American Housewife Research Articles

Feminist analysis of women's role in the film Desperate Housewives

Desperate Housewives, an American sitcom aired in 2004, takes American housewives as the theme, sets in the middle-class area of Wisteria Lane, and tracks the lives of four housewives with different personalities, Susan, Lynette, Bree and Gabrielle, following the plight they face: all kinds of pressures in life, and the contradiction between the shackles of tradition and the demands for independence and freedom of modern women, which make these housewives almost desperate. In this paper, the reasons for the female plight in the context of the times will be analyzed, and feminism in Desperate Housewives will be explored based on intersectionality theory, feminist media study theory, and post-feminism. Finally, the female plight hidden in the opening animation will be analyzed through multimodal theory.

Hierarchical textual compositions and (post-)colonial framing in The View from Up Here

The article analyses the hierarchical visual compositions and framing of Marco Calvani’s The View from Up Here and argues that its carefully structured compositions create a metaphorical imbalance in power between the two main characters, an American housewife and a Syrian refugee. The repeated use of low-angle camera positions and the claustrophobic framings adds a connotative layer to the film that emphasizes the subaltern refugee’s inferior status in the view of the American.

Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, by Ben Carver

Reviewed by: Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America by Ben Carver Christopher Ferguson (bio) Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, by Ben Carver; pp. xviii + 292. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, £79.99, $109.99. In Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, Ben Carver describes his book as a study of the “nineteenth-century imagination of worlds that history might have produced” (1). Specifically, he analyzes the writing of “alternate histories” and identifies the wider contexts that produced them. Carver defines “alternate histories” as literary works wherein an author identifies a single point of historical divergence (example: Napoleon’s decision to begin his retreat from Moscow in September rather than October of 1812) and from this point imagines all subsequent history evolving in a new direction as a result of this change. (By leaving Russia earlier, the Grande Armée avoids decimation by the Russian winter, and Napoleon remains undefeated and rules over a massive French empire until his death from old age.) Carver contends that a wide variety of nineteenth-century authors—including British journalists, French philosophers, and American housewives—engaged in imaginative rewritings of history not only in order to imagine alternate “forms of society” or “the history of nations that might have followed,” but also as a means of “working with and often testing ideas about cycles of cause and effect that had produced the world they lived in” (5). Nineteenth-century alternate histories thus represented an important medium that allowed reflection on how new forms of knowledge, such as archaeology, astronomy, or the natural sciences, “altered the understanding of the past” (1). Carver’s book is one of several recent works interested in analyzing the production, content, and meaning of fictional histories, with Catherine Gallagher’s Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction (2018) being the most notable among them. Indeed, it is difficult to assess Carver’s study without comparing it with Gallagher’s, and Carver himself notes some important affinities between their [End Page 688] two studies. This includes their shared preference for the phrase “alternate history” as opposed to “alternative history,” the first strictly referencing “a narrative set of circumstances that history might have produced” while the second also potentially encompassing nonfictional accounts which “offer marginal perspectives normally excluded from histories of a subject” (11). Carver’s definition of what constitutes an “alternate history,” however, is more fluid and inclusive. While Gallagher draws clear distinctions between “alternate histories,” “alternate history novels,” and “counterfactual histories” on the basis of both their formal elements and contents (Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction [The University of Chicago Press, 2018], 5), Carver argues that the “boundaries between alternate and counterfactual histories are hard to establish.” Such distinctions, he contends, are “anachronistic” to the study of nineteenth-century “historical imaginaries” because none of these styles had “solidified into a form that [contemporary] writers and readers were conscious of” (12). Despite these differences of definition, Carver and Gallagher analyze many of the same works, including Louis Geoffrey-Château’s Napoléon et la conquête du monde [Napoleon and the Conquest of the World] (1836), Charles Renouvier’s Uchronie [Uchronia] (1857), Auguste Blanqui’s L’éternité par les astres [Eternity According to the Stars] (1872), Edward Everett Hale’s Hands Off (1895), and Edmund Lawrence’s It May Happen Yet: A Tale of Bonaparte’s Invasion of England (1899). These varied works are united not only by their presentation of fictional histories but also by their relative obscurity and the rarity with which they have been utilized by other scholars; the same might be noted about most of the other texts Carver examines, including Richard Whately’s Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte (1819), Benjamin Disraeli’s early novel The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833), an essay on astronomy and the plurality of worlds by Thomas De Quincey (“System of the Heavens As Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes” [1846]), and Mary E. Bradley Lane’s feminist utopia Mizora: A Prophecy...

