Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons

Book Description

From board games to beauty pageants, a smart, witty, pop-culture history of the perilous path to achieving the feminine ideal.

Deluged by persuasive advertisements and meticulous (though often misguided) advice experts, women from the 1940s to the 1970s were coaxed to "think pink" when they thought of what it meant to be a woman. Attaining feminine perfection meant conforming to a mythical standard, one that would come wrapped in an adorable pink package, if those cunning marketers were to be believed. With wise humor and a savvy eye for curious, absurd, and at times wildly funny period artifacts, Lynn Peril gathers here the memorabilia of the era —from kitschy board games and lunch boxes to outdated advice books and health pamphlets—and reminds us how media messages have long endeavored to shape women's behavior and self-image, with varying degrees of success.

Vividly illustrated with photographs of vintage paraphernalia, this entertaining social history revisits the nostalgic past, but only to offer a refreshing message to women who lived through those years as well as those who are coming of age now. 8 pages of color, 45 black-and-white illustrations.

Customer Reviews:

I laughed, I cried, I rinsed, lathered and repeated.......2005-11-15

I happened to just pick this off the shelf at Borders when just doing a browse, as a collector of "femorabilia" it really stood out. After a quick look, the faithful consumer in me just HAD to have this book. I have a collection of cheesy "nurse in love" 1960's romance novels, old health textbooks, Barbies, you name it- but I never really thoroughly thought about all of it (or why I was so strangely attracted to it) until I read this book.

The writing style is great- it moves at a quick pace and I had trouble putting it down. You do get glossy pictures in the middle, and vintage ads are always fun. But the meat of this book shows just how twisted the image of "femininity" (and in one chapter, masculinity) is in our media and society. It illustrates very clearly that while we have come a long way, "pink think" is still alive and sashaying. Passages reminded me of personal weird "celebrations of your womanhood" that were fed to me, like in sex ed in the 5th grade they made getting your period sound like an amazing, wonderful thing. Me and my friends literally couldn't wait, and even said things like "I hope mine is a week long, and not just three days!"
It's embarrassing now, but I was thoroughly brainwashed and naturally pretty bummed out when menstruation wasn't like a party in my pants. I also remember having those Mall Madness and boyfriend board games as a girl (for the author it was Mystery Date), which I played years before I had much interest in guys or my credit rating.

This book is incredibly smart, interesting, surprisingly non-judegmental, and as fun as it is scary. Ranging from the hilarity of a "Lady" marketed pink train set to the horrors of ads for douche made from LYSOL, this book will keep your attention and keep you thinking long after you finish it. Highly recommended to all age groups.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll scream, you'll LEARN!!.......2005-05-17

This was great. Terribly entertaining and very informative as well. Lynn Peril obviously has a passion for this stuff, and her research is quite extensive. I thought that the information was presented in a very manageable and clever way. I only wish most of the non-fiction I read in college was this good while still teaching me things. Should be required reading for EVERYONE! I loved her chapter at the end about how, sadly, we are none too far away from this type of thinking, with several examples, such as "The Rules." It just made me very sad and angry at times, while laughing out loud or cringing in horror at others. My roommates and I had a grand time taking the 1947 Ladies Home Journal quiz to find out if we should look for a job or a husband. (One of the instant "job" qualifiers was if you were over 26 years old or "above average height")

Fun Read On Womens History...How Far Have Wein Really Come??.......2005-03-04

When I first saw Pink Think at Barnes and Noble I thought that it was misplaced in the women's studies section as it really did not look like a book with a feminist glance.
BOY WAS I WRONG!!! I wound up actually taking a look at it one day and could not leave the store without it!!!
I have always been intrigued by women's history. I am not into cooking or sewing or cleaning by any means to be honest. However I find that the stuff that dates back in time regarding those issues really shed light into the lives that women of the time would have lead. Its really hard to find that kind of information and Lynn Peril did a really good job at not only compiling the stuff that she found, but presenting it in an easy to read fashion.
I must admit as I read the stuff in the book I really could not help but wonder: how far have we really come?? When I think of womens magazines, women's fiction, ivillage and the stuff that we market towards teen girls.
Lynn Peril has a fun Pink Think website that has links to other fun information on these kind of historical facts. A few other books I would highly recommend if you are into these historical view on women are: The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz as well as From Front Porch to Backseat by Beth Bailey.

