Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century

Mary P. Ryan traces the fate of public life and the emergence of ethnic, class, and gender conflict in the nineteenth-century city in this ambitious retelling of a key period of American political and social history. Basing her analysis on three quite different cities—New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco—Ryan illustrates how city spaces were used, understood, and fought over by a dazzling variety of social groups and political forces. She finds that the democratic exuberance America enjoyed in the 1820s and 1840s was irrevocably damaged by the Civil War. Civic life rebounded after the War but was, in Ryan's words, "less public, less democratic, and more visibly scarred by racial bigotry." Ryan's analysis is played out on three different levels—the spatial, the ceremonial, and the political. As she follows the decline of informal democracy from the age of Jackson to the heyday of industrial capitalism, she finds the roots of America's resilient democratic culture in the vigorous, often belligerent urban conflicts that found expression in the social movements, riots, celebrations, and other events that punctuated daily life in these urban centers. With its insightful comparisons, meticulous research, and graceful narrative, this study illustrates the ways in which American cities of the nineteenth century were as full of cultural differences and as fractured by social and economic changes as any metropolis today.

History

Ryan, Mary P.

Americas

University of California Press

Focusing primarily on the middle class, this study delineates the social, intellectual and psychological transformation of the American family from 1780-1865. Examines the emergence of the privatized middle-class family with its sharp division of male and female roles.

Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern History)

Cambridge University Press

Womanhood in America, from colonial times to the present

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

New Viewpoints

Womanhood in America: From colonial times to the present

an interpretation of 20th century popular culture and values regarding women.

Explores traditional female roles in American society and culture, and illuminates the factors that hindered and precipitated the women's liberation movement

Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present

Children's Books

Franklin Watts

This volume, which focuses on women in nineteenth-century Britain and America and includes work by scholars in both countries, takes its place in a long history of Anglo-American debate. The collection adopts what Joan Kelly . . . calls 'the doubled vision of feminist theory,' the view that it is the simultaneous operation of relations of class and of sex/gender that perpetuate both patriarchy and capitalism. . . . Many of these articles had their origin at an international conference in women's history at which the theoretical and political agendas of feminist historians were discussed with a vigour and urgency possible only where scholarship is infused with social aims. Both the vigour and the urgency can be clearly felt in the essays collected here."

Sex and Class in Women's History (HISTORY WORKSHOP SERIES)

Newton, Judith

Routledge

"Ryan's elegant essays sketch a chronology of changing gender symbology and contribute to our understanding of the cultural construction of boundaries between public and private. Historians and feminists will pursue for some time her questions about the process and consequences of excluding women from the public arena and their striving for participation in it."—Lee Chambers-Schiller, American Historical Review. "An extremely important contribution to women's history. It reminds us . . . that women's emergence in public life during the twentieth century continues to open up new political possibilities."—Ruth Rosen, Women's Review of Books. The Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History.

Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (The Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History, 16)

Johns Hopkins University Press

Mysteries of Sex: Tracing Women and Men through American History

In a sweeping synthesis of American history, Mary Ryan demonstrates how the meaning of male and female has evolved, changed, and varied over a span of 500 years and across major social and ethnic boundaries. She traces how, at select moments in history, perceptions of sex difference were translated into complex and mutable patterns for differentiating women and men. How those distinctions were drawn and redrawn affected the course of American history more generally. Ryan recounts the construction of a modern gender regime that sharply divided male from female and created modes of exclusion and inequity. The divide between male and female blurred in the twentieth century, as women entered the public domain, massed in the labor force, and revolutionized private life. This transformation in gender history serves as a backdrop for seven chronological chapters, each of which presents a different problem in American history as a quandary of sex. Ryan's bold analysis raises the possibility that perhaps, if understood in their variety and mutability, the differences of sex might lose the sting of inequality.

University of North Carolina Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ryan, Mary P.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ryan, Mary P.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ryan, Mary P.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century

Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century

Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern History)

Womanhood in America, from colonial times to the present

Womanhood in America: From colonial times to the present

Womanhood in America: From colonial times to the present

Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present

Sex and Class in Women's History (HISTORY WORKSHOP SERIES)

Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (The Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History, 16)

Mysteries of Sex: Tracing Women and Men through American History