A Subjective Glance at Ladies Home Journal

What might one learn about the changes in American society through the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal during the twentieth century?

One of my less rigorous attempts at journalism research involved a look at a century of the magazine’s content for impact on “women’s roles.” for a Media Studies class, graduate level.

Methodology

I read randomly selected issues from the collection at the University of Oklahoma and put together an enormously tedious essay which proved nothing but fulfilled the assignment.  It is a bit interesting, I think and I’ve tried to summarize the more informative points of interest.

[My research was accomplished in this manner: Blah, blah, blah. Listen, when you are in graduate school and the professors like you? They let you turn in crap and give you good grades. I pared this way down for TBP. Methodology went first.]

I kept a few “typical” comments where I thought necessary.  It was a journalism elective course… not rocket science.

I consulted the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature for articles about working mothers in Ladies’ Home Journal and selected issues in a semi-random manner. Perhaps my research would be more valid had I tracked, decade by decade, to the present, but in all honesty, I was getting pretty tired of Ladies’ Home Journal by the end of that semester.

[My good intentions devolved into summarizing the content in the following manner, which has now been pared significantly, with no apparent loss of meaning.]

One would discover two World Wars, a Great Depression, the Korean Conflict, and a societal upheaval in the 1960s, throughout which Ladies Home Journal promoted the value of the home, of family commitments, and the central role the mother/wife played in our society.

During the Depression, you might have concluded that ten million men were out of work because ten million women were working. And, after World War II, juvenile delinquency was directly linked to mothers who had worked outside the home to support the war effort. Rosie the Riveter was needed at home to raise those post-war boomer babies, but she refused to go home.

The tone of the magazine during the 1960s suggested working women caused divorce rates to skyrocket and broke up the family structural unit. Topics of stories in the 1970s suggested women were forced to put their children in sub-standard child-care facilities or neglect them at home, creating a whole generation of latch-key children, according to the articles carried by the magazine’s staff and contributing authors.

(Remember that my tone here reflects magazine tone, as perceived by me, of course.  Don’t you LOVE qualitative research?)

It was neither my desire nor my intent to conclude Ladies’ Home Journal demonized the working mother. My goal, at the onset of the project, was simply to discover how and when women’s issues had narrowed to the content Ladies’ Home Journal carried in the timeframe studied. I hoped that once I discovered the era responsible, I would be able to backtrack and discover what brought it about. Then, I assumed, we could FIX it and convince women there were more important things to read and write about.

Ladies’ Home Journal was a traditional woman’s magazine until the 1990s, when it tried to reinvent itself too late. It was turned into a quarterly periodical in 2014. Some things cannot be fixed.

Subjective Pattern

Supposedly, I looked for a pattern through the narrow view of the world given readers of Ladies’ Home Journal from the turn of the century to 1999. Woman’s world was confining, defined by the interior of her home and family, with advertising targeting a woman intent on keeping a home clean and a family well fed.

As decades passed, more and more women ignored or rejected social norms and entered the paid labor force. The dilemma played out in the Ladies’ Home Journal in articles supporting working mothers rebutted by articles defending traditional roles for women. The debate reached a crescendo in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a booming economy, a mobile population, and the civil rights movement inspired millions of women to reevaluate their roles in society.

In the 1970s, things began to change and MOSTLY, I believe, it was because of advertising.

There really is no way around it. Our mothers needed to go to work to buy the things advertised on television and in magazines. Women’s participation in the paid workforce rose steadily during the 20th century, with varying levels of increase each year. Women’s magazines, like LHJ, continued to glorify the traditional mother and homemaker with stories about women returning to traditional roles, but the numbers belied the propaganda: 76 percent of mothers worked outside the home by 1995. I suspect subscriptions continued for mothers working with no time to read magazines. (Dept. of Labor statistics, 1995)

Where Ladies’ Home Journal encouraged women at the turn of the 20th century to stay home and care for their husbands and their homes, the focus at the dawn of the 21st century was the promise self-fulfillment for working mothers in the form of nurturing their children’s hopes and dreams.  We all became helicopter moms, doting on kids who now were entitled to be anything they wanted to be.

Homes and husbands had apparently fallen into the background.

Subject Matter

Magazine contributors know that magazines have a certain target audience which is specialized on certain topical themes.  However, subject matter can encompass a broad theme.  Ladies’ Home Journal was a good example:

In 1907, Ladies’ Home Journal was 250-plus pages of romantic and spiritual fiction, broken with short articles on home entertaining, an ongoing series about the Holy Land, children’s stories and songs and a variety of how-to articles ranging from tatting lace to redoing last years fashions to baking ideas.

