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5 - Love and Sex

The Limits of Modern Womanhood and Heterosexual Masculinity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2021

Amy Aisen Kallander
Affiliation:
Syracuse University, New York
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Summary

Modern womanhood was also a project of social transformation, with an impact on gender roles as seen in conversations about marriage relationships and love. The 1950s and 1960s were an era of shifting standards in marriage across the globe where novel understandings of love departed from earlier romantic traditions with romantic love standing for youth, progress, and modernity. Companionate marriage had long featured within reform projects across the Middle East. The women’s press contributed to the process of translating marital ideals articulated in state discourse, poetry, fiction, and film into practice through the innovative feature of the advice column. By offering advice and responding to letters, journalists and their audience formed an emotional community within which to deliberate the gendered norms of modern behaviors such as courtship. Yet the promise of love became a tool to discipline youthful femininity into mature adult womanhood, while romantic love also worked to fortify newly constructed national borders by racializing these identities. Within the confines of the women’s press and its relative anonymity, young girls transformed the question of romance into an attack on double standards surrounding premarital sex that urged a reconsideration of hegemonic forms of masculinity.

Type
Chapter
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Tunisia's Modern Woman
Nation-Building and State Feminism in the Global 1960s
, pp. 197 - 238
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • Love and Sex
  • Amy Aisen Kallander, Syracuse University, New York
  • Book: Tunisia's Modern Woman
  • Online publication: 20 May 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108961264.006
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Love and Sex
  • Amy Aisen Kallander, Syracuse University, New York
  • Book: Tunisia's Modern Woman
  • Online publication: 20 May 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108961264.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Love and Sex
  • Amy Aisen Kallander, Syracuse University, New York
  • Book: Tunisia's Modern Woman
  • Online publication: 20 May 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108961264.006
Available formats
×