Ladies’ Home Journal & The End of World War II

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“War,” began Dorothy Thompson in her August 1943 column in Ladies’ Home Journal, “has a curious way of speeding up all historical processes and pushing people and their societies much more rapidly into the future.” Few might have debated her point having witnessed the United States’ technological advancements and the economic boom of its massive manufacturing efforts. Yet, what most interested Thompson was not the future of the nation’s technology or economy, but of its women. Her article, appropriately entitled then “Women and the Coming World,” sought to anticipate what a postwar America might look like for the magazine’s readers, many of whom entered the workforce and society in areas previously unknown for their sex. In her piece, Thompson boldly imagined a society where men and women would work side by side in what would “cease to be a ‘man’s world’.” A world where “father won’t come home at night dead-tired to find mother all dressed up.” A world that centered around the family but did so for once with complete understanding between husband and wife.[1] For Thompson and others, the war offered the nation the chance to revisit and revise much of what had become expected in prior years.

That the egalitarian society she envisioned failed to materialize in the immediate postwar period is hardly surprising for several reasons, not least the public’s “general desire for the ‘normalcy’ denied by depression and war.”[2] Nevertheless, such writing provides particularly interesting, easily overlooked, insight into a hope declared but not quite realized. Thompson, of course, was not alone in attempting to predict what the war’s end meant for the state of the American woman and family. Across the Journal’s issues from the period, one is apt to find the discussion and debate over what peacetime might mean for its readers. The magazine, however, never offered a single, coherent vision to its audience. Instead, as the war waned and concluded, the Journal presented competing, often contradictory, ideas for the future. Though a woman’s duty to the home was rarely questioned, for instance, the possibilities for her outside of it became increasingly acknowledged.

The aim of this paper then is to explore how the Ladies’ Home Journal’s coverage of the final stages of World War II in 1944 and ‘45—particularly its depictions of womanhood, work, and home—informed its anticipations of the postwar period. The intent behind this is not necessarily to grapple with the history of a publication but rather to understand how popular media presented the changes underway in American life, and how many responded to them.

The Journal

Over the course of its printing, the Journal has been both a source and subject of history. The former, not surprisingly, and the latter, not undeservedly as the magazine reached ubiquity in the war years and after. The most popular publication in the nation—with a circulation of 4.1 million from 1942-1945—the monthly attracted more readers than even Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post.[3] Collectively, women’s magazines outnumbered all other groups in copies sold and created more advertising revenue per copy. By 1947, for instance, the Journal received 25 cents from its readers for a copy and 34 cents from its advertisers.[4] This demand for advertisement reflected both the magazine’s consumerist-slant and the fact that “as purchaser and consumer, women had never [before] been as important.”[5]

The uneasy relationship that certainly existed between the magazine’s advertising and editorial elements will go unexplored here, suffice it to say, however, that the Journal was a profit-driven enterprise. This is not to suggest it lacked an editorial vision separate from revenue. Co-editor during the period, Beatrice Gould, professed a staunchly conservative view: “I believe it is a woman’s job to be as truly womanly as possible. I mean to nourish her family, and to rest them, to guide them, and to encourage them.”[6] Though this ideology proved somewhat inconsistent in practice, coupled with the magazine’s advertising, it attracted its share of criticism.

Perhaps most famously, Betty Friedan lambasted the Journal and its ilk, declaring them guilty in crafting the ideological “chains that bind” and “trap the suburban housewife.”[7] Her condemnation, coming in 1963, echoed similar cries made in the preceding decades. In 1946, Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger criticized what she believed was a widespread refusal to recognize a woman’s “responsibility as a citizen” outside the home.[8] Three years later, another critic argued that in addition to the “impossibly high” standards such magazines set in the domestic sphere, their approach to “real problems” were little more than “inadequate” and “uninspired” attempts to project an appearance of worldly concern.[9] Additional criticism followed the same reasoning, emphasizing the domestic pressures placed on women at the expense of other aspects of their lives.

