Short Skirts Research Articles

Changes in the Fashion Preferences of Women in their Twenties according to Awareness of in Gender Equality

In response to recent changes in gender equality and social awareness among female college students, we sought to investigate whether there were corresponding changes in their preferred fashion styles and items. A survey was conducted with 200 women in their twenties to determine whether they were aware of gender equality and social change, as well as their preferred fashion styles and items at both the time of college admission and the current time. Awareness of gender equality was divided into two factors: feminism and a perceived increase in women’s social power. A significant difference was observed in the fashion styles of female college students in their twenties between the time of admission and the current time. Compared with the past, the preferred style has changed to gender-neutral rather than feminine, useful rather than aesthetics, character rather than fashion, sporty rather than elegance, and casual rather than formal. Preferred items included pants rather than skirts, sneakers rather than shoes, socks rather than stockings, long skirts rather than short skirts, and backpacks rather than handbags. The level of attention paid to campus attire per week decreased over time. No correlation was found between gender equality awareness and preferred fashion style, while feminism was correlated with preferred fashion items. The degree to which attention was paid to campus attire per week was correlated with feminism, but was not correlated with a perceived increase in womens’ social power.

Self-Objectification and Self-Sexualizing Appearance Behaviors in Chinese Lesbian and Bisexual Females: Moderating Effect of Femme/Butch/Androgyne Identity

ABSTRACT In heterosexual populations, self-objectification is associated with self-sexualizing appearance behaviors. This study examined the relationship between self-objectification and self-sexualizing appearance behaviors and the moderating effect of butch/androgynous/femme sexual self-label identification in Chinese bisexual and lesbian females. We recruited 637 bisexual and lesbian females to complete an online questionnaire that asked about demographic information and feminine and masculine self-sexualizing appearance behaviors and measured the Objectified Body Consciousness Scale. Feminine self-sexualizing appearance behaviors include wearing high heels, short skirts, low-cut outfits, skinny clothes and makeup. Masculine self-sexualizing appearance behaviors include wearing short hair and binding breasts. Femme-identified females scored higher on body surveillance than did butch- and androgynous-identified females. Butch-identified females reported having more masculine self-sexualizing behaviors, whereas femme-identified females reported having more feminine self-sexualizing appearance behaviors. Sexual self-label identification moderated the relationship between self-objectification and feminine self-sexualizing behaviors. Body surveillance was significantly associated with feminine self-sexualizing behaviors in femme- and androgynous-identified females but not in butch-identified females. Body shame was negatively associated with feminine self-sexualizing appearance behaviors in androgynous-identified females. The current findings highlight the role of sexual self-label identification in self-objectification among Chinese bisexual and lesbian females. The findings imply the heterogeneousness of self-objectification among Chinese bisexual and lesbian females.

DINAMIKA BERPAKAIAN PELAJAR SEKOLAH DASAR (SD) DI KABUPATEN SOLOK MASA PEMERINTAHAN GAMAWAN FAUZI 1995-2005

This paper aims to look at the changes in the dress of school students in Solok Regency during the reign of Gumawan Fauzi. This change was motivated by the issuance of regional regulation letter No. 6 of 2002 concerning Muslim and Muslim women's clothing. This title was taken from 1995 to 2005. The type of research used is qualitative research. The method used in this research is historical research method using steps (1) heuristics or source collection (2) source criticism, (3) interpretation, (4) historiography. From the results of the research conducted, during the reign of Mr. Gamawan Fauzi found that there was a change in the form of dress for elementary school students in Solok Regency, this was caused by a circular issued by Mr. Gamawan Fauzi regarding the way elementary school (SD) students dressed. From 1995 to March 2002 the clothes worn by elementary school students were wearing short-sleeved shirts for both men and women and wearing short skirts for women while men for men also wore short pants and did not wear headscarves for women, whereas after being expelled regional regulation letter No. 6 of 2002, namely that there was a change in the dress of female and male students wearing long sleeves and long male skirts for female students and wearing headscarves while male students wore trousers. While the meaning of changing the clothes of school students is: This change of clothes also has a meaning which means to protect the private parts, especially for female students, to guard against disturbances that will damage the genitals and also by wearing closed clothes also avoid the fires of hell in the future and also fortify themselves and the next generation of the nation so that they do not fall into a culture that is not in accordance with the teachings of Islam

