The Feminization of American Culture

by Ann Douglas

Overview

This modern classic by one of our leading scholars seeks to explain the values prevalent in today's mass culture by tracing them back to their roots in the Victorian era. As religion lost its hold on the public mind, clergymen and educated women, powerless and insignificant in the society of the time, together exerted a profound effect on the only areas open to their influence: the arts and literature. Women wrote books that idealized the very qualities that kept them powerless: timidity, piety, and a disdain for competition. Sentimental values that permeated popular literature continue to influence modern culture, preoccupied as it is with glamour, banal melodrama, and mindless consumption.

This new paperback edition, with a new Preface, will reach yet more readers with its persuasive and provocative theory. Richard Bernstein of The New York Times said: "Her remarkable scholarship is going to set the standard for a long time to come."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374525583
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/30/1998
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	688,865
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.93(d)

About the Author

Ann Douglas, author of Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, has taught American studies at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, where she is now Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature. She lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

Indispensable reading for . . . anybody of serious intelligence.” —The New York Times

“An exciting, readable book.” —The New Republic

“Admirably documented and ambitious . . . [The] examination of the perils of sentimentalism and the legacy it bequeathed modern culture is excellent.” —Newsweek

From the Publisher

In 1977, the reviewer praised "the textural richness and methodological sophistication of this intellectual and literary history.
—New York Times Book Review

Gerda Lerner