Feminism After Wwii

I will be referring to Susan Douglas’ book, Where the Girls Are, to discuss how representations of femininity in popular culture evolved before and after the woman’s movement. For the children born after World War II, the media’s influence was extraordinary. These children were the fastest growing market segment and were referred to as the “baby boomers”. The preteen and teenage girls were the first generation to be relentlessly isolated as a distinct market segment. Advertisers knew they had to speak to the young women of this generation in a way that encouraged distinctions between teenagers and adults in order to go against the usual parental guidance in which provided fiscal restraint. “So at the same time that the makers of Pixie Bands, Maybelline eyeliner, Breck shampoo, and Beach Blanket Bingo reinforced our roles as cute, air headed girls, the mass media produced a teen girl popular culture of songs, movies, TV shows, and magazines that cultivated in us a highly self-conscious sense of importance, difference, and even rebellion.(Douglas,14)” Because the market of young women became important economically, these women started to believe that they could be of importance culturally and politically as a generation. Mass media, without trying, was able to encourage rebellion throughout this generation.

“American Women have been surrounded by contradictory expectations since at least the nineteenth century (14).” After World War II these circumstances increased with the meticulous array of media technology and outlets that interlocked in peoples homes. The contradictions in the media were heightened dramatically due not only to the changes of the audience but because the media itself was transforming in how it regarded and marketed the consumers. Mass media started to be defined by the division of age and sought to please “the lowest common denominator”. Television programs sought to please the “lowest common denominator” by offering homogenized images of our culture which sparked up a great deal of debate and succeeded in reinforcing the middle class, sexually repressed, white-bread norms and values. “By the 1960’s, the contradictions grew wider and more obvious, and the images and messages of this period were obsessed with shifting gender codes, driven with generational antagonisms, schizophrenic about female sexuality, relentless in their assaults on the imperfections of the female face and body, and determined to straddle the widening gap between traditional womanhood and the young, hip, modern “chick” (15).”

Female characters on T.V. were changing into witches and genies in an attempt to acknowledge the obvious increase in female power and sexual energy. “Since viewers had been socialized to regard female sexuality as monstrous, TV producers addressed the anxieties about letting it loose by domesticating the monster, by making her pretty and sometimes slavish, by shrinking her and keeping her locked up in a bottle, and by playing the situation for laughs. (126)” In such shows as Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Flying Nun had women with magical powers in which the men in their lives begged them not to use, unless of course to do chores. If the powers were used in the “public sphere” the man’s entire existence would be turned upside down. Bewitched for example was a show full of witches that constantly threatened the husband’s manhood and authority as the head of the household. Samantha was the witch on Bewitched who embodied important contradictions, for she was a happy, respectable house wife who exerted power beyond the kitchen or the living room. Samantha had to make excuses for the odd occurrences around their home and for her husband to remain being seen as competent to his male authority figures. The husband stays true to being the superior gender in the eyes of his superiors but the audience saw a different story in that the wife with the magical powers had control.

Therefore rise of the feminist movement changed our images of women in many different ways. In the late 1960’s the Miss America Pageant was the stage for the most outrageous and defining