A regular column titled “The Country Contributor” appeared each month. She (or he, since the Ladies’ Home Journal did not often publish names with columns or editorials) did have something to say on the issue in December 1907:

Blessed is the woman who is keeping home in the real sense. There are so many strangers in a strange land:…lazy women who have got rid of the responsibilities of housekeeping and who browse in hotels; ambitious women who imagine there is something broader than home — ridiculous idea! Only women who are keeping home and rearing families are seeing life — the rest are playing — and it is a stupid game.” (LHJ, Dec. 1907, pg 38).

On the first page of each issue, Dr. Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard University wrote a letter. In January 1908, he had the following to say to Ladies’ Home Journal’s more than two million readers:

“There is no question that a woman who does not pursue the natural vocation of women may enjoy an intellectual life in employment similar to men, but these exceptional women will, as a rule, contribute far less to the progress and development of mankind than the normal woman.”(my italics) (LHJ, Jan. 1908, Inside Cover).

In 1913, Ladies’ Home Journal printed articles without author’s names. “The Things Women Keep Quiet About” was a column containing stories from anonymous women about neglect, their husband’s infidelity, and fear of destitution were they to divorce.

I found a two page article of ideas home-based business options for women in 1913. A woman could sell hickory nuts for $1.50/bushel, shell pecans for $.75/pound, or tailor hats for well-to-do ladies who were so busy with charity work they could not tailor their own.

Through the 1930s, articles seemed to focus on the need for women to “make do” during the hard times. Some were optimistic about economic recovery and Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a column titled “Just Ask Me.”

Because the wartime shortage of men had co-opted women into the workforce as a patriotic duty, I expected the tone of the 1947 Ladies’ Home Journal to be different. By 1947, Dorothy Thompson, a distinguished political columnist of the era, wrote her “Peace in the World” column, subtitled “The Woman’s Manifesto” about the need for women to contribute to their community and support public education. Mothers should volunteer in their communities to improve them, she said, but —
…we recognize our primary function, and primary occupation, to be the reproduction and nurture of children to adulthood and the maintenance of the home.”

Topical Slant

Postwar (1947) Ladies’ Home Journal added a feature about medical issues relating to women. Breast cancer was discussed in an article titled “I Had Cancer” by Mary Rinehart Roberts, though she never specifically said “breast” and never talked of how she had been “cured”.  She did discuss the feelings of shame and disgrace women faced when they were diagnosed with the illness. The November issue also included an article on recent findings by Dr. Papanicolaous about the recently approved “Pap” test.

New sorts of articles about working women and education began to suggest juvenile delinquency was on the rise.  Early studies linked the phenomena to mothers who worked during the war. In August 1947 a three page article gave advice to concerned mothers on how to form “mothers’ clubs” to keep their kids from becoming tomorrow’s criminals.

In December 1947, a funny (to me) article about a housewife with seven kids told readers how she survived on her husband’s $3500 yearly salary. One photo of her hanging up clothes on a clothesline, surrounded by children and baskets of presumably wet laundry, showed a woman who was delighted with her situation. (Never Enough Kids, Dec. 1947).

In 1951, Ladies’ Home Journal editor Margaret Hickey urged women to avoid working in defense plants, declaring that the rise in juvenile delinquency was a consequence of mothers working during the war. (LHJ, Sep. 1951).

Less than 15 percent of mothers of preschool children were working outside the home in 1950.

Expert opinion on child rearing and education made their entrance on the pages of the 1950s Ladies’ Home Journal. Pediatrician Benjamin Spock became a regular contributor whose advice to women perpetuated a stereotype of mother as the sole developer and nurturer of children.
Dr. Benjamin Spock in March 1963 stated that he felt women who want to work but don’t need to were psychologically dysfunctional.

By 1970, 30 percent of mothers of preschool children were working outside the home.

In the 1970s, Ladies’ Home Journal had regular articles about the benefits of day care for children. A column call “The Working Woman” was a regular feature and assured working mothers that children benefitted from day care. In June 1970, “Why Working Mothers Have Happier Children” quoted Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim (who in the 1950s had cautioned women about their critical role in nurturing their children) in support of working mothers:

…a non-working mother is often in a poor position to give her support to her children. Having over-invested emotionally in her child’s achievement, she sees all this investment in jeopardy when the child fails. (LHJ, Jun. 1970, pg. 24).

