The Rise to Respectability documents the history of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) and examines its cultural and religious impact on African Americans and on the history of the South. It explores the ways in which Charles Harrison Mason, the son of slaves and founder of COGIC, embraced a Pentecostal faith that celebrated the charismatic forms of religious expression that many blacks had come to view as outdated, unsophisticated, and embarrassing. While examining the intersection of race, religion, and class, The Rise to Respectability details how the denomination dealt with the stringent standard of bourgeois behavior imposed on churchgoers as they moved from southern rural areas into the urban centers in both the South and North. Rooted in the hardships of slavery and coming of age during Jim Crow, COGIC’s story is more than a religious debate. Rather, this book sees the history of the church as interwoven with the Great Migration, class tension, racial animosity, and the struggle for modernity—all representative parts of the African American experience.

This study of the working classes of York in the late Victorian period places respectability at the heart of the interpretation of working-class culture, drawing attention to its distinctive role within working-class daily life while eschewing a class-based analysis. Through an investigation of workers’ actions, choice-making and personal testimony, and using a wide range of textual and non-textual sources, a picture is produced of what it meant to be respectable in working-class communities and respectability’s role in personal and community identity formation. Not only is the importance of gender-based notions of the male breadwinner and female homemaker explored, but fresh light is cast on how respectability was engaged with and negotiated in everyday contexts. Respectability is shown to be a dynamic and culturally creative process with workers building their identities within the confines of “structural” constraints, including street and neighbourhood based mores and institutions, but with a measure of self-generated cultural, social and organisational space. Far from respectability being a function of socio-economic differentiation, even the poorest are shown to have aspired to join self-help organisations and become worthy citizens. Crucially, “working-class respectability” is shown to have been moral and Christian in character—underpinned by a form of diffusive Christianity that was robust and vital rather than some kind of legacy cultural and religious phenomenon. Although different attributes of respectability could be prioritised within working-class circles, respectability is seen as a distinctive and essentially pan-class culture centred on a set of universal values which distinguished and defined the respectable citizen and separated him from imagined or real rough “Others.” This study will appeal to readers interested in social and cultural history, gender studies and material culture. York inhabitants are given their own voice through hitherto unpublished, as well as published, oral and written testimony. Worker and family attitudes are analysed in the everyday contexts of work, home, neighbourhood and leisure, and as part of the wide-ranging discussion, attention is paid to the cultural significance of what working people ate and wore, and what goods they bought to furnish their often very modest homes. The emphasis throughout is on a “grass-roots” analysis, showing clearly how and why respectability answered the needs and aspirations of most ordinary Victorian and Edwardian workers and their families.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of African Americans arrived at Detroit's Michigan Central Station, part of the Great Migration of blacks who left the South seeking improved economic and political conditions in the urban North. The most visible of these migrants have been the male industrial workers who labored on the city's automobile assembly lines. African American women have largely been absent from traditional narratives of the Great Migration because they were excluded from industrial work. By placing these women at the center of her study, Victoria Wolcott reveals their vital role in shaping life in interwar Detroit. Wolcott takes us into the speakeasies, settlement houses, blues clubs, storefront churches, employment bureaus, and training centers of Prohibition- and depression-era Detroit. There, she explores the wide range of black women's experiences, focusing particularly on the interactions between working- and middle-class women. As Detroit's black population grew exponentially, women not only served as models of bourgeois respectability, but also began to reshape traditional standards of deportment in response to the new realities of their lives. In so doing, Wolcott says, they helped transform black politics and culture. Eventually, as the depression arrived, female respectability as a central symbol of reform was supplanted by a more strident working-class activism.

This book interrogates the role of gender and class in shaping women’s everyday leisure practices. Drawing on empirical research in urban Turkey, the book explores how leisure is perceived and practised by women within their communities. The book examines the relationship of women’s leisure to their labour, women’s access to and uses of public leisure spaces, and the dynamics of their everyday sociability within their neighbourhoods. It is the first book to apply Skegg’s concept of ‘respectability’ – socially recognised judgments and standards which label the ‘right’ practices, that hold morality and power in a given context – as a theoretical tool with which to understand leisure in a country in which modernisation and Westernisation have been a central dynamic shaping political, social, and cultural life. This analysis reveals that two measures of gendered respectability – reproductive work and the honour code – and how they mediate with the classed measures of respectability, are essential to understanding women’s leisure practices in the Turkish context. The book argues that these interactions are likely shared in many Global South countries, including Islamic societies. Therefore, this analysis shines important new light on women’s experiences more broadly, and on the social, political, and cultural dynamics of traditional social structures in a modernising world. This book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in leisure studies, women’s studies, sociology, cultural studies, or Middle East studies.

The population of London soared during the Industrial Revolution and the poorer areas became iconic places of overcrowding and vice. Focusing on the communities of Westminster, MacKay shows that many of the plebeian populace retained traditional working-class pursuits, such as gambling, drinking and blood sports.

Tying together of several distinct cultural patterns during this century to create a culture of respectability and its impact on popular culture, trade, politics, social dynamics, and literature, this original and thoughtful work provides a comprehensive and much-needed understanding of the origins of modern consumption and all of its cultural implications.