“So yes, it has been decades in the making in that sense.” A seesaw effect “I think this book was in the making even when I was a kid, when I couldn’t understand how I was so different from the ways girls were supposed to be,” Faderman continues. “To understand for myself how what influenced me so much as a kid, something that I knew I would never fit into, why that was the dominant image.” “For years, I wanted to find out how those images got established, and I think that was the reason I began working on the book,” Faderman says. Still, she says, that idea, that question of “why had that ideal of women been created” and, more importantly, “why had its grip been so tenacious,” had continued to vex her all these years.
These images of clean-cut nuclear families were not particularly relatable to a young lesbian woman who admits that she just as easily could have ended up in a juvenile detention facility or a boarding school had she not been a decent student, eventually ending up in a doctorate program at UCLA. They impinged on our psyches, and they made us feel like we were lacking because we were not like those images.” “So these images of the 1950s that absolutely bombarded us, myself and my classmates, those images had nothing to do with us.
“I realized I was gay already back then, and I came from this working class family and my mother was not married and worked in the garment industry,” Faderman recalls. After all, she’s already written about her life at length in her excellent 2003 memoir, “Naked in the Promised Land.” Rather, she speaks about it as a means of pointing out precisely the moment where she became fascinated by the conceptualization of women - the idea of what women are supposed to be and act like and how that idea is often perpetuated by outside forces.
Faderman mentions this in a small introduction in “Woman” not as a means of showing off some sort of cultural cachet.
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