From Desegregation to Desexigration in Richmond, Virginia, 1954-1973
.......................................................................................................v Introduction...................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Designing Dignity in the Dress ways of Downtown Richmond..............17 Chapter Two: Cashing in On Chivalry: Dignity, Desegregation, and the Demarcation of Space in the Thalhimer Boycott..........................................49 Chapter Three: Revolutionizing Retail & the Region: The Formation of Multiracial Female Coalitions in Downtown Richmond.................................74 Chapter Four: Feminism in Fashion: The Foothold of Personal Politics in Richmond, Virginia...............................................................................94 Conclusion.................................................................................................106 Bibliography...............................................................................................109
A “New Frontier” for Women: The Public Policy of the Kennedy Administration
In December 1961, more than four years before the emergence of a vigorous wave of feminism, President John F. Kennedy established the President's Commission on the Status of Women. The creation of the commission, which one newspaper hailed as the launching of a "distaff 'Fair Deal,' " denoted a fundamental shift in federal policy, expressed also in the enactment of equal pay legislation and the prohibition of discrimination against women in the federal civil service.' These steps, taken without the impetus of either a widespread feminist movement or a national emergency, marked the federal government's assumption of a new responsibility with regard to equal treatment for women in the labor force. How Kennedy came to appoint such a commission, why the departure in policy took place, and what consequences resulted from the change constitute the subjects of this essay. Throughout the period 1945 to 1960, government agencies, women's organizations, educators, and journalists expressed concern about proper roles for women. Immediately after the war, those who spoke for working women concentrated on the need to "protect" women in the labor force, including their right to jobs, while providing employment for returning service personnel. Reinstitution of "labor standards" or protective labor laws and the attempt to persuade women to leave their "masculine" jobs for more "feminine" ones in the burgeoning clerical and service occupations served both purposes, and both were attempted.2 A desire to resume "normal" family
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.