ABSTRACT
Feminist scholars have recently been thinking through the unintended consequences of the type of feminism which developed with the rise of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.1 All deal with the home-work dilemma which became the central focus of postwar feminism, leading towards the problematization of domesticity and a concomitant appreciation and recommendation of ‘a life’ outside the home. Some have shown a specifi c interest in the ways home life is required to deal with the consequences of women going out to work and men not (yet) taking home life seriously while others discuss the decline of the family wage, the contemporary necessity for households to be dual earning and the legal and social expectation that single mums with young kids now go out to work. Still others return to the original discussions present in early second wave feminist texts in order to reinterpret these in view of contemporary theoretical debates and continuing dilemmas within feminism and its representation. I want to begin by examining one of these approaches. In The Commercial Spirit of Intimate Life and the Abduction of Feminism (2003), Arlie Russell Hochschild investigates the connections between feminism and capitalism, with the advice manual serving as a case-study. She illustrates how specifi c feminist values have come to be utilized in the discourses of these cultural texts for women, encouraging them to live their lives in a manner that reaffi rms one feminist ideal, that of equality, and undermines another, that of ‘emotionally rich social bonds’ (2003, 15).
