[On October 15, 1951, I Love Lucy premiered on CBS. The show was many things, but at its heart it was a cultural depiction of a housewife—a common & complex category across our history to be sure. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of such fictional figures, leading up to this weekend post featuring my own wife’s phenomenal work on the subject!]
First, a trio of links to Vaughn’s past and future work on The Stepford Wives, Yesteryear, housewives, retrofuturist nostalgia, and more:
–This past Tuesday Vaughn gave a talk for the West Hartford Public Library (as part of a series on Yesteryear), the recording of which you can watch here;
–Back in March Vaughn wrote for her Review Roulette newsletter about her evolving ideas on the subject (as inspired by a complete watch of Desperate Housewives);
–And in November, Vaughn will be presenting some of this work as part of a Massachusetts Historical Society Seminar discussion.
Second, I just wanted to highlight a few particularly impressive things about how Vaughn’s ideas on this multilayered topic have evolved over time:
–Vaughn has been thinking deeply about nostalgia since at least the March 2024 NeMLA panel on the subject that she organized and chaired (and on which I talked about Lone Star), and over that 2.5 years has allowed her ideas to evolve as she’s connected them to new texts and topics (like housewives), while still keeping core throughlines present.
–Moreover, she has been able to apply those ongoing interests and evolving specifics to a number of texts that she’s been analyzing for the first time, across multiple genres—TV shows like Desperate, novels like Yesteryear, and multi-genre works like The Stepford Wives and its adaptations—and with nuance in each and every case.
–And third, as she does with every topic on which she works, Vaughn has been able to connect those nuanced cultural and historical analyses to public scholarly takeaways about political ideas and debates in our own moment—making clear the stakes of why we do this work while still modeling how to do the work thoughtfully.
Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Cultural housewives you’d highlight?
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