Family Matters: Postfeminist Constructions of a Contested Site

FAMILY MATTERS:POSTFEMINIST CONSTRUCTIONS OF A CONTESTED SlTE1

ELIZABETH G. TRAUBE

It was a reception theorist's dream. When Dan Quayleattacked an episode of Murphy Brown, a television serieswhich he later conceded he had never watched, he confirmedthe autonomy of the reception process from the media text.Moreover, Quayie's outrage over the show's glorification ofunwed motherhood seemed to suggest that the Utopian hadprevailed over the ideological, a view of mass culture mostoften encountered in reception studies. For in a sitcomwhich a frustrated feminist of the second wave might haveseen as one more foray in a campaign to redomesticateindependentwomen, Quaylefoundan attempted subversionof patriarchal order consistent with and partly responsiblefor the upheaval in Los Angeles over the Rodney Kingverdict.

Quayie's attack derives from a long tradition ofconservative cultural criticism which links the developmentof the modem mass media of communication — includingthe press, radio and television, the cinema, and the musicindustry — to a moral breakdown in society. While left-wing criticism of the media came to fasten on a threat from"above," defining social stabilization as the ideologicalproject of the "culture industry," the danger discerned bythe right is the eruption of social anarchy from "below,"under the influence of cultural forces. Conservativeintellectuals, Tony Bennett (1982:35) notes, have typically"responded to the political problem of social disorder byredefining it as a cultural problem," or specifically, as aratftf-cultural problem. Culture produced in commodityform by the few for the many has been repeatedly condemnedby the right as corrupt and corrupting, a desecration of aunifying high culture by the low tastes of the masses, oralternatively, a manip ulative assault on the consciousness ofatomized masses, calculated to arouse and unleash their

baser impulses.Since the mid-1970s, New Right intellectuals and

politicians have fine-tuned a conspiratorial version of diemass culture critique in which a "New Class* or "liberalelite" are identified as the real holders of social power.Borrowing the language if not the conceptual frameworkofrecent developments in class theory, neoconservatives definethe "New Class" as a loose alliance of government bureaucratsand assorted cultural producers who together control theState, the educational system, and the mass media, and whohave launched a concerted attack on traditional Americanvalues from those bases.2 Among the New Class's mostinsidious instruments of subversion are affirmative actionprograms, social welfare programs, assorted left-liberaleducational initiatives, and the cultural commoditiesproduced and distributed by the entertainment industry.

What links these disparate phenomena in New Rightimagination is an underlying narrative of the patriarchalfamily under siege. Affirmative action contributes to theperceived crisis in multiple ways. By supporting the careerambitions of women, it lures them away from their domesticrole and erodes the authority of male breadwinners, whileit unmans minority men by enabling them to succeedwithout the traditionally masculine virtues of industry andself-reliance. Even more corrosive is the "dependency"fostered by the welfare system, to which conservativesattribute the notorious "breakdown of the family" amongthe minority poor. The black welfare queen at the bottomof the class ladder is the counterpart of the selfish careerwoman whom affirmative action and feminism have helpedascend to the top. Producing babies for profit, exchangingthe disciplinary influence of masculine authority in thehome for the largesse of an overly indulgent "liberal"

56 Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 Visual Anthropology Review

welfare state, the poor black unwed mother melds with theprofessional woman in the New Right imaginary, acondensed figure of subversive female desire.3

Contra David Letterman, Quayle had not confoundeda television fiction with reality.4 Rather, he had mapped thesame fiction onto both a mass-cultural representation ofunwed motherhood and the growth of female-headedhouseholds in the inner cities. Within the terms ofneoconservative discourse, a sitcom which celebrates anupscale life without father and the welfare system whichundermines "family values" among the minority poor areboth the artifacts ofNew Class liberals, the domestic enemyofNew Right imagination, whom Quaylewenton to attackas the enemy of domesticity. In a series of speeches to hiscore supporters Quayle lashed out at what he called "thecultural elite," an assortment of mental workers, ensconced"in newsrooms, sitcom studios and faculty lounges acrossAmerica" (Rosenthal 1992a: A-l), who use their control ofcultural institutions to infect us all with their lax moralvalues.

Feminism epitomizesmorallaxityforneoconservatives,who view it as a collective expression of female selfishnessand irresponsibility. Quayle's complaint about MurphyBrown, that"(b)earing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong"(Wines 1992: B-16), was a condensed allusion to welfaremothers and to the feminist values which have supposedlyeroded elite family ties.5 What he hadneglected to consider,however, is the transformation that "feminism" hasundergone in media representations. As Elspeth Probyn(1990) observes, the New Women who populate late-1980s and 1990s mass culture are uniformly preoccupiedwith domesticity. If they have not already "chosen" toreturn home, like the "neotraditionalist" homemakers atthe centers of Parenthood and Thirty something, they areeither nervously listening to the ticking of their biologicalclocks or busy combining motherhood with career, whethereffortlessly, like Claire Huxtable, Maggie Seaver, and otherSuper Moms, or with trepidation, like single mothersMolly Dodd and Murphy Brown. Not having paused toadjust his antifeminist rhetoric to this "postfeminist" turnin mass culture, Quayie found his routine condemnation ofunwed childbearing being re-presented as hostility to awoman's choice of motherhood, and it was suggested (byMurphy Brown creator Diane English, among others) thatsuch asentimen t logically presupposed support for abortion.

This charge left Quayie understandably disconcerted.6

New Right "profamily" ideology defines abortion andsingle motherhood as two sides of the same coin, alternativeways of enabling women to reject the discipline of marriage,and counters such assertions of female autonomy with thereassertion of traditional patriarchal authority. In its presentpostfeminist construction, however, unwed motherhood isan elusive target for antifeminist rhetoric, for it condensesthe female autonomy which conservative antifeminists seekto curtail with the nurturing family values which they claimto defend.7

Postfeminist trends in media representations of womenhave also been attacked by feminist critics, as manifestationsof what Susan Faludi (1991) calls a "backlash" against thewomen's movement. For Faludi, postfeminism is a soft-peddled, mass-mediated version ofNew Right antifeminismwith a broader but fundamentally similar appeal.8 Yet, asthe Murphy Brown incident demonstrated, postfeministfictions can give offense to feminists (Pollitt 1992) andantifeminists alike, and this capacity, to my mind, is notinsignificant. It gives support, I will argue, to JudithStacey's (1990) model of "postfeminism" as a mixed andcontradictory gender consciousness which informs anambiguous gender politics. InStacey's ethnographic researchon the postindustrial remaking of the family system,postfeminists are women and men who distance themselvesfrom feminist identity and politics but have neverthelessabsorbed many feminist assumptions into their strategiesfor family life.

Extended to media representations, this model suggeststhat postfeminist images of female domesticity are notadequately understood as antifeminist regressions. Rather,the family in media representations as in lived experience isa contested terrain, a site where desires for more egalitarianfamily and gender systems intermingle with pervasiveanxieties over change. How mass-mediated fantasies offemale autonomy in the domestic sphere intersect withideologies of race and class is the subject of this paper. Ifocus on postfeminist media images of white singlemotherhood in which, I argue, imaginary identificationswith women of subordinated racial groups and social classesare used to reconfigure middle-class femininity. Theimmediate roots of these fantasies lie in the 1950s whenimages of white and black single motherhood were splitapart.

ELIZABETH TRAUBE IS PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY. HER MOST RECENT BOOK IS DREAMING IDENTITIES:

CLASS, GENDER, AND GENERATION IN 1980S HOLLYWOOD MOVIES (1992). SHE IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON MASS CULTURAL

PRODUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES.

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 57

FIGURE 1: THEN VICE-PRESIDENT DAN QUAYLE, FOURTH FROM RIGHT, AND HIS WIFE MARILYN, RIGHT, JOIN OTHERS IN WATCHING

THE SEASON PREMIERE OF MURPHY BROWN, MONDAY SEPTEMBER 2 1 , 1992. COURTESY A.P . / WORLD WLDE PHOTOS.

I. REBEL WITH CHILD

The dramatic postwar increases in fertility and marriagerates and in the number of households conforming to themale breadwinner-female homemaker ideal were soonrevealed to be a temporary reversal of longterm trends.Even at the height of the 1950s, the ideology whichglorified women's return to fulltime domesticity did notcompletely regulate their lives. Gaps between die refurbisheddomestic ideal and social practice emerged within thepostwar period itself, in the growing numbers of marriedwomen who quietly returned to work to help finance risingconsumption needs (May 1988: 167; Marsh 1990: 186-187).

Nor was work the only sphere in which postwarwomen contested the cult of domesticity. The period that

saw a spectacular rush of young people into marriage andparenthood also saw an increase in the official number ofillegitimate births among white as well as black women.How the dominant culture responded to this perceivedviolation of its norms is the subject of Wake Up Little Susie,Rickie Solinger's (1992) compelling study of singlepregnancy before Roe v. Wade. The response, Solingershows, was differentiated on racial lines. Although bothwhite and black unwed mothers were constructed as threatsto die postwar "family ethic," different meanings wereassigned to dieir pregnancies and justified their differentialtreatment.

