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This essay examines the formation, organization, and ethos of the Folly Cove Designers group. Led and trained by illustrator Virginia Lee Burton, the Designers were a group of Massachusetts craftswomen whose shared interests in draftsmanship, pattern, and New England material culture united them across class and ethnic backgrounds. Their artistic and commercial success printing their designs onto textiles energized and legitimized their group, both as a collective of women and as an artist’s cooperative. The essay argues for the Folly Cove Designers (active 1938-1969) to be seen as a forerunner of the women’s groups and professional organizations that fueled feminist social change in the following decades.

PurposeThis article aims to explore the work lives and contributions of a group of women employed at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in the early twentieth century.Design/methodology/approachArchival source material from the J. Walter Thompson Company archives at Duke University includes personnel files, advertising campaign reports, and meeting minutes. The archival work is placed in historical context.FindingsThe J. Walter Thompson Women's Editorial Department played a significant role in the development of advertising and in furthering women's opportunities as advertising professionals.Originality/valueAdvertising was one of the few male‐dominated professions open to women in the early years of the twentieth century. An exploration of these women's work experiences greatly enhances our understanding of the field, of women's roles as advertisers, and of women's roles as consumers.

Helen Gurley Brown, diva of the New York magazine world, is best known for her 32-year editorship of Cosmopolitan magazine. Taking over the ailing Cosmopolitan in 1965, Brown transformed the magazine almost overnight, turning it into Cosmo, which became shorthand for the sexually astute, sexually active, single woman. Putting sex front and center, however, was not a new undertaking for Brown, who initially made her mark in the publishing world with the 1962 publication of Sex and the Single Girl, her upbeat guide for living in what she considered “superlative” style. Published a year before Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Brown's book counseled her readers to avoid the pitfalls of suburban domesticity by embracing a philosophy of long-term single living, sex before and even outside of marriage, and an enjoyable domesticity based on the self rather than the family. This essay explores the publishing context for Sex and the Single Girl, locating the book within the traditions of sensationalist litera...

In the 1990s, what has come to be called a “third wave” of feminism emerged in the United States. Like their predecessors in the first and second waves of feminism, who fought for suffrage and then...

Recent scholarship problematizes the dichotomous reading of the American suburb as either middle-class nirvana or homogeneous wasteland. Suburbs are spaces where race, class, and gender can be read onto landscapes in new and provocative ways. This article explores how suburban history was presented and explored in a gender and women’s studies/history course on the suburbs and their representation in American popular culture.

Using a life course perspective, we identified perceived events, transitions and trajectories in older adults' lives that contributed to and inhibited continuous participation in physical activities and exercise at three stages of their lives (ie, young adulthood, middle adulthood, late adulthood). In‐depth interviews with nine men and six women provided an understanding of how societal processes and opportunities, life course roles and transitions and individual meanings of physical exercise influenced the older adults' perceptions of and current participation in physical activity and exercise.

