How midcentury periodicals that fostered an indelible middle-class ideal for American women also confronted the happy homemaker stereotype

Read by millions of women each month, such mainstream periodicals as Ladies' Home Journal and McCall's delivered powerful messages about women's roles and behavior. In 1963 Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique accused the genre of helping to create what Friedan termed -the problem that has no name- -- that is, presenting women as stereotypical happy homemakers with limited interests and abilities.

But this ideal of contented,...

The author contends that the novels of the period 1969--1988 served as a dialogue among women authors and their readers as they attempted to deal with dramatic alterations in attitudes toward career, sexuality, and continued tension between personal autonomy and cultural sexism.

In readings of novels by American, British, and Canadian authors, including Gail Godwin, Toni Morrison, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Margaret Atwood, the author proposes that the narrative devices of irony and fantasy that are used commonly in these novels reflect women's...