Suburban Captivity Narratives: Feminism, Domesticity, and the Liberation of the American Housewife

Abstract

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 conjured 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 abductors was African-American. From the earliest recounting of the story, Hearst was sexualized and her captors racialized. The abduction was portrayed as an intrusion into the domestic space, with Hearst’s fiancé brutalized as she was removed from their home. The most widely used image of Hearst was one of idyllic bourgeois domesticity, cropped from the announcement of her engagement in the media—which, ironically, provided her would-be captors with the address to the couple’s Berkeley home. As it turned out, Hearst’s captors, members of a group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army, were almost all white, middle-class youth—with the exception of Donald DeFreeze (who went by Cinque in tribute to the leader of the Amistad rebellion), an African-American man who, after escaping from prison, sought refuge with the white radicals of the SLA whom he had met while incarcerated. DeFreeze’s prominent role in the SLA provided a link to Black nationalist militancy, aiding in the construc-