The Three faces of eve : the housewife, melodrama and home

In this essay we wish to trouble a received history of popular cultural narratives about women’s lives in the 1940s and 1950s as shaped by dominant ideologies of the home as women’s “proper place.” By comparing two post-war Hollywood films that feature housewives as main characters, we show that these texts, rather than being concerned with promoting domesticity as women’s proper social role, actively explored a tension between discourses of modernity and femininity. We suggest that the housewife in such popular cultural forms of the period must work through the problem of the modern individual’s relationship to home; that is, the discourse of self-determination that requires the modern self to be completed in the public world of work. Gender complicates the housewife’s story: she must become a modern citizen; yet still complete her feminine subjectivity “at home.” We suggest that popular films of the 1940s and 1950s therefore reveal changes in a historically formed emotional ambivalence about the figure of the domestic woman.19 page(s