The Feminist, the Housewife, and the Soap Opera traces the history of the feminist engagement with soap opera using a wide range of sources from programme publicity to interviews with key scholars. The book reveals that feminist scholarship on soap opera was a significant site of which the identity 'feminist intellectual' was produced in dialogue with her imagined other, the soap opera watching housewife. The book integrates personal autobiographical accounts within a broader history which traces both the move from 'women's liberation' to 'Feminism', and the acceptance of soap opera as a serious object of study.

• Introduction


• Part 1. Mapping the Fields


• Women's genres and female agency


• Part 2. Early Work on Soap Opera: "Worrying Responsibility"


• The Housewife in the 1940s Mass Communication Research: Arnheim, Kaufman, and Herzog


• Feminists Taking Soap Opera Seriously: The Work of Carol Lopate, Michele Mattelart, and Tania Modleski


• Fantasies of the Housewife: The Case of Crossroads


• Part 3. Talking Soap Opera


• Autobiography and Ethnography


• 'I don't think we thought about it as studying soap opera': Christine Geraghty


• 'What about the rest of the audience?' Dorothy Hobson


• 'Slightly guilty pleasures': Terry Lovell


• 'The pleasure of a programme like this is not something simple': Ien Ang


• 'A sense of trying to valorise soap opera as women's TV': Ellen Seiter


• Commonalties: Writing Across the Interviews


• The Feminist, the Housewife, and the Soap Opera


• Appendix


• Bibliography

Charlotte Brunsdon Reader in Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick