My thesis examines the role that Ladies Home Journal played in challenging the ideals of domesticity that emerged in the postwar period in the United States. Originally founded in 1883, Ladies Home Journal emerged from World War II as the most popular and highly circulated women’s magazine. Husband and wife duo Bruce and Beatrice Gould served as co-editors-in-chief from 1935 to 1962, and populated the magazine with numerous ambitious and talented female writers and editors. Many of these female staff members also married and had children, while maintaining their careers. During an era where employees discriminated against women in the workplace, Ladies Home Journal employed women and published numerous articles supporting women in the workplace. In 1963, Betty Friedan claimed that women’s magazines only perpetuated the idealized, feminine housewife, but I argue that her argument oversimplifies the complexities women’s magazines represented during the 1950s. Divided intro three chapters, I analyze the shifting working conditions for women between the 1940s and 1950s, then unearth the working culture of Ladies Home Journal during the postwar period through an analysis of the editors, writers, and articles. Lastly, I examine three female journalists, Dorothy Thompson, Betty Hannah Hoffman, and Maureen Daly who all regularly contributed to the Journal.

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This thesis provides the first rigorous history of the concept of midlife crisis. It highlights the close connections between understandings of the life course and social change. It reverses accounts of popularization by showing how an idea moved from the public sphere into academia. Above all, it uncovers the feminist origins of the concept and places this in a historically little-studied tradition of writing about middle age that rejected the gendered "double standard of aging." Constructions of middle age and life-planning were not always oppressive, but often used for feminist purposes. The idea of midlife crisis became popular in the United States with journalist Gail Sheehy's Passages (1976), a critique of Erik Erikson's male-centered model of ego development and psychoanalytic constructions of gender and identity more generally. Drawing on mid-century notions of middle life as the time of a woman's entry into the public sphere, Sheehy's midlife crisis defined the onset of middle age, for men and women, as the end of traditional gender roles. As dual-earner families replaced the male breadwinner model, Passages circulated widely, read by women and men of different generations, including social scientists. Three psychoanalytic experts-Daniel Levinson, George Vaillant, and Roger Gould-rebutted Sheehy by putting forward a male-only concept of midlife as the end of a man's family obligations; they banned women from reimagining their lives. Though this became the dominant meaning of midlife crisis, it was not universally accepted. Feminist scholars, most famously the psychologist and ethicist Carol Gilligan, drew on women's experiences to challenge the midlife crisis, turning it into a sign of emotional instability, immaturity, and egotism. Resonating with widespread understandings of mental health and social responsibility, and confirmed by large-scale surveys in the late 1990s, this relegated the midlife crisis to a chauvinist cliché. It has remained a contested concept for negotiating the balances between work and life, production and reproduction into the present day.