Author : Eliza Potter
Publisher :
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 17,45 MB
Release : 1859
Category : African Americans
ISBN :
Eliza Potter, a freeborn woman of mixed race during the antebellum period, chronicles her experience as a hairdresser, the gossip she encounters, and her life experiences both in the United States and Europe.
Author : Eliza Potter
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 38,98 MB
Release : 2009-11-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 080789866X
Here is the first fully annotated edition of a landmark in early African American literature--Eliza Potter's 1859 autobiography, A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life. Potter was a freeborn black woman who, as a hairdresser, was in a unique position to hear about, receive confidences from, and observe wealthy white women--and she recorded it all in a revelatory book that delighted Cincinnati's gossip columnists at the time. But more important is Potter's portrait of herself as a wage-earning woman, proud of her work, who earned high pay and accumulated quite a bit of money as one of the nation's earliest "beauticians" at a time when most black women worked at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Because her work offered insights into the private lives of elite white women, Potter carved out a literary space that featured a black working woman at the center, rather than at the margins, of the era's transformations in gender, race, and class structure. Xiomara Santamarina provides an insightful introduction to this edition that includes newly discovered information about Potter, discusses the author's strong satirical voice and proud working-class status, and places the narrative in the context of nineteenth-century literature and history.
Author : Brenda R. Weber
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 44,70 MB
Release : 2016-02-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1134772122
Focusing on representations of women's literary celebrity in nineteenth-century biographies, autobiographical accounts, periodicals, and fiction, Brenda R. Weber examines the transatlantic cultural politics of visibility in relation to gender, sex, and the body. Looking both at discursive patterns and specific Anglo-American texts that foreground the figure of the successful woman writer, Weber argues that authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Fanny Fern, Mary Cholmondeley, Margaret Oliphant, Elizabeth Robins, Eliza Potter, and Elizabeth Keckley helped create an intelligible category of the famous writer that used celebrity as a leveraging tool for altering perceptions about femininity and female identity. Doing so, Weber demonstrates, involved an intricate gender/sex negotiation that had ramifications for what it meant to be public, professional, intelligent, and extraordinary. Weber's persuasive account elucidates how Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë served simultaneously to support claims for Brontë's genius and to diminish Brontë's body in compensation for the magnitude of those claims, thus serving as a touchstone for later representations of women's literary genius and celebrity. Fanny Fern, for example, adapts Gaskell's maneuvers on behalf of Charlotte Brontë to portray the weak woman's body becoming strong as it is made visible through and celebrated within the literary marketplace. Throughout her study, Weber analyzes the complex codes connected to transatlantic formations of gender/sex, the body, and literary celebrity as women authors proactively resisted an intense backlash against their own success.
Author : Rafia Zafar
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 43,20 MB
Release : 1997
Category : African Americans
ISBN : 0231080956
Zafar demonstrates that in doing so, these forerunners of modern black American writers both adapted to and reacted against a milieu of social resistance and cultural antipathy. By the end of Reconstruction, this first century of black writers had paved the way for a distinctive, African American literature.
Author : Xiomara Santamarina
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 14,69 MB
Release : 2006-05-18
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 080787700X
According to nineteenth-century racial uplift ideology, African American women served their race best as reformers and activists, or as "doers of the word." In Belabored Professions, Xiomara Santamarina examines the autobiographies of four women who diverged from that ideal and defended the legitimacy of their self-supporting wage labor. Santamarina focuses on The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Eliza Potter's A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, and Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes. She argues that beyond black reformers' calls for abolitionist work, these former slaves and freeborn black women wrote about their own overlooked or disparaged work as socially and culturally valuable to the nation. They promoted the status of wage labor as a mark of self-reliance and civic virtue when many viewed African American working women as "drudges." As Santamarina demonstrates, these texts offer modern readers new perspectives on the emergence of the vital African American autobiographical tradition, dramatizing the degree to which black working women participated in and shaped American rhetorics of labor, race, and femininity.
