Another popular daytime show was the homemaking shows. These shows covered an array of topics of homemaking issues in order to help housewives and encourage them to become interested in homemaking because millions of women left wartime employment to become full-time wives and mothers. Elain Tyler May noted in What Women Watched that as postwar women “came to accept their domestic role as the center of their identity, they sought to turn homemaking and motherhood into vocations” (Chapter 6, pg. 134). The homemaking shows’ popularity continued to increase in which in response home economic began to become popular during this period and home economists across the country embraced television as a powerful new teaching tool. Women during this time …show more content…
These homemaking shows’ tactics were to encourage and show women that being a homemaker, wife, and mother is not a lonely life or a life full of drudgery and that having this status is not being an unproductive citizen. These shows had to incorporate these tactics because a decade before women’s role were vastly different to the roles they have now. Women before were working in jobs that were mainly solely for men, they were independent by earning their own wages, and being patriotic citizens by participating in the war effort by fighting on the home front or joining the military. Their work on both fronts were dangerous and life-threatening in which these jobs were predominantly for men; many were spies, others made bombs and weapons, and many flew planes and carried out dangerous missions. All of this changed during the postwar years in which their main occupations now were mothers and housewives. It may seem that women decreasing independence and their rigid gender and social mobility made them feel limited in …show more content…
Cookbooks during this time period in the 1950’s had a significant role in society in which it impacted and influenced the domestic ideology of postwar America. Many cookbooks were created to advise women and mainly newly-weds in the culinary arts to reassure that their skills in the kitchen would ensure happy marriages. These cookbooks helped to limit women’s role to those of wives, mothers, and homemakers. They are a reflection of the 1950’s popular culture which emphasized conformity, a gender-based society, and gender norms, in which gender roles were very distinct and rigid. They are similar to television in that they can be seen as teachers because they have instructional texts “given detailed account of the correct gender specific way to undertake the activity of cooking” in which their students are mainly women pressuring them to identify themselves as solely housewives and mothers (“The Way to a Man’s Heart”, pg. 531). Because of cookbooks and its reflection on popular culture, there was a heightened emphasis during this time period on the woman’s role in feeding the family. The 1940s cookbooks emphasized more on rationing food and helping the war effort by not wasting any food and being creative of limited sources of food. However, although the concept of food is different, the domestic ideology was still the same in that these
The film titled, “The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter”, looks at the roles of women during and after World War II within the U.S. The film interviews five women who had experienced the World War II effects in the U.S, two who were Caucasian and three who were African American. These five women, who were among the millions of women recruited into skilled male-oriented jobs during World War II, shared insight into how women were treated, viewed and mainly controlled. Along with the interviews are clips from U.S. government propaganda films, news reports from the media, March of Time films, and newspaper stories, all depicting how women are to take "the men’s" places to keep up with industrial production, while reassured that their duties were fulfilling the patriotic and feminine role. After the war the government and media had changed their message as women were to resume the role of the housewife, maid and mother to stay out of the way of returning soldiers. Thus the patriotic and feminine role was nothing but a mystified tactic the government used to maintain the American economic structure during the world war period. It is the contention of this paper to explore how several groups of women were treated as mindless individuals that could be controlled and disposed of through the government arranging social institutions, media manipulation and propaganda, and assumptions behind women’s tendencies which forced “Rosie the Riveter” to become a male dominated concept.
In the beginning of television series with childless couples, the wife was the one that stayed at home, cleaned, cooked, and did the laundry. The husband was the one that made the money by going to work. Television series always portrayed women as the weaker characters. “Women in the early 1950s family were weak, secondary characters, and as such were usually dominated by their husbands and their own conceptions of marriage” (Hastings, 1974). Certain episodes of these shows always tried to prove that women should stay at home. When I Love Lucy came out with a woman as the main star, they still had her stay at home, cooking and cleaning, but still made her seem useless. “Women characters frequently were shown as less mature and less capable human-beings and their husbands often took a quasi-parental role by...
During WWII, women took over the work force, and had such inspirations as Rosie the Riveter. This created a generation of women who wanted more out of life than birthing children, and keeping a nice home for their husband. The end of the war, however, brought with it a decrease of working women. In the 1950’s the rate of working women had slightly rebounded to 29% following the post-war decrease in 1945. These women were well rounded, working outside the home, and still having dinner on the table by 5PM.
