Remaking Respectability by Victoria W Wolcott

Remaking Respectability by Victoria W Wolcott

How black women challenged and reshaped notions of respectable behavior for women and men; In the early decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of African Americans arrived at Detroit's Michigan Central Station, part of the Great Migration of blacks who left the South seeking improved economic and political conditions in the urban North. The most visible of these migrants have been the male industrial workers who labored on the city's automobile assembly lines. African American women have largely been absent from traditional narratives of the Great Migration because they were excluded from industrial work. By placing these women at the center of her study, Victoria Wolcott reveals their vital role in shaping life in interwar Detroit. Wolcott takes us into the speakeasies, settlement houses, blues clubs, storefront churches, employment bureaus, and training centers of Prohibition- and depression-era Detroit. There, she explores the wide range of black women's experiences, focusing particularly on the interactions between working-and middle-class women. As Detroit's black population grew exponentially, women served not just as models of bourgeois respectability, but began to reshape traditional standards of deportment in response to the new realities of their lives. In so doing, Wolcott says, they helped transform black politics and culture. Eventually, as the depression arrived, female respectability as a central symbol of reform was supplanted by a more strident working-class activism.

Victoria W. Wolcott is assistant professor of history at Saint Bonaventure University in Saint Bonaventure, New York.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780807849668
ISBN 10	0807849669
Titel	Remaking Respectability
Autor	Victoria W Wolcott
Serie	Gender And American Culture
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	The University of North Carolina Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2001-09-30
Seitenanzahl	360
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar