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Love Lives
From Cinderella to Frozen
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Book Presentation:
• Asks bold questions about how women's lives have transformed since 1950, presenting a new interpretation of social change affecting relationships between men and women
• Includes hitherto unpublished data from the Mass Observation Archive about 'close relationships', and people's reactions to changes in male-female relations and to feminism
• Draws on film and popular culture to understand changing aspirations and expectations
The story of how women's lives, loves, and dreams have been re-shaped since 1950, the year of Walt Disney's Cinderella and a time when teenage girls dreamed of marriage, Mr Right, and happy endings...
Cinderella stories captured the imagination of girls in the 1950s, when dreams of meeting the right man could seem like a happy ending, a solution to life's problems. But over the next fifty years women's lives were transformed, not by the magic wand of a fairy godmother, nor by marrying princes, but by education, work, birth control - and feminism. However, while widening opportunities for women were seen as progress, feminists were regularly caricatured as man-haters, cast in the role of ugly sisters, witches or wicked fairies in the fairy-tale.
This book is about the reshaping of women's lives, loves and dreams since 1950, the year in which Walt Disney's film Cinderella gave expression to popular ideas of romance, and at a time when marriage was a major determinant of female life chances and teenage girls dreamed of Mr Right and happy endings. It ends with the runaway success of Disney's Frozen, in 2013 - a film with relevance to very different times. Along the way, it illuminates how women's expectations and emotional landscapes have shifted, asking bold questions about how women's lives have been transformed since 1950. How have women's changing life experiences been mirrored in new expectations about marriage, intimacy, and family life? How have new forms of independence through education and work, and greater control over childbearing, altered women's life ambitions? And were feminists right to believe that sexual equality would improve relationships between men and women?
About the Author:
Carol Dyhouse, Professor of History Emeritus, University of Sussex Carol Dyhouse is Professor (Emeritus) of History at the University of Sussex. She has written extensively about the social history of women, education and popular culture. Her publications include Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire (Oxford University Press, 2017), Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (Zed Books, 2011) and Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (Zed Books 2013).
Press Reviews:
"A fascinating journey through women's and men's sex lives from the 1950s to the present ... remarkably readable ... Highly recommended" - R. A. Standish, CHOICE
"Enlightening." - Martin Chilton, The Independent
"[A] subtle, thoughtful book... Dyhouse gives a sense of narrative cohesion to this fitful, complex, uneven revolution... reading Love Lives, I was struck less by the speed of change than by how difficult women still find it to reconcile their professional, romantic, political and domestic lives." - Sophie McBain, New Statesman
"A witty cultural history of heterosexual courtship and sexual mores in the second half of the 20th century." - Emma Rees, Times Higher Education
"Pacey and wonderfully readable ... [Dyhouse] gallops sure-footedly through educational reforms, the Pill, second-wave feminism, widening opportunities for women in the workplace, growing rates of co-habitation and divorce, male attitudes towards housework and parenting, adultery, pornography, gay rights and the rise of internet dating." - Helen McCarthy, History Today
"An interesting and thorough exploration of the ways in which women's views of themselves and their function in the world has changed over the generations since WW2." - Shiny New Books
"This wonderful book shows us how the Cinderella fantasy of a 'happy ever after' has long framed women's lives - even as they have resisted and subverted it... [Love Lives] reveals the devastating power of cultural scripts but also their malleability in the face of material context, individual agency and political change. It is well argued, well evidenced and beautifully written - a real pleasure to read." - Claire Langhamer, author of The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
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