Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Housewife feminist feminism'

My dissertation demonstrates how housewives manipulated and redefined the image and identity of the housewife in the U.S. during the second half of the twentieth century. From the eras of June Cleaver to Gloria Steinem and Phyllis Schlafly, women invoked motherhood and domesticity for both progressive and traditionalist ends. They did so amid shifting expectations of homemakers. In the decades following World War II, the legalization of contraceptives and abortion transformed understandings of the connections among womanhood, marriage, and maternity; legislation offered limited opportunities for women to acquire education and participate in new sectors of the workforce; and the decline of the family wage and the introduction of no-fault divorce increasingly curbed men's and women's ability to keep mother at home. Whereas in 1962 more than fifty-five percent of women aged twenty-five to fifty-four were engaged in full-time homemaking, by 1985 housewives made up just over twenty-six percent of the same population. Amid this change, the word housewife served as a lingua franca in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that helped people to organize under the banner of domesticity. The arbiters defining the American housewife included not only members of the conservative Silent Majority, but also members of the feminist National Organization for Women (NOW); not only white television stars like Donna Reed who spearheaded protest against the Vietnam War by the group Another Mother for Peace, but also African American and Catholic and Jewish women working together to promote cross-racial understanding; not only women who earned wages outside of the home, but also non-wage-earning househusbands. I investigate how women's groups in the 1960s and early 1970s turned the dismissals that frequently accompanied the phrase "just a housewife" into an asset. Some groups deployed the housewife as the antithesis of the expert: Housewives' opinions about racism could be trusted as an authentic voice of the people because they did not rely on statistics calculated to fit into theories or models. Others relied on biologically determinist arguments: Motherhood made housewives into specialized experts on specific topics such as peace. Domesticity generally made these women less politically threatening and so better able to enact their agendas. While these housewife activists certainly grew and benefitted from their participation in these groups, the main purpose of their work was never to aid housewives exclusively. Beginning in the mid-1970s, women finally capitalized on the authority of the housewife image to improve the lives of homemakers. The efforts of housewife groups in the 1970s and early 1980s who opposed and supported the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution underscores the flexible definition of "housewife." While they initially organized to lend the authority of the housewife name to a particular cause, these groups ultimately became political organizations that represented and mobilized housewives as a constituency. Despite many differences, traditionalists and feminists could find common ground in recognizing the problems homemakers faced. Both were troubled by the realities of second shifts in which women juggled wage-earning and family obligations. They were concerned by the feminization of poverty, especially among older women. Whereas many traditionalists advocated a performed femininity meant to produce starkly gendered male protector-breadwinner and female dependent-homemaker roles, feminists looked to legislative and social equality solutions to provide both men and women the opportunity to succeed at home and at work. Yet some traditionalists united with feminists to critique the vulnerabilities of displaced homemakers - women who had engaged in years of unwaged homemaking only to be displaced from their vocations by widowhood or divorce. These women drew on previous experience in maternalist, racial equality, and anti-poverty movements. They sought solutions that included transferring the skills of homemaking into well-paid jobs in traditionally-male fields. They accomplished this by simultaneously praising the work of homemaking even as they criticized homemaking as a vocation that put women in a vulnerable economic position. The formation of a movement by and for homemakers crystallized, however, at the same time as the erosion of housewife as a crucial identity for women. Finally, I analyze the extent to which gender is caught up in the potentials and limitations of the housewife role by tracing the ways that Americans have envisioned the housewife as male. So long as the male homemaker was cast as exotic, role models and new precedents could be transformed into freak shows and warnings. Men who made the unusual choice to take on the role of family homemaker were further marginalized. Despite a sometimes overt emphasis on men's domesticity as a means of achieving social equality, the real efforts and the imagined experiences of the male housewife often ran counter to feminist goals. Varying from farcical to feminist, the successes and failures of these visions of male homemaking demonstrate the extent to which domesticity, economic dependency, and gender have been entangled in the American imagination. My dissertation underscores how women (and some men) adopted flexible definitions of homemaking to create complicated and sometimes fleeting alliances through which housewives organized. My research complicates the dichotomous stereotypes of the feminist and the antifeminist by exploring how both progressive and traditionalist women organized as housewives. Although my project considers media and pop culture, I rely primarily on archival research and published primary sources to examine the way that women claiming to be homemakers and mothers actively manipulated cultural understandings of those roles. The definitions they employed demonstrate how perceptions of homemaking are laden with multiple and complex meanings about sex, gender, class, race, citizenship, labor, religion, and identity.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007.
The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on October 25, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.

