Reading J. Edgar Hoover in Woman's Home Companion, 1944

A short article written by J. Edgar Hoover for Woman’s Home Companion in January of 1944, offers a useful entrance into a conversation about the role women’s magazines played in the construction of domesticity, both for its content, and for the curious nexus of state power, commercial enterprise, and expertise contained in its intersection. Written as an ostensible warning about delinquency, the narrative contains all of the elements that would eventually make up what Betty Friedan would eventually call the ‘feminine mystique’, placing an extraordinary psychic, social, and political burden on the domestic labor of women. When one pairs this article with Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers, we find a structure of expertise that both chastises mothers for spending too much time with their children as well as not devoting enough attention to their children. Without dismissing that particular hypocrisy, Hoover’s article gestures towards a set of discursive structures of a newly expanded domesticity, one that incorporates the previously excluded new immigrants and working classes, and folds them into a expanded cross-class alliance that produces whiteness. In effect, the domestic space of the home is meant to play a central role not only in consumption, but in social reproduction of the society, providing That burden is inextricably linked to the concept of futurity contained in the child, in this case through it potential threat to security in the form of delinquency. Hoover opens his article by posing ‘juvenile delinquency’ as a threat to the nation, one that has been exacerbated by the war, but was preceded by two generations. Delinquency is cumulative and progressive, in Hoover’s description of the phenomenon.

“Girls and boys who are now mothers and fathers suffered from adult delinquency of the past. If they allow the disintegrating process to continue until they and their own children are completely isolated one from the other, it is because they have never been taught how to do otherwise. They are themselves second-and-third-generation delinquents, adults in years but not in parenthood.” (Hoover 45)

The current crisis as identified by Hoover can be understood as a generational one, a crisis produced through the sins of the past, each family passing on the blight of delinquency to the next generation. It’s not difficult to see this as an obvious precedent to the concept of the culture of poverty that would become a sort of common sense thirty years later, but more significant to this discussion are the linked concepts of development and futurity, both of which are implicit in the argument. Hoover notes that the forms of disintegration in the present are easily explainable in terms of the development process, arguing, “They are themselves second-and-third-generation delinquents, adults in years but not in parenthood.” The parents of delinquents continue to produce delinquents because of their inability to completely develop, due to their abnormal parentage. One might even go as far as to argue that they are not fully modern. The parent who fails to fulfill their role as sufficiently mature parent poses a substantial threat, one that threatens to transform the current crisis into a catastrophe of the future.

Hoover then sees the mother as the key figure in rescuing the future from this present crisis, to rescue the process of raising children from abnormality, a threat that is placed in terms that would be familiar to any reader of Lee Edelman’s recent polemic, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. The mother becomes the one who can guarantee the development of the child, guiding it into the norms of patriarchal heteronormativity, recognizing the central role of women in the reproductive labor of industrial and consumer capitalism. He notes,

“The mother who does not provide that decent place is definitely falling down on her war job. Whatever rearrangement of her own eating, sleeping and working hours is entailed, she must be ready to give her children and their friends—no matter how recent vintage the latter may be—hospitality and decency. If she fails to do this she is driving them to places of their own choosing, clandestine places, where there may be hospitality, but where decency is unknown.

If her burdens are already too heavy or her strength too frail to permit her becoming a two-shift or three shift mother, she must find some way of staggering these emergency duties among relatives, neighbors, friends. This applies to the comparatively small group of mothers who must take jobs which keep them from their homes at the hours their children most need them, and to the unfortunately larger group whose families live in such cramped quarters that both old and young are driven into the streets and into the taverns during those hours when the family wage-earners must sleep.” (Hoover 47)

Hoover immediately characterizes the work of mother as labor, indeed, as a form of labor designed to support the war. Drawing on the nationalist fervor of the time, he argues that any failure for a mother to live up to these expectations “is definitely falling down on her war job.” Drawing on a discourse of sacrifice that is best described by Lauren Berlant amongst others as key to the generic form of the domestic melodrama, he places the difficulties and hardships at the forefront of this article, emphasizing the burdens of the mother, and the exhaustion of her labors. Hoover notably recognizes a number of problems that limit mothers from taking up their proper role in the feminine mystique, notably poverty, but also physical limitations such as the health of the mother and the cramped quarters that many families live in. Hoover minimizes the genuine need for mothers to take on waged labor, but he recognizes this as well. In each of these cases, he links these needs to the threat of the tavern, with its pathological forms of sociality. Within these situations, Hoover recognizes a limitation of the nuclear family form, and advocates a solution either in extended kinship networks, neighborhood networks of friends, or in the limited governmental programs set up to provide daycare or other services.