Unwed black mothers continued to be constructed inbiological and sociological terms, as "wanton breeders or"breeders for profit," products of unrestrained sexual drivesand degraded social environments. Upon their unruly


wombs conservative politicians laid the blame for populationincrease, rising welfare costs, and urban poverty.9 By contrast,Solinger argues at length (1992: 86-186), white singlepregnancy was psychologized over the therapeutic fifties.Where traditional religious authorities had seen irreversiblyfallen women, psychiatric professionals and social workersrecast the white unwed mother as a treatable neurotic Herpregnancy, according to the new paradigm, wasunconsciously motivated, the symptom of inner conflictswhich were found in case after case to revolve aroundproblems in feminine sex role identification. These, inturn, were traced to the failure of a girl's parents to provideappropriate models of sex role identity.

Developmental psychology in this period wasdominated by a neo-Freudian model of socialization inwhich children internalized their proper sex roles throughidentification with the same-sex parent (Ehrenreich andEnglish 1978: 241-251; Pleck 1987: 92-95).10 Applied tothe pregnancies of single white girls, the sex-role modelproduced a variety of particular explanations along thesamegeneral lines. A girl who became pregnant, psychiatricprofessionals argued, was one who felt unappreciated by aweak or distant father and had failed to identify with adoniineeringornegligentmother. As aresult, her femininitywas insecure, and this caused her to become pregnant, anunconscious attempt either to get backator reachout to theparents who had disappointed her. Her cure, as Solinger(1992: 127-147) describes it, entailed accepting andinternalizing the blame for her condition. Throughtreatment she was expected: to confront and renounce herhostile, unfeminine wishes; to accept her inability to raisea child alone; and to relinquish the child for adoption by anormative couple, demonstrating through her sacrifice herfuture vocation for motherhood.

The psychological model of single pregnancy had acomplex ideological effect. By removing the "biologicalstain" of illegitimacy from the babies of white unwedmothers, psychological explanation rendered the babiesadoptable in a period of rising demand; at the same time, itworked to secure the unwed mother's complicity in theadoption mandate by representing any desire to keep herchild as a prolongation of the pathology that had supposedlymade her pregnant (Solinger 1992: 152-154).11 Insubmitting to expert authority and giving up their children,Solinger argues more generally (1992: 16-17), unwedmothers enabled childless couples to realize the postwarfamily norm; they also reinforced the dominant normindirectly, by validating the postwar redefinition ofmotherhood as a status that could not be achieved withoutaman, outsideof a legally sanctioned, properly constructed,

two-parent, male-headed family.The psychological stereo typeof whitesingle pregnancy

was one strategy in what Elaine May (1988) calls thepostwar "ethos of containment," which defined the familyas the uniquely safe site for all expressions of female desire.In terms of the history of domestic ideology, containmentcodified ashift in the dominant construction of femininity.Whereas the older Victorian ideal of true womanhood hadrepresented women as essentially asexual, maternal beings,containment produced female sexuality as a dangerous butpotentially productive force.12 Women in the new modelwere en tided to sexual fulfillment so long as they accepteddependence on male breadwinners and used sex to enhancetheir marriages. Conversely, the model invested singlewomen in general with the negatively valued sexuality oncereserved in bourgeois consciousness for women ofsubordinated classes (Stansell 1987) and racial groups(Carby 1987). Moreover, any assertion of independenceon the part of middle-class women, such as choosing careerover marriage, became ever more heavily freighted with theimagined threat of dangerous female sexuality.13

Eventsover the next decades would conspire to intensifythe sense of threat among defenders of the traditionaldomesticideal. For the fifties family soon proved inadequateto its assigned task of containing desire. By 1960, marriageand birth rates began to fall once more, renewing thelongterm trend, and as the baby boom ended, the divorcerate resumed what proved to be its giddy, largelyuninterrupted climb (Levitan & Belous 1981). Theheightened instability of marriage encouraged women toreject fulltime domesticity for participation in the paidlabor force at the same time as it reflected such decisions.14

Over the next decades, the domestic ideal becameincreasingly remote from lived experience, as economic andcultural forces together pushed and pulled women of allclasses out of the home and into the paid labor force(Gerson 1985; Stacey 1990).

Liberal feminism of the second wave took hold amongwhite, college-educated, professional-managerial-classwomen, those best positioned to experience careercommitment as fulfilling. Among these women, improvedaccess to education and employment worked together withfeminist aspirations to shape a new consciousness whichalso found expression, Rosalind Petchesky (1983: 142-148) suggests, in risingrates of abortion and out-of-wedlockbirths. Terminating an unwanted pregnancy and becominga single mother offered alternative ways to contest thedominant cultural narrative of marriage as the definingevent in their lives; for those with expectations of economicindependence, both acts could express and reinforce a new


sense of autonomy.Dominant representations of single motherhood in

the larger culture continued to be differentiated along raciallines. Over the 1960s black single pregnancies weresubsumed under the metaphor of the "population bomb,"for which they were supposedly the trigger, further hardeningthe already harsh attitudes toward black single motherhood(Solinger 1992:206).15 White single mothers, by contrast,became a subset of a larger group, the youthful, middle-class baby boomers who rejected their parents' ethos ofsexual containment and made up the vanguard of the"sexual revolution."16

The white unwed middle-class pregnant girl lost hermarginality through this shift. If premarital sex were nowthe rule among her peers, a widely accepted feature of thedating system, then premarital pregnancy was a misfortunethat could befall any young woman and not, or notnecessarily, a neurotic symptom. As the psychiatricconstruction of white single pregnancy lost its hold, theadoption mandate also came apart, not least of all becausesingle mothers were increasingly likely to resist it. A declinein the number of women applying to adoption agenciesindicated just such a development, and new studies beganto represent this trend in relatively positive terms. By themid-1960s, according to Solinger (1992:224-228), it wasgenerally accepted among the experts that a white unwedmother who elected to keep her child could be pursuing arational plan.

II. KINDER WOMEN IK A MEANER SEASON

Dominant images of single motherhood in the 1990scontinue to be polarized on racial lines. At one pole of theprevailingrepresentational system, poor blacksingle mothersremain under the sign of the irrational, constructed as"excessive" reproducers whose fertility must somehow berestricted. At the other pole, single motherhood appears asthe rational "choice" of elite white career women who haverevised an earlier lifeplan. Both images recur with differentinflections across a range of political positions, embeddedin a variety of discourses that center on the family.

Black single motherhood is pathologized in thedominant discourses on social welfare which have made theelimination of "welfare dependency" rather than of femalepoverty into the overriding concern (Abramovitz 1988:367; Fraser 1989: 144-5). Within this definition of thesituation, the problem is to explain why poor minoritywomen supposedly perpetuate a cycle of dependency byrepeatedly bearing children out-of-wedlock.17 While

conservatives attack the welfare system itself for creating an"underclass" deficient in "traditional values," liberals pointto structural causes of urban poverty and to such putativepsycho-cultural consequences as a low sense ofaself-efficacy*among the chronically jobless urban poor (Wilson 1987,1991).18

Pregnancy among inner-city minority teenagers isbelatedly psychologized in this latter perspective, whichcorresponds to what Nancy Fraser (1989: 155) calls the"therapeutic moment" of the operation of thesocial-welfaresystem as a "juridical-administrative-therapeutic-stateapparatus." Counseling sessions, the application of thetherapeutic model, construct the poor unmarried pregnantminority teenager in terms formerly reserved for white girls.Her pregnancy now appears as an individual, psychologicalproblem, a (doomed) attempt to overcome her inner lack ofself-worth. As the feminine counterpart to the criminalactivities of restless ghetto youth, teenage sexuality comes torepresent the sexuality of all black women as a pathologicalactivity in which the state may justifiably intervene.19

Proposed solutions to the so-called welfare crisis sharean underlying assumption: that black women need to bedrawn out of. their state-supported, female-headed, "defectivefamilies" and into the paid work force, where they canbecome responsible, self-sufficient, productive individuals.20

Various means to this end are now in circulation, such as the"New Covenant" set forth at the Democratic conventionwhich combines automatic limits on welfare grants withtraining for jobs that are somehow to materialize.Conservative rhetoric continues to appeal to widely heldfears about the breadwinner family by blaming unwedwelfare mothers for its breakdown among the urban minoritypoor. Despite sporadic railing against "deadbeat dads,"however (who tend to be represented as white and middleclass), the punitive strategies favored by conservatives (strictereligibility requirements, forced work requirements, andcuts in benefits to eliminate the "incentive" to bearillegitimate children) are not designed to strengthenmascuUneauthoritywithmpoorminorityfarnilies. Instead,it is the "public patriarch" who is asked to reassert himselfand drive welfare mothers back to work (Abramovitz 1988:355-358).

I will not undertake the economic analysis required toconnect these trends to the postindustrial economy and thedemands of capital for cheap labor. Rather, I want toconsider the ideological system which generates symmetricnarratives about the relative places of motherhood andwork in women's lives. Even as the welfare debates convergeon the beneficial effects of labor discipline on single blackmothers, stories about white women have been circulating

6 0 Volumes Number 1 Spring 1993 Visual Anthropology Review

in the mass media which follow a reverse course. Since themid-1980s, the increasingly common wisdom conveyed infictional and nonfictional representations is that middle-class white women must either leave the work force ormodify their commitment to it in order to recover their truewomanhood.

