Beginning with its first issue of 1945, Elle magazine was instrumental in changing the way the French saw female domesticity in the postwar period, infusing the domestic space with an aura of glamour and modernity. Newly glamorous female domesticity went hand-in-hand with images of women as voters and professionals, communicating to the magazine's readers that they could ‘have it all’ – but never to the exclusion of their primary identity as mothers and wives. This ultimately conservative postwar version of femininity came to be challenged in the early 1960s by Mademoiselle, a magazine that projected a reader unmarked by war memories and whose relationship to technology and modernity went beyond the home. Yet, Mademoiselle was grooming the fun-loving teenage girl as a consumer who would one day be a wife and mother as well; from one version of modernity to another, feminine destiny remained the same.
FCS, vie (1995), Prmted m England In 1930s France, advertisements for the Moulinex line of kitchen appliances made the claim that 'Moulinex libere la femme.' A woman's place might still be in the home, but Moulinex's new technology allowed her to accomplish her domestic tasks with greater ease. This sort of ambivalent message was intensified in the expanding consumer culture of the 1950s. The principal ideology at work in Elle magazine, the foremost novelty in the post-World War II women's magazine market,' was that consumerism empowered women:Dans la vie moderne, 1'element moteur est souvent la femme. C'est elle qui impose son style, se passionne pour 1'appareillage m6nager ... Ce sont les femmes qui, depuis une generation ... ont sugg6r6 aux hommes les chemises de nylon, se sont fait offrir des aspirateurs et des cireuses, ont d6couvert les principes de la decoration moderne. Les hommes, un peu m6dus6s, assistent a cette transformation du cadre de leur vie par la femme. Le progres, pour eux, c'est 1'auto, 1'avion, et 1'6nergie atomique, ces choses dont ils parlent plus qu'ils n'en usent; pour la femme, le progres se touche du doigt ... La revolution feminine est all6e plus loin: elle a converti la femme à l'usage du credit, lequel n'est plus 1'exp6dient un peu honteux du menage qui veut paraitre, mais le moyen 16gitime de planifier sa vie au rythme du progres ...
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