American Domesticity: From How-to Manual to Hollywood Melodrama - Hardcover

Kathleen McHugh's generous, big-hearted work on the construction and representation of domestic labor in American culture offers an original look at the intersection of class, race, and gender in domestic ideals. Combining study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century didactic studies of popular melodramatic films and recent avant-garde films by women, American Domesticity is much more than a book about cinema. For that very reason, however, it is a better book about cinema than most others. In fact, it is the best study of American melodrama I have read. (Linda Williams, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Hard Core)

American Domesticity considers representations of domesticity and domestic labour over the last two centuries in historical, popular and feminist texts, tracing key moments in the construction of an idea whose political power and effectivity in our national imagination cannot be overestimated ― that of normative domestic femininity.