[1] Kelly Schrum,
Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture 1920-1945 (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 2. Schrum noted: “teenagers first appeared in the 1950s, complete with distinct dress, habits, music, and culture.”
[2] Tom Engelhardt, “Triumphalist Despair,” in
The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 1-15. Engelhardt, 5, contends that whiteness standards appeared post-World War II, specifically after Japan (tan-skinned ‘Others’) known as the “savage, nonwhite enemy” bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
[3] Tom Engelhardt, “The Haunting of Childhood,” in
The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 133 – 154. Engelhardt, 133, explains, “In the post-World War II years, adult unease about the young…for adolescents (now labeled ‘teenagers’) were organizing themselves in new and unsettling ways, distinct from mocking of the frameworks and values of the adult world.”
[4] James L. Baughman, “Who Read
LIFE?: The Circulation of America’s Favorite Magazine,” in
Looking at LIFE Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 44. Baughman, 44, explains the reading public of
LIFE magazine, stating: “The
LIFE readership that emerged [post-World War II]…was middle class, often very comfortably so.”
[5] Erika Doss, introduction to
Looking at LIFE Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 11. November 23, 1936, Henry Robinson Luce pitched the idea for a new picture magazine that would give people the ability “To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events…to see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed.” Picture editor Wilson Hicks observed that
LIFE magazine, “looked at what people thought and did in a particular way…both word and picture took on extra meaning and vitality.”
[6] James Pomerantz, “The Surreal World of Nina Leen,”
The New Yorker, April 11, 2013, accessed January 11, 2016,
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-surreal-world-of-nina-leen. One of the first female photographers contracted for
LIFE magazine, Pomerantz states: “[Leen’s] most well-known subjects were animals (including her dog Lucky), American women and adolescents, and the Irascibles, a group of abstract artists…”
[7] Wendy Kozol, “Documenting the Ordinary: Photographic Realism and
LIFE’s families,” in
LIFE’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 12. Kozol asserts: “
LIFE increasingly depicted middle-class families to promote patriotic sentiments.” She continues, ”
LIFE’s contribution was to focus on the representative middle-class family in news stories to signify a national cultural identity.”
[8] Nina Leen, “Teen-Age Girls: They Live in a Wonderful World of Their Own,”
LIFE Magazine, December 11, 1944: 91-98. Google Books, accessed January 7, 2016,
https://books.google.com/books?id=10EEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA91#v=twopage&q&f=true.
Nina Leen photographed the 1944, article that appeared in
LIFE magazine investigating the life of teenage girls. The 1947 photo-essay, “Tulsa Twins” is a follow-up to the first article. Readers familiar with style and social life in 1944 will recognize the transitions that occurred in the 1947 teenage girl, such as fashion and proper socialization. Introduction and promotion of uniformity in dress and actions led to conformity in appearance (including style and hair) and adherence to traditional gender roles. First introduced in 1944, the traditional, status quo mindset spilled into the 1947 installment. Post-World War II America experienced a heightened promotion of whiteness ideals and gender roles. Since America was involved in the Cold War, wished for peace on the home front, and safety within home life. Conformity to traditional standards tamed and controlled the new group of adolescents.
[10] Rickie Solinger, “The Smutty Side of
LIFE: Picturing Babes as Icons of Gender Difference in the Early 1950s,” in Looking at
LIFE Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 201-219. Solinger’s essay speaks about the emergence of female images in
LIFE magazine. Solinger, 202, poses the question, “Who is the American woman?” and continues by tracing female identity: “During the
Depression and the war, cultural arbiters like
LIFE promulgated unified, iconic images of female identity.” Solinger’s essay explores the relationship between “babes” and recognizing the “American woman.” During the war era women were told to wear overalls and work outside of the home, in the next era they were told to rear children and obey their husbands. Despite these vast differences in woman’s identity,
LIFE believed that they “produced a shared belief in the qualities of ideal American womanhood.”
[11] S. Mintz & S. McNeil, “Social Changes During the War,”
Digital History, accessed February 13, 2016,
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3493.
Digital History explains: “married working women outnumbered single working women as 6.3 million women entered the work force during the war. The war challenged the conventional image of female behavior, as ‘Rosie the Riveter’ became the popular symbol of women who abandoned traditional female occupations to work in defense industries. Social critics had a field day attacking women.” In postwar America, women were expected to resume traditional social roles by returning to the home with a focus on the family. Domesticity was the woman’s sphere.
