In an era in which women are expected to "have it all" by balancing public and private sphere responsibilities, the media increasingly define femininity in terms that are uniquely temporal. This project examines how American popular culture from the 1990s through the present represents how the mass movement of women into the working world affected women's domestic lives. Specifically, it explores how representations of and discourses about housework reflect the time-stresses that result from postfeminist expectations that women should strive for success in both their career and family lives. The media as technologies and cultural forms help construct panics about the lack of time women have to achieve public and private sphere goals. Media aimed at women, including films, television programs, magazines and websites also offer fantasy solutions to the "time crunch" women presumably experience. Studying how the media represent women's time is crucial to understanding definitions of femininity, women's labor and leisure in the postfeminist context. Postfeminism is used here to describe the historical context and as a discourse that assumes women have embraced the gains of second-wave feminism, have complete and unfettered access to the public working world, and are free to "choose" their lifestyle. While most scholars studying postfeminist media focus on depictions of women in the public sphere, this dissertation argues that representations of housework reflect contemporary time-stresses, the changing temporality of women's everyday lives, and the contradictions in postfeminist discourse about "women's time." This project adds insights from media history and theory to the existing sociological and historical literature on women's labor and leisure and the general feminist interest in how women negotiate public and private spheres. This dissertation analyzes texts such as lifestyle television shows about cooking, cleaning, childcare, pregnancy and childbirth, cinematic representations of maternal surrogacy, movie theater screenings for moms and babies, internet websites about domestic crafts like knitting, and mall-based consumer culture marketing of domestic home goods. Contemporary media representations of housework articulate discourses about time that expose the tensions between public and private spaces, labor and leisure and the construction of femininity in the postfeminist context.

Last modified

• 09/20/2018

Creator

• Elizabeth Nathanson

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N29X5H

Subject

• Media, Technology and Society

Keyword

• Women's Time
• Popular Culture
• Lifestyle Television
• Postfeminism
• Housework

Date created

• 2008-12-05

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright