The contrast between [the realism of "One Life to Live" and the classical canon of daytime television drama embodied in "As the World Turns"] shows that what James Thurber once called "Soapland," like American society as a whole, is torn between the need to keep up with changing realities and the desire to stick to tried-and-true formulas that have never expressed reality—to tell it like it isn't. The search for relevance has led daytime drama to deal with social issues like drugs, venereal disease and the Vietnam war, to take feminist positions on questions like abortion and women working, and to bring blacks and ethnics into the WASP population of Soapland….

Change and constancy, realism and fantasy all testify that soap operas make up one of the main currents of American culture. So does their appeal to some of the feminists who have done so much to...