[12] Erika Doss, introduction to
Looking at LIFE Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 11. Doss explained that
LIFE’s emphasis on presentation of powerful images “enlighten and instruct” audiences.
[15] Rickie Solinger, “The Smutty Side of
LIFE: Picturing Babes as Icons of Gender Difference in the Early 1950s,” in Looking at
LIFE Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 201-219. Solinger, 201, provides female readership data asserting: “…more than 17 million women between the ages of 20 and 24 read
LIFE in the early fifties…”
James L. Baughman, “Who Read
LIFE? The Circulation of America’s Favorite Magazine,”
Looking at LIFE Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 41-51. Baughman, 42, states: “In a 1946 review of research on magazine readership…the model readers for
LIFE were 30 to 34 years of age, from the professional and skilled labor classes, married and college-educated.”
[16] Elaine Tyler May, introduction to
Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 5.
[17] Rickie Solinger, “The Smutty Side of
LIFE: Picturing Babes as Icons of Gender Difference in the Early 1950s,” in Looking at
LIFE Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 201-219. Solinger, 202, contends: “Despite the potentially disorienting injunctions that mandated that American women wear an apron in one era and overalls in the next, the flourishing postwar mass media produced these serial, unified images indefensibly and with confidence that they reflected a shared belief in the qualities of ideal American womanhood.”
[18] Elaine Tyler May, “Explosive Issues: Sex, Woman, and the Bomb,” in
Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 94.
[19] Wendy Kozol, “Looking at
LIFE: A Historical Profile of Photojournalism,” in
LIFE’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 39.
[20] Elaine Tyler May, “Explosive Issues: Sex, Woman, and the Bomb,” in
Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 94.
[21] Peter Bacon Hales, “Imaging the Atomic Age,” in
Looking at LIFE Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 105. Hales accounts that one-dimensional photo- stories in
LIFE magazine communicated values associated with white, middle-class Americans, and it “also directed and modified the beliefs of its audience.”
[22] Andrew Hartman, “From Hot War to Cold War for Schools and Teenagers: The Life Adjustment Movement as Therapy for the Immature,” in
Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 61. As Hartman suggests that: “’Social guidance’ was another way of describing the process of adjusting American teenagers to white, bourgeois, gendered, Protestant norms.”
[23] Karal Ann Marling, “Mamie Eisenhower’s New Look,” in
As Seen of TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994), 8-14 .
[24] Kelly Schrum,
Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture 1920-1945 (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 2.
[26] David Morgan,
The Lure of Images: A History of Religion and Visual Media in America (London: Routledge, 2007), 1. Professor at Duke University specializing in visual culture and media, David Morgan, 1, asserted in
The Lure of Images that there lies a triangular relationship between image, viewer and interpretation. Vision oscillates between scanning and concentrated focus, continually shifting between the two modes; thus, the photograph exerts its power over the viewer, “luring him/her in and offering something [the individual] seeks: happiness, nourishment, desirability, security, power, love, fellowship, social status, divine presence, refuge, etc.”
[27] Tom Engelhardt, “The Haunting of Childhood,” in
The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 132-154. Author and historian Tom Engelhardt, 134, states: “Between 1944 and 1958, the teenager’s average weekly income quadrupled from $2.50 to $10.”
[31] Elaine Tyler May, introduction to
Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 1-18. May, 5, states: “…it was the values of the white middle-class that shaped the dominant political and economic institutions that affected all Americans. Those who did not conform to them were likely to be marginalized, stigmatized, and disadvantaged as a result.” Hence the construction of cultural norms: those who were nonconforming were judged and outcast. Magazines such as
LIFE promoted conformity through visual print. The image acted as visual propaganda, and the lexical accompaniment further persuaded appeal.
[33] Jack Blair, “A History of Tulsa Annexation,” Report, (Tulsa City Council, 2004), accessed January 16, 2016,
http://www.tulsacouncil.org/media/79331/Annexation%20History.pdf. 9. Between 1940-1950 Tulsa, Oklahoma experienced a surge in expansion in order “to accommodate the trend toward suburbanization.” Jack Blair, Policy Administrator for the Tulsa City Council asserted: “Tulsa expanded its land base slowly, but steadily, after World War II, to accommodate the trend toward suburbanization. Annexations during this period consisted of relatively frequent but small expansions. New housing additions were regularly incorporated into city limits as developers coordinated with the city for the provision of municipal services.”
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