Female Sexual Subjugation and Domesticity

Female Sexual Subjugation and Domesticity in America The end of the 19th Century brought with it a host of changes which, as driven by technology and spreading urbanization, brought the entire world under the sway of the Industrial Revolution. Factories, tenements and immigrants filled the cities of Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States, and with them came overcrowding, urban blight, aesthetic conformity and the seedling of mass consumerism. The result was not a move away from the inequality of the eras before it but a repackaging of this imbalance to fit new cultural tendencies. This would be especially true for women in such contexts as the United States, where the premise of equality would be subverted by a reconsideration of American culture within the context of consumerist roles. Indeed, even as the Industrial Revolution and the decades of economic development to follow would present new cultural and social opportunities for women as well as men, the Golden Age of American consumer development would reintroduce the domestic imbalance of the Victorian Era. However, instead of aristocratic determinism rendering the woman an accessory to a man's power and prestige, she would now be portrayed as the wife, mother, maid and chef responsible for fulfilling the functions of daily home life. Where Victorian premises relating to the female role would explicitly and forcibly remand her to subtlety and suppression of her true feelings on the nature of her existence, there is a more implied reflection of this same arrangement in modern American culture, where the same expectations would be couched in marketing, advertisement and a general cultural consensus as to the inherent domesticity of the female gender. Considering several key pieces of literature concerning the movement endorsing female equality, this essay is primarily concerned with uncovering the social and cultural factors which have been employed to detain women from achieving equality with men. An examination of American society beginning in the late 19th century and extending through the 20th century will reveal that consumer culture would be used in co-conspiracy with the retention of institutional patriarchy in order to restrain female ambition to within the boundaries of sexual idealization, beauty and domesticity. The close relationship between these gender roles causes us to begin this examination with a consideration of an early American campaign on behalf of female rights. Under a banner of moral purification, several women's unions worked in the last decade of the 19th century to gain protections against statutory rape for women. Kicking off the presence of women in the political process by attempting to have the age of female consent moved from 10 to 18 years, "the campaign found its largest following and most forceful leaders among middle-class white women. Their vigorous activity in the cause stemmed from deep gender, class and racial tensions over the issue of female sexuality." (Odem, 9) This is to pose the argument that, indeed, with the transition into this new modern era, there would arise the early rumblings of a feminist movement. Here channeled into addressing the core sexual abuses which had conspired to detain women in so many other respects, we find that the climb to equality would be significantly uphill. As we enter into a more detailed discussion on the implications of consumerist culture to female inequality, it is crucial to recognize that as a foundation to the issues which have faced women in the in shadow of the homemaker's image has long been an undercurrent of sheer sexual dominance and exploitation. This power dynamic which has historically favored the entitlement and authority of white men, is illustrative of the motive which we will argue is underlying to the promotion of the dis-empowered and housebound woman. The male psychological need for sexual and emotional dominance is manifested both in the institutional protections for male exploitation against which feminist groups have long battled and in the sophisticated reinforcement of proposed gender stereotypes and roles which ensure predominantly male-populated sectors of professional, political and cultural hegemony. The consumer culture which we argue has been used to define women according to male desires is instigated at an early age, when cultural proclivities become seamlessly related to occurrences within the marketing context. For instance, in her examination of the emergent 'teenage girl' culture, Schrum (2004) considers the balance between independent will and collective conformity which would come to define the modern woman thereafter. Inherent to this discussion is no small degree of recognition as to the role that peer pressure would play in defining female role assumption as teenage years coincided with the 1920s-1940s boom in American consumerism. As Schrum discusses, such concepts as the application of cosmetics-a decorative approach to femininity not unlike those adornments which were undertaken in the Victorian age-would be accompanies by severe cultural pressures. To this extent, according to the Schrum examination, "in 1936, one girl who chose not to wear makeup elicited ire from her peers. An observer reported, 'I heard some of the girls expressing outrage that Elizabeth should affect no make-up. The implication was that she thought it only detracted from her natural beauty etc, but was necessary for others." (Schrum, 88) The impression we are given here is of girls as behaving in a petty and competitive fashion in order to improve their qualifications for male objectification. As the text here goes on to note, school social structure would explicitly promote and praise the use of cosmetics