Perhaps more significantly within this passage, the labor of the mother is defined in primarily affective, rather than productive terms. Hoover already assumes an audience of mothers who are no longer engaged in primarily agricultural labor, who live without servants, and who exist in either urban or suburban spaces. Within this context, the labor of the mother is primarily defined by the care of children, or to draw on the direct language of Hoover himself, “she must be ready to give her children and their friends—no matter how recent vintage the latter may be—hospitality and decency.” The terms ‘hospitality’ and ‘decency’ play a central role in this discourse, defining both a normal and a pathological sociability in its formation. The mother’s attentive care creates a ‘hospitality’ needed by children in a manner that also creates a sense of ‘decency.’ Presumably this indicates a fidelity with the conventions of patriarchal heteronormativity, in line with the rising consumerist, social democracy. However, the potential threat contained in neglect is far more interesting. Hoover notes that “if she fails to do this she is driving them to places of their own choosing, clandestine places, where there may be hospitality, but where decency is unknown.” What is notable here are a number of curiously structured dangers. The first danger takes the form of self-organization; children might find their own alternative spaces of ‘hospitality.’ These spaces are defined in terms of both their ‘clandestine’ nature, and their lack of ‘decency’, but the full implication of those terms is deliberately left open, gesturing towards sexual deviancy, criminality, and possibly even radical politics. Through the motif of what would become the feminine mystique, Hoover marks the family as the sole legitimate space of socialization and community, the space that would regulate the forms of sociality and protect against the various forms of ‘deviance’ discussed above. As Stephanie Coontz notes in The Way We Never Were, not only were women discouraged from entering the public sphere in the post war period, but previously acceptable homo-social spaces such as the saloon became increasingly marked as pathological.

Despite these dire warnings, Hoover ends his article on an optimistic note, stating,

“In short, the situation is far from hopeless for any mother who really wants to do a good job for her children and will give time and thought to working out a practical program for doing it. And if enough mothers do give that time and thought, the situation is far from hopeless for the nation and its youth.” (Hoover 47)

Despite the strong critique of the lack of developmental maturity and lack of parental skills on the part of parents, Hoover’s article ends on a surprisingly volunteerist basis. The vast problems of delinquency and developmental disfigurement laid out in the early part of the article wind up being easily solved through the simple enactment of a ‘practical program.’ I want to argue that, in effect, that popular women’s magazines play a significant role in filling that gap, in producing and accessible and popular version of the modes of expertise, in the form of developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, and home economics developed to reconceptualize the family in light of the radical transformations in the structures of domesticity due to both industrialization and the structures of consumerist social democracy put into place to stabilize that structure. Those transformations not only took the form of economic transformations, but also came in the form of new forms of intimacy, child-rearing, diet, manners, and forms of sociality. Within these transformations, women’s magazines become a key forum for negotiating the crisis, for producing new forms of common sense built upon the normative structures of expertise contained in their pages. Beyond that, one can think of the magazines as a pedagogical space in a double sense, both creating new forms of common sense, but also as a space that disseminates the technical and disciplinary apparatuses for the collective laboring practices occurring in the household. Instead of accepting the common sense premise referenced by Ruth Schwarz Cowan, the notion of the untrained housewife, or the primitive labor of the household as claimed by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, domestic and women’s publications gesture towards an intense training process for the domestic labor of the housewife, a set of disciplinary apparatuses that links to not only the school system, but to corporate structures as well as the informal ideological state apparatus of the home. In order to do so, I am looking into a number of publications, notably the archives of Good Housekeeping, and Better Homes and Gardens from the period of 1942-1950, in order to explore the movement from the years of the war into the initial post war period. This will supplemented by both the run of the Journal of Home Economics along the same period, and the edited collection, Women’s Magazines 1940-1960, edited by Nancy A. Walker. Together they represent a broad set of approaches to domestic publications, reflecting the diversity of publications within the genre, and can provide a basis for understanding the discursive shift in domestic structures that are developed with the post-war era.

