Business Girls and Two-Job Wives

This new book is an historical examination of how popular magazines portrayed wage-earning women during the critical interwar years, 1918-1941. Although women had been entering the workplace for some time, their contributions to World War I, the passage of women’s suffrage, postwar business expansion, and changing social morés put the cultural conversation over women’s employment into high gear. Meanwhile, magazines were becoming more visual, more commercial, more affordable—and more influential. Young women looked to magazines for advice that they had previously gotten at home, while ads shifted their focus from information about products to social tableaux centred on idealised gender roles. Examining how magazines covered employed women during this critical period, this book identifies a number of emerging stereotypes and argues that women were reinscribed into a domestic discourse. Moreover, those stereotypes are echoed today in print media, television, film and the Internet.