American Housewife and Super Fun Night: Fat Ambiguity and Televised Bodily Comedy

ABSTRACT This article offers a reparative textual analysis of the fat representations and comedy in the first seasons of the sitcoms American Housewife and Super Fun Night. These series navigate a discursive terrain that increasingly encourages individual body positivity while not overtly pushing back against discourses of the “obesity epidemic.” These narratives and representations of individual body positivity or acceptance that avoid or fail to engage with larger systemic and political critiques construct a fat ambiguity that may nevertheless create important televisual space for more diverse and less oppressive ways of understanding and representing fatness.

The “Rag Doll” Won't Move: The Curious Case of Sylvia Gellburg

AbstractArthur Miller has often been criticized for creating an androcentric environment onstage, but if Kate Keller and Linda Loman were victims in the male world, the female condition seems to only have worsened in his later stage plays of the 1990s and early 2000s. However, despite the voluminous feminist criticism hurled at the playwright, it is essential to recognize Miller as a truthful chronicler of his times for he efficaciously uses the dramatic stage as a mirror image of his society. This article investigates the curious case of Sylvia Gellburg, the paralyzed Jewish American housewife of Miller's Broken Glass (1994), by connecting her “hysteria” to her subjugation as a woman of the 1930s, and justifying Miller's portrayal of women as realistic instead of demeaning. In simpler terms, the article is a defense of Miller's art of characterization.

Suburban Captivity Narratives: Feminism, Domesticity, and the Liberation of the American Housewife

Suburban Captivity Narratives: Feminism, Domesticity, and the Liberation of the American Housewife

The Uncanny Tapestry of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lovely House”

The essay discusses Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lovely House” (1952), in which uncanny architecture and supernatural elements combine to express the writer’s concerns about very real horrors of domesticity and femininity in mid-century America. In Jackson’s story it is the idealization of domesticity, its power to entrap as well as the idea of selfhood established by domestic fictions, which are the greatest sources of anxiety experienced by many American housewives, ideally immobilized and isolated in their lovely suburban homes. The paper argues that Jackson’s story not only continues the tradition of the Female Gothic but also complicates the idea of patriarchal domination by showing women as prisoners of domestic fictions woven by themselves.

Producing a Radio Housewife

This article examines how the writers and publicists behind the pioneering radio serial Clara, Lu 'n' Em circulated representations of gendered labor in early prime-time and daytime network radio. Through their satiric impersonations of “syntax-scrambling” midwestern housewives, the careful promotion of the three young stars, and their sale of Super Suds to American housewives, they established gender norms for both the production and the consumption of commercial messages in early radio. The creative team supporting Clara, Lu 'n' Em helped write the script for how broadcasters and sponsors could negotiate economic pressures and cultural concerns about women's paid work in the young medium. By embracing domesticity, the program negotiated the division then developing between prime-time and daytime programming, modeled modern consumer behavior for a mass female audience, and pledged its support for gendered spheres of labor.

Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan by Jan Bardsley

Reviewed by: Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan by Jan Bardsley Ulrike Wöhr Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan. By Jan Bardsley. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 224 pages. Hardcover £58.50/$112.00; softcover £24.99/$39.95. This well-written and timely book comes at a moment in history when U.S.-Japan relations, Japan’s postwar democracy, and Japan’s role in the world are at a new stage of social and political contestation, within and beyond Japan. Jan Bardsley provides a fascinating view of cultural politics of the 1950s that shaped the value system and the social order of postwar Japan as well as powerful discourses of national identity. Her analyses of representations of women and, in particular, the postwar ideal of the Japanese housewife, highlight the centrality of gender in these discursive processes. Bardsley focuses on the 1950s as a juncture “when [gender roles] could take several paths, but became naturalized in the housewife-salaryman model” (p. 5). She approaches the housewife (shufu) as a postwar icon of Japanese modernity connoting democratic progress and economic recovery, on the one hand, and modern domesticity, on the other. The housewife is, thus, comparable to earlier and similarly controversial constructs of femininity, such as the girl student (jogakusei), the new woman (atarashii onna), and the modern girl (modan gāru, or moga). In other words, the postwar housewife was, in her time, the latest in a series of female icons at the center of twentieth-century discourses of Japaneseness. The book, as its title suggests, understands 1950s representations of the housewife to be inseparably intertwined with discourses and power structures pertaining to the Cold War. Indeed, Cold War economic and cultural politics continued to hold up the ideal of the modern, emancipated, and sexually attractive American housewife even after the end of Japan’s Allied Occupation (1952), and while Japanese women were exhorted to emulate this model, Japanese men were denounced as a hindrance to women’s emancipation. The author traces the processes and products of such transnational gender politics in a range of sources—texts of various genres from women’s magazines, newspaper reportage, and visual images including photographs and cartoons. Her textual analysis “recreat[es] the theater” of five major disputes, or issues, she singles out from these sources and reconstructs the images and meanings that were attached to the housewife in these [End Page 247] controversies (p. 5). While Bardsley thus treats the housewife in the abstract, as a discursive phenomenon, her narrative also features flesh-and-blood housewives—most of whom identify themselves as such. These women inhabit the “contact zone” (discussed below) of 1950s Japan and participate in negotiations of “competing domesticities” (p. 2) as actors and/or objects in the debate. The introduction (chapter 1) begins with a short look at a 1959 Time magazine feature article on the emancipation of Japanese women, thus highlighting the transnational character of the book’s research subject and approach. As told in the magazine, this process of emancipation—which culminated in the wedding of Crown Princess (and now Empress) Michiko, the first commoner to marry into the royal family—owed its success to the American-led Occupation of Japan. Bardsley then takes up the social and political reality of housewives both in Japan and the United States and introduces the reader to the Cold War rhetoric of American domesticity as well as to a view of early postwar Japan through the lens of Marie Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone” (p. 11). The final part of the introduction argues for the current relevance of Bardsley’s research by pointing out the persistence of competing narratives that evolved or gained prominence in the late 1950s. Among these are the notion of Japanese women being in need of foreign rescue from oppressive Japanese men; the idea of the Japanese housewife as a symbol and guarantor of public order and national identity by virtue of her very domesticity; and, not least, images of royal women and beauty queens as personifications of these contradictory concepts of femininity. Following the introduction, chapters 2 through 6 provide in-depth analyses of single issues that each...

Nelly Don’s 1916 pink gingham apron frock: an illustration of the middle-class American housewife’s shifting role from producer to consumer

AbstractNelly Don created a stylish, practical, affordable pink gingham housedress in 1916, quickly selling out her first order of 216 dresses at Peck’s Dry Goods Company in Kansas City. This study investigated the reasons behind the success of her dress, and found that during the early 20th century, women’s roles shifted from that of producer to consumer, and that clothing was a visible reflection of this shift. Specific design attributes and social appeal contributed to the success of the housedress. Integrating trendy design elements into an affordable housedress along with the growing demand for a stylish, yet practical housedress induced by consumption culture in the early 20th century facilitated the success of Nelly Don’s pink gingham housedress. As such, Nelly Don’s 1916 housedress reflected social and cultural change in this transitional period, and exemplified the shifting role of the middle-class American housewife by offering an alternative to the traditional Mother Hubbard housedress as well as a lifestyle free of long hours spent sewing.

