dc.contributor.advisor | Greer, Jane, 1964- | eng |
dc.contributor.author | Allred, Kristen | eng |
dc.coverage.spatial | Maryland -- Baltimore | eng |
dc.coverage.temporal | 19th century | eng |
dc.coverage.temporal | 20th century | eng |
dc.date.issued | 2013 | eng |
dc.description.abstract | Questions of American female intellectual and social identity were hotly debated
at the turn of the 20th century, most publically within urban centers of the eastern
United States. Focusing on the 1899 writings of a single 18-year-old Baltimore
girl, this essay provides exegesis on the voice of the writer through a review of
both her words and her penmanship. The purpose of this analysis is to consider
how the conflicting historical archetypes of the New Woman and the Gibson Girl
were explored and negotiated through a careful process of individual identity
construction. The Baltimore setting is particularly crucial to this undertaking
as this city offered the location for an experiment in female academic rigorousness
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Bryn Mawr School for Girls,
a feeder school for the university with the same name, was one of the first and
most notable female college prep schools in the country. Competing for clientele
against traditional finishing schools, Bryn Mawr promoted itself by negating the
legitimacy of the education provided by its rivals. A student at the rival finishing
school Southern Home School for Girls, Alice Lloyd Pitts uses the pages of her
high school yearbook as a mouthpiece to simultaneously refute these attacks and
identify herself and her classmates as intellectually superior beings, whose autonomy
and wit as New Women is only surpassed by their Gibson Girlish beauty
and feminine grace. | eng |
dc.identifier.citation | Lucerna, Volume 8, Number 1, pages 80-90 | eng |
dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10355/44945 | eng |
dc.publisher | University of Missouri--Kansas City | eng |
dc.title | The Literary Achievements of Alice Lloyd Pitts : Assumptions of Power through Rhetorical Identity Constructions | eng |
dc.type | Article | eng |