Television and Postfeminist Housekeeping No Time for Mother [Paperback]

In this book, Nathanson examines how contemporary American television and associated digital media depict womens everyday lives as homemakers, career women, and mothers. Her focus on American popular culture from the 1990s through the present reveals two extremes: narratives about women who cannot keep house and narratives about women who onlykeep house. Nathanson looks specifically at the issue of time in this context and argues that the media constructs panics about domestic time scarcity while at the same time offering solutions for those very panics. Analyzing TV programs such as How Clean is Your House, Up All Night, and Supernanny,she finds that medias portrayals of womens time is crucial to understanding definitions of femininity, womens labor, and leisure in the postfeminist context.

Introduction: No Time for Mother  1. Disordered Homes: Organizing and Cleaning The Domestic Mess  2. Its Time for Dinner: Cooking and Managing the Rhythms of Everyday Life  3. Multitasking Moms: Childcare, Time Management and Womens Leisure  4. Knitting, Sewing and Grandmas Retro-Style: Domestic Crafts and Free Time  5. Monthly Ebbs and Flows: The Labor of Childbirth and the Postfeminist Biological Clock Epilogue

A new, astute, and one cant help but say timely look at the way women are portrayed in popular culture, particularly contemporary reality television shows about domesticity. This book insightfully draws on a range of contemporary criticism and twenty-first century programming to reveal how time, and womens relationship to time, serves as a fundamental way to understand womens current social standing.   --Elaine Roth, Indiana University South Bend, USA

A thought-provoking contribution to debates on postfeminism and lifestyle television. --