Imagining Gender, Nation, and Consumerism in Magazines of the 1920s

Over the past two decades, modernist periodical studies has gradually expanded its precincts to consider magazines and newspapers well beyond the little magazines and the major book reviews. This coincides with a more general shift in the critical discourse to focus on understanding modernism within its historical moment—both by considering high modernists as consumers and producers of mass and popular culture (Faulkner wrote for Hollywood!) and by studying more closely the responses of mass and popular critics and audiences to high modernist works. The smart magazines in the Smart Set (see George Douglas’s The Smart Magazines, NY: 1991) and critics like H. L. Mencken have been studied as mediators between the “high” and the “low,” while work on literary series such as the Modern Library and Everyman’s Library has shown the fluidity of those aesthetic hierarchies in practice, even if notions of what constituted those boundaries remained fairly well agreed upon in contemporaneous critical rhetoric or in the cultural imagination.The expansion of digital archives of periodicals previously treated as disposable by research libraries has contributed to this scholarly interest in and ability to explore the wider territory of literary production in the early part of the twentieth century. Women’s magazines, regional periodicals, Black newspapers and magazines, and periodicals in languages other than English in particular have finally become internationally available and profoundly searchable. Digital humanities projects are underway and are frequently open access; just one example of this is the exciting new Circulating American Magazines website, which aggregates and digitizes data from the Audit Bureau of Circulation from 1919 through 1972, enabling comparisons of the circulation patterns of a wide range of periodicals during the modernist era.1Rachael Alexander’s Imagining Gender, Nation, and Consumerism in Magazines of the 1920s contributes to this body of work through a comparative study of two North American women’s magazines with similar names and similar missions, but whose divergent advertising and editorial contents signal significant differences in the imagined readerships, and therefore in national imaginaries, across the border. Alexander finds that both the Ladies Home Journal in the United States and Canadian Home Journal in Canada imagine their audiences as white women, middle-class or middle-class-aspiring, and both frame their contents as aiding their readers in becoming more ideal women and patriots. These similarities belie the ways that the two publications define nearly all of the above terms differently, sometimes even radically so; the LHJ sees femininity as ideally domestic but also as suburban and more inclined toward “increased glamour, luxury and leisure time” than the CHJ, which targets a more rural audience and tempers its proconsumerist stance with an emphasis on “nature and the natural, practicality and thrift” (90). The two magazines, she argues, both emphasize self-improvement through “character and appearance,” but with subtly different, nationally-inflected “negotiations and constructions” (91). These differences ultimately lead Alexander to conclude that while the two take the same form they must be understood as belonging to two “distinct—but not unrelated—genres” (194): the American women’s magazine and the Canadian women’s magazine. Such a distinction, Alexander argues, is difficult to discern outside of her unique comparative approach, but it is important both because it allows her to counter tendencies to subordinate and subsume Canadian print culture to US print culture and because it facilitates more careful readings and cross-disciplinary treatments of these titles in particular, and by extension, of mass-market magazines more generally.Alexander rightly identifies one of the major hurdles to a comparative approach: the sheer amount of material periodicals scholars must process to achieve a substantive account of just one title, much less more than one. But this, of course, is the particular joy and richness of periodical studies, and it is easy to detect Alexander’s intellectual excitement about the multifarious forms contained in both the LHJ and the CHJ. Alexander manages her materials deftly, balancing astute readings of editorials on the duties of a housewife and the morality of fashion and cosmetics with discussions of dressmaking patterns, cover images, and a quantitative analysis of the advertising content of both magazines throughout the decade. From the start, Alexander asserts her commitment to performing close and surface readings that allow a tracing, for example, of the “ways in which notions of the natural and the artificial were being remade in the context of modernity” (187).At the same time, her analysis is informed by significant historical and theoretical accounts of the burgeoning twentieth-century culture of consumption, the concomitant emergence of a so-called “middle class” in both the United States and Canada, and the complex relationship between “mass” and “popular” cultures in the modernist era. Thus framed, Alexander’s study does a lovely job of demonstrating the ways these two magazines are essential case studies for the complex cultural scenes in Canada and the United States in the 1920s. Her conclusion concisely lays out the significance of the preceding analysis for modernist periodical studies:Alexander