Shaping Our Mothers' World: American Women's Magazines

Abstract

Thanks to scholarly inquiries into the mystique of the feminist classic, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), we have learned that a more complicated vision of 1950s womanhood emerges in general readership magazines, that Friedan camouflaged a radical past behind her suburban homemaker identity, and that discontent was a commonplace theme in women's magazines. Examining women's magazines themselves, Nancy A. Walker argues that, rather than presenting a “unitary,cohesive image” of American homelife and gender in midcentury American society, they acknowledged differences among women, promoted social mobility, and responded to changes in women's lives. Walker surveys the history of women's magazines and then examines their content from the 1920s to 1960, tracing subtle shifts in ideology in response to the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. The copious instruction on clothes, homelife, and manners and the varied content that celebrated women's achievements, she argues, indicate that editors assumed diverse female readers with aspirations to middle-class status, many of whom led lives outside the home.