Girls Just Want to Have Fun
From Cyndi Lauper to Sia, our popular culture has exposed us to Cheap Thrills and girls wanting to have fun. What both of the mentioned artists share in common is that the topic of their art, women’s prerogative to have fun and to freely express what makes them unique, in their pastimes, can be derived from the working women of the turn of the century. Whether it be Cheap Thrills or Cheap Amusements, working woman’s preferred pastimes have very important historical implications. In the same vein, Kathy Peiss’s book examines the culture of young working women and their customs, values, public styles and ritualized interactions expressed in their leisure time. Her examination is set within a larger context, which we …show more content…
Peiss states that working men had a plethora of institutions where they could go in their free time to “blow off some steam”. These included fraternal societies, saloons, lodges, and many others. Women were excluded form most of these, especially married women. The married woman’s leisure time was spent in the home and was quite a bit more restricted than that of their husband’s. The exception to this, Peiss argues, were young and single wage earning women. The reason being that they had more “leisure” opportunities than their mothers did. A shift in the organization of labor, shorter working hours, expanding job opportunities, and the development of a new women’s work cultures, young working women were granted women the ability to use their leisurely time to explore a newfound independence, pleasure, and fun. However, Peiss also stresses that this development was not completely infallible. While working women did gain more autonomy and freedom, they were still limited by the underlying patriarchal structure of society. I believe that the latter is the ultimate goal, and what Peiss is trying to accomplish with her argument. With that said, we should not disregard the author’s key themes and concepts that she uses to reach this conclusion, because they are almost as important as the end goal of her argument.
In Cheap Amusements, Peiss presents three case studies …show more content…
While we feel a wave of female empowerment, freedom, and resistance all throughout Cheap Amusements, the newfound opportunities for young working women were not enough to move deeply rooted issues of patriarchy. Even though women were experiencing this newfound freedom, they were also embracing commercialization. Peiss argues that commercialization focuses too much on the individual consumer, which makes women be prone to dependency on men in heterosocial relationships. This, in turn, undermines the ability for women to challenge the status quo, and to substantively change the patriarchal order of the
From Cyndi Lauper to Sia, our popular culture has exposed us to Cheap Thrills and girls wanting to have fun. What both of the mentioned artists share in common is that the topic of their art, women’s prerogative to have fun and to freely express what makes them unique, in their pastimes, can be derived from the working women of the turn of the century. Whether it be Cheap Thrills or Cheap Amusements, working woman’s preferred pastimes have very important historical implications. In the same vein, Kathy Peiss’s book examines the culture of young working women and their customs, values, public styles and ritualized interactions expressed in their leisure time. Her examination is set within a larger context, which we …show more content…
Peiss states that working men had a plethora of institutions where they could go in their free time to “blow off some steam”. These included fraternal societies, saloons, lodges, and many others. Women were excluded form most of these, especially married women. The married woman’s leisure time was spent in the home and was quite a bit more restricted than that of their husband’s. The exception to this, Peiss argues, were young and single wage earning women. The reason being that they had more “leisure” opportunities than their mothers did. A shift in the organization of labor, shorter working hours, expanding job opportunities, and the development of a new women’s work cultures, young working women were granted women the ability to use their leisurely time to explore a newfound independence, pleasure, and fun. However, Peiss also stresses that this development was not completely infallible. While working women did gain more autonomy and freedom, they were still limited by the underlying patriarchal structure of society. I believe that the latter is the ultimate goal, and what Peiss is trying to accomplish with her argument. With that said, we should not disregard the author’s key themes and concepts that she uses to reach this conclusion, because they are almost as important as the end goal of her argument.
In Cheap Amusements, Peiss presents three case studies …show more content…
While we feel a wave of female empowerment, freedom, and resistance all throughout Cheap Amusements, the newfound opportunities for young working women were not enough to move deeply rooted issues of patriarchy. Even though women were experiencing this newfound freedom, they were also embracing commercialization. Peiss argues that commercialization focuses too much on the individual consumer, which makes women be prone to dependency on men in heterosocial relationships. This, in turn, undermines the ability for women to challenge the status quo, and to substantively change the patriarchal order of the