Books about Respectability from Amazon.com

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Price: $7.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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 not only served as models of bourgeois respectability, but also 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..
Price: $23.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

On Providencia, a tiny island in the southwest Caribbean, the metaphor of "crab antics" is commonly used to illustrate the dynamics of social life. For Peter Wilson, who spent over a year on the island, crab antics became a key image in his attempt to identify and analyze the standards by which people judge each other's worth, and to explain how values of social differentiation provide a basis for social order. His findings and insights are presented in this vivid and readable study filled with the lives and language of the Providencians. Wilson examines Caribbean social life as a totality and in its own terms. In doing so, he describes a major dimension of Caribbean society that has been ignored in the literature: the pattern of values based on respectability, the drive toward stratification, reputation, the drive toward equality, and the dialectical relation between them. Wilson's other important and original contribution is his treatment of the men's groups that function as the psychological and political counterpart of the matrifocal household. Though primarily intended to offer a description and interpretation of the social life of Providencia, Crab Antics raises issues of critical importance to general anthropological theory..
Price: $138.16 [Notify me when price goes down.]

An intriguing history of the futures market and speculation
From Jay Gould's attempt to corner the gold market in the 1860s to the Hunt brothers' scandalous efforts to control the silver market in the 1980s, Wheels of Fortune traces the rich, colorful history of the futures market on its quest for respectability and profit. This comprehensive account shows readers why the markets have been grabbing headlines for over 100 years as both respectable economic institutions and hotbeds of gambling activity and scandal. Charles Geisst brings the personalities and strategies behind the futures market and speculation in general to life, against a backdrop of American life that begins prior to the Civil War..
Price: $5.38 [Notify me when price goes down.]

With a well-earned reputation for tolerance of both prostitution and miscegenation, New Orleans became known as the Great Southern Babylon in antebellum times. Following the Civil War, a profound alteration in social and economic conditions gradually reshaped the city's sexual culture and erotic commerce. Historian Alecia P. Long traces sex in the Crescent City over fifty years, drawing from Louisiana Supreme Court case testimony to relate intriguing tales of people both obscure and famous whose relationships and actions exemplify the era.

Long uncovers a connection between the geographical segregation of prostitution and the rising tide of racial segregation. She offers a compelling explanation of how New Orleans's lucrative sex trade drew tourists from the Bible Belt and beyond even as a nationwide trend toward the commercialization of sex emerged. And she dispels the romanticized smoke and perfume surrounding Storyville to reveal in the reasons for its rise and fall a fascinating corner of southern history. The Great Southern Babylon portrays the complex mosaic of race, gender, sexuality, social class, and commerce in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans.

"Long brilliantly charts the historical roots and evolution of the culture of commercial sexuality in New Orleans. . . . The result is a landmark book all should read."—Darlene Clark Hine, coauthor of A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America..
Price: $15.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

California during the gold rush was a place of disputed claims, shoot-outs, gambling halls, and prostitution; a place populated by that rough and rebellious figure, the forty-niner; in short, a place that seems utterly unconnected to middle-class culture In American Alchemy, however, Brian Roberts offers a surprising challenge to this assumption.

Roberts points to a long-neglected truth of the gold rush: many of the northeastern forty-niners who ventured westward were in fact middle-class in origin, status, and values. Tracing the experiences and adventures both of these men and of the "unseen" forty-niners—women who stayed back East while their husbands went out West—he shows that, whatever else the gold seekers abandoned on the road to California, they did not simply turn their backs on middle-class culture.

Ultimately, Roberts argues, the story told here reveals an overlooked chapter in the history of the formation of the middle class. While the acquisition of respectability reflects one stage in this history, he says, the gold rush constitutes a second stage—a rebellion against standards of respectability..
Price: $19.09 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Respectability and Resistance is the first major history of the black township of Sophiatown in western Johannesburg. Sophiatown, together with the neighboring townships of Newclare and Western Native Township, formed the center of black South African urban culture and politics in the 1940s and 1950s. Using a wealth of sources including oral history and much previously unknown archival material, Goodhew provides a detailed portrait of Sophiatown life. The widow turning to illegal liquor production to get her children a good education, the gang of miners who made common cause with the white police, the Communist Party's rather puritanical views on pleasure, and a nativity play satirizing state policy - these are just a few of the diverse strands of life that teemed through Sophiatown. With a social fabric always liable to fragment, the people of Sophiatown found a fragile unity through a culture of working class respectability. This, in turn, crucially fueled resistance to the state. Al With a social fabric always liable to fragment, the people of Sophia town found a fragile unity through a culture of working class respectability. This, in turn, crucially fueled resistance to the state. Although respectability was undermined by state repression and popular militancy, it remains of significance. Goodhew's book joins the ranks of classic books on the working class in the tradition of E. P. Thompson. As such, Respectability and Resistance will be of interest to all labor and social historians..
Price: $84.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Gilded Age cities offered extraordinary opportunities to women--but at a price. As clerks, factory hands, and professionals flocked downtown to earn a living, they alarmed social critics and city fathers, who warned that self-supporting women were just steps away from becoming prostitutes. With in-depth research possible only in a mid-sized city, Sharon E. Wood focuses on Davenport, Iowa, to explore the lives of working women and the prostitutes who shared their neighborhoods.

The single, self-supporting women who migrated to Davenport in the years following the Civil War saw paid labor as the foundation of citizenship. They took up the tools of public and political life to assert the respectability of paid employment and to confront the demon of prostitution. Wood offers cradle-to-grave portraits of individual girls and women--both prostitutes and "respectable" white workers--seeking to reshape their city and expand women's opportunities. As Wood demonstrates, however, their efforts to rewrite the sexual politics of the streets met powerful resistance at every turn from men defending their political rights and sexual power..
Price: $19.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]