In the decades since, historians who have reappraised the era’s periodicals, with the benefit of both hindsight and detachment, have arrived at a far more nuanced understanding. Joanne Meyerowitz’s revisionist approach to Friedan’s seminal text offered many the launching point by which to consider hundreds of articles that “contradicted the domestic ideology” many previously took for granted mid-century.[10] Others, including Eva Moskowitz, have analyzed the domestic discontent that was frequently offered in plain sight in the postwar years. Perhaps the most extensive contribution to the topic, however, has been Nancy Walker’s Shaping Our Mothers’ World, a book length study of women’s magazines during the 1940s and 1950s. Looking at a variety of titles, Walker’s work studies the role of the periodicals in American life during a period of cultural transition. Emphasizing the middle-class values and worldview they espoused and helped create, Walker, like others, nonetheless speaks to the frequent inconsistencies and contradictions persistent from issue to issue. While these historians have provided insight into the world of women’s magazines over the span of decades, this paper seeks to offer a finer focus on a single title over a far shorter time span.

A War, A Revolution?

In December 1943, two months after Thompson’s earlier cited treatise on postwar equality, the Journal printed its only published reader response to her article. A terse letter from a widowed former defense plant worker, it began: “I won’t believe it! That any woman with even 50 per cent of her natural mother instincts would have any part of the postwar world women’s revolution that Dorothy Thompson […] tries to poison readers’ minds with.” Under the title “No Use for a Woman’s World,” the reader went on to describe leaving her job to stay home with her son because “he needs me more than a defense plant does.”[11] Her sentiments, undoubtedly shared by others—2.3 million women had left factories to return home in 1944 alone—meant that if the world Thompson envisioned was desired, it was hardly unanimous preference.[12] A fact particularly evident from the magazine and its readers’ generally continued preoccupations with domesticity.

While Thompson often provided articles more discerning than typical Journal fare during the war and after, it must be noted that she was neither radical nor revolutionary. A famed journalist, her commitment to women’s progress grew from a female-focused, family-centric worldview critical of the male dominated society (“if [the world] is to be regarded in terms of primitive male activities ­— then it will go on as it has gone on, with booms, depressions, and wars”) but also later of feminists as well.[13] The “revolution” she foresaw grew partly from ideals, but mainly earnest observation. In 1944, with “nearly 50 percent of all adult women […] reported in the labor force” at some point, most in job categories and industries inaccessible prior to the war, the future for women was justifiably favorable. The war, Thompson wrote had “demonstrated that there is no field of human activity in which women cannot substitute for men,” leading her to declare it improbable that they or any “group of people who have once succeeded in expanding the area of their lives [could be] ever persuaded again to restrict it.”[14] This warranted, she argued, a reworking of the nation’s educational system—a favorite topic of hers—to accommodate working mothers and prepare for the world of tomorrow. Like other articles of hers, this one was featured within the first few pages of the magazine and offered a perspective not usually found elsewhere in it. Though, it must be said, even she was guilty of delivering a sometimes-inconsistent message.

Her subsequent columns, for instance, expressed similar if somewhat more restrained sentiments. In April 1944, she stressed that most women’s duty was, in fact, to raise a family and home—contrary to earlier her predicted “coming world.” Recognizing, however, the necessity out of which many had to work—one which would only increase in future years—she argued for a future economy that ensured accommodation of all women needing or wanting a job, proclaiming that “the stake of women in full postwar employment […] is second to that of no class or group of Americans.”[15] In June, no longer satisfied with their relegation to a single domain, Thompson expounded on the “great American failure” to adequately utilize women in areas outside of manufacturing. Criticizing the government’s “neglect” in overlooking women’s knowledge and intelligence, Thompson presented a litany of successful women as evidence of the many public fields in which they could contribute, none of which were tied to domesticity.[16] Though the article centered around wartime occupations, implicit in its argument was that such female potential existed regardless of circumstance.

A similar point was made earlier by Dr. Leslie Hohman in January 1944, in an article entitled “Working Wives Make the Best Wives.” Presenting a lengthy case in favor of women’s work outside the home, Hohman notably made no qualification on the demands of a wartime economy. Instead, upon declaring “boredom” to be the greatest threat to a successful marriage, he argued for employment on the grounds of women’s personal fulfillment and satisfaction. Some outdated assumptions notwithstanding, he vocalized the need to get out of the home and the psychological benefit it afforded.[17] Though written during war, his point was made for peacetime.

