history

Over at Ferris State University’s Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, I found a page about depictions of the Jezebel stereotype, which included a number of fascinating/horrifying images. The Jezebel was, of course, a sexually promiscuous African or African American woman, wanton and lustful. Here’s a topless grass-skirted Jezebel ashtray:

According to the website, this license plate with a pregnant Black woman came out after Lyndon B. Johnson won the 1964 Presidential election (he used the phrase “All the way with LBJ” in his campaign):

A Virgin Fishing Lucky Lure:

This is a set of swizzle sticks shaped like African women:

I found an image of a full set for sale at Go Antiques:

Note that the swizzle sticks supposedly show the woman at different ages; the age is in that cutout area in their butt. The text next to the figures:

Nifty at 15, Spiffy at 20, Sizzling at 25, Perky at 30, Declining at 35, Droopy at 40

If you look carefully you’ll see that their boobs and butts sag as they age. I wonder if this same aging scheme applies to White women? At 33, apparently I’m just about to leave the last decent stage of my life and enter my declining years. Of course, in modern America we have cosmetic surgery, so I guess I could stave off droopiness for at least a few years.

Anyway, they’re good examples of the way Black women’s bodies have often been sexualized, and how people were comfortable showing them naked even when the idea of women’s sexuality in general wasn’t considered appropriate for polite company. The Jezebel stereotype reemerged in a slightly different form  in the 1980s with the idea of the “welfare queen,” a poor black woman (on public assistance, of course) who has lots of kids with various men just to get more welfare payments, an image President Reagan used to further reduce public support for the welfare state.

I am teaching Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street in my Introduction to Sociology class, and I have found that an excellent supplement to the text is the “Street view” of Google Maps. With a simple internet connection, you can type in addresses into maps.google.com and show students the places Anderson describes in the book.

Anderson begins the book with a descriptive tour of Germantown Avenue, starting in the wealthier and middle class neighborhoods and continuing through the ghettos described throughout the book.  As you read the introduction, you can follow his description of the street with Google maps.  The “Street view” allows you to “drive” up and down the street, look all around, and actually see how the ghettos are different from the middle-class neighborhoods that are his comparative foil.

The entire street is not photographed in this way, but much of it is.  You can detour off Germantown Avenue as well, following other major arteries and smaller streets through the city.

Here are the instructions and some screenshots. I don’t know much about Philadelphia; this is only based on Anderson’s descriptions.  Perhaps those more knowledgeable than I can fill in some details?

Go maps.google.com and type in the following addresses. Then click on “Street view” and navigate up and down the street as you desire.

“8500 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA” takes you to a little shopping district in Chestnut Hill, the upper-middle class nighborhood that Anderson starts out with. You can go all the way up to about 9500 or so.

“7600 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA” transitions into the Mt. Airy neighborhood, a more racially mixed middle class neighborhood. The street view ends at 7200.

“4600 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA,”  Here the Street View starts up again and goes for a few blocks before turning off on Windrim Ave.

“3700 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA”–Corner of Broad St, “one of the centers of the North Philadelphia ghetto”

“2900 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA.” Here, you start to see the empty lots, barred windows, and shuttered buildings.

“1000 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA.” Where the street ends under the interstate:

———————

Peter Hart-Brinson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He is a cultural sociologist and is working on a dissertation about gay marriage.  His post is inspired by Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street… so it’s for serious sociological nerds.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Aspic [noun]:  A clear jelly typically made of stock and gelatin and used as a glaze or garnish or to make a mold of meat, fish, or vegetables.

Gelatin [noun]: A jelly made with gelatin, used as a dessert or salad base.

