Where The Girls Are Analysis

I will be referring to Susan Douglas' book, Where the Girls Are, to discuss how representations of femininity in popular culture evolved before and after the woman's movement. For the children born after World War II, the media's influence was extraordinary. These children were the fastest growing market segment and were referred to as the "baby boomers". The preteen and teenage girls were the first generation to be relentlessly isolated as a distinct market segment. Advertisers knew they had to speak to the young women of this generation in a way that encouraged distinctions between teenagers and adults in order to go against the usual parental guidance in which provided fiscal restraint. "So at the same time that the makers of Pixie Bands, Maybelline eyeliner, Breck shampoo, and Beach Blanket Bingo reinforced our roles as cute, air headed girls, the mass media produced a teen girl popular culture of songs, movies, TV shows, and magazines that cultivated in us a highly self-conscious sense of importance, difference, and even rebellion.(Douglas,14)" Because the market of young
In the late 1960's the Miss America Pageant was the stage for the most outrageous and defining moment in America's history. This moment was when Robin Morgan, who was an actress on the show Mama, organized several buses of women to protest the pageant. They held up posters comparing women to slabs of meat, burning their brassieres, and chanting such things as, "Atlantic city is a town of class. They raise your morals and they judge your ass." "They suggested that the sense of cultural and social collectivity many young women felt when they sang along together with the Shirelles or the Beatles was about to be extended into a political movement that would change America...They put us on notice that the politically innocent word girl was about to give way to the politically conscious word women.