Word: postfeminists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...women of country music used to wait for their wayward husbands to come home, or stand by them even when they didn't. But to country music's postfeminist performers, both scenarios seem a waste of time. The middle-aged women in K.T. Oslin's work are busy warning their lovers that they are chronically fickle, are having careers while their ex-husbands have custody of the child, or are just plain contemplating the legacy of their past revolts. "Oh we've burned our bras and we've burned our dinners/ And we've burned our candles at both ends...
...issue is the status of American womanhood, this line of argument follows a swollen stream of trend stories that declare feminism shuddered and died sometime during the Reagan era. Many headlines of the '80s called feminism THE GREAT EXPERIMENT THAT FAILED and announced that America had graduated to a postfeminist age of Mommy Tracks, garter belts and men beating drums in the woods. Only in 1991, a year defined by date-rape trials, harassment hearings, abortion battles and gender wars, did the popular media begin to acknowledge that relations between the sexes were not as settled as they seemed...
...child abuse goes on in the home. She also found fault with the stories about women with Harvard M.B.A.s dropping out to go home and raise their children, the Good Housekeeping ads of the New Traditionalist, the notion of the Mommy Track; to her, they all implied that the postfeminist woman was the one who had sampled having it all and preferred to give most of it up. In fact, the pattern of the '80s was dictated by economic reality: 69% of women 18 to 64 work today, in contrast to 33% in 1950. "There may be women being laid...
This insidious new image, Faludi claims, was Hope Steadman, the exalted, blissful, breast-feeding mother of thirtysomething, who provided a postfeminist contrast to the "neurotic spinster ((and)) ball-busting single career woman." Or Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction, the crazed professional temptress -- beautiful, successful and mad as a hatter, thanks to the deafening tick of her biological clock. Or the Dress for Success models who, in Faludi's lethal description, "trip down the runway in stiletto heels, hands snug in dainty white gloves. Their briefcases swing like Easter baskets, feather light; they are, after all, empty...
...MOST SURPRISING THINGS ABOUT THE 1991 Battle of the Sexes was that it was so full of surprises. After the feminist revolution of the '70s, the postfeminist age unrolled in the '80s amid musings about "mommy tracks" and the installation of diaper-changing facilities in airport men's rooms. By the '90s Americans were supposed to have moved on to more subtle issues about enhancing everyone's quality of life, letting women define themselves as individuals, letting men be warriors or frogurt eaters, as they choose...