4
tradition of imposed limitations”—a supposed part of a woman’s essential nature that,
paradoxically, is at risk if she steps outside patriarchal definitions. “Femininity in all
respects is a matter of containment,” she notes. One has to work at femininity, “by
accepting restrictions, by limiting one’s sights, by choosing an indirect route, by
scattering concentration and not giving one’s all as a man would to his own, certifiably
masculine, interests”--characteristics that clearly conflict with workplace success.
8
While the larger project uses these theories to examine how women’s paid labor was
socially constructed vis-à-vis femininity, the project here will look at how those
discourses were refuted and reconstructed by Fleischman and other feminists of the era,
working in a mainstream publication. Using material gleaned from the kind of “long
preliminary soak”
9
recommended by Hall, this project employs textual and visual
analysis to identify rhetorical strategies used by Fleischman and other writers.
This focus should not be construed, however, as an implication that their work marked
the first time the magazine supported women’s employment, for LHJ published a number
of articles right after WWI and in the early 1920s supporting women’s new career
opportunities. For example, a Ladies’ Home Journal headline in July 1920 asked,
“Doctor? Lawyer? Merchant? Chief? Which Shall She Be?” This article on women’s
business leadership roles urged the magazine reader to “look steadily within until she
finds her dominant life interest”--perhaps one that her brothers and parents scoffed at--
8
Susan Brownmiller. Femininity. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 14, 15.
9
Stuart Hall. “Introduction” to Paper Voices: The Popular Press and Social Change, 1935-1965. Ed.
A.C.H. Smith (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975), 15.
Convention