Paper short abstract:

Popular cultural forms by and for women in the early 20th century have been relegated to “women’s work;” dismissed and forgotten. The inclusion of such denigrated work would demolish the historical exile of “woman” by the privatizing quotation marks and effect an epistemological break.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at popular cultural forms produced and consumed by women in the 1920s and 1930s in the U.S., Sweden, and England -- women's magazines and "weeklies", clothing and knitting patterns and designs, and children's books and magazines. This post-suffrage interwar period has often been referred to as a period of stagnation, sandwiched in between various "Golden Ages" of the fin de siècle and the post-WWII era. This generalized dismissal, combined with the relegation of these particular genres to "women's work" has led to their being ignored and excluded from academic discussion, when at the time they enjoyed broad popularity and wide distribution.

Analysis of these forgotten media reveals a parallel world which was shaped by women and women's networks in the public sphere, not only providing new forms of employment, and thus a measure of economic independence, but also shaping the very terms of "woman" and female subjecthood in modernity in wholly new mediated forms. Part of this was the creation of what Lauren Berlant has called the “intimate public sphere” in which female readers (consumers) were assumed to share a common world view and experience as women, although the essentialist trap in this reading is apparent.

The paradox of this parallel discursive field, however, that was essentialized as "women's work," is that it was easily excised, ultimately reinscribing female self-consciousness “within a reductive and genericizing patriarchal fantasy.” Inclusion of these genres would challenge the ideological operations that maintain an anthrocentric production of knowledge.