Business Girls & Two-Job Wives: Emerging Media Stereotypes of Employed Women

Marcellus, Jane. Business Girls & Two-Job Wives: Emerging Media Stereotypes of Employed Women. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2011. 277 pp. $29.95. Magazines between the two world wars were filled with images of employed women. Jane Marcellus of Middle Tennessee State University effectively argues that these representations worked towaid reinscribing women into the domestic role despite recent political and social advances. Choosing not to use the more common label working women, which implies that women's unpaid labor in the home is not work, she identifies and categorizes the portrayals of employed women in a spectrum of magazine articles, fiction, advertising, and illustrations that reinforced the construction of gender that equated women with die domestic sphere and femininity with culturally defined beauty. Images of women of the 1920s tend to be associated almost exclusively with the flapper, and with photojoumalism's help the remembered image of the 1930s is one of a weather-worn mother of the depression. Absent in public memory is the abundance of images of employed women during these decades, the symbolic annihilation serving the function of erasing women's reality from history. The business girl was conflated with modern office machinery, most notably the typewriter, while the office wife was a helpmate of the male boss. Women professionals were depicted as experts, their status used to hawk household products, and as exceptions to the social norm. Perhaps the most controversial portrayal was the two-job wife: the mother who also worked outside the home. The majority of the representations remained relatively stable across the two decidedly different decades. Embedded in the representations was the symbolism of women's bodies, with tall, thin women as stand-ins for modernity and rounder women representing traditional roles and values. Despite this reliance on women's bodies, health concerns were generally not addressed, even in the women's magazines. Neither was advice on homework balance or child-care options proffered. Notwithstanding the occasional appearance of Aunt Jemima - who, it must be noted, was thought to be based on a real person - black women were absent in mainstream media. Therefore, Marcellus referenced publications of African-American organizations to reveal how assumptions of race underlay mainstream representation of gender. The NAACP publication, The Crisis, did not characterize the employed black mother as a conflicted two-job wife who belonged in the home but rather portrayed her as someone who made sacrifices in order to better the lives of her children and to advance society. In similar fashion, more positive images and relevant discussions regarding employed white women were prevalent in the business women's magazine, Independent Woman. …