If you peruse cookbooks from the 1950s, you’ll find a ton of recipes featuring aspic and gelatin.  Many of us, today, find many of these recipes, well, repulsive.  For example:

My friend, Emily, had a Mrs. Beeton party and I made avocado lime gelatin with mayonnaise (left), but it lost the competition for nastiest dish to the Cucumber Au Gratin (center):

Here is the cover of a cookbook devoted to “gel cookery”:

Was it just a fad?  It turns out, no.  It was status.  Or so says a blogger at The Good Old Days:

We’ve all wondered what the hell could motivate someone to [prepare, serve, and eat so many gel-based foods] — well, it was simply so they could brag about owning a refrigerator. You can’t solidify gelatin without refrigeration, and so you couldn’t serve Jellied Bouillon with Frankfurters unless you were above a certain income level…  So people started jellying vegetables, meats, salads, cream, and pretty much everything in their kitchen.

This graph, based on U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics and current as of February 6th, compares the number of jobs lost during the 1990 (blue), 2001 (red), and current (green) recessions:

Found at The Daily Kos thanks to Jerry A.

This graphic shows the age at which successive cohorts of French women are marrying.  Along the bottom of the graphic, the thick grey line represents women who were age 15 in 1987 (the oldest at the end of data collection is a little less than 30, which is why the line stops).  Each line above that represents an earlier cohort of women.  The data shows that, while the earliest cohorts largely married in their early 20s, with just a few stragglers.  The younger cohorts increasingly spread out the typical age of marriage.  It takes nearly 15 years for the most recent cohort to have married off the same proportion of women that were married in the older cohort in the five years between 15 and 20.

This image was borrowed from a new Contexts blog called Graphic Sociology.  Check it out.

Citation: German Rodriguez (2006) Office of Population Research, Princeton University. Problem Set 4: Marriage in France.  Research Methods in Demography.

In case you missed it, a few years back there was a major brouhaha (limited mostly to the U.S.) because some astronomers began to argue that Pluto should be reclassified as a dwarf planet, part of the Kuiper belt. This started when, in 2001, the American Museum of Natural History (in New York) created a display about the solar system that did not include Pluto. At first the museum received letters (often from children) pointed out that Pluto was missing, such as this one (from an NPR story on the subject):

But then word got out that the museum left Pluto out of the display on purpose, and that the director of the museum argued that Pluto is not a planet. Then a real letter-writing campaign began, from both kids and adults (found here):

Text [some errors corrected for ease of reading]:

Dear Scientist,

What do you call Pluto if it’s not a planet anymore? If you make it a planet again all the science books will be right. Do people live on Pluto? If there are people who live there they won’t exist. Why can’t Pluto be a planet? If it’s small doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have to be a planet anymore. Some people like Pluto. If it doesn’t exist then they don’t have a favorite planet. Please write back, but not in cursive because I can’t read in cursive.

A Save Pluto movement had begun, including pro-Pluto websites, t-shirts, bumperstickers, and so on (at CafePress):

Some of these were clearly meant in a joking manner, but many of the letters sent to the museum or published in newspapers expressed realy anger over the change. Headlines announced that Pluto was being “demoted” from planet status. Amid lots of angry debate even among themselves, astronomers eventually voted to recategorized Pluto as a dwarf planet.

You might use these to talk about public controversies about scientific research. This is a particularly odd example because the public concern didn’t spring from arguments that the research was immoral or dangerous (claims used to oppose, say, embryonic stem cell research or cloning). The outrage about Pluto’s change in status mostly occurred in the U.S. and was based on the fact that people just seem to really like Pluto and consider it their “favorite” planet. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director of the museum, suggests that this might be because of Disney’s cartoon dog Pluto. Regardless, a significant number of people wrote angry and even threatening letters to various outlets about a scientific reclassification that didn’t affect them in any real way; they just didn’t like it.

It’s also interested that Pluto’s reclassification was interpreted as a “demotion,” as though being a dwarf planet is clearly inferior to being a “real” planet, as though the objects in the solar system are arranged in a hierarchy based on size, and being anything other than a planet is a sad, sad fate. DeGrasse Tyson stresses that to astronomers, a dwarf planet isn’t “inferior to” a “regular” one–it’s just another category of things that exist in the galaxy. It’s an interesting example of how scientists’ perceptions of what their research means and the public’s interpretations may differ wildly.

