Women's Magazines 1940-1960 Gender Roles and the Popular Press
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THE BEDFORD SERIES IN HISTORY AND CULTURE Women's Magazines 1940-1960 Gender Roles and the Popular Press Edited with an Introduction by Nancy A. Walker Vanderbilt University Palgrave Macmillan For Bedford/St. Martin's History Editor: Katherine E. Kurzman Developmental Editor: Kate Sheehan Roach Production Editor: Stasia Zomkowski Marketing Manager: Charles Cavaliere Production Assistants: Melissa Cook, Beth Remmes Copyeditor: Barbara G. Flanagan Text Design: Claire Seng-Niemoeller Indexer: Steve Csipke Cover Design: Richard Emery Design, Inc. Cover Art: Women under hairdryers reading. UPI photo, 1961. UPI/Corbis-Bettmann. Composition: ComCom Printing and Binding: Haddon Craftsmen, Inc. President: Charles H. Christensen Editorial Director: Joan E. Feinberg Director ofEditing, Design, and Production: Marcia Cohen Managing Editor: Elizabeth M. Schaaf Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-74972 Copyright© 1998 by Bedford/St. Martin's All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, record ing, or otherwise, except as may be expressly pennitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the Publisher. Manufactured in the United States of America. 2 1 0 9 8 fedcba For information, write: Bedford/St. Martin's, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116 (617-426-7440) ISBN: 978-0-312-10201-2 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-349-61484-3 ISBN 978-1-137-05068-7 (eBook) DOI 10. 1007/978-1-137-05068-7 Acknowledgments Figure 1. KLEENEX® and DELSEY® Tissue Products are registered trademarks of and used with permission of the Kimberly-Clark Corporation. Figure 3. Listerine is a trademark of and used with pennission of the Warner-Lambert Company. Figure 4. Used with pennission of the Singer Sewing Company. Figure 5. Used with permission of Star-Kist Foods, Inc. Figure 6. Used with permission ofWearever/Mirro. Figure 7. FO RMFIT is a trademark of and used with pennission of]ockey International, Inc. Foreword The Bedford Series in History and Culture is designed so that readers can study the past as historians do. The historian's first task is finding the evidence. Documents, letters, memoirs, interviews, pictures, movies, novels, or poems can provide facts and clues. Then the historian questions and compares the sources. There is more to do than in a courtroom, for hearsay evidence is welcome, and the historian is usually looking for answers beyond act and motive. Different views of an event may be as important as a single verdict. How a story is told may yield as much information as what it says. Along the way the historian seeks help from other historians and per haps from specialists in other disciplines. Finally, it is time to write, to decide on an interpretation and how to arrange the evidence for readers. Each book in this series contains an important historical document or group of documents, each document a witness from the past and open to interpretation in different ways. The documents are combined with some element of historical narrative - an introduction or a biographical essay, for example - that provides students with an analysis of the primary source material and important background information about the world in which it was produced. Each book in the series focuses on a specific topic within a specific his torical period. Each provides a basis for lively thought and discussion about several aspects of the topic and the historian's role. Each is short enough (and inexpensive enough) to be a reasonable one-week assign ment in a college course. Whether as classroom or personal reading, each book in the series provides firsthand experience of the challenge - and fun - of discovering, re-creating, and interpreting the past. Natalie lemon Davis EmestRMay iii Preface Designed primarily for college courses in American history, American studies, women's studies, and popular culture, Women's Magazines brings together selections from mass-circulation magazines for women pub lished between 1940 and 1960. By focusing on the World War II and post war periods, this reader provides documents that participate in the debates about woman's role as homemaker and citizen, wife and worker, mother and consumer during two decades of enormous social change. With circulations numbering in the millions each month, the major women's magazines- through their editorial content, fiction, and adver tising- served as advice manuals, guides to fashion and home decor, cookbooks, marriage counselors, and catalogs of goods and services. A sampling of their contents thus provides a resource for understanding how a pervasive segment of the popular press perceived and attempted to influence women's values, goals, and behavior. The period that this volume addresses has been the subject of a great deal of recent reassessment by cultural historians, who have pointed out that American culture in the 1940s and 1950s was far more diverse eco nomically, politically, and culturally than