Review: Julia Child’s The French Chef, by Dana Polan

Book Review| February 01 2014 Review: Julia Child’s The French Chef, by Dana Polan Julia Child’s The French ChefDana Polan: Duke University Press, 2011 295 pp. including index. $23.95 (cloth) Malena Watrous Malena Watrous Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Gastronomica (2014) 14 (1): 83–84. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2014.14.1.83 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Malena Watrous; Review: Julia Child’s The French Chef, by Dana Polan. Gastronomica 1 February 2014; 14 (1): 83–84. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2014.14.1.83 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentGastronomica Search Julia Child earned her status as an American icon only after she burst onto the small screen in 1963 with her cooking show, “The French Chef.” Although it aired two years after the publication of her hit book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, no biographical detail or specific personality emerges from the cookbook, as Dana Polan astutely points out in his meticulously researched and entertaining book, Julia Child’s The French Chef, which analyzes the rise of Child’s popular cooking program and TV persona and her lasting influence upon the genre of the TV cooking show as we know it today. Child had a palpable passion for her subject—to make French cooking make sense—which meant that she wanted to import and translate the secrets of French gastronomy for the American housewife, or man. Polan notes that Child did not cater to a particular or gendered audience, and in... You do not currently have access to this content.

Truman Capote, enfant terrible

Introduction 1 Early Years to Capote's Departure for Europe 1949 2 Nine High School Stories (Hilda, If I Forget You, Lucy, Saturday Night, Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child, Swamp Terror, The Moth in the Flame, Miss Belle Rankin, Louise) Tree of Night and Other Stories Summer Crossing 3 Other Voices, Other Rooms 4 Travels Including Local Color, Short Fiction, and Reportage 5 Grass Harp--Novel and Play 6 Films: Beat the Devil and Indiscretions of an American Housewife 7 Observations - with Photographs by Richard Avedon 8 In Cold Blood 9 Late Years in the Public Eye 10 Answered Prayers Works Works Consulted Index.

The taming of the Desperate Housewives : A stylistic analysis of CCTV’s Dub of the serial

Dubbing is the norm in re-editing imported foreign screen programming in China. Yet the practice has been rarely critiqued. In this context, I have undertaken a stylistic analysis of a dubbed Chinese edition of Desperate Housewives , which was screened by China Central Television (CCTV) soon after its US release. This paper discusses the analysis and the ensuing findings. The paper presents a number of examples extracted from the original script, accompanied by the CCTV translation plus back translation of the program. I begin the paper by providing information about the CCTV edition of Desperate Housewives , focusing on its poor reception by the viewers. This is followed by a discussion of the four prominent translation strategies used in the CCTV rendition, which I have identified on the basis of the stylistic analysis. The strategies include being maximal, being literal, being logical and being sanitary. I then proceed to a critique of the four strategies. I argue that the use of the strategies is intended to serve two specific objectives. (1) Accomplishing the difficult task of translating the program from English into Chinese and from American culture into Chinese culture. (2) Taming the desperate language acts of the characters. It will be argued, however, that the use of the strategies prevents the foreign (i.e., articulation of the desperation of suburban American housewives) from coming through to the Chinese audience, which I believe contributes to the viewers’ disenchantment with the program.

Lessons from “Around the world with Oprah”: Neoliberalism, race, and the (geo)politics of beauty

On 6 October 2004, viewers went “Around the world with Oprah” and received a rare glimpse inside the lives of 30-year-old women from 17 different countries. When Oprah turned her gaze (and that of middle-class American housewives) eastward, she highlighted South Korean women's penchart for plastic surgery. Oprah's “trip” to South Korea is emblematic of Western discourse surrounding South Korean Women's plastic surgery consumption, most of which focuses on cosmetic eyelid surgery or the sangapul procedure as it is called in South Korea. Given its widespread popularity, the sangapul procedure has come to signify South Korean women's acquiescence to not only patriarchal oppression but racial oppression as well. This essay goes beyond the psychologization of South Korean women in order to ask what such psychological musings obscure about the very political nature of beauty itself. Using “Around the world with Oprah” as a starting point, then, this essay examines beauty at the intersection of race, technology, and (geo)politics in order to show that, in an era of neoliberalism, plastic surgery is often rationalized as an investment in the self towards a more normal, if not better future. As this essay suggests, such a framing of plastic surgery is contingent on Oprah's production of neoliberal feminism based on liberal notions of choice. Given her global reach, these neoliberal feminist subjects are not produced equally, however, but are discursively constructed along a First World/Third World divide.

