Social Criticism in Laurie Simmons Early Color Interiors

In the 1950’s, women were working and being transformed into the American housewife, while their husbands went off to corporate careers. In Ingalls and Johnson, women were said to have careers however, could only succeed at “motherhood substitute jobs” such as teaching, nursing, administrative assistive, and social work (I&J, 51). This culture portrayed woman as only being capable of household jobs. When looking for the perfect suburban home, General Electric said women would head straight for the kitchen because this was where she would be spending most of her time. General Electric’s Wonder Kitchen made it even easier for women to save time, space, and work, allowing for wives to have more leisure time. The Chase & Sanborn advertisement reinforces the culture of women having to do everything to please their husbands. The picture on the ad depicts a man spanking his wife across his lap because she disappointed him with flat and stale coffee. Not only are women conforming to this domestically pleasing life style, but men also had

The most prevalent and popular stereotype of the post World war II era in America is one filled with women abandoning their wartimes jobs and retreating into the home to fulfill their womanly duties. In Joanne Meyerowitz’s Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, she shows how far women departed from this one dimensional image. While Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is reflexive and focused on the mainstream, Meyerowitz’s analysis is a broader and more inclusive exploration of media, as she draws upon multiple sources. Although Friedan effectively unveiled the thought process and reasoning behind society's belief that the message of media was to make women think that their place was to be the happy housewife, Meyerowitz expanded her media archives and found a differing message in analyzing both female responses to media and exploring their stories.

Traditionally, men have held the power in society. Women have been treated as a second class of citizens with neither the legal rights nor the respect of their male counterparts. Culture has contributed to these gender roles by conditioning women to accept their subordinate status while encouraging young men to lead and control. Feminist criticism contends that literature either supports society’s patriarchal structure or provides social criticism in order to change this hierarchy. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts one women’s struggle against the traditional female role into which society attempts to force her and the societal reaction

At the start of the decade, society and the way people lived changed drastically. Women specifically were viewed in a different way. Before the 1920s, women were portrayed as the “typical housewife”. Women were supposed to stay home, cook, clean, and raise the children. During the 1920s, women were changing the culture and the stereotype of a “typical housewife”. Women began to go

Being a housewife is one of the many roles that needed to be destroyed in radical feminists’ ideology because it oppressed women. Women who are housewives have to cook, clean, take care of the children; do “women’s work”. A major depiction of how radical feminists felt about women’s oppression was at the 1968 Miss America Pageant. A pageant that is seen as empowering to women by making them beautiful. Radical feminist, understandably, reject this form of empowering women. It does not matter whether women are “beautiful”, pageants, generally, only reinforce that women need to be beautiful to succeed or e noticed by men. Radical feminists through feminine trimmings into a garbage can to represent freedom from

Friedan, however, was no ordinary housewife. Before starting her family, she had worked as a newspaper reporter; even after her children came, she wrote regularly for the major women 's magazines. By 1957 she was fed up with the endless stories about breast-feeding, the preparation of gourmet chip dips, and similar domestic fare that was the staple of ‘Redbook‘, ‘McCall 's‘, and ‘Ladies ' Home Journal‘. She had noticed many women like herself who worked outside the home and felt guilty because their jobs threatened their husbands ' roles as providers or took time away from their children. Thus Friedan began to wonder not only about herself as a woman, a wife, and a mother, but also about the role society had shaped women to play.

As a result of the drafting of the majority of American men, several essential jobs were left vacated. Therefore, it seemed inevitable for women to employ themselves in order to survive. With the end of the war, men had returned to their jobs, leaving women with emptiness in their core. Despite feeling bound to their traditional role of the household, the need for a sense of purpose had awoken in them, and they would be relentless in finding it. One primary example of these changes holds true in a 1917 political cartoon, which shows a phrase on the wall, stating,“Woman’s sphere is the home wherever she makes good,”. The woman, who is holding a list of places/things she had

Every girl growing up always use to play dress up in clothes as a childhood past time for fun. Cindy Sherman used that passed time as a way to create art with photography and is known for her talent of this act and taking self-portraits of it. Her ideas come stereotypes of women throughout past and present society. These self-portraits are known to “confront and explore the representations of women in society.” (Jankauskas).

Before starting this project, I knew very little about photography, photographers, or exactly how much impact photographical images have had on our society. I have never taken a photography class, or researched too in depth about specific pictures or photographers. This project has allowed me to delve deeper into the world of photography in order to understand just how much influence pictures can have over society’s beliefs, emotions, and understandings’. I have have chosen two highly influential photographers, Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange, who I have found to both resonate with me and perfectly capture human emotions in way that moves others.

The characters Sherman portrays, lighting, clothing and expressions are cliché of what is present in cinema, so much that viewers of her work have told Sherman that they ‘remember the movie’ that the image is derived from, yet Sherman having no film in mind at all.[iv] Thus showing that her word has a pastiche of past cinematic genres, and how women are portrayed in cinema and photography and how Sherman has manipulated the ‘male gaze’ around her images so they become ironic and cliché.

The aim was to study how women are portrayed in “Desperate Housewives” and how the modern women have similar identities as traditional housewives.

What do Betty from "Pleasantville," June from "Leave it to Beaver," and Donna Reed from "The Donna Reed Show" all have in common? They all represent the image of the perfect housewife in the 1950s. They represent women who gladly cooked, cleaned, dressed in pearls and wore high heals while waiting for their all-knowing husbands to come home. They represent women who can only find fulfillment in male domination and nurturing maternal love. Tillie Olsen, as a single mother with four children (204), provides readers with another view of women. Through the representation of the narrator in I Stand Here Ironing, Olsen contradicts the image of the 50s ideal woman, a happy housewife and a perfect mother.

Sally Mann’s style incorporates black and white photographs of her children, which are presented with “ordinary moments of childhood, suspended in time and transformed into aesthetic objects, takes on a distorted, even uncanny quality” (Arnason and Mansfield 719). Sally Mann photographed The New Mothers in 1989. This photograph’s most dominant elements are value and space. Having the photographs black and white really enhances the visibility of values. Most of Mann’s work is outside and has a define depth of field to blur out the background and emphasize the focus of the children. This compositional style helps to identify the high and low key values within the photos. The clothes, the reflection of the sun on the girls’ hair, and the girls fair skin are the part of the image that show high-key values, while the rest of the photo in more middle and low-key values. The intense depth of field increases a feeling of space for the viewer. In the photo you can see that the two young girls and their stroller is all in a line horizontally. Behind the girls you can notice they are outside in a open area because of the blurred grass and trees behind them. This photograph’s most dominant principles are movement and variety. The depth of field and lack of distraction in the background of the photo allows your eye to focus and move around with the subjects in the photo. The height of the subjects forms a triangle shape, which is

It is evident that "The Young Housewife" is a very sexually charged poem. Through its subject matter, its language, its imagery, and even its use of phrasing, Williams accentuates the young housewife's seductive and almost unrestrained nature. For instance, He describes her moving about behind closed doors, dressed in negligee, or going to the curb un-corseted to call ice-man, or allowing her hair to hang freely, only periodically tucking it in. All of these images suggest strongly that the young housewife is a natural and unrestrained character. She is free any imposed social constraints that has the power to squelch her pristine and almost wild nature.

It compares women showed in “A Doll’s House” with the actual women of that time.