Fictional constructions of women in different mediahave been working toward a similar effect, which is toreposition women in the home. In the movies, theindependent heroines of the late 1970s and early 1980swere displaced by frus trated career women andself-sacrificingmothers, women who returned to or simply belonged to thesphere their feminist sisters had rejected.21 On television,the few single childless professional women who survivedwere made to appear increasingly neurotic. Workplacesitcoms are symptomatic of the wider trend. In the 1970sMTM enterprises produced the "family of co-workers," avariation on the nuclear family sitcom which, Jane Feuer(1984:58-9) has suggested, offered a Utopian alternative tobourgeois domesticity. Progressive aspects of the genrewere particularly evident in its representation of women,for whom the generic requirement to preserve the unity ofthe work family precluded any withdrawal into the home.By the end of the 1980s, however, the female members ofworkplace families were no longer content with thesubstitution and they became fixated on motherhood, witha husband (temporarily, on Night Court) or without one(Cheers, Designing Women, Murphy Brown).

According to Susan Faludi (1991), such cinematicandtelevisual images are part of a wider campaign waged overthe last decade to construct feminism as the enemy ofwomen. By demonizing independent women whilecelebrating motherhood as women's primary role, the massmedia, Faludi argues, have sought to substitute a regressivepostfeminist disposition for the more hopefiiland combativespirit which the women's movement expressed andreinforced. Postfeminism, in this view, is fundamentally amass-cultural phenomenon with potentially negative effectson the consciousness of female audiences.22 It consists of aset of ideological representations created by mediaprofessionals and deployed in a campaign against genderequality to which women are peculiarly susceptible.

By contrast, Judith Stacey (1987; 1990) has consistentlyand cogently used the concept of "postfeminism" todemarcate a symptomatically mixed gender consciousnessemergent among different social classes and also objectifiedin media texts. In a critique of media texts aimed at middle-class women, Deborah Rosenfelt and Stacey (1990: 549)define postfeminism as "an emerging culture and ideologythat simultaneously incorporates, revises, and depoliticizes

many of the fundamental issues advanced by second-wavefeminism." As the definition suggests, Rosenfelt and Staceysee important distinctions between the ideologies andconstituencies of postfeminism and those of antifeminism,"distinctions," they add, "that make it worthwhile [forfeminism] to grapple with rather than simply dismiss theliterature and issues of the former."

They proceed to reinterpret selected postfeminist textswhich to many feminists exemplify antifeminist backlash:the June 2, 1986 Newsweek cover story, "Too Late forPrince Charming," about the grim marital prospects foreducated women over thirty as documented by Yale andHarvard researchers; Sylvia Hewlett's A Lesser Life: TheMyth of Women's Liberation in America, which accusesfeminism of devaluing motherhood and privileging a "malemodel" of career success; and The Good Mother, a novel bySue Miller about a divorced mother's unsuccessful struggleto integrate her erotic and maternal feelings.

Rosenfelt and Stacey recognize troubling, antifeministtendencies in each of these texts, noting how femaleautonomy is repeatedly made to appear responsible fordifficulties faced by contemporary women. But thedifficulties, they continue, are not manufactured by mediatexts, as some feminist critics have implied. The lonelinessof single working women (Newsweek), the obstacles tocombining motherhood and work (Hewlett), thevulnerability of single mothers (Miller), these are real andpainful dimensions of women's lived experience in a societyin which progress toward gender equality remains unevenand incomplete. Nor can the texts be dismissed asantifeminist, Rosenfelt and Stacey argue, for even as theyretreat from feminist responses to social discontents into amore conservative profamily vision, they also incorporateselected features of the feminism they reject. Such textualincoherence, according to Rosenfelt and Stacey (1990:564), is cause for "modest optimism" about the future.What the "potentially fruitful inconsistencies of postfeministculture" indicate, they argue, is not an antifeminist closurebut the contradictory consciousness of women and men inaperiod when family and gender arrangements are multiple,insecure, and pervasively contested. With this consciousness,they conclude, a third wave of feminism can and mustengage.

In the following sections I treat postfeminist mediarepresentations as a locus of contradictions, a site wherediffuse fears about the passing of the breadwinner nuclearfamily and nostalgia for the stability and security of animagined home coexist in tension with longings for new,more egalitarian forms of family life. This mixed charactersets postfeminism apart from New Right "profamily"


ideology, which appeals primarily to the socially conditionedfears, falsely promising to restore an order that is over byblaming feminism and the welfare state, rather than thepostindustrial economy, for its collapse. But neither doespostfeminism express the oppositional consciousnesspromoted on the left, where the struggle to redefine whatconstitutes a family is collectively waged by feminists, gayand lesbian activists, and welfare rights groups seeking bothsocial legitimation and economic support for diverse,nontraditional households. Postfeminism resonates,however, with less dramatic, everyday forms of strugglewhich are carried on by women and men in all social classes,in different circumstances and with unequal resources, whofind themselves obliged to invent new ways of being afamily.

Rather than replicating conservative antifeminism inanother key, as the backlash theory would have it, mass-mediated postfeminism recognizes and reworks selectedelements from the opposed discourses on the family that arecompeting in the larger culture. It appeals to the mixedfears and desires of diverse, socially situated audiences,proffering multiple, contradictory possibilities of meaning-Contemporary media representations of white singlemotherhood exemplify the intricacies of the postfeministinterpretive situation.

III. THE MATERNAL REBEL AS NATURAL WOMAN:

MURPHY BROWN

Over the course of the 1991-92 television season, theMurphy Brown series revolved around the single pregnancyof the lead character, a successful television journalist. Asthe season unfolded, Murphy Brown's body was madevisible to viewers as a specifically female body, and anincreasingly grotesque and demanding female body, towhich Murphy was ritualisticaliy required to submit herselfin episode after episode. These insistent visual and narrativeaffirmations of what Denise Riley (1988) calls the "sexedbody" culminated with the image of Murphy in the seasonfinale, singing Aretha Franklin's "A Natural Woman" toher newborn babe in arms. To borrow a phrase from DickHebdige (1979:45), "a phantom history of race relations"was embodied in that moment.

Appropriated and incorporated into middle-class youthculture, African-American music had provided a symbolthrough which single white middle-class women in the1960s and 1970s identified with the represented sexualautonomy of black women. Murphy Brown had long sincegiven this identification a new twist by converting the

Motown music that opens every episode into a signifier ofits elite white heroine's professional autonomy.23 Sexualitywas constructed in the show as an indulgence which Murphyhad largely given up, alongwith alcohol andother "excesses"of the 1970s, and throughout the series viewers were madeto understand that her primary fulfillment now camethrough work. This unilateral commitment was understoodto have been costly. Murphy was supposed to have recentlyreturned from the Betty Ford Clinic in the series opener,and many episodes drew attention to her loneliness.Nevertheless, the career achievement for which she hadsacrificed her personal life was consistently represented asexhilarating.

Pregnancy initiated a change in the traits attributed toMurphy's character, or more precisely, the plotting of thepregnancy episodes confirmed what viewers had alwaysbeen encouraged to believe, that Murphy's harsh,antimaternal, and, as Andrea Press (1991: 41) notes,stereotypically feminist personality masked the "naturalwoman" hidden within. In this context her postpartumperformance of her favorite soul song decisively redefinedprofessional autonomy in terms of lack, as an attempteddenial of true womanhood which was shown to be rootedin the distinctive difference of the maternal body.

From the perspective of an egalitarian feminism thatseeks to reduce the socially constructed difference betweenthe sexes, the treatment of Murphy's motherhood negotiatesa partial, disturbing return to the ideology of women asessentially maternal beings. If women cannot be fulfilledsolely through motherhood in the show's postfeministvision, neither can they fully realize themselves without it,and that caveat has an antifeminist force. At the same time,however, the show also transposed a feminist ideal of theindependent woman to the domestic realm, where Murphy,assisted by her family of primarily male co-workers, willmother more or less autonomously in the coming season.24

Only the struggles waged by "maternal rebels" over the pastdecades, and the dramaticshifts they produced in dominantconstructions of white single motherhood and in women'sexperienceofthat status, allowed the Murphy Brown show'sfeminist critics to take the rights of single mothers largelyfor granted and not to see a feminist victory in their fictivereassertion.

Dan Quayle knew better. The intrepid ideologue ofthe New Right protested the show with good reason, foreven as it absorbs elements of the traditional ideology ofmotherhood, it simultaneously contests the conservativedefinition of the family and envisions an alternative tofulltime, mother-intensive child raising. What is more,Quayle had brought a hidden connection into the light.


Dipping into the New Right politics of the imaginary, hecondensed the independent white professional womanwith the poor black welfare mother, and he reminded usthat these figures have also been covertly conjoined incentrist symbolism of self-realization.

Black people, along with the white working class, werethe largely absent presence in the middle-class "sexualrevolution." As young white middle-class women and menasserted a more openly eroticized identity, claiming theright to direct their sex lrves as they saw fit, they identifiedtheir new freedom with the idealized sexualities ofsubordinated classes and racial minorities.25 Whetherpositively or negatively valued, white stereotypes of blackpromiscuity continued to be oppressive for black womenand men. But expressed through cultural commoditiessuch as music and dress, the imaginary affiliation withdominated social groups provided the youthful "sexualrebels" of the white middle-class with a language of resistanceto bourgeois respectability.

