Periodicals as Handbooks for Doing Gender and Doing Difference: Racialized Womanhood in Cosmopolitan and Essence Magazines from 1978-2000 (thesis)

Abstract

. . . This means that, simultaneously, black women in America and white women in America were receiving very different messages from popular and political culture, as both the (black) welfare queen and the (white) feminist rose to prominence in America's social consciousness, replacing the Stepford wife as a white female trope. Black women (regardless of class) were universally condemned as lazy while white women were told that they could do anything that they could imagine. The purpose of this thesis is to examine and describe the messages created by and disseminated within these racialized groups (and how these messages interact with the public perception of the groups) from 1978-2000 in the United States and to determine the constructions of the idealized black and white woman (particularly through motherhood) in America in the late twentieth century. In analyzing media created by these groups and for these groups, the intent is to determine to what extent the public's conception of black and white women aligned (or did not align) with the groups' self-concepts. [From introductory section]