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"IT'S GOOD TO BLOW YOUR TOP": Women's Magazines and a Discourse of Discontent, 1945-1965
Americans of the Cold War years are often remembered for their zealous commitment to domesticity. One prominent source identified with this cult of domesticity is women's magazines. As such, they became targets of feminist criticism. Beginning with The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan condemned women's magazines for their "happy housewife" images. She accused them of representing women as "gaily content in a world of bedroom, kitchen, sex, babies, and home," while women experienced pain, dissatisfaction, and self-loathing.1 Building upon these complaints, radical feminists took direct action against the magazines. In the 1970s, for example, feminists occupied the offices of the Ladies Home Journal.2
To this day, women's magazines of the Cold War era remain symbols of antifeminism.(3) Scholarly and popular accounts portray them as containing grossly distorted images of womanhood. They criticize them for "depict[ing] happiness where there was frustration," portraying the "home" as a "haven," and "promulgating a happy-housewife syndrome," in the service of what popular writer Marcia Cohen described as the "all was peach nectar heaven" editorial standard.4 Whether women's magazines relentlessly filled their pages with images of happy women is an important question, not only because these images can tell us much about a powerful ideology directed primarily at white middle-class American women during the Cold War era, but also because they can shed light on the context out of which recent feminism emerged.
In accounts of this emergence, Cold War women's magazines occupy a critical place. According to feminist historiography, women's magazines misrepresented women as fulfilled, thereby keeping them in the private world of home and bedroom, in contrast to feminists who presented women with the truth about their condition, encouraging them to free themselves from the bondage of domesticity. Students of women's history emphasize the role of Betty Friedan and feminists in the Civil Rights movement and the New Left in exposing the myth that domesticity fulfills. One historian describes these women as among those "finally willing to say that the emperor had no clothes";5 another as those who "like the proverbial child who points out that the emperor had no clothes" first realized "the discrepancy between myth and reality."(6)
This article reexamines the myths about...