As the baby-boom generation aged, those career-oriented white middle-class women who also wantedchildren found themselves obliged to become "maternalrebels," to some degree. A minority who, whether throughcircumstances or sexual preference, had never built a stablerelationship with a man chose to have children outside ofmarriage, sometimes with the aid of new technologies ofreproduction. Many more became single parents throughdivorce, to which the additional strains of two-careermarriages have no doubt contributed. But another groupof work-committed wives became mothers on theunderstanding that they and their husbands would more orless equally share parenting responsibilities (see Gerson1985; Hertz 1986; Ehrensaft 1987). Contesting thetraditional ideology of motherhood as a fulltime andexclusively female vocation, women and men in two careerfamilies who "mother" together are attempting toredistribute parental responsibilities along egalitarian lines.

What seems to be emerging with these and otherexperiments is a new identification in which the familypractices rather than the represented sexuality of subordinategroups become a symbolic resource for reconfiguring white,middle-class identities. From a historical perspective, blackwomen, together with white working-class women, havebeen what Judith Stacey (1990: 252) calls "the genuinepostmodern family pioneers." Although fuiitimemotherhood was constructed (against resistance) as ahegemonic ideal, it was only belatedly and temporarilyattained in the postwar years by privileged sections of thewhite working class.26 It has rarely been a possibility forblack women, who for generations were denied the right to

legal marriage and who have a long history of combiningpaid work with domestic responsibilities (Jones 1985).

Single motherhood, moreover, has a particularlyrespected place within African-American culture. Whilerepresentations of the strong father as the solution to the"crisis" of the black family are not without appeal in blackcommunities, they have not gone uncontested by blackfeminists and political leaders.27 Against nostalgia for male-headed families, a black feminist literary tradition whichdates back to the nineteenth century uses the absence of theblack father as what Hazel Carby (1986: 315) calls a"utopian space" to imagine a range of egalitarian,nonpatriarchal unions between black men and black women.

What I am suggesting is that shadow traces of African-American family practices are inscribed in postfeministvisions of the family. In converting the Utopian family ofco-workers into a female-headed household sustained by anetwork of fictive kin, Murphy Brown unconsciouslyrecognizes and disguises the long, quiet struggle of blackwomen to construct alternatives to the dominant whitemiddle-class family system. With that system now underattack from within the white middle class, other socialgroups who have contested it under different conditionsand for other purposes take on heightened symbolic value.But inasmuch as Murphy Brown gives only displacedrecognition to the struggles of black women, it remainscomplicit with the pervasive splitting of praise andcondemnation on racial lines. By indiscriminatelycondemning white and black single mothers, Quayiechallenged us to defend all maternal rebels, who fight theirbattles with the unequal means at their disposal.

IV. REFORMING WOMEN: LITTLE MAN TATE

Given the historical connection between family life and theformation of middle-class identity, it is not surprising thatwhen the family is in flux, the ideological boundariesbetween classes may become blurred. It was in the name of"the family" that middle-class men and women advancedtheir claim to status in the mid-19th century and launchedwhat Christine Stansell (1987:65) has unmasked as a "classintervention" into urban working-class neighborhoods.There they encountered what Stansell calls a "city ofwomen:" collectivities oflaboring women who were unableto depend on men for support in the unstable industrialeconomy and became household heads themselves,supporting one another in timesof distress; and independent,assertive, pleasure-seeking working girls who drew on newforms of commercial leisure to construct a vivid, prideful


style of their own. In these alternative forms of working-class womanhood and family life, middle-class reformerssaw only deviations from the "true" female nature which,they believed, was incarnated in their own genteel familypractices. By the 1850s, Stansell concludes (1987:219), acampaign was underway "to transform the character ofworking-class womanhood into one resembling more closelythe female identity that the cult of domesticity celebrated."Mediated by a particular, class-based conception of gender,a moral reform movement that targeted the households oflaboring women became linked to the wider efforts of thebourgeoisie to suppress an oppositional working-classculture.

Ironically, from the perspective of class history, arecent postfeminist fantasy assigns to its working-classheroine the true womanhood in which her middle-classrival is deficient. Little Man Tote was a modestly successful,female-oriented 1991 movie about a gifted child and thetwo women in his life. The directorial debut of Jodie Foster,who also stars as the boy's single, working-class mother, themovie opened to generally courteous but unenthusiasticreviews and, wi th litde support from its financially troubleddistributor (Orion Pictures), it might have been expected toquickly disappear. Yet it lingered on the top 50 chart foreighteen weeks (six of them among the top 10), grossing arespectable $25 million.28 The movie provides identificationfigures for working-class and professional women, and myanecdotal evidence suggests that it appeals across classlines.29 For this analysis, it is an exemplary postfeministtext, symptomatic of the contradictory pressures negotiatedin mainstream representations of gender and family.

Generically, Little Man Tate draws on variant forms ofthe "woman's film" (see Gledhill, ed. 1987), as female-oriented Hollywood melodramas are known. Its heroine,Dede Tate, is the sacrificing mother of maternal melodramawho effaces herself for the good of her child, but transposedto what resembles the plot of a romantic melodrama inwhich an estranged couple is reunited after a separation. Asis common in both varieties of the woman's film, thenarrative facilitates identification with multiple viewpoints,allowing female spectators to sympathize to some degreewith Dede's rival for her son's affection.30 Against this generictendency to shift point of view, much of the story is toldfrom the perspective of the central male protagonist, whoseintimate relationship to his adoring mother is announcedwhen "I Get a Kick Out of You" plays over the openingcredits. Fred Tate is indeed the litde man in his mother'slife, a controlling figure in many ways. He keeps thehousehold accounts, knows when Dede's period is due, andfully absorbs her maternal and erotic energies.31

Seven year old Fred is also given partial control over thenarrative discourse. His voice-over frames the movie andexemplifies his omniscient knowledge, which he thinksmay encompass his own birth. Whether or not Fred canactually remember being born, the movie has himmiraculously narrate that event in his voice-over to theopening scene, Dede in the delivery room, joyfully greetingher newborn child. Therx>y'smmiculousnatureisreafBnnedin the next scene when he performs what proves to be thefirst of many prodigious feats of knowledge and becomesthe object of his mother's reverential gaze.

In keeping with the theme of Fred's uncanny powers isthe movie's treatment of his fatherless condition. WhileDede horses around with him, displaying the playfullyerotic physicality which the movie associates with herworking-class background, he explains in a voice-over thathe is son to no (mortal) man:

People are always asking who my Dad is. Dede says Idon't have a Dad. She says I'm an immaculate conception.That's a pretty heavy responsibility for a litde kid.

It is also, at the very least, a rather extreme case of"father absence." Nor is the movie quite so blase as Dedeabout the implications for Fred's masculinity. His firstappearance at age seven finds him on hands and knees in aschool yard, isolated and a bit forlorn. He is putting thefinishing touches on a chalk mural of a mother and child,all the while wishing, his voice-over tells us, to be one of theboys roughhousing across the yard under the leadership ofa particularly macho little kid whom Fred will try in vain toemulate as the story unfolds.

Dede is entirely devoted to Fred, like the Madonna inhis mural. She hovers over the boy, seeking to attend to hisphysical, mental, and social needs, a caring, giving maternalpresence whose every move is for her son. He is, she tellshim just before their parting, "exactly what I want to be,"the admired and idealized object in which her own self issubmerged. It is her difference from him, however, thatdrives the plot along its halting oedipal trajectory.

In contrast to the unhappily married heroine of StellaDallas (1937; recendy recreated as a single mother in Stella,the 1990 Bette Midler remake), Dede never seeks to be"something else besides a mother." Where Stella tried,unsuccessfully, to keep her direcdy erotic, pleasure-seekingimpulses separate from her maternal ones, in Dede the twoappear successfully fused. Maternal concern predominatesin her scenes with Fred, though always erotically tinged, butwhen she comes to pick him up at school in her slinky bluecocktail waitress dress, we briefly see her through hisclassmates' eyes, as adesirable, seductive, excessivdyfemininepresence. It is not just that she represents "body* in the


conventional codingoPworking-classness," butaspecificallyfemale body, a female as body, the source of sensuality,desire, feeling, and also of a powerful pull toward fusionwhich her "little man" must resist if he is to achieveautonomous, masculine selfhood.

Or so it seems, at first, as the movie launches Fred onthe oedipal path of separation from the mother. In place ofthe absent father, his way into the larger world is a wealthyand accomplished female mental worker, a culturalintellectual who belongs to the upper echelons of theprofessional sector of the professional-managerial class.Jane Grierson (played by Diane Wiest) is a child psychologistof considerable means, both material and mental. She hasher own institute for gifted children (of whom she was one),as well as a "ranch" in Virginia (apparently an inheritancefrom her physician parents) and a townhouse in Cincinnati.She wants Fred to spend time with her in all three places sothat she can observe him and help him to develop hisprodigious intellectual powers.

