Protest And Popular Culture: Women In The American Labor Movement / Edition 1

by Mary Triece

Overview

Protest and Popular Culture is at once a historical monograph and a critique of postmodernist approaches to the study of mass media, consumerism, and popular political movements. In it, Triece compares the self-representations of several late nineteenth and twentieth-century women's protest movements with representations of women offered by contemporaneous mass media outlets. She shows that from the late nineteenth century until the present day, U.S. women's protest movements sought to convince women that they are first and foremost laborer/producers, while the U.S. media has just as consistently sought to convince women that they are primarily consumers. Triece contends that these approaches to portraying women have been and continue to be constructed in opposition to one another. The leaders of women's protest movements, she argues, have long sought to convince women not to spend time and money on reshaping their selves through consumer purchases, but instead to focus attention on empowering themselves politically by asserting control over their own labor power. The mass media, meanwhile, has always treated such movements as potential threats to the financial well-being of the consumer sector (that is, of advertisers), and so has consistently trivialized them, while seeking simultaneously to convince women that they should devote attention and resources to buying things, not to struggling to overcome class and gender discrimination. Many cultural-studies scholars have argued that in recent years, rising prosperity has made consumerism into the primary site of both individual expression and 'resistance' to the dominant socio-economic order, with self-definition through personal purchases supplanting the role formerly played by struggle for an end to inequities of all kinds. These scholars contend that as such, mass media no longer function to naturalize, and thus reinforce such inequities, and consumerism no longer serves to perpetuate them. Triece argues that her examples show that this argument is faulty, and that scholars should continue to take a traditional materialist view in all studies of mass media, consumerism, and popular protest.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813368191
Publisher:	Westview Press
Publication date:	01/05/2001
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	314
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Lexile:	1510L (what's this?)

About the Author

Mary E. Triece is assistant professor in the University of Akron School of Communication. She received her Ph.D. in Speech Communication from the University of Texas in 1997. She has published articles in scholarly journals; this is her first book.

Table of Contents

* Contents * Acknowledgments * Introduction: Understanding Popular and Protest Rhetorics * 1. Propriety in a Period of Upheaval * 2. Helping Our Sisters Out: Middle-Class Reformers in the Muckraking Movement * 3. Domesticating Dissent: Replacing Collective Protest with Homelife and Self-improvement * 4. From Sewing Machine to Solidarity in the Streets * 5. Protest and Popular Culture: Bridging Past and Present * Notes * Bibliography * Index

Editorial Reviews

Since the late nineteenth century women have faced conflicting pulls on their sense of identities: while the US media tries to convince women that they are primarily consumers, women's movements have rallied that they are really, first and foremost, producers and laborers. Triece, (U. of Akron School of Communication), examines this phenomenon by comparing the self-representations of several late- nineteenth and twentieth-century women's protest movements with representations of women offered by contemporary mass media outlets. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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