Reading Journals - Essay Example

17 September Reading journals: In the article about the gender norms and issues, Neuhaus examines the nature of gender roles of women in the postwar years. The article is based on investigating if the women were encouraged to restrict their activities to the kitchens for the sake of status symbol or they were pushed by men into their houses in the 1950s. While discussing gender roles, the author identifies how media played a prominent role in establishing female gender roles by giving example of a poem from one of the 1950s bridal magazines targeting women in which was stressed that fine culinary skills are a sure bet to save a married life.

In addition to that one magazine called To The Bride, about a hundred another different texts written in the postwar period are analyzed by Neuhaus in order to develop an understanding of the ideology behind female gender norms popular in those years. It dawned on the author that most of those texts targeted newly wed women thus getting them familiar with the path men wished the women to follow for the rest of their lives and which stretched from their kitchens to catering to their husband’s needs.

The article interestingly reveals how marital concepts during the 1950s set in contrast with the present ideologies by identifying that a woman was only eligible to get married if she knew how to make the best steak or pie for her husband to be. In this way the author aims to convey to the public how stereotypical gender roles were promoted during the 1950s through cookbooks that young girls were encouraged and even pushed to act out. One question regarding this article that I would like to be discussed in the class is about how women’s dependence on men in the 1950s could be demonstrated by the fact that men claimed themselves as meat consumers and women as meal makers?

Work cited:Neuhaus, Jessamyn. “The Way to a Mans Heart: Gender Roles, Domestic Ideology, and Cookbooks in the 1950s.” Journal of Social History 32.3 (1999): 529-555. Print.