[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.”
in the upper left corner of any page. At any given page you may see navigation icons that take you further through a path or that enable you to jump from one intersecting path to another.
above to open the search dialog box.
.png){kind=link}
.png){kind=link}
.png){kind=link}
.png){kind=link}