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WORK TITLE: Forgotten Men and Fallen Women
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Middlebury
STATE: VT
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/amst/faculty/node/21891 * https://networks.net
net.org/node/3119/reviews/104104/wilhelm-allen-forgotten-men-and-fallen-women-cultural-politics-new *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 25, 1965.
EDUCATION:Brown University, B.A., 1988; Yale University, M.A., Ph.D. 1996.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, educator, and writer. Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, assistant professor of American studies.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals.
SIDELIGHTS
Historian Holly Allen teaches a wide range of history courses revolving around her research, including U.S. cultural history and cultural studies, political culture and theories of citizenship, women’s and gender studies, the history of sexuality, and digital history. Much of Allen’s focus is on race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and disability. Allen majored in American civilization and Afro-American studies as an undergraduate and received her doctorate in American studies. She is a contributor to professional journals and periodicals, including articles about gender and Japanese-American internment and about the cultural politics of labor activism during the Gilded Age and World War II. Allen is also the author of Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives, which explores gendered narratives within the wide civic developments that occurred from the time of the Great Depression on through World War II.
The period covered by Allen was marked by significant transformations in the U.S. social, institutional, and political worlds. Allen examines the civic stories that American institutions, from government politicians and bureaucrats to journalists to Hollywoods moguls and filmmakers presented to Americans to help them face and understand a difficult time of significant social democratic reform. The narratives presented to the people ranged from government documents and social scientific case studies to various forms of popular media. They not only included discussions of national political power but also relationships among this power in terms of gender, race and sexuality.
In terms of women, Allen notes that conventional stories of manhood both minimized and ignored issues associated with women, such as women’s desire to enter the working world. This desire was typically portrayed as problematic in that it was presented as subverting the man’s role as the worker and financial handler, thus furthering the injury of men who, during the depression, could not find work. The narratives were not always supportive of men either. Allen points out that, during the New Deal era initiated by President Franklin Roosevelt, the most vulnerable of America’s male workforce were portrayed negatively. Often they were depicted as lazy and unwilling to take on the hard work to be the family’s provider. They were also portrayed as sexual deviants.
In her depiction of social and moral archetype, such as the forgotten man and the fallen woman, Allen points out officials and the media often focused on stories involving collective identity to help bring about popular support for the New Deal effort and then for support of World War II. Allen writes about how the New Deal policy makers used the Civilian Conservation Corps and other New Deal initiatives as a way to provide purpose to the youth and young workers of America. She also points out that this approach was also used during the war to control the U.S.-born Japanese American youth. “Here again, the restless and the transient found themselves stereotyped as comprehensively dangerous, deviant figures who were deserving of official inspection and harassment,” wrote Ben Keppel in the Journal of Southern History. Allen also writes about African Americans and Mexicans, especially their experiences during the New Deal era. Throughout Forgotten Men and Fallen Women, Allen places a special emphasis on how gender norms were used to provide a sense of stability in a rapidly changing social and political environment via a message of social conservatism.
Although he felt that Allen provided few new insights into the Japanese internment during World War II, H-Net Reviews: Humanities and Social Sciences Online contributor Chris Wilhelm praised Allen for her discussion of gender narratives used in New Deal politics. Wilhelm went on to write: Allen “convincingly shows how the New Deal used conservative and traditional ideas about gender to assuage American’s fears concerning the expansion of government power and new ideas about social citizenship and responsibility.” Journal of Southern History contributor Keppel remarked: “Allen brings much-needed illumination into unfamiliar corners of this otherwise well-traveled territory.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, October, 2015, J.P. Sanson, review of Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives, p. 305.
Journal of Southern History, August, 2016, Ben Keppel, review of Forgotten Men and Fallen Women, p. 712.
ONLINE
H-Net Reviews: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org/ (February 15, 2017), Chris Wilhelm, review of Forgotten Men and Fallen Women.
Middleburg College Web site, http://www.middlebury.edu/ (February 15, 2017), author faculty profile.
Holly Allen
Assistant Professor of American Studies
Email: hallen@middlebury.edu
Phone: 802.443.2042
Office Hours: Fall 2016: Monday 10:30-12:00, Thursday 1:00-2:30 and by appointment
Office Location: Axinn Center at Starr Library 245
Holly Allen teaches courses on U.S. cultural history and cultural studies, political culture and theories of citizenship, women’s and gender studies, the history of sexuality, and digital history. Race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and disability are also important categories of analysis in Allen’s teaching and research.
Allen received an M.A. and Ph. D. in American Studies from Yale University (1996). She also holds a B.A. in American Civilization and Afro-American Studies (1988) from Brown University.
Allen’s book, Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives, examines the interplay between widely-circulating gendered narratives and broader civic developments during the Great Depression and World War II. She has also published articles on gender and Japanese-American internment and on the cultural politics of labor activism during the Gilded Age and World War II.
Allen’s current project is a cultural history of gender, developmental disability, and institutional care in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Vermont.
Courses
Courses offered in the past four years.
