| This dissertation is a critical analysis and cultural history of popular girls' media produced between 1968 and 1980---the era of second-wave women's liberation. The dissertation explores how some of the era's most popular girls' media forms---specifically, Seventeen magazine, teen TV sitcoms, ABC Afterschool Specials, and Disney films---circulated ideas about feminism and femininity to an audience of preteen girls. By examining representations of both white and minority girls from varied backgrounds, my project also investigates how race, class, and sexuality informed what it meant for girls to be "liberated." While I frequently employ textual analysis, I supplement this methodological technique with empirical audience research, institutional/industrial analysis, critical reviews, and feminist media history and theory in order to determine how various audiences, media institutions, critics, and scholars were deliberating over, and attempting to manage, changing ideas about feminism, femininity, and girls.;My analysis reveals that 1970s media were riddled with contradictions about the possibilities and limits of liberation for girls. The impact of feminism could be detected in discourses that encouraged girls to be strong and independent and invited them to pursue educations and careers. However, girls' magazines, advertisements, TV shows, and movies consistently undercut these themes by privileging discourses about traditional feminine behavior, beauty, fashion, consumerism, and romance. Thus, while girls' media regularly tapped into liberation themes to sell consumer products and ideologies of "new womanhood" to a diverse population of girls, they simultaneously contained the more threatening outcomes and connotations of feminism---a pattern of narrative compromise that can be detected in girls' media dating back to the mid-19th century. Although the tensions between feminism and femininity belie anxieties about the growing power of women and girls at the time, the narrative and iconographic conventions used to alleviate these anxieties suggest that despite their liberating claims, girls' media of the period ultimately served a hegemonic project of putting girls "back in their place."... |
