Women and Society

 In the presentation, we learned about women and cultures during the post-war era. We learned about women's representation in magazines and media advertisements. The way women were portrayed in media shaped how viewers would perceive these women in these advertisements. From their fashion to their sizes, and their looks and their values there was a lack of representation in this magazine. In the magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, the magazine would emphasize the traditional gender roles women should partake in. In an ad from the 1950s in a magazine, the title of the ad is “Women don't leave the Kitchen!“  it shows a woman watching her husband and son playing outside while she doing the dishes. These show the traditional gender roles of women that society sets. The roles that women should stay in the kitchen and do more of the work around and inside the house. 

The way the women are dressed in these magazines shows the differences in fashion and the expectations we have set for women in America during the 1950s-1960s. In all the ads the women are wearing skirts with freshly ironed shirts with heels. They mainly wear dresses.  As I did my research there was not a single image of women wearing pants. In these advertisements, the women had freshly done hair and makeup. Brands while promoting their products would use their clothing as a way of explaining why their husbands love them.  

In these magazines, there was a lack of representation for minorities in the images. The magazines mainly catered to richer middle-class white women. All of the ads had images of mainly white people. 

These magazines set an unrealistic standard of how we should perceive women and how society should expect them to act and look. I feel that in the times of 1950s-1960s and the post-war era, this created a lot of conflict for women, who did not fit the traditional gender roles. It feels like society was trying to force women into being something that they wanted them to be and not what the women themselves were.