Tremendous Potential and Easy Livin’: How Ebony and Redbook Magazines Shaped American Memory of Midcentury Black and White Women through Respect and Exploitation
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As Americans receive less historical education in public schools, digital and streaming content fills the curiosity gap about their past. Filmmakers and content creators rely on shared memory and nostalgia to construct the characters that appear in films about the postwar United States. Because much of American nostalgia for the long 1950s (1946-1964) is rooted in television sitcoms and popular magazines, modern film often reinforces stereotypical images of Black and white middle-class women in the era. In the first comparative study of Redbook and Ebony magazines and their respective sponsored films, In the Suburbs and The Secret of Selling the Negro, this paper explores how editors and advertisers viewed their audiences and how those attitudes shaped women’s views about themselves. Ebony partnered with their audience and gradually empowered Black women throughout the era, while Redbook condescended to their audience and routinely discouraged white women. Because historians rarely challenge existing nostalgia for the long 1950s, stereotypes about the era’s women endure in modern film with Black women often featuring in roles related to the civil rights movement and white women often appearing as fifties housewives reminiscent of television sitcoms.