Long dismissed as ciphers, sycophants and "Stepford Wives," women characters of primetime television during the 1950s through the 1980s are overdue for this careful reassessment. From smart, savvy wives and resilient mothers (including the much-maligned June Cleaver and Donna Reed) to talented working women (long before the debut of "Mary Tyler Moore") to crimebusters and even criminals, American women on television emerge as a diverse, empowered, individualistic, and capable lot, highly worthy of emulation and appreciation.
In the popular stereotype of post-World War II America, women abandoned their wartime jobs and contentedly retreated to the home. This work unveils the diversity of postwar women, showing how far women departed from this one-dimensional image.
When Stephanie Staal first read The Feminine Mystique in college, she found it "a mildly interesting relic from another era." But more than a decade later, as a married stay-at-home mom in the suburbs, Staal rediscovered Betty Friedan's classic work -- and was surprised how much she identified with the laments and misgivings of 1950s housewives. She set out on a quest: to reenroll at Barnard and re-read the great books she had first encountered as an undergrad. From the banishment of Eve to Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, Staal explores the significance of each of these classic tales by and of women, highlighting the relevance these ideas still have today. This process leads Staal to find the self she thought she had lost -- curious and ambitious, zany and critical -- and inspires new understandings of her relationships with her husband, her mother, and her daughter.
In Constructive Feminism, Daphne Spain examines the deliberate and unintended spatial consequences of feminism's second wave, a social movement dedicated to reconfiguring power relations between women and men. Placing the women's movement of the 1970s in the context of other social movements that have changed the use of urban space, Spain argues that reform feminists used the legal system to end the mandatory segregation of women and men in public institutions, while radical activists created small-scale places that gave women the confidence to claim their rights to the public sphere.Women’s centers, bookstores, health clinics, and domestic violence shelters established feminist places for women’s liberation in Boston, Los Angeles, and many other cities. Unable to afford their own buildings, radicals adapted existing structures to serve as women’s centers that fostered autonomy, health clinics that promoted reproductive rights, bookstores that connected women to feminist thought, and domestic violence shelters that protected their bodily integrity. Legal equal opportunity reforms and daily practices of liberation enhanced women’s choices in education and occupations. Once the majority of wives and mothers had joined the labor force, by the mid-1980s, new buildings began to emerge that substituted for the unpaid domestic tasks once performed in the home. Fast food franchises, childcare facilities, adult day centers, and hospices were among the inadvertent spatial consequences of the second wave.
A study of what American cookbooks from the 1790s to the 1960s can show us about gender roles, food, and culture of their time. From the first edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook to the latest works by today’s celebrity chefs, cookbooks reflect more than just passing culinary fads. As historical artifacts, they offer a unique perspective on the cultures that produced them. In Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking, Jessamyn Neuhaus offers a perceptive and piquant analysis of the tone and content of American cookbooks published between the 1790s and the 1960s, adroitly uncovering the cultural assumptions and anxieties—particularly about women and domesticity—they contain. Neuhaus’s in-depth survey of these cookbooks questions the supposedly straightforward lessons about food preparation they imparted. While she finds that cookbooks aimed to make readers—mainly white, middle-class women—into effective, modern-age homemakers who saw joy, not drudgery, in their domestic tasks, she notes that the phenomenal popularity of Peg Bracken’s 1960 cookbook, The I Hate to Cook Book, attests to the limitations of this kind of indoctrination. At the same time, she explores the proliferation of bachelor cookbooks aimed at “the man in the kitchen” and the biases they display about male and female abilities, tastes, and responsibilities. Neuhaus also addresses the impact of World War II rationing on homefront cuisine; the introduction of new culinary technologies, gourmet sensibilities, and ethnic foods into American kitchens; and developments in the cookbook industry since the 1960s. More than a history of the cookbook, Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking provides an absorbing and enlightening account of gender and food in modern America. “An engaging analysis . . . Neuhaus provides a rich and well-researched cultural history of American gender roles through her clever use of cookbooks.” —Sarah Eppler Janda, History: Reviews of New Books “With sound scholarship and a focus on prescriptive food literature, Manly Meals makes an original and useful contribution to our understanding of how gender roles are institutionalized and perpetuated.” —Warren Belasco, senior editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink “An excellent addition to the history of women’s roles in America, as well as to the history of cookbooks.” —Choice
Kristin A. Goss examines how women’s civic place has changed over the span of more than 120 years, how public policy has driven these changes, and why these changes matter for women and American democracy. As measured by women’s groups’ appearances before the U.S. Congress, women’s collective political engagement continued to grow between 1920 and 1960—when many conventional accounts claim it declined—and declined after 1980, when it might have been expected to grow. Goss asks what women have gained, and perhaps lost, through expanded incorporation, as well as whether single-sex organizations continue to matter in 21st-century America.
