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Constructing a Culture

Life through the Camera Lens: Analyzing Post-World War II Teenage Social Norms in LIFE Magazine

As the United States recovered from World War II, America sought to reinstate safety, calm and normalcy on the home front. Alongside America’s movement toward peace, for the first time teenagers were recognized as a new group who had different values than both children and adults.[1] The newness of this group created suspicion, and with the threat of the Cold War on the horizon, fear of the unknown and ‘otherness’ emerged. [2] Amidst the hysteria, the life of a teenager was under inspection. As teens developed an identity, in angst adults marginalized them and pressured for social norms to guide this new group.[3] In order to retain peace and compose society, whiteness standards emerged as a tool to control American teenagers. During the same moment, the preeminent photo-magazine LIFE acted as an agent to promote the ideals of white, middle-class American life.[4] The founder, Henry Luce, created LIFE as a means to give people the ability “To see life,” and in turn the audience would “see and be instructed.”[5] LIFE photojournalists canvassed America documenting anything newsworthy including commentary on social, political, and cultural events. In turn, LIFE was not only a magazine delivering newsworthy, relevant information, it also delivered distinct societal values that instructed audiences and heavily influenced the public. Photojournalist for LIFE magazine, Nina Leen documented the emergence of the teenager,[6] and through presentation and reflection on their ‘secret lives,’ social norms emerged that visually shaped and drove public opinion.[7] As a follow-up to the 1944 original story that identified teen girls,[8] Nina Leen’s 1947 photo-essay “Tulsa Twins,” visually presented and encouraged social norms emphasizing conventional gender roles and promoting conformity through uniformity in fashion.[9]

After World War II, women were left questioning their social role.[10] During wartime, as men enlisted to fight for freedom, a majority of American females took work outside the home, oftentimes in factories supplying troops with needed materials.[11] Postwar America was different: women were expected to resume traditional social roles and embrace domestic ideology. Images in LIFE magazine were meant to “enlighten and instruct;” therefore, Leen’s gaze groomed audiences to support traditional gender roles. [12] Through Leen’s images, women were encouraged to embrace domestic responsibilities (such as child rearing, home life, and spirituality) while men focused on areas outside of the home in the political and economic arenas. For example, in a large, multi-column vertical photograph, Betty is framed doing the laundry. Since “Chores are receiving new respect,” Betty’s serious expression and deep concentration is focused solely on the act of pinning clothes to the dry line.[13] The snapshot, tightly cropped on Betty’s duty, captures the audience’s attention and lures them into embracing domesticity for females; yet, at the same moment the photograph and accompanying narrative move deeper into promotion of social norms: “…for 1947 teens think of marriage much more seriously than their wartime equivalents.”[14] LIFE audiences understood the photograph’s implications as such: during formative years, Betty focuses on completion of her domestic responsibilities so that one day in the future she will make a good wife by providing a clean, ordered home for her husband.[15] Acclaimed historian of twentieth century American studies, Elaine Tyler May asserts that postwar there was “a rush of young Americans into marriage, parenthood, and traditional gender roles.”[16] Photographs, such as the esteemed Leen’s, acted as an agent during the late-1940-era when “flourishing postwar mass media produced…serial, unified images … [that] reflected a shared belief in the qualities of ideal American womanhood.”[17] As women struggled postwar to gain an identity, LIFE magazine took charge and provided their version of the “ideal American woman.” Leen, in promotion of the “rush” young Americans were experiencing, carefully framed the shot of Betty, who seemed to pleasantly accept domestic responsibility. Upon first glance, the photo is an opportunity to view a female teen in action; however, the underlying values associated with the image groomed LIFE’s audience to embrace gender divisions. Acting as signposts, Leen’s photographs visually prepare LIFE’s audience for mature gender-specific responsibilities that are also present in everyday American society.
Compounding Leen’s presentation of circa 1950s appropriate social norms, none of the teen girls photographed made eye contact with Leen’s camera lens. Methodically positioned, the teen girls in “Tulsa Twins” were never square with the camera. The Bounds girls were posed on an angle to suggest compliance with social norms and acceptance of being a submissive member (woman) of society. The wayward positioning of the face and lack of eye contact add further to the theme of gender specific, non-threatening posturing. Adhering to traditional gender roles, 1950s philosophy proclaimed: “as long as [women] were subordinate to their husbands, they would be contented and fulfilled.”[18] Thus, Leen, savvy of gender division code intelligently framed the photographs in “Tulsa Twins” to establish appropriate male-dominant/female-subordinate ideology. [19] By positioning the female subjects in non-threatening positions, oftentimes with their heads tilted and eyes set to look into the distance so as not to lock eyes with readers of LIFE, Leen’s photo-story is not just a visual presentation, but it supports era-specific ideology promoting gender divisions and women being subordinate to males.

Juxtaposed against teen girls, upholding male-centered ideology, the boys look at the audience and make direct eye contact with readers, since “popular and official ideology insisted that male power was as necessary in the home as in the political realm.”[20] In a double page spread, Leen photographed eight teen boys who epitomized masculine ideals: holding rank in the Armed Forces, being involved on sport teams, and attending college. Masculinity radiated in their straightforward gaze, and their perfectly groomed visage displayed confidence and courage, qualities male readers of LIFE magazine could identify with, admire and then duplicate. Esteemed historian and author, Peter Bacon Hales reminds scholars that LIFE magazine and the photojournalist’s camera “directed and modified the beliefs of its audience.”[21] Thus, Leen encouraged ideals aimed at bourgeois audiences by expertly framing ascribed masculine characteristics, such as boldness and strength to support male-dominant ideals promoted in postwar America.[22] Leen’s arrangement of photographs captured the audience’s gaze, and propagated ideas that reinforced white, middle-class gender roles.
Not only were social roles prominently portrayed through the camera lens, Leen’s photo-essay focused heavily on trendsetting and the “New Look” of fashion.[23] With the emergence of Otherness, teenagers were viewed as potential threats. As Cold War hysteria crept into everyday American life, measures maintaining peace were developed. Consequently, conformity emerged as a tool to control this new group. In turn, objectification of teen girl fashion produced associations with group mentality and social acceptance standards. As teens were recognized as an emerging group, the consumer market identified girls as trendsetters, and LIFE magazine capitalized on this connection by pushing conformist ideals onto readers. [24] Established in presenting sameness, in her 1944 article tracing the livelihood of teen girls, Leen’s commentary explains: “There is a time in the life of every American girl when the most important thing in the world is to be one of a crowd of other girls and to act and speak and dress exactly as they do.”[25] Mimicking values presented in 1944, Leen’s 1947 photo-essay replicated idealized values associated with uniformity, and urged the1947 audience to accept and follow the status quo.

