Cumulative Final Exam

SCANLON In Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture, Jennifer Scanlon points out the layers of irony in the work of Resor and her contemporaries. A woman who asserted her own independence and helped others achieve it as well created a campaign that promised to make women the objects of male sexual desire. Feminists in recent decades who have turned their attention to the objectification of women in advertising may not realize that a woman created one of the prototypes of such campaigns. Nor are they likely aware that she did so in advancing the opportunities for women like her in the new consumer society. More generally, as Scanlon observes, “These advertising women, in writing ads that provided a narrow definition of women’s lives—a definition confining women to home and market—secured their own independence, financial and otherwise.” An intriguing recent study that stresses the gendered nature of consumer culture. Scanlon demonstrates that advertisements—as well as the fiction and advice in America’s first mass-circulation women’s magazine—portrayed a society where women would find meaning and satisfaction in their lives through consumption. Lois Ardery of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency coined in 1924. Ardery and others hoped consumer goods would satisfy these dreams. Persistently emphasizing the contradictions revealed by the interaction between the Ladies' Home Journal and its readers, Scanlon focuses on how the magazine promoted the vision of women as consumers. The resulting domestic ideal, she shows, focused only on white, middle-class women but failed to meet the needs of its targeted audience. Scanlon argues convincingly that what the ads proffered would not satisfy "inarticulate longings for personal autonomy, economic independence, intimacy, sensuality, self-worth, and social recognition" (p. 10). Scanlon's larger task is to demonstrate how from 1910