title
Still Waiting for Our Revolution: The Representation of Females in Women’s Magazines
thesis statement
Magazine representation of females in the 1950s instituted a shift in portraying women as desexualized individuals, to sexualized objects.
topic
The image representation of women in post-WWII America, especially during the sexual liberation of 1953-1955.
body
For this essay, I will be looking at the representation of women in American women’s magazines from the mid-1950s. During World War I, the government urged women to join the workforce. Yet, once soldiers began returning, the very same government that once encouraged women to leave the house and work, ushered women back into the household in order to uphold the status quo. Suddenly, women’s magazines halt pushing the Rosie the Riveter image and begin showcasing women as subservient, docile housewives. With women now being fed the image of the stay at home mother who should maintain the household and rear their children correctly as to prevent deviance, magazines play a pivotal role in suppressing feminism.
It is only in 1953, with the advent of Playboy magazine and Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, that a shift occurs. For the first time, women are seen as sexual creatures and are no longer viewed as desexualized humans. My paper will focus on this occurrence contrasted to the imagery of appeased housewives from magazines like My Home and Woman's Home Companion.
Moreover, I will be using Friedan’s Feminine Mystique to analyze why the images were instituted as well as Kipnis’s chapter on ‘Dirt’ to analyze the plethora of images of women with cleaning products in the magazines. I will also be using Butler’s chapters on gender performativty to discuss the ways in which women were made to appear as bland, sexless dolls that merely cooked and cleaned and performed the role of ‘happy housewife’. Lastly, I will be using images from Kearney’s article to exemplify how Playboy and Kinsey truly altered the ways in which women were viewed during the sexual liberation of the mid-1950s.
bibliography
Butler, Judith. "Conclusion". Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Butler, Judith. "Critically Queer". Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’
New York : Routledge, 1993.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York : Norton, 2001.
Kearney, Mary Celeste. "Birds on the Wire: Troping Teenage Girlhood Through
Telephony in Mid-Twentieth-Century US Media Culture". Cultural Studies 19:5 ;
(September 2005).
Kinsey, Alfred. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia, PA: W.B.
Saunders; 1953.
Kipnis, Laura. The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability. New York : Pantheon
Books, 2006.
MEGA Publishing Group. "Cadbury Drinking Chocolate." My Home. April 1955.
MEGA Publishing Group. "You’re got a wise Mummy." My Home. April 1955.
Lane, Gertrude. "Singer Roll-a-Magic". Woman's Home Companion. December 1956.
Hefner, Hugh. "Marilyn Monroe." Playboy. December 1953.
