Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: WORK IN PROGRESS

This work-in-progress paper looks at the work of interwar-era feminists who attempted to frame women’s paid employment in positive ways in Ladies’ Home Journal. Focusing primarily on a series of articles written by Doris Fleischman in 1930, it looks at how dominant discourses concerning women’s paid labor were subverted to make women’s career success seem like a cultural norm. These strategies include role reversal, the strategic use of numbers, and a refutation of binaries.
The paper is part of a larger project exploring magazine representation of employed women during the interwar years—a significant time because increasing numbers of women entered the workplace after World War I ended and suffrage was passed; however, their employment became far more controversial during the Great Depression. During the interwar era, the larger project argues, writers and editors working in mainstream publications framed employed women in ways that resonated with culturally familiar definitions of socially constructed femininity. This paper, then, looks at how those social constructions were reworked, primarily by Fleischman. Ultimately, however, it points to the difficulty of overcoming the dominant discourse, even among writers who apparently intended to support women’s increased job roles.
The paper uses theories pertaining to social construction of reality and feminist theories of “femininity,” along with qualitative textual and visual analysis