Winner, 2010 Lavinia L. Dock Award, American Association for the History of NursingAn American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year in History and Public Policy “‘I never got a chance to be a girl,’ Kate O’Hare Palmer lamented, thirty-four years after her tour as an army nurse in Vietnam. Although proud of having served, she felt that the war she never understood had robbed her of her innocence and forced her to grow up too quickly. As depicted in a photograph taken late in her tour, long hours in the operating room exhausted her both physically and mentally. Her tired eyes and gaunt face reflected th e weariness she felt after treating countless patients, some dying, some maimed, all, like her, forever changed. Still, she learned to work harder and faster than she thought she could, to trust her nursing skills, and to live independently. She developed a way to balance the dangers and benefits of being a woman in the army and in the war. Only fourteen months long, her tour in Vietnam profoundly affected her life and her beliefs.” Such vivid personal accounts abound in historian Kara Dixon Vuic’s compelling look at the experiences of army nurses in the Vietnam War. Drawing on more than 100 interviews, Vuic allows the nurses to tell their own captivating stories, from their reasons for joining the military to the physical and emotional demands of a horrific war and postwar debates about how to commemorate their service. Vuic also explores the gender issues that arose when a male-dominated army actively recruited and employed the services of 5,000 nurses in the midst of a growing feminist movement and a changing nursing profession. Women drawn to the army’s patriotic promise faced disturbing realities in the virtually all-male hospitals of South Vietnam. Men who joined the nurse corps ran headlong into the army's belief that women should nurse and men should fight. Officer, Nurse, Woman brings to light the nearly forgotten contributions of brave nurses who risked their lives to bring medical care to soldiers during a terrible—and divisive—war.
Beginning in 1963 with the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and reaching a high pitch ten years later with the televised mega-event of the “Battle of the Sexes”—the tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs—the mass media were intimately involved with both the distribution and the understanding of the feminist message. This mass media promotion of the feminist profile, however, proved to be a double-edged sword, according to Patricia Bradley, author of Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 1963-1975. Although millions of women learned about feminism by way of the mass media, detrimental stereotypes emerged overnight. Often the events mounted by feminists to catch the media eye crystalized the negative image. All feminists soon came to be portrayed in the popular culture as “bra burners” and “strident women.” Such depictions not only demeaned the achievements of their movement but also limited discussion of feminism to those subjects the media considered worthy, primarily equal pay for equal work. Bradley's book examines the media traditions that served to curtail understandings of feminism. Journalists, following the craft formulas of their trade, equated feminism with the bizarre and the unusual. Even women journalists could not overcome the rules of “What Makes News.” By the time Billie Jean King confronted Bobby Riggs on the tennis court, feminism had become a commodity to be shaped to attract audiences. Finally, in mass media's pursuit of the new, counter-feminist messages came to replace feminism on the news agenda and helped set in place the conservative revolution of the 1980s. Bradley offers insight into how mass media constructs images and why such images have the kind of ongoing strength that discourages young women of today from calling themselves “feminist.” The author also asks how public issues are to be raised when those who ask the questions are negatively defined before the issues can even be discussed. Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 1963-1975 examines the media's role in creating the images of feminism that continue today. And it poses the dilemma of a call for systematic change in a mass media industry that does not have a place for systematic change in its agenda.
In Remapping Second-Wave Feminism, Janet Allured attempts to reshape the national narrative by focusing on the grassroots women's movement in the South, particularly in Louisiana.