In the middle-class world of the early twentieth century U.S., with its emphasis on business and manufacturing, paid work, and skilled work, women who worked in the home received little promise of social status. Despite attempts to professionalize housekeeping, it remained unskilled, unpaid, and time-consuming. Women's service magazines, dependent on definitions of women as homemakers, nevertheless introduced new approaches to dealing with the onerous and stifling nature of housekeeping. In a series in the Ladies' Home Journal, the kitchenless home was introduced as a possible alternative. Proponents of it argued that, like the spinning wheel, the home kitchen had become hopelessly anachronistic. Instead, they argued, women could free themselves for paid work and other non-domestic experiences by participating in cooked food delivery services, apartment hotels, and community kitchens. Between 1918 and 1919, the Ladies' Home Journal offered its readers a series of articles on cooperative housekeeping and community kitchens. With titles such as "Will the Kitchen Be Outside the Home?" and "One Kitchen Fire for 200 People," these articles brought to a mass readership a discussion that had been taking place in feminist, socialist, and Utopian circles for decades, first in Europe and then in the United States.1 With the advent of new technologies and new opportunities for women outside the home, what household tasks would women abandon or otherwise relegate? Might food preparation and laundry work, for example, follow the trajectory of the spinning wheel and find a more suitable home in the world of industry? Some observers argued that many of women's fundamental responsibilities in the home had become anachronistic. As feminist Abigail Duniway put it in 1914: [T]here is no more reason why every loaf of bread should be baked in a different kitchen than there is why every bushel of wheat should be ground in a different mill. . . . The laundry is destined, hereafter, to keep pace with the threshing machine; the creamery with the spinning jenny and power loom; the fruit cannery with the great flour mill; the dish washer with the steamdriven mangle, and the bakery with the ready-made clothing store.2 In linking these social and technological changes to women's work, and suggesting that few if any women's tasks existed outside the realm of progress or collectivity, Duniway and others challenged definitions of the home, womanhood, individual consumption, and technological innovation. Advocates of cooperative housekeeping arrangements suggested at once practical and radical changes in a culture that looked ahead but that also invested tremendously in women's domestic roles and services. Architecture, through Victorian notions of gender difference, had embraced and promoted the ideology that "a woman's place is in the home."3 Designs for living spaces contrasted women's and men's domestic arenas, such as the kitchen and the library, while designs for public spaces largely failed to consider women at all. But architecture, as feminists discovered, also could be used as a means of liberation from strict gendered social and domestic divisions. The home, which effectively kept women "isolated from the human community," could be reconfigured to provide women greater access to the larger world and thereby equalize gendered power relationships.4 Thus, the community housekeeping movement, which the La- dies' Home Journal endorsed, at least in part, invited contemporary women to rethink domesticity and womanhood. It also, for the historian, brings into relief the ways in which the ideal of the American home resisted change by requiring women's presence and women's bodies as well as women's work. What reception could such a radical idea as cooperative housekeeping find in the pages of the leading women's service magazine of the day? It was, after all, the Ladies' Home Journal. The Journal relied heavily on the support and, increasingly, the loyalty of its advertisers, its own tried-and-true approach of validating housework, and its formula of defining womanhood through the consumption of goods. …

In the early twentieth century, companies relied on advertising to inform international audiences about their products and services, just as they do today. The J. Walter Thompson Company, a New York–based advertising agency, entered the global stage early, and by 1928 Thompson advertisements had appeared in twenty-six languages in over forty countries. Reaching international audiences and expanding their tastes required an understanding of local cultures and the ways in which they conducted their businesses, and advertisers often had to act as mediators for their clients. The J. Walter Thompson Company's efforts in Argentina provide an excellent case study of how both “local” and “global” messages of consumption were understood–and often misinterpreted–when they were transmitted to other countries from the United States.

Synopsis For decades, feminists have been arguing that oral histories of women are empowering for all those involved. They provide a voice for women whose stories would otherwise go unrecorded and offer readers personal stories of and insights about groups of women they might not otherwise meet. They provide feminist researchers with a way to uncover significant information about women and to further political causes by weaving women's stories into a narrative. Recently, however, practitioners have begun to question the ethics of oral history work. Arguably, researchers have far more to gain in this process than respondents do. This article explores several ethical issues and suggests that any oral history project should begin by asking what the researcher will do to compensate respondents for the information they provide, in an effort to acknowledge, address, and minimize the inherent imbalances of power and of benefits.

In the immediate post-9/11 world, it appeared that the retail sector might rank second to the airline industry on the list of economic casualties. Pollsters depicted the post-9/11 American as a survival-ist, sealed hermetically or at least with duct tape in a home loaded down with canned goods, connected to the world primarily through the television cable. Locked into news channels, their remotes seemingly incapable of processing connections to the shopping network, television viewers appeared unable to respond positively to the invitations of advertisers on any channel. “There are very few events that can actually scare some consumers from spending, [but] the events of [September 11] fall into that category,” stated Diane Swonk, chief economist at Bank One in Chicago.1 The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon threatened to undermine not only the nation’s infrastructure and reputation but also its equation of spending with citizenship. “There is a risk of a sudden attack of prudence,” noted David Wyss of Standard and Poor’s, in a particularly apt turn of phrase. If people stop living beyond their means, this could turn into a recession.”2 Fortunately for the economy, however, and in keeping with a historical tradition of spending, the dual afflictions of “affluenza” and “mall-aria” came out of remission, patriotism was recast as consumerism, and people quickly resumed their customary practices.3

As with other sports under consideration in this volume, cricket is both a game and a source of entertainment and identity. Although largely absent in the American sports lineup, cricket occupies a central position in the consciousness of people who lived—or whose ancestors lived—under British colonial rule around the world. It has, as a result, always been tied to colonial and postcolonial struggles on and off the field; its fans have always found meaning in a broad social context. In this essay, two different voices emerge and then merge in an attempt to explore contemporary West Indian cricket and its discontents.