As postwar divisions along racial, class and gender lines attempted to separate Americans, Leen’s article functioned as a unification force. By presenting real people, the Bounds twins and their circle of friends, in an up-close and personal format, Leen capitalized on the lure of images to captivate, instruct and persuade audiences.[26] In turn, through the visual promotion of superficial qualities, compliance with group thought was encouraged. In short, Leen’s presentation of clothing served a twofold approach: educate the public about new trends and encourage uniformity in dress and thought. Since postwar teens now had extra money for disposal, girls could shop for luxury items such as clothing, accessories and style-enhancing goods. [27] For example, in the large, three-quarter photograph opening the photo-essay, Leen positioned the Bounds twins to appose the change in style and trends. In the foreground, Betty stands clothed in a light-colored knee-length skirt that is topped off with a ruffled white, shoulder-bearing top trimmed with a ribbon. Her hair, shoulder length and curled, is pulled to one side and ornamented with a large flower. Open-toed sandals complete this “New Look,” a fashion style that began just months earlier when French designer Christian Dior presented his collection to the press and salons in France.[28] Secondary to Betty, Barbara stands in the background, her clothes reflect the 1944 “sloppy get-up” style of teenage girls: saddle shoes, bobby socks, rolled denim and an over-sized men’s plaid shirt. [29] Leen’s presentation of new trends discounted the mid-1940s oversized masculine-esque style of Barbara, and instead, embraced the frilly, feminine style Betty wore. Text supporting the photograph further emphasized conformist ideals: “…the changes in the lives of the seventeen-year-old Bounds twins are, according to LIFE correspondents around the nation, typical of all U.S. teen-agers.”[30] Replicating the 1944 installment, the 1947 lexical content pushed the threshold for conformity. If the photographs were not enough, language such as “typical of all teenagers” and “to be one of the crowd” reiterated the stress placed on conformist group mentality. There was much at stake for those who did not conform, such as marginalization, stigmatization and great disadvantages.[31] Throughout the six-page photo-essay, clothing and styling of hair pulled the audience into the commentary and unified readers to replicate trends and conform to the status quo.

Not to be forgotten, even the males photographed in Leen’s photo-essay epitomized conformist ideals. In Leen’s June 11, 1945 “Teen-Age Boys” photo-essay boy’s style “always conforms to a pattern of sloppiness,” mimicking sameness ideals apparent in teen girl fashion. [32] Postwar, the male-dominated sphere focused on serious life endeavors and establishment of a future, which is reflected in the teen boy’s style of clothing. Unlike the sloppy dress and shenanigan pranks of the 1945 teen boy, 1947 was an era of earnestness. Although the style of clothing changed over the years, the ideals of “being one of the group” continued. Ergo, Leen’s boys in “Tulsa Twins” were dressed in formal attire, even when attending a dance party that took place in the basement of a Tulsa suburban home.[33] A shirt, tie and suit jacket adorn each of the boys in the posed portraits, further supporting the theme of social correctness and alignment with the group. Undoubtedly, like their counterparts, teen boys were presented to the audience as charming and classy. Their formal attire radiated order, power, acceptance of uniformity, and endorsement of white, bourgeois ideology.

Postwar America was a time for healing and peace. As America pulled itself together, Leen’s photographs functioned as signposts cuing whiteness ideology. The photo-essay, “Tulsa Twins” embraced traditional gender roles and supported conformity in style; acting as both a reflection and progression of bourgeois societal values. Although Leen had covered the emerging life of teenagers earlier in the postwar era, the 1947 assignment spoke directly to the audience, assuring readers that post-World War II teens were establishing themselves as mature members of American society. For readers of LIFE magazine, the reassurance directing teenagers to conform and embrace conventional gender roles may have quelled some adult fears as America entered the age of hysteria and the Red Scare.

[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.

[9] Nina Leen, “Tulsa Twins: They Show How Much the Teen-Age World has Changed,” LIFE Magazine, August 4,1947: 77 – 82. Google Books, accessed January 7, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?id=1U0EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA77#v=twopage&q&f=false.

[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.

[13] Nina Leen, “Tulsa Twins: They Show How Much the Teen-Age World has Changed,” LIFE Magazine, August 4,1947: 77 – 82. Google Books, accessed February 13, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?id=1U0EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA77#v=twopage&q&f=false.

[14] Nina Leen, “Tulsa Twins: They Show How Much the Teen-Age World has Changed,” LIFE Magazine, August 4,1947: 77 – 82. Google Books, accessed February 13, 2016,
https://books.google.com/books?id=1U0EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA77#v=twopage&q&f=false.

[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.

[25] Nina Leen, “Teen-Age Girls: They Live in a Wonderful World of Their Own,” December 11, 1944, 91.
https://books.google.com/books?id=10EEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA91#v=onepage&q&f=false.

[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.”

[28] Sidney Toledano, “The New Look, A Legend,” The Story of Dior: The New Look Revolution, La Maison Dior, accessed January 20, 2016, http://www.dior.com/couture/en_us/the-house-of-dior/the-story-of-dior/the-new-look-revolution.

[29] Nina Leen, “Tulsa Twins: They Show How Much the Teen-Age World has Changed,” LIFE Magazine, August 4,1947: 77 – 82. Google Books, accessed January 7, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?id=1U0EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA77#v=twopage&q&f=false.

[30] Nina Leen, “Tulsa Twins: They Show How Much the Teen-Age World has Changed,” LIFE Magazine, August 4,1947: 77 – 82. Google Books, accessed January 7, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?id=1U0EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA77#v=twopage&q&f=false. 77.

[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.

[32] Nina Leen, “Teen-Age Boys: Faced with War, they are just the same as they have always been,” LIFE Magazine, June 11, 1945: 91-97. Google Books, accessed February 17, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?id=_EkEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&dq=LIFE%20June%201945&pg=PA91#v=onepage&q&f=false.

[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.”

