ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a number of recent romantic comedies and female-centered dramas are working to manage a pervasive cultural contradiction in which claims of feminist victories need to be squared with abundant evidence of feminism’s losses. A highly serviceable narrative scenario used to reconcile this contradiction is that of the professional, urban woman who returns to her hometown; this scenario has been remarkably recurrent in contemporary media. While the rediscovery of hometown via romance (and vice versa) is also a regular feature of popular print fi ction of the chick-lit variety as in Lauren Weisberger’s 2005 novel Everyone Worth Knowing or Lucinda Rosenfeld’s 2004 Why She Went Home, journalistic accounts and pop sociology regularly document a variety of forms of female retreatism from the “mommy track” (in which women leave their careers to raise their children) to the “daughter track” (giving up paid work to care for elderly parents). A 2005 front-page article in The New York Times exploring the latter phenomenon typifi ed the latent hostility of some such coverage in which professional women are cast as modulating their ambition and reduced/restored to care-giving roles. The article profi les Mary Ellen Geist, a successful radio news anchor in large urban markets who quit her job to return to her parents’ Midwestern home when her father became ill with Alzheimer’s, noting rather gratuitously but tellingly that “Ms. Geist sleeps in the dormered bedroom of her childhood and survives without urban amenities like white balsamic vinegar.”1
