This thesis investigates the meanings and representations of respectability in Pakeha women's lives in nineteenth-century Lyttelton, New Zealand. Respectability was a form of gendered behaviour connected to ideals of appropriate femininity and women's proper place. It was one of the values on which Lyttelton was founded and respectable women had an important role from the beginning as agents of civilization. However, respectability was not solely a behavioural norm imposed on women and an examination of the forms of respectability in this growing colonial town reveals that women were active agents negotiating and contributing to definitions of respectability. The forms of respectability in Lyttelton were related to the town's character as a busy port, and the associated disorder contributed to divisions between respectable and unrespectable spaces. Women understood and represented respectability in different ways depending on their class position, social status, family responsibilities and involvement in the workforce. Not all women were able to conform to dominant norms of respectability, and others demonstrated an ambivalent commitment to ideals of respectable behaviour. The discourses of respectability in Lyttelton were complex and diverse, illustrating the anxieties and tensions of a migrant community.

Since 1998 there has been a dramatic increase in the numbers of paid, additional, support staff, employed in Scottish primary schools as successive Scottish governments have attempted to raise standards by freeing teachers from administrative and ‘housekeeping’ duties and allowing them to teach. Of these additional staff, currently just over 4000 are classroom assistants, with a remit to provide general class learning and teaching support, including social inclusion and pupil discipline, under the direction of a fully registered teacher. Classroom assistants in Scotland are almost exclusively White women, typically aged 31-50, but concentrated in the 41-50 age range, partnered and with children of school age. These women exist on the margins of school hierarchies as witnessed by short-term contracts, low pay, limited access to formal training and low status. Nevertheless, many classroom assistants seem willing to accept poor working conditions as a trade off for family friendly working hours. Given these working conditions the study sought to consider several key questions: • Why are classroom assistants willing to undertake work that has low status, low pay and insecurity? • How do classroom assistants create and maintain a sense of integrity and commitment to their work? • How do classroom assistants create and sustain positive social and professional identities in this context? • Why do classroom assistants appear to be complicit, to some extent, in their own oppression? To achieve this the study used a critical ethnographic methods to explore the lived experiences of 13 classroom assistants as they supported pupils in two Scottish primary schools. The key insights were firstly that a Bourdieuian account of class, combined with an understanding of patriarchy, provided an explanation of these women’s labour market decisions. In addition, ‘preference theory’, was rejected in favour of a range of constraints, particularly having children and the associated childcare costs, that were considered much more important factors. Secondly, classroom assistants performed versions of ‘emphasised femininity’ as part of their identity as ‘classroom assistants’. Thirdly, the notion of ‘respectability’ was a crucial analytical tool in explaining not only these women’s constant struggle for recognition, but also their continuing oppression. And finally, classroom assistants told a particular type of talk, the ‘atrocity story’, which contributed to the social production of occupational boundaries. The study concluded that from their position of insecure and poorly paid employment, classroom assistants justified and reconciled their position by drawing on talk of moral superiority associated with mothering and caring to construct and perform identities that created the spaces and boundaries from which they positioned themselves as superior to both parents and teachers. As a result they were able to negotiate their roles within the micro-political world of the school.

Using ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews, this project explores the extent to which race, class, and gender shape the socialization that Black women receive about their emotions and attitudes in a college bridge program. It unpacks the ways that dominant emotion cultures can inform the emotional socialization practices of a college bridge program in ways that resist and reproduce larger cultural narratives about Black women. To operationalize this emotional socialization, I introduce a concept called emotional respectability, which suggests that emotional reactions and demeanor must always align with the larger emotion cultures and goals of institutions such as family and education. The data presented in this project suggests that through vehicles of family, emotional respectability, and discipline, the program provides academic preparation alongside a more invisible curriculum related to emotional socialization which encourages the resistance and reproduction of larger cultural narratives about Black women, especially with regard to emotion.

