Abstract This research seeks to conceptualize how the communication messages that women received as they entered the workplace during the tumultuous seventies have impacted their own self-images, their perceptions of reality and, by extension, their lives. The aim of this research is not just to provide an overview of the lives of women in male-dominated professions nor to encourage young women to enter non-traditional occupations. Rather, this study seeks to recognize and understand the reasons...

Introduction [excerpt] The popular media has often been criticized for creating and sustaining the cultural battlefield of the so-called "Mommy Wars." However, I argue in this paper that these two opposing social images of "traditional" versus "contemporary" mothers are rooted in the internal conflict over issues of motherhood that have divided the feminist movement and scholarship since its beginning. Many of the online communiities of stay-at-home mothers have called attention to...