▲ indicates offered in the current term
▹ indicates offered in the upcoming term[s]
AMST0102 - Politics, Media, Pop. Culture
AMST0224 - Race and Ethnicity in the US
AMST0230 / GSFS0230 - Gender Images in Pop Am Cult ▹
AMST0234 - American Consumer Culture
AMST0262 - Class, Culture, Representation ▹
AMST0400 - Theory and Method
AMST0500 - Independent Study ▲ ▹
AMST0705 - Senior Research Tutorial
AMST0710 - Honors Thesis ▲ ▹
AMST1007 - Designing a Field House Museum
FYSE1335 - Cold War Culture
Cold War Culture
“Without the Cold War, what’s the point of being American?” So asks Rabbit Angstrom, the main character in John Updike’s 1990 novel, Rabbit at Rest. In this course, we will examine the Cold War’s impact on American culture throughout the period 1945-1991, with a focus on art, literature, television, film, consumer culture, and politics. Texts will include Luce, The American Century; Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking; Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle; and Plath, The Bell Jar. Films will include The Thing from Another World!/, /Dr. Strangelove, and Terminator. 3 hrs. sem CW HIS NOR
Fall 2013
LC control no.: no2014129322
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Allen, Holly, 1965-
Birth date: 19651225
Field of activity: American studies
Fuller form of name
Holly Marie
Affiliation: Middlebury College
Found in: Forgotten men and fallen women, 2015: ECIP title page
(Holly Allen) data view (Allen, Holly M.; birth date,
December 25, 1965)
OCLC, September 30, 2014 (access point: Allen, Holly Marie;
usage: Holly Marie Allen)
Middlebury College WWW site, viewed September 30, 2014
(Holly Allen, Assistant Professor of American Studies;
Holly Allen teaches courses on U.S. cultural history and
cultural studies, political culture and theories of
citizenship, women's and gender studies, the history of
sexuality, and digital history; Ph. D. in American
Studies from Yale University (1996))
Associated language:
eng
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Here again, the restless and the transient found themselves stereotyped as comprehensively dangerous, deviant figures who were deserving of official inspection and harassment.
brings much-needed illumination into unfamiliar corners of this otherwise well-traveled territory.
Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives
Ben Keppel
Journal of Southern History. 82.3 (Aug. 2016): p712.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives. By Holly Allen. (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. [x], 257. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8014-5357-1.)
Over the last half-century, historians of the New Deal have come to a sophisticated understanding of the cultural politics of the 1930s. Whereas many of those who survived the Great Depression recalled the period as one defined by radical experimentation of all kinds, a new generation, those who had been children in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal America, looked back on the era with a stronger sense of continuity. Warren Susman and William E. Leuchtenburg were among the first to capture the introverted nature of Depression-era popular culture as people sought not to establish a new social order but to reestablish, as much as possible, the one that had crashed with the stock market in the fall of 1929. Following Leuchtenburg's and Susman's lead, scholars as different as Lawrence W. Levine, Lizabeth Cohen, and Alan Brinkley have, with great analytical acuity and historical imagination, helped us see how traditional and conservative themes in political culture and cultural politics blunted the reach of innovation and reform across American culture--whether in the iconography of daily life, in the administration of federal programs, or in the formulation of economic policies.
Holly Allen brings much-needed illumination into unfamiliar corners of this otherwise well-traveled territory. She does so in ways significant enough that they should alter how we view the entire vista. Allen's mission here is to recover and distill for us the '"civic stories'" through which Americans were encouraged by political leaders, popular journalists, Hollywood filmmakers, and New Deal bureaucrats, all of whom were the human faces of their era's social democratic reform, to understand and live through times of crisis (p. 3). In these "conventionalized" stories of "forgotten manhood," the struggles of women, when they were not ignored, were minimized (p. 35). Allen makes a very convincing case that, throughout popular culture and public life, the desire of women to work was presented as a problem because it added insult to their husbands' injury by replacing men as "'the controller of the family pocketbook'" (p. 37).
Even more compelling is Allen's effective demonstration of how the leaders of New Deal-era popular culture treated the physical and economic transience of the most vulnerable workers as sexual deviants with an inability or unwillingness to contribute the stout labor needed to be a breadwinner. Students of the New Deal will learn much from Allen about the masculinism of New Deal policy makers through her treatment of the Civilian Conservation Corps as a nation-building entity in two distinct contexts: as a way of saving the "boys on the loose" in a failed economy and as a model for the War Relocation Authority, which sought to contain the unruly Nisei youth (second-generation, U.S.-born Japanese Americans) whose Americanism could not be counted on (p. 70). Here again, the restless and the transient found themselves stereotyped as comprehensively dangerous, deviant figures who were deserving of official inspection and harassment.
By extending her analysis through wartime mobilization and the relocation of Japanese Americans and their relatives, Holly Allen reminds us of something else that we dare not forget: preexisting structures of harassment and surveillance did not go into remission during these years of depression and war, only to reemerge in the more conservative 1940s and 1950s; such nationalism is always at hand to be mobilized in the name of the "national interest."
