A Cultural History of Democracy in the Modern Age by Eugenio Biagini;Gary Gerstle;

Author:Eugenio Biagini;Gary Gerstle;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

FIGURE 6.3 The housewife as seen by the radical feminist Red Stocking movement in Iceland in 1975, from Forvitin rauð, vol. 4, no. 5 (1975), p. 14. Drawing by artist Sigrún Eldjárn. From web archive (http://timarit.is/view_page_init.jsp?pubId=56&lang=is). Printed with permission from the artist.

In London, women artists came together to confront the misogynist images of women perpetrated through media advertising, generating what came to be known as the See Red Women’s Workshop. Through a series of campaigns from 1974 to 1990, this organization used posters to communicate strong visual messages against the heteronormative notions of family and mobilized women’s solidarity across class and racial divides.3 It demanded equal pay, education, and job opportunities as well as access to abortion and contraception—asserting bodily autonomy, equality, and freedom. The famous poster “A Woman’s Work Is Never Done” recalled a late eighteenth-century ditty, “Man may work from sun to sun, but woman’s work is never done,” and showed women’s life split between an oppressive, depressing household and what appears to be a tampon factory. The posters rejected the androcentric view of work, drawing the relationship between women’s double burden, unpaid work, the devaluation of women’s work, and social relations of production put in place by capitalism, sexuality, and intimate relations.

The story of housewifization had a double meaning for women of color. Not only did black, Asian, and Latina women perform a disproportionate amount of low-paid domestic work in white women’s homes, helping thereby to secure the domestic space of privileged women. They also bore the burden of unpaid domestic work in their own homes. Because they worked in much greater numbers in the external world of work, “separate spheres” ideology rarely had as much meaning to them as it did to middle-class (and working-class) white women. Thus they were often quicker to celebrate women as workers rather than as homemakers, an initiative that became evident in the appropriation in 2009 by black women of a popular Second World War poster, “Rosie the Riveter.” The “Rosie” image was emblematic of the millions of American women in manufacturing who replaced male workers who went to the battlefield during the Second World War. Released for a limited period in 1942, the poster was meant to connote a temporary state of affairs. When the men came back from the war, the Rosies would go back into their homes. But by the early twentieth century, this image served as evidence of the enduring, as opposed to temporary, empowerment of women as equal citizens. Figure 6.4 transforms white Rosie into a black woman. The caption, “this world in a woman’s hands” is meant to convey the enduring power of African American women in the world of work.

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