Abstract
The 1920s to the 1940s witnessed the most dramatic political and social events of the twentieth century. Prohibition, the Great Depression, consumerism, advertising, radio, movies, Freudian psychology, World War II, contraception, and adolescent culture produced a torrent of contradictory messages about women’s social and economic roles, pulling them between paid employment and the demands of home and family, showing them glamorous life styles and how to use new domestic appliances, but insisting that they should put family first. These forces interacted not to liberate women from the home but to entrench them within it. They became “cryptoservants” (in economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s analysis) with ever-greater responsibility for the emotional and physical well-being of their families and longer hours of domestic labor regardless of supposedly labor-saving devices. The interplay between women’s responsibilities in the family and the economic and cultural forces during the inter-war years illustrates the tensions inherent in their dual roles.
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Bibliography
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Christopher Finch, The Art of Walt Disney: From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdom (New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1983) contains splendid illustrations from Disney cartoons and a clear explanation of the animators’ art as practiced in the 1920s-1940s.
Apart from reading scholarly commentaries, the best way to understand the popular culture of this period is to view the films, literature, and cartoons produced. Periodicals from these years contain a wealth of visual images which trace the shift from flappers, to Depression, and thence to Rosie the Riveter. The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, McCall’s, and Ladies’ Home Journal give fascinating insights into the rapid shifts in attitudes towards women in the home, labor force, and as citizens. Melissa Dabakis, “Gendered Labor: Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter and the Discourses of Wartime Womanhood,” in Barbara Melosh (ed.), Gender and American History since 1890 (London, Routledge, 1993), argues for a complex analysis of wartime iconography. Maureen Honey, “Images of Women in the Saturday Evening Post, 1931–1936,” Journal of Popular Culture (Fall 1976), analyzes the content of this popular journal.
On radio see Margaret T. McFadden, “American’s Boy Friend Who Can’t Get a Date,” Gender, Race, and the Cultural Work of the Jack Benny Program, 1932–1946,” Journal of American History, 80 (June, 1993), 113–34.
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990) explores the role of radio in working-class culture.
Jeanne Westin, in Making Do. How Women Survived the ’30s (Chicago, Follet Publishing, 1976) interviewed Virginia Payne whose long-time portrayal of Ma Perkins gave her insights into the minds of Depression era radio listeners.
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© 1999 S. J. Kleinberg
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Kleinberg, S.J. (1999). Family and Migration, 1920–1945. In: Women in the United States, 1830–1945. American History in Depth. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27698-1_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27698-1_11
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