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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
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Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Osburn, Debra Pozega. "Women in Transitional Times: The Untold Stories of Working Women in the 1950s," Michigan State University, November 2001.
Women’s lives were much more diverse than was apparent in the mass media of the time, since those media likely were both reflecting the culturally proscribed value structure of the time and constructing a reality that the American power structure of the time and constructing a reality than the American power structure wished the rest of the world to see. A qualitative study of the way that women’s lives were depicted in the nation’s largest mass-circulation, general audience magazine of the day-Life, with a circulation of more than 6.5 million and an audience that spanned gender and ages-places the question within a cultural context, and provides important insight on the decade of the 1950s in America; a decade it is argued, that was as volatile and conflicting-ridden as those that preceded and followed it. By applying frameworks of feminist, cultural, and media theory to an examination of the way that Life portrayed women who worked for pay during a decade in which the social structure was built in part on the ideal of women being at home, it can be shown that the magazine, one of the most well read and influential of its day, also was providing a kind of rallying point for a culture searching for a sense of order and security. It also is likely that, in this transitional decade of America’s culture and social order, women were at the center of an invisible revolution that would come to the attention of the nation during the 1960s. Indeed, the one-third of American women who worked for pay during the decade actually formed a new culture-a culture of working women-that still has gone unrecognized in a society where women and the roles they play often are held up as symbols of economic success or social stability. While the productive 1950s housewife has been joined, thanks to the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, by the dissatisfied suburban homemaker in the nation’s cultural history, their paycheck-earning sisters still are considered exceptions to the rule. They are marginalized and dismissed during a decade in which they actually led vibrant, productive, and diverse lives. A close look indicates that this culture of working women served as a metaforce that made wide cultural change inevitable.
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