2
women’s magazines. Popular literature carried both the domestic and non-domestic content:
“domestic ideals coexisted in ongoing tension with an ethos of individual achievement that
celebrated non-domestic activity, individual striving, public service, and public success.”
4
Women’s magazines during the Cold War era not only portrayed marriage as “a deadly battlefield
on which women lost their happiness” but also contributed to the rise of “a discourse of
discontent” that in turn became a seed of women’s liberation movement in the 1960s.
5
Contrary to popular belief, the content of women’s magazines and readers’ receptions of
them indicate something more than conformity and “conservative promotion of domesticity.”
6
The letter quoted earlier is an example of 1950’s women’s restlessness and ambivalence toward
their identity. The letter can be also regarded as one of Friedan’s subjects, a woman with the
“problem that has no name.”
7
While Friedan treated her subjects as victims of the ideology of
domesticity, I consider these women as active agents that struggled to define their own identities
at a time of identity crisis. Some women willingly embraced domesticity and led happy lives as
wives and mothers. Many letters protesting Betty Friedan’s condemnation of housewifery
exemplified this.
8
Others seemed to choose housewifery out of the lack of viable alternatives, as a
result of such as the significant decrease in women’s employment opportunities due to the
demobilization project for veterans, and society’s increasing anxiety over independent, wage
earning women.
I propose that women in the postwar era struggled with tensions and contradictions built
within themselves due to the gap between cultural promises and reality. They struggled between
a hunger for mainstream acceptance and contempt for the mainstream. Their desire to be part of
mainstream and participate in domesticity did not always turn out to be what they aspired. At the
same time, a radically different path didn’t seem to be an easy choice for the women, out of various
reasons such as a fear of being ostracized and the lack of financial independence. Yet, they
challenged, ever so subtly, if not overtly, norms of the time, experts’ advice on marriage and sex,
Convention