Great for reference, horrible otherwise.......2005-01-06

This book was witty and a great reference for all things mid-century and female-oriented, but beyond that wasn't much of anything. Homosexuality is never really covered in regards to women and doesn't really analyze or comment on things or even try to understand the why behind it: the book is just sarcastic in a rather juvenile sense. The best part of the whole book is when Peril indicts Betty Friedan for being a part of the pink think problem.

I actually got the impression from the book that if you happen to be a contemporary female who is feminine, you're evil. And that is sad.

FABULOUS!.......2004-06-13

This book is fantastic. For anyone interested in gender studies, women's studies, or just 50's/60's culture, this book is just great. I had read Peril's column in Bitch magazine and decided to get her book. (the column is similar to this book) I couldn't believe all of the amazing and frightening tidbits of female life in the 50s... like Lysol being sold as a douching product?? And even more disturbing was the death toll from using Lysol in such a capacity. More upsetting still was the company's reaction to these women's deaths - the women had failed to properly dilute the product and, therfore, caused their own deaths. Most of the book is not so disturbing. In fact, most of it is really charming. The kind of stuff that makes you look at bullet bras, cardigans, saddle shoes, and other icons of 50s femininity and think "wow, I've got it pretty good." A great read if not for academic purposes then for simple head-shaking humor.

Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture

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Fashion and feminism--more compatible than we imagined

Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture
Joanne Hollows
Manufacturer: Manchester University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0719043956

Book Description

In this accessible introductory guide, the author identifies key feminist approaches to popular culture from the 1960s to the present and demonstrates how the relationship between feminism, femininity and popular culture has often been a troubled one. The book introduces the central ideas of both second-wave feminism and feminist cultural studies and demonstrates how they inform feminist debates about a range of popular forms and practices through a series of case studies: the woman's film; romantic fiction; soap opera; consumption and material culture; fashion and beauty practices; and youth culture and popular music.

Customer Reviews:

Fashion and feminism--more compatible than we imagined.......2000-08-18

Hollows has produced a cutting-edge feminist analysis of feminine popular culture including such topics as fashion and beauty practices, women's film, etc. that were regarded by many second-wave feminists to be more "feminine" than "feminist". Hollows has re-examined the feminine/feminist dichotomy to explore how they have been constructed as competing or opposing social pressures. She is examining the tension between wanting to hold on to the identity "feminist" and wanting to see how feminism can be understood differently for multiple generations of women.

Feminist cultural criticism has relied heavily on the idea that a politically correct feminist identity can deconstruct other feminine identities as "invalid". A popular perception is that a feminist "leader" will instruct "ordinary women" in the error of their non-feminist ways. If feminist intellectuals are trained, educated and committed to raise the consciousness of other women they should therefore be committed to "redeem" others from their servitude to interests such as fashion. Hollows believes that much of this black-and-white thinking comes from traditional views of production/consumption issues and how the dichotomous perception of these issues has produced gendered identities of those who are associated with one or the other.

Book Description

The New Biography looks at the life stories of eight famous women in nineteenth-century France who became public figures even though they lived in a society that did not encourage women to speak out publicly. All of these women--activists, writers, and philosophers--became controversial figures who challenged conventional notions of femininity in their time. By showing how these women deliberately created their public lives, Jo Burr Margadant and her colleagues demonstrate the rich rewards of the new methods in biography.
In her introduction Margadant gives a brilliant explanation of the new biography and how it fits into recent and current debates about the writing of history. Each essay that follows connects the lives of the women it discusses with major themes in French history. The famous activist Flora Tristan, the feminist journalist Marguerite Durand, and a leading advocate of birth control, Nelly Roussell, are just a few of the fascinating women brought to life in this book.
Because these stories often expose the cracks in what has been seen as a monolithic separation of gendered spheres in nineteenth-century bourgeois France, they challenge historians to rethink assumptions about the history of this period. The New Biography thus joins a body of work that brings women from the margins of the historical record into history's mainstream.

