...ruled women for centuries. The control and suppression of free will was accepted as fact. The time of Women making change in their own lives through free expression started a revolution of achievements breaking the oppression. These revolutionary achievements gave birth to a new age of equity. Women’s equality is a topic that has been approached over the years. The common vision, that all people are to be treated equally. The race, religion, sex, age, and other differences should not matter. The day when a person looks won't be what they judged until they actually meet them. The Sex should not mater in one’s ability to perform similar tasks, but history has taught the hierarchy of men throughout society. The Declaration of Independence states, "that all men were created equal”. This was written with the reality of the hierarchy of man that has been inbred into society. Human equality was far from the true reality. Individuals of that era would start to approach their own virtue’s, which forever shape the future of society (Mosser, 2013 ). The most famous deontologist, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) stated, “that we have a duty, or an obligation, to treat other people with respect; human beings have dignity, and we must take that dignity into consideration when dealing with them. We also expect others to respect our dignity when they deal with us”(Mosser,2013). It is only humane to treat women as equal as they carried most of the responsibility of a household per 20th-century. Women...
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...created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This is the most iconic line from the Declaration of Independence. In it, Thomas Jefferson provides a rallying cry for the American Revolution. But in addition to serving as the mantra of America’s founding fathers, it raised a lot of questions, particularly regarding the exact definition of “men.” As history has shown, in contrast to the notion of a united mankind, “men” in Jeffersonian America referred almost exclusively to white, landowning males. And yet, when one considers the private life of Thomas Jefferson - the life he led with his slave Sally Hemings - his views on race become a much more complicated topic. The issue of interracial sex became a divisive issue during the nineteenth century. By the mid 1800’s, white males who had enjoyed a sort of...
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...history of alcohol can be aligned synonymously with the history and control over women excluding them from the public sphere. Starting with Ancient Greek and Roman times, and then moving to the Middle Ages and the two world wars, I examine how different countries attempted to remove women from spaces where men drank and socialized, to the ways they were removed from the production of alcohol with the rise of mass production after industrialization. It is through this examination that I enable a better understanding of larger history of alcohol, and how its production and sociality can be linked to the historical oppression of women. Ancient Greek and Roman cultures had some of the first recorded accounts of alcohol being used in a social...
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...In her 1818 preface to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote that Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron sojourned into Nature leaving her behind at Villa Diodati near lake Geneva. After weeks of rain, the weather suddenly clears and she writes “my two friends left me on a journey among the Alps, lost, in the magnificent scenes…” (8) This would be the first of many excursions from which she would be left out. Though exceptionally educated and progressive, Shelley was a woman trapped by the mores of the nineteenth century. She was no stranger to the social constraints placed upon her sex. Her experiences as a woman of her time are mirrored in her portrayal of men and women and their relationship to nature in the novel. While creation, pregnancy and birth, were intrinsically the provenance of women, the quest for a rational, scientific method for understanding and conquering Nature was the objective of men. This...
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...in 20th Century Cuba Katie Wang UCLA Professor Wright-Dixon I. Introduction Coalitions through marriage is a long understood concept. Kingdom alliances through marriages are ones that first come to mind. Often fictional portrayals of real pressures for pressures to gain resources or military alliance for a capital or imperial need involve young princes and princesses who are forced to marry. However, in a nonfictional example for this paper, Chinese indentured laborers or former indentured laborers and African slaves or former slaves married in 19th century Cuba both romantically and strategically. I argue that there needs to be further research around Afro-Chinese marriages in Cuba and a recentering on women. I had originally planned to center this paper around African slave women who married Chinese men in Cuba in the 19th century but was not able to because of the lack of literature available. However, I aim to focus on a reading against the grain for indications of women’s agency and voice in this set of literature. My personal stakes in this topic are two-fold. First, my mother’s side of my family lived in Cuba for a few decades from the late 1920s to 1960 as a part of an entrepreneurial endeavor and as refuge from persecution from the Communist Party of China. Because of my personal tie to Chinese in Cuba, I seek to uncover untold stories and hidden transcripts. Second, this paper is a part of a larger project on Chinese in Cuba in the 20th century, specifically...
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...Human Rights: A Paine in My….Douglass? According to Frederick Douglass, a nineteenth-century northern slave, “Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.” Thomas Paine, a rebellious eighteenth-century Englishman, finishes and furthermore expands this thought, saying that “those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” While both of these men grew up in separate worlds, miles and years apart, their idealisms and life missions are very much alike. This is evident through the investigation of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Frederick Douglass is the...
