Bad Women Research Articles

Review: Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema by Janet Staiger

Review: Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema by Janet Staiger

: Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema . Janet Staiger.

: Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema . Janet Staiger.

Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema.

Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema.

Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry.

Journal Article Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry. By Frank Walsh. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996 and Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema. By Janet Staiger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995 Get access Nancy J. Rosenbloom Nancy J. Rosenbloom Canisius College, Buffalo, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 3, December 1996, Pages 1042–1043, https://doi.org/10.2307/2945725 Published: 01 December 1996

A few bad women: Manufacturing “education mamas” in postwar Japan

A few bad women: Manufacturing “education mamas” in postwar Japan

Bad women: regulating sexuality in early American cinema

How did cultural tensions about behaviour for play out in early 20th-century films? Janet Steiger examines a classical period in Hollywood cinema during which the notion of the was created, magnified and spread nationwide. She isolates 1907-1915 as the key moment in the struggle over the meaning of woman as a sign, and illustrates how such issues as sexuality and hygiene were being reimagined to define an appropriate version of, and explanation for, women's sexuality. early 1900s saw the repeal of reticence laws, opening up issues of behaviour and sexuality for wide discussion. movies of the time portrayed women as intelligent, self-assertive, and desiring - as long as what they desired was appropriate and their desire was not excessive. Bad women in turn, were wayward and oversexed. She proposes that these images of good and bad suggested a middle-class vision of sexual morality, a vision that was not necessarilly repressive, rather a response to how and women's sexuality might most appropriately fit a developing consumer society. This work provides important and interesting insights about the role of cinema as a redemptive instrument during the progressive era. Staiger examines how self-regulation institutions within the film industry were advocates of one sector of the middle-class. She discusses what effect the formation of the National Board of Review and the New York City censorship board had on sexual regulation through an in-depth exploration of these films: Traffic in Souls, A Fool There Was and The Cheat.

"Bad Women": Asian American Visual Artists Hanh Thi Pham, Hung Liu, and Yong Soon Min

"Bad Women": Asian American Visual Artists Hanh Thi Pham, Hung Liu, and Yong Soon Min

Wang Yaru: A Victim of Mental Rape

However much dirty water Aspirations has poured onto the character Wang Yaru, it is hard to cover up her many intrinsically good qualities and beautiful spirit. In love, Wang is steadfast; in work, she is serious and responsible. Through the pall the producers and the directors have laid over her, we can still see that she is by no means a bad woman or a villain.

Rites of passage: smoking and the construction of social identity

The following article, based on a qualitative study of young women from a Melbourne suburb, is concerned with the role smoking plays in the presentation of social identity. These women, in their early teens, are viewed as being in the liminal or transitional phase of a rite of passage to adulthood. The passage to adulthood is attained with the construction of a social identity corresponding to popular notions of the feminine, which fall into the familiar categories of the bad and good woman. Smoking is one of the props in the stereotypical representation of the bad woman. Conventional anti-smoking health messages have little relevance for young women who have chosen such a social identity for themselves.

The Women of Yuma: Gender, Ethnicity, and Imprisonment in Frontier Arizona, 1876-1909

Until quite recently, histories of imprisonment in America have overlooked women. Prison history has also been limited geographically to institutions in the northeast, and consequently there have been few studies of western prisons. The present historical analysis deals with women who were confined in the Arizona Territorial Prison at Yuma between 1876 and 1909. It extends and expands upon Nicole Rafter's Partial Justice (1990). Specifically, it covers the experience of women imprisoned in western states and territories during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, describes the racial and ethnic diversity of the female prison population along with the accompanying social and cultural differences, and outlines the treatment that women received from male prison officials. It also develops the concept of the western "bad women" within nineteenth-century popular culture to provide further support for Rafter's claim that prisons function to control gender, race, and ethnicity as well as crime.

HIV and the Invisibility of Women: Is There a Need to Redefine AIDS?