underscores the fact that LHJ and CHJ editorials frequently contradicted the advertisements that accompanied them on facing pages or in adjacent columns—or even other editorial content or fiction offerings appearing in the same issue—and asserts that this is not a flaw of the form. While she makes passing reference to Caroline Levine’s notion of “affordances” here (191), Alexander explicitly states in her introduction that she is not inclined to reconstruct the readership of either title she examines. Instead she centers her claims on the ways the magazines themselves are imagining their readers, as consumers, housewives, women, and citizens. The implication, then, seems to be that the multiple and sometimes contradictory messages are a hallmark of individual magazines’ attempts to be relevant to a wide audience, and that the “affordances” function for editorial staff rather than audiences. This producer orientation also suits Alexander’s characterization of the magazines as artifacts of a “proto-mass culture” as Michael Kammen describes it in American Culture, American Tastes (1999). In this work, Kammen narrates a gradual and uneven shift from the dominance of “popular culture” (which he characterizes as participatory and local) to “mass culture” (generally passive and privatized) through a period of “proto-mass culture” during the interwar years. As mass-market magazines, Alexander explains, the LHJ and CHJ are fundamentally “middlebrow” because they play a “dual role of encouraging a burgeoning consumer culture and promoting self-improvement” (49).But is that all that is meant by “middlebrow”? How, or is, that concept related to class formations? If the LHJ and the CHJ appeal to “middlebrow” audiences, is that because they themselves are “middlebrow” texts, or does “middlebrow” define readerly orientations? Alexander’s discussion of middlebrow culture relies heavily on Joan Shelley Rubin’s magisterial The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992), which is of course a foundational text in the field, and mentions in passing Janice Radway’s equally foundational A Feeling for Books (1997), but there is a surprising lack of engagement with more recent historical and theoretical work on the middlebrow. Aside from Rubin’s own 2013 collection, Cultural Considerations, Imagining Gender might have benefitted from dialogue with the work of Beth Driscoll (particularly “The Middlebrow Family Resemblance” [2016]); the essays in Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s (ed. Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith [2003]); Jaime Harker’s America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars (2007); the work of Nicola Humble (particularly The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s–1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism [2011]); or Melissa Sullivan and Sophie Blanch’s special issue of Modernist Cultures on “The Middlebrow—With or Without Modernism” (2011). Much of this recent work engages with reception studies approaches to suggest that the “middlebrow” is as much a function of readerly orientation as it is of authorial or editorial intentions. Taken together, this body of work points the way to a broad conception of the middlebrow that is about both forms and practices.From this perspective, one might acknowledge the multiple and sometimes contradictory representations of, for example, femininity or domesticity within one issue of a periodical in order to note that the magazine form actually allows readers to “choose their own adventure” by selectively reading or skipping or skimming the multiple offerings in any given issue. If, as Alexander suggests in her analysis, the representations of “nation” and “citizenship” are consistent throughout the magazine, as opposed to those of femininity or domesticity, this reader-centric approach would actually reinforce her argument about the relative commitment to cultural nationalism in these two magazines. Femininity might be in flux, the “middlebrow” under contestation, but there is perhaps more at stake in pinning down “Canadian-ness” than “American-ness.” Must “affordances” be available to readers in some categories to enable the codification of other identities? Even without determining precisely “who” the readers “actually were,” such possibilities could be considered. This would also enable the potential further investigations Alexander suggests in her conclusion, which might query how readers who were not the white, middle-class or middle-class aspiring women being “imagined” as ideal audiences by the LHJ and CHJ writers, editors, and advertising agents might have used, remixed, or come to terms with the ideals presented to them in the magazines’ pages.Alexander closes with Patrick Collier’s 2015 assertion, published in this journal, that “the periodical is valuable simply because it exists—because it once performed some desirable functions for some number of people.”2 Imagining Gender is an ambitious, and ultimately quite successful, accounting of two periodicals whose circulation and longevity suggest that they clearly did perform desirable functions for their readers, which may—or may not—have been consistent with the functions their creators had in mind. Alexander’s multilayered approach offers a salient model for comparative periodicals study going forward, and reminds us that the Canadian periodical was much more than a derivative of its US counterpart.

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