Countering his perhaps “controversial” position, the opposite page featured another article, “You Can’t Have a Career and Be a Good Wife,” anonymously penned by a “successful career wife.” Unlike Hohman, this author argued for the supremacy of motherhood in terms of both duty and fulfillment, believing outside employment a threat to both (“the most insidious of all is the danger threatening the girl who really finds her work stimulating”).[18] During the war, a woman’s choice to work was typically one of necessity, duty or patriotism, this January debate, however, anticipated the decisions to be made by women come war’s end.

In April, a Brooklyn mother of three with twenty years of work experience, offered her two cents. Deriding Hohman’s piece as a “typical male article on Working Wives,” she declared that mothers ought to be “the last group in any community to take on work outside the home,” wartime or not. Citing the sheer exhausting nature of running a household with children, she posited that if any extra work was needed in wartime factories, it was for the remaining men to do, bluntly stating, “fathers are the much more leisured group.”[19] Another reader agreed, calling Hohman’s proposal “as farfetched a theory I’ve read in a long time, and just as impractical.”[20] Similarly, she offered the burdensome nature of her household duties. While both women sided with the anonymous “career wife,” it must be said that neither’s response offered any support with respect to personal happiness or satisfaction, only duty.

The pushback against working mothers in the Journal—both as a general idea and in practice—was hardly limited to these examples either. Eleanor Roosevelt, excepting for the war, told one reader that “I do not think anyone can take the place of a mother at home” with young children.[21] One fifteen-year-old reader wrote in declaring that the wartime uptick in juvenile delinquency was symptomatic of parents too occupied with their work (read: mothers). Her mother, employed at an aircraft factory, left the house at 5:50 each morning.[22] Another sixteen-year-old girl spoke likewise, writing “some of America’s mothers should realize that the most patriotic thing they can do to help in this war is to stay home.”[23] Susan Hartmann writes of this “social disapprobation” that working mothers received, stating, “no women could avoid hearing the charge that ‘mothers, proudly winning the war on the production line, are losing it on the home front.’”[24] These feelings were neither new to the war nor restricted to it.

While such attitudes were often implicit in the magazine—it had weaponized domestic duty after all for the average housewife—the Journal did not completely ignore what was reality for many others. An August 1944 feature entitled, “What About Us?” sympathetically detailed the day-to-day life of a divorced, working mother of five. Her story was one of self-sufficiency (and a warning against early marriage: “No girl should marry until she is at least twenty-five,” the woman cautioned).[25]

We do know that the most lasting inroad the war made on women’s employment was, perhaps, with working mothers. As William Chafe adroitly states, “it was important that Rosie riveted, but far more crucial in the long run was the fact that she was married and over thirty-five years old.”[26] In 1944, for the first time in American history, in fact, there were more married women than single ones in the female labor force. By forcing many wives out of the home, the war also forced some examination of their role within it. This was particularly evident in the letters received from the magazine’s readers. One woman, after describing the host of lofty expectations for a wife in marriage, in addition to war work, wondered “what, may I ask, is the man expected to do in return?”[27] Another reader wryly responded to her question, “before you waste precious paper trying to tell husbands how to contribute to a successful marriage […] let me say you don’t. You take them as they are or you leave them.”[28] Still, other wives pondered how their husbands could be trained to clean their barracks but not their homes on return. In a survey with women working in war plants, 83% agreed that husbands should share household duties.[29]

That the war fostered questions—if not different ultimate answers—about gender roles and expectations is noteworthy because it was through these questions that many forecast their postwar futures. This is not to suggest that the Journal was not typically dominated by traditional domestic ideals but rather that some of these ideals became complicated by a changed reality. Consider even a September 1944 article entitled “Motherhood’s Back in Style” that made the case for larger families. While the argument is decidedly old-fashioned, it was careful not to exclude those women desiring to work, declaring near its close: “Not suppressing women but giving them the fullest opportunity to express themselves, and to live their lives freely and completely is the only American way to more abundant and happier families.”[30] Lip service or not, the article sought to accommodate those enticed by an increasingly freer world within traditional family plans.