Blind Alfred Reed: Appalachian Visionary

Atlanta-based indie record label Dust-to-Digital has released the complete recorded works of Blind Alfred Reed, one of the largely unsung heroes of the early days of recorded country music, and one of the earliest recorded songwriters in the genre. Reed is not exactly obscure—he recorded at the famed Bristol Sessions, and his songs have been recorded by Bruce Springsteen, Ry Cooder, and others, so enthusiasts of old-time music will recognize his name and perhaps his sound. His complete recordings have not been available in one place until now. Producer and liner note author Ted Olson, who has, in the last decade, produced landmark box set collections on the Bristol, Johnson City, and Knoxville Sessions among others, considers Reed a sage. He writes in the notes that Reed possessed in his songwriting “an intense and fearless social vision” and that Reed's songs “seek to venture beyond the shadowy world of injustices, hypocrisies, and lies.”Reed was a singer and fiddler from southern West Virginia, whose main occupation was music and who managed to eke out a living as a performer, a music teacher, and for a short time in the late 1920s, a recording artist. His sound was sparse and unembellished, using only fiddle, guitar, and one or two voices. Many fiddlers of his time played and sang at the same time, but Reed had a more direct and conservative approach than most—he played the same notes he sang, often in a measured, sauntering cadence—and his voice and fiddle both resonated deeply and clearly. As a singer, Reed was emotive in a manner similar to the old ballad singers—he did not try to shape how listeners interpreted the lyrics; rather, he sang in a neutral way that invited them in to sort things out for themselves. Reed recorded all of his songs with his son Arville, except for one solo number recorded in Bristol and three more with neighbor Arthur Wyrick. I find the recordings of Arville singing with his father among the most enjoyable on the set.The songs deal with religious virtues or economic conditions, or they provide some kind of social commentary, often having to do with the roles and behavior of men and women in relationships, albeit offered from varying, sometimes opposing viewpoints. His perspective was in no small way shaped by the Church, and about one-third of the twenty-two songs on this collection reference religious life in some manner. There are also topical songs about real-life events of the day, a common songwriting practice at that time, and several lighthearted social songs that may be off-putting if taken out of context. In “Woman's Been After Man Ever Since,” he sings: “What a shame it is that women try to be so much like men, they will run for office if they get the chance.” Other songs are social and religious statements on rural Appalachian religious morals of the time, addressing short skirts, bobbed hair, and young men who wear fine shoes but carry a bottle in their pocket. Reed's best-known composition “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” is indicative of yet another strain of Reed's songwriting: economic hardship.This is a hardy collection that shows the breadth of Reed's songwriting, but to some ears, the music itself may sound monotonous. Indeed, with the exception of a single track recorded by Arville, the songs are either in the key of G major or C major—and all of the nineteen songs Reed sings begin with a simple, single-string fiddle intro. The melodies are pleasant and at times nuanced, including a waltz, but I must admit that for many years, Reed's songs tended to run together for me. This set helped me connect the music itself with its historical context and importance, and to realize more keenly that the real impact of Reed's music is as a songwriter who was ahead of his time. In the notes, Olson compares him to Woody Guthrie.As we have come to expect from Dust-to-Digital, the eighty-four-page hardcover book accompanying the CD is original, tidy, and beautiful. It contains unreleased photos and documents, studio sheets, and complete lyrics, in addition to an essay by Olson, who is becoming a household name in historical releases (he has been nominated multiple times for Grammy awards for his work as a music producer and songwriter). The notes here contain new research into Reed's life and music and are a friendly read—at once affectionate and informative. Since the release of this collection in 2016, Olson has continued to research the Reed family and has assembled an even more nuanced account. An updated and revised version of his liner notes was published in June 2022 on the Music of Our Mountains website. See https://musicofourmountains.com for more information.

Single Incision Endoscope-Assisted Gastrocnemius Muscle Resection for Calf Hypertrophy: Analysis of 300 Cases.