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Deconstructing Deconstructionism

Female Impersonation
Carole-Anne Tyler
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415916887

Book Description

Female Impersonation is a feminist and psychoanalytic investigation of the contemporary fascination with impersonation. Evident everywhere from television talk shows to cultural theory, masquerade and "passing" are now at the center of both popular and scholarly explorations of dominant gender, sexual, race and class identities and cultural values. When--and for whom--is a performance of an identity a masquerade, rather than the real thing? Why do people try to pass as what they are not? Is there a difference between masquerade and passing if both make identity an unnatural act?

Carole-Anne Tyler considers these questions raised by female impersonations in a wide range of contemporary media and texts, from Dolly Parton and Renee Richards to Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida. Female Impersonation will be of interest to readers concerned with the complex politics at stake in every discussion--and performance--of identity.

Customer Reviews:

Deconstructing Deconstructionism.......2004-06-12

Carole-Anne Tyler takes on the world of feminist criticism in Female Impersonation. The back cover states that she "explores what it would mean to take seriously the notion that gender is an artifice, that one's very identity is in fact a socially mandated impersonation." And it's this that is meant by the title. Female Impersonation is not primarily about drag queens; it's certainly not a "how-to" book, nor a sociological study of the phenomena. While transgendered issues do appear, they are not the main focus of Tyler's attention and primarily serve to attempt to illustrate her basic premise, that gender is imposed and not innate.

Here, though, is where the whole thing goes astray. Tyler's interest is in culture, not biology, and she looks solely at cultural artefacts to make her points. It's clear she's well read and thoughtful, but just because Simone de Beauvior, in The Second Sex, wrote, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman...this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine", that doesn't mean it is true. It's certainly a provocative claim, and one that has had great influence in gender studies, but there's a growing body of biological evidence that directly contradicts it. This is a fundamental failure of Tyler's to confront the truth, or at least what appears now to be the truth: that while gender and sex are not identical, they are both biological in origin. Certainly any particular outward manifestation of gender is cultural (one merely needs to compare courtly male attire of Louis XIV to a Can-can dancer at the Moulin Rouge); but that is a far cry from claiming that gender itself is artificial.

Further weaknesses result from Tyler's single-minded cultural approach. When she does discuss drag queens, transsexuals, and other transgendered people, it seems apparent that she's only seen them on TV and in the movies, and maybe not too often, at that. In one chapter, Transsexual Impersonation: the Ultimate Sacrifice, she repeated speaks of TV movies about transsexuals and makes broad generalizations about them and how they reflect the societal view of gender. Never mind that every transsexual would be livid about the chapter title; it's impossible to argue the point that transsexuals are not impersonating women, they are becoming women--or even, they have always been women but are making their physique match their gender, with someone who believes that natal females are female impersonators! No, what's particularly odd here, especially given the breadth of her source material elsewhere, is that after practically being given the impression there's a transsexual movie-of-the-week, Tyler apparently knows only one TV movie about transsexuals: Second Serve, the Renee Richards Story. It's a problematic example at best to learn anything about transsexualism--Richards now professes unhappiness with her gender change, and Dr. Richard Stoller's theories, summed up as "too much mother and too little father makes a feminine boy" are widely recognized today as simply inaccurate. Stoller is the only medical professional cited in the work, and that from work published in 1985. Tyler is either unaware of or ignores more recent studies, such as one indicating differences in brain physiology between transsexuals and non-transsexuals; this surely gives the lie to her fundamental premise. Nor did she employ basic sociological research. Should Tyler have gone and interviewed transgendered people, she might have gotten a real impression of their experience and what gender really means. If one wants to write about gender and culture, and use the incongruities of gender and sex as examples on which to base one's point, to not speak directly to those people is unconscionable. Failing to step out of the ivory tower and truly consider the accuracy of comments by "authorities" is common to far too much academic writing; I speak as an academic myself.

Instead, Tyler would prefer to discuss what various cultural critics have said, and even here I'm not always sure whether she agrees with them or not. Catherine Mallot is cited as claiming that "the transsexual, like the transvestite, wishes to be a 'she-male," the phallic woman who lacks nothing...the transsexual can only lose lack by giving up the penis. Paradoxically, a real castration is demanded as the (imaginary) solution to castration anxiety." I'm amazed--a feminist Freudian. Again, speaking with actual post-operative transsexuals would not bear this over-thought nonsense out. A quick flip through a random chapter sub-section reveals the following writers cited: Pecheux, Brownmiller, Irigaray, Butler, Beauvoir, Foucault, Fanon, Freud, Lacan, Woolf--well, I'm stopping here, after only two pages! Literally hundreds of writers are cited throughout the book, and if you haven't read them in depth, you'll wonder at the relevance of much of this. It frankly reads like a doctoral dissertation, in which the author seeks to impress by displaying her prodigious bibliographic skills in lieu of her impressive critical thinking skills.