An End in Sight

“Everybody these days seems to have a postwar plan,” one Philadelphia reader happily asserted, before sharing her own, in early 1944. Her plan, perhaps only semi-tongue-in-cheekily, included an over the top rejection of wartime rations, penny-pinching measures, and strained “we’re-all-in-this-together smiles” shared with strangers.[31] Another reader expressed more modest wishes in a short poem: “Quite simple is / My postwar plan: / It’s simply to / Get back my man.”[32] That the war was still more than a year from its completion made no difference to the Philadelphia woman or the millions of others who had anticipated its end from the start. The Journal shared in its readers’ eagerness and throughout 1944 and ‘45 frequently offered preview of a postwar world.

Perhaps the most commonly discussed feature of that upcoming world was the promise of a new, postwar home. In a January 1944 article, “The House Planned for Peace,” the Journal’s architectural editor, Richard Pratt, presented a six-page look into the “creation of a home that will contain, at the very lowest cost, all the elements which an age of scientific wizardry can produce for living as we would like to live.” The home he described was single-story, pre-fabricated, customizable, bright, spacious, and alluring. It also was a fantasy, “the house nobody can have until the war is won.”[33]  Planning as a coping method was evident elsewhere. An article from July 1944 opened, “Now is the time to think about the dining you want to decorate after the war.”[34] Of course, these articles served foremost to distract from daily sacrifice and worry. Pratt wrote later in 1944, “this [postwar] house contains a hope for the millions of new houses to come […] and a hope for the millions of average American families who want a better home for their money, and more of it.”[35] He needn’t have said even that much, the postwar house contained hope, period. It was a hope, however, that proved effective by locating women’s future desires back into the home.

The function of housing as a source of hope was not new to the war. In her book, Nancy Walker remarks that Journal editors made the conscious decision in the mid-1930s to feature homes just out of its audience’s reach, a decision that “tapped into the desire of Depression-weary Americans to dream of the more affluent lives” they could someday lead.[36] The same essential conceit applied here. This time, however, it was presented not as mere possibility, but “every family’s right.”[37] One Wisconsin woman stated: “Right now Richard Pratt’s homes for modern living are the main prop for our sagging spirits whenever we contemplate [our] inadequate, poorly planned—not to mention dirty—flat.”[38] A brief response from the editors indicated that Pratt’s articles attracted more mail than any the magazine had ever previously printed.

If the promise of postwar homes was widely agreed upon, less clear were any changes that might occur to the dynamic operating within them. A June 1944 article, “What About the Women?” released the results of a Journal-sanctioned survey designed to understand how wartime women workers saw their peacetime futures on the job and at home. 47% of respondents, for instance, indicated a desire to keep working postwar (versus the 44% who wished to stop, and 9% uncertain). The split between the two main camps, however, largely fell along married vs. unmarried lines. And most those who wished to stay on (87%) had already been working prior to 1941. The more interesting statistic, though it was unexplored, was the fact that 71% of married women admitted their husbands wished for them to stop. When one considers that 70% of them declared a preference of factory work over staying home, their “decision” to quit seems unlikely wholly their own. Moreover, their declared preference flew in the face of the magazine’s assumptions. The article’s author, Nell Giles, wrote that one woman spoke for most when she explained simply, “I don’t like to stay home alone.”

Despite the consensus around their enjoyment of work (79% of all women preferred work to keeping house), most nonetheless expressed a willingness to give up their job if it negatively affected their marriage (91%), or if it were required to marry a husband (70%). Giles’ interpretation of the entire survey centered around this desire for marriage and family (she concluded that the survey “clearly indicates that women want marriage and homemaking, not factory jobs”), however in so doing she failed to seriously consider how problematic the sacrifice of day-to-day satisfaction might have been.[39] Nevertheless, she did acknowledge the strides taken by women in the preceding years. Two other interesting statistics included 90% of women asserting support for equal pay with men and 60% believing that men—returning GIs even—should not be given preference over a self-supporting woman in a postwar job search.

Where Giles’ article rather favorably documented an increasing self-sufficiency in women, particularly singles, November 1944’s “Men Have Lost Their Women” offered an incredibly critical assessment of the recent history of women’s increased autonomy—particularly in the sexual arena but also in society at large. Declaring dissatisfaction and home instability the driver of their entering the world in “competition” with men, the article’s author argued that the demands placed on the worldly “modern woman” worked “direct violence against her fundamental nature” leading inevitably to disappointment for all. The article was yet another example of the conflicting images presented to women and the magazine’s inability to fully integrate women’s progress within its domestic emphases.

