Antifeminism, Anti-Blackness, and Anti-Oldness

The Intersectional Aesthetics of Aging in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Bibliographic Data

ID2228841
AuthorsCorinne T Field (University of Virginia, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume47
Issue4
Pages843-883
Publication date2022-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSigns: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/718865
OpenAlexW4282943940
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited42

When feminists in the antebellum United States organized to end slavery and demand their rights, they immediately faced critics who ridiculed them as ugly old maids, wrinkled old ladies, and superannuated old ex-slaves. “Old” in this sense was not the same as old age but rather an aesthetic judgment wielded by antifeminist and anti-Black journalists, caricaturists, and politicians to suggest that women speaking in public looked unattractive, ridiculous, or pitiful and should therefore be dismissed without engaging their ideas or political strategies. To gain a public hearing, feminists needed to shift how Americans saw mature women, but the very plasticity of the term “old” did more to divide women from each other than to create a unified age group. Images of female oldness remained keyed to middle-class marriage, racial difference, and chronological age in ways that divided old maids from married matrons, white women from Black women, and middle-aged women from those over sixty. Moving beyond a simplistic analysis of ageism, defined as prejudice by one age group toward another, this article develops an intersectional approach to analyzing the gendered and racialized aesthetics of oldness. By examining Anglo-American visual culture from the 1830s to the 1890s through the analytic of age, I demonstrate how antifeminist and anti-Black representations of female oldness created distortions in public recognition and led some women to internalize negative stereotypes with which abolitionists and feminists had to contend in order to enter politics

Aesthetics · Art · Black women · Literature · Political science · Politics · Prejudice (legal term) · Ridiculous · Sociology · White (mutation) · Architecture, Design, and Social History · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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