The silencing of Ruby McCollum: race, class, and gender in the South

The Silencing of Ruby refutes the carefully constructed public memory of one of the most famous - and underexamined - biracial murders in American history. On August 3, 1952, African American housewife Ruby McCollum drove to the office of Dr. C. LeRoy Adams, beloved white physician in the segregated small town of Live Oak, Florida. With her two young children in tow, McCollum calmly gunned down the doctor during (according to public sentiment) argument over a medical bill. Soon, a very different motive emerged, with McCollum alleging horrific mental and physical abuse at Adams's hand. In reaction to these allegations and an increasingly intrusive media presence, the town quickly cobbled together what would become the public facade of Adams's murder - a more acceptable motive for McCollum's actions. To ensure this would become the official version of events, McCollum's trial prosecutors voiced multiple objections during her testimony to limit what she was allowed to say. Employing multiple methodologies to achieve her voice - historical research, feminist theory, African American literary criticism, African American history, and investigative journalism - Evans analyzes the texts surrounding the affair to suggest that an imposed code of silence demands not only the construction of an official story but also the transformation of a community's citizens into agents who will reproduce and perpetuate this version of events, improbable and unlikely though they may be.

American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957-1965 (review)

American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957-1965, by Kirsten Fermaglich. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2006. 252 pp. $29.95. Kirsten Fermaglich's highly suggestive American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares offers spirited plea for us to reassess the multiple and often ambiguous meanings of secular Jewish identity. Her defense of secular American Jewishness is as well rebuke to more static ideas about Jewishness that measure identification strictly in terms of ritual observance or temple membetship. As Fermaglich demonstrates, secular Jews at the turn of the 1960s championed universal values and liberal causes in fashion completely consonant with their Jewish identities even while they often neglected (or hesitated) to name Jewishness as motivation for their actions. As Fermaglich illustrates in quartet of case studies, the content of secular Jewish self-understanding for these individuals was anything but static. It often could - and did - change dramatically over rime. In four self-contained chapters, Fermaglich traces the careers of four controversial public intellectuals at the turn of the 1960s: the historian Stanley Elkins, the journalist Betty Friedan, the sociologist Stanley Milgram, and the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton. In each case, Fermaglieli explores how the intellectual made use of references to the Holocaust to make sense of radically different political or historical situation. Indeed, major purpose of Fermaglich's book is to contribute to growing body of scholarship that challenges Peter Novick's increasingly threadbare paradigm (advanced in his The Holocaust in American Life) that the Holocaust was not topic for public discussion in the U.S. until after 1967. To the contrary, as Fermaglich persuasively shows, the Holocaust was openly and broadly discussed already at the turn of the 1960s. Thus, her first chapter looks at Elkins' Slavery (1959), blockbuster academic text that equated pathological damages done to (male) slaves in the antebellum South with psychic damages experienced by victims of the Nazi concentration camps. Considered liberal intervention in debates over whether African Americans should be the beneficiaries of preferential treatment, Slavery soon found its way into public policy discussions and was cited prominently in the Johnson administration's now infamous Moynihan Report. In her second chapter, Fermaglich examines Friedan's massively influential TIk Feminine Mystique (1963), which stated that the American housewife was little more than the dehumanized denizen of a comfortable concentration camp. In the third chapter, Fermaglich recounts the fascinating tale of Milgram's obedience experiments wherein unsuspecting subjects administrated (what they believed were) painful electric shocks to another human being. Since subjects so often did what they were told, his research led Milgram to conclude that Nazi lay dormant in each of us. …

Her kind: Anne Sexton, the Cold War and the idea of the housewife

As a key figure of the 'Confessional' movement, Anne Sexton's work has often been critically assessed only in relation to her life ‐ her history of mental illness and eventual suicide. This article attempts to place Sexton's poetry back into its historical context, arguing that with American suburbia being viewed as a new 'home front' during the Cold War, the persona of 'Housewife‐poet' that Sexton adopted was highly politically charged. Seizing the language of pop‐culture ‐ from advertising to sci‐fi ‐ Sexton used it to expose the nightmare behind the white picket fence, and deconstruct the carefully constructed propaganda of the American housewife.

