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The Ladies' Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture. Jennifer Scanlon. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Reflecting current scholarly interest in massmarket magazines, advertising, and consumption, Jennifer Scanlon undertakes a feminist study of the Ladies' Home Journal between 1910 and 1930. The choice of these two decades seems an odd one, given the profound cultural changes after World War I, as well as the fact that Edward Bok, the Journal's powerful editor, retired in 1920. Although recent books have dated the creation of a mass-market audience and the concomitant rise of advertising and consumerism to the decades surrounding the turn of the century, Scanlon argues that during the two decades she covers mass culture "carv[ed] out a limited definition of a mass audience," and the Journal, more specifically, constructed "the story of a common woman, the 'average' woman,...