This entails taking him away from what Jane will proveunable to provide, the constrictive but supportive confinesof a home. The movie contrasts the sleek, ultra-moderninteriors of Jane's upscale world of themindto theworking-dass streets, where Fred watches other boys play from hiswindow, and to the shabby but snug nest which breadwinner-homemaker Dede struggles to maintain (she has to sell thepiano when money is short but she paints one for him onthe wall), a haven where mother and son dance together tojazz music, all bathed in a warm, golden light. From this lastimage the movie cuts to a blue-lit scene in the GriersonInstitute and our first glimpse of Jane, who is viewing slidesof gifted children while her male associate recites theirrespective qualifications. When he quotes from a poem bya girl who represents the housewife as a "pathetic phlegmhound with no sense of self-worth," Jane cannot containher pleasure.

The visual contrast opposes the humanizing influenceof maternal nurturance to education, which is equated withabstract control. Jane will often appear as in this scene, asthe feminist agent of a bureaucratic system of surveillance,her Institute a plush panopticon where the child geniusesare the objects of the observational gaze. In the movie'svision of the educational process, the children's knowledgeis rapidly converted into cultural capital with a high marketvalue in the corporate world, while the children themselves,removed from their families, lose their humanity andbecome apprentice functionaries in the modern apparatusof power. At a convention for gifted children, for example,a boy prosecuting Goldilocks in a mock trial explains thatcompassion for the homeless is irrelevant to an issue of

private property, echoing in a legal discourse the samecontemptfor the role ofnurturer which won Jane's approvalat the slide show.

But superimposed on the movie's pop-Foucaultiancritique of the educational apparatus is a humanist modelof education as an instrument of emancipation rather thanof control. Jane, in this view, is truly a kindred spirit whounderstands Fred's longing for enlightenment and offershim access to a higher plane. Yet she also offers him whatthe movie represents as her own overly regulated andrepressive domestic regime. When she insists to Dede thatthe boy is "starving for stimulation and challenge and fororder in his life," she collapses the two views of education,and they remain entangled in the represented events.

It could be argued that the movie's inability or refusalto separate control from liberation evokes the structurallyambivalent, historically contradictory relationship of middle-class professionals to the working class (Ehrenreich andEhrenreich 1979). Whether intelligence is irrevocably inthe service of capital and class control or whether it can beenlisted in emancipatory projects remains uncertain in themovie, which stresses the first possibility but also hints atthe second. At the margins of the plot, a disciplinarybureaucratic rationality is critically evaluated from theperspective of an expanded welfare state dedicated tosatisfying basic human needs. This critique, however, iscarried on in fragmentary and allusive form, condensedinto peripheral moments peripheral, such as when Fredabruptly switches off a television talk show on which aWilliam Buckley stand-in is denouncing "welfaredependency." What is central to the story is the privatesphere, where caring for dependents is not a publicresponsibility but a personal capacity, and one which isunequally distributed along class lines. To overcome classantagonism in this representation entails reforming theprofessional woman.

Fred leaves the television on at a later point, when thesame conservative talk-show host is promoting a bestsellerentitled Family of One: Today's Career Woman, and the titleintroduces the ensuing scene. Deflecting Jane's concernover Dede's apparent unwillingness to let him pursue hiseducation, Fred forces Jane to confront her own neglectedchildhood in a two-career family and her loneliness as achildless single career woman. As events unfold, both Fredand the movie become more and more intent on exposingJane's insufBciendy maternal nature. When she burns ameadoaf for Fred's dinner or anxiously follows him on hisway to school, the movie invites female viewers to feelcondescendingapproval for her inept attempts at mothering,but it harshly condemns her for her selfish absorp tion in her


own work, her one-sided attention to Fred's intellectuallife, and her utter inability to respond to his emotionalneeds.

The movie's antifeminist tendency is most pronouncedin its compulsion to construct the female intellectual as afailed woman. Having set up a polarity between Dede, asthe devotee of the female cult of self-sacrifice, and Jane, asthe implicitly feminist proponent of self-realization formen and women alike, the plot comes to the defense of thefirst woman, while requiring the second to undergo aprotracted and increasingly p uni tive process of reeducationin the art of self-denial. At the same time, as if to underlineJane's stifled but essentially maternal nature, the narrativealso calls into question her ability to provide Fred with a wayinto the world, that is, to perform the paternal function inoedipal socialization.

Fathers are conspicuously absent in this movie, and theoccasional allusions to their presence are less than flattering.In the background, the conservative talk-show host wouldseem to represent stern patriarchal authority, as does theeducational apparatus in its disciplinary function, whileone of Fred's fellow geniuses speaks bitterly of his ownignorant and abusive father. What is missing is anyparticipatory paternal figure of identification, and Fred ispreoccupied with this lack. LikeMikeyin LookWho's Talking(Traube 1992: 156-167), he spends much of the movie insearch of a masculine role model, but without Mikey'ssuccess. His schoolyard idol is intellectually too far belowhim, while Damon, the other genius, is too close.

For a fleeting moment, he appears to have found theideal balance in an amiable college student (played by HarryConnick Jr.), a breezy, fun-loving youth who instructs himin jazz piano and pool. But no sooner has Fred attachedhimself to Eddie then he is disappointed. When he arrivesunannounced to find Eddie in bed with a woman, theyoung man makes clear that he is not going to let the boyintrude upon his sexual pleasure. Eddie's assertion ofhimself as a sexual subject marks him in this movie's viewas unsuited for parenthood, a point which is driven homeby his refusal to be continuously available. "I'm not yourbabysitter," explains Eddie, notunkindly, "I can'ttake thatkind of responsibility."

Nor is he expected to. Eddie might have said that heis not the boy's mother, for it is only women in this moviewho are expected to find their fulfillment in caring forothers and are held accountable if they fail. While Eddie'srejection plunges Fred into a depression, Jane'sinattentiveness compounds it and triggers an emotionalcrisis which only Dede can resolve. Fred flees from Jane andreturns home, where he is reunited with Dede who promises

to take care of everyone: "You, me, even Jane." As shespeaks, a chastised Jane appears briefly in the doorway* andthen retreats, unobserved.

In the next and final scene, however, Dede's promisehas been magically fulfilled. It is Fred's eighth birthdayparty, and he is surrounded by friends, a joyous contrast tothe previous year's party, whichno oneattended.32 Moreover,the two women in his life have been reconciled. For Dede,this means accepting the role of the Institute in hisdevelopment, but it is Jane who has been dramaticallyreformed, her domestic reeducation evident in the huge,homemade cake that she proudly presents. The intellectualhas become a woman, and the reforged bonds of womanhoodprovide the basis for a class reconciliation.

As critic David Ansen noted (1991: 65), the happyending is "frankly baffling'' and tenuously related to therepresented events. Such disregard for narrative coherence,however, is a characteristic feature of romantic melodrama,motivated, S teve Neale and Frank Krutnik (1990) suggest,by the genre's Utopian avoidance of real-world restrictionsthat bear upon women in terms of marriage and family. Inmelodramas, they argue, the romance is conventionallyopposed to marriage and genital sexuality, both of whichwould represent the subjugation of the heroine's desire tothat of a man and to patriarchy. Hence a common tendencyin the genre is for the union to fail, thereby deferring anyresolution to the heroine's wish. Alternatively, Neale andKrutnik observe (1990:136), when the union is achieved:"it tends to be marked as 'impossible, incredible, orfantasy'... What both tendencies suggest, then, is that thesemelodramas involve a triumph of fantasy over theconventional restrictions which are involved in 'realist'narrative closure, where desire is in some way fixed."

In fact, Fred concedes in his voice-over that the festivescene we are witnessing is his remembered and hencepossibly wishful version of the past, which would seem tobe an invitation for viewers to take the resolution as afantasy. Here it seems to me that the Utopian possibilitiesof this "maternal romance" lie in the disjunction betweenthe plot and its fantastic resolution. For the plot, as I havesuggested, initially appears to be governed by an oedipallogic in which to become an autonomous individual theboy hero would have to reject the nurturing mother ofdependency for her symbolic opposite, a liberating father ofseparation. In these terms, adapted from Jessica Benjamin's(1988) critique of the gender-differentiated process ofoedipal socialization, the movie starts out on the oedipaltrajectory only abruptly to reverse it. At least in fantasy,home becomes the site where the principles of nurturanceand freedom commingle, both of them represented, albeit


in different proportions, by women.With respect to gender and parental roles, events up to

the resolution convey a mixed message. On the one hand,Jane, biologically female, appears to have failed in theculturally masculine role of liberator and way into theworld, the implication being that she has been denying heressentially maternal nature. On the other hand, by sendingthe boy back home to Dede, Jane's failure as a liberatorpartially undoes the oedipal polarities which constructrepudiation of the mother as the condition of masculinedevelopment. Moreover, when Jane reappears with hercake in the final scene, she is still the director of the Instituteand so a representative of the culturally masculine sphere ofintellectual activity. As the movie studiously refuses toprovide Fred with any biologically male father figure, wemay assume that Jane, as intellectual, and Dede, asbreadwinner, together perform the paternal function ofmodelling independence and achievement, at the sametime as they also provide maternal nurturance and emotionalsupport.

As the product of this unusual shared parentingarrangement, Fred himself represents an increasingly securebalance of capacities that are traditionally polarized.Identified from the outset as a genius whose abilities rangefrom art and music to math and physics, attributed aprofound sense of attunement with nature and quasi-divinepity for the weak and helpless to accompany his awesomepowers of abstraction, he embodies the wish for transcensionof a gender system in which feminine and masculine,feeling and intellect, emotionality and rationality,compassion and instrumental reason, nurturance andfreedom are constructed as antagonistic opposites.