For the 'public' of Britain, HIV and AIDS have only recently become issues for women, due to the publicity about the increased numbers of women diagnosed with AIDS, plus the initial results of the anonymous testing of pregnant women in antenatal clinics. But HIV has acted as a spotlight, for over a decade, to expose all the inequalities that exist worldwide, including all the familiar women's issues. The images of women in relation to HIV (where women are visible at all) have reflected society's stereotypic roles: not being seen as people in their own right, but as carers or partners of others; bad women versus good women, and so on. Therefore, we have medical statistics about women based on 'partners of infected men', mothers of infected children (medically described as 'vectors of vertical transmission'), or sex workers blamed for infecting the heterosexual community, and the 'wives at home' as (passive) victims. HIV exposes all the inequalities of women's positions in society: poorer; less access to health care for themselves; little support in their roles as carers; in less powerful positions to negotiate relationships, including the sexual ('safer sex'). And we hear discussions by some medical professionals about the 'management' of transmission to children - that is, the management of the mothers - through obligatory testing, and termination of pregnancies in women who are HIV positive. HIV has exposed, also, the low priority given to research about women's health needs. Although, in many parts of the world, equal numbers of women and men are infected by HIV, research on how HIV affects women has been only a very recent concern. Even now, very few resources are being directed towards understanding the ways the disease affects women. Earlier research was directed towards the

Altering bad habits and women’s health

The potential for women to reduce their risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) by changes in lifestyle may be less than for men, according to a major survey.

From "White Slave" to Labor Activist: The Agony and Triumph of a Boston Brahmin Woman in the 1910s

courts. From the moment it began, the case had attracted wide public interest. Its testimony concerning sexual abuse, marital infidelity, free love, and abortion was spicy, and its principals and witnesses were members of Boston's wealthiest and most distinguished families.' Lois Burnett Rantoul had filed for divorce, charging cruel and abusive treatment by her husband. In his summation, her attorney portrayed his client as the victim of violent and demeaning treatment inflicted by a husband threatened by her superior intelligence; he had broken her health and reduced her to a white slave. But her husband's attorney presented a radically different portrait of Lois Rantoul. She was a thoroughly and unmistakably bad woman, an unfit mother who would abandon her children to pursue sensual

Geoffrey Chaucer by Jill Mann

REVIEWS at times is distracting; she explains that "connotations of 'femininity' often make this word inappropriate" (p. 1 n. 1), but perhaps a justification on grounds of feminist theory would be more appropriate for a study of this type than a reference to Eric Partridge's Usage andAbusage. Overall, McLeod's history of the catalog of women, and its associations with the florilegium, is a wonderful survey of the genre that will be useful for many people. Chaucerians, for example, will find the first three chap­ ters helpfulbackgroundmaterialfordiscussionof theWife ofBath as much as for the Legend. MARTHA A. KALLSTROM Georgia Southern University JILL MANN. Geoffrey Chaucer. Feminist Readings Series. Atlanric High­ lands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1991. Pp. xv, 222. $39.95 cloth, $12.50 paper. Women's traditionally ascribed adaptability to change, pity, and patience form the basis for Jill Mann's feminist reading of Chaucer's works. Her approach, by her own prefatory declaration, comes out of no particular school of feminist criticism. Instead she seeks to "describe Chaucer's 'femi­ nism' in his own terms rather than ours,... to avoid bounding him in the orthodoxies ofthe present" (p. xii). It is important to recognize this caveat before picking up the book, for if a reader approaches it expecting radically new approaches to text, as the Feminist Readings Series announcement promises, she will be disappointed. In fact, Mann criticizes new historicism andpolitical concerns of feministcriticismas either binding Chaucer in the past and "patronizingly awarding him praise" for anticipating modern views (p. xii) or "perpetuat[ing] the sterile antithesis between active and passive, to stigmatise female passivity only to find that the obverse of this is approval of male activity" (p. 185). What Mann offers is a feminist reading that focuses on the status of women in Chaucer's writing (p. 165) to determine that he repudiates the male role model of action, aggression, and coercion in favor of a female model of passivity, pity, and patience that ultimately undercuts the male model and creates a new mutuality between the genders. Claiming Chau­ cer to be free of the culturally constructed preference for "activity," and 177 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER using Prudence, Constance, and Griselda as evidence, Mann concludes, "For him, it is the 'passive' role that is superior; we must never forget that patience conquers" (p. 161). But that is Mann's conclusion. She begins in a slightly different place. Chapter 1,"Women and Betrayal," praises Chaucer for retrieving a female viewpoint in conventionally male-centered stories. Mann finds in both Dido and Criseyde Chaucer's acute awareness of a special burden that women bear: their knowledge that their actions cannot escape meaning in reference to models of good and bad women (p. 17). Similarly, in The Manciple's Tale we see Chaucer's realization that the words and the ways tellers choose to tell stories determine attitudes toward women in those stones. Instead of balancing stories of bad women with stories of good women in a conventional response to misogyny, Mann sees Chaucer challenging the authority of the misogynist stories themselves in The Legend of Good Women. Retelling the stories with the women's concerns at the center, he showsmen eliciting pity from the women butnotreciprocating. This causes the poet to cry out for the pity in his own heart, and the reader, joining him in the"womanly ethos of pity,""is feminised, as it were, by the process of reading" (p. 41). In the second chapter,"Anti-Feminism," Mann argues, through May of The Merchant's Tale and the Wife of Bath, that Chaucer sees female shrewishness as the inevitable result of male selfishness and antifeminist stereotypes. This near-symbiotic relationship in which women use stereo­ typical behavior to withstand oppressive male behavior comes to an end only when the malesurrendershis sense of"maistrye." Then, as Mannreads the end of The Wife of Bath's Tale in chapter 3, "The Surrender of Maistrye," the woman's desire becomes the man's desire in her desire to please him; the two meet in a"vision of mutuality, which strips obedience of its oppression by making it an emotional response which matches and balances male...

