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Foreshadowing the Dissolution of Domestic Containment: Inarticulate Desires in “Our Readers Write Us” in Ladies Home Journal, 1945-1955 |
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Abstract:
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The study examines the middle-class women’s popular discourse of discontent by looking at “Our Readers Write Us” in the most popular women’s magazine of the postwar era, Ladies Home Journal, from 1945 to 1955. I argue that women who wrote letters to the editors struggled with a considerable amount of tension and contradiction built within themselves due to the gap between cultural promises and reality. They struggled between a hunger for mainstream acceptance and, simultaneously, 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, however, they could not really choose a radically different path for various reasons, such as a fear of being ostracized and a lack of financial independence. Inclusive domestic containment permitted the expression of restlessness and tension in the mainstream women’s magazine, but women’s discontent had to remain personal grumbles — not a social problem that had to be publicly addressed and solved. Nonetheless, the Journal provided one way for women who led isolated lives in suburbs and thus lacked a supportive network of kin and friends to form an imagined community. The struggle over women’s proper place in the late 1940s and 1950s failed to initiate a new definition of women’s identity, but it foreshadowed the dissolution of domestic containment and provided a framework that became the seed of the women’s movement in the 1960s. |
Most Common Document Word Stems:
women (255), letter (81), marriag (70), cultur (63), work (59), popular (54), domest (51), war (44), magazin (42), reader (39), also (37), journal (35), print (34), said (32), mani (31), home (31), could (31), one (30), peopl (30), seem (30), children (30), |
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20th century U.S. cultural history of women, popular culture, cold war containment, Ladies Home Journal, letters to the editors |
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Association:
Name: International Communication Association
URL: http://www.icahdq.org
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Citation:
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MLA Citation:
| Park, Bongsoo. "Foreshadowing the Dissolution of Domestic Containment: Inarticulate Desires in “Our Readers Write Us” in Ladies Home Journal, 1945-1955" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, New Orleans Sheraton, New Orleans, LA, May 27, 2004 <Not Available>. 2009-05-26 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p112547_index.html> |
APA Citation:
| Park, B. , 2004-05-27 "Foreshadowing the Dissolution of Domestic Containment: Inarticulate Desires in “Our Readers Write Us” in Ladies Home Journal, 1945-1955" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, New Orleans Sheraton, New Orleans, LA Online <.PDF>. 2009-05-26 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p112547_index.html |
Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The study examines the middle-class women’s popular discourse of discontent by looking at “Our Readers Write Us” in the most popular women’s magazine of the postwar era, Ladies Home Journal, from 1945 to 1955. I argue that women who wrote letters to the editors struggled with a considerable amount of tension and contradiction built within themselves due to the gap between cultural promises and reality. They struggled between a hunger for mainstream acceptance and, simultaneously, 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, however, they could not really choose a radically different path for various reasons, such as a fear of being ostracized and a lack of financial independence. Inclusive domestic containment permitted the expression of restlessness and tension in the mainstream women’s magazine, but women’s discontent had to remain personal grumbles — not a social problem that had to be publicly addressed and solved. Nonetheless, the Journal provided one way for women who led isolated lives in suburbs and thus lacked a supportive network of kin and friends to form an imagined community. The struggle over women’s proper place in the late 1940s and 1950s failed to initiate a new definition of women’s identity, but it foreshadowed the dissolution of domestic containment and provided a framework that became the seed of the women’s movement in the 1960s. |
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| Document Type: |
.PDF |
| Page count: |
31 |
| Word count: |
11707 |
| Text sample: |
| -1- 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 |
| Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford UP 1993) 295. Defining popular culture as widely popular accessible and accessed a historian Lawrence Levine criticizes how the notion of popular culture has been misunderstood: “What we call Popular Culture has been used . . . to signify the mudsill of culture the lowest of the low—and in this sense it has been a very misleading term which has made it virtually impossible to perceive that Shakespearean drama or |
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