Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media

"More and more over the last 20 years, academics, in addition to their scholarly work, have aspired to write books that cross over to a more general readership. Susan Douglas, who teaches at the University of Michigan, is among those able to do it with brilliant success. Where the Girls Are is about a particular generation of women growing up in post War America, and the impact popular media had on their lives, both for good and for bad. It weaves wonderfully smart, often funny, always engagingly written discussions of pop music, movies and television shows with Douglas’s own development as a feminist. Yes, it’s unabashedly feminist—but it isn’t a speech. It’s an exploration of the push-pull of growing up female at a transitional time, a time in which attitudes toward women were changing, unevenly, and how pop culture reflected the tensions of the times. Douglas is great at showing how the same show — Mary Tyler Moore , for example — can be both empowering and diminishing of women at the same time. And she’s wonderful at chronicling how the male media responded to early feminist demonstrations and icons such as Steinem. But none of it is impersonal “history” —throughout, Douglas writes about her own experiences and how they reflected those of a whole generation. This book is history, memoir, sociology, media studies, all at once – immensely informative and very entertaining. In the course of describing the different stages of the development of pop culture, the book offers a number of really important new cultural insights. For example, when we think of the music of the 1950s and 60s, we remember Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones – basically, a male dominated culture of rock and pop. While Douglas agrees they were important, she also points out that for girls, there was another cultural development going on that spoke directly to them and the push-pull of their lives – the girl groups. These were almost always African American, and they sang of women’s dreams, fears and difficulties of wanting to be “good” and daring to be “bad”. “It’s like a heat wave, burning in my heart.” But…”Will he still love me tomorrow?” Groups like the Supremes and Shirelles spoke to the girls of my generation, caught between the culture of our mothers and a new restlessness and sexual energy. In a sense, Douglas’s book is an alternative history of the post-war years, told from the perspective of growing up female with the mass media."