Antifeminism, Anti-Blackness, and Anti-Oldness: The Intersectional Aesthetics of Aging in the Nineteenth-Century United States.
When feminists in the antebellum United States organized to end slavery and demand their rights, they immediately faced critics who ridiculed them as ugly old maids, wrinkled old ladies, and superannuated old ex-slaves. "Old" in this sense was not the same as old age but rather an aesthetic judgment...
| Publicado en: | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society Vol. 47; no. 4; pp. 843 - 884 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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University of Chicago Press
Summer2022
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=157462431&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 157462431 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00979740 SIG jtl: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society issn: 00979740 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Summer2022 vid: 47 iid: 4 pid: 415 pub: University of Chicago Press artinfo: ui: 157462431 10.1086/718865 ppf: 843 ppct: 41 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T db: hlh ui: 157462431 – @attributes: type: P db: hlh ui: 157462431 tig: atl: Antifeminism, Anti-Blackness, and Anti-Oldness: The Intersectional Aesthetics of Aging in the Nineteenth-Century United States. aug: au: Field, Corinne T. affil: Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, University of Virginia su: United States Ageism Middle-aged women Age White women Stereotypes Age groups Aesthetic judgment sug: subj: Ageism Middle-aged women Age White women Stereotypes Age groups United States Aesthetic judgment ab: When feminists in the antebellum United States organized to end slavery and demand their rights, they immediately faced critics who ridiculed them as ugly old maids, wrinkled old ladies, and superannuated old ex-slaves. "Old" in this sense was not the same as old age but rather an aesthetic judgment wielded by antifeminist and anti-Black journalists, caricaturists, and politicians to suggest that women speaking in public looked unattractive, ridiculous, or pitiful and should therefore be dismissed without engaging their ideas or political strategies. To gain a public hearing, feminists needed to shift how Americans saw mature women, but the very plasticity of the term "old" did more to divide women from each other than to create a unified age group. Images of female oldness remained keyed to middle-class marriage, racial difference, and chronological age in ways that divided old maids from married matrons, white women from Black women, and middle-aged women from those over sixty. Moving beyond a simplistic analysis of ageism, defined as prejudice by one age group toward another, this article develops an intersectional approach to analyzing the gendered and racialized aesthetics of oldness. By examining Anglo-American visual culture from the 1830s to the 1890s through the analytic of age, I demonstrate how antifeminist and anti-Black representations of female oldness created distortions in public recognition and led some women to internalize negative stereotypes with which abolitionists and feminists had to contend in order to enter politics. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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