The category “prostitute” in scientific inquiry

Social science research is infected with prejudices against prostitute‐branded women. Even the category “prostitute” is based more upon symbolic and legal representations of the bad woman or whore ...

Gender and survival vs. death in slasher films: A content analysis

The content of slasher films was examined, focusing on what portion of the violence is directed toward and committed by women vs. men and the survival rates, the juxtaposition of sex and violence for male and female victims, and differences between male and female survivors vs. nonsurvivors. Five student coders analyzed 56 slasher films (474 victims). Female and male victims were portrayed equally frequently in these films. Male characters were as likely to die as female characters as a result of the attack; however, more female than male characters survived the attacks. The slashers were primarily men. Sexiness was paired with nonsurvival of female victims, whereas male nonsurvivors were portrayed as possessing negative masculine traits. The reinforcement of the good vs. bad woman dichotomy and the portrayed cost of unmitigated extreme masculinity in men in slasher films are discussed.

ABSTRACTS

Dennis Danielson. “Sin, Theodicy, and Milton's Pastoral Poetry.”Lars Engle. “Milton, Bakhtin, and the Unit of Analysis.”Robert Thomas Fallon. “Council and Consult: Milton's Governments.”Philip P. Fehl. “Milton and Bernini's Buldacchino in St. Peter's.''John Guillory. “From the Superfluous to the Supernumerary: Reading Gender into Paradise Lost, Books 7 and 8.”Lee A. Jacobus. “Milton Hero: The Rhetorical Gesture of Monody.”Robert A. Kantra. “The Aeronautical Perceptions of Ariosto and Milton.”William W. Kerrigan. “John Milton, Poetess.”Michael Lieb. “Milton's Celestial Drama: The Dialogue in Heaven in Paradise Lost, Book 3.”Carolyn Lund. “Milton and the Tradition of the Failed Son.”Philip McCaffrey. “The Fallen Object.”Mark J. Miculan. “Signification and Civil Authority in Milton's The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.”Anna K. Nardo. “Samson, Sung and Proverb'd for a Fool.”Mary Ann Radzinowicz. “Eye and Ear in Milton's Late Plain Style: Psalms and the Poetic Medium of Paradise Regained.”Carter Revard. “The Timeliness of That Two—Handed Engine.”Stella P. Revard. “Milton, Euripides, and the ‘Bad Woman’: Dalila as Euripidean Heroine.”David Roessel. “Servility with Freedom to Contend: Xerxes and the Persian Wars in Paradise Lost.”Peter L. Rudnytsky. “'Here Only Weak': Sexuality and the Structure of Trauma in Paradise Lost.”James H. Sims. “Biblical Texts and lnterpreters in Paradise Regained: Exempla for Today.”Mindele Treip. “Milton and Allegorical Ceiling—Cycles in Rome: 1638–39.”Julia M. Walker. “The Un—True Image: Renaissance Women and Mirrors.”

Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West

May Wing, who spoke these words, was born in Leadville, Colorado, in 1890. The daughter and wife of miners, she lived her life in Colorado mining towns. I am not certain that she would recognize herself in much of the scholarship on western women, which has been influenced by the assumptions of traditional western history and of the Victorian Cult of Womanhood.2 Assuming that men's and women's worlds were separate, that men were public and women were private, that men were active and women were passive, historians have created a number of polarized images of western women. Common stereotypes divide them into good and women-the genteel civilizer and the sunbonneted helpmate, and the hell raiser and the bad woman.3 Some recent history is distinguishing class divisions within prostitution and providing a more complicated sense of bad women's lives and options,4 but our understanding of all women's roles has been shaped by prescriptions for female respectability in Victorian America, and I want to concentrate here on interpretations of the majority of western women, who were married and were thus good. Understandings of their history have been influenced by the images of the genteel civilizer and the helpmate. The civilizer was projected from Victorian prescriptive literature, which reflected the cardinal virtues of True Womanhood--piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness to male authority. Women were to shape national morality from the privacy of their family hearthsides, leaving public action to men. The assumption that women behaved as they were told influenced early works on western women, beginning with Dee Brown's The Gentle Tamers in 1958.5 The image of western women he created was that of the reluctant pioneer, who, while her man tamed the physical world, gently and passively tamed him and brought civilized culture to the frontier. This passive image was countered by emphasizing the hard work women did and their active roles in community building, but this approach led to equally one-dimensional views of the heroic feats and stoic endurance of oppressed women. Both images can be found in recent works.6 These dichotomized images are rooted in the presumed separation of public spheres for men and private spheres for women. This presumption posed an important question in the West, where women were enfranchised before their eastern sisters. By 1914 women could vote in the Territory of Alaska and eleven states, all but Illinois west of the Mississippi. In Canada suffrage was first won in three western provinces. Influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, which suggested that the West was a liberating and innovative environment, historians accepted the belief that the frontier liberated women, and then debated whether men gave women the vote because they valued women's civilizing influence or because they recognized women's contributions as workers. Recently, feminist historians like Julie Roy Jeffrey have questioned the significance of suffrage, pointing out that political

The sexual politics of pre-menstrual tension

This article argues for a re-evaluation of the feminist acceptance of the concept PMT from several different angles: (1) Initially I look at the basis on which PMT is built—the splitting that is enforced upon us between Good women and Bad women and the good and bad in ourselves, the way in which women are encouraged to label unacceptable emotions sickness, and to deny their responsibility for them. (2) Further I shall bring into question the whole idea of ‘illness’ and will try to demonstrate that all illness, not only those generally thought of as psychosomatic, are in a sense socially-defined and hence open to political analysis. (3) To try to see PMT more clearly, I have looked at the history of the concept—both in terms of a comparison of PMT with nineteenth century female complaints, and in terms of the gradual promotion and development of the idea over the last 50 years. An aspect of this is (4) examining in some detail the anti-woman ideological content of the current wave of PMT-promotion, and questioning in whose interests PMT really operates. (5) Finally I look briefly at the scientific evidence offered for the existence of a clear category of illness called PMT and at some of the theories put forward about its causes.

TOO DUMB TO KNOW BETTER

AbstractThroughout history, three traits have commonly been stressed as characteristic of the bad woman: her irresolution. her promiscuity, and her responsibility for the downfull of others. These traits were amplified by a series of studies of “cacogenic” families which appeared between 1874 and 1926. The family studies offered seemingly scientific proof that the bad woman was the source of many social problems and an important criminal type in her own right. The process by which the family studies helped remodel the image of the bad woman is examined as are effects of that remodeling on institutionalization policy. The development of this new image of the bad woman is explained, in part, by the fact that the family studies were financed by wealthy eugenists; these sponsors stood to gain from the increased social control which, the family studies showed, was required by the cacogenic woman and her progeny.