Author : Jill Christine Jepson
Publisher : Peter Lang
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 32,54 MB
Release : 2009
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781433104237
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women's businesses - from small local concerns to financial empires - offered women independence, supported their families, and supplied essential goods and services to their communities and the world. They also contributed to much-needed legal and social change and set the stage for the female entrepreneurs who would come later. All this was accomplished despite immense financial barriers, an inequitable legal system, and the widely held belief that women had no business in business. Women's Concerns explores the lives of twelve women who owned and operated businesses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It focuses on the ways they created personal and public identities and managed the contradictions between their entrepreneurial ambitions and deeply entrenched attitudes about women's roles.
Author : Victoria Sherrow
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 560 pages
File Size : 45,26 MB
Release : 2023-03-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN :
This popular volume on the culture of hair through human history and around the globe has been updated and revised to include even more entries and current information. How we style our hair has the ability to shape the way others perceive us. For example, in 2017, the singer Macklemore denounced his hipster undercut hairstyle, a style that is associated with Hitler Youth and alt-right men, and in 2015, actress Rose McGowan shaved her head in order to take a stance against the traditional Hollywood sex symbol stereotype. This volume examines how hair-or lack thereof-can be an important symbol of gender, class, and culture around the world and through history. Hairstyles have come to represent cultural heritage and memory, and even political leanings, social beliefs, and identity. This second edition builds upon the original volume, updating all entries that have evolved over the last decade, such as by discussing hipster culture in the entries on beards and mustaches and recent medical breakthroughs in hair loss. New entries have been added that look at specific world regions, hair coverings, political symbolism behind certain styles, and other topics.
Author : Bridget Ford
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 425 pages
File Size : 20,29 MB
Release : 2016-02-05
Category : History
ISBN : 1469626233
This vivid history of the Civil War era reveals how unexpected bonds of union forged among diverse peoples in the Ohio-Kentucky borderlands furthered emancipation through a period of spiraling chaos between 1830 and 1865. Moving beyond familiar arguments about Lincoln's deft politics or regional commercial ties, Bridget Ford recovers the potent religious, racial, and political attachments holding the country together at one of its most likely breaking points, the Ohio River. Living in a bitterly contested region, the Americans examined here--Protestant and Catholic, black and white, northerner and southerner--made zealous efforts to understand the daily lives and struggles of those on the opposite side of vexing human and ideological divides. In their common pursuits of religious devotionalism, universal public education regardless of race, and relief from suffering during wartime, Ford discovers a surprisingly capacious and inclusive sense of political union in the Civil War era. While accounting for the era's many disintegrative forces, Ford reveals the imaginative work that went into bridging stark differences in lived experience, and she posits that work as a precondition for slavery's end and the Union's persistence.
Author : Emmanuel S. Nelson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 26,52 MB
Release : 2002-03-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0313011184
There is growing popular and scholarly interest in autobiography, along with increasing regard for the achievements of African American writers. The first reference of its kind, this volume chronicles the autobiographical tradition in African American literature. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for 66 African American authors who present autobiographical material in their works. The volume profiles major figures, such as Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X, along with many lesser known autobiographers who deserve greater attention. While some are known primarily for their literary accomplishments, others have gained acclaim for their diverse contributions to society. The entries are written by expert contributors and provide authoritative information about their subjects. Each begins with a concise biography, which summarizes the life and achievements of the autobiographer. This is followed by a discussion of major autobiographical works and themes, along with an overview of the autobiographer's critical reception. The entries close with primary and secondary bibliographies, and a selected, general bibliography concludes the volume. Together, the entries provide a detailed portrait of the African American autobiographical tradition from the 18th century to the present.
Author : Eliza Potter
Publisher : BoD – Books on Demand
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 32,71 MB
Release : 2023-04-16
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 338231231X
Reprint of the original, first published in 1859. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.
