Cultural History and Consumer Culture

Abstract

The inarticulate in the title of Jennifer Scanlon's effectively illustrated, well-researched, smart, and focused book is a phrase Lois Ardery of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency coined in 1924. Ardery and others hoped consumer goods would satisfy these dreams. Persistently emphasizing the contradictions revealed by the interaction between the Ladies' Home Journal and its readers, Scanlon focuses on how the magazine promoted the vision of women as consumers. The resulting domestic ideal, she shows, focused only on white, middle-class women but failed to meet the needs of its targeted audience. Scanlon argues convincingly that what the ads proffered would not satisfy inarticulate longings for personal autonomy, economic independence, intimacy, sensuality, self-worth, and social recognition (p. 10). Scanlon's larger task is to demonstrate how from 1910 to 1930 this influential mass circulation woman's magazine helped strengthen both capitalism and patriarchy at the same time that it unwittingly enabled its readers to work toward a more adversarial response to what the advice columns, fiction, and advertisements offered. We have known many elements of this story before, but Scanlon fills in and elaborates-accomplishing what she sets out to do in a nuanced way. At key points she offers fresh readings, evidence, and arguments. She avoids onedimensional analysis of consumer culture, again and again emphasizing the dialogic nature of the relation between readers and texts. Sources that seem at first glance to offer pat, traditional answers on closer reading unintentionally enhanced women's interest in nontraditional pursuits. Although on occasion, as she examines the articles or the self-promoting claims of professionals, she seems less skeptical than she should be about what rhetoric reveals and texts