ABSTRACT
The relationship between second wave feminism and domesticity was frequently troubled. Since the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the idea that an investment in domestic life is contrary to the aims of feminism has structured much feminist debate and the fi gure most closely associated with the domestic-the housewife-often operates as the feminist’s ‘other’. While some second wave feminists clearly sympathized with the position of the housewife who was trapped in the home performing unpaid work for her family, the home was frequently portrayed as a prison and a constraint. As Judy Giles observes, it appeared as if domesticity “must be left behind if women were to become ‘modern’, emancipated subjects” (142). These assumptions have often shaped how feminism has approached popular culture. Many early second wave feminists focused on how ‘false’ images of women were created within popular culture, socializing girls into restricted defi nitions of femininity that were based around “hearth and home” (Tuchman 37). These critics argued for more accurate images of women in the workplace that refl ected what women were really like, or, at least, what they should be like. If ‘negative’ images of women as housewives could be eradicated, it was assumed, that women would adopt more ‘feminist’ modes of femininity based around achievement in the public sphere. More complex understandings of the relationships between feminism, the media and lived experience emerged from the mid-1970s onwards, infl uenced by structuralism, psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. Often diverse in their intentions and outcomes, these approaches rejected the idea that texts could simply represent or misrepresent ‘reality’ and focused on how the meaning of gender differences was constructed through advertising, television, fi lms, women’s magazines and novels. These approaches played a crucial role in shaping a more complex and theoretically rigorous understanding of the relationships between feminism and popular culture.