Space is socially constructed, reflecting and reinforcing the nature of gender relations in society. This is evident in nineteenth century architecture, particularly domestic architecture, where space was structured around the ideology of respectability. Within the discipline of interior architecture, this study investigates the relationship between the Victorian (1837-1901) ideology of respectability and the gendering of domestic space. The problem was investigated by means of a literature review; thereafter, a set of criteria derived from the literature were applied in a critical analysis of selected examples of Victorian domestic architecture, interior space and the decoration thereof. The findings indicated that Victorian domestic architecture embodied a male/female dichotomy in which men owned and ‘ruled’ the home/house; while women maintained it. Although Victorian ideology was fissured and developed unevenly, it still functioned in terms of the ideal of respectability which was embedded and demonstrated in domestic space. / Dissertation (MInt)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Architecture / unrestricted

This thesis studies the intertwinement of economy and emotions within the context of modernity. By investigating how work and romantic love interact in fiction films from the period 1930 to 1955, I seek to shed light on how two cultural practices that might normally be assumed to belong to separate dimensions of life – the economic and the emotional – are actually closely connected to each other. The examination of these interactions allows a better understanding of the process of modernisation, as well as the ways in which cultural differences matter in two national contexts: Sweden and Mexico. The thesis is structured into three overarching dimensions of analysis: space, gender and class. I seek to explain the relationship between work and romantic love within these dimensions using the concepts of emotional capital, respectability and worthiness. The results highlight the differences between the national cases. For example, films depicting the Swedish countryside represent both modern and non-modern domestic spaces when judged in terms of their configuration and appearance; however, certain traits of rural characters such as solidarity, closeness to nature and equality transcend into modern society and guide work and romantic love practices. In Mexico, the countryside is depicted at the core of national identity; however, this space is characterised by its non-modern nature. The countryside, according to films, must be reformed by notions of science and rationality. Film narratives show that through romantic love, the man modernises the non-modern woman. The gender analysis revealed that Swedish films endorse the Housewife Contract in Swedish society during this period. In Mexican films, a similar contract is found in the discourse of the modern nation but films endorse a broader interpretation. Mexican films show that whilst the patriarchal organisation of society is expected to loosen its grip in a modern society, a stable gender structure is desirable. The class analysis reveals that upward mobility is a desirable outcome in Swedish film stories. Women attain it through love while men do so through work. However, upward mobility is unacceptable in Mexican films; they instead endorse class permanence.

What do Black Lives Matter and Freaknik have in common? In this paper, I will argue that moments of Black Lives Matter in Atlanta exhibited refusals and undoings of respectability politics through the method of the ratchet. I define the ratchet as moments of non-normative embodiment and political possibility that refuse statist and Eurocentric norms through slippage of the self and the engagement of Black queer sexual politics. Freaknik is foregrounded as a ripe space for excavating such a display of the politically ratchet in Atlanta. I will look at a few different moments in the Black Lives Matter movement in the city of Atlanta and read each for currents of ratchetness and respectability, highlighting the importance of the ratchet in political imagination and possibility.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate if women from the Western world joined ISIS in search of respectability. Beverly Skegg’s (1997) theory of respectability was used as the theoretical framework and as a lens to shape the result. The study collected information on women from the Western world known to have joined the Islamic State and then analyzed them to see if it was respectability they were searching for. Skeggs theory will be further explained in the theory chapter. This thesis is looking at articles, interviews, and YouTube clips of women who have joined ISIS this thesis will determine if it was because of respectability or not. The findings were relevant and useful because the interviews and articles went into depth on why Western women joined ISIS. The result and conclusion for this study are that Western women join ISIS in search of respectability.

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This study explores the oppression faced by 18th-century labouring-class women through poetry and intersectionality. By employing Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality and Beverly Skeggs' theory of respectability, it examines how gender and class intertwine to create unique challenges. Analysing the lives and works of non-canonized women poets, the research unveils enduring patterns of overlapping oppressions, highlighting the significance of intersectionality in understanding women's experiences. This study offers fresh insights into their struggles, contributing to both literary analysis and women's studies.

In Song of Solomon, published during a transitional moment in the history of U.S. feminism, Toni Morrison portrays the destructive forces of hegemonic female beauty standards, materialism, and consumerism in a Midwestern African-American community from the 1930s to the 1960s. She reveals a hierarchy in which men define standards of beauty and respectability that enforce white bourgeois ideals. Focusing on five female characters, this thesis examines this hierarchy; the agents who maintain it; and the ways in which it affects female characters who accept and/or reject it. While one of the characters, Hagar, perishes in her attempt to live up to normative beauty standards, her cousin Corinthians is liberated when she leaves her oppressive father and moves in with a working class male partner. Morrison thus creates a viable alternative to strict adherence to materialist values, while representing the destructive force of oppressive beauty norms and standards of respectability.