NOTE: Mordecai comments,

First I want to say: All scientific classification is arbitrary.  There is no such thing as a planet, or a mammal.  These are terms humans put on them to try to make sense of the universe, not some built in truth.

Absolutely. I didn’t mean to imply the scientists were applying some ultimate truth about the universe when they re-classified Pluto. What I find interesting is what the controversy was based on: not “we think the data is wrong,” or “this is immoral or harmful,” but “Leave Pluto alone! It’s our favorite!” And the fact that it was really only a scandal in the U.S. is striking as well–whether it’s the character of Pluto or not, for some reason Americans are pretty much uniquely concerned about Pluto’s status.

This week in the New York Times, Catherine Rampell explained how the recession was affecting the ratio of female to male workers:

The proportion of women who are working has changed very little since the recession started. But a full 82 percent of the job losses have befallen men, who are heavily represented in distressed industries like manufacturing and construction. Women tend to be employed in areas like education and health care, which are less sensitive to economic ups and downs, and in jobs that allow more time for child care and other domestic work.

Here are the results:

Excluding farm workers and the self-employed, women held 49 percent of the nation’s jobs as of November. Including farm workers and the self-employed, women held 47 percent of jobs.

But, Rampell reminds us:

Women may be safer in their jobs, but tend to find it harder to support a family… Women are much more likely to be in part-time jobs without health insurance or unemployment insurance. Even in full-time jobs, women earn 80 cents for each dollar of their male counterparts’ income…

If the recession continues as it has, the U.S. workforce may soon be majority female.

See also this post on job segregation.

I read some very silly celebrity blogs, but make a point of staying away from the ones that make fun of people for being fat, sad, whatever, even as they may poke fun of the sometimes-ridiculous things celebrities wear.

That said, AYYY! does a “puzzle corner” every Monday and blurs out the faces of people in a similar theme (i.e. child star pics of current stars) and the reader’s meant to guess who’s who.  Last week, they did one of women who are currently very twig-like, but once were curvier.

So, let’s pretend we’re playing the puzzle just like any old Monday morning. Do you think you recognize any of these stars? I’ll admit, I only had guesses for a couple of them.

So, let’s have the big reveal, shall we?

1. Renee Zellweger, 2. Nicole Richie, 3. Madonna, 4. Amy Winehouse, 5. Lindsay Lohan, 6. Jennifer Connelly, 7. Christina Ricci, 8. Courtney Love, 9. Teri Hatcher, 10. Sophie Dahl

And here are the same women today:

Now, I want to put a disclaimer out there that I’m not trying to body shame anyone here—fat, skinny, in between, or whatever words you prefer to describe yourselves. And, based on their older pics, I’d say that these are not generally women who are naturally this thin (though, of course, such natural changes can occur). I’m sure we all know at least one naturally extremely thin woman, and they get their share of shame (No boobs!) and guilt (Gawd! You’re so lucky! I wish I could be that skinny!) from people daily. I’m not here to add to that.

The point I want to make is that these women have ALWAYS been beautiful. They were considered beautiful enough to be stars with their curves, so what made them think they needed to lose them?

What I want to know is: What changed? What happened between the ’90s (when several of those pics were taken) and today? You can see evidence of the skinnying of hollywood over many decades, but it seems like it suddenly sped up to an extreme point in the last 10-15 years.

What are your takes on the social/political issues that have made this shift occur? My guesses include a lot of conservative blowback against the liberation of women, but I’d really like to know what you think.

* Title unapologetically stolen from ayyyy.com, the inspiration for this post.  Originally posted at Shakesville and Crossing the Highway

———————–

InfamousQBert, sometimes known as Bethany Keeler, is a pinko-commie-liberal-vegetarian-feminist, living, writing, and attempting to fight the good fight in Dallas, TX.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.