Peace Arrives

For many Americans, the most immediate consequence of victory in 1945 was that it marked the looming arrival of returning GIs from overseas.  Accompanying this anticipation in the Journal were instructions on how best to prepare for their return. Whereas previous war efforts forced women to enter the public sphere—be it at work or in the community—these articles spoke to more private, personal efforts. February 1945’s “What You Can Do to Help the Returning Veteran” offered suggestions for mothers and wives.[40] Others that considered combat fatigue or blindness spoke to care on an individual level. October 1945’s “When Your Soldier Comes Home” detailed many of the difficulties a marriage might face “during the stormy period of readjustment,” unsurprisingly it placed the burden on the wife to navigate the soldier’s return to civilian life.[41] And again in December, “Has Your Husband Come Home to the Right Woman?” placed the onus of adjustment on the wife.

While other Journal articles explored the war’s aftermath in European countries or considered the prospects of world peace and rebuilding, little time was spent engaging with the role of America’s women—outside of their relation to the men—in the immediate postwar months. November 1945’s “Meet a Demobilized Housewife” was the exception and perhaps was meant to sum up what was expected for all: Ruth, a newlywedded welder during the war, retreated home full-time come its end to take care of her family. Photo captions included: “I want to be pretty once more,” “No more 18-hr. days for me” and “Hurrah for a full -time wife.”[42] Little examination was given to the changed home she returned to or the personal effects that her wartime service might have. It was simply assumed that for Ruth, like all other “duration” workers—“war heroes” though they were—their work life ended with the war. Yet, the article does interestingly mention what would become a growing problem for American families: one less salary. Notably absent during this period, however, was any consideration of the shift many women were making into different industries, having largely been displaced in the factories, in order to keep their pay.

Settling into Peace & Conclusion

By 1946, the Journal had completely entered the burgeoning postwar period along with the rest of American society. Its covers—once bearing constant reminder of the war and female service—had long been replaced by innocuous fashion shots of attractive women. To be sure, articles still reckoned with the aftermath of the war, however concern was quickly shifting towards the fears that would define the Cold War (see Thompson’s “Toward the Big One” and “We Live in the Atomic Age!”). Life, it seemed, had resumed.

Yet, the magazine still grappled with negotiating women’s roles outside of the home within the domestic model it had long advocated for; a side effect no doubt of the war itself and the proof it offered many women of their own capabilities.  Consequently, inconsistencies in the magazine’s message often continued to abound. In appealing to a younger audience in January 1946, the magazine profiled the lives of three New York “career girls” transplanted from the Midwest in hopes of working their way up the corporate ladder. In March, it profiled five successful career women; the article’s tagline asked: “What has two hands, one good head and a million potentialities? If you’ve got what five of America’s top career women tell us it may be you!”[43] Granted, nearby articles still dealt with upset stomachs, grandmas, and childrearing, but the Journal made no effort to hide out-of-the-home possibilities and the success of women decidedly outside the domestic sphere.

Later that year, in two successive months the Journal’s editorial column included first a piece asking “Are You Too Educated to be a Mother?” (their answer: a resounding no) and another that stated “Women Need Interests Outside the Home” (e.g. jobs). The former, a decidedly traditional article, and the latter, anything but: it argued for women’s work outside the house and went so far as to declare that the conventional “domestic role damages women’s capacities for functioning in society at large.”[44] That the two articles could follow one another illustrated certainly the Journal’s willingness to promote different, often contradictory, ideas within its pages. It is unlikely, of course, that the same reader would have accepted the conflicting arguments equally. Nevertheless, the magazine offered them both as options. As it moved further into the postwar period, the Journal continued to offer its readers options clearly distinct from the conservative views its co-editor Beatrice Gould had earlier affirmed. At no point during that time, however, did the magazine ever move to fully embrace the society that Dorothy Thompson envisioned in October 1943. Thompson, herself, had even moved away from her own ideas. Still, in retrospect her vision serves well as a reminder not only of what might have been, but of a future many hoped for, and it was one found within a sea of advertisements, recipes, and home products.