early television situation come dies would lead us to believe. On one level, the content of the women's magazines contributes to, rather than disturbs, stereotypical notions of the period: The overwhelming ideal in the magazines is the white, middle class nuclear family. Yet a careful look at this material reveals glimpses of a world well beyond the tranquil suburbs. Advertisers' portrayals of African Americans almost exclusively as railroad porters and mammies expose the racial prejudice that was the target of the civil rights move ment of the 1950s; the fiction published in the magazines frequently shows people coming perilously close to adultery or other illicit behav ior; and the very fact that so many articles give advice on remedying troubled marriages suggests that Beaver Cleaver's family was not the norm in real life. Nearly five years of research in the magazines themselves have con- v vi PREFACE vinced me of the centrality and continuing relevance of the following the matic groups, into which the nonfiction articles are organized in this book: World War II, women and the workplace, marriage and motherhood, homemaking and consumerism, and fashion and beauty. It will quickly become obvious to readers that these are not mutually exclusive cate gories. The material for this volume has been drawn from a dozen maga zines, including Ladies' Home journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Woman's Home Companion, Harper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Seventeen, Better Homes and Gardens, Redbook, Coronet, and Parents. The first four periodicals in this list are represented most frequently in the volume for several reasons: They had the largest circulations during the period (although Woman's Home Companion ceased publication in 1957) and therefore had the greatest potential to both reflect and influence women's lives; because of their large subscriber and advertiser base, the magazines could afford to attract well-known writers to their pages; and they published articles on a wider variety of topics than did more specialized periodicals. The book's final section, "Critiques of the Women's Magazines, 1946-1960," provides a different perspective on the content of the women's magazines of the period; it is composed of a group of articles critical of the women's magazines published in other periodicals during the period. Such critiques testify to the significance the magazines had assumed in mid century American culture and can serve as starting points for discussion of the magazines' philosophies and contents. Most of the authors whose names are not footnoted with their selec tions were members of the editorial staffs of the magazines; a few were apparently freelance writers who did not achieve sufficient stature as writers to have biographical information included in standard reference works and computer databases. Although some of these authors pub lished fiction and/ or nonfiction in the magazines with some regularity, the fact that they published work primarily in mass-circulation periodi cals has prevented their careers from being documented in the same way as have those of other writers. I take sole responsibility for errors or omis sions in the documentation provided. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the editorial staff at Bedford Books - especially Louise Townsend, Kate Sheehan Roach, Fred Courtright, and Stasia Zomkowski - for their assistance and their patience with what has turned out to be a much more complex project than any of us knew at PREFACE vii the start. And my special thanks go to the staff in the bound periodicals department of the Ben West Public Library in Nashville, Tennessee, par ticularly Lawanda Smith, who made me welcome, assisted with the loca tion of materials, and saw me through many an ordeal with copy machines and microfilm. Finally, the manuscript benefited from the thoughtful comments and constructive criticisms of Lois Banner at the University of Southern California, James Gilbert at the University of Maryland, Col lege Park, Joanne Meyerowitz at the University of Cincinnati, Eva Moskowitz, and Ellen Schrecker at the National Humanities Center. Nancy A Walker Contents Foreword iii Preface v list of Illustrations xiii PARr ONE Introduction: Women's Magazines and Women's Roles 1 The Role of the Women's Magazines 1 Women and Society 11 PARr1WO The Documents 21 1. World War II 23 1. ''What Do the Women of America Think about War?" Ladies' Home journal, February 1940 24 2. PearlS. Buck, ''Women and War," Ladies' Home journal, May1940 26 3. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, ''Women Work for Their Country," Woman's Home Companion, December 1941 34 4. "How a Woman Should Wear a Uniform," Good Housekeeping, August 1942 35 5. "Meet the Berckmans: The Story of a Mother Working on Two Fronts," Ladies' Home journal, October 1942 37 6.]. Edgar Hoover, "Mothers ... Our Only Hope," Woman's Home Companion, January 1944 44 ix X CONTENTS 7. James Madison Wood, "Should We Draft Mothers?" Woman~ Home Companion, January 1944 48 8.