2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel interprets the intersection of politics and popular culture to include print culture and questions how printed materials reflected and shaped the gendered experience between the mid-nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth-century. All three papers use print culture to demonstrate the power print media has to shape crucial elements of the cultural construct of gender, from whether or not it was socially acceptable to wear bloomers in mid-nineteenth century America, to victim blaming in Intimate Partner Violence, and to defining in what spaces it was socially acceptable for women to practice science. These shifting definitions of appropriate gender behavior created through print culture then shaped political consciousness and decision-making. In the case of bloomers, Ping connects fashion with whether or not the garment was a signal for woman’s right to vote. In Baggett’s analysis, intimate partner violence in the black community led to defining what legal protections should be afforded to the black men and women involved. And Sutherland shows that by defining the value and place of women’s appropriate science work to be the home, women’s appropriate social roles were both validated and limited as the nurturers of future male voters and politicians.  Together these papers contend that print is an influential cultural tool in defining gender.