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Finds Self Hard to Live With . . .
Los Angeles, California
Dear Editors: Can a confirmed, practicing neurotic change—and if so, how?
I know with private, inescapable certainty that if my husband weren’t such a swell guy to
live with I could create a fancy five-room hell right here with the tensions and worries and
dissatisfactions I accumulate in a single, ordinary day of keeping house and taking care of
one baby.
I have all the raw materials for a happy life—good health, congenial husband and cute
child, no in-law interference, few money worries. And yet, half the time I carry around as
black and bitter a brew of inward discontent as you could find in a psychiatrist’s filing
cabinet. From what I know of several of my friends I’m not alone, either. I don’t believe
I’m a case for a psychiatrist—even if I could afford one. But sometimes when I hear my
own voice, echoing shrewishly in my ears, or find myself trembling with irritation over
trifles, I ache with the realization of how I hate the person I’ve become.
At past thirty—can I change?
Sincerely,
Name withheld by request
(From Ladies’ Home Journal, December 1949)
The American mass-circulated popular women’s magazines in the post war era were said
to perpetuate femininity and the ideology of domesticity. Scholars have condemned women’s
magazines as a symbol of antifeminism that presented women as happy and fulfilled in the
security of private sphere.
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Women’s magazines in the Cold war era were also criticized for their
depoliticization of discontent by presenting experts’ advice as a scientific solution to marital
problems and private consumption as a way to relieve a sense of isolation from the lives of
suburbia.
2
Academic feminism has condemned depictions of women in popular culture for their
representations within the already accepted conventional femininity. Such criticism only focused
on “representational forms and their meanings” and overlooked the aspect of “the experiences of
women as producers of cultural meanings.”
3
However, some historians have re-evaluated women’s magazines during the Cold War era
and found that portrayals of women were more complex and contradictory than they were
assumed to be. Recent feminist scholarship has challenged the monolithic view on the role of
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