Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife

ISBN-13: 9781845200329 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 192 str.

Justine Lloyd; Lesley Johnson

Opis

The history of the housewife is a complicated and uneasy narrative, rife with contradictions, tensions, and unanswered questions. What is the relationship between women and the home? And why are women reluctant to call themselves housewives? Starting with an exploration of why 1940s housewives became associated with drudgery, this book examines how magazines and advertising articulated connected women with the domestic sphere, while 1950s films explored the shifting boundaries between social, family, and individual desires and constraints for women. Johnson and Lloyd also study the home as a site of boredom, and the balance between work and family in the modern world. By situating their examination in a still unresolved and contemporary topic, Johnson and Lloyd offer us both a backward glance and a forward-looking perspective into domesticity and the modern self.

Recenzje

'Why are 'housewife' and 'feminist' seen to be mutually exclusive terms? Why has feminism so often assumed that women can only become modern by leaving home? In their illuminating work of cultural history, Johnson and Lloyd challenge such beliefs by redescribing the housewife as a distinctively modern and politically complex form of identity. A timely, invigorating, and much needed reassessment of feminist ideas.' Rita Felski, University of Virginia 'Combines an impressively broad range of materials from popular culture and wider public debate to challenge some of the key feminist wisdoms about the significance of the figure of the 1940s and 1950s housewife. This exemplary study offers a taste of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship at its best.' Jackie Stacey, Lancaster University 'Why do stories about happy homemakers provoke such conflicting emotions among contemporary women? Sentenced to Everyday Life helps us understand the issues at stake. It is a timely analysis and

Spis treści

1 'Only a Housewife' * Defining the Housewife: Contemporary Feminism * Defining the Housewife: Early Second Wave Feminism * Reviewing the 1950s * Feminism and the Subject of Modernity * 'Good-Enough Feminists?' 2 Who Does she Represent? * 'The Future in her Hands' * 'As Housewives we are Worms' * The Meanings of Home * At Home and at Work 3 Dream Stuff * The Housewife Speaks * The Importance of Looking * On the Kitchen Front * The View from the Kitchen Window 4 The Three Faces of Eve * Homework and Housework * Definitions of Melodrama * Putting on the Apron * The Childless Housewife * A Doubled Plot of Femininity * Harpies Like Mildred 5 Boredom: The Emotional Slum * 'Time to Burn' * Housewife's Corner * Finding Time * Declining Audiences: an Afterword on the Housewife 1 'Only a Housewife' * Defining the Housewife: Contemporary Feminism * Defining the Housewife: Early Second Wave Feminism * Reviewing the 1950s * Feminism and the Subject of Modernity * 'Good-Enough Feminists?' 2 Who Does she Represent? * 'The Future in her Hands' * 'As Housewives we are Worms' * The Meanings of Home * At Home and at Work 3 Dream Stuff * The Housewife Speaks * The Importance of Looking * On the Kitchen Front * The View from the Kitchen Window 4 The Three Faces of Eve * Homework and Housework * Definitions of Melodrama * Putting on the Apron * The Childless Housewife * A Doubled Plot of Femininity * Harpies Like Mildred 5 Boredom: The Emotional Slum * 'Time to Burn' * Housewife's Corner * Finding Time * Declining Audiences: an Afterword on the Housewife

O autorze

Dr. Lesley Johnson is the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Justine Lloyd is Lecturer in the Culture and Everyday Life stream of the Department of Sociology, Macquarie University, Australia. She is also a member of the Management Committee of Macquarie's interdisciplinary Centre for Media History. She has been a joint editor of the journal Space and Culture since 2009.