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E-book
Author Findlay, Eileen, author.

Title Imposing decency : the politics of sexuality and race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920 / Eileen J. Suárez Findlay
Published Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1999

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 316 pages) : illustrations
Series American encounters/global interactions
American encounters/global interactions.
Contents Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Respectable Ponce : deciphering the codes of power, 1855-1898 -- Motherhood, marriage, and morality : male liberals and bourgeois feminists, 1873-1898 -- Decent men and unruly women : prostitution in Ponce, 1890-1900 -- Marriage and divorce in the formation of the new colonial order, 1898-1910 -- Slavery, sexuality, and the early labor movement, 1900-1917 -- Saving democracy : debating prostitution during World War I -- Conclusion -- Abbreviations and acronyms
Summary Feminists, socialists, Afro-Puerto Rican activists, and elite politicians join laundresses, prostitutes, and dissatisfied wives in populating the pages of Imposing Decency. Through her analyses of Puerto Rican anti-prostitution campaigns, attempts at reforming marriage, and working-class ideas about free love, Eileen J. Suárez Findlay exposes the race-related double standards of sexual norms and practices in Puerto Rico between 1870 and 1920, the period that witnessed Puerto Rico's shift from Spanish to U.S. colonialism.In showing how political projects and alliances in Puerto Rico were affected by racially contingent definitions of "decency" and "disreputability," Findlay argues that attempts at moral reform and the state's repression of "sexually dangerous" women were weapons used in batttles between elite and popular, American and Puerto Rican, and black and white. Based on a thorough analysis of popular and elite discourses found in both literature and official archives, Findlay contends that racialized sexual norms and practices were consistently a central component in the construction of social and political orders. The campaigns she analyzes include an attempt at moral reform by elite male liberals and a movement designed to enhance the family and cleanse urban space that ultimately translated into repression against symbollically darkened prostitutes. Findlay also explores how U.S. officials strove to construct a new colonial order by legalizing divorce and how feminist, labor, and Afro-Puerto Rican political demands escalated after World War I, often focusing on the rehabilitation and defense of prostitutes.Imposing Decency forces us to rethink previous interpretations of political chronologies as well as reigning conceptualizations of both liberalism and the early working-class in Puerto Rico. Her work will appeal to scholars with an interest in Puerto Rican or Latin American studies, sexuality and national identity, women in Latin America, and general women's studies
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-308) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
English
Print version record
digitized 2011 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Subject Prostitution -- Government policy -- Puerto Rico -- History
POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Public Policy -- Cultural Policy.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropology -- Cultural.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Popular Culture.
POLITICAL SCIENCE -- General.
Colonization
Moral conditions
Prostitution -- Government policy
Race relations
Social policy
Rassenpolitik
Sexualpolitik
Prostitutie.
Politieke aspecten.
Rassenverhoudingen.
Geschichte 1870-1920.
SUBJECT Puerto Rico -- Moral conditions
Puerto Rico -- Race relations
Puerto Rico -- Social policy
Puerto Rico -- Colonization
Subject Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780822397014
0822397013