It needs emphasis, however, that although both of thewomen occupy culturally feminine and masculine spaces,neither of them approaches Fred's level of genderindeterminacy. To identify with the women in this maternalromance is to assume a postfeminist viewpoint, with itscharacteristic blend of Utopian longings for new gender andfamily arrangements and pessimism about the possibilitiesfor change. I have argued that an essentializing tendency ispronounced in the movie's chastisement of Jane, whichdefines domestic womanhood as a universal standard againstwhich all women must be measured. Moreover, theconflation of maternal with romanticmelodrama constructsfemale sexuality on neo-Victorian lines, reversing suchuneven progress as women have made under patriarchy inachieving recognition as sexual subjects. Women do enjoya desire of their own within the nonpatriarchal spaceprovided for them in the movie, but that desire is stricdysublimated into maternal affection for a dependent and

seems to preclude directly (hetero)sexual love betweenadults.

I would not deny that Dede and Jane could beinterpreted as a lesbian couple, an "over-reading" (Young:1990) of their relationship which would give the movie'snontraditional family a radical slant. Indeed, if rumorsconcerning Foster are to be believed, it is quite possible thata lesbian subtext was at some level intended by the directorand seems likely to contribute to the pleasure which lesbianviewers, among others, may negotiate from the movie.33

Nevertheless, even interpreted on such lines, the moviedoes not affirm a female sexuality detached from maternalinstinct. Woman's desire, whether heterosexual ornonheterosexual, appears as something fixed by nature, anessentially nurturing and pacific expression of a sexed,maternal body, rather than something socially constructed,fluid, and transformable.

In line with this underlying tendency to essentializegender and sexual identities is the movie's tacit pessimismconcerning men's ability to change. Fred, after all, isportrayed as a miraculous being. While he may representthe movie's ideal, its overall verdict on boys is that they will,alas, be boys, leaving the task of caring for dependents in thestrong hands of women. Here again, I would stress themixed character of the movie's family vision. In itsnonpatriarchal household there is both a Utopian assertionof female autonomy and a retreat from the struggle torestructure the domestic relations between women andmen on egalitarian lines.

A similar pessimism about the "public patriarch" isimplicit in the movie's confinement to the private sphere.This brings me to the final point I want to make, which hasto do with how postfeminist fantasies of domesticity mayreflect and reinforce a retreat from political engagement.The problem with celebrations of home and family is notonly that they tend to essentialize gender identities, but alsothat they may contribute to a reluctance to imaginerelationships of mutual commitment at levels other thanthe individual household unit. Whether two- or single-parent, male- or female-headed, breadwinner or two-career,hetero- or nonheterosexual, nuclear or extended, the familyis all too easily constructed and experienced as the exclusivelocus of nurturing activities, a privileged alternative to o thermodes of providing for human needs. Over the course ofthe Reagan-Bush era, the right used the rhetoric of familywith considerable success to attack social welfare programsand to limit the provision of public goods and services.Softened by invocations of "family values," its authoritarianimage of the state has threatened to eclipse the very idea ofcaring as a public responsibility that corresponds to a


socially held right to receive basic necessities.Little Man Tate, I have suggested, offers resistance to

the conservative assault on social welfare, but of a limitedand symptomatically passive sort. When meanspiritedvoices drone on in the background, denigrating the needsof others in the name of private property and self-reliance,the movie asks us not to listen to them. It invites us todetach ourselves from the selfish children at the conventionand follow Fred out of the hall, to turn off the television set,as he does, cutting short the conservative litany about thebenefits of labor discipline. But what the movie fails to offeris any counter-vision of a generous, nurturing father and asocial-service-oriented state. Its response to a situation inthe public sphere which it seems clearly to regret is towithdraw into a private sphere presided over by women,whom nature alone suffices to unite.

Nature, however, will no more unite women with oneanother than it need divide them from men. What couldbring together women differentiated by class or racialidentity is the struggle to create a society in which caring isdefined as both a public and a private concern and is equallyshared between women and men. Inasmuch as postfeministmass culture systematically fails to imagine that struggle, itretreats from the feminist program which it partiallyincorporates and pursues.

NOTES

1. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: An earlier draft of this paperwas presented to the CSST Faculty Seminar at TheUniversity of Michigan; I am particularly grateful to NickDirks, Nancy Lutkehaus, and Sherry Ortner for theircomments and encouragement. Thanks to my colleaguesKaren Bock, Sue Hirsch, and Dick Ohmann for theircritical insights. Lastly, this paper would never have beenwritten were it not for Len Tennenhouse and NancyArmstrong who hosted a collective viewing of the MurphyBrown birth episode.2. The right's "New Class" is an ideologically definedsegment of the class to which the critics themselves belong.The larger formation has been variously designated andtheorized on theleftasaNewClassof intellectuals (Gouldner1979), a professional-managerial class of salaried mentalworkers (Ehrenreich & Ehrenreich 1979), a service class ofbureaucrats (Abercrombie and Urry 1983), a credential orskill-based class of semi-autonomous employees (Wright1985), a new middle class of knowledge workers (Frown.d.). Although different groups are included and excludedin these models, most theorists agree that the boundariesseparating the new middle class from those above and below

it are not sharply drawn, and the class itself is understood tobe internally differentiated. John Frow argues that £>eingweakly formed is a crucial attribute of the new class andreflects the mechanisms of its formation, which have to dowith claims to knowledge as opposed to ownership of themeans of production or direct exploitation.3. On the state as thesubstitute for the male breadwinner,seeMimiAbramovitz(1988:313-314). Barbara Ehrenreich(1987: 180) notes the parallel which New Right criticsdraws between feminism and social welfare. On thecondensation of the welfare queen with the upwardlymobile female professional, see Wahneema Lubiano (1992)and Nancy Fraser (1992).4. Letterman's contribution to the post-mortem: "I'mgoing to say this only once, Mr. Quayle. Murphy Brownis a fictional character."5. Katha Pollitt (1992: 88) takes Quayle to be positinga causal connection whereby watching Murphy Brownwould encourage inner-city women to bear fatherless babies.But the speech alluded, it seems to me, to the paradigmaticassociation of career women with welfare mothers, whichpresupposes the subversive activity of the New Class. Pollittwas also puzzled by Quayle's inclusion of TV writers in thecultural elite ("I thought they were the crowd pleasinglowbrows, and intellectuals were the cultural elite"), butwithin the terms of New Right ideology there was noinconsistency here. What is interesting about theneoconservative construction of theNewClass (andoverlapswith the theories cited in note 1) is precisely that itencompasses such differentially credentialed knowledgeworkers as media professionals and the traditionalintelligentsia.6. "That's the first time I've heard that," he said when apolitical analystfor a San Francisco television station broughtthe abortion connection to his attention: "It's far-fetched"(Rosenthal 1992b: 34).7. As the summer of 1992 unfolded, anti-abortionrhetoric proved equally recalcitrant. Faced with the questionof how they would respond should a pregnant daughter orgranddaughter consider an abortion, both Quayle andBush exchanged the image of the stern patriarchaldisciplinarian for that of the supportive, caring father whowould respect his child's decision, thereby backingthemselves (perhaps intentionally) into what many took tobe a pro-choice position. Marilyn Quayle was left to holdthe line, promising that should her daughter becomepregnant, "she would carry the child to term."

8. Here, for instance, is Faludi (1991:77) on the press:"Journalism replaced the 'pro-family' diatribes offundamentalist preachers with sympathetic and evenprogressive-soundingrhetoric It cosmeticized the scowling


face ofantifeminism while blackening the feminist eye. Inthe process, it popularized the backlash beyond the NewRight's wildest dreams."9. Aid to Dependent Children, the basic program of thewelfare state which provided limited financial support tounmarried mothers raising children, was established in1935. By the postwar years a majority of ADC recipientswere black women who were rendered increasingly visibleto the public through the mediation of the welfare state'sdisciplinary gaze. Living without a husband but dependenton the state, these women appeared to violate both thefamily ethic and the work ethic (Solinger 1992: 52).Abramovitz (1988: 351) also links a perception of blackwelfare mothers as dual transgressors to the mobilization ofantiwelfare sentiment. Similar stereotypes, Nancy Fraser(1989: 152) observes, influence how service professionalsview their black female clients and have helped to j ustify theheavy component of surveillance which characterizes the"feminine" sector of the social welfare system.

10. The model placed particular emphasis on the"instrumental" role of the father, who was supposed toguide both boys and girls into their respective masculineand feminine identities. Sons appeared to be especially atrisk in the "father absent" suburban home, and child careexperts called on Dad to assert his manly presence on theirbehalf; an added benefit, said the experts, was that Dad'sdisplays of appreciation would encourage daughters todevelop their feminine selves.

Such calls were not unique to the 1950s, According toMargaret Marsh (1990), the fusion of the suburban and thedomestic ideals at the turn of the century was accompaniedby increasing emphasis on the husband's family obligations.Male advice writers in that period encouraged suburbanmiddle-class men to exchange their all-male social networksfor greater intimacy with their wives and children. Themodel of domestic masculinity which developed from suchinstructions contributed to the evolving ideal ofcompanionate marriage. It also shaped a new, increasinglyinfluential definition of the father's role as that of a "caringolder companion rather than a stern patriarch" (Marsh1990: 80).

