ABSTRACT
Growing up in a feminist household, in my youth I was largely protected from popular culture by my earnest Californian parents. As a result, American popular culture held a distinct fascination for me as a terrain that was strangely familiar and alien at the same time. It is probably not surprising, then, that eventually popular culture became, for me, an object of intellectual and scholarly curiosity, the focus of an almost anthropological sense of inquiry on my part as I attempted to understand the dominant cultural trends of the historical period into which I had been born, and through which I came of age. In the course of researching popular culture for women as part of my doctoral thesis in the 1980s, I was shocked to discover not the downtrodden housewives that I had been led to expect by feminism, but a group of lusty, independent females determined to have fun, to succeed and to develop a healthy bank account, while masquerading behind a girlish demeanor. Popular culture generally, and women’s magazines in particular, were not
lamenting woman’s fate-rather, there was a mood of celebration and heated anticipation about what the present offered and what the future might bring. This discovery prompted me to begin a reassessment of the place and function of second-wave feminism, in the course of which I took a number of wrong turns, attributing, as did many scholars, the confidence of succeeding generations of women to the hard work of feminists in the 1960s and 1970s; however, the divide between the “can-do” woman and the feminist continued to sharpen. While the 2008 US Presidential Campaign left a bad taste in the mouths of many because of the scrutiny and abuse to which Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin were subjectedof a type reserved only for women-their respective candidacies also reflected a general sentiment that women should not limit their aspirations, and that the possibility of having, perhaps not “it all,” but “most of it,” remained very real for many women. Feminists, in contrast, viewed the developments of contemporary culture with understandable dismay. In a recent book, feminist scholar Diane Negra asks, “Why does this period feel so punishing and anxious to many?”1