amongst females, while simultaneously decrying the physical features apparent without said cosmetics. There is an explicit connotation to which women in this society appear to submit which promotes the display of idealized rather than real feminine features. This helps to make clearer how the transition of consent from sexual or cosmetic idealization to domestic idealization is enabled. There is expressed in the Schrum text a certain societal admiration for young women adopting the use of make-up at increasingly younger ages. In historical coincidence with the establishment of sexually protective laws for young women, there is evidence here that women at roughly the age of twelve were already preparing for a subsistence in which standards of beauty and domestic behavior were becoming closely related. The schools which had become increasingly accessible to young women during the early 20th century were, while on one level promoting educational equality, nonetheless institutional channels for conveying the social and political values detaining women from equal recognition. Accordingly, Schrum notes that "a new consciousness of age accompanied the rise of high school attendance. Girls in this era expressed acute awareness of the transition from childhood into the teenage years and from the teens into adulthood. In 1929, a girl named Eleanor confided her ambivalence about turning thirteen in a letter to her friend Adele: 'I'll have to wear dresses, stop slamming everyone, get settled down and learn how to be civilized.' Eleanor accepted social norms of femininity regarding dress, manners, and domestic duties and of the teen years as the appropriate time to begin to adopt these norms." (Schrum, 16) To this point, we note that there is a distinct and forcible conditionality requiring that women who desire to 'grow up' as it were, and to be recognized as either beautiful or matured, must also accept certain ideals about that which reflects womanhood. Clearly, the attendance to domestic duty and appearance of dress are notions of the female established to meet male interests. However, we can see that there is also a complex set of parameters by which the woman is likewise bound to these roles in the pursuit of here interests, such as social acceptance and status opportunity. Indeed, the Breines text describes female culture as existing in somewhat of a vacuum, outlined by consumer interests and domestic opportunities, with academic discourse being fully reserved for discussion on the male experience. Indeed, the author describes how "literature addressed issues of gender, if at all, from the perspective of work and the changing corporate economy. Its starting point was how changes in the occupations world affected men, and through men, women, children and the family." (Breines, 28) The implication would be that all perspectives were to be channeled through an understanding crafted by the white male. With consideration to this exclusiveness, the discussion applied to America's deep-seeded racial tensions reveals yet another level of inequality which presents even wider an array of challenges. As Odem finds, even as female activists had begun to successfully tie sexual and moral behaviors together in a discussion of female mistreatment, "moral protection. . . did not automatically extend to all working-class female youth. Reflecting the racism of the dominant society, purity activists largely ignored the sexual dangers facing African American women and girls." (Odem, 9-10) It is to this extent that our research finds another manner in which consumer culture has negatively impacted a female population with regard to equality. Namely, the premise that a free market economy as that upon which America's economic ideology is founded should contribute to a collective rise in living standards is counter-indicated by its historical dependence on inequality and exploitation. Particularly, as slavery and segregation had contributed to the establishment of a wealthy ownership class in the United States, so had the nature of its 20th century consumer culture helped to enforce separate racial societies. Thus, even as white women struggled for recognition and equal rights, the climb from domestic servitude would be a great deal more arduous for a female African American culture which had been conditions through centuries of slavery toward assumed domestic servitude. To this extent, the parallels which Odem's text draws between slavery and female inequality bear a shared relationship in defining America's gendered culture. Today, women have in many ways been relieved of the domestic roles once foisted upon them with no outlet of relief. Indeed, it is increasingly common and standardized to find women in all walks of professionalism and at positions of authority. Moreover, the premise that the woman should be expected to remain in the home as a subject to all buying decisions and all use of domestic goods has diminished considerably in many aspects of American culture. Nonetheless, there remains a close connection between the idealization of female beauty and formulation of expectations relating to gender roles. Particularly, a man might find an attractive female in a position of power to be especially threatening to his assumptions of sexual power dynamics. This may perhaps explain the persistence of unequal pay as it impacts men and women in the workplace. Indeed, this is only one aspect of the relationship between men and women which remains unequal and tied to older expectations. The implication with which to resolve this discussion, therefore, is that though progress has been made, we are yet a long distance from being entitled to claim that real equality has emerged from stereotyped assumptions of female sexual subjugation and domesticity.