City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research New York City College of Technology 2019 Suburban Captivity Narratives: Feminism, Domesticity and the Liberation of the American Housewife Megan Behrent CUNY New York City College of Technology How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ny_pubs/569 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact:
[email protected] Suburban Captivity Narratives: Feminism, Domesticity, and the Liberation of the American Housewife Megan Behrent On February 4, 1974, the heiress Patricia Hearst—granddaughter of the media mogul William Randolph Hearst—was kidnapped from her home in Berkeley, California. 1 In reporting the story, the media reproduced a trope even older than the U.S. itself: a captivity narrative. To do so, they con - jured an image of racially other captors defiling a white woman’s body. The New York Times describes Hearst being carried off “half naked” by “two black men” (W. Turner), despite the fact that only one of the abduc - tors was African-American. From the earliest recounting of the story, Hearst was sexualized and her captors racialized. The abduction was por - trayed as an intrusion into the domestic space, with Hearst’s fiancé brutal - ized as she was removed from their home. The most widely used image of Hearst was one of idyllic bourgeois domesticity, cropped from the an - nouncement of her engagement in the media—which, ironically, provided her would-be captors with the address to the couple’s Berkeley home.