The ideal of the participatory father has contradictoryimplications. While it is a necessary condition for anegalitarian sharing of domestic labor that would reducegender polarity, it may also be realized as the transpositionof separate spheres to domestic space, and such a divisionbecame the postwar family ideal (Segal 1990: 6). Thefamily united, Lynn Spigel (1992: 36-72) observes, wasdivided on gendered lines, creating new signifiers ofmasculinity out of selective domestic responsibilities. Yetthe "manliness" of the man around the house seemed to

require continual reaffirmation, and in the fifties version ofpaternal participation "concern for masculinity.wasexpressed in terms that condemned women" (Solinger1992:21). At the underside of the experts' crusade against"father absence" lurked the symmetric threat of "motherpresence," or more precisely, the presence in the home ofdiscontented (hence "maladjusted") wife-mothers whoseoverprotective or rejecting behaviors could subvert theirchildren's sexual development.

The assumption which underlies the sex role model,more fully theorized in object relations psychoanalysis, isthat boys, unlike girls, must repudiate their primaryidentification with the mother by identifying with theoedipal father. Within this conception of masculinity,"excessive" mothering compounded by "father absence"(or the relative unavailability of a weak, passive father)creates severe obstacles to masculine development. Afeminist approach within object relations psychoanalysis(Chodorow 1978; Benjamin 1988) sees exclusive femalemothering and father absence as problematic for boys andgirls alike. The solution envisioned in this approach is analternative to gender-differentiated parenting and amasculinity that would no longer be based on the rep udiationof femininity.11. As Solinger observes (1992: 40), the adoption planwhich liberal service professionals designed and implementedin the 1950s has become a strategy of antiabortion activists.Had Quayle been quicker on the uptake and had he wishedto embroil himself further in the debate over a fictionalcharacter's pregnancy, he could havesuggested that MurphyBrown give her baby up for adoption after carrying it toterm.12. On the subordination of sexuality to nurturance inthe Victorian construction of the Ideal Mother, see Smith-Rosenberg (1985). Ehrenreich and English (1978: 242-245) discuss the misogynistic slant which sexologists andchild care experts gave to the sexualization of marriage byprescribing it as the remedy for overprotective mothering.As Elaine May (1988: 106-109) also argues, a homoiogybetween female sexuality and nuclear energy underlay suchprescriptions: both were forces that would prove destructiveunless they were tamed by men.13. Increasing suspicion of independent women wasmanifested in postwar cinematic images of women. By thelate 1940s, therelativelypositiveportrayalsofsingleworkingwomen which both the Depression and wartime cinemashad made available all but disappeared. Emancipatedheroines were converted into the dangerous fcmmesfatalesof film noir or into neurotics in need of therapeuticintervention. Alternatively, feminine independence wasabsorbed by the spunky wives and mothers of liberal family


movies. On representations of women in the late fortiesand fifties cinemasee Susan Hartmann (1982), May (1988),and Peter Biskind (1983).14. On the one hand, high divorce rates made womenreluctant to depend on potentially unreliable malebreadwinners, many of whom were becoming involved inwhat Barbara Ehrenreich (1983) has called the "malerevolt" against the provider role. On the other hand, thefeminist critique of domesticity (Friedan 1963) helpedmany women to leave unhappy marriages, especially thosewith access to the expanded employment opportunities.Economic opportunities, however, were unequallydistributed along class lines, and women's differentialexperiences in the work place, Judith Stacey (1990:12-16)argues, would affect their perspectives on the family systemthat was passing. As Kathleen Gerson (1985) has alsofound, women whose earning power and mobility is strictlylimited are more disposed toward a nostalgic view of thebreadwinner family as a receding haven.15. The population control movement clashed withreligious defenders of traditional sexual morality over howbest to halt what both sides viewed as the "excessive"reproduction of poor minority women (Petchesky 1983:120-122; Solinger 1992: 211-213). This debate overmeans was never fully resolved, andconsequently, Petcheskyargues(1983:120-130), the U.S. never developedacoherentpolicy. While support from the population controlestablishment contributed to the legalization ofcontraception and abortion, government policy shiftedback toward sexual control in the late 1970s, under pressurefrom the religious right. The Hyde Amendment was passedin 1977 to curb "promiscuous sex" among the minoritypoor.16. The repositioning of unwed mothers as sexualrevolutionaries, Solinger notes (1992: 217-218), reflecteda shift in the dominant models of behavior. As sociologicaldisplaced psychological explanation, sexual nonconformitybecame a social rather than an individual pathology to itscritics, something to be blamed on the disintegrating valuesof a "permissive" society rather than on the maladaptivebehavior of individual families.17. The concept of "welfare dependency" presupposesthe stereotype it reinforces of black unwed welfare mothersas promiscuous reproducers. In fact, as a recent New YorkTimes series on welfare points out, almost three-fourths ofthe families on welfare have two children or less, accordingto the American Public Welfare Association, and long-termuse is more the exception than the rule (Toner 1992b: A-16). Although the Times series repeatedly refuted thedistorted perception of the welfare mother as a long-term,chronic user whose "dependence" on the system leads her

to bear baby after baby, one entire article in the six-partseries (Dugger 1992) was devoted to women who more orless fit that stereotype.18. I have adapted this critique of Wilson's explanationfrom Gregory (n.d.), who argues that despite Wilson'semphasis on the role of structural processes in creatingurban poverty, his appeal to psycho-cultural factors toaccount for the effects of poverty reinforces existingstereotypes of minority groups and obscures the role ofpower relations both in producing poverty and mediatingits effects.19. See Gilroy (1987: 104-105) for similar Britishconstructions of black teenagers.20. The phrase "defective families" is from Nancy Fraser's(1988:150) critiqueofthedominantdiscourseson welfare.21. In a New York Times article that called attention tothe trend, film critic Caryn James (1989) cited Baby Boomand CrossingDelancey, in which professional women tradeunfulfilling careers for marriage and motherhood, alongwith Beaches and Stella (the 1990remakeof Stella Dallas),which extol the joys of maternal sacrifice.22. Andrea Press (1991: 49) also stresses the role of themass media in "constructing and shaping postfeministideology," but her more sophisticated, reception-basedmodel of media effects on consciousness explores howwomen's responses to television vary along lines of class andgeneration. Unfortunately, for my purposes, the receptionanalysis seems loosely connected to the text-based critiqueof postfeminist television. This makes it difficult to assessthe critique, which to my mind overstates the regressivefeatures of mass-mediated postfeminism. Press's textualanalysis relies on a reflectionist model that takes realism asthe criterion for assessing a text's progressive content. So,for example, while Roseanne is praised for reflecting theexploitation of women in the workplace, its idealizedportrayal of working-class family life is criticized for ignoringsuch phenomena as the wife's double burden. Press argues,as I understand her, that the "retreat from all criticism ofthe family" (1991: 43) identifies the show's ideology aspostfeminist. But leaving aside whether this is an adequatedefinition of postfeminism or an accurate account of thereferential code in Roseanne (double burden issues werecentral to the series premiere, albeit resolved in comicfashion), the reflectionist model precludes attention to theinternal dynamics of television fictions. For anotherperspective on Roseanne, see Kathleen Rowe (1990), whotreats the central character as an instantiation of the "unrulywoman," the antithesis of the self-sacrificing wife-motherof domestic ideology.

23. I am grateful to my colleague Indira Karamcheti whofirst called my attention to the disarticulation and


rearticulation of African-American culture in Murphy Brown.24. It came as no surprise to Murphy Brown viewers thatElden, the bohemian working-class housepainter, becamethe co-mother in the course ofthe 1992 fall season. Althoughintermittendy associated with a rigid, undomesticated,stereotypically working-class masculinity, Elden alsorepresented the artist as natural man, enemy of bourgeoisconventions (including conventional breadwinnermasculinity). Consistent with the analysis presented hereis the historical connection between the "beat culture"evoked through Elden and African American street cultures.25. On the imaginary relation of middle-class youth tothe white working class, and in particular the projection ofunrestrained sexuality onto the working class, see BarbaraEhrenreich 1989: 93-96 and Sherry Ortner 1991: 175-179.26. In many ethnic working-class families during theearly stages of capitalist development daughters were morelikely to work outside the home than mothers (Lamphere1987). The wife-mother, however, might contribute to thehousehold economy by taking in boarders or industrialhomework.27. Michelle Wallace (1978) explicidy rejected themodel,popularized by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, of "matriarchy"as responsible for the "breakdown" of the black family.Jesse Jackson also defended the integrity of female-headedblackhouseholds in his critical response to Quayle's MurphyBrown speech. On the other hand, the movie Boyz 'NtheHood popularized conservative nostalgia for the strongfather by constructing the male-headed family as necessaryto black empowerment and community control.28. In its first weeks of release Little Man Tate showed atonly 327 screens. Over the next few weeks, its release waswidened to slighdy over 1000 screens, afterwhichitgraduallycontracted again. To gross $25 million with such a limitedrelease, the movie had to have excellent word of mouth.29. In my experience, it was frequently and heatedlydiscussed among college students and professors, while itwas also warmly received in the nail salon where I sometimesconduct highly informal reception work.30. On this feature of female-oriented genres, see TaniaModleski (1982:,85-109) and Linda Williams (1987:314-320).31. I thank the members of the Michigan CSST seminarwho pointed out that child viewers may derive pleasurefrom the antiauthoritarian fantasy of subordinating adultsto their desires. Yet I would not overemphasize the liberatoryaspects of such a fantasy, especially as the adults whom Fredcontrols in the movie are uniformly female. The image ofthe all-giving nurturer continues to bear unequally uponwomen and men, making it difficult for women to assert