Life through the Camera Lens:
Analyzing Post-World War II Teenage Social Norms in LIFE Magazine
by Maureen Kudlik
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Known as “The Show-Book of the World,” LIFE magazine played a major role in “representing and disseminating information and ideas, [while also] shaping meaning [for] consumers fluent in the language of pictorial communication.”[1]

In 1936, Henry Robinson Luce (head of the Time Inc., mass media empire that included the weekly news magazine Time, and the business monthly magazine Fortune) had a new idea for a picture magazine.[2] Luce’s picture book was proposed to give people the ability:
To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things—machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man’s work—his paintings, towers, and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the women that men love and many children; to see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed.[3]

LIFE magazine ran for thirty-six years producing 1,864 consecutive weekly issues.[4] Luce’s LIFE magazine delivered both a ‘coherent story’ and a “particular historical vision that entertained, informed, and influenced millions.”[5] With a circulation of more than two million in 1939, LIFE had become “one of the most widely consumed magazines in America.”[6] In short, LIFE magazine reached the homes of millions, and catalogued, through images, “American society, [including] culture and politics [spanning] from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War.”[7] In the 1940s, the decade the article “Tulsa Twins” was published, LIFE reached “21 percent of the entire population [of people aged] over ten years old (around 22.5 million people).”[8]

LIFE was not the only pictorial magazine produced in America (competitors included National Geographic, Vanity Fair, Mid-Week Pictorial, Look, Ebony, Photo-History, Picture Post, See, Photo, Picture, Focus, Pic, and Click, and it did not always have the highest paid circulation, being surpassed in the 1940s by competing weeklies such as Collier’s, Liberty, and the Saturday Evening Post.[9] During the postwar era, specialized magazines such as Reader’s Digest and TV Guide swept LIFE magazine in regard to circulation numbers.[10] By 1970, LIFE was “America’s ‘favorite magazine’ with over 8 million subscribers.”[11] Furthering the data, LIFE had an estimated pass-along rate “of four to five people per copy; each issue reached as many as 40 million people.”[12] LIFE magazine seemed to take on a life of its own, and in time, became an icon in American social society.

[1] Erika Doss, introduction to Looking at LIFE Magazine (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 2-4.
[2] Ibid., 1.
[3] Ibid., 2.
[4] Ibid., 2.
[5] Ibid., 2.
[6] Ibid., 2.
[7] Ibid., 2.
[8] Ibid., 2.
[9] Ibid.,3.
[10] Ibid., 3.
[11] Ibid., 3.
[12] Ibid., 1.
Contents of this reply:
1. "Tulsa Twins: They Show how much the Teen-Age World has Changed" Imagine yourself as a teenager in post-World War II America.
  
  What would 1947 teen life look like?
  What would be considered hip and cool?
  What rules would you need to follow?
  
  In her post-World War II assignment covering the social transition of teen girls, photojournalist for LIFE magazine, Nina Leen, photographed Caucasian, middle-class seventeen-year-old Tulsa, Oklahoma twin sisters, Betty and Barbara Bounds. "Tulsa Twins: They Show how much the Teen-Age World has Changed" ...
  Shot in an-up-close and personal photo shoot, the twins unveil their trendy, frilly, flowing and feminine “New Look” style. Shoulder-length hair and personal accessories completed the late-1940’s ensemble, leaving teen boys to exclaim, “Hello, Dolly!”. Social transitions, such as thoughts of marriage and completing domestic chores were welcome changes for the postwar teen girl. On the opposite side, teen boys focused on masculine pursuits, such as leadership, sports and collegiate life.
  
  Capturing 1947 girlhood at its best, Leen documented the changing life of a teen girl, where “parties with boys are their favorite things in life.” Leen's photo-essay “Tulsa Twins” welcomes you into the fashionable social world of middle-class, postwar teen girlhood, where being a lady required domestic responsibility and acceptance to be “one of the crowd”.
2. "Freedom to Learn" Film "Freedom to Learn"
  
  “No teacher can be the final judge of truth . . . This judgement remains for the decision and conscience of every free man.”
  
  This film was produced by Agrafilms, Inc. in 1954 and directed by Irving Rusinow.
  
  Read the full review of "Freedom to Learn" in Educational Screen: The Audio-Visual Magazine.
3. About In the years following World War II (1945 - 1955), film and print media created sources geared at the newly acknowledged teenage audience. In order to contain the rapidly expanding group, adults chose to "construct a culture" by impressing white, bourgeois values on the teens.
  
  "Constructing a Culture" was created by four graduate students enrolled in Professor Roshanna Sylvester's "Doing Digital History" course at DePaul University (HST 438 & DHS 460).
  
  Using the course theme: "How to be Popular?" as our guide, each contributor selected and researched one primary-source piece of media. After composing an essay detailing our source in context, and adding our media to an Omeka site, our final project was to create a Scalar site that envelops the theme of postwar teenage life.
  
  METHODS:
  Each contributor was responsible for research on his or her own primary-source material. After brainstorming the theme for Scalar, students collaborated to incorporate their individual research and develop the website.
  
  GRADUATE STUDENT BACKGROUND:
  Micah Ariel
  
  Jessica Martinez
  Currently enrolled in the College of Education program at DePaul University seeking a degree in Secondary Education. Jessica focused on the use of film in the classroom as a means to educate teenage youth on sensitive and taboo topics. Contributions include the review of A New Film Helps Girls, found in The Education Screen, and the Disney Film The Story of Menstruation.
  
  Vince Sandri
  Vince is a Masters in History student that focused on educational philosophy during the Cold War through analysis of the educational film "Freedom to Learn," the review for this film printed in Educational Screen: The Audio-Visual Magazine, and additional secondary sources. His contributions to this project include descriptions of these two primary sources as well as the context essays for the Life Adjustment Movement and McCarthyism in Education pages.
  
  Maureen Kudlik
  Maureen is a Masters in English Literature and Digital Humanities Graduate student. Maureen focuses on the rise of teenagers in photojournalist Nina Leen's photo-essay, "Tulsa Twins: They Show how much the Teen-age World has Changed". Under the subheading, "Creating a Visual Culture through Print Media," Maureen discusses the biography of LIFE magazine, photojournalist Nina Leen, and explores the promotion of teenage conformity through uniformity in fashion and gender roles during the post-WW II era.
4. Bibliography “Freedom to Learn.” Educational Screen: The Audio-Visual Magazine 33, no.6 (Summer, 1954): 228. URL: http://www.archive.org/stream/educationalscree33chicrich#page/n219/mode/2up.
  
  “Freedom to Learn.” Film. Directed by Irving Rusinow. 1954. Agrafilms Production. URL: https://archive.org/details/0882_Freedom_to_Learn_13_00_59_00.
  
