Y Tabloid - Issue 88 - September 15, 2009 - Y-oman.com

eplace stale or dead ones. It was just like real life, an often repetitive state of monotony, albeitwith a few surprises thrown in. Soaps became regular fixtures of many women’s lives, oneswho were forced to the ‘kitchen’ and denied equal access to education, but held a glowingyearning to learn more about life outside their four walls. Soap operas gave ‘domesticated’women access to this ‘other world’, and a glimpse into how life could be. Tragic narratives ofcharacters they could easily relate to gave relief and comfort to battered wives and ignoredspouses, appealing to this with poor social skills, unable to express their own pain and sufferingfrom a domesticated life of bullying and abuse. With this, a stronger female identity was born,far removed from the submissive roles of women in the previous generation of entertainment.Whilst the works of Virginia Woolf and Germaine Greer might have been lost on many of thehousewives, these ‘role plays’ allowed for women to expect more in life and gave an examplefor them to follow. Indeed, it was the progression of soap storylines that was to be one of thegreatest contributing factors for women’s rights in many nations. That’s more than any singlefeminist intellectual could ever claim. More and more, women went out to work, enrolled inuniversities and began to lead their own lives, taking comfort and direction from their favouriteSoap stars onscreen lives.In Brazil, where soaps are something of an institution, the society has experienced rapiddevelopments, which many attribute to the increased access to television sets and thereforesoap operas. There are between 60 and 80 million regular viewers of evening soaps in Brazil25