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...Patriarchal Oppression and Cultural Discrimination in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea “In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different” (Coco Chanel) “We may have all come in different ships but we’re in the same boat now” (Martin Luther King, Jr.) “Share our similarities, celebrate our differences” (Morgan Scott Peck) These quotations, which were uttered in the 20th century, have in common that to be different is regarded not only as tolerable but also as something that should be pursued. Also, they reflect the process of increasing tolerance towards females and foreigners, which in many countries has taken place during the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, with the result that, today, these two groups are widely, although by far not entirely, regarded as equal. However, only two centuries ago, people who were different or ‘other’ were considered subordinate or even frightening, and in the 19th century, this was true for both females and people from the orient or colonized people (Barry 134, 193). In Jane Eyre (JE), published in 1847, and in Wide Sargasso Sea (WSS), the prequel or paraquel of JE that was written about one hundred years later and published in 1966, the two female protagonists, Jane, a female orphan, and Antoinette, a female Creole, struggle against displacement and patriarchal oppression and, in Antoinette’s case, also against imperialistic domination. In JE, the reader learns that Jane can handle this pressure whereas Antoinette/Bertha1...
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...Barbara Jeanne Fields Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America Two years ago, a sports announcer in the United States lost his job because he enlarged indiscreetly—that is, before a television audience—upon his views about ‘racial’ differences. Asked why there are so few black coaches in basketball, Jimmy ‘the Greek’ Snyder remarked that black athletes already hold an advantage as basketball players because they have longer thighs than white athletes, their ancestors having been deliberately bred that way during slavery. ‘This goes all the way to the Civil War,’ Jimmy the Greek explained, ‘when during the slave trading . . . the owner, the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so he could have a big black kid, you see.’ Astonishing though it may seem, Snyder intended his remark as a compliment to black athletes. If black men became coaches, he said, there would be nothing left for white men to do in basketball at all. Embarrassed by such rank and open expression of racism in the most ignorant form, the network fired Jimmy the Greek from his job. Any fool, the network must have decided, should know that such things may be spoken in the privacy of the 95 locker-room in an all-white club, but not into a microphone and before a camera. Of course, Jimmy the Greek lays no claim to being educated or well informed. Before he was hired to keep audiences entertained during the slack moments of televised sports events, he was...
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...“BONDAGE”, “PATRIARCHY”, AND “FEMININE” IN ANITA DESAI’S NOVELS: A SILENT REVOLT Munmi Sen M. Phil. Researcher, Center for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Email: sskylarky@gmail.com ABSTRACT Historically women have been silenced in history and literature. In the social sphere they have been “pressed”-oppressed, depressed and suppressed. With the setting in of the modern period, women began to snatch for themselves spaces for themselves. In India with the struggle against colonialism another silent struggle went on simultaneously. That was by women to bring themselves at par with men. This was visible even in the literary sphere. In the current paper we would trace the feminist way of portraying women in Anita Desai’s two most popular and widely acknowledged novels- CRY, the peacock and where shall we go this summer. Here in this paper our concern is to look at how in post colonial period women English writers of India have dealt with the theme of “woman oppression”. Have she raised a loud voice or revolt or has silently taken way to some other way to escape this position. Taking queue from the broader sub-themes of today’s Seminar, the paper would look at the dynamics of Indian English women writers concern and feminist thoughts in the writings in post independent India. Looking at the time constraints, for the sake of convenience we would look at the famous characters characterized by the famous writer Anita Desai. Her famous woman characters, the...
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...its economic system and established a new political state of entirely free individuals—with some ex-slaves constituting the new political authority. As only the second state to declare its independence in the Americas, Haiti had no viable administrative models to follow. The British North Americans who declared their independence in 1776 left slavery intact, and theirs was more a political revolution than a social and economic one. The success of Haiti against all odds made social revolutions a sensitive issue among the leaders of political revolt elsewhere in the Americas during the final years of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century. Yet the genesis of the Haitian Revolution cannot be separated from the wider concomitant events of the later eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Indeed, the period between 1750 and 1850 represented an age of spontaneous, interrelated revolutions, and events in Saint Domingue/Haiti constitute an integral—though often overlooked—part of the history of that larger sphere. These multi-faceted revolutions combined to alter the way individuals and groups saw themselves and their place in the world. But, even more, the intellectual changes of the period instilled in some political leaders a confidence (not new in the eighteenth century, but far more generalized than before) that creation and creativity were not exclusively divine or accidental attributes, and that both general societies and individual conditions could be...
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...Feminism 3.6.7 Contribution to the Women’s Movement 3.7 Postmodern Feminism 3.7.1 Postmodern Thought 3.7.2 Postmodern rethinking of psychological explanation of gender 3.7.3 Postmodern Feminist 3.7.4 Limitations of Postmodern feminism 3.7.5 Contribution to the women’s Movement 3.8 Black Feminism and Womanism 3.8.1 The Beginnings of Black Feminism 3.9 Cyber Feminism 3.9.1 Origin of Cyber Feminism 3.9.2 Definition of the 100 Anti Thesis 3.9.3 Cyber art and its relation to Cyber feminism 3.9.4 Cyber Feminism – Practical Manifestation 3.9.5 Cyber Feminism challenges and its future 3.10 Let Us Sum up 3.11 Answers to Check Your Progress 3.12 Unit End Questions 3.13 References 3.1 INTRODUCTION The second half of the twentieth century has seen a new impetus to the women‟s movement. There are many factors responsible for this. One of the main factors, however, has been the recognition of...
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...Assignment 1 How was the south changed? The chief accomplishment of the new south was the expansion of textile production, as the number of cotton mills grew from 161 to 400. There was also an increase in the lumber industry, coal production, and tobacco growth. Although, the majority of southern farmers were not flourishing, which caused sharecropping and tendancy to increase between blacks and whites. The bourbons perfected a political alliance with northern conservatives and economic alliance with northern capitalists. They also reduced state expenditures and public debt. Attitudes about race became more strongly felt and the prospect of an electoral alliance between poor whites and blacks that could threaten the power structure became a possibility, so the southern states came up with various ways to disenfranchise blacks. Also, “Jim Crow” laws were enacted to mandate public separation of the races. Legalized segregation reinforced the notions of white racial superiority and African-American inferiority, creating an atmosphere that encouraged violence, and during the 1890s lynching’s of blacks rose significantly. Define the New West. After 1865, the federal government encouraged western settlement and economic exploitation. The transcontinental railroads opened the western half of the nation to economic development and created an interconnected national market. Needing rapid communication, companies built telegraph lines along the railroad as the track was laid...
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...to inform the reader about the true meaning of Black Liberation Theology. I want to present this paper as an enlightening pit of information to all who read it. I hope that will be an enlightenment and appreciation of the culture and spirituality of Blacks by non Blacks. And for Blacks I hope to affirm that our culture and spirituality is a depiction of our past, present, and future relationship with God. “Black Liberation Theology and Black Theology” are terms that walk hand in hand. For both share it’s African and slave roots since the 1560s. Long before the landing of The Mayflower at Plymouth Rock in 1620. There are a lot of differences between the two. Black Liberation Theology is more “vocal” in proclaiming liberation from oppression. Often it presents itself as hatred. An example of this is the speech of Rev. Jeremiah Wright on March 13, 2008. Black Theology, from a Black Catholic perspective, works in the line of tradition within the Catholic Community. Such hatred is...
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...Bertha again. I shall try to explain this rewriting of a canonical text in a postcolonial context. Historical Madness Early in the Victorian period the madness seems to be lurking in the shadows – especially in gothic fiction, but then madness was very much on everybody’s mind in those days. The Lunatics Act of 1845 required that all counties should have mental asylums, and this led to an enormous increase of mental patients admitted to public care.[1] Before that it was not unusual for husbands to “shut up” their madwomen behind locked doors[2], and confining them to the attic or the madhouse might indeed have been a convenient way to dispose of unwanted wives and daughters. Most of the patients admitted to the new asylums were women, and they were mainly admitted because of “Hysteria”.[3] At that point hysteria had various definitions; physical aggression, grandeur, sexuality, alcoholism, addiction to drugs,...
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...History Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past Sharon Hartman Strom, Political Woman: Florence Luscomb and the Legacy of Radical Reform Michael Adas, ed., Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical History Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered Janis Appier, Policing Women: The Sexual Politics of Law Enforcement and the LAPD Allen Hunter, ed., Rethinking the Cold War Eric Foner, ed., The New American History. Revised and Expanded Edition E SSAYS ON _ T WENTIETH- C ENTURY H ISTORY Edited by Michael Adas for the American Historical Association TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS PHILADELPHIA Temple University Press 1601 North Broad Street Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2010 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2010 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Essays on twentieth century history / edited by Michael...
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