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New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer Culture, 1880-1930 (Routledge Transatlantic Perspectives on American Literature, 1)

Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Popular Culture | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
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General | Sociology | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
Culture | Sociology | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
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Criticism & Theory | History & Criticism | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books | Deconstructionism | Feminist | General | Hermeneutics | Marxist | Semiotics | Sexuality in Literature | Structuralism
ASIN: 0415299837

Book Description

New Woman Hybridities explores the diversity of meanings ascribed to the turn-of-the-century New Woman in the context of cultural debates conducted within and across a wide range of national frameworks. Individual chapters by international scholars scrutinize the flow of ideas, images and textual parameters of New Woman discourses in the UK, North America, Europe, and Japan, elucidating the national and ethnic hybridity of the 'modern woman' by locating this figure within both international consumer culture and feminist writing.

Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race

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Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race
Ann Pellegrini
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415916860

Book Description

Performance Anxieties looks at the on-going debates over the value of psychoanalysis for feminist theory and politics--specifically concerning the social and psychical meanings of racialization. Beginning with an historicized return to Freud and the meaning of Jewishness in Freud's day, Ann Pellegrini indicates how "race" and racialization are not incidental features of psychoanalysis or of modern subjectivity, but are among the generative conditions of both.

Performance Anxieties stages a series of playful encounters between elite and popular performance texts--Freud meets Sarah Bernhardt meets Sandra Bernhard; Joan Riviere's masquerading women are refigured in relation to the hard female bodies in the film Pumping Iron II: The Women; and the Terminator and Alien films. In re-reading psychoanalysis alongside other performance texts, Pellegrini unsettles relations between popular and elite, performance and performative.

Performing Femininity: Rewriting Gender Identity (Ethnographic Alternatives Book Series)

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positive feminism

Performing Femininity: Rewriting Gender Identity (Ethnographic Alternatives Book Series)
Lesa Lockford
Manufacturer: AltaMira Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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General | Performing Arts | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 075910073X

Book Description

Humorous yet touching, Performing Femininity challenges traditional and feminist perspectives on gender. As a woman whose brand of feminism is suspect, Lesa Lockford places herself in the most shameful, the most abject circumstances: an image obsessed weight-watcher, an exotic dancer, and a theatrical performer. By exposing herself to the abject, she reclaims her body's symbolic value from society. This experimental autoethnography provides a provocative model to the ethnographer and rewards the student of gender studies with a rare perspective.

Customer Reviews:

positive feminism.......2005-04-16

What is ethical and/or moral when it comes to sexuality? Who determines this?

Is sex performance/genre any more or less ethical than other performance style? Is it less or more powerful?

Why is Western society so uncomfortable with its own sexual expression and choices?

Desire is desire is desire...the hierarchy of desire...
...at the top, of course is the most accepted form, heterosexual monogamous coupling. Below this and in declining order resides queer desire, desire expressed in S/M, masturbation, desire aided by pornography or sex toys, promiscuous desire or more than one partner at a time, desire for partners from different generations, and desire expressed or fulfilled via commercial sex (Lockford 61).

Lesa Lockford explores the physiological, psychological, sexual, and social feminine identity today's Western culture within her dissertation. Lockford interweaves humorous stories with first hand accounts in an academic method known as autoethnography, which breaches the line between feminist verses patriarchal points of view. She explores the social and cultural paradigms of feminine behavior as a result of women's physiology, and sexuality.

"To be a feminist, one has first to become one". Commonly referred to as "consciousness raising," this process of profound personal transformation" entails self-reflexivity and the development of solidarity with other women [regardless of sex or gender]...this transformative experience "goes far beyond the sphere of human activity we regard ordinarily as `political'": indeed it manifests itself in everyday performances of self: In the course of undergoing the transformation to which I refer, the feminist changes her behavior: She makes new friends: she responds differently to people and events; her habits of consumption change; sometimes she alters her living arrangements or, more dramatically, her whole style of life. Becoming a feminist then is the embodying of the maxim "the personal is political" (Lockford 32).

