History of Women and Gender

This paper will explore women's aging in the early twentieth century amidst rapidly rising life expectancy, an exploding American youth culture, and the interrelated claims that modern life was taking a disproportionately heavy physical toll on women. By the 1920s, popular descriptions of women's aging made growing old the equivalent of growing careless; women aged when they grew careless of appearance, careless of diet, and careless about maintaining active social lives. Popular culture stressed that it was crucial for them to look and to be young in the fast-paced modern world, where confidence, health, and energy were essential to success.Meanwhile, even as women's political, economic, and social roles expanded, doctors warned that women's activities outside the home were causing them to deteriorate physically and to age prematurely. Significantly, the things they pointed to as the causes of women's supposed ill health and premature aging-working outside the home, staying up late, wearing short skirts and make-up, exercising, smoking, drinking, and dieting-were the very things that women were doing by the 1920s to define themselves as modern, and even as young.

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During the period that scholars have identified as the "long civil rights movement," black women entertainers were among the performers who used their status as celebrities to support black activism, and who made political struggles meaningful to Americans and non-Americans who never participated in marches or other protests. In public performances and political protests-and crucially, in the myriad instances when the lines between those blurred-women entertainers such as Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll and Miriam Makeba (to name a few) drew attention to unequal relationships between blacks and whites and to relationships between men and women. This paper analyzes how black women performed civil rights in ways that made gender central to a broader vision of black liberation. It suggests that black women entertainers were central to the simultaneous development of black activism in the "long civil rights movement" as well as second wave feminism.

"She thought she could find a better market" explores white southern women's economic roles in antebellum New Orleans slave markets and slave trading communities. It demonstrates that, in spite of formidable social, legal, and economic constraints, single, married and widowed women entered slave markets, attended slave auctions, bought, sold and hired enslaved people, participated in their families' slave trading businesses, and supported the market in slaves by offering their goods and services to New Orleans slave yard operators, traders, brokers, and dealers. Taken together, these women's slave market activities encourage us to reconsider the ways that gender shaped economies and communities woven together by the institution of slavery in the antebellum South.