Stanford University Press Blog

The Happy (Intellectual) Housewife

This month marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of The Feminine Mystique, and the  chattering classes haven't stopped, well, chattering about it.  We asked Rachel Mesch, author of our forthcoming Having it All in the Belle Epoque: How French Women's Magazines Invented the Modern Woman, to comment on the striking similarities--and differences--between how women were both portrayed and instructed in women's magazine's from the Belle Epoque through the 1960s.  Plus ca change, we might say...

"While the problem may have had no name, its cause was easy to identify. In her classic volume The Feminine Mystique, which celebrates its 50^th anniversary this year, Betty Friedan pointed an accusing finger directly at American women’s magazines.  

“By the end of 1949,” lamented Friedan, “only one out of three heroines […] was a career woman—and she was shown in the act of renouncing her career and discovering that what she really wanted to be was a housewife.” What particularly disturbed Friedan, and what might seem surprising to contemporary readers, was that in previous generations, some of these very same magazines had urged women otherwise—cheering them on towards equal rights, suffrage and the career of their choice. A post-war emphasis on marriage and family building altered the equation. Friedan documents with dismay how legions of happy housewives seemed to get increasingly younger and childlike in the pages of McCall’s, Ladies Home Journal and Redbook, just as the bright ambitious futures that once lay before these college graduates receded from memory. 

Friedan’s classic work reminds us that magazines have long controlled the precise dose of femininity served to women, inviting readers to see themselves in specific, culturally determined ways that can radically shift from one generation to the next—and from one continent to another. American readers, noted Friedan, scoffed at Simone de Beauvoir when The Second Sex was translated in the US. But French women’s magazines have their own fascinating story to tell about the feminine mystique and its journalistic deployment. The first French women’s glossies, Femina and La Vie Heureuse (literally, The Happy Life), which were launched in the early 1900s, also celebrated the happy housewife. But these blissful domestic figures were depicted just as often sitting at their desks-- where they wrote novels and poetry—as arranging flowers and tending to their children. Happiness, for these early working mothers, was measured through the precise balance of books and babies, intellectual and domestic productivity.  

Several generations before their 1950s American equivalents, then, French women’s magazines  pressured readers into a new bourgeois ideal.  But it was one that encouraged women to use their minds, even as they kept up their impeccable households and appearances. Don’t leave it up to male authors to tell stories about women, urged best-selling author Delarue-Mardrus in a 1909 column for Femina. “Reflect, ladies,” she exhorted, “and write for us what you discover!” 

Out of this combination emerged the paradoxical image of an “intellectual housewife,” as writer Camille Marbo termed it in 1907, one taught to recognize her own strengths inside and outside the home. There is nothing wrong with housework, noted Marbo in a long-forgotten but deeply significant early moment in “having it all” myth-making from the pages of La Vie Heureuse. It’s just that housework is not for every woman. And the worst thing in the world for a woman is to be forced to stay home when her talents lie elsewhere. 

It would be another four decades before Friedan discovered this all over again."

For more on Having it All, including images from the book, see her recent piece in Slate's "DoubleX."

 

 

Related articles

The Feminine Mystique, 50 Years Later

At 50, Does 'Feminine Mystique' Still Roar?

Two Filipina feminista sisters in academia (who write about sex)

What are the chances?

Two Filipina sisters grow up in Boston, head off to UC Berkeley for college, end up staying in academia, and now write about sex. They’re also both Stanford Univ. Press authors: Rhacel Salazar Parreñas’ most recent book investigates trafficked Filipina hostesses (Illicit Flirtations, 2011), and Celine Parreñas Shimizu has just authored the first full-length study of the racialization of Asian American men in movies (Straitjacket Sexualities, 2012).

And we're not the only ones who thought this was neat: this fall, the two professors are going to be featured in a segment on LA18, a SoCal TV station. (Edited to add: check out the television interview on Youtube here and here.) 

In the meantime, here are two thoughts to mull over from Professor Shimizu about filmmaking and being Asian American, taken from a Hyphen Magazine interview about her new book Straitjacket Sexualities:

 -       It’s not breaking news that Asian American men in movies have often been marginalized as practically asexual. But after taking a closer look at Hollywood films, Shimizu has another way of looking at it: rather than being macho-bravo, Asian American men are shown as being ethical, caring, and selfless. It’s a different kind of manhood--one that goes against all the stereotypes.