A “True Women’s” life before the war was to make a clean, comfortable, nurturing home for her
In the 1950’s, a woman’s life path was pretty clear cut, graduate from high school and find a good man while your ultimate goal is to start a family and maintain an orderly house. This is shown when Kingston says to the little girl “Some one has to marry you before you can become a housewife.” She says this as if becoming a housewife is a top priority for a woman. However presently, most women in America hold very respectable jobs and the role as housewife is slowly disappearing from American culture. Another example of modern day women showing strength is portrayed when the narrator’s mother goes on a cultural rampage and forces the narrator to go to the drug store and demand a piece of candy simply because the druggist missed the address of the house. This scene is shown in pages three, four, and five. By doing so the narrator comes off as poor and illogical.
The 1960s provided a reality time of suppressed females and overindulgent males within the society spectrum. Yet the nostalgia aspect of this manifests in the idea of the perfect housewife and the graci...
...represented an escape from the uncertainty of the future. But with the rise of a new traditional family in America, complete with strict and separate gender roles, women were denied opportunities in the workplace and forced to embrace the task of homemaker. While Nixon argued in the “kitchen debate” that American strength rested on each member’s ability to rise and fall, the marginalization of woman in Cold War culture masterfully highlights the distance between political idealism and reality.
The traditional image of women before the 1920s centered on their roles in the household. They cooked, cleaned, sewed, baked, and carried out many other domestic tasks. Even the media portrayed women’s roles through magazines such as “Good Housekeeping”, which by the very nature of the name is condescending. One editorial title was “Your Daughter and Her Job”, stating that women who didn’t do household tasks were not prepared for the f...
When America became an industrialized country, women began to loose their importance. Since many products could be bought cheaply, there was no longer any need for women to make things such as butter, yarn and other household items. ...
The article was published on February 6, 1943 in the midst of World War II. Women had become an asset to the war effort and were then considered "At Home Soldiers" or "Riveters". They worked in the factories constructing submarines for the Navy, planes for the Air Force, and became medics.
Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks they Wrote by Janet Theophano provides an insightful and well documented survey to the potential knowledge found in non-traditional archives. Thanks to the modern study of material culture, the concept of turning to physical home-goods such as quilts, baskets, and other similar items is not an entirely new concept. What makes this book fresh and interesting is Theophano’s desire to provide her readers with the appropriate tools and context from which they may be able to better understand more specific characteristics of the marginalized women represented within these pages.
Contention (Introduction): At the beginning of the 1950's women faced the expectation that they must become a housewife. Towards the end of the 1960’s, women started to believe that
“Home Economics Study Teaches Girls at School to be Good Housewives: Dull Meals Probably to Be in Limbo of Past as Result of Course,” The Globe and Mail, August 29, 1939, 13.
This statement by Druckman portrays the belief that women cook for the emotional experience while men cook for the technical experience. Research conducted by Marjorie DeVault (1991) suggests wives and mothers cook as a way to show their love to their family. Similarly, research by Cairns, Johnston, and Baumann (2010) discusses women’s emotional responses to cooking for their family and friends. Both studies highlight the emotion and nurture women feel as they cook for others. The studies’ discussion about the nurturing aspect of cooking demonstrates the traditional feminine belief that women cook in order to nurture their families as discussed by Friedan (1963) and Hochschild
In the last century, America and its inhabitants underwent many changes. From the "Roaring Twenties" to the Great Depression, and from the Dust Bowl to the ideal 50's, entertainment evolved to suit an ever changing nation. In D.W. Griffith's film, Way Down East, a young woman seeks out financial assistance from her wealthier family members. In this film in particular an ever widening separation between the classes is evident. In John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, and The Salt of the Earth, a change has occurred within the sexes, and within the struggles of working class American's. In Leave it to Beaver, American is life depicted as worry free and ideal. It is through movies and television shows of these eras that people of today are able to witness the evolution of a culture first hand. Between 1920 and 1962, movies and television experienced a vast amount of progress. During this century, as is displayed in these films, woman's roles were drastically transformed. The struggles that families faced during the Great Depression and the overwhelming Dust Bowl called on women, especially mother's, to become just as much the backbone of the American family as the father had always been. Another great change that is apparent from the viewing of these films is the ever changing fashion and the prominent emphasis placed on appearances. Perhaps the most momentous change apparent in the comparing of American life in these films is the substantial emphasis placed on the appearance of the home. Within the fifty years between 1920 and 1962 American's and their perceptions of the world changed substantially. By taking an in depth look at women's roles, the e...