Shaping Our Mothers' World: American Women's Magazines

Abstract

midcentury periodicals that fostered an indelible middle-class ideal for American women also confronted happy homemaker stereotype Read by millions of women each month, such mainstream periodicals as Ladies' Home Journal and McCall's delivered powerful messages about women's roles and behavior. In 1963 Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique accused genre of helping to create what Friedan termed the problem that has no name -- that is, presenting women as stereotypical happy homemakers with limited interests and abilities. But this ideal of contented, domestic women was far from monolithic in periodical literature of time. Nancy A. Walker's analysis of a wide range of magazines, including Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Redbook, and others, reveals their depiction of a broader, fuller image of womanhood. As she notes a reflection of complex debates about nature of domestic life in 1940s and 1950s, she perceives editorial policies that mixed banalities with urgent actualities. Rather than making isolated decisions about content, editors interacted with advertising agencies, with manufacturers of products, with experts in such fields as nutrition, medicine, technology, and childcare, and with preferences and values of their readers. When World War II altered family patterns by taking millions into armed services and drawing many women to jobs in defense plants, magazine articles both supported and attacked new roles women took, while applauding women's home-front contributions to war effort. After war magazines reflected Cold War anxieties while touting rising consumer culture. Even as magazine ads promoted a white, suburban, middle-class ideal, such series as How America Lives in Ladies' Home Journal revealed a society that was economically and ethnically diverse. The pages of women's magazines of 1940s and 1950s helped to shape and expand domestic world our mothers inhabited. Examining articles, fiction, advice columns, and advertisements that magazines comprised during midcentury, Walker argues persuasively that contradictory messages were a reflection of complex cultural values and institutions at a time when domestic world became increasingly important as both a symbol of American democracy and site of personal fulfillment. Nancy A. Walker, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is author of A Very Serious Thing: Women's Humor and American Culture and Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in Contemporary Novel by Women (University Press of Mississippi). She is coeditor of Redressing Balance: American Women's Literary Humor from Colonial Times to 1980s (University Press of Mississippi).