February 9, 1998
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From pot roast to parenting - Vanderbilt University English professor researches women's magazines
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Before the Internet and television, women's magazines were a one-stop shop for advice on fixing marriages, making a casserole, planting flowers and teaching children manners.
Vanderbilt University Professor of English Nancy Walker usually researches women's literature, but her most recent book focuses on women's magazines from 1940 to 1960.
"I think there is scarcely a better way to look at the lived history of a nation than to look at a popular periodical," Walker said. "You don't get that from a history book." Popular magazines give insight into what houses looked like, what families did for recreation, what kind of food they ate and other clues into everyday life.
Edited by Walker, "Women's Magazines, 1940-1960: Gender Roles and the Popular Press" (forthcoming in March from Bedford Press) is a compilation of articles reprinted from America's most popular women's publications. Intended as a history book, it is the product of five years' research for Walker. The project has resulted in so much material that she is writing a second book on the subject, forthcoming in 1999.
The current book begins with an introduction by Walker and contains a selection of representative articles from 1940s and 1950s women's magazines that focus on World War II, women and the workplace, marriage and motherhood, homemaking, fashion and beauty and critiques of the women's magazines. The project, she said, was an enjoyable diversion from her usual research and teaching.
"I really enjoyed working on this. It has proven to be a fascinating trip through my childhood as well," Walker said. "The magazines have evolved in many ways and have not evolved in many ways. Some of the articles and ads are a stitch."
"Can This Marriage Be Saved?," a regular feature in Ladies' Home Journal today, began in the 1940s. Other longstanding features of women's magazines include cooking, parenting tips, household products and beauty and fashion advice.
Although the feminist view of these magazines may be negative, Walker said their editors "were by and large sincere in their mission to help the American woman be the best wife, a good mother, cook nutritional meals and guard her family's health." The magazines were even called "service" magazines, and the most popular publications of the 1940s and the 1950s -- Ladies' Home Journal, McCalls, Good Housekeeping and Woman's Home Companion -- each had 4 to 8 million subscribers at the time. These numbers don't take into account the many women who passed the magazines on to family and friends. In 1940, Ladies' Home Journal claimed the largest circulation of any magazine in the world. Today the magazine still has a strong circulation of 4.5 million.
Women's magazines evolved in the late 19th century from women's pages in primarily rural newspapers. "There is a myth that mothers were teaching cooking, housecleaning and other traditionally womanly duties to their daughters," Walker said. "But with an increasingly mobile culture, there was a real sense by the mid-20th century that women needed training being women. And I think in a very practical way this was true."
Cooking and cleaning weren't the only topics discussed in the magazines. Articles debating America's role in World War II and the Equal Rights Amendment were featured, and politics was certainly discussed in a broad sense, Walker said. Famous contributing writers included such political figures as Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote a three-part series of articles for Good Housekeeping in the early 1940s titled "Women in Politics."
Magazines from this period were devoid of news on the more divisive issue of race. "Talking about the Cold War brought people together, whereas race was a very divisive issue," Walker said. "The editors did not want to offend readers by including articles on a sensitive topic."
The editorial staff of women's magazines from this era was male-dominated, with the husband and wife-edited Ladies' Home Journal being the exception. When Helen Gurley Brown became editor of Cosmopolitan in 1965, it spurred a trend for other women to take the editorial helm of popular women's magazines.
Although the magazines were proponents of consumerism and too often depicted unrealistic images of women in high heels cooking in a spotless kitchen, they can be credited for helping women make wise choices when purchasing products such as appliances and makeup, Walker said. The Good Housekeeping Institute was the "original Ralph Nader," she said. Begun in the 1890s by an editor at Good Housekeeping, the institute's purpose was to test food products and give them a seal of approval that was a mark of quality.
Women's magazines have also served as the starting point for many well-known American writers. Sylvia Plath began her career by winning an annual fiction contest sponsored by Mademoiselle, and writers such as Truman Capote and Shirley Jackson were published early in their careers by women's magazines.
Overall, the magazines of the 1940s and 1950s served as a resource for the American woman in a time when radio was the rage and computers were something out of a science fiction novel. "These publications focused on the totality of being a woman in a time when many women did want help in buying new products, managing their home and raising children," Walker said.
Walker, former director of the Women's Studies Program at Vanderbilt, is also the author of "A Very Serious Thing: Women's Humor and American Culture" (1988) and "Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Narrative Tradition"(1990).
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