  Hartman, Andrew. Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.
5. Educational Screen Review for "Freedom to Learn" “Can the freedom to learn be controlled and restricted and still be freedom?”
  
  This is the opening question of the review of the film "Freedom to Learn" in the Summer 1954 issue of Educational Screen: The Audio-Visual Magazine. By this point, educational films had become a commonly used medium in classrooms across the U.S. and magazines such as Educational Screen and See and Hear regularly featured reviews for educational films. This film addresses what had become a very important question regarding educational freedom as the Life Adjustment Movement had gained popularity and McCarthyism had found its way into U.S. public schools. In the film, Mrs. Orin finds herself facing the school board to answer questions concerning her teaching of Communism to her social studies class.
  
  "Freedom to Learn" was produced by Agrafilms, Inc. and directed by Irving Rusinow who had made over 100 films for organizations such as the National Education Association and Encyclopedia Britannica among others. Rusinow had already established himself as an award winning filmmaker by the time “Freedom to Learn” was made.[1]
  
  Freedom to Learn reminds us of the intensity of the fear of Communism being taught in schools as Mrs. Orin is reported by a concerned parent who finds notes about Communism in her daughter's notebook.
  
  “No teacher can be the final judge of truth . . . This judgement remains for the decision and conscience of every free man.”
  
  Watch "Freedom to Learn"
  
  [1] “Irving Rusinow, 75, Dies,” The Washington Post, August 11, 1990. Accessed January 10, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1990/08/11/irving-rusinow-75-dies/f423a1ad-7296-4449-a714-260a6c19b530/.
6. Creating a Visual Culture through Print Media Known as “The Show-Book of the World,” LIFE magazine played a major role in “representing and disseminating information and ideas, [while also] shaping meaning [for] consumers fluent in the language of pictorial communication.”[1]
  
  In 1936, Henry Robinson Luce (head of the Time Inc., mass media empire that included the weekly news magazine Time, and the business monthly magazine Fortune) had a new idea for a picture magazine.[2] Luce’s picture book was proposed to give people the ability:
  To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things—machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man’s work—his paintings, towers, and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the women that men love and many children; to see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed.[3]
  
  LIFE magazine ran for thirty-six years producing 1,864 consecutive weekly issues.[4] Luce’s LIFE magazine delivered both a ‘coherent story’ and a “particular historical vision that entertained, informed, and influenced millions.”[5] With a circulation of more than two million in 1939, LIFE had become “one of the most widely consumed magazines in America.”[6] In short, LIFE magazine reached the homes of millions, and catalogued, through images, “American society, [including] culture and politics [spanning] from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War.”[7] In the 1940s, the decade the article “Tulsa Twins” was published, LIFE reached “21 percent of the entire population [of people aged] over ten years old (around 22.5 million people).”[8]
  
  LIFE was not the only pictorial magazine produced in America (competitors included National Geographic, Vanity Fair, Mid-Week Pictorial, Look, Ebony, Photo-History, Picture Post, See, Photo, Picture, Focus, Pic, and Click, and it did not always have the highest paid circulation, being surpassed in the 1940s by competing weeklies such as Collier’s, Liberty, and the Saturday Evening Post.[9] During the postwar era, specialized magazines such as Reader’s Digest and TV Guide swept LIFE magazine in regard to circulation numbers.[10] By 1970, LIFE was “America’s ‘favorite magazine’ with over 8 million subscribers.”[11] Furthering the data, LIFE had an estimated pass-along rate “of four to five people per copy; each issue reached as many as 40 million people.”[12] LIFE magazine seemed to take on a life of its own, and in time, became an icon in American social society.
  
  [1] Erika Doss, introduction to Looking at LIFE Magazine (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 2-4.
  [2] Ibid., 1.
  [3] Ibid., 2.
  [4] Ibid., 2.
  [5] Ibid., 2.
  [6] Ibid., 2.
  [7] Ibid., 2.
  [8] Ibid., 2.
  [9] Ibid.,3.
  [10] Ibid., 3.
  [11] Ibid., 3.
  [12] Ibid., 1.
7. Constructing a Culture
  Adults created a network of resources and tools to coerce and disseminate their concocted standard of upstanding American youth.
  
  Post-World War II life had changed as GI’s returned home to begin families, and the rise of the middle-class began with the creation of suburbanization in the early 1950s.[1]
  Donald Miller, professor of History at Lafayette College and narrator of “From War to Normalcy,” explained that suburbanization promoted homogenization, blandness and conformity.[2] Furthermore, American life post-war gave rise to a new class of people: teenagers.
  
  Although the war with Europe and Japan was over, America was not free from threat. By 1946 America had a new threat: Communism. The social, political, and economical ideology and movement was a threat to all that America stood for, including freedom, capitalism and the belief in a God.[3] Even though life in suburban America looked hopeful and homogenous, appealing to many GI’s and their families. In reality, paranoia on the home front created an underlying stress that would appear full-force in the years to come. The United State had entered a new “Cold War” that “pitted the United States and its Allies against the Soviet Union and its supporters.”[4] “East- West confrontations over Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and many other hot spots created the Cold War, which lasted from 1946 until 1991.[5] The Cold War affected America and its ideals of “liberty and equality...”[6]
  
  Despite the growing terror spreading across the American landscape, teenagers were viewed as a "threat" that could be controlled. Film and print media attempted to constrain teenagers by using different modes of educational material. Informational sources aimed at disseminating information, such as The Journal on Audio-Visual Learning and Education Screen: The Audio-Visual Magazine promoted conformist ideology to educators, who would in turn, cultivated and circulated "idealist" dogma upon their students, the teenage public. Across America, teens were "tuning in" to films created by production agencies such as Cornet. During this same moment, magazines such as LIFE circulated photo-essays about concerning the new group of peoples, and acted as an agent to culture the public using multidimensional images hoping that the image would "speak louder than words" and further impress white, bourgeois ideals upon the impressionable youth.
  