Muscular calf hypertrophy can cause severe psychological distress. Total or subtotal resection of the gastrocnemius muscle results in significant calf reduction. However, both techniques require a second incision of 5 and 2 cm, respectively, at the posterior mid-calf. The resultant mid-calf scar is more difficult to conceal when wearing short skirts or pants. The authors sought to describe the technique of endoscope-assisted gastrocnemius muscle resection to obviate the need for a mid-calf scar and to review the outcomes of patients who underwent this procedure. A retrospective study of 300 patients in a single center in Taiwan who underwent endoscope-assisted subtotal resection of the gastrocnemius muscle for hypertrophic muscular calves, between March 2015 to June 2019, were included in this study. The combined weight of the resected gastrocnemius muscle ranged from 156 to 484 g per calf (mean = 276 g). The mean maximal calf circumference was 36.1 cm preoperatively and 30.9 cm postoperatively. The calf reduction achieved was 3.0 to 8.1 cm (mean = 5.2 cm), or 8.9% to 19.8% (mean = 14.4%). The complications were minor, and the rate was low (2%). As for the popliteal fossa scar, 6 patients underwent further treatment of their hyperpigmented or hypertrophic transverse scar. There were no complaints of impaired leg function regarding gait or sports activities 3 to 6 months postoperatively. At present, gastrocnemius muscle resection remains unrivaled in its ability to achieve calf reduction. The surgery is now much more appealing to patients as a result of employing the endoscope-assisted technique to obviate the mid-calf scar.

Unsteady Work

Hilary Leichter's Temporary is the rare novel that reckons with unsteady work. If the book is a surreal, absurd, sometimes self-defeating entry in the office genre, that is because temporary work is all those things. "I have a shorthand kind of career," the opening pages declare. "Short tasks, short stays, short skirts." The wry unnamed narrator progresses from placement to placement, bolstering her résumé and attempting to fake it until she makes it. She lives by an inspirational quote—"Nothing is more personal than doing yourjob"—which she also identifies as nonsense she got from the back of a granola packet. Landing a permanent job here has little to do with good work or persistence. The characters term the ascent to a staff position "the steadiness" and talk about it in mystical tones. It's an elusive state: the narrator's mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother each spent a lifetime "filling in," never advancing beyond temp status.

Beyond the dolls house?

Purpose This paper aims to examine the concepts of gendered, entrepreneurial identity and fetishism through an analysis of images of Barbie entrepreneur. It draws on the literature of entrepreneurial identity and fetishism to examine how such identity is socially constructed from childhood and how exposure to such dolls can shape and influence perceptions of entrepreneurial identity. Design/methodology/approach Using semiotic analysis the authors conduct a visual analysis of the Barbie to make observations and inferences on gendered entrepreneurial identity and fetishism from the dolls and artifacts. Findings The gendered images of Barbie dolls were influenced by societal perceptions of what an entrepreneur should look like, reflecting the fetishisation of entrepreneurship, especially for women. Mirroring and exaggerating gendered perceptions, the dolls express hyper-femininity reflected in both the physical embodiment of the doll and their adornments/accessories. This includes handbags, high-heeled shoes, short skirts, haute-couture and designer clothes. Such items and the dolls themselves become fetishised objects, making context and culture of vital importance. Research limitations/implications There are positive and negative implications in relation to how the authors might, as a society, present unrealistic gendered images and role models of entrepreneurship to children. The obvious limitation is that the methodology limits what can be said or understood, albeit the imagery mirrors socially constructed reality for the context examined. Originality/value This is original research in that no previous published studies have tackled gendered entrepreneurial identity in relation to fetishism. The value of the work lies in discussing the concepts and embeds them in the expanding conversation surrounding gendered entrepreneurial identities.

National and Rational Dress: Catholics Debate Female Fashion in Lithuania, 1920s–1930s

The debates about female fashion in the new Republic of Lithuania in the 1920s and 1930s saw papal representatives, bishops, leading public intellectuals, and members of Catholic youth movements argue about deep décolletés and short skirts. In this predominantly Catholic country, objections made against modern fashion may initially look like a conservative stand against modern developments. Studying more closely the debate around women's fashion as it developed in a particular subset of the Catholic population in Lithuania—educated youth in the Ateitis Catholic student association, this article examines the interconnected arguments that were woven together to evaluate what women should wear in interwar Lithuania and shows that Catholics in this northeastern European country aimed to create a modern national and rational woman. At issue were not just Catholic moral norms but also national identity and the challenges posed by mass consumer culture. The new ideal being proposed was a modern Catholic female intelligentsia, a gender ideal that embraced the opportunities offered in the first decades of the twentieth century, such as suffrage, education, urban living, more active participation in civic life, while retaining more conservative moral norms, questioning consumer culture, and debating woman's nature and mission.

