Mike O'Malley at the excellent and always informative Aporetic blog on the history of gendered discourse about money: http://theaporetic.com/?p=4800 ----------------------snip resident Obama is considering appointing, among others, Janet Yellen as chairman of the Federal reserve. Predictably, opponents and proponents both take her gender into consideration: she’d be the first female head of the central bank.
Yellen’s supporters think having a woman as chair would amount to a breakthrough for gender equality, but opponents have worried about “the Female Dollar.” Have we entered, asks the *New York Sun,* “the era of the gender-backed dollar?<http://www.nysun.com/editorials/the-female-dollar/88357/> The *Wall Street Journal* quotes this language in its editorial denouncing <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/fear-of-a-female-fed-chief.html>the fact that Yellen’s “cause has been taken up by the liberal diversity police as a gender issue ” My book *Face Value* looks at the way race talk informs money talk, but I could just have easily looked at how gendered language filters into money debates. In American history gold and silver are usually referred to as “hard” money, paper as “soft” money. Need I say more? Hard money is held to have good character, and to be the devoted companion of the higher races, hard money is on board the warships of imperialism, while its subjects, or victims, use flimsy paper. The Civil War was financed by printing legal tender paper money, the famous greenbacks. Following the war, Americans split over what to do with these paper dollars. These arguments were never simply about money; they always involved questions about social stability and the meaning of difference. Thomas Nast in particular loved to characterize paper money as “the rag baby,” a grotesque, floppy doll masquerading as a real child. The child had parents, and in the pages of *Harper’s Weekly *Nast usually inverted their gender roles, to demonstrate that paper money emasculated its supporters.
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