  [1] Donald Miller, “Program 23: The Fifties/From War to Normalcy,” Video, Fred Barzyk (2000; WGBH
  Education Foundation.), Online Video.https://www.learner.org/series/biographyofamerica/prog23/transcript/index.html.
  [2] S. Mintz & S. McNeil, “The Cold War,” Digital History, Retrieved (January 7,2016)
  http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3401.
  [3] S. Mintz & S. McNeil, “The Cold War,” Digital History, Retrieved (January 7, 2016)
  http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3401.
  [4] S. Mintz & S. McNeil, “Hearts and Minds,” Digital History, Retrieved (January 7, 2016)
  http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3423.
  [5] S. Mintz & S. McNeil, “The Integration of Professional Sports,” Digital History, Retrieved (January 7,2016) http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=3424.
  [6] S. Mintz & S. McNeil, “Post-War Era Timeline,” Digital History, Retrieved (January 7, 2016)
  http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraID=16&smtID=4.
9. How Did We Get Here? In 1945, the public education system in the U.S. was experiencing radical changes and in order to get a more complete understanding of the educational climate in 1945, a look back to the preceding years is required. After World War I, the military became concerned with the fact that many of the Army’s draftees were illiterate and troubled by the challenges that illiteracy presented for training and developing soldiers.[1] As a result, there was a marked increase in public education enrollment. Especially impactful was raise in the mandatory school age during the Great Depression to help discourage young people from working and thereby eliminating some measure of competition from the job market[2]. Accompanying this increase in enrollment were two ideas: that education could be a vehicle for social change and that schools were no longer the exclusive domain of the college bound[3].
  
                 Education became an important tool to help facilitate the development of an informed electorate that would rely more heavily on reason than on political coercion to make their decisions. Schools still felt obligated to educate their students on multiple fronts and prepare them for college, but were now preparing students for life in the workplace, responsible citizenship and teaching them how to lead healthy, productive lives. But, there was concern among educators that traditional methods of education would not meet the needs, or hold the interests, of a less academic student population. [4]
  
                 In this time period we see the emergence of vocational tracks in schools, as well as the general education track, the less rigorous alternative to the college preparatory track. As early as 1945, housing multiple educational programs in a singular school led to concerns about conflicts between the different student populations. To combat this widening divide, experts recommended having some shared classroom time between the different tracks to help facilitate interaction and understanding. [5]
  
                 What better way to facilitate learning experiences for various levels of students than the newly emerging genre of Audio-Visual education? Facing a teacher shortage after World War II, it made perfect sense for schools to utilize returning service people with audio-visual experience as teachers in the classroom![6] In fact, that was part of the stated mission of the newly formed Dept. of Visual Instruction of the National Education Association![7]
  
                 These new audio-visual teaching aids allowed new technology, techniques and training that were developed during the war to make their way into the classroom.[8] It was believed that sound recording, exploded views and 3D diagrams would hold students interest in ways they never have before. Educators imagined that by utilizing the principles of psychology along with education and by combining seasoned educators with commercial producers they could make the classroom more fun and engaging. They believed that “color and humor have at last found their place in the teaching program.”[9]
  
      Most important however, was the ongoing debate at the time about federal financing of education. Educators made a strong case for the capabilities of audio-visual education and the need to properly finance its use. In 1945, as had happened many times in the past, individual teachers and the N.E.A. were lobbying congress in the hopes of achieving federal funding for education to eliminate the staggering inequality of resources between wealthy urban and poor rural school districts. There was a fear that federal funding would become federal control of schools. In addition, worries that racial and religious segregation would be undermined by federal interference and a reluctance on the part of the American electorate to continue the programs and spending policies of the New Deal[10].
  
  [1]             Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1985) 7-18
  [2]             Ibid.
  [3]             Ibid.
  [4]             Ibid.
  [5]             Ibid.
  [6]             Boyd B. Rakestraw “ Proposed Objectives of the Department of Visual Instruction of the N.E.A. 1945-46” See and Hear: The Journal on Audio-Visual Learning 1, no. 1 (1945): 59-60
  [7]             Ibid.
  [8]             Paul Wendt, “Viewing the New in Audio-Visual Education” See and Hear: The Journal on Audio-Visual Learning 1, no. 1 (1945): 81-86
  [9]             Ibid.
  [10]            Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1985) 3-18
10. Films in the Classroom
  With the technological advances in cinema, films could now be used in the classroom to teach sensitive topics, such as bodily functions. Instructors were able to show medically correct films without the stigma of a morally constricting culture. The film was viewed by young women in churches, 4H clubs, as well as community college. The use of animation made it easier to view diagrams. The audience can relate to the activities that the animated girl goes through and the omnipresent narrator speaks in a calm voice, relieving any embarrassment or stigma the audience might have felt.
11. Life Adjustment Movement American education was facing a dilemma immediately after WWII as the ideas of progressive education from the 1930s clashed with the paranoia of the early Cold War. As the fear of Communism grew, so did a general feeling that Americans were too immature to resist the ideas of Communism.[1] Therefore, it became the duty of secondary education to instill maturity in the nation’s youth to resist Communism through therapeutic education.[2]
  
  The fear of the spread of Communist ideas, particularly among the youth through misguided education, led to the creation of the Commission of Life Adjustment in 1947.[3] The Commission on Life Adjustment was created by the U.S. Office of Education to redefine progressive education in the atmosphere of the Cold War.
  
  The principles of the “life adjustment movement” became the major force behind American education. According to Andrew Hartman in his book Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School, the life adjustment movement was a reversal of the “radically reformist ideas of the educational reconstructionists of the 1930s, those ‘frontier thinkers’ who wanted to use the schools as means to a social democratic ends.”[4] In accordance with the life adjustment movement, American education no longer focused on “adjusting society to the child, in the hopes of creating a socialist society, the child was to be mentally adjusted to the decidedly un-socialist society already in existence.”[5]
  
  The life adjustment movement emphasized four interrelated principles which were believed to be the ends to therapeutic adjustment: relevance, instrumentalism, social order, and patriotism.[6] Instilling patriotism in American youth was especially important to protect national security and ensure that teenagers became adults that believed in the power of the U.S. and its democratic way of life.[7] There was also a shift in the way many secondary educators approached their jobs as they believed their schools should be run like a business to help support the industrial economy of the U.S.[8] Therefore, it also became important for secondary education to help students fit into the American economy with a degree of vocational training.[9]
  
  It is quite clear that the life adjustment movement was a coercive movement that tried to guide teenagers into pre-determined societal roles through therapeutic education. The role of secondary schools had been shifted by this movement to help teenagers find their relevant places within American society and they worked under the assumption that the American way of life did not need adjustments. It was the students that needed to be adjusted and therapeutically coerced into their ideal roles within a predetermined U.S. society and economy.
  
