Peiss cheap amusements. Cheap Amusements:Working Women & Leisure in Turn 2022-11-13
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"Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York" is a book written by Kathy Peiss that explores the leisure activities and entertainment pursued by working-class women in New York City during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At a time when many women were entering the workforce for the first time, Peiss argues that leisure activities were an important means for women to create a sense of identity and community.
One of the key themes of "Cheap Amusements" is the role of the city in shaping working-class women's leisure activities. Peiss argues that the dense, crowded urban environment of New York City provided women with a wide range of entertainment options that were both accessible and affordable. These included amusement parks, vaudeville shows, nickelodeons, and dance halls, all of which were popular among working-class women.
Peiss also explores the ways in which working-class women used leisure activities to create a sense of community and belonging. For many women, these activities provided a sense of escape from the daily grind of factory work and domestic labor. They also allowed women to socialize with each other, forming friendships and support networks that helped them navigate the challenges of urban life.
However, "Cheap Amusements" also highlights the ways in which working-class women's leisure activities were often seen as a threat by middle-class and elite society. Many of the entertainment options available to working-class women, such as dance halls and amusement parks, were viewed as immoral or degenerate by those with more privileged backgrounds. This led to efforts by reformers and social purists to restrict or prohibit these activities, which were often seen as a corrupting influence on working-class women.
In conclusion, "Cheap Amusements" is a fascinating look at the leisure activities and entertainment pursued by working-class women in turn-of-the-century New York City. Through her research, Peiss sheds light on the ways in which these activities were central to women's lives and identities, and how they were shaped by the urban environment of the city. While facing societal disapproval and efforts to restrict their activities, working-class women used leisure as a means of finding community and creating a sense of belonging in the midst of the challenges of urban life.
Peiss, Cheap Amusements
Coney Island, nickelodeons, dance halls, etc are all the subject of analysis. Studying work by Peiss is standard fare for courses that touch on cultural history, sexuality, gender, and American pop culture. New jobs in department stores, large factories, and offices provided alternatives to domestic service and household production. Peiss places prostitution within the context of a range of exchanges between women and men. Also goes in into great detail about the socio-economic changes that facilitated many of the new amusements and city life happening during this turn of the last century account. Each assertion of distinct identity was a potential source of conflict, which would become a hallmark of adolescence throughout the twentieth century.
. Kathy Peiss examines working class youth culture in turn-of-the-century New York through the lens of public leisure spaces and activities. What did young, independent women do for fun and how did they pay their way into New York City's turn-of-the-century pleasure places? With this came a new conception of leisure as something separate from the workplace. . Would perhaps benefit from a contrast with what women of color's leisure looked like at the same time.
She utilizes extensive archival sources on working-class life in New York, ranging from records of middle-class reformers who descended upon the city to oral testimonies of young white women who ventured into the developing sphere of public leisure. Not only does her analysis lead us to new insights into working-class culture, changing social relations between single men and women, and urban courtship, but it also gives us a fuller understanding of the cultural transformations that gave rise to the commercialization of leisure. . Working-class women, by and large, identified with the men of their own class before the women of the bourgeoisie; they resented bourgeois women's individualism and identified with the labour struggle instead if they were political and even if they were not, they preferred to mingle with men - and enjoyed the freer sexual culture of the working class - to stuffy, stultifying notions of respectability. For Peiss, what all of this boils down to is, working-class women created new forms of behavior through their leisure activities, which changed gender roles and contributed to the growth of a mass culture. The journal is dedicated to providing a forum for theoretical debate and innovation on questions of social formations, genders, classes and ethnicities and is open to approaches from other fields such as sociology, social anthropology, politics, economics and demography.
Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn
Instead of a top-down approach to culture, Peiss argues for a bottom-up influence of the working class. The leisure time of married women was also constrained by responsibilities to the home, which left them with more narrowly defined opportunities for participation in public forms of leisure. Although they experienced greater integration with men than the generations before them, Peiss suggests that only until the 1970's w A good, well-written book that illustrates an oft ignored topic- the leisure patterns of young women. The subtitle should not be read as if Working Women were the Cheap Amusements of Turn-of-the-Century New York. Cheap Amusements is a fascinating discussion of young working women whose meager wages often fell short of bare subsistence and rarely allowed for entertainment expenses. She accurately asserts, however, that leisure patterns varied greatly by class, nativity status, and educational level.
Peiss argues that this development was a double-edged sword: on the one hand working women could gain more autonomy and freedom, but on the other it limited their ability to more substantively change the underlying patriarchal structure of society. Kathy Peiss follows working women into saloons, dance halls, Coney Island amusement parks, social clubs, and nickelodeons to explore the culture of these young women between 1880 and 1920 as expressed in leisure activities. In the last chapter, chapter seven, Peiss describes how bourgeois women tried to create some kind of cross-class solidarity among women. Coney Island, nickelodeons, dance halls, etc are all the subject of analysis. This book about how working women found amusements for what leisure time they had and how the purveyors of amusement changed to garner their business.
Not only does her analysis lead us to new insights into working-class culture, changing social relations between single men and women, and urban courtship, but it also gives us a fuller understanding of the cultural transformations that gave rise to the commercialization of leisure. These may take the form of interventions that invoke discussion, provoke argument, enter criticism and create new space for analysis. Professor Peiss has managed to control many factors in her argument: Second- and third-generation women working during full-on American Industrial Age whose families were of various parts of Europe of both Christian and Jewish backgrounds who were not so fond of leaving records for themselves as of amusing themselves. As I read the book, I made connec Wow. Kathy Peiss is the Roy F. What did young, independent women do for fun and how did they pay their way into New York City's turn-of-the-century pleasure places? Later with the reform movement some stayed in settlement houses.
Kathy Peiss follows working women into saloons, dance halls, Coney Island amusement parks, social clubs, and nickelodeons to explore the culture of these young women between 1880 and 1920 as expressed in leisure activities. The social experiences of these young women gives different clues to the ways in which these women constructed and gave meaning to their lives between the years of 1880-1920. It draws extensively on primary sources as you would hope I guess, but I digress. There's a reason this book is a classic. Not only does her analysis lead us to new insights into working-class culture, changing social relations between single men and women, and urban courtship, but it also gives us a fuller understanding of the cultural transformations that gave rise to the commercialization of leisure. Interesting historical narrative regarding what working-class and immigrant young women did for leisure and amusements in New York City. So I was mostly reading this for the purposes of writing an essay on how working-class women in turn-of-the-century North America experienced their sexuality, and this book is positively brilliant for learning about that.
By examining the rituals and styles they adopted and placing that culture in the larger context of urban working-class life, she offers us a complex picture of the dynamics shaping a working woman's experience and consciousness at the turn-of-the-century. A big help for my research, as well as being entertaining to read. Ultimately, this influenced a new mass culture of leisure, which in turn, created a new set of drawbacks for women. Kathy Peiss follows working women into saloons, dance halls, Coney Island amusement parks, social clubs, and nickelodeons to explore the culture of these young women between 1880 and 1920 as expressed in leisure activities. My only criticism is that the book only looks at white working-class women.
The novel covers several key aspects of the way women changed their roles in the work place specifically factories during this time period and the social injustice that women faced when it came to free time. Would perhaps benefit from a contrast with what women of color's leisure looked like at the same time. Peiss argues that the agency and opportunities that came with women's leisure activities also carried a cost. Because certainly at the time she wrote this, women were not seen as a serious driving force behind major changes in history. Her research has examined the history of working women; working-class and interracial sexuality; leisure, style, and popular culture; the beauty industry in the U.
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