In “How the Other Half Read,” Erin Smith notes the struggle of understanding how working class, marginal readers might react to pulp magazine publications in the mid-twentieth century. “Although wealthy people with access to education and print media leave all sorts of evidence […] that give testimony to what they read and how they read it, the ‘marginal’ readers of pulp magazines were of a social and class position that made it unlikely hey would leave behind this kind of evidence” [1]. But the popularity of pulp magazines speaks to our ability to imply that pulp magazines did accurately represent the marginal readers’ interests—at least enough so that they continued to sell for more than half a century. We can look at materials such as ads within the magazines as “indirect sources, representations of readers’ presumed desires and experiences by ad writers whose primary goal is to sell products, to shape readers into consumers” [2].
This exhibit investigates the October 1956 edition of popular romance pulp True Confessions with a critical lens involving the assumed interests of working class women, the majority audience of such publications [3]. In looking at both structure and content of this specific publication, it becomes clear that heteronormative romance narratives are placed as the central focal point of the publication, with advertisements existing in the periphery and often validating the representation of women in the narratives. Throughout the exhibit, we will look at how the female body is represented in one of the narratives from the October 1956 issue of True Confessions. We will also look at a variety of advertisements, some of which seem to promote female healthy and individuality, and others that clearly promote products for women that are meant for the sole purpose of male appeal. But, based on how the magazine is physically constructed and the narratives that are centra to the publication, I will argue that despite the ads that seem to promote female body agency, the magazine promotes the idea that female body agency is intrinsically linked to alluring the male and that happiness depends on beautification, love, and male attention.
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1. Smith, Erin A. “How the Other Half Read: Advertising, Working-Class Readers, and Pulp Magazines.” Book History, vol. 3, 2000, p. 205. www.jstor.org/stable/30227317.
2. ibid, p. 206.
3. ibid, p. 205.