On begging to be a bridesmaid in a ballerina dress: some meanings of British fashion in the 1950s

Summers, Alan

doi:10.1093/hwj/1997.44.226

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…She 'appeared to control situations and interactions as well as … [her body and] … herself'. [74] Iolanthe herself is both mother and lover. She looks seventeen but has a son of twenty-five.…”

Section: Women's Amateur Performing Identitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dainty little fairies: women, gender and the savoy operas

D'Cruze

2000

Women's History Review

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Since the 1890s, amateur operatic societies have enabled middleand lower middle-class women to overcome any stigma associated with public stage performance through their constitution as 'serious' leisure organisations. Some women have occupied positions of (situated) prestige, though others were confined to supporting roles. Amateur 'operatics' have generated a carnival atmosphere around the activity of performance, where boundaries between members' leisure, social and performing identities became permeable and easily crossed. The Gilbert and Sullivan operas, a staple of the amateur repertoire since their late-Victorian composition, draw on a range of representations of masculinity and femininity that acquired new cultural relevance for the middle classes from the inter-war period. Positive representations of femininity are predominantly youthful. More negative representations of older women have their origins in the grotesque, crossdressed dame of burlesque. Nevertheless, interview evidence demonstrates that older women in particular, aided by the possibilities of moving between performing and social identities that this leisure activity encourages, have made empowering and selective imaginative appropriations from these gender ideals.

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Section: Women's Amateur Performing Identitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dainty little fairies: women, gender and the savoy operas

D'Cruze

2000

Women's History Review

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Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev

Reid¹

2002

Slavic rev.

159

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Consumption, a key issue in the study of post-Soviet culture, was already a central concern during the Cold War. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Khrushchev regime staked its legitimacy at home, and its credibility abroad, on its ability to provide its population with consumer goods and a decent standard of living. Despite promising "abundance for all" as the precondition for the imminent transition to communism, the regime could not afford to leave abundance undefined. In this article, Susan E. Reid examines the way discourses of consumption, fashion, and the ideal Soviet home sought to remake consumers’ conceptions of culturedness, good taste, and comfort in rational, modern terms that took into account the regime’s ideological commitment and economic capacity. Such efforts to shape and regulate desire were directed above all at women. Reid proposes that the study of consumption provides insights into the ways in which post-Stalinist regimes manipulated and regulated people through regimes of personal conduct, taste, and consumption habits, as opposed to coercion. Indeed, the management of consumption was as significant for the Soviet system's longevity as for its ultimate collapse.

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On begging to be a bridesmaid in a ballerina dress: some meanings of British fashion in the 1950s

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Dainty little fairies: women, gender and the savoy operas

Dainty little fairies: women, gender and the savoy operas

Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev

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