The Role Of Print And Television During The 1950 ' S

The chapter, From Rosie to Lucy, by James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, is about how the feminine mystique changed drastically from the era of WWII to the era of the baby boom. The shift was attributed to men’s influence on the women through fashion trends, magazines, and TV shows. The main purpose of the chapter is to show that the propaganda through TV and society affected individuals, and more specifically the feminine mystique.

In "Where the girls are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media," Susan Douglas analyses the effects of mass media on women of the nineteen fifties, and more importantly on the teenage girls of the baby boom era. Douglas explains why women have been torn in conflicting directions and are still struggling today to identify themselves and their roles. Douglas recounts and dissects the ambiguous messages imprinted on the feminine psyche via the media. Douglas maintains that feminism is a direct result of the realization that mass media is a deliberate and calculated aggression against women. While the media seemingly begins to acknowledge the power of

In the 1960’s, women had been placed in stereotypical roles for years. But women were tired of these roles and were done with being complacent. They felt like something was missing in their lives, and they desired something more. The typical American

The most prevalent and popular stereotype of the post World war II era in America is one filled with women abandoning their wartimes jobs and retreating into the home to fulfill their womanly duties. In Joanne Meyerowitz’s Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, she shows how far women departed from this one dimensional image. While Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is reflexive and focused on the mainstream, Meyerowitz’s analysis is a broader and more inclusive exploration of media, as she draws upon multiple sources. Although Friedan effectively unveiled the thought process and reasoning behind society's belief that the message of media was to make women think that their place was to be the happy housewife, Meyerowitz expanded her media archives and found a differing message in analyzing both female responses to media and exploring their stories.

Frederick Lewis Allen, in his famous chronicle of the 1920s Only Yesterday, contended that women’s “growing independence” had accelerated a “revolution in manners and morals” in American society (95). The 1920s did bring significant changes to the lives of American women. World War I, industrialization, suffrage, urbanization, and birth control increased women’s economic, political, and sexual freedom. However, with these advances came pressure to conform to powerful but contradictory archetypes. Women were expected to be both flapper and wife, sex object and mother. Furthermore, Hollywood and the emerging “science” of advertising increasingly tied conceptions of femininity to

“were forced out of their wartime occupations and into the domesticity of the new American nuclear family, many women felt disenfranchised. Furthermore, the 1950s are often identified as the pinnacle of gender inequality as women were denigrated and portrayed as ‘stupid, submissive, purely domestic creatures’” (George, 2013).

In this article, PBS explores the role of women post World War II and their assimilation into the workforce. When World War II began, the men overseas left the women to take over their jobs in the workforce. But as success on the war front proved to be significant, the men returned home and expected the women to return to their housework, leaving the business to the men. It was this development that made World War II a turning point as women fought for their equality to work and prove their ability it to the same capacity. Overall, the return of the male figure of superiority and strength sparked a revolutionary change in the cultural acceptance of rigid gender roles.

In the 1950s, most TV diversion projects overlooked current occasions and political issues. Rather, the three noteworthy systems (ABC, NBC, and CBS) created prime-time demonstrates that would engage a general family gathering of people. These real systems would indicate family drama that was recognized by its character-based amusingness and normally set inside of the home. SO in the event that you needed to realize what was going ahead on the planet you needed to listen to the radio on the off chance that you were sufficiently blessed to have one. Dark families were poor. Vagrant laborers endured terrible hardships, and racial pressures were overflowing. None of this was reflected in the realm of residential comedies. Impacts of TV in the

The advent of television also caused a great impact in the American society that brought huge changes in the economy. American families during the 1950s started to replace radios, newspapers, and magazines as the leading media entertainment with televisions. They became common for families to unite and watch TV shows at noon. “Television as a product itself influenced the economy, creating what quickly became an essential household item. By 1957, over 40 million TVs were in American households”. Fundamentally, television altered how Americans utilize their free time, but economically there was even a major impact. Businesses around the country started to use the TV for advertising and marketing to sell their products easier. TV commercials

Prior to the Roaring Twenties, women were expected to perform traditional roles: cooking meals, weaving clothes, raising their children, and doing all the different chores around the house. Women had very few privileges and liberties; they were taught to live their lives very conservatively, to be modest and innocent, having high levels of morality. The figure of the woman was actually the status quo, so they were meant to be demure; they had no prerogative to anything in society. It is not erroneous to believe that females were so injuncted to live by the standards of society that new generations availed the 1920’s. The dramatic social, political, and economic changes during the 1920’s were the perfect time to hostile the quondam virtues of

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and see to what extent women have been depicted within typical stereotypes, how they have been objectified and only seen as a sexual sell, and what consequences and effects these depictions can have on both the female and male audiences. The analysis is over two decades where major social changes underwent. The time after the war, being a housewife and mother was heavily implemented. Whilst after a decade, women started to step away from what was considered the norm, what was considered the ideal life. They started to fight for a better future for themselves, and a life free from their husbands ruling hand. I have chosen visual analysis of magazine front covers as my method because magazines were a major resource for both women and men at the time, it was one of their sources of information about what was going on around them. Front covers often represent the magazine or the audience it is meant for, and

Government campaigns stressed the message that women needed to sustain their “feminity” so they provided beautiful posters of feminine women who were nicely groomed as nurses, volunteers, or factory workers. Additionally in Europe as well as the United States, “Attempts were made to maintain the boundary between masculinity and femininity.” In the United States and Europe many women stepped in opened occupations, media affected women greatly, and even though women were raised in a feminine way they still entered the workforce and volunteered for military service.

That decade was really influenced through the technology that arose; for instance, in television shows, commercials, and movies. Talking about women, they had an oversimplified image. Meanwhile their husbands left to work as business mans, contrary wives had to stay in their suburb learning to do many chores. A photograph of an article by the journalist Agnes Meyer was a mega hit. It was debated on what a women’s real job is.

The war brought challenges, new jobs, new skills and lots of opportunities for women. Women were needed for jobs that were traditionally deemed for males only. According to Mathis (1994), government propaganda was responsible for much of the change in society’s acceptance of women in the workforce. These changes enabled women to enter factories and proved that women were capable of being more than housewives. The propaganda campaign was to mobilize women and was necessary in order to change the public’s attitude towards women. Propaganda was also used to appeal to women to do their part in order to bring their men home sooner.

The first section of Gender and the Media addresses gender representations and the beginning of feminism. During the late 60’s and early 70’s, women’s rights movements were first introduced with the challenge of the media, prompting them monitor the way the media portrayed women. This portrayal starting in the late 1970’s has seen many transmissions since. Gil states: “I use the term feminism to signal a concern with enduring gender