Trapped at Home: What It Meant to be the Ideal Housewife in the 1950s America Represented through Magazine Advertisements

Abstract

In my thesis, my aim is to explore and analyze the role of women’s magazines, including Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, in shaping middle-class white women’s perception of themselves by setting the image of the ideal woman, housewife, and mother,reinforcing these roles on women and contributing to the sexist oppression of women. My aim is to explore the effects of advertisements and different articles on middle-class women in 1950s America. I wish to deal with the question how the new social expectations toward women changed in the years following the Second World War, present how advertisements in women’s magazines influenced women’s way of thinking, and how middle-class women tried to fit into the newly set roles in the 1950s.