This chapter focuses on the ways in which English infantrymen understood duty and how their perceptions of their military role drew both on military and civilian culture. It underlines the differences between officers’ and other ranks’ understanding of their obligations. The army itself defined duty, like morale, as a set of ‘moral’ criteria. Officers’ duties were defined in their commissions and the King’s Regulations; their duty, at least to their men, was of an infinite nature. In contrast, the rank-and-file’s ‘contract’ with the military was finite and secular. In 1914, regulars viewed their job with a clinical and professional eye. However, for reservists and the civilian soldiers that followed them, the idea of ‘doing one’s bit’ came to dominate their perception of duty. Importantly, though, the cultural pressure of ‘respectability’ (drawn from both the military and civil society) informed their rationalisation of service. ‘Military cultures’ were also influential, particularly those of cheerfulness and obedience, which informed men’s actions, attitudes, and performance. What is more, the need to maintain ‘good character’ also exerted its own pressures. Men’s wartime record would influence their prospects once peace returned. Significant, too, was the soldiers’ perceived duty to England. After all, they were the defenders of the homeland.

The genteel tradition, inspired by British essayists, thrived in the United States in the early twentieth century up until the 1930s. George Santayana coined the term in 1911 to describe a group of New England intellectuals who, through their essays, acted as cultural gatekeepers, defining the standards of moral behavior and the rules of good literature. This chapter traces a genealogy between European genteel essayists and their American counterparts, focusing particularly authors such as Charles S. Brooks, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Louise Imogen Guiney, Gail Hamilton, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Agnes Repplier, George William Curtis, Donald Grant Mitchell, and Charles Dudley Warner. Much of the genteel essayists’ privileged Anglo, upper-middle-class, Christian values and sought to defend "high culture" against its perceived enemies: industrialism, immigration, capitalism, and class polarization. The chapter closes with a presentation of Black genteel essayistic writing and reflects on how the genteel tradition should be understood today, as a more critical eye is turned toward writers of the past whose ideals do not align with contemporary social and political sensibilities.

Chapter 2 explores Afro-Cuban responses to stereotypes that connected blackness, dirtiness, and servitude. Using black newspapers and the legal petitions of black women in Santiago de Cuba, the chapter examines the tension between “racial uplift” – the notion that African-descended people could prove their worthiness as citizens by behaving “respectably” – and the lived realities of many black Cuban women. The chapter uses legal petitions from eastern Cuba to show how African-descended domestic workers advocated for themselves to the new national government. African-descended Cubans of the middle classes tended not to discuss the problems of their working-class counterparts, resulting in an almost complete absence of discussion of domestic service or domestic servants in black newspapers or magazines. Chapter 2 offers a pluralistic perspective on blackness in twentieth-century Cuba, showing the connections between and divisions among people in the same racial group.

From the very beginning of the transatlantic slave trade and the rise of racial hierarchies, people of African descent advocated for particular forms of conduct and assimilation as a means to alleviate their oppression. As such, respectability rhetoric – discussions about Black African character and comportment – appear in the earliest literature written by and about Black Africans in the Americas. These discussions about respectability evolved over time and were shaped by sociopolitical phenomena such as European expansion into the Americas and invasive colonization, the Enlightenment Movement, the Revolutionary War, the Great Awakening, and developing racial ideologies. What is more, a preoccupation with respectability among Black Africans led to transformations in the Black life writings and poetry that first emerged in the eighteenth century and evolved into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter examines the extent to which respectability as an idea and coping strategy fueled transitions in the earliest African American literature.

This chapter presents the book’s framework and overall argument. It also describes the book's implications for the field of social movement studies and for the understanding of the consequences of neoliberal globalization. In addition, it includes a brief description of the case of study, an outline of the project’s methodology, and an overview of the chapters ahead.

Often relegated to a parallel narrative in Frederick Douglass’s biography, family life played an integral role in his political life. He and his first wife, Anna Murray, formed a partnership defying their upbringing as a slave and as a free woman surrounded by slavery. They implicitly claimed citizenship by demanding the integrity and privacy of their free family, contradicting depictions of African Americans in popular culture and contemporary race science. By doing so, they politicized their household as much as when they provided a haven for militants, the self-emancipated, or extended kin in need. Anna and their daughter, Rosetta, navigated roles of domesticity and activism by serving the movement through support of Douglass, but Rosetta especially endured the conflicts between the patriarchal family and women’s rights ideology endorsed by her father. In his widowhood, Douglass further challenged racial definitions of family by marrying a white woman, Helen Pitts.