  [1] Andrew Hartman, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 58.
  [2] Hartman, 58.
  [3] Hartman, 55.
  [4] Hartman, 55.
  [5] Hartman, 55.
  [6] Hartman, 56.
  [7] Hartman, 56.
  [8] Hartman, 62-63.
  [9] Hartman, 62.
13. McCarthyism in Education The Communist witch hunt started in the U.S. government by Senator Joseph McCarthy had leaked into all levels of American education by the early 1950s. It was only natural for the red scare to cause paranoia of educators including teachers and librarians because according to Eugenia Kaledin, they were “considered dangerous influences on the general public, [and] were singled out for special scrutiny.”[1] Educators who were believed to be Communist sympathizers or have affiliations with Communists were interrogated at all levels by deans and school boards and all educators were also encouraged to “name names.” This paranoia had a real effect as it is believed that approximately 600 teachers in the U.S. lost their jobs due to McCarthyism in education.[2]
  
  The Case of Professor Burgum
  
  The film “Freedom to Learn” featured in this project portrays a veteran high school teacher, Mrs. Orin, who is called in front of the school board after a parent discovers that she had been teaching her social studies class about Communism. What Mrs. Orin experiences in this film is a representation of what real educators went through during the McCarthy period. One prominent case of a teacher losing his job due to McCarthyism is that of professor Edwin Berry Burgum.
  
  Burgum was an Associate Professor of English at New York University and he was dismissed from his job in 1953 after facing a committee that accused him of teaching Communism.
  
  [1] Eugenia Kaledin, Daily Life in the United States, 1940-1959: Shifting Worlds (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 78.
  [2] Stephen H. Aby, “Discretion Over Valor: The AAUP During the McCarthy Years,” American Educational History Journal 36 (2009): 122.
14. Life through the Camera Lens: Analyzing Post-World War II Teenage Social Norms in LIFE Magazine As the United States recovered from World War II, America sought to reinstate safety, calm and normalcy on the home front. Alongside America’s movement toward peace, for the first time teenagers were recognized as a new group who had different values than both children and adults.[1] The newness of this group created suspicion, and with the threat of the Cold War on the horizon, fear of the unknown and ‘otherness’ emerged. [2] Amidst the hysteria, the life of a teenager was under inspection. As teens developed an identity, in angst adults marginalized them and pressured for social norms to guide this new group.[3] In order to retain peace and compose society, whiteness standards emerged as a tool to control American teenagers. During the same moment, the preeminent photo-magazine LIFE acted as an agent to promote the ideals of white, middle-class American life.[4] The founder, Henry Luce, created LIFE as a means to give people the ability “To see life,” and in turn the audience would “see and be instructed.”[5] LIFE photojournalists canvassed America documenting anything newsworthy including commentary on social, political, and cultural events. In turn, LIFE was not only a magazine delivering newsworthy, relevant information, it also delivered distinct societal values that instructed audiences and heavily influenced the public. Photojournalist for LIFE magazine, Nina Leen documented the emergence of the teenager,[6] and through presentation and reflection on their ‘secret lives,’ social norms emerged that visually shaped and drove public opinion.[7] As a follow-up to the 1944 original story that identified teen girls,[8] Nina Leen’s 1947 photo-essay “Tulsa Twins,” visually presented and encouraged social norms emphasizing conventional gender roles and promoting conformity through uniformity in fashion.[9]
  
  After World War II, women were left questioning their social role.[10] During wartime, as men enlisted to fight for freedom, a majority of American females took work outside the home, oftentimes in factories supplying troops with needed materials.[11] Postwar America was different: women were expected to resume traditional social roles and embrace domestic ideology. Images in LIFE magazine were meant to “enlighten and instruct;” therefore, Leen’s gaze groomed audiences to support traditional gender roles. [12] Through Leen’s images, women were encouraged to embrace domestic responsibilities (such as child rearing, home life, and spirituality) while men focused on areas outside of the home in the political and economic arenas. For example, in a large, multi-column vertical photograph, Betty is framed doing the laundry. Since “Chores are receiving new respect,” Betty’s serious expression and deep concentration is focused solely on the act of pinning clothes to the dry line.[13] The snapshot, tightly cropped on Betty’s duty, captures the audience’s attention and lures them into embracing domesticity for females; yet, at the same moment the photograph and accompanying narrative move deeper into promotion of social norms: “…for 1947 teens think of marriage much more seriously than their wartime equivalents.”[14] LIFE audiences understood the photograph’s implications as such: during formative years, Betty focuses on completion of her domestic responsibilities so that one day in the future she will make a good wife by providing a clean, ordered home for her husband.[15] Acclaimed historian of twentieth century American studies, Elaine Tyler May asserts that postwar there was “a rush of young Americans into marriage, parenthood, and traditional gender roles.”[16] Photographs, such as the esteemed Leen’s, acted as an agent during the late-1940-era when “flourishing postwar mass media produced…serial, unified images … [that] reflected a shared belief in the qualities of ideal American womanhood.”[17] As women struggled postwar to gain an identity, LIFE magazine took charge and provided their version of the “ideal American woman.” Leen, in promotion of the “rush” young Americans were experiencing, carefully framed the shot of Betty, who seemed to pleasantly accept domestic responsibility. Upon first glance, the photo is an opportunity to view a female teen in action; however, the underlying values associated with the image groomed LIFE’s audience to embrace gender divisions. Acting as signposts, Leen’s photographs visually prepare LIFE’s audience for mature gender-specific responsibilities that are also present in everyday American society.
  Compounding Leen’s presentation of circa 1950s appropriate social norms, none of the teen girls photographed made eye contact with Leen’s camera lens. Methodically positioned, the teen girls in “Tulsa Twins” were never square with the camera. The Bounds girls were posed on an angle to suggest compliance with social norms and acceptance of being a submissive member (woman) of society. The wayward positioning of the face and lack of eye contact add further to the theme of gender specific, non-threatening posturing. Adhering to traditional gender roles, 1950s philosophy proclaimed: “as long as [women] were subordinate to their husbands, they would be contented and fulfilled.”[18] Thus, Leen, savvy of gender division code intelligently framed the photographs in “Tulsa Twins” to establish appropriate male-dominant/female-subordinate ideology. [19] By positioning the female subjects in non-threatening positions, oftentimes with their heads tilted and eyes set to look into the distance so as not to lock eyes with readers of LIFE, Leen’s photo-story is not just a visual presentation, but it supports era-specific ideology promoting gender divisions and women being subordinate to males.
  
