Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

History

Reader 1

Andrew Aisenberg

Reader 2

Lily Geismer

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2025 Hannah E. Lorenz0-Meyer

Abstract

In the Post-War era, women’s magazines took on a key role in cultural production, publishing literature, non-fiction articles, and advice on everything from marriage to fashion. Women’s magazines served a a form of propaganda, promoting a specific form of femininity that upheld the status quo. And that form of femininity was overwhelmingly affluent and White. By establishing magazines as a solution to women’s personal problems, editors served to shape the image of the post-war American woman. Nowhere is this vision more intimate than the way it was applied to the female body and reproduction. In this thesis, I analyze how magazines attempted to influence women’s reproductive decisions to promote mass consumption and whiteness.

By investigating women’s magazines, I show how whiteness and capitalism become naturalized through the relationships we form with our bodies. The body is a space of many meanings, meanings that have significance not simply in the way we move about our individual lives, but as representations of the communities and society we belong to. What we consume, from media to products, influences our perception of the world, the opinions we have about our bodies, and how we choose to treat them. Perception and choice do not exist in a vacuum. What we feel has meaning and power. It is only through understanding how these conceptions came to be formed that we can hope to dismantle a culture that seeks to profit off of making the female body into an object for consumption and not an extension of the self.

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