Dampak Masuknya Turis Asing Terhadap Budaya Asli Masyarakat Sekitar Lokasi Pantai Lakey Desa Hu’u Kabupaten Dompu

This study aims to describe the impact of foreign culture on the indigenous culture of the community around the Lakey beach location in terms of the positive and negative effects of foreign cultures around Lakey beach in Hu’u village, Dompu district. This study uses a type of qualitative data, the data in this study are in the form of words and actions obtained by observation, interviews and documentation. The main instrument in this study is data assisted by observation, documentation and interview guidelines. The research aids used are in the form of digital cameras and writing equipment. The validity of the data is obtained by triangulation techniques. The data analysis technique used is descriptive. Steps for analyzing data by reducing data, presenting data and drawing conclusions or verification.
 The results of this study show that 1) Westernized lifestyle tradition is one of them is a way of dressing that is not polite for women such as wearing pants or short skirts and clothes that cannot cover all bodies and some even wear a bikini (underwear only). They do not feel uncomfortable or ashamed of the opposite sex when they wear short clothing or do not cover their entire body. This is considered normal for them so they feel unafraid of the effects of short dressing. 2) Still adopting a consumptive lifestyle, some people still waste money just to do negative things like binge drinking when there are certain events, they are not reluctant to spend a lot of money just to get drunk. Not only to buy liquor they also often buy non-essential needs such as buying clothes that are quite expensive only to spend money. 3) The presence of foreign tourists also results in social inequality, in general, the people are picky about their associations, making the poor feel inferior to the more capable people. According to the Lakey beach community's response that some of the people who have capital or wealth are more likely to reduce associations with the less fortunate because they are considered less experienced in the business world. Until now there has also been no government intervention in responding to this. 4) But of the many negative impacts described by the Lakey community there is also a positive impact felt by the community, namely the creation of jobs and others.
 In this study many people complained of the impact of foreign cultures, so that people were worried about extinction of their own indigenous cultural values.

Communities’ perceptions of factors contributing to child sexual abuse vulnerability in Kenya: a qualitative study

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a major global health concern. Although it is prevalent in Kenya, scant literature on factors contributing to CSA vulnerability exists. Using qualitative data from 28 focus groups and ethnographic field notes, we explored and assessed community perceptions of factors contributing to CSA vulnerability in Homa Bay County, Western Kenya. Findings suggest that people living in these communities perceived CSA as being influenced by multiple factors: developmental stage, peer pressure, huge gender disparities exacerbated by negative social norms and cultural practices, the HIV epidemic and social media platforms that circulate sexualised images. From our findings, it was clear that participants also regarded poverty as exacerbating children’s vulnerability to CSA. Minors from poor families engaged in transactional sex for survival and social status. Some community members perceived girls dressed in short skirts or tight clothing as warranting unwanted sexual advances. Although poverty and gender roles and relations were viewed as increasing vulnerability to CSA, blame was often placed on survivors’ modes of dress or behaviour. There is a need for comprehensive education of the communities on CSA, its consequences and the rights of women and girls.

Thinking Women, Feminism, and Muslim Identity through Bodies and Space in Turkey

Thinking Women, Feminism, and Muslim Identity through Bodies and Space in Turkey

Short Skirts, Telephonoscopes and Ancient Locomotives: Albert Robida’s Vision of the Twentieth Century

Junctions: Graduate Journal of the Humanities is an interdisciplinary, peer reviewed and open access journal in the Humanities. The journal aims to connect the different disciplines of the Humanities by collecting disciplinary and interdisciplinary texts so that they are accessible to readers from across the Humanities. Junctions provides scholars at the start of their academic careers with the opportunity to disseminate their research to a diverse audience of peers and professionals, as well as providing graduate students with relevant practical experience of organizing and maintaining a peer-reviewed open access journal. Through a rigorous double blind peer review process, the journal seeks to maintain the highest academic standards possible. Check out our new promo video here.

