Women’s Pages, Women’s Clubs and Wearing White Gloves
I am finishing up a paper for the upcoming AEJMC Convention in St. Louis. It is part of the Research Panel Session: Mad Men, Working Women, and History. My paper is called “Mad Men and Reasonable Women: Selling Bras Rather Than Burning Them.”
I am going to focus on how women were making some inroads in 1960s adverting in products aimed at women, arguing that the selling of lipstick or bras should not be looked at as “lesser than” the selling of other products especially at a time when there were limited areas for women to claim authority. For a framework, I am making a comparison of Mad Men’s Peggy to Helen Gurley Brown who was a successful advertising copywriter before her time at Cosmo. I am concluding with the idea of re-considering Betty’s limited housewife role as she was also a clubwoman – an often ignored important role for women in communities.
It is the clubwomen and their work that was covered in the women’s pages of newspapers. In re-watching Mad Men episodes, I was struck by the white gloves of the 1960s era. This led me to look back at some of my women’s page images. I noted that there were several images of the women’s pages journalists wearing hats and gloves, such as the above image of Marie Anderson and Dorothy Junrey – the one wearing the gloves in steamy Miami.
