Rockabye lady: pregnancy as punishment in popular culture
Article Abstract:
Western culture's ambivalent view of pregnancy and childbearing as both the privilege of women and a God-ordained punishment for tempting men sexually was first expressed in the early novel and is now sustained by television soap operas. 18th-century novels such as Richardson's 'Pamela' reinforced Biblical doctrines that having children serves not only as women's main purpose in life but also as retribution for their sexuality and as a device for maintaining male supremacy, a view which the soap operas are now carrying on. These teachings should be re-evaluated because of the harm they inflict on women.
Publication Name: Journal of American Studies
Subject: Regional focus/area studies
ISSN: 0021-8758
Year: 1992
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The soldier and the aesthete: homosexuality and popular culture in gilded age America
Article Abstract:
The Gilded Age American culture saw a defusion of warrior ethics and the soldier-hero model due to the exhausting Civil War. The Aesthetic Movement in the post-war years was marked by the altered perceptions of gender and the soldier model's supplementation by the docile male aesthete. Male weakness and homosexuality ruled the popular imagination, as both the middleclass and the lower strata were influenced by Oscar Wilde's model of domestic aestheticism. The interiors of the Seventh Regiment Armory demonstrated the unique merging of masculine and feminine tastes in art.
Publication Name: Journal of American Studies
Subject: Regional focus/area studies
ISSN: 0021-8758
Year: 1996
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Outside the panel - race in America's popular imagination: comic strips before and after World War II
Article Abstract:
African Americans were portrayed in comic strips prior to World War II as a culturally inferior and diverse group apart from mainstream American society. After the war, however, they have come to be depicted as a race equal to those of whites stemming from the inculcation of American ideas of equality and unity brought about by World War II where the blacks fought side by side with the whites. Other cartoons also showed some militant blacks demanding that America owe up to its promises of racial equality.
Publication Name: Journal of American Studies
Subject: Regional focus/area studies
ISSN: 0021-8758
Year: 1998
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