The social implications and expectancies constructed by our predominantly patriarchal and sexually inhibited culture renders women sensitive to issues of appearance, identity, and sexual confidence. She explores the most baring of feminine issues: from the humbling system of weight loss...to the allure of make-up and a girl stuffing her bra...to the public politeness of sexless/fearing academic circles... to the independence of a confident stripper and exploration of herself as a performance artist.

The subordination of women by men is pervasive, that it orders the relationship of the sexes in every area of life, that a sexual politics of domination is as much in evidence in traditionally private spheres of the family, ordinary social life, and sexuality as in the things we do in the traditionally public spheres of government and the economy. The belief that the things we do in the bosom of the family or in bed are either "natural" or else a function of the personal idiosyncrasies of private individuals is held to be an "ideological curtain that conceals the reality of women's systematic oppression. (Lockford 32-3)

By society's everyday actions and words, women are dictated on how they should behave: by what we have been taught and how we are expected to behave, determines our power and the way we are perceived in society and our culture. When a woman undermines the primary social power's expectations, she becomes an outcast, a renegade, a delicious forbidden fruit.

The persuasiveness of objectification...time to start the music...
Lockford explores how "we women experience our agency and constitute our subjectivity given the persuasiveness of objectification" (x). The most extreme objectification situation she discovers and experiments with herself is inside sexual performance. She then discovers that society underestimates the true power of the sexual performance, and that the labels of objectification are misplaced. She then questions society itself and the labels we place upon ourselves as a result of other's expectations and "moral" implications.
Claiming space and giving voice to our perspectives was and is a vital touchstone for the development of empowered being and for revalorizing what traditionally has been considered important in the world (x).

I think we are approaching a time where the emphasis of the individual is becoming the forefront of intellectual and social accpetance. Perhaps this makes me idealistic, a liberal feminist, etc. I choose individualism, and this book definitely breaks the ice on feminist theory and sexual performance.

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Shopping Around
Hilary Radner
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

What is the nature of the pleasure offered to and derived by women in their encounters with popular culture?

Shopping Around investigates the issues of contemporary popular narrative, feminine pleasure, and consumer culture, viewing the permutations of the feminine subject as a textual construction evolved through everyday life. A wide spectrum of texts are examined, including The Taming of the Shrew, Waiting to Exhale, 9 1/2 Weeks, Vogue, Jane Fonda's Workout Book, and Harlequin romances, exposing the fact that women "read" within a complex and conflicted cultural arena characterized by a significant intertextuality that produces multiple "femininities."

Radner contends that feminine culture is neither a repressive tool of a male conspiracy to keep women in their place nor a form of resistance to a dominant patriarchal order; women do not shop because they are shopping addicts narcotized by the media, or because they have the urge to challenge masculine hegemonic control. Rather feminine culture is best understood as a strategic and dynamic system of investment and return. "Shopping" is pleasurable in terms of an affective economy that is regulated not only by gender, but by sexual identity, race, ethnicity, and class.

Shopping Around raises these issues in the context of everyday cultural practices such as perusing self-help books, reading magazines, watching television, and working-out, providing an insightful introduction to postmodern feminism and cultural theory.

Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture.(Review) (book review): An article from: Women's Studies in Communication

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Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture.(Review) (book review): An article from: Women's Studies in Communication
Ashli A. Quesinberry
Manufacturer: Organization for Research on Women and Communication
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Women's Studies in Communication, published by Organization for Research on Women and Communication on March 22, 2001. The length of the article is 1341 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture.(Review) (book review)
Author: Ashli A. Quesinberry
Publication: Women's Studies in Communication (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2001
Publisher: Organization for Research on Women and Communication
Volume: 24 Issue: 1 Page: 127

Article Type: Book Review

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Looking on: Images of femininity in the visual arts and media (Pandora Press popular culture critical readers)

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Looking on: Images of femininity in the visual arts and media (Pandora Press popular culture critical readers)

Manufacturer: Pandora
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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