From Drill Sergeants to Maternal Negotiators: Mass-Mediated Business Strategies in the 1980s

Abstract

By drawing on Foucault's theory of governmentality, this essay posits that media discourses helped to create, deliberate upon, and circulate proper practices for U.S. white-collar working women in the 1980s. Analysis of discourse circulating in mass media about the woman manager, the saleswoman, and the woman union leader shows that media outlets claimed each would offer innovative solutions to counteract the volatile economy in the 1980s. For example, the logic of maternal management propagated in these discourses valorized a “return to the home” for women while simultaneously claiming that men were better maternal managers than women. The privileged subject ultimately emerging in this discourse was a feminized businessman, rather than a maternal or feminized businesswoman.

Keywords:

• Governmentality
• Public Culture
• Women and Labor
• Management
• New Traditionalism

This essay was derived from the author's dissertation, which was completed under the direction of Melissa D. Deem and John Durham Peters at the University of Iowa. An earlier version was presented at the 2002 National Communication Association annual convention.

This essay was derived from the author's dissertation, which was completed under the direction of Melissa D. Deem and John Durham Peters at the University of Iowa. An earlier version was presented at the 2002 National Communication Association annual convention.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Drs. Deem and Peters, as well as Vesta Silva, Evelyn Ho, Rebekah Farrugia, Karen Pitcher, Rafael Cervantes, Mike Lawrence, the editor, and the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

This essay was derived from the author's dissertation, which was completed under the direction of Melissa D. Deem and John Durham Peters at the University of Iowa. An earlier version was presented at the 2002 National Communication Association annual convention.

1. Holland recently re-named the organization “Exceptional Women” (Nebenzahl, 2004).

2. Throughout this essay, “work” and “working” signify paid work outside of the home.

3. Morris (1998) described public culture as a “mixture of rituals, beliefs, customs, practices, and images of policy and pleasure created by all those institutions, great and small, state and private, sacred and secular, that sustain a ‘mirage that can float over a society, purporting to be its national life, serving some interests and suppressing the very existence of others’” (p. 9).

4. I conceptualize context not as the background of a text but as the very “material” that is the object of analysis (Grossberg, 1992, p. 55). “Analysis, then, involves producing maps of the interrelated vectors, each with its own trajectory and strength which define its ability to penetrate into and affect reality” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 61). Putting various texts in contact with each other and examining the particularities of that contact can elucidate why and how certain stories become dominant and are incorporated into popular knowledge.

5. Nussbaum and Ellen Cassidy founded 9 to 5 in 1972, when both were secretaries in Harvard University's School of Education. 9 to 5 was one of many grassroots organizations that emerged in the 1970s to improve women's working conditions, particularly those of women office workers (Murphy, 2000). Nussbaum is now one of the most significant women in the contemporary U.S. labor movement. In 1993, she became head of the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau and later directed the Working Women's Department at the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organisations.

6. The history of women's interactions with unions in the U.S. is complex. See Foner (1980), Gabin (1990), and Deslippe (2000). For an excellent treatment of union imagery, see Rabinowitz (1999).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathryn A. Cady

Kathryn A. Cady is an assistant professor in the Speech Communication Department at Minnesota State University, Mankato