Selling women's history : packaging feminism in twentieth-century American popular culture / Emily Westkaemper.

Author
Westkaemper, Emily, 1979- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2017]
Description
xiv, 257 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Availability

Available Online

Copies in the Library

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Firestone Library - Stacks HQ1410 .W47 2017 Browse related items Request

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    Subject(s)
    Summary note
    "Long before American feminists of the 1960s and the 1970s persuaded universities and the public to treat "women's history" as a valid subject for serious study, popular culture dramatized women's pasts. Sentimentalized visions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domestic life saturated the twentieth-century consumer culture landscape. Advertisements lobbied housewives to select "Betsy Ross Red" lipstick, and muffin mix containing "Early American flour." Women's magazines, radio broadcasts, and comic books featured historical biographies of famous and forgotten women, including entrepreneurs, activists, educators, and wives of notable men. Selling Women's History provides the first analysis of these diverse messages about women's histories. As twentieth-century American women assumed new social, political, and economic roles, many historical narratives emphasized continuity, sentimentalizing historical figures like Martha Washington as models for the present. Yet women advertisers, script writers, historians, and consumers responded, constructing more dynamic narratives to promote feminism. This work prefigured the subject matter and analytical approach of academic historians of gender, tracking changes in the expectations for women's behavior over time to demonstrate that society rather than biology had limited women. Advertising women's professional societies, established to expand women's employment opportunities, promoted new facets of such familiar icons as the patriotic Colonial Dame and the Quaker Maid, destabilizing the assertion of feminine domesticity made in advertisements themselves"-- Provided by publisher.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    Contents
    • Acknowledgments
    • Abbreviations
    • Introduction
    • Martha Washington (would have) shopped here : women's history in magazines and ephemera, 1910-1935
    • "The Quaker girl turns modern" : how adwomen promoted history, 1910-1940
    • Broadcasting yesteryear : women's history on commercial radio, 1930-1945
    • Gallant American women : feminist historians and the mass media, 1935-1950
    • Betsy Ross red lipstick : products as artifacts and inspiration, 1940-1950
    • "You've come a long way, baby": women's history in consumer culture from World War II to Women's Liberation
    • Epilogue
    • Notes
    • Index.
    ISBN
    • 9780813576336 ((hardcover))
    • 0813576334 ((hardcover))
    • 9780813576329 ((paperback))
    • 0813576326 ((paperback))
    • 0813576342
    • 9780813576343
    LCCN
    2016015514
    OCLC
    950751097
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