-       Minority art has a reputation for portraying warm and glossy versions of minority life--stories that usually don’t get told anywhere else. But according to Shimizu, the urge to only tell the positive “story of your people” doesn't always do justice to the people it's supposed to represent, for it's still just another fabric of incomplete truths. 

 

If you’re in Los Angeles later this summer, check out this upcoming book talk with Shimizu and Parreñas entitled “Filipinas, Feminism and Sex.”  Details: Echo Park Branch Library; Saturday, August 4, 2012; more information here.

 

Check out Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies here.

Check out Rhacel Salazar Parreñas’ Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo here. 

 

Appreciating artistic expression - Kaja Silverman interviewed on Artforum

Do film and photography affect your life? Do you ever consider these forms of artistic expression to be an essential part of your existence? While many people may tend to regard these types of art as background in our lives, some might ask: what if there’s more to it?

For years Kaja Silverman has been producing analytical work on cinema, art, and photography. From movies like Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick, to art from Leonardo De Vinci, Silverman’s work carefully examines the roles, within the art world, of vision, being, analogy, and more. Silverman was recently interviewed in Artforum about her past work and her most recent publication, Flesh of my Flesh, which is a sort of alternate history of photography. The author is obviously very passionate about her work. In the interview, she sites how from political influences like September 11, 2001 and the invasion of Iraq to personal battles with loss of love and breast cancer, art has reflected, influenced, and enhanced her life.

Read the full interview with Artforum here.

Pioneering Collection of Asian American Art

Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970  is a groundbreaking volume that not only presents these artists’ important contributions to and influences on American art and culture, but also details the political and social conditions that have delayed the recognition of these achievements.  It spans the period from the Gold Rush to the late 1960s, when a heightened civil rights and cultural consciousness began to emerge along with the emergence of Asian American Studies as a subject of academic study.

The volume is connected with a current exhibition at the de Young Museum, Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970, which continues through Jan. 18, 2009 in San Francisco. The art showcased in the volume and the exhibit presents familiar places, people and experiences in unfamiliar ways, allowing us to see America with “new eyes.” Chiura Obata’s Setting Sun: Sacramento Valley and Chang Dai-chien’s vision of Yosemite, Autumn Mountains in Twilight, offer fresh perspectives on the American landscape.

On seeing the exhibit, I was particularly struck by--Yun Gee's Where is My Mother, an early, poignant work where the artist expresses his sorrow at leaving his mother behind in China in color prisms of yellow, ochre, and green. An Untitled (Winter Internment Scene), by George Matsusaburo Hibi, painted in 1943 when the artist was confined with thousands of other Japanese Americans at the internment camp in Topaz, Utah. This stark and spare painting is at once gripping with isolated and dark figures moving through thick snow past gray barracks. The cascading destruction depicted in Eitaro Ishigaki's Disaster by Atomic Bomb is striking. And, the Bauhaus inspired modernism of Ruth Asawa's hanging wire sculptures disassembles any stereoptypical ideas one might have about the "asianness" of American art.

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the volume's editors, Mark Johnson remarks, "I think the range and sophistication of expression and the complexity of references are going to take you aback," this show "expands our understanding of American cultural history. It isn't often that one gets to be a part of rewriting such an important chapter in our national cultural heritage."

The Stanford Asian American Art project, whose work resulted in this volume, found "over 1,000 professional artists working in California alone," said Gordon Chang (in an interview with the Stanford Report), adding that these were not Sunday afternoon artists but "professionals, who lived by their art."  Over the years these artists' names disappeared from art history, said Chang (watch a video clip of the interview), leaving the project's researchers to "excavate knowledge, because the knowledge wasn't there." It was "an undercover, hidden history—a history hidden before my eyes. Most names were "erased," he said, as people who live on the margins of society often are. Hence, the researchers combed old newspapers, art school rosters and museum catalogs from a bygone era. They hunted down families and looked for artwork in "attics, basements, garages."

The volume covers several of the most important centers of Asian American creative activity—from New York to the West Coast cities of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and exhumes the careers of more than two hundred artists—most of whom are seen here for the first time in many decades, some in more than a century. Profiled artists include painters, sculptors, printmakers, photographers, textile artists, and ceramicists who were active for a decade or more in the United States.

Also see a longer video of a panel discussion at the exhibit's opening at the de Young.