their independentsubjectivity, and, Jessica Benjamin (1988:213-214) observes, for children to work through theiraggressive responses to any such assertions. In Benjamin'smodel, mother and child collude in the fantasy that he is thecenter of her life, a fantasy which denies her existence as anindependent subject.32. Thefirstbirthdaypartyscenealludestotheequivalentscenes in Stella Dallas and Stella, suggesting that Fosterintended her movie to evoke the famous maternalmelodrama. It bears mention that what spoils the birthdayparty in the Stella movies is the heroine's unrestrained andplayful sexuality, which offends the stuffy parents of herdaughter's friends, whereas Dede is insufficiently attentiveto Fred's needs, failing to appreciate his estrangement fromordinary kids.33- Perhaps a more plausible reading would take Dedeand her friend and co-worker Gina as lesbian companions.It would be interesting to compare Little Man Tate withanother, even more popular movie marketed to women in1991-2, thesleeperhit Fried Green Tomatoes, adaptedfromFannie Flagg's novel about a depression-era lesbianrelationship.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abercrombie, Nicholas and John Urry1983 Capital, LabourandtheMiddle Classes. London: Allen

and Unwin.Abramovitz, Mimi1988 Regulating the Lives ofWomen: Social Welfare Policy

from Colonial Times to the Present. Boston: South EndPress.

Ansen, David1991 Jodie Foster Lurches About. Newsweek, 21 October.

65. Benjamin, Jessica1988 The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, andthe

Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon Books.Bennet, Tony1982 Theories of the Media, Theories of Society. In

Culture, Society andthe Media, ed. M. Gurevitchet. al.,30-55. London: Methuen.

Biskind, Peter1983 Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop

Worrying and Love the Fifties. New York PantheonBooks.

Block, Fred, Richard Howard, Barbara Ehrenreich, andFrances Fox

1987 The Mean Season: TheAttackontheWefanState. NewYork: Pantheon Books

Carby, Hazel


1986 "On the Threshold of Woman's Era:" Lynching,Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory. In"Race, "Writing, and Difference, ed. H.L.Gates, Jr., 301-316. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

1987 Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of theAfro-American Woman Novelist. New York: OxfordUniversity Press.

Chodorow, Nancy1978 The Reproduction of Motherhood: Psychoanalysis and

the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Dugger, Celia W.1992 In Newark, Single Mothers on the Edge of Survival.

New York Times, 6 July: Al, B6.Ehrenreich, Barbara1983 The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight

from Commitment. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

1989 Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. NewYork: Pantheon Books.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and John Ehrenreich1979 The Professional-Managerial Class. In Between Labor

and Capital ed. P, Walker, 5-45- Boston: South EndPress.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English1979 For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts 'Advice

to Women. New York: Anchor Books.Ehrensaft, Diane1987 Parenting Together: Men and Women Sharingthe Care

of Their Children. New York: Free Press.Faludi, Susan1991 Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American

Women. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.Feuer, Jane1984 The MTM Style. In MTM 'Quality Television, eds.

J. Feuer, P. Kerr, and T. Vahimagi, 32-60. London:BFI Publishing.

1986 Narrative Form in American Network Television.In High Theory/Low Culture: Analysing PopularTelevision and Film, ed. C.MacCabe, 101-114. NewYork: St. Martin's Press.

Fraser, Nancy1989 Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in

Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press.

1992 Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Some Reflections onthe Confirmation of Clarence Thomas. Critical Inquiry18: 595-612.

Friedan, Betty1963 The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W.Norton.Frow, John

n.d. Knowledge and Class. Unpublished manuscript.Gerson, Kathleen1985 Hard Choices: How Women Decide About Work,

Career, and Motherhood. Berkeley; University ofCalifornia Press.

Gilroy, Paul1991 "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack:' The

Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Chicago: TheUniversity of Chicago Press.

Gledhill, Christine (ed.)1987 Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama

and the Woman 'sFilm. London: British Film Institute.Gouldner, Alvin1979 The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New

Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures,Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role ofIntellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International ClassContest of theModernEra. New York: Oxford UniversityPress.

Gregory, Stevenn.d. Power, Discourse and the Construction of the

"Ghetto Underclass." Unpublished manuscript.Hebdige, Dick1979 Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London & New

York: Methuen.Hertz, Rosanna1986 More Equal than Others: Women and Men in Dual-

Career Marriages. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

James, Caryn1989 Are Feminist Heroines an Endangered Species? New

York Times, 10 July: 15, 20.Jones, Jacqueline1985 Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work,

and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York:Basic Books.

Hartmann, Susan1982 The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the

1940s. Boston: Twayne Publishers.Lamphere, Louise1987 From Working Daughters to Working Mothers:

Immigrant Women in a New England IndustrialCommunity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Levitan, Sar A., and Richard S. Belous1981 What'sHappeningto the American Family? Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press.Lubiano, Wahneema1992 "Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels:

Ideological War by Narrative Means." In Race-ingJustice, En-genderingPower Essays on AnitaHill, ClarenceThomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni


Morrison, 323-363. New York: Pantheon Books.Marsh, Margaret1990 Suburban Lives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University

Press.May, Elaine Tyler1988 Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold

War Era. New York: Basic Books.Modleski, Tania1984 Lovingwitha Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for

Women. New York: Methuen.Neale, Steven, and Frank Krutnik1990 Popular Film and Television Comedy. London:

Routledge.Ortner, Sherry1991 Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and

Culture. In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in thePresent, ed. Richard G. Fox, 163-189. Santa Fe:School of American Research Press.

Petcheskey, Rosalind1983 Abortion and Women's Choice: The State, Sexuality,

and Reproductive Freedom. New York & London:Longman.

Pleck, Joseph1987 American Fathering in Historical Perspective. In

ChangingMen: New Directions in Research on Men andMasculinity, ed. M. S. Kimmel, 83-97. NewburyPark:Sage Publications.

Pollitt, Katha1992 Dan, Murph and Me: Why I Hate "Family Values"

(LetMeCounttheWays). TheNation,20/27July: 88-94.

Press, Andrea1991 Women Watching Television: Gender, Class, and

Generation in the American Television Experience.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Probyn, Elspeth1990 New Traditionalism and Post-Feminism: TV Does

the Home. Screen, 31 (2): 147-159.Riley, Denise1988 "Am I That Name?:" Feminism and the Category of

'Women' in History. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press.

Rosenfelt, Deborah, and Judith Stacey1990 Second Thought on the Second Wave. In Women,

Class, andthe Feminist Imagination: ASocialist-FeministReader, ed. K. V. Hansen and I. J. Philipson, 549-567.Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Rosenthal, Andrew1992a Quayle Attacks a 'Cultural Elite' in Speech Invoking

Moral Values. New York Times, 10 June: Al.1992b Quayle's Moment. New York Times Magazine, 5 July:

10-13,30,33-34.Rowe, Kathleen K.1990 Roseanne: Unruly Woman as Domestic Goddess.

Screen, 31 (4): 408-419.Segal, Lynne1990 SlowMotion: ChangingMasculinities, ChangingMen.

New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll1985 Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian

America. New York: Oxford University Press.Solinger, Rickie1992 Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race

Before Roe V Wade. NewYork& London: Routledge.Spigel, Lynn1992 Make Room/or TV: Television andthe Family Ideal in

Postwar America. Chicago: The University of ChicagoPress.

Stacey, Judith1987 'Sexism by a Subtler Name?' Postindustrial

Conditions and Postfeminist Consciousness in theSilicon Valley. Socialist Review, 17 (6): 7-28.

1990 Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval inLate Twentieth Century America. New York: BasicBooks.

Stansell, Christine1987 City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-

1860. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Toner, Robin1992 Quayle, at Anti-Abortion Meeting, Presses 'Cultural

Elite'Attack. New York Times, 12 July.Traube, Elizabeth1992 Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation

in 1980s Hollywood Movies. Boulder: Westview Press.Wallace, Michele1979 Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.

London: John Calder.Williams, Linda1987 "Something Else Besides a Mother:" Stella Dallas

and the Maternal Melodrama. In Gledhill, ed. Homeis Where the Heart Is, 299-325.

Wilson, William Julius1987 The Truly Disadvantage^ Chicago: The University

of Chicago Press.1991aStudying Inner-City Social Dislocations: The

Challenge of Public Agenda Research. AmericanSociologicalReview56: 1-14.

Wright, Erik Olin1985 Classes. London: Verso.Young, Alison1990 Femininity in Dissent. New York* Routledge.


Family Matters: Postfeminist Constructions of a Contested Site

Documents

Transcript of Family Matters: Postfeminist Constructions of a Contested Site