A History of Popular Women's Magazines in the United States, 1792-1995

A History of Popular Women's Magazines in the United States, 1792-1995
Author: Mary Ellen Zuckerman
Publisher: Praeger
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1998-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN:

Throughout their history, women's mass circulation journals have played a major role in the lives of millions of American women. Yet the women's magazines of the early 20th century were quite different from those perused by women today. This book looks at changes that occurred in these journals and offers insight into these changes. Business forces formed a key shaping mechanism, tempered by individual editors, readers, advertisers, technology, and cultural and social forces. Founded in the second half of the 19th century, six titles became the largest circulators—Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Pictorial Review, Woman's Home Companion, and Delineator. Capturing the interest of readers and advertisers, these journals published reliable service departments, fiction, and investigative reporting; however, competition eventually bred editorial caution. This, coupled with the depression of the 1930s, led to a narrowing of content and the beginning of Betty Friedan's feminine mystique. After World War II, the journals faced competition from television. The women's liberation movement and women's entry into the work force also brought changes.

Women's Magazines, 1940-1960

Women's Magazines, 1940-1960
Author: Nancy A. Walker
Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's
Total Pages: 274
Release: 1998-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780312102012

During and following World War II, women's magazines served as advice manuals, fashion guides, marriage counselors, and catalogs. This thematically arranged collection of selections from Ladies' Home Journal, Woman's Home Companion, McCall's, Redbook, and others provides a resource for understanding how the popular press perceived and attempted to influence women's values, goals, and behavior in the postwar era.

The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique
Author: Betty Friedan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 587
Release: 2001-09-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0393322572

The book that changed the consciousness of a country—and the world. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic—these adjectives barely describe the earthshaking and long-lasting effects of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This is the book that defined "the problem that has no name," that launched the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and has been awakening women and men with its insights into social relations, which still remain fresh, ever since. A national bestseller, with over 1 million copies sold.

From Under My Hat

From Under My Hat
Author: Hedda Hopper
Publisher: Graymalkin Media
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2017-04-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1631681184

Hedda Hopper came into this world screaming, and she liked to say that she never stopped. Decades after, she could still out-shout any producer in Hollywood, and she wasn’t afraid to do whatever it took to get her way. One of the most glamorous stars of the silent era, Hopper became one of the most notorious gossip columnists in the country, whose acid wit and razor-sharp pen fearlessly attacked the biggest names in Hollywood. In From Under My Hat, she tells her story as only she can. From her birth in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, to her early days as a Broadway understudy to her rise and fall as a Hollywood starlet, Hopper tells the story of the golden age of the movie business with candor and grace. At the height of her popularity, 20,000,000 read Hopper’s column. Reading her searing autobiography, it’s easy to see why. Hedda Hopper is portrayed by Judy Davis in the Ryan Murphy TV series Feud about Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.

Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s

Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s
Author: Forster Laurel Forster
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 709
Release: 2020-09-21
Genre: Women's periodicals, English
ISBN: 1474470009

Foregrounds the diversity of periodicals, fiction and other printed matter targeted at women in the postwar periodForegrounds the diversity and the significance of print cultures for women in the postwar period across periodicals, fiction and other printed matterExamines changes and continuities as women's magazines have moved into digital formatsHighlights the important cultural and political contexts of women's periodicals including the Women's Liberation Movement and SocialismExplores the significance of women as publishers, printers and editorsWomen's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s draws attention to the wide range of postwar print cultures for women. The collection spans domestic, cultural and feminist magazines and extends to ephemera, novels and other printed matter as well as digital magazine formats. The range of essays indicates both the history of publishing for women and the diversity of readers and audiences over the mid-late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century in Britain. The collection reflects in detail the important ways in magazines and printed matter contributed to, challenged, or informed British women's culture. A range of approaches, including interview, textual analysis and industry commentary are employed in order to demonstrate the variety of ways in which the impact of postwar print media may be understood.

Forever Feminine

Forever Feminine
Author: Marjorie Ferguson
Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1983
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

Programmed Inequality

Programmed Inequality
Author: Mar Hicks
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2018-02-23
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0262535181

This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women (Harvard Magazine) In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.

The Trials of Nina McCall

The Trials of Nina McCall
Author: Scott W. Stern
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807042757

The nearly forgotten story of the fight against the American Plan, a government program designed to regulate women’s bodies and sexuality “A consistently surprising page-turner . . . a brilliant study of the way social anxieties have historically congealed in state control over women’s bodies and behavior.” —New York Times Book Review Nina McCall was one of many women unfairly imprisoned by the United States government throughout the twentieth century. Tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of women and girls were locked up—usually without due process—simply because officials suspected these women were prostitutes, carrying STIs, or just “promiscuous.” This discriminatory program, dubbed the “American Plan,” lasted from the 1910s into the 1950s, implicating a number of luminaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Earl Warren, and even Eliot Ness, while laying the foundation for the modern system of women’s prisons. In some places, vestiges of the Plan lingered into the 1960s and 1970s, and the laws that undergirded it remain on the books to this day. Nina McCall’s story provides crucial insight into the lives of countless other women incarcerated under the American Plan. Stern demonstrates the pain and shame felt by these women and details the multitude of mortifications they endured, both during and after their internment. Yet thousands of incarcerated women rioted, fought back against their oppressors, or burned their detention facilities to the ground; they jumped out of windows or leapt from moving trains or scaled barbed-wire fences in order to escape. And, as Nina McCall did, they sued their captors. In an age of renewed activism surrounding harassment, health care, prisons, women’s rights, and the power of the state, this virtually lost chapter of our history is vital reading.