THE NEW ERA AND THE NEW WOMAN

2004 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. A. CLEMENTS

Lou Henry Hoover, wife of Herbert Hoover, demonstrated the strengths and limitations of the expanded social de�nition of womanhood that had been won by reformers during the Progressive Era and World War I. As a leader of several business and women's social welfare organizations, she urged young women to follow her example in seeking professional education and careers as well as upholding traditional domestic roles. Protected by wealth and social status from the most burdensome aspects of domesticity, her public position emphasized the opportunities but understated problems faced by the "new women" in the 1920s and later generations.

Author(s):  
Paul Lawrie

Throughout U.S. history, the production of difference, whether along racial or disability lines, has been inextricably tied to the imperatives of labor economy. From the plantations of the antebellum era through the assembly lines and trenches of early-twentieth-century America, ideologies of race and disability have delineated which peoples could do which kinds of work. The ideologies and identities of race, work, and the “fit” ’ or “unfit” body informed Progressive Era labor economies. Here the processes of racializing or disabling certain bodies are charted from turn-of-the-century actuarial science, which monetized blacks as a degenerate, dying race, through the standardized physical and mental testing and rehabilitation methods developed by the U.S. army during World War I. Efforts to quantify, poke, prod, or mend black bodies reshaped contemporary understandings of labor, race, the state, and the working body.


2018 ◽  
pp. 238-246
Author(s):  
Tricia Starks

The onset of World War I brought prohibition to alcohol but an explosion of tobacco use on the front lines, with even government sponsored tobacco collection drives, yet the Bolshevik Revolution, carried the downfall of the tobacco queens and ushered into power a new state with its own conflicted relationship to tobacco. The participation of the tobacco workers in the Kronstadt rebellion spurred attacks on women workers as backward and erased them from the record. The triumph of public health as a major policy point of the revolution closed one chapter on tobacco’s relationship to state and citizen and brought a new era for anti-tobacco advocacy although the continued situation of tobacco use within the disease cluster of neurasthenia did little to change opinions on therapy. Despite the avowed interest of the state, the anti-tobacco drive floundered as smoking became more popular, ubiquitous, and profitable.


Author(s):  
Leonard Rogoff

World War I deferred women's progress toward suffrage and social welfare. Like other women, Weil worked for the Red Cross and was appointed to civic boards that sought to ensure social services maintained their vitality in war time. War service demonstrated women's qualifications for citizenship. As a volunteer nurse, she served the poor during the influenza epidemic, later suffering a bout herself. Weil joined organizations like the North Carolina Conference for Social Service which advocated for reform legislation. At war's end she committed to women's international peace organizations in support of disarmament, a World Court, and the League of Nations.


Author(s):  
Michael K. Rosenow

This book concludes by summarizing developments that made death a contested terrain of political authority and ideology containing elements of class, gender, ethnicity, race, and religion during the period 1865–1920. It begins by focusing on the exhortation by American Federation of Labor's Samuel Gompers at the International Labor Congress in 1893 that “the lives and limbs of the wage-workers shall be regarded as sacred as those of all others of our fellow human beings.” It then discusses the emergence of class-based rituals of death and dying as an undercurrent of industrialization from the end of the Civil War to the close of the Progressive Era as working communities infused their funerals, processions, and memorials with meanings and invented traditions that became customs used by the working class to measure the dignity and respect paid to the deceased. The book also considers how labor conflict such as strikes produced an array of funerary tableaus in the years leading to American participation in World War I.


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