| Descript |
287 p |
| Note |
UMI Number: 8810119 |
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Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 49-04, Section: A, page: 0656 |
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Supervisor: Bruce E. Gronbeck |
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Iowa, 1987 |
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Public images of the modern American home and woman were constructed by multiple institutions with conflicting interests during the 1920s. Based on analyses of these institutions, their structural relations, and their discourses on the home and gender, this project builds a critical theory of the generative power of public discourse |
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The literature on the rise of American consumer culture at the turn of the twentieth century contextualizes the study of gender and consumption. Other literatures on the American home, housework, cooperatives, communal living, commercialized domestic services, and consumerism from the Victorian era through the Great War provide historical evidence that meanings of the modern home and woman did not simply evolve. Dominant public constructions were produced against oppositional discourses and practices |
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In defining the middle class home as the site of consumption and the woman as consumer, new experts and powerful institutions organized their discursive practices within wide political and economic trends, such as standardization and rationalization, as well as within specific institutional constraints, such as the development of new psychologies and their application in advertisements. Manufacturers of household technologies, the advertising industry, women's and home magazines, the state, home economics, and youth organizations, among others, each had vested interests in constructing and legitimizing particular public images of the home, its work, and its worker, "Mrs. Consumer." Many of these institutions coalesced in Better Homes in America, a national home reform campaign, wherein they unified for promoting individual home ownership, individualized housework, and standardized consumption practices, all constituted on historically and culturally-specific gender, class, and racial relations |
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A critical theory of such public discourse accounts for ideological processes at work when history and culture are erased by discursive claims to so-called natural, instinctual, or universal conditions. As a hegemonic process, public discourse links conflicting institutions and various publics whom they address into social formations, and legitimizes particular interests, values, and relations in the name of the people. Public discourse theorized as a social practice within specific historical formation offers a critical understanding of the ideological production of modern woman and home |
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Photocopy. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International, [1987] |
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School code: 0096 |
| Host Item |
Dissertation Abstracts International 49-04A
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| Subject |
The University of Iowa -- Optical disc |
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Speech Communication -- Optical disc
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Economics, General -- Optical disc
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Sociology, Social Structure and Development -- Optical disc
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0459
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0501
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0700
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| Alt Author |
The University of Iowa
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| Alt Title |
Public discourses on woman and the home [electronic resource] |
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