On November 17, 1980, twenty Mormon women and one man were arrested on criminal trespassing charges after chaining themselves to the Bellevue, Washington LDS Temple gate. The news media extensively covered the event due to the shocking photos of middle-aged housewives, covered in large chains, holding protest signs and being escorted to police cars. These women were part of the group Mormons for the Equal Rights Amendment (MERA) and were protesting the LDS Church’s opposition to the ERA. The LDS Church actively opposed the ERA and played an important role in influencing the vote in key states leading to its eventual failure. However, ERA literature generally ignores the LDS Church and their influence, instead attributing the ERA’s failure to lack of appeal to lower class and minority women, the ratification process, and confusing messaging about the amendment. Literature that does discuss the LDS Church and its opposition to the ERA fails to tell the story of the small, but bold and attention grabbing group of Mormon women who organized a campaign in direct opposition to the position of their church. This thesis begins with an evaluation of MERA’s use of sacred space in protest, and their portrayal in the media. It then explores how MERA re-appropriated LDS hymns, rituals and language to assert their power and express discontent with the church’s position on ERA, and concludes with an evaluation of the institutional and social consequences MERA members faced as a result of their activism.

Since the 1960s, the modern environmental movement, though generally liberal in nature, has historically excluded a variety of serious and influential groups. This thesis concentrates on the movement of working-class housewives who emerged into popular American consciousness in the seventies and eighties with their increasingly radical campaigns against toxic contamination in their respective communities. These women represent a group who exhibited the convergence of cultural influences where domesticity and environmentalism met in the middle of American society, and the increasing focus on public health in the environmental movement framed the fight undertaken by women who identified as “housewives.” These women, in their use of both traditional female stereotypes as well as radical influences from other social movements, synthesized their own unique type of activism, which has had a profound influence on the environmental movement and public health in the United States, especially in its relation to environmental justice.

What do art workers, nuns and care workers have in common? How can these commonalities be conceptualised from the perspective of feminist Marxism? How would such conceptualisation open up intersectional and transversal perspectives for social movements struggling against precariousness? Departing from an auto-ethnographic account on activist experiences originating from the art workers’ movement in Tallinn, this thesis aims to theorise the intersection of precarious labour and gender. By using the thinking technology of diffractive reading, it places the debates around unwaged labour within art and care sector into the context of autonomist Marxist thinking. Furthermore, affinities and entanglements between feminist politics and the struggles of precarious workers are configured and imagined, in order to interlink and converge spatially and temporally isolated resistive practices that are constructed from the experience of unwaged and precarious workers.

Ce travail s’attache à étudier les éventuels féminismes de Desperate Housewives. La peinture que la série propose de femmes et mères au foyer américaines désespérées est a priori le lieu d’une dénonciation de leur vie et de leur condition qui n’est pas sans rappeler celle de Betty Friedan dans The Feminine Mystique au début des années soixante. De plus, de nombreuses contradictions du féminisme américain (en fait constitué de nombreuses sous-catégories et sensibilités) y trouvent un écho. Cette multiplicité des interprétations possibles de Desperate Housewives, ainsi que sa composante postmoderne et camp, en font le lieu privilégié d’un féminisme queer propre à la série
This study investigates the feminist messages conveyed by Desperate Housewives. The depiction of desperate American housewives and stay-at-home mothers seems at first to be a scathing indictment of their plight, not unlike that of Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique.Furthermore many inner dissensions of American feminism (a term far more pluralistic than one might think) are voiced in the television series. The different ways Desperate Housewives can be interpreted, along with its postmodern and camp components, make it possible for an idiosyncratic brand of queer feminism to emerge

Esta tesis se inscribe en una trayectoria de pensamiento libre de la diferencia sexual para nombrar en femenino la injusticia. Estudia específicamente lo negativo que encierra la creación y la gestión de la casa, el trabajo, el matrimonio y la maternidad. Teniendo en cuenta la teoría psicosocial sobre la percepción de injusticia y siguiendo la necesidad de ampliar el conocimiento de la justicia, la investigación profundiza en la representación de la injusticia en lengua materna. Participan 95 mujeres de la Región de Murcia narrando el trabajo y los cuidados en el ámbito doméstico y familiar. Se han utilizado varias metodologías y teorías de investigación: teoría feminista, teoría basada en los datos y psicología discursiva. La hipótesis de trabajo principal es que las palabras de las mujeres trascienden el sentido corriente de la injusticia de un modo inaudito. Los resultados re-significan los denominados paradigmas populares de la justicia.
The present study focuses on the meaning of injustice for women from the thinking of sexual difference. The negative about household labor is studied. In response to psychosocial theory on the perception of injustice and to continue with justice knowledge, this research explores the representation of injustice for 95 women from Region of Murcia. These female participants were invited to narrate work and care in their families. It have been used several research methodologies and theories: feminist theory, Grounded theory and discursive psychology. The strongest support is for the hypothesis that suggests that women's words transcend the ordinary sense of injustice in a way unheard of. Findings give a new meaning of justice for social sciences.