BEN KEPPEL
University of Oklahoma
Keppel, Ben
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Keppel, Ben. "Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 3, 2016, p. 712+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460447803&it=r&asid=f63f03ebfeef78922e87c8ae3b945b08. Accessed 19 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460447803
Allen, Holly. Forgotten men and fallen women: the cultural politics of new deal narratives
J.P. Sanson
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.2 (Oct. 2015): p305.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Allen, Holly. Forgotten men and fallen women: the cultural politics of New Deal narratives. Cornell, 2015. 257p index afp ISBN 9780801453571 cloth, $45.00
53-0926
E806
2014-39031
CIP
As President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal transformed the relationship between the American people and their government in the effort to combat economic devastation during the Great Depression, Americans adjusted first to the realities of economic want and then to the extraordinary expansion of federal power. Allen (American studies, Middlebury College) argues that politicians and ordinary Americans developed numerous civic stories to help them understand the forces that changed their civic ideals fundamentally. Use of these images helped align traditional beliefs with the emergent welfare state, even as federal relief programs undermined familiar foundations rooted in states, communities, and the male-dominated family. Specifically, the study focuses on the New Deal agencies Federal Emergency Relief Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and Works Progress Administration. During the emergency created by WWII, the federal government continued to use these stories to shape its policies and programs, so Allen also focuses on the Office of Civilian Defense and the War Relocation Authority to explain how gender, racial, and sexual differences affected the shared experience of US citizenship. Sources include appropriate secondary works as well as contemporary articles and archived records. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--J. P. Sanson, Louisiana State University at Alexandria
Sanson, J.P.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sanson, J.P. "Allen, Holly. Forgotten men and fallen women: the cultural politics of new deal narratives." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2015, p. 305. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA431198513&it=r&asid=2ca39d750b3fac2dbffb169ae9676715. Accessed 19 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A431198513
She convincingly shows how the New Deal used conservative and traditional ideas about gender to assuage American’s fears concerning the expansion of government power and new ideas about social citizenship and responsibility.
Wilhelm on Allen, 'Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives'
Author:
Holly Allen
Reviewer:
Chris Wilhelm
Holly Allen. Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. 272 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8014-5357-1.
Reviewed by Chris Wilhelm (College of Coastal Georgia)
Published on H-Florida (December, 2015)
Commissioned by Jeanine A. Clark Bremer
Holly Allen’s Forgotten Men and Fallen Women offers valuable insights into the gender narratives used by the Roosevelt administration during the New Deal and World War II. This book argues that administration officials created and responded to a variety of “civic stories” and genres of civic stories to justify and support New Deal government actions (p. 3). Many of these stories revolved around conventional gender norms, but Allen also pays attention to race, and does a good job examining how African Americans’ experiences in the New Deal were characterized by popular ideas about gender and race. Allen also attempts, with less success, to incorporate the experiences of Mexican Americans into her work, but often these mentions of the Mexican-American experience during the New Deal are unexplored and superficial. Lastly, Allen examines the experiences of Japanese Americans during WWII in terms of American ideas about race and gender.
Allen’s incisive analysis of the New Deal’s gender politics are the strength of this book. She convincingly shows how the New Deal used conservative and traditional ideas about gender to assuage American’s fears concerning the expansion of government power and new ideas about social citizenship and responsibility. Allen’s first four chapters examine traditional ideas about gender as found in narratives related to the forgotten man, social transients, young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and transgressive women. She shows how America’s embrace of these gender norms signaled stability in a period of rapid change. The social conservatism of the New Deal was thus used to win acceptance for the New Deal’s expansion.
Allen’s arguments are less convincing when she moves from the New Deal to World War II. The book’s last two chapters examine ideas about gender in the Office of Civilian Defense and ideas about race in the context of Japanese internment. Yet Allen’s analysis seriously understates the role of women in the war. She states that “American women of all races were largely excluded from wartime civic ideals,” yet Allen completely ignores women in the workplace and women in the military, and focuses exclusively on only one, somewhat minor wartime agency. Allen’s chapter on Japanese internment is well-worn territory and offers little new or novel.
The problems with both of these chapters relate to a larger problem with Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: the book often fails to connect to the relevant secondary historical literature on these topics. Readers looking for substantive footnotes that discuss the implications of Allen’s arguments on the historical literature will be severely disappointed. Although Allen makes excellent use of a wide variety of primary sources, the book is almost entirely lacking in references to other historical works, and the citations that do exist seem tacked on and are typically inadequate. For example, a footnote on women in the Works Progress Administration consists of only one citation: a 1998 review essay by Jacqueline Jones entitled “Race and Gender in Modern America.” These 209 pages of text only merit an addition 34 pages of endnotes, and the book does not contain a bibliography.
Despite these flaws, this book, particularly the first four chapters on the New Deal, offers valuable insights into the cultural conservativism and gender politics of the New Deal. Yet, these arguments could have been greatly enhanced by connecting them to existing historical debates over the conservativism of the New Deal, the historical literature pertaining to race and gender in the New Deal, and the examinations of the continuity between the New Deal and World War II. Allen fails to make those connections explicit, but still provides a great deal of insightful analysis pertaining to these topics.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=44967
Citation: Chris Wilhelm. Review of Allen, Holly, Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives. H-Florida, H-Net Reviews. December, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44967
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.