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Unassailable Motherhood, Ambivalent Domesticity: The Construction of Maternal Identity in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1946

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: sburkeodland{at}sandiego.edu.

	Abstract

This article explores how Ladies' Home Journal, the most popular women's magazine of the postwar era, participated in the discursive construction of maternal identity as the nation underwent a critical transition from wartime to peacetime, marshalling women out of the factories and encouraging a return to domestic life. Drawing on theories of gender identity, motherhood, and the ideological influence of women's magazines, the analysis demonstrates that while Ladies' Home Journal provided a complicated—and even ambivalent—portrayal of domesticity, the magazine regarded maternal identity as an unassailable ideological position. In separating the concept of motherhood from domesticity, and therefore altering the analytical lens through which scholars have traditionally examined discursive constructions of postwar female identity, this paper finds that while Ladies' Home Journal did not require domesticity of all women, it did require domesticity of all mothers.

First published on September 17, 2009
Journal of Communication Inquiry 2009, doi:10.1177/0196859909343762


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