This review addresses two books that draw on on American feminist thinking in different genres during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first, Selling Women’s History, uses a women’s history approach to popular print and broadcast media of the twentieth century, and the second, Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children’s and Adolescent Literature, employs postmodern feminist theories to analyze primarily young adult literature focusing on girls.
Emily Westkaemper’s book, Selling Women’s History: Packaging Feminism in Twentieth-Century American Popular Culture, undertakes an ambitiously wide scope in its aims to understand how key women figures in American history from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were represented and sold to American women in the early and mid-twentieth century through popular culture media.
In the introduction, Westkaemper refers to an interesting way to approach waves of feminism through the lens of radio waves. She cites Nancy A. Hewitt who applies a metaphor of...
