Your search

This paper examines charivaris and whitecapping in 19th-century North America. Establishing the presence of the charivan/shivaree over the course of the century and of whitecapping in the years 1885-1905, the study examines two particular ritualistic forms of enforcing community standards and behaviour. Commonly directed against unnatural marriage, sexual offenders, wife beaters, and those who defied acceptable standards of behaviour (including employers and strikebreakers), charivaris and whitecapping posed the threatening order of custom against the rule of law. As such, they challenged, implicitly if not explicitly, a developing bourgeois hegemony. In studying them, we learn much about society and culture, order and disorder, in the 19th-century past, forces crucial to an understanding of the plebeian and working-class communities.