Refusing Refuge at the United States–Mexico Border

Refusing Refuge at the United States–Mexico Border Gilberto Rosas (bio) Contemporary social relations at the United States–Mexico border kill the legal fiction that distinguishes between politically motivated refugees and economically motivated immigrants, a distinction fundamental to liberal governmentalities. The border is where refugee, immigrant, green-card holder, and other legal categories become occupied, become transformed, and are destroyed. Its subjects may become sites for a refusal of liberal governmentalities—rooted in long-standing practices of border life, escaping the law, and normative accounts of resistance in academic circles. They may birth a sense of autonomy or defiance rather than the pursuits of a fundamental change in social relations.1 The United States has traditionally adhered to international laws and conventions for people seeking asylum on grounds that they are being persecuted because of their race, religion, nationality, political beliefs, or other factors. They are presumed to be a problem for the state. But immigrants, refugees, or other incarnations of the dispossessed are not the problem.2 The problem remains the racial state. It has been degraded into a vicious assemblage that monopolizes territory and enacts law-preserving violence.3 It relies on de facto status crimes that evoke race, in which gang members are prosecuted under neutral laws that are racialized in application, while illegal aliens or suspected terrorists are targeted based on national origin.4 Carlos Spector, attorney, activist, and all around maker of case law, reports: We’re getting bombarded by complaints that they’re discouraging people at the bridge to apply. And all, if not most of these are working people so and they’re screaming at people . . . horrible stuff. Or they’re being detained for a year or two, not releasing them. The whole antagonism begins at the bridge in terms of the discouraging . . . The regime begins to discourage them from becoming refugees at the actual bridge . . . People are turned away.5 Yet the charged entanglements of privileged bodies crossing borders occur. It is about 7 p.m. People have left work. Whereas Juarez once was the site for the best food, drink, and fun in the region, many now come across from Juarez to El Paso, and many now live in the latter. Stiletto heels, long tanned legs, short skirts, tight tops, red lipstick, dark eyeliner that accentuates big brown eyes, all commingle with tight t-shirts, khaki shorts, carved arms, and thick wallets. They are clearly here not to try El Paso’s booming restaurant scene. No, these are scenes to be seen. “We make a mean martini sir or do you want to try one of our microbrews?,” the young woman in Daisy Dukes tells me. She wears a low-cut t-shirt that reveals a little too much and explains my drink options over the booming music in the posh outdoor, [End Page 535] open-air fresh sushi establishment. It is not far from the multimillion-dollar minor league baseball stadium, home of the El Paso Chihuahuas, a nod to the promiscuity of contemporary racisms with new capital addictions and an ever-deepening heteronormativity. El Paso has boomed. Its downtown has been revitalized. Its restaurant scene has exploded. Its nightlife seduces. It ranked as the safest large city in the United States as recently as the late 2000s. And it sits opposite to what was then being called the murder capital of the globe, the deadliest city in the world. More than twice as many people were killed in Ciudad Juárez, with a population of 1.3 million, as in New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago combined in 2009, the same year that the mayor of Juárez and many of his functionaries themselves moved to El Paso out of concerns for their safety. Juarez was then the center of Mexico’s horrendous “drug war.” Stories of young men turned into assassins, of the killing of young “available” women, of corpses abandoned in the streets and dumps, and of mass disappearances filled sensationalist accounts by the Mexican news media. Upward of 160,000 people have perished since 2006. Some 40,000 others have been “disappeared.” Graciela fled Juarez to El Paso then, in the midst of the violence...

