Destructive
Women and Little Men:
Masculinity, the New Woman, and Power in 1910s Popular Media
by Carolyn Kitch
During the 1910s, the final decade of the suffrage
drive, women's social, economic, and professional opportunities
seemed to broaden dramatically at the same time that political leaders
and psychologists decried the "feminization" of manhood. The spectre
of a world in which domineering women emasculated powerless men
inspired a visual motif that ran throughout popular culture: the
pairing of large women and tiny men. Through humor, explosive notions
were discussed but then dismissed. This rhetorical analysis, which
draws on hegemony theory, explores the symbolic cultural work of
such imagery in mass media, especially magazines, at a pivotal moment
in American gender relations. ... [continued]
This research examines what consumers of news have
written about journalism ethics over the past 30 years in letters
to the editor. To obtain a national view, letters to the editor
from 1962, 1972, 1982 and 1992 published in 10 news magazines were
examined. This research found that :