Reduced bone density has been documented in children after burns. This loss of bone may place children at heightened risk for fractures. The medical records of all acutely injured patients with burns in excess of 40% TBSA burn admitted to our institution between January 1, 1997, through December 31, 2000, were reviewed for fracture incidence. Patients with fractures sustained during the course of initial trauma were not included in the review. One hundred four records were reviewed. These patients had a mean age of 6.7 ± 0.51 years, (range, 0.2 to 18.0) and a mean %TBSA burn of 59.9 ± 1.60 (range, 40 to 98) with a mean full-thickness %burn of 51.7 ± 2.16 (range, 0 to 95). Fifteen long bone fractures were documented in six patients during the review time frame. All fractures were initially suspected by physical therapy personnel upon regularly scheduled therapy sessions and subsequently verified by x-ray. All fractures identified by this review occurred in children less than 3 years of age. Most fractures were noted during the rehabilitation phase of injury (range, 73 to 283 days after burn) once wounds were more than 95% healed, except for one child, who sustained multiple fractures during the acute recovery phase at a referring hospital. A 5.8% incidence of fractures was noted in patients with burns in excess of 40% (6 of 104 admissions). The etiology of the fractures is unknown, although the hormonal milieu postburn, depressed vitamin D status, inadequate protein intake, and decreased weight-bearing activity are potential contributory factors. In addition, infants and toddlers tend to provide more resistance to therapy because of an inherent lack of cognition. This may account for the increased breaks in this population.

Focus Questions 1 Policymakers today speak about ‘sprawl,’ poorly planned or uncontrolled growth, as the biggest suburban challenge in the United States. How might this article’s historical insights about the intersectionality of race and class in suburban development and suburban life assist policymakers in analyzing the contemporary situation? 2 The article cites Margaret Marsh’s analysis of the American suburb as a ‘metaphor for a way of life,’ and explores the ways in which that metaphor has been used in popular culture to reinforce stereotypes and limit exploration of the suburban landscape. Might this argument be made about the metaphor of urban life, or rural life, as well as their depictions in television, film, and music? Author Recommends * Dolores Hayden, A Field Guide to Sprawl (Norton, 2004). One of the most prominent scholars in this field, Hayden pairs up with photographer Jim Wark to explain in text, and document visually, the most recent form of suburban development, sprawl, and the political and economic decisions that promote and sustain it. * Bruce D. Haynes, Red Lines, Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb (Yale University Press, 2001). Haynes provides the first in-depth history of a black middle-class suburban community in the United States. Combining archival and ethnographic research, the book explores the political, economic, and cultural history of Runyon Heights, a community in Yonkers, New York, over the course of the past century. * Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2005). Kruse’s history of desegregation and resegregation in Atlanta covers sixty years of civil rights activism, white flight, and the development of a conservative white political power base in the city and its suburbs. By focusing on the racially-motivated acts of ordinary citizens rather than overt racists, Kruse explores the quotidian but highly influential politics of race in American urban and suburban life. * Nina C. Leibman, Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television (University of Texas Press, 1995). Television shows of the 1950s arguably model the homogeneous – and happy –white middle-class family. Films of the same decade, however, including Rebel Without a Cause and Splendor in the Grass, reveal serious family and social conflicts. Leibman’s work brings together film and television to demonstrate that both media share not only an obsession with the American family but also anxieties about its place in postwar life. Online Materials: 1. Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/Levittown.html 2. Levittown, PA: Building the Suburban Dream http://server1.fandm.edu/levittown/three/kitchen.html These sites contains historical information and artifacts, including photographs, architectural drawings, and a whites-only lease, from the Long Island, New York, and Levittown, Pennsylvania communities that became synonymous with suburban life in the minds of many Americans. 3. The Media History Project Connection Pages http://www.mediahistory.umn.edu/ Television page of more comprehensive media history project provides links to museums, archives, and other websites that explore the role of television in American life.