Inarticulate Longings

The Ladies' Home Journal, Gender and the Promise of Consumer Culture

Jennifer Scanlon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000143355
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities
• Index: Social Sciences

Inarticulate Longings explores the contradictions of a social agenda for women that promoted both traditional roles and the promises of a growing consumer culture by examining the advertising industry in the early 20th century.

Notes

Introduction

1. The Journal passed the one million circulation mark in 1904. A Short History of the Ladies' Home Journal (Philadelphia: Curtis Publications, 1953), 19, from Curtis Publishing Company Papers, Department of Special Collections, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of Pennsylvania. Although women have been and continue to be the primary consumers, historians and economists have too often regarded consumption as an activity of the generic economic man or of the passive female. Early advertisers, however, recognized women as consumers, addressing them in a variety of ways. For discussions about the assumed gender of the mass of consumers, see Joseph Appel, Growing Up With Advertising (New York: The Business Bourse, 1940), 128; Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 64-69. For contemporary evaluations of the consumer culture, see Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: New American Library, 1912), and Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1937). The magazine industry employed an estimated 40,000 professionals in the early twentieth century, according to Mary Ellen Waller-Zuckerman, '"Old Homes in a City of Perpetual Change': Women's Magazines 1890-1916," Harvard Business Review, 63 (Winter 1989), 730.

2. Nancy Woloch, "Sarah Hale and the Ladies Magazine," in Women and the American Experience (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 98. On Sarah Josepha Hale, see Woloch generally, 97-112. Barbara Welter's pivotal article, "The Cult of True Womanhood," in Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 21-41, made popular the notion of women's separate spheres. On the movement beyond the separate spheres discussion, see Michelle Rosaldo, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding," Signs, Vol. 5 (Spring 1980), 389-417; Linda Kerber, "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's HistoryJournal of American History, 75 (June 1988), 9-39; Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, "Introduction," in DuBois and Ruiz, eds. Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History (New York: Routledge, 1990), xi-xvi. The most recent work in this area focuses on the ways in which a separate spheres notion contradicts the experiences of women of color. Aida Hurtado, in "Relating to Privilege: Seduction and Rejection in the Subordination of White Women and Women of Color," Signs, Vol. 14 (Summer 1989), 849, argues that there is "no such thing as a private sphere for people of color except that which they manage to create and protect in an otherwise hostile environment."

3. Woloch, 97-112.

4. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), argues that during the Progressive era, "new generations of managers and professionals arose as problem solvers" (172). While business professionals have been most frequently discussed as the purveyors of new ideals, advertisers were clearly involved in dispensing information and advice to a populace overwhelmed with social and demographic changes. See also Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

5. Helen Woodward, The Lady Persuaders (New York: Ivan Oblensky, 1960), 63.

6. Edward Bok, A Man From Maine (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1923), 92.

7. A Short History of the Ladies' Home Journal, 1.

8. Bok's column, targeted to women, was subscribed to by 137 newspapers. See David Shi, "Edward Bok and the Simple Life," American Heritage, Vol. 36, No. 1 (December 1984), 100.

9. A Short History of the Ladies' Home Journal, 15-17. Bok relates that he married Mary Louise Curtis in 1896 in A Man From Maine (277). James P. Wood, Magazines in the United States: Their Social and Economic Influence (New York: The Ronald Press, 1949), 106.

10. James D. Norris, Advertising and the Transformation of American Society, 1865-1920 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 9.

11. Classified Advertisement, Printer's Ink (January 25, 1917), 11!. On Negro Digest see John H. Johnson, Succeeding Against the Odds (New York: Warner Books, 1989). Johnson, founder of Negro Digest, Ebony, and Jet, borrowed five hundred dollars, using his mother's furniture as collateral, to start Negro Digest. Following its enormous popularity, he founded Ebony in 1942 to give returning black veterans something to distract them from "the day-to-day combat with racism," 153. On Essence, see Ellen McCracken, Decoding Women's Magazines: From Mademoiselle to Afc.(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 224-26. Essence became viable when publisher Jonathan Blount could demonstrate that the readership had disposable income and represented the "young, inquisitive, acquisitive black women" (Blount, quoted in McCracken, 224). At the time that Essence was founded, the Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and McCall's each had over one million readers categorized as minority; Essence went after that substantial population (McCracken, 224). Latina, targeted toward Latina American women, was founded in 1982 and is described in McCracken as targeting a monied but neglected group (230). Interestingly, according to Bryan Holme, ed. TheJournal of the Century (New York: Viking Penguin, 1976), 10, John Mack Carter, editor of the Ladies' HomeJournalhora 1965 to 1973, was the first editor to feature a black model on the cover of a mass magazine. Carter was also editor when a group of feminists staged a sit-in at the Journal offices in 1970, protesting the traditional approach of the magazine, particularly its "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" column. See Jean Hunter, "A Daring New Concept: The Ladies' Home Journal and Modern Feminism," NWSA Journal Vol. 2, No. 4 (Autumn 1990), 583-602.

12. Richard Ohmann, "Where Did Mass Culture Come From? The Case of Magazines," Berkshire Review, 16 (1981),,99; Todd Gitlin. "Prime Time Ideology: The Hegemonic Process in Television Entertainment," Social Problems, 26 (Feb. 1979), 251. On the notion of cultural hegemony, see also Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), and Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971). A debate among historians about the value of or methods of studying popular culture can be found in "AHR Forum," Lawrence W. Levine, Robin D. G. Kelley, Natalie Zemon Davis, and T.J.Jackson Lears, American Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 5 (Dec. 1992), 1369-1430. Levine argues that the seeming differences within and among modes of popular culture warrant rather than discount their study: "Indeed, it is the very asymmetry and div...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• one A Profile of the Ladies' Home Journal
• two Housekeeping The Greatest Business in the World
• three Women's Paid Work Setting and Stretching the Boundaries
• four Stoves for Women, Votes for Men The Journal and Women's Political Involvement
• five The Amateur Rebel Female Protagonists in Ladies' Home Journal Fiction
• six Advertising Women The J. Walter Thompson Company Women's Editorial Department
• seven "Every Woman Is Interested in This" Advertising in the Ladies' Home Journal
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index