Carol Dyhouse's "Love Lives"

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 (2017), Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (2011) and Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (2013).

Dyhouse applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Love Lives: From Cinderella to Frozen, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my new book focuses on women getting more control over their bodies through contraception and legalised, safe abortion in the middle of the last century. It references Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl (1962) and Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963) for changing attitudes to birth control. The idea of ‘premarital sex’, or Helen Gurley Brown’s suggestion that women should try men out, sexually, before marrying them was still acutely controversial and horrified conservative moralists.

Is this a useful insight into what the book is about? I think it is. The book explores the various ways in which twentieth century women achieved more control over their lives and how this affected their relationships with men.

I set out to investigate women’s changing expectations and dreams, drawing upon fairytale romance and popular culture. The story begins in the postwar years and analyses the huge appeal of Cinderella stories and particularly the popularity of Walt Disney’s animated screen version (1950) of the tale. The first chapter of the book has the title ‘When Men Were an Ending’. Girls in Britain and North America in the 1950s were encouraged by romance magazines and teenage culture to think of meeting and marrying man as their life project. The age of marriage plummeted, many married in their teens and it was common for young women to fear that they were ‘left on the shelf’ if they hadn’t met ‘Mr Right’ by the time they reached twenty-one years of age.

But the 1970s turned many trends around. Safe contraception had a massive effect on sexual mores. Educational and employment opportunities widened. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) showed how lives of full-time domesticity could do terrible things to women. The women’s liberation movement both reflected and contributed to a reimagining of women’s dreams. By the 1980s some were arguing that feminism had ‘gone too far’, and there was a backlash of criticism of women for ‘wanting it all’. But the ground between men and women had shifted.

Disney heroines in recent animations have moved on. We are less likely to encounter helpless heroines needing bluebirds or forest creatures to help them with housework and princes to come to the rescue. Frozen (2013) featured bold heroines, sisterly love, scepticism about princes and a sense that men and women could share equally in the quests and adventures which give life purpose.

Learn more about Love Lives at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire.

--Marshal Zeringue