Full Description
The couplings of millionaires with stenographers, servants, and other so-called working girls supplied early twentieth-century newspapers with sensational headlines and swarms of eager readers. Carole Srole delves into how the media prominence and popularity of these unions reflected unease over the rapid changes shaking American society.
Women's desire for autonomy, a rising divorce rate, the declining power of the upper class, new ideas of beauty and sexuality - newspaper tales of cross-class nuptials brought a host of anxieties about gender and class to the front page. Srole focuses particular attention on the economic changes faced by working-class women while also surveying newspaper attacks on their morality and womanhood, and their complicity in their own poverty. As she shows, working women and their advocates persevered by asserting an independence they pursued through union activism, professionalism, land ownership, and filling traditionally male jobs.
An engaging merger of media and women's history, Marriage Making News looks at a rags-to-riches genre and illuminates the forces of change at work behind the stories.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Newspaper Representations of Millionaires and Working Women
Chapter 2. Upper-Class Scandals of Unconventional Marriages: Marking the Outcasts
Chapter 3. Opportunities for Working Women: Intimacy and New Representations
Chapter 4. Family Conflict and Reconciliation
Chapter 5 Marital Lives and Endings
Epilogue
Appendices
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