The divorce rate and the rate at which women entered the job market rose dramatically during the 1970s. Three separate studies by the Nielsen Co., Dr. Suzanne McCall, and Ladies’ Home Journal linked divorce to working mothers. Arguments against working mothers were now blaming the phenomena for the breakup of family structure.

By the late 1970s, working women were seen as a threat to the self-esteem of the housewife. In June 1979, Ladies’ Home Journal “I Won’t Apologize for Being a Housewife” described the author’s feeling of resentment when her working friend began referring to her a “just a housewife.” The lines between the two groups were drawn.

Ladies’ Home Journal continued to defend the traditional homemaker. In September 1978, the woman’s magazine assured housewives of their social worth, comparing their activities at home of child-development, economic, domestic chores with paid employment in the market. The article claimed “the total value of all housework done by American women today, excluding child care, is estimated at $250 billion per year.” (Oppenheimer, LHJ, Sep. 78). Ladies’ Home Journal helped recast the housewife as a homemaker; ideologies to cast the homemaker as the child development specialist made their entry.

By 1980, 45 percent of mothers of preschoolers worked outside the home.

Women’s magazines tried to hold their readership by justifying both roles, but more articles appeared to support women staying home for their children’s benefit. The imagery of the “good mother” was the theme of those supporting traditional gender roles. Articles ignored household responsibilities completely and began to discuss child rearing.
In the 1970s the idea of “quality time” had given working mothers security. But in the 1980s, homemakers declared that quality time occurred only in long stretches of quantity time. In May 1984, Ladies’ Home Journal printed “The Myth of Quality Time” and author/mother Prudence MacKintosh explained that her children needed a full-time mother to oversee their development.

Ladies’ Home Journal published “Women vs. Women: The New Cold War Between Housewives and Working Mothers.” In the article Nancy Rubin quoted housewives who felt their working neighbors were depriving their children of their presence. “Working women look down their noses at us and meanwhile there we are, picking up the pieces for them, being unofficial neighborhood baby sitters.” (Rubin, LHJ, Apr. 1982).

Ladies’ Home Journal tried to support working women in the 1980s, too. “Did Women Like You Save America?’ declared the working mother of the recession was the unsung heroine of the 1970s.

In Feb. 1982, a business specialist Stephanie Winston described a frantic lifestyle of trying to do it all, never having the time to accomplish everything well. She feared her working was destructive to her family. The housewife became a “new-traditionalist” defending a life spent carpooling kids to school and soccer, with drive-thru everything a way of life for most families.

Ladies’ Home Journal continued that theme into the 1990s.  The articles for stay-at-home moms evolved into March 1997’s Ann Haaland, who is profiled by Michael J. Weiss in his monthly column, “How America Lives.” Haaland is a financial analyst who quit her management position to start a home-based graphic art business. She explained that she preferred making a fraction of her income to be available for her children.

Housecleaning has almost disappeared from women’s hands in advertising. By 1997, there were only one or two housecleaning products advertised in the magazine. Advertising concentrated on cosmetics, skin care, beauty, fragrance. Oh and lots of food. I baked a cake almost every week that semester and gained ten pounds. Talk about subliminal messages.

Analysis

In present society, mothers carry a disproportionate share of responsibility for children.  There is an intrinsic conflict between the caring and nurturing function required by children and the political-economic function required by society. The first is not profitable and excludes those performing it (women) from the second.   So, the paradox is that mothers who work outside the home are in conflict with those who do not, simply by vitue of their having chosen a nontraditional role.

Several women’s authors felt that much of this was brought on by the general acceptance of Freudian thought about the roles of men and women. Subsequent child care experts, Dr. Bowlby, Spock, Brothers, etc., accepted Freud’s notions that women recognized their inferiority to men in all things but child rearing. Late 20th century experts cited in LHJ like T. Berry Brazelton and Penelope Leach continued to see the mother as the primary nurturer of children. The magazines do not debate motherhood as biological destiny, and tend to see the child care responsibility as an extension of biological fact.

T. Berry Brazelton says he believes mothering is a goal as important as any that can be achieved in professional life, echoing the sentiments of 1907 Harvard President Charles Eliot. Brazelton says women’s guilt about working is legitimate because working mothers put their children “at risk”. (Eyer, p. 5). The term “at risk” took on political connotations similar to “family values” and it didn’t bode well for working women or children.

Or magazines like Ladies Home Journal.

Click to visit the TBP Store for Great TBP Merchandise