Song Character Analysis Worksheet - The University of North ...

gender) inequality forced them instead to work at low-wage jobs to support their
families. 45 As young white women are portrayed as innocent and chaste, ethnic women
are presented as sexually aware and seductive. In literature, they are portrayed as sexual
beings, able to lure men just by their presence. 46 In Show Boat, this stereotype is por-
trayed as a caricature in the role of Queenie and a subplot shorthand for the role of Julie
Dozier. The aid societies and civic groups of the Southern Belle excluded African-
American women in the “Jim Crow “ segregated politics of the South, but the New
England Victorians embraced the plight of the Ethnic woman as part of their reforms for
welfare and settlement housing.
As a summary of these nineteenth-century gender stereotypes, Jessie Bernard’s
text from Women in the Public Interest seems appropriate. She wrote, “American
woman’s role is similar to that of an underdeveloped nation—her natural resources are
funneled to her husband in return for economic support and protection . . . but she has no
equal voice in decisions and is probably viewed as inferior.” 47 Or, as the original
suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in her memoirs regarding the commonality of
women, regardless of class or ethnicity, women are “ranked with idiots, lunatics and
criminals in the Constitution.” 48
Beginning in the 1890s, however, social paradigms began to shift in favor of
greater independence, higher education, and greater economic opportunities outside the
45 Pleck, 1952.
46 Kerber and DeHart, 485. Sam Dennison provides a provocative study on sexual stereotypes of
black men and women in “Coon songs” of the 1880s and 1890s in his book, Scandalize My Name: Black
Imagery in American Popular Music (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982).
47 Quoted in Richmond-Abbott, 73.
48 Eighty Years or More: Reminiscences, 1898. Quoted in Donnelly, 138.
50