Female Sexual Subjugation and Domesticity in America

Introduction: Repackaging Victorian Inequality in the Consumer Age

The end of the nineteenth century brought with it a host of changes which, 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 earlier eras but a repackaging of this imbalance to fit new cultural tendencies.

This would be especially true for women in the United States, where the premise of equality would be subverted by a reconsideration of American culture within the context of consumerist roles. Even as the Industrial Revolution and the decades of economic development that followed would present new cultural and social opportunities for both women and 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 explicitly and forcibly remanded her to subtlety and suppression of her true feelings about 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 that have been employed to detain women from achieving equality with men. An examination of American society beginning in the late nineteenth century and extending through the twentieth century reveals that consumer culture would be used in co-conspiracy with the retention of institutional patriarchy in order to restrain female ambition within the boundaries of sexual idealization, beauty, and domesticity.

Early Feminist Campaigns and the Roots of Sexual Exploitation

The close relationship between 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 nineteenth century to gain protections against statutory rape for women. Kicking off the presence of women in the political process by attempting to raise the age of female consent from ten to eighteen 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, p. 9).

This is to argue that, with the transition into this new modern era, there would arise the early rumblings of a feminist movement. Channeled here 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 of the implications of consumerist culture for female inequality, it is crucial to recognize that underlying the issues women have faced in the 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, illustrates the motive underlying the promotion of the disempowered 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 that ensure predominantly male-populated sectors of professional, political, and cultural hegemony.

Consumer Culture and the Making of the Teenage Girl

The consumer culture that 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. In her examination of the emergent "teenage girl" culture, Schrum (2004) considers the balance between independent will and collective conformity that would come to define the modern woman. Inherent to this discussion is considerable recognition of 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, concepts such as the application of cosmetics — a decorative approach to femininity not unlike the adornments undertaken in the Victorian age — would be accompanied by severe cultural pressures. 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, p. 88). The impression we are given here is of girls behaving in a petty and competitive fashion in order to improve their qualifications for male objectification.

As the text goes on to note, school social structure would explicitly promote and praise the use of cosmetics among females while simultaneously decrying physical features apparent without them. There is an explicit connotation to which women in this society appear to submit, one that promotes the display of idealized rather than real feminine features. This helps to clarify how the transition of social consent — from sexual or cosmetic idealization to domestic idealization — is enabled. The Schrum text expresses a certain societal admiration for young women adopting the use of make-up at increasingly younger ages.

Works Cited

Breines, W. (2001). Young, White and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties. University of Chicago Press.

Odem, M. E. (1995). Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Females. The University of North Carolina Press.

Schrum, K. (2004). Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture, 1920–1945. Palgrave Macmillan.