Better Homes and Gardens Consumerist Utopia: WWII

      For my research into structures of domesticity, I've been reading a number of domestic and women's magazines from the period of 1942-1950, notably Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens.  Within that context, I came across a remarkable set  of articles written in the latter publication during 1942-1943 that purport to offer a glance into the future home of the country, along with the future of medicine, technology, and other aspects of life pertinent to the domestic sphere.  Linked in with the publications push to sell war bonds, each of the articles offers a possible glimpse into the world of possibilities that will be available to families when the war is over.  Bonds are offered as the vehicle to invest in this future, to, in effect, buy a share of that future.  It's important to note that bonds are advertised throughout the publication, pushed primarily from a nationalist frame of security and contributing to the war effort.  However, the series of articles does something substantially different than the work to sell bonds in the rest of the magazine.  It links that process to the horizon of the future, a future that both can be understood as progressive, but beyond that, utopian in its most traditional meaning.  Within this context, it can be understood as part of a greater narrative of futurity, along with the figure of the child and nuclear war, which is technologically oriented without falling fully into a technocratic structure, not through a political framework, but through anti-politics of domestic sentimentality and individuation.

      The post war future produced by bonds is constructed at a multiplicity of levels.  At the most immediate level, it is created through the possibility of owning a refrigerator, a larger house, or saving for a child's education.  The publication reinforces these possibilities through select letters from readers, discussing their plans for the money they will receive from bonds.  Readers are called to recognize themselves within the monthly column of letters discussing the possible post-war uses of war bonds.  These letters continually reference and frame the larger articles written to discuss the future.  As noted, these articles focus on three basic issues, personal commodities that add convenience to domestic labor, new forms of technology developed in the war to help home construction, and new possibilities of health care.  The articles frame these possibilities in a discourse that both personalizes and individualizes the audience, drawing heavily on the second person, and often writing from that perspective.  In ideological terms, the magazine is constantly 'hailing' its audience of readers, using the forms of intimacy and the participatory structures of the magazine to identify with and feel a part of the future horizon produced through the war.  We are offered a future that is focused on the household, but one that offers the promise of resolution of not only the problems of war time restriction, but the larger issues of poverty, toil, and disease.

     At the most immediate level, the magazine discusses a number of commodities that will either be invented or be improved through the war effort.  The most significant of those discussions are the discussions of the upcoming invention of television, and the future improvement of the automobile.  Both are heavily constructed in the second person format, inviting them to imagine the future when these these home technologies would be available to its readers.  Within a Blochian framework, we can see the linkage between this sort of work and the functions of wish fulfillment contained in the daydream.  We are invited as readers to participate in a collective daydream, one structured by technological improvement, rather than political transformation.  Just as significantly, the articles bear the mark of the intersection of the federal government, advertisers, and the publications.  The article on the new automobile is a report on the activities of the American auto industry, produced through a series of conversations between the owners of the auto industry and the magazine.  It also reflects some of the shifts in expertise in the domestic sphere.  As Nancy Walker notes in her text on mid-century women's magazines, Shaping Our Mother's World: American Women's Magazines,  the forms of domestic expertise found in women's magazines originated more from the corporate world, rather than the academic world that previously defined the field of home economics.

     That shift is even more evident in the sort of enthusiastic utopian vision of the household of the future.  The possibilities of which are discussed in the February 1943 issue of the magazine.  The article immediately frames the promise in relationship to bonds,


    “Come victory you’ll find these products mean a far better house than you ever had before. We, personally, are going to be ready for it with War Savings Bonds, bought now and put away in the sock to buy this better home of tomorrow when it’s available.”

    At this point, the War Savings Bond literally becomes a sort of investment in the future, a type of savings, but also a kind of pledge to participate in that future, and a social contract to that future horizon.  The reader is invited to join the we of the magazine, an imagined audience of primarily middle class house wives, in committing to the larger structure of the nation state, one that will lead to prosperity.  That future promise is quickly linked to the corporate industries building the equipment for the war, and profiting from it.

