Introduction: Women’s Magazines and Women’s Roles

Abstract

Today information, entertainment, and advice come to us from a dizzying array of media, many of them electronic: film, television, video, and computer. Newspapers and magazines continue to play a role in influencing how we dress, conduct our relationships, cook, raise children, purchase products, spend our time, and plan for the future, but they must compete for our attention with the bolder, faster images and messages that arrive in our homes and workplaces at the click of a button. To understand the different role that magazines played in the lives of many women in the 1940s and 1950s, we must imagine a society very different from our own — one in which the only two technological links between the average American home and the larger culture were the telephone and the radio. The television set was not a common fixture until the late 1950s, and even then programming was extremely limited, by today’s standards. Cable television service and the VCR were still in the future; the personal computer was undreamed of.