The Material Culture of Women's Accessories: Middle-class Performance, Race Formation and Feminine Display, 1830-1920
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the cultural meaning ascribed to feminine fashionable objects such as gloves, fans, parasols and vanity sets. I pay particular attention to issues of middle-class formation, the performance of gender, and the materiality of race, empire and colonialism. While these issues lie at the heart of British historiography, this project is written from a unique perspective which privileges cultural artifacts through material culture analysis. While the emergence of the middle class is typically studied as a masculine/public phenomenon, this project corrects the overemphasis on male activity by showing that middle-class women created a distinctive ‘look’ for their class via the consumption of specific goods and through participation in daily beauty rituals. Adding to these ideas, I argue that Victorian women performed a distinct type of femininity represented as passivity, asexuality, innocence, and leisure. By studying the repetitive gestures, poses and consumption practices of middle-class women, I show that certain corporeal acts helped to create Victorian femininity. This work also suggests that women participated in the British colonial project by consuming objects that were represented in the Victorian imagination as imperial spoils. As such, I argue that imperialism penetrated the everyday lives of Britons through several everyday objects. Empire building also created anxieties surrounding questions of race. Women’s accessories, such as gloves and parasols, helped British women to maintain their whiteness, an important way of distinguishing the ‘civilized’ Britons from the ‘uncivilized’ tanned colonial peoples. Overall this project showed that within the everyday objects consumed by women we can identify the anxieties, hopes and dreams of Victorians.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".