Roughing it in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties

by Valerie Korinek

Originally launched in 1928, by the 1950s and 1960s nearly two million readers every month sampled "Chatelaine" magazine's eclectic mixture of traditional and surprisingly unconventional articles and editorials. At a time when the American women's magazine market began to flounder thanks to the advent of television, "Chatelaine's" subscriptions expanded, as did the lively debate between its pages. Why? In this exhilarating study of Canada's foremost women's publication in the 50s and 60s, Valerie Korinek shows that while the magazine was certainly filled with advertisements that promoted domestic perfection through the endless expansion of consumer spending, a number of its sections – including fiction, features, letters, and the editor's column – began to contain material that subversively complicated the simple consumer recipes for affluent domesticity. Articles on abortion, spousal abuse, and poverty proliferated alongside explicitly feminist editorials. It was a potent mixture and the mail poured in – both praising and criticizing the new directions at the magazine. It was "Chatelaine's" highly interactive and participatory nature that encouraged what Korinek calls "a community of readers" – readers that in their very response to the magazine led to its success. "Chatelaine" did not cling to the stereotypical images of the era, instead it forged ahead providing women with a variety of images, ideas, and critiques of women's role in society. Chatelaine's dissemination of feminist ideas laid the foundation for feminism in Canada in the 1970s and after. Comprehensive, fascinating, and full of lively debate and history, "Roughing it in the Suburbs" provides a cultural study that weaves together a history of "Chatelaine's" producer's, consumers, and text. It illustrates how the structure of the magazine's production, and the composition of its editorial and business offices allowed for feminist material to infiltrate a mass-market women's monthly. In doing so it offers a detailed analysis of the times, the issues, and the national cross section of the women and, sometimes, men, who participated in the success of a Canadian cultural landmark. Winner of the Laura Jamieson Prize, awarded by the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women

Genres: Nonfiction, History

512 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2000

Reviews

[Martha]

reads like a thesis

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Examining the Canadian women's magazine Chatelaine through the 1950s and 1960s, cultural historian Valerie Korinek provides a critical analysis of the 1950s suburbia and women's roles within this space. Disputing notions of postwar prosperity and subservience, Korinek uses the cultural artifacts of Chatelaine to understand how advertisers/producers, editors, and the readers understood themselves as Canadian women in the mid-twentieth century and how this different from imagined ideas of the past. As Korinek convincingly argues, Canada in the postwar faced a much lower standard of living and economic reality than our neighbours to the south, which meant, in turn, that the majority of married women were actually working outside the household and/or budgeting their spending far more carefully. Through Korinek's detailed examination of Chatelaine issues from the 1950s and 1960s we get a far more complicated, nuanced understanding of postwar gender roles, feminism, and Canadian identity, as readers were quick to assert their voice and hold Chatelaine up to a high standard that fit within their own ideas around gender and national identity.