CAPES
O imaginário mobilizado pela corrida espacial no segundo período pós-guerra instigou a criação de um repertório visual que logo tornou-se fonte de inspiração em diversos campos da produção cultural. Neste trabalho tenho por objetivo discutir a construção da figura da “mulher do futuro” mediante a articulação entre as produções filiadas a esse imaginário no vestuário e na decoração de interiores. O recorte de estudo abarca as décadas de 1960 e 1970 e está centrado nas representações de interiores domésticos divulgados pela revista Casa & Jardim e nos editoriais e anúncios publicitários de vestuário divulgados pelas revistas Claudia e Manequim. Esses títulos colocaram em circulação uma série de recursos imagéticos e textuais que evidenciam aspectos do comportamento social da época, servindo como base para a investigação das novas representações de feminilidades que surgiram naquele período. A escolha por privilegiar a articulação entre decoração de interiores e vestuário se justifica pela relação historicamente construída entre essas materialidades e o corpo feminino, caracterizando-se como parte integrante na construção de identidades de gênero, classe e geração. Com esse trabalho pretendo evidenciar que as materialidades dos interiores domésticos e do vestuário inspirados pela iconografia espacial atuavam como dispositivos que criavam e reforçavam noções de feminilidades em diálogo com o processo de modernização da sociedade brasileira em curso.
The imagery mobilized by the space race in the second post-war period instigated the creation of a visual repertory that soon became the source of inspiration in several fields of cultural production. In this work I aim to discuss the construction of the "woman of the future" figure through the articulation between the productions affiliated to this imaginary in clothing and interior decoration. The study covers the 1960s and 1970s and is centered on the representations of domestic interiors published by Casa & Jardim magazine and the editorials and advertisements for clothing published by magazines Claudia and Manequim. These publications put into circulation a series of imagery and textual resources that demonstrated aspects of the time’s social behavior, serving as basis for the investigation of the new representations of femininities which appeared in that period. The choice to focus on the articulation between interior decoration and clothing is based on the historically constructed relation between these materialities and the female body, therefore being an important part in the construction of gender, class and generation identities. With this work I intend to show that the materialities of domestic interiors and clothing inspired by the space age iconography acted as devices that created and reinforced notions of femininity.

World War II women are commonly understood to have come closer to equality than any previous generation. Their mass entry into the workforce is remembered as a united front to support the troops while simultaneously claiming ground to demonstrate their abilities as workers. However, scholarship which emphasizes the collaboration between the government and advertisers to create propaganda that persuaded women to enter the workforce and thus serve as the "domestic front" of the war begins to question the prevailing notion of wartime employment as strides towards equality. This project begins with the question: why did post-war women seemingly willingly abandon these jobs and move to the suburbs? I argue the construct of the post-war housewife, which positions women as willing to abandon careers for the suburban kitchen, is a social imaginary which responds to and uses social anxieties to constrain women’s gender performance and silence gender anxieties. I use the context of the time, as well as rhetorical analysis of mediated artifacts of representations of housewife, to argue this social imaginary silences women’s post-war lived experience and replaces it in public discourse with the multimodal image of Fifties housewife. A visual rhetorical analysis of post-war advertisements which portray the housewife reveals the work of the social imaginary using social anxieties concerning gender roles as well as Cold War fears to define woman’s place. Examining the way Hollywood uses housewife as a frame for its female stars uncovers how circulated use of the imaginary of housewife perpetuates the imaginary by seeming to evidence its claims to representation. However, an analysis of televised representations of the housewife imaginary reveals the fabric of the imaginary fraying. Television humor illuminates the illusion of the imaginary of housewife’s claims to representativeness, and therefore creates a public space in which women can contest the imaginary by exposing women’s discontent with the role of housewife. I conclude with a discussion of the ways this social imaginary of housewife continues to define women’s lives in political debate seventy years after it began to define and constrain post-war women’s gender performance.

While Ireland remained neutral throughout the Second World War, it was not spared from the economic and social consequences of the conflict. This time in Ireland is known as ‘the Emergency’ and shortages of essential goods exacerbated poverty, often with fatal consequences for the worst off. In 1941, Hilda Tweedy organized a petition signed by Irish women that was sent to Government in pursuit of a variety of policies intended to alleviate some of the harshest suffering caused by economic turmoil and minimal government intervention. This petition ultimately laid the groundwork for the subsequent formation of the Irish Housewives Association in 1942. This Association was involved in a wide array of activities, but consumer protection and the cost of living were of preeminent concern throughout their existence. The Irish Housewives Association has received some historical attention for its feminist activities, but I propose that many of their initiatives can be usefully analyzed through theories of nationalism. I argue that the theoretical innovations of everyday nationalism and consumer nationalism possess previously unrecognized utility for illuminating women’s experience throughout this period of Irish history.
Graduate
2021-08-25

This study is a discursive analysis of the representation of the person Erika Girardi within the Reality TV show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. With a theoretical perspective anchored within Judith Butler’s (1999) theory of performativity and Beverley Skeggs (2000) research of class within feminism. The aim is to find how Erika Girardi is discursively portrayed within the series as well as finding and analyzing the various subject positions found within the material. The results are presented as eight different subject positions; Housewife, Showgirl, Gold Digger, Southern Mother, Bad Bitch, Daughter,Empowered Woman and Good Friend. These positions are then decoded into the various signs which build these up as well as the nodal points which are further found within the discourse of the selected episodes.

AFRIKAANS: Die teenwoordigheid van vroue in die massamedia, en spesifiek in televisie, is vroeg in die een-en-twintigste eeu groter as ooit vantevore. Reekse waarin uitbeeldings van vroue beperk was tot dié van meestal onderontwikkelde, periferale of sekondêre karakters, is iets van die verlede. Die wyse waarop vroue in televisie uitgebeeld word is dus uiters belangrik aangesien so ’n groot hoeveelheid televisiereekse spesifiek die vrouegehoor teiken wat, hetsy aktief of passief, met wat hulle in hierdie reekse sien omgaan. Boodskappe wat deur televisiereekse versprei word, sal waarskynlik onbewustelik ’n uitwerking hê op hoe vroue hulleself beskou, hoe hulle ander vroue beskou, sowel as op hulle houding jeens kwessies soos feminisme en vroulikheid. Die doel van hierdie studie is om dominante diskoerse oor feminisme en vroulikheid wat deur hedendaagse televisiereekse aan die samelewing voorgehou word, te ondersoek. Die studie konsentreer spesifiek op drie gewilde en veelbekroonde Amerikaanse televisiereekse van 1997 tot 2012, naamlik Ally McBeal (Kelley 1997- 2002), Sex and the City (Starr 1998-2004) en Desperate Housewives (Cherry 2004- 2012) – reekse wat al drie as sogenaamde zeitgeist-televisie beskryf kan word. Die artikulering van feministiese doelstellings, hetsy dié afkomstig uit die tweede generasie of uit meer onlangse bewegings in feminisme, val onder die soeklig en die wyse waarop hierdie doelstellings aangespreek word, word bespreek. Deur aspekte wat teoreties nóύ verband hou met feminisme (aspekte soos melodrama as ’n vroulik-geïdentifiseerde genre en verbruikerswese) te identifiseer, word daar aangvoer dat die drie reekse beslis in ’n feministiese sfeer geposisioneer is. Die teenwoordigheid van hierdie aspekte in die drie reekse het dan ook dieperliggende narratiewe oor feminisme blootgelê – narratiewe waarvan die alledaagse kyker waarskynlik nie bewus sal wees nie, maar wat onderbewustelik moontlik ’n invloed kan hê op kykers se denke oor en begrip van feminisme. Die belangrikste gevolgtrekking van hierdie studie is dat die drie gekose televisiereekse op verskillende en uiteenlopende wyses met feminisme en vroulikheid omgaan. Verder ondersteun die studie die uitgangspunt dat daar ’n behoefte is aan kritiese debat rakende die uitbeeldings van feminisme en vroulikheid in hedendaagse voorbeelde van populêre massamedia. ENGLISH: The presence of women in mass media, specifically in television, in the twenty-first century is larger than ever and the days of series featuring women that are generally underdeveloped, peripheral or secondary characters is a thing of the past. The way in which females are portrayed in television is thus of the utmost importance since such a large number of television series cater to an extensive female audience, who engage (whether actively or passively) with that which they see. Messages received from popular television series are likely to inadvertently have an effect on how women view themselves, how they view other women, as well as their attitudes towards issues like feminism and femininity. The purpose of this study is to examine dominant discourses on feminism and feminity that are being propagated by contemporary television series. The specific focus of the study falls on three highly successful and critically acclaimed television series running from 1997 until 2012, namely Ally McBeal (Kelley 1997-2002), Sex and the City (Starr 1998-2004) and Desperate Housewives (Cherry 2004-2012) – series that have all been described as so-called Zeitgeist television. The articulation of feminist goals, whether from the second wave or more recent feminist movements, is examined and the ways in which these goals are addressed are discussed. By identifying aspects that are theoretically related to feminism (aspects like melodrama as a female identified genre and consumerism), it is argued that these three series are definitely positioned in a feminist sphere. The presence of these aspects also uncovered deep-seated feminist narratives – narratives that the everyday audience member will most likely not be aware of, but which could unconsciously influence viewers’ thoughts on and understanding of feminism. The main conclusion of this study entails that the three chosen television series deal with feminism and femininity in very different and diverse ways. Furthermore, the study supports the view that there is a need for critical debates on the representation of feminism and femininity in contemporary examples of popular mass media
Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2013.
Visual Arts
unrestricted