시사만화 『고바우 영감』에 표현된 복식의 상징성

Abstract Popular culture has symbolic meaning and has been constructed through different mass media. Newspa-pers played a significant role in 1950s and 1960s public culture. In particular, editorial cartoons in news-papers expressed social aspects of the age implicitly through satire and criticism. This study examines deli-vered culture by reflecting the past social aspects and inquiring on clothing featured in the editorial cartoon『Gobau』. As for a research method, literature research was conducted on clothing of the age with a reviewof『Gobau』. As for a research range, examination was done based on the complete works of Gobau com-posed of 5 volumes published as a first edition by Hankookmunhwasa on November, 1973. Early『Go-bau』cartoons from 1951-1963 were published in 5 volumes; therefore, research was conducted for the erafrom 1950s to the early 1960s. Clothing expressed in『Gobau』were reviewed, classified into formative cha-racteristics and internal meaning. Internal meaning was examined by dividing into the expression of socialaspects and criticism of society. The research findings are as follows. First, clothing in『Gobau』reflectedcharacteristic in direct manner. There was a coexistence of Hanbok and western-styled, clear distinctionbetween men's trousers and women's skirt. Besides, various kinds of women's western-styled dress appearedin the 1960s. Second, they showed the dress culture that reflected past social aspects. Many aspects wereincluded to reconstruct old and worn clothes due to scarce resources after the Korean War, and cherishingclothes, buying fabric directly to making clothes, making clothes from dressmaking shop, and restrictionson imported goods and luxury items. Third, the study also examined the social norms for fashion. It con-tained negative perspectives on women wearing pants, short skirts, and new hair styles (like perms) fromwestern culture as well as lipstick.Key words: Gobau, Symbolism, Korean clothing, Western-styled dress, Fashion; 고바우 영감, 상징성,한국 복식, 양장, 유행

II. Young activists, new movements: Contemporary Chinese queer feminism and transnational genealogies

In 2012, in response to victim-blaming statements by the Shanghai Subway System online, two young feminists appeared in Shanghai’s subway, wearing headscarves, short skirts, and metal bras, carrying signs saying ‘‘I can be flirtatious, you can’t harass,’’ as a resistance to social control of women’s bodies (Phillips, 2012). This small performance inspired a storm of national media coverage and public discussion, giving unprecedented public visibility to the issues of women’s sexual expression and sexual assault. Being part of a broader milieu of young Chinese feminists protesting through various forms of public performance arts in the past two years, the Shanghai Subway protesters, in particular, were queer feminist activists with years of involvement in lesbian communities. As young, diasporic feminist activist–scholars involved in queer feminist movements across China, Taiwan, and New York City, we reflect on the emergent ‘‘new’’ queer feminism in China today, with its amorphous cohesion and dramatic impact, as highlighted by the subway protest. Drawing on transnational feminism, we are part of this latest ‘‘new’’ response to growing global inequalities and

Pussy Riot, Putin and the Politics of Embodiment

On 21 February 2012, five young women clothed in brightly coloured short skirts, knit tights and rudely made balaclavas ruptured the silence of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, Russia, with an obscenity-laced song asking the Virgin Mary to deliver Russia from the impending re-election of its former president Vladimir Putin. The Russian Government responded to this provocative but non-violent act with unexpected and unprecedented coercive force against the small group of activists. In this article, we argue that Pussy Riot's ‘Punk Prayer’ and its aftermath demonstrate that the volatility of the conflict arises from a socio-historically specific form of the tension between a political citizenship and an embodied social agency. The Pussy Riot phenomenon was particularly explosive because it exposed the unstable coexistence of authoritarianism with a liberal constitutional state whose legitimacy depends upon the exclusion of arbitrary authority from the political field. Pussy Riot's ‘Punk Prayer’ and its aftermath demonstrate the subversive potential of even the most local, sporadic and symbolic feminist and queer challenges to the established order. The response of the Russian State exposed its dependence upon and investment in patriarchal and heteronormative power structures often rendered politically invisible through relegation to ‘private life’. The value of Pussy Riot's performance lies in its making visible, and thus available for public debate, the ways in which authoritarianism legitimates its exercise of power by exploiting social divisions through a network of institutionalized forces which civil society had come to take for granted.

