Women's Work on the World Wide Web: How a New Medium Represents an Old Problem

Abstract

This article examines how iVillage.com, one of the most popular World Wide Web portals for women, advises them on how to integrate the demands of wage and domestic labor. Specifically, the article focuses on the implications such advice has for gender relations within the family and for feminist politics in U.S. society. Discursive strategies in advice generated by iVillage.com support the ideology of postfeminism, which promotes individual consumer-based solutions for a primarily middle-class audience over politics addressing the gendered division of labor, both within individual families and in social structures. Such commercial Web-site discourses are consistent with those constructed by other mainstream media.