Fashioning Teenagers by Kelley Massoni

Author:Kelley Massoni [Massoni, Kelley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9781315428512
Google: eclmDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-06-16T03:23:14+00:00

Sterling Silver Dreams

Body care products and their use were just the first step toward romance and marriage, however. Advertisements for domestic goods began to appear in the pages of Seventeen magazine in the postwar period, pitching marriage and homemaking along with their products. As precursors of the domestic ideal that would fully develop in the 1950s, these purveyors of the tools of housekeeping and hostessing equipped Seventeen’s teen girl readers for an idealized feminine adulthood—Destination: Domesticity.

The rise of domestic advertisements in postwar Seventeen mirrored the shift that took place in American society as domesticity (re)emerged as women’s ideal role—and home, her ideal workplace—after a short-lived wartime sabbatical. Although advertisements for domestic products didn’t begin to approach the numbers of either body wear or body care advertisements in postwar Seventeen, they did move from last to third place in five years’ time. In addition, domestic advertisements occupied the prime sales territory in Seventeen, their full-page color ads located in the influential first-well section of the magazine. Much like the body care advertisers, they used their prestigious position as a bully pulpit, offering the teen readership an advanced course in Ideal Womanhood 101.

Domestic ads in Seventeen didn’t just increase from war to postwar period, however; they metamorphosed. During the war period, the few domestic ads that appeared in the magazine’s pages sold laundry soap, fabric, and bedding. Wartime advertisers promoted these items in a kind of gender-generic way—that is, as products to be used by people in a variety of settings. For example, an August 1945 advertisement for the Bates Company displayed its bedspreads and drapes in a college dorm room with a male inhabitant (sporting saddle shoes and letter sweater).75 Other war period domestic ads featured fabric displayed unaccompanied by any human models.76 During the postwar period, however, domestic ads became more gendered, promoting products to women for use in household settings. In their postwar scenarios, these advertisers portrayed girls and women as domestic producers and consumers, boys and men as domestic receivers, and the home as a woman’s world.

In the period from September 1949 to September 1950, twenty-two manufacturers advertised the “necessities” of postpubescent feminine domesticity: silverware, hope chests, culinary products and tools, and home decorating items. Half of these advertisers marketed their products specifically to teen girls, led by the representatives of the sterling silver industry. Indeed, sterling silver advertisers became a major advertising presence in postwar Seventeen, their wares prominently displayed in full-page color ads in the most prestigious areas of the magazine. These ads often featured teen girl models, but perhaps more importantly—and very much like some body care ads and the editorial voice of the magazine itself—they directly engaged Seventeen’s readers, referring to them individually as “you,” and addressing them either from a caring adult authority standpoint or as a teen girl confidante. Using this intimate conversational style, manufacturers such as Gorham, International, Towle, and Reed & Barton spooned out heaping helpings of advice about both sterling silver tableware and the domestic lifestyle, enhanced with exclamation

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