White Snake, Green Snake

Carol Steinbeck at Work Susan Shillinglaw (bio) In the mid 1930s, Edward F. Ricketts, the marine ecologist who ran a biological supply laboratory on Monterey’s Cannery Row, drew around him a coterie of talented, off-kilter artists and writers, John and Carol Steinbeck among them. After a day’s work of gathering cephalopods, writing a story, or toiling at odd jobs, the group often gathered to drink Burgermeister beer, unfold shaggy dog stories—John’s specialty—and talk endlessly about ideas, often far into the night. One memorable evening, recalled Virginia Scardigli, the lab group debated the differences among the good, the right, and the proper. It’s difficult to imagine what this gathering of the middling-good, the incorrigible, and the improper might have said on the subject—other than to poke holes in any exalted notions of good, right, and proper. Debunking made excellent sport, John Steinbeck’s métier. And it was an indissoluble bond between John and his wife Carol, married from 1930 to 1943. During Steinbeck’s formative decade as a writer, Carol was John Steinbeck’s partner, editor, inspiration, muse. They were a team. Both were bums, rebels, outsiders, satirists, always impoverished, always empathetic with other marginalized souls. As a pair of outcasts, hand in hand they took on the world, John in books about power and powerlessness, and Carol the debunker in jaunty artwork: pen and ink drawings; little clay sculptures—“civic statues”; and brief satiric poems, “feelthy verse.” Hers was a winsome gaze. No doubt, Carol’s artistic talents were modest—untutored and undeveloped might be a better description. She saw herself as someone nibbling at self-expression, sometimes serious about her output, usually dismissive or bemused about her creations. She relished the creative process and the satiric thrust of her art. Of her sculptures she told a New York Post reporter, they are “my amusement and ‘my amazement’—and sometimes I laugh until I’m sick—my very private and personal protest against all artistic poseurs.” [End Page 70] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Figurine by Carol Steinbeck, 1950s. Courtesy of the author. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 2. Plaster cast of Carol Steinbeck, date unknown, probably 1930s. This and all subsequent images courtesy of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. [End Page 71] Cartoonist John Held of the New Yorker was an early model (“Girls with long legs, short skirts, spread knees … so you could see their underwear,” recalled Carlton Sheffield, who shared his Eagle Rock home near Los Angeles with Carol and John in January 1930, the month of their marriage). At the Sheffields’, the magazine was read cover to cover each week. Carol’s creative gaze was also shaped by Peter Arno’s cartoons and other caricatures in the magazine. In several pen and ink sketches of their few weeks living at the Sheffields’, Carol depicts the gaiety of a household packed with three couples and several cats, and invigorated by Sheffield’s home brew. With seven in the household, he upped his brewing to eighteen gallons of beer every five days “and at that could barely keep up with consumption.” John wrote that his own beer drinking induced “a state of lassitude intershot with moments of unreal romance.” Years later he concluded: “As starved and happy a group as ever robbed an orange grove. I can still remember the dinners of hamburger and stolen avocados.” Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 3. “The Sunbath, or what John Held Jr. found in his Christmas stocking.” Carol captured the zaniness of the Eagle Rock sojourn in her sketches. Before she married John, she had been a career woman in San Francisco, working as a secretary and training as a journalist, a jaunty New Woman earning a good salary. Freed from her 9 to 5 job, however, newly married and very happy, Carol frolicked with the three young women of the household (Tal Lovejoy; her sister [End Page 72] Nadia, who visited briefly; and Maryon Sheffield) and helped form the “Eagle Rock Self Expression Society.” The Society sunbathed in the nude—there was “some, shall we say, informality...

Carol Steinbeck at Work

Carol Steinbeck at Work

Populist Crane: A Reconsideration of Melodrama in <i>Maggie</i>

Stephen Crane’s first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), is replete with images of popular entertainment. Some of these might justifiably be said to depict working-class New Yorkers of the fin de siecle as in pursuit of escapism. Early in the novel, for example, Maggie—a young woman growing up in the working-class Bowery neighborhood of Lower Manhattan—goes to “a gr eat green-hued hall” with her boyfriend, Pete, where they watch “[a]n orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men” perform “a popular waltz” (Crane 30). Next “a girl” wearing “a pink dress with short skirts” (31) entertains the audience with a song-anddance routine that ends with “grotesque attitudes which were at the time popular among the dancers in the theatres up-town” (31). As a result, “the Bowery public” enjoys “the phantasies of the aristocratic theatre-going public, at reduced rates” (32). The show also features a ventriloquist; a minstrel performance; “some verses which described a vision of Britain being annihilated by America, and Ireland bursting her bonds” (32); and “a small fat man” who “began to roar a song and stamp back and forth before the foot-lights, wildly waving a glossy silk hat and throwing leers, or smiles, broadcast” (32). In response to the evening’s entertainment, Maggie, who works in a sweatshop making collars, “drew deep breaths of pleasure” (33), and “[n]o thoughts of the atmosphere of the collar and cuff factory came to her” (33). Clearly, this is escapism. Maggie works at a job that is exploitive and unfulfilling, and a night of Bowery entertainment allows her to forget her troubles. Pete and Maggie also r egularly attend melodramas, one of which Crane describes in some detail. In general, Crane critics have tended to regard melodrama as a similar form of escapist entertainment, and Crane’s portrayal of it as merely parodic. But I would argue that Crane’s representation of melodrama is more complex than critics have recognized, and that melodrama as a cultural formation in the second half of the nineteenth century resists reduction to mere escapism. While it does contain a measure of irony, Crane’s portrayal of Bowery theater suggests that

