Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture (Gender & American Culture) - Softcover

Devlin, Rachel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807856053 ISBN 13: 9780807856055

Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Celebrated as new consumers and condemned for their growing delinquencies, teenage girls emerged as one of the most visible segments of American society during and after World War II. Contrary to the generally accepted view that teenagers grew more alienated from adults during this period, Rachel Devlin argues that postwar culture fostered a father-daughter relationship characterized by new forms of psychological intimacy and tinged with eroticism.

According to Devlin, psychiatric professionals turned to the Oedipus complex during World War II to explain girls' delinquencies and antisocial acts. Fathers were encouraged to become actively involved in the clothing and makeup choices of their teenage daughters, thus domesticating and keeping under paternal authority their sexual maturation.

In Broadway plays, girls' and women’s magazines, and works of literature, fathers often appeared as governing figures in their daughters' sexual coming of age. It became the common sense of the era that adolescent girls were fundamentally motivated by their Oedipal needs, dependent upon paternal sexual approval, and interested in their fathers' romantic lives. As Devlin demonstrates, the pervasiveness of depictions of father–adolescent daughter eroticism on all levels of culture raises questions about the extent of girls' independence in modern American society and the character of fatherhood during America’s fabled embrace of domesticity in the 1940s and 1950s.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rachel Devlin is associate professor of history at Tulane University.

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Devlin examines the prominent role that postwar fathers played in shaping the sexual maturation of their teenage daughters and the way popular culture reinforced this dynamic in teen magazines, Broadway plays, novels, and other media.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0807856053
• ISBN 13: 9780807856055
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar