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