Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies' Home Journal, Gender and the Promise of Consumer Culture [Paperback]

Inarticulate Longings explores the contradictions of a social agenda for women that promoted both traditional roles and the promises of a growing consumer culture by examining the advertising industry in the early 20th century.A Profile of the Ladies Home Journal, Housekeeping, Women's Paid work, Stoves for Women, Votes for Men; The Amateur rebel, Advertising Women, every Women is Interested in This.Inarticulate Longings explores the contradictions of a social agenda for women that promoted both traditional roles and the promises of a growing consumer culture by examining the advertising industry in the early 20th century.Jennifer Scanlon is William R. Kenan Professor of the Humanities in Gender and Women's Studies at Bowdoin College. Combining attention to textual complexities and contradictions with a clear analytical and critical voice, Scanlon succeeds in showing how mass culture can be both powerful and pleasurable. This is a significant accomplishment. -- Journal of American History
Scanlon provides a very useful analysis of the production of an important cultural artifact, demonstrating that the Ladies' Home Journal offered its readers a much more complex package of options than we have heretofore realized. -- American Historical Review
Jennifer Scanlon has written a thoughtful and elegant study of the relationship between magazines, consumer culture, and the construction of womanhood in the first decade of the twentieth century. -- The Historian
This fascinating study of the Ladies Home Journal is sure to interest scholars and generalists particularly intrigued by the many ironies of 20th century consumer culture, perhaps the most vivid of which is Scanlon's description of how it came to be that women and men who carefully crafted the conventions of whil³>