to survive more than five hundred years of attempted cultural assimilation. This revised edition has been expanded to include extensive discussion of Native American philosophy and culture in the United States as well as Canada.

A study of women in vaudeville. It reveals how female performers, patrons and workers shaped the rise and fall of the most popular live entertainment at the turn of the century. Once a sign of vaudeville's refinement, Kibler says, women became associated with the decay of vaudeville.

This volume presents a portrait of the life and work of writer Lillian Smith (1897-1966), a leading southern white liberal of the mid-20th century. The author has selected 145 of Smith's 1500 extant letters for the book, with subjects including her lesbian relationship with Paula Snelling.

Contains 17 personal narratives by leading black women historians at various stages in their careers. The essays in this book show how - first as graduate students and then as professional historians - they entered and navigated the realm of higher education, a world concerned with and dominated by whites and men.

In this richly detailed and imaginatively researched study, Victoria Bynum investigates "unruly" women in central North Carolina before and during the Civil War. Analysing the complex and interrelated impact of gender, race, class, and region on the lives of black and white women, she shows how their diverse experiences influenced the changing social order and political economy of the state.