Kathleen McHugh´s generous, big-hearted work on the construction and representation of domestic labor in American culture offers an original look at the intersection of class, race, and gender in domestic ideals. Combining study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century didactic studies of popular melodramatic films and recent avant-garde films by women, American Domesticity is much more than a book about cinema. For that very reason, however, it is a better book about cinema than most others. In fact, it is the best study of American melodrama I have read." (Linda Williams, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Hard Core)