Brigitte Fielder’s “Radical Respectability and African American Women’s Reconstruction Fiction” begins with the serialization of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Sowing and Reaping and then considers additional work by Harper and Julia C. Collins in exploring tensions between radical anti-racism and what has become known as “respectability politics.” Tracing contemporary assumptions about respectability and its limitations in reverse chronology, Fielder asserts that African American women’s Reconstruction fiction did not simply embrace the politics and processes of respectability but often refused respectability’s directionality toward outward approval. Examining concepts of self-respect and self-interest, the chapter highlights moments when texts refuse to prioritize white and/or male characters over Black women’s perspectives – a radical deviation from the usual politics of the respectable. Fielder thus locates the roots of respectability’s critique as more fully present and available to African American women writers of the late nineteenth century than most critics have acknowledged.

When Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins wrote and published her serial novel Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Caste Prejudice in the Colored American Magazine from 1901 to 1902, African Americans’ struggle for sociopolitical recognition seemed reflected in two images: Booker T. Washington’s White House dinner and lynching postcards. The political implications of the Washington visit and the lynching epidemic appear to be squarely at odds with one another, yet Hopkins, a former singer and actress, editor, and novelist, proposes in Hagar’s Daughter that an important connection binds them: a politics of performance. Like many writers of her time, Hopkins moved away from realism. However, she did not do so to undertake determinism as an explanation for African American evolution or devolution. Instead, Hopkins turned toward the concept of performance to interrogate American epistemologies of sociopolitical progress.

The previous chapter showed how the Solidarity Movement sought to declass its trade union past in favour of a historical and ideological narrative emphasising Afrikaner cultural unity and the politics of race. Yet profoundly classist attitudes, stereotypes, and prejudice, which contradicted the Movement’s official framing, persisted among its leadership. This chapter uncovers these sub-narratives. It argues that they reveal the discursive labour and strategic contradictions deployed by the Movement’s executives to manage the working-class roots of their organisation and reformulate working-class identity in such a manner as to serve the new social alliance their Movement represents, and to use it as a vehicle for advancing ethnic and racial interests in the wake of the demise of the racial state. This included the leadership’s deployment of class distinctions in terms of education, respectability, political attitudes, and morality to legitimise their own position and agenda. These findings attest to the persistent presence of deep class-based prejudice and tensions within the white population, begging a revision of existing scholarship on post-apartheid Afrikaner identity construction and homogeneous white subjectivities.

This chapter explores social morality on the home front focusing on the commentary about the public behaviour of soldiers’ wives, anxiety about a supposed increase in incidences of female drunkenness, and concern about prostitution and the spread of venereal disease. It tracks the number of wartime arrests of women for drunkenness and child neglect. The chapter argues that the hostility to separation women transcended the nationalist movement, and that while there were many incidences of soldiers’ wives arrested for drunken behaviour, the rhetoric exaggerated the reality with total convictions for drunkenness declining in wartime Ireland after the first year of the war.The chapter further explores concern with sexual immorality in wartime, focusing on venereal disease and illegitimate births. It also examines the women’s patrols established to limit the public interaction between working-class women and the soldiers. The chapter concludes that the public behaviour of working-class women in Ireland altered little as a consequence of the war, but there was nevertheless greater censure of problems evident before 1914. While the separation allowances brought women greater control over their domestic spaces, the surveillance of state and society confined women to narrowly defined codes of behaviour.

Scholars writing about Gilbert and Sullivan prefer ‘Savoy Operas’ to ‘operettas’, taking their lead from history and often hoping to place these shows on a par with more highly regarded comic operas. Whatever one calls them, they provide plenty of interest for musicologists working on operetta, and the status anxiety surrounding them is especially revealing. An opening section on their history shows that concerns over respectability lay behind every aspect of the way the shows were created and marketed, and formed the background to changing perceptions of the two creators. New critical attention is given here to the continued entanglement of ethical and aesthetic concerns in scholarly writing on composer and librettist. The second section addresses distinctive features of the content, in particular Gilbert’s legal influences and stagecraft, and Sullivan’s musical deadpanning. Anxiety appears again over the quotations and references in both the music and text, but this can be understood as a fundamental part of the audience experience, closely tied to the creation of class identity. Finally, a discussion of modern Gilbert and Sullivan performances and enthusiast communities serves as a springboard for considering issues of politics in staging and performance and points the way to possible left-wing interpretations.