  Juxtaposed against teen girls, upholding male-centered ideology, the boys look at the audience and make direct eye contact with readers, since “popular and official ideology insisted that male power was as necessary in the home as in the political realm.”[20] In a double page spread, Leen photographed eight teen boys who epitomized masculine ideals: holding rank in the Armed Forces, being involved on sport teams, and attending college. Masculinity radiated in their straightforward gaze, and their perfectly groomed visage displayed confidence and courage, qualities male readers of LIFE magazine could identify with, admire and then duplicate. Esteemed historian and author, Peter Bacon Hales reminds scholars that LIFE magazine and the photojournalist’s camera “directed and modified the beliefs of its audience.”[21] Thus, Leen encouraged ideals aimed at bourgeois audiences by expertly framing ascribed masculine characteristics, such as boldness and strength to support male-dominant ideals promoted in postwar America.[22] Leen’s arrangement of photographs captured the audience’s gaze, and propagated ideas that reinforced white, middle-class gender roles.
  Not only were social roles prominently portrayed through the camera lens, Leen’s photo-essay focused heavily on trendsetting and the “New Look” of fashion.[23] With the emergence of Otherness, teenagers were viewed as potential threats. As Cold War hysteria crept into everyday American life, measures maintaining peace were developed. Consequently, conformity emerged as a tool to control this new group. In turn, objectification of teen girl fashion produced associations with group mentality and social acceptance standards. As teens were recognized as an emerging group, the consumer market identified girls as trendsetters, and LIFE magazine capitalized on this connection by pushing conformist ideals onto readers. [24] Established in presenting sameness, in her 1944 article tracing the livelihood of teen girls, Leen’s commentary explains: “There is a time in the life of every American girl when the most important thing in the world is to be one of a crowd of other girls and to act and speak and dress exactly as they do.”[25] Mimicking values presented in 1944, Leen’s 1947 photo-essay replicated idealized values associated with uniformity, and urged the1947 audience to accept and follow the status quo.
  
  As postwar divisions along racial, class and gender lines attempted to separate Americans, Leen’s article functioned as a unification force. By presenting real people, the Bounds twins and their circle of friends, in an up-close and personal format, Leen capitalized on the lure of images to captivate, instruct and persuade audiences.[26] In turn, through the visual promotion of superficial qualities, compliance with group thought was encouraged. In short, Leen’s presentation of clothing served a twofold approach: educate the public about new trends and encourage uniformity in dress and thought. Since postwar teens now had extra money for disposal, girls could shop for luxury items such as clothing, accessories and style-enhancing goods. [27] For example, in the large, three-quarter photograph opening the photo-essay, Leen positioned the Bounds twins to appose the change in style and trends. In the foreground, Betty stands clothed in a light-colored knee-length skirt that is topped off with a ruffled white, shoulder-bearing top trimmed with a ribbon. Her hair, shoulder length and curled, is pulled to one side and ornamented with a large flower. Open-toed sandals complete this “New Look,” a fashion style that began just months earlier when French designer Christian Dior presented his collection to the press and salons in France.[28] Secondary to Betty, Barbara stands in the background, her clothes reflect the 1944 “sloppy get-up” style of teenage girls: saddle shoes, bobby socks, rolled denim and an over-sized men’s plaid shirt. [29] Leen’s presentation of new trends discounted the mid-1940s oversized masculine-esque style of Barbara, and instead, embraced the frilly, feminine style Betty wore. Text supporting the photograph further emphasized conformist ideals: “…the changes in the lives of the seventeen-year-old Bounds twins are, according to LIFE correspondents around the nation, typical of all U.S. teen-agers.”[30] Replicating the 1944 installment, the 1947 lexical content pushed the threshold for conformity. If the photographs were not enough, language such as “typical of all teenagers” and “to be one of the crowd” reiterated the stress placed on conformist group mentality. There was much at stake for those who did not conform, such as marginalization, stigmatization and great disadvantages.[31] Throughout the six-page photo-essay, clothing and styling of hair pulled the audience into the commentary and unified readers to replicate trends and conform to the status quo.
  
  Not to be forgotten, even the males photographed in Leen’s photo-essay epitomized conformist ideals. In Leen’s June 11, 1945 “Teen-Age Boys” photo-essay boy’s style “always conforms to a pattern of sloppiness,” mimicking sameness ideals apparent in teen girl fashion. [32] Postwar, the male-dominated sphere focused on serious life endeavors and establishment of a future, which is reflected in the teen boy’s style of clothing. Unlike the sloppy dress and shenanigan pranks of the 1945 teen boy, 1947 was an era of earnestness. Although the style of clothing changed over the years, the ideals of “being one of the group” continued. Ergo, Leen’s boys in “Tulsa Twins” were dressed in formal attire, even when attending a dance party that took place in the basement of a Tulsa suburban home.[33] A shirt, tie and suit jacket adorn each of the boys in the posed portraits, further supporting the theme of social correctness and alignment with the group. Undoubtedly, like their counterparts, teen boys were presented to the audience as charming and classy. Their formal attire radiated order, power, acceptance of uniformity, and endorsement of white, bourgeois ideology.
  
  Postwar America was a time for healing and peace. As America pulled itself together, Leen’s photographs functioned as signposts cuing whiteness ideology. The photo-essay, “Tulsa Twins” embraced traditional gender roles and supported conformity in style; acting as both a reflection and progression of bourgeois societal values. Although Leen had covered the emerging life of teenagers earlier in the postwar era, the 1947 assignment spoke directly to the audience, assuring readers that post-World War II teens were establishing themselves as mature members of American society. For readers of LIFE magazine, the reassurance directing teenagers to conform and embrace conventional gender roles may have quelled some adult fears as America entered the age of hysteria and the Red Scare.
  
  [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.
  
  [9] Nina Leen, “Tulsa Twins: They Show How Much the Teen-Age World has Changed,” LIFE Magazine, August 4,1947: 77 – 82. Google Books, accessed January 7, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?id=1U0EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA77#v=twopage&q&f=false.
  
  [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.
  
  [13] Nina Leen, “Tulsa Twins: They Show How Much the Teen-Age World has Changed,” LIFE Magazine, August 4,1947: 77 – 82. Google Books, accessed February 13, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?id=1U0EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA77#v=twopage&q&f=false.
  
  [14] Nina Leen, “Tulsa Twins: They Show How Much the Teen-Age World has Changed,” LIFE Magazine, August 4,1947: 77 – 82. Google Books, accessed February 13, 2016,
  https://books.google.com/books?id=1U0EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA77#v=twopage&q&f=false.
  
  [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.
  