North for the Harvest: Mexican Workers, Growers, and the Sugar Beet Industry (review)

2Oi o Book Reviews551 the stereotype being pushed in die press of the patriotic wife and mother. Women who donned the zoot suit projected a working-class masculine identity that fed fears regarding the impact of women's wartime productive role on the postwar gender order. Moreover, heavy makeup and the short skirts of those who did not cross-dress signaled a dangerous and subversive sexuality at a time when "bad girls" were deemed a threat to servicemen's health and the war effort. As Ramirez shifts her focus to the 1960s, the connections between the invisibility of la pachuca during World War II and her invisibility in Chicano movement culture become clear.Just as U.S. nationalism during the war was highly gendered and rooted in the hetero-patriarchal family, so was Chicano cultural nationalism (the concept ofMexican Americans as a separate culture and nation) in the 1 960s. The ideal of lafamilia de la raza, of Chicano community as family, rendered invisible Chicanas who were not exclusively wives or mothers. La pachuca, an assertive woman in control of her sexuality who encroached on public space, threatened the traditional gender roles underlying lafamilia de la raza, and so she was either omitted from Chicano treatments of the era or sexualized and equated with a puta (whore). Hints of this fate can be seen as early as 1942, when a Mexican-American newspaper's account of the Sleepy Lagoon incident labeled the pachucas as malinches, a term referring to a Christian Indian woman who supposedly betrayed her people by becoming Hernán Cortés's translator and concubine. Readers looking for a documentary narrative of female gangs will be disappointed and historians may wish for more grounding in primary sources at times, but Ramirez succeeds at the task she has set for herself—to restore agency to pachucas, to expose the process by which they have been rendered invisible, and to explain their significance for constructions of citizenship and nationalism . Through a sophisticated melding of feminist and queer theory that is both accessible and illuminating, she has laid important foundations for further fruitful inquiry. Texas State University—San ManosRebecca Montgomery North for the Harvest: Mexican Workers, Growers, and the Sugar Beet Industry. By Jim Norris. (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2009. Pp. 236. Illustrations , notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780873516310, $22.95 Paper.) For much of the twentieth century, agricultural labor conditions in Texas substantially affected the Latinos in the state. Crop cultivation provided a living for the overwhelming majority of rural Latinos, particularly in South Texas, where there has been the largest concentration of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. These workers lacked equitable labor protections and were subject to exploitation by growers. Scholars of Mexican-American history widely agree that the resultant local conditions and interstate migratory labor systems unjustifiablyinfringed upon the civil and human rights of both United States and Mexican citizens. Although we know much about the factors pushing "Mexican" agricultural workers out of the state, there has been relatively litde written on the structure and functioning of agricultural systems that pulled workers from Texas. This monograph offers a 552Southwestern Historical QuarterlyApril well-written history of one such system in the Red River Valley, which runs along the North Dakota-Minnesota border. This "Red River Valley of the North" (8) contains ideal land for cultivating sugar beets, diough the climate only allows for one planting of the crop per year. American Beet Sugar (and its later incarnation, American Crystal) was the company that dominated beet processing in the valley. Following World War I, American Beet Sugar began to heavily recruit Mexican and Mexican-American workers in Texas to become betabeleros (sugar beet workers) . For the next five decades, until social and technological conditions rendered the system unprofitable, many Texas agricultural workers left home in late spring to spend three months in the beet fields of the Red River Valley. Norris elucidates a triad of actors with significant leverage over each odier. Perceived labor shortages in Texas spurred government guest worker programs, most notably the Bracero Program that ran from 1942-1964. While the Lone Star State became saturated widi low-wage agricultural workers, the sugar beet farms in...