After World War II, women were left questioning their social role.
[1] 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.
[2] 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.
[3] 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.
[4] 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.”
[5] 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.
[6] 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.”
[7] 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.”
[8] 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.
[1] 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.”
[2] 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.
[3] 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.
[6] 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.”
[7] Elaine Tyler May, introduction to
Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 5.
[8] 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.”