  [25] Nina Leen, “Teen-Age Girls: They Live in a Wonderful World of Their Own,” December 11, 1944, 91.
  https://books.google.com/books?id=10EEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA91#v=onepage&q&f=false.
  
  [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.”
  
  [28] Sidney Toledano, “The New Look, A Legend,” The Story of Dior: The New Look Revolution, La Maison Dior, accessed January 20, 2016, http://www.dior.com/couture/en_us/the-house-of-dior/the-story-of-dior/the-new-look-revolution.
  
  [29] Nina Leen, “Tulsa Twins: They Show How Much the Teen-Age World has Changed,” LIFE Magazine, August 4,1947: 77 – 82. Google Books, accessed January 7, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?id=1U0EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA77#v=twopage&q&f=false.
  
  [30] Nina Leen, “Tulsa Twins: They Show How Much the Teen-Age World has Changed,” LIFE Magazine, August 4,1947: 77 – 82. Google Books, accessed January 7, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?id=1U0EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA77#v=twopage&q&f=false. 77.
  
  [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.
  
  [32] Nina Leen, “Teen-Age Boys: Faced with War, they are just the same as they have always been,” LIFE Magazine, June 11, 1945: 91-97. Google Books, accessed February 17, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?id=_EkEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&dq=LIFE%20June%201945&pg=PA91#v=onepage&q&f=false.
  
  [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.”
  
  Life through the Camera Lens:
  Analyzing Post-World War II Teenage Social Norms in LIFE Magazine
  by Maureen Kudlik
  is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
15. Nina Leen Preeminent photojournalist Nina Leen, employed by LIFE magazine in the 1940s primarily photographed animals, women and teenager. December 11, 1944 marked Leen's first coverage of teenage girls, "Teen-Age Girls: They Live in a Wonderful World of their Own". In this article, through photographs, Leen introduced LIFE audiences to "the time in the life of every American girl when the most important thing in the world is to be one of a crowd of other girls and to act and speak and dress exactly as they do. This is the teen age. Some 6,000,000 U.S. teen-age girls live in a world of their own--a lovely, gay, enthusiastic, funny, and blissful society almost untouched by the war."
  
  Seven months later, June 11, 1945, Leen revisted the teenager's livelihood, but this time photographed boys. The photo-essay, "Teen-Age Boys: Faced with war, they are the same as they have always been," ...
  
  As American life transitioned postwar, the livelihood of teenage girls flourished. "Tulsa Twins: They Show how much the Teen-age World has Changed" showcases the transformation in teen girls, such as presenting cutting-edge, trendsetting, “New Look” clothing that made girls look more flirty and feminine.
  
  In an up-close-and-personal photo shoot, serving as representatives for all teen girls nationwide, identical twins Barbara and Betty Bounds show off their fashion style, social life, and domestic tasks. “Tulsa Twins” welcomes you visually into the fashionable social world of middle-class, postwar teen girlhood, where being a lady requires domestic responsibility and acceptance to be “one of the crowd,” and in which “parties with boys are their favorite things in life.”
16. Sensible Schooling
  The world was at a crossroads when three influential educators at the University of Wisconsin decided to do their part to promote progress in education. World War II had ended in Europe only months before and was still drawing to a close in Japan when the first edition of See and Hear: The Journal of Audio-Visual Education was published.
  
  Like the larger world, the world of education was also at a crossroads. Schools were educating more students than ever before. educators, lobbyists, politicians and parents all struggled for control of public education and the funding that fueled it.
  
  As the battle raged over the future of education, teachers had to fight for what they thought were the best ways to educate students. How they taught the youth of America became just as important as what they taught them.
17. See and Hear! School can be dull.
  
  Learning can be a challenge, especially if students aren't engaged. After World War II, Walter Wittich, John Fowlkes and C.J. Anderson, Professors of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, all saw the need for educators to embrace technological change and implement Audio-Visual education into their classrooms. They saw the success that the armed forces had in training large numbers of soldiers during World War II quickly and efficiently. These educators believed that good teachers engage more than one of their students' senses. They believed that students' experiences inside the classroom should reflect their experiences outside of it. Students should learn with their eyes and their ears.
  
  And what better medium for teachers to utilize than film?
  
  See and Hear: The Journal of Audio-Visual Education pushed educators, administrators, school board members and other people who had influence in schools to use their resources to develop strong programs of audio-visual education in schools.
18. The Educational Screen Review of "The Story of Menstruation"
  
  The Educational Screen Review of The Story Of Menstruation.
  
  The Educational Screen journal served to inform instructors of new films that could be useful in the classroom. Their review of The Story of Menstruation, a film produced by the Walt Disney company, was pivotal to the widespread publication of a film that explained to teenage girls the process that their bodies underwent every month while removing much of the stamina and embarrassment associated with menstruation.
  
  This film was also hailed for the constant effort that was seen in the finished product, both in terms of the high production values, and in the straightforward manner that the topic was presented. The author makes it a point to show that even the title The Story of Menstruation was not sugarcoated nor treats women as an inferior sex due to the natural occurrence as some films produced around this time tended to do.
19. Why Use Film in the Classroom In the article New Biology Film Helps Girls, published in Educational Screen’s April 1947th edition, the author describes this revolutionary film produced by the Walt Disney Production for the International Cell-u-cotton Products Company, explaining menstruation, called The Story of Menstruation. The Story of Menstruation was created to help teachers and students alike learn about the completely normal human function called menstruation in which a woman of child baring age undergoes the hormonal cycle needed for human reproduction.
  This film was praised for being anatomically correct while also keeping with the moralistic and modest values of the time. At this point in time, women were ashamed of the natural process that their bodies went though, and as a result some harmed their bodies on accident following antiquated rituals or traditions of their foremothers. Traditionalistic views on menstruating were to hide one’s body and be ashamed of what they could not control. The film goes go into depth to explain that women should not be ashamed of this process and also what they should and should not do while menstruating in a non-explicit manner.
  The film was reviewed by a variety of audience members, such as teachers, the young women, and a highly qualified gynecologist were on hand to review the film. Medical terms were used and not softened or confused with obscure terminology. The narrator was serious throughout the film and the animation allowed the audience to see the cycle of life in a concise manner.
  This film was also hailed for the constant effort that was seen in the finished product, both in terms of the high production values, and in the straightforward manner that the topic was presented. The author makes it a point to show that even the title The Story of Menstruation was not sugarcoated nor treats women as an inferior sex due to the natural occurrence as some films produced around this time tended to do.