What are the answers ?

Week 12: Mothers were working full time outside of the house instead of being housewives. Did this lead to the targeted advertising on television made for women to increase their family purchasing to actually decrease?

Network executives and sponsors were targeting women at home to purchase items. “We’re after a specific audience, the young housewife- one cut above the teenager- with two or four kids, who has to buy clothing, the food, the soaps, the home remedies” (577). They were targeting stay at home mothers to buy items that housewives would be needing.

During the 1950s, there was a growing number of mothers in the work force. One out of three wives were wage earners and one out of five mothers of young children were working outside of their homes (590).

Many women claimed that working made them a better mother as well as a happier one. Now, because mothers were working and did not have time to watch television, does this mean that they also decreased their purchasing? Did they buy less items, which leads for the advertisers to make less profits/money?

Week 12: How did the Civil Rights Movement affect motherhood for women during the Civil Rights Years?

In the primary source Is a Working Mother a Threat to the Home, it states that during the 1950s, public policy experts extensively studied the question of the working wife and mother. An ex-working mother reported, “I am now a better mother. I know I am a happier one”. This primary source consists of a forum assembled by the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1958 to address the question of whether mothers of young children should work.

Women who supported the civil rights movement through their unions or through middle class organizations like YWCA were responding to one of the most potent movements for social change of the twentieth century, the civil rights campaign of the postwar years. How does the civil rights movement correlate with the increase in women of all colors in the workforce? How does this affect the women’s motherhood and domestic life?

My question today is how does this information tie in together? How did the Civil Rights Movement affect motherhood for women during this time?