Weighed upon a scale: African -American women, class and consumer culture in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., 1880--1950.

This dissertation brings a different geographic focus, and a needed racial focus as well, to a burgeoning area of interdisciplinary scholarship that has until very recently investigated only the experiences of working-class and middle-class whites in the northeastern states. I have extended scholarly interest in the topic of consumer culture to the South, and by doing so, also helped to narrate an even more complicated vision of southern history and of African American history in the twentieth-century. My dissertation focuses on the history of people of color in New Orleans. I believe that the domestic activities and unique cultural beliefs of the Afro-Creole society in the period are central to an accurate understanding of a history of consumption and consumer culture, and I believe my project is original and will be an important contribution not only to the history of New Orleans, but also to the history of the region and the nation. I use the activist and literary careers and published short stories of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, to examine the construction of a mixed-race, female, middle class identity within the contradictions of late Victorian society and modernist transformations of American society in the twentieth century. The study of Dunbar-Nelson is complemented and expanded by an analysis of Mary Church Terrell's autobiography, and a reading of the diary of a lesser-known individual who was a teacher at Straight University named Nellie DeSpelder. I also examine the construction of black female sexuality through an exploration of prostitution in Storyville, the red-light district in New Orleans, and through an examination of photographs by Ernst Bellocq representing the women of Storyville. This work achieves a thoughtful, interdisciplinary application of contemporary theories about representations of the body, domesticity and courtship as historical constructions, the growth of consumer culture, and the role of consumer capitalism as a force for changes in gendered power relationships and the nature of racial segregation.PhDAmerican historyBiographiesBlack historySocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123498/2/3079550.pd