The History of “Having It All”: Black and White Women and Work-Life Balance, 1890s-2010s

<p>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.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History

Grantor

The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York

Year dc:date.available

2024

Author dc:creator

• Brennan, Amanda W

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Dagmar Herzog
• Gerald Markowitz

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• David Waldstreicher
• Michele Mitchell

• African American Studies
• American Popular Culture
• Cultural History
• History of Gender
• United States History
• Women's History
• Women's Studies
• Women
• Gender
• Race

Repository record dc:identifier

https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6036

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:academicworks.cuny.edu:gc_etds-7157