Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media

by Susan J. Douglas

Book Overview

A scholar and media critic takes a provocative look at the portrayal of women in American popular culture from the 1950s to the present day and assesses the impact of such images on women's real lives.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812925300
• ISBN13: 9780812925302
• Release Date: March 1995
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

I feel like I was reading a different book...

I feel like I was reading a different book from the other reviewers. Because the author is a professor I expected more substance and less anecdotal information about her own mother who was p.o'.ed about being a housewife. Will not finish.

A Great Read for those interested in Media and Women

I borrowed this book from my sister who was reading it for school. I found it incredibly interesting. The book traces the history of women and how the media has portrayed them. Although it is used in feminism and media classes, it reads nothing like a textbook. Although it is nonfiction, it is a quick, informative, entertaining, and engaging read. I highly reccomend it.

Like eating ice cream from the container...

This book chronicles the images of females in baby-boom popculture and how they reflected and shaped politics. Because women have been historically consigned to the private sphere of home and hearth, the idea that our tv and mass media images can alter society is a riveting idea. Douglas then backs up this thesis with an admirable amount of intensive research and personal recollection that travels from Gracie Allen to Northern Exposure. Although the book was primarily intended for babyboom women's culture, I am old enough to remember the rise of the superwoman as personified in Wonder Woman and Charlie's Angels and how this new genere was designed for both male tittilation and female admiration. Meanwhile, myself and other first graders loved the show because people who looked like us (hopefully when we were older) were the center stars of the show. While I am now eagerly awaiting a revised and expanded edition with chapters on Buffy, Xena and Charmed, the book still provides an excellent example of the un-ending struggle between feminist and anti-feminist influences in the American mass media. No self-respecting feminist of any age ought to be without this awesome and well-researched tome.

Fun & Fabulous...you won't realize you're learning

I spent countless hours reading books for my thesis. I read until my eyes felt like were going to fall out and I wanted to cry. And then my advisor told me to read *another* book. This one...and I felt revatalized afterwads.Douglas managed to make me laugh on the subway...and in Boston, you don't laugh on the subway when reading. I went around quoting her for weeks on end (and still do). And I was able to pull out of my thesis/senior slump.Why? Douglas portrays and relates the experiences of the american woman and her relationship (at times comfy, most often at odds) with the media. Relating her own experiences of seeing stay at home moms on tv and watching her mom go to work are only the beginning. She disects Disney with a rapier wit and keen vision. She points out that I dream of jeannie was not fluff, but subversive. She tells us "why the shirelles matter".Her book is mostly free of academese, and if you are neither a historian, nor a women's studies major you can easily understand what she's saying, which is often not the case. She's fun to read and she's brillant. Even if you're not of the baby boom generation (as I am not) or even if you're not a woman, you NEED to read this book. It's fun (first of all) and you'll never look at the tv you mindlessly ingest the same way again (or the magazines or the billboards or the....)

This book will change your perception of the feminist world.

I was assigned this book in a gender studies class last year and am re-reading it, cover-to-cover, presently. If you are looking for a fascinating base of feminist theory and history, Susan J. Douglas's work is for you. She writes with a personal, fun voice, yet she really hits hard and makes some compelling arguments while presenting the history from the perspective of a baby boomer living it. I forget sometimes that she's writing all of this from a 90's perspective, some of it seems as if she's really living the drama of the 50's and 60's. A very quick read, and a true outlook changer. Highly recommended for anyone.

Who says scholarly writing can't be fun?

Reading this book is like spending a long weekend with a new friend about your own age, wallowing in music and decades-old sitcom reruns while you trade memories that begin "Did you ever see . . . ?" and "Remember the one about. . . ?" You laugh yourselves silly, but also come away with a new appreciation for how TV, movies, and music helped you define who you were and how you saw the world.OK, I'll be honest. _Where The Girls Are_ is also a first-rate introduction by example to the field of media studies, a brilliant defense of feminism, a scathingly funny critique of American broadcast journalism and an insightful exploration of the complex ways that girls and women relate to the steady stream of female images they're fed by the mass media. But if I led with that paragraph, the book wouldn't sound like it was any fun at all. And it *is* fun. Oh, my, is it fun.Susan Douglas starts from the idea that, although her experiences and those of her friends (white, middle-class, suburban, straight, Baby-Boom-era women) aren't universal, they *can* be used to illustrate larger truths about how people relate to the mass media. She proceeds, for 300 pages, to do just that. Her analyses are always sharp (you will *never* look at "Charlie's Angels" the same way again), and her prose is as far from academic-ese as you can get: funny, pointed, and (when the subject warrants it) wrath-of-God angry at some of the manifest injustices she describes.Read this book. Even if you're not part of the Baby Boom generation. Even if you're not a woman. Trust me.