Bless Her Hearth: Domestic Advice Media in the American South, 1920-present
2024-01
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Bless Her Hearth: Domestic Advice Media in the American South, 1920-present
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2024-01
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This dissertation begins with the assertion that, well into the twentieth century, the American South did not contribute to cultural production on a mass scale. Instead, cultural production was the domain of the urban North, Midwest, and later, the West Coast as publishing firms, film and television studios, production companies, and advertising agencies were found predominantly in these regions. The South’s earliest cultural productions, instead, appeared in the form of domestic and lifestyle advice produced locally utilizing emergent domestic technologies beginning in the 1920s. This project presents a history of southern cultural production and the women and media institutions responsible for defining southern culture and identity from the twentieth century to the present. The ongoing (re)defining of southern culture during periods of industrialization and modernization was facilitated through the region’s domestic and lifestyle media texts as many of the South’s earliest cultural productions. Domestic advisors and lifestyle institutions utilized emergent domestic technologies such as radio, television, and VHS tapes to create, teach, and preserve the region’s traditions, instructing white, middle-class women audiences towards the production of a uniquely southern domesticity and femininity. The southern home and media texts devoted to its upkeep – physically, emotionally, and ideologically – form the case studies presented here; a successful life, region, and nation depended first on a successful home. Questions of how to be and live southern require ongoing training and adaptability as the region continues to change. From radio programs of the 1920s to home construction in the contemporary moment, southern domestic advisors instruct women to perform a distinctly southern domesticity steeped in the region’s past for guidance on how to navigate the present and future.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. 2024. Major: Communication Studies. Advisor: Laurie Ouellette. 1 computer file (PDF); 229 pages.
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Bayne, Caroline. (2024). Bless Her Hearth: Domestic Advice Media in the American South, 1920-present. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/262871.
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