The History of “Having It All”: Black and White Women and Work-Life Balance, 1890s-2010s
type: CreativeWork
description: This project traces the history of that at once vaunted and contested aspirational image, “the woman who has it all,” from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first, attending throughout to the complex intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality. It establishes both notable consistency and critical change over the twentieth century by linking and contextualizing multiple iterations of this perfect working mother ideal in the United States. It adds to scholarship on the mutual construction of race and gender by showing the eugenic origins of the white ideal, which emerged concurrently with the complementary ideal of the “New Negro Woman,” as it ultimately tracks as well both the practical and conceptual innovations Black women pioneered and the ideological policing of racialized notions of proper motherhood that ensued. Along the way, it offers new insights into the role of feminine advice culture in neutralizing economic discontent and stoking racial animus while pretending not to. Significantly, this dissertation connects this cultural ideal, in its multiple variants, with the ongoing lack of structural support for caregiving as it details how the ideal paradoxically continued to tie women to work in the home while opening possibilities beyond it.
abstract: This project traces the history of that at once vaunted and contested aspirational image, “the woman who has it all,” from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first, attending throughout to the complex intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality. It establishes both notable consistency and critical change over the twentieth century by linking and contextualizing multiple iterations of this perfect working mother ideal in the United States. It adds to scholarship on the mutual construction of race and gender by showing the eugenic origins of the white ideal, which emerged concurrently with the complementary ideal of the “New Negro Woman,” as it ultimately tracks as well both the practical and conceptual innovations Black women pioneered and the ideological policing of racialized notions of proper motherhood that ensued. Along the way, it offers new insights into the role of feminine advice culture in neutralizing economic discontent and stoking racial animus while pretending not to. Significantly, this dissertation connects this cultural ideal, in its multiple variants, with the ongoing lack of structural support for caregiving as it details how the ideal paradoxically continued to tie women to work in the home while opening possibilities beyond it.
author: Brennan, Amanda W
keywords: African American Studies, American Popular Culture, Cultural History, History of Gender, United States History, Women's History, Women's Studies, Women, Gender, Race
date published: 2024-09-01T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:59:38Z
provider: City University of New York - Graduate Center
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York