The Business of Housekeeping: The Mistress, the Domestic Worker, and the Construction of Class

The Business of Housekeeping:The Mistress, the Domestic Worker, and the Construction of Class Laurie Ousley At the outset of A Treatise on Domestic Economy, Catharine Beecher, one of the most prominent of American domestic economists, explains the political structure of America in order to lay the groundwork for her prescriptions for the American home. She explains that, as both the principles of democracy and Christianity have established, "each individual of our race shall regard the happiness of others, as of the same value as his own; and . . . forbid any institution, in private or civil life, which secures advantages to one class, by sacrificing the interests of another" (2). "The institutions of monarchical and aristocratic nations," Beecher adds, "are based on precisely opposite principles" (3). American women have the power to choose their husbands, and domestics, artisans, and laborers the power to choose their employers. Americans choose their superiors: "Each subject . . . has equal power with every other, to decide who shall be his superior as a ruler" (3). In "private or civil life," dependence on and deference to superiors is voluntary, and "each individual may pursue and secure the highest degree of happiness within his reach, unimpeded by the selfish interests of others" (2). Beecher places the American home firmly within the political context of the nation, its economy not only reflecting but also determining the social and civic relations of the nation. Accompanying these "valuable civil blessings" which allow us to "escape from the untold miseries and oppression" that are necessary elements of aristocracy, Beecher instructs her reader, are trials peculiar to the American housewife (Treatise 197).1 The need for manuals of domestic economy and the instruction provided by domestic novels is driven by the political economy that has allowed the freedom of this unprecedented class mobility. One of those great trials of the American housewife is the training and care of her domestics, which is a trial precisely because there is no permanent class of workers. Beecher argues consistently throughout the Treatise that while all must be treated as we would like ourselves to be if we were in the same position, we can and should train the domestic into her proper place in the hierarchy of the home. Furthermore, the housekeeper must consider that the wages of the worker must be consistent with those determined by the laws of supply and demand and that the working conditions of the domestic are very much part of those laws. A good domestic will work where she finds those conditions most agreeable and most respectful of her rights as guaranteed in [End Page 132] America. Beecher therefore recommends creating a work environment that will welcome a domestic and promise to instruct her in the matters of domestic economy. Providing such a workplace would not only secure the labor of the domestic but would also contribute to "the welfare of society" (Treatise 203). At the end of this chapter, entitled "On the Care of Domestics," Beecher recommends Catharine Maria Sedgwick's domestic novel Live and Let Live; or, Domestic Service Illustrated: "The excellent little work of Miss Sedgwick, entitled 'Live, and Let Live,' contains many valuable and useful hints, conveyed in a most pleasing narrative form, which every housekeeper would do well to read" (206, n.). Like Beecher, Sedgwick addresses domestic economy as a form of political economy, attributing changes in the structure of the home to the introduction of democratic ideals and the laws of capitalism into American economy, society, and culture. Both Beecher's Treatise and Sedgwick's Live and Let Live are preoccupied with the political implications of the new class relations. When women debated class relations in America, they often did so by examining how class worked within the home, which meant a particular examination of the relationship between the housekeeper and the domestic servant.2 Although the theory of separate spheres has been rightfully and effectively dismantled, it was, however, certainly the case that women were primarily responsible for the care of their homes and it was likely that women—and children—encountered paid labor and the distinctions of class for the first time within a home or within the context of home, as part...

Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Cuba (review)

Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Cuba (review)

Women’s Rights National Historical Park: where ‘rights’ are our mission

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann M’Clintock, Martha Wright and Jane Hunt were no ordinary middle‐class American housewives, and the Women's Rights National Historical Park in the United States commemorates their activism. Vivien Ellen Rose, historian at the park, is responsible for the historical content of exhibits and programmes. The stated goal of the park is to ‘inspire and educate visitors about the struggle of women for their equal rights’, and this article presents some of the recent activities aimed at attaining those ends.