 

End notes:

[1] Dorothy Thompson, “Women and the Coming World,” Ladies’ Home Journal, October 1943, 6.

[2] Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982), 216.

[3] Association of National Advertisers, Magazine Circulation and Rate Trends, 1937-1955 (New York: Assoc. of National Advertisers, 1956), 84.

[4] Association of National Advertisers, Magazine and Rate Circulation Study (New York: Assoc. of National Advertisers, 1948), 3.

[5] D’Ann Campbell, Women at War with America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 224.

[6] “Ladies’ Home Journal” in Kathleen Endres and Theres Lueck, eds., Women’s Periodicals in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 175.

[7] Betty Friedan, Feminine Mystique (New York: WW Norton & Co., 1963), 31.

[8] Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger, “The Women’s Magazines” in Nancy Walker, ed., Women’s Magazines 1940-1960 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998), 233.

[9] Ann Griffith, “The Magazines Women Read,” The American Mercury, March 1949, 273.

[10] Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture,” The Journal of American History, March 1993, 1455.

[11] Margaret Briggs Costell, “No Use for Woman’s World,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Dec. 1943, 10.

[12] Hartmann, 77.

[13] Peter Kruth, American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 212.

[14] Thompson, “Coming World.”

[15] Dorothy Thompson, “Stake of Women in Full Post-war Employment,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Apr 1944, 6.

[16] Dorothy Thompson, “Why Not Use Our Women?” Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1944, 6.

[17] Dr. Leslie Hohman, “Working Wives Make the Best Wives,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Jan. 1944, 90.

[18] Anonymous, “You Can’t Have a Career and be a Good Wife,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Jan. 1944, 91.

[19] Mary Melia Kimm, “Let Father Work for a Change,” Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1944, 10.

[20] Mrs. Arthur Wilson, “Wives Should Not Work,” Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1944, 10.

[21] Eleanor Roosevelt, “If You Ask Me,” Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1944, 30.

[22] Anonymous, “Parents Are Responsible,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Feb. 1944, 164-5.

[23] K.P. “Protests to Parents,” Ladies’ Home Journal, October 1944, 10.

[24] Hartmann, 82.

[25] “What About Us?” Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1944, 124.

[26] William H. Chafe, The Paradox of Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 129.

[27] Jane Skeffing, “How About the Man?” Ladies’ Home Journal, January 1944, 10.

[28] Mrs. F. Ann Murray, “You Can’t Change Men,” Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1944, 10.

[29] Nell Giles, “What About the Women?” Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1944, 157.

[30] Amram Sheinfeld, “Motherhood’s Back in Style,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Sept. 1944, 159

[31] N. Hammesfahr, “Post-war Planning Momma,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Jan. 1944, 10.

[32] Elizabeth Grey Stewart, “Reconversion Program,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Oct. 1945, 10

[33] Richard Pratt, “The House Planned for Peace,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Jan. 1944, 54.

[34] Henrietta Murdock, “A Spode Pink Dining Room for After the War,” Ladies Home Journal, July 1944, 108

[35] Richard Pratt, “The House with a Plan for the Future,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Oct. 1944, 87.

[36] Nancy Walker, Shaping Our Mothers’ World (Jackson: University Press of Miss., 2000), 37.

[37] Richard Pratt, “Every Family’s Right,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Sept. 1944, 36.

[38] Mrs. W. H. Southworth, “Homes for Modern Living, Ladies’ Home Journal,” April 1945, 13.

[39] Nell Giles, “What About the Women?” Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1944, 162.

[40] Willard Waller, “What You Can Do to Help the Returning Veteran,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Feb. 1945, 26.

[41] Lt. Frederick Robin, “When Your Soldier Comes Home,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Sept. 1945, 183.

[42] Elizabeth Janeway, “Meet a Demobilized Housewife,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Nov. 1945, 158.

[43] Evelyn Sager, “Profile of Success,” Ladies’ Home Journal, March 1946, 32.

[44] Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs, “Women Need Interests Outside the Home,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Sept. 1946, 6.

The above was originally submitted as an assignment for HIST 780 at Queens College in the Spring ’17 semester. If you’re researching the same period, free to contact me for copies of any of the cited articles (or even those not cited from ’44-’45) as I’ve got loads of them.

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