Taking a series of popular jokes about fictitious “anti-societies” as its point of departure, this article explores the responses to the transformation of reform in the decade between 1825 and 1835... Show moreTaking a series of popular jokes about fictitious “anti-societies” as its point of departure, this article explores the responses to the transformation of reform in the decade between 1825 and 1835 and places them in the context of social and political change brought about by Jacksonian democracy. Rooted in the tradition of the moral reform society, through specialization of its aims, the anti-society seemed to become a democratic pendant of older reform societies and was thought to play a more divisive role in local communities. Critics denounced the new societies for their prescriptive character, the prominent role women played, and the “spirit of opposition” they triggered. Contemporaries increasingly understood the evolution of reform culture from the relatively harmonious religious and moral reform societies of the Benevolent Empire of the first quarter of the 19th century to the oppositional and highly contested organizations of radical antislavery and temperance of the 1830s as a serious threat to the social order and the future of the United States. Using the Benign Violation Theory of Humor, this article argues that the American reaction to anti-societies suggests that while they were broadly perceived as a threat to the social order from the late 1820s on, this threat was at first understood to be benign, and thus could be laughed off, while from 1833 on, anti-societies were increasingly regarded as a destructive force, and provoked substantial fears that could justify violent responses as an alternative way to reinforce the “normal” order of things. Show less
Drift en koers (Passion and control) is the first scientific biography on the Dutch socialist, sociologist and feminist Hilda Verwey-Jonker (1908-2004). She is best known for the introduction of... Show moreDrift en koers (Passion and control) is the first scientific biography on the Dutch socialist, sociologist and feminist Hilda Verwey-Jonker (1908-2004). She is best known for the introduction of the word allochtonen (foreigner/alien) in the Dutch discourse and has very been influential in improving the (legal) status of especially married women. The questions her autobiography provoke were the starting point of my research. I present the results of my investigations into her lives as a passionate socialist, Protestant, intellectual, governor, expert in the field of refugee and migrant issues, ‘grey panther’ and mother of four children in fourteen chapters and fifty images. In the epilogue I present answers to the questions Verwey-Jonkers memoires raise and connect them with the notion that women are not supposed to fight in public. I thus present a new explanation for the very slow entry of women into Dutch parliamentary politics Show less