      “Today we’re building houses much as Henry Kaiser builds ships and Boeing builds planes—by slipping mass produced, scientifically engineered panels together at the site. One type of panel consists of two thin metal or plywood sheets welded or glued to a light material, as in an airplane wing. Tho they use little material, their strength is immense, and to assemble a house from them you need no studs, no other framing.”

    The technological promise of the war is immediately linked to the corporate names of Henry Kaiser and Boeing.  They become the sites at which the future promise of home technology is invented and produced.  That production is tied to the promise of mass production, science, and engineering.  The future home is literally being produced out the wings of a bomber, or in another article, the technologies developed in the context of tank warfare in Africa.  The home is not only protected by the war effort through a discourse of security; it is reconstructed by it, rebuilt on a rationalized and accessible foundation.  In his later lectures, Michel Foucault notes that World War II was unique in the sort of social contract offered to the primarily working class participants who made up the rank and file of the military, offering financial stability and security in exchange for the risks and sacrifices made in the war.   We can see the work of the magazine in that light, both offering the social contract through the popular form of the journal, and linking it to the larger structure of the developing structure of Fordist state capitalism, linking its promise to the commodity form and the corporate state.

    We can see a mildly science fictional and even utopian investment in the future in the material discussed above, but those promises are magnified when the magazine begins to discuss the future of medicine and health care in the March 1943 issue of the magazine, in an article entitled, "Coming Miracles in Family Health."  The editors frame the article in a lengthy introductory statement.

    "You have everything.  The world’s at peace again, and your son or your husband is back from overseas.  Your home’s the way you want it, bright and cheerful with comfort and color.  Outside the growing things you’ve set out, waiting for spring’s touch.  You settle back in your chair.

                And then comes a sound from the children’s room—the tight, hacking cough of a child in pain, a child whose strength is burning out in a fever that routs sleep.

                Everything you own is suddenly drab and meaningless.  The gray finger of illness is pressing down on your home.

                In that picture lies the reason for this article, and its place in our stories of your home world of tomorrow.  We’ve talked about your car of tomorrow, and what television and lighting have in store for you.  We’ve laid before you some of the marvels that can be part of the postwar home your War Savings Bonds will buy—and we’re going to tell you much more about that home in coming issues.

                But none of it can mean anything while there’s sickness in your family.  This article will tell you about the wonderfully fascinating things that are being done to destroy the power of many illnesses to touch you and  yours.”—Editor

     Without going through the entire introduction, 'you' are once again offered to imagine the promised future of the post-war era, defined by domestic peace, happiness, and economic security.  That promise is interrupted by illness, which threatens to destroy that happiness and security, literally draining the color from the many bright commodities of the home.  Illness becomes the last remaining threat to the new world created by savings bonds and the technologies developed by the war.  We're quickly told that these threats too will be removed.  Author Donald Cooley notes just above the Editor's introduction, “You and your family will escape tomorrow from many of the ailments, great and small, which plague you today. From colds to cancer, illnesses are yielding their secrets to the men who are bent on destroying them.”  Technology, often linked to war production, will once again solve the problems of the current situation.  The article then lists the future maladies to be resolved through these new inventions, from cures of the common cold and cancer, to child birth without pain.  The connection to the war is made through a number of rhetorical choices of the publication, "light that blitzes germs," for instance.  If the war effort will translate into a new physical home, it will also translate into new techniques and technologies developed to combat and destroy the diseases that threaten it.

     We can see a series of domestic, commercial, and national discourses being created and enforced through a narrative that can only be called 'science fictional' in its emphasis on the future promise of social investment and new technology.  Even more than that, the very structure of the home and of domesticity is being constructed within that narrative, one that makes the extraordinary promises and demands that create the feminine mystique in the post war years.  We can see the construction of a post-war consensus that is built of the combination of domestic expertise, technology, and the labor of the housewife.  Is it terribly surprising that science fiction becomes a major literary form to challenge and re-imagine these structures?  After all, the codes of the domestic discourse they challenge and rewrite has its origins, in part, in the futurity of science fiction, and its promise linked to the forms of wish fulfillment offered in the utopian form.