To add and/or compare countries, go to the World Data website: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-rates-by-country?country=FRA~DEU~ESP~GBR~USA
Magazines in Chronological Order
McCall's
Publication Date: 1873 to 2001
A women's fashion magazine that also featured fiction, editorial, health, beauty, and foreign travel columns.
Harper's Bazaar
Publication Date: 1867 to present
A women’s fashion magazine well known for being sophisticated and elegant.
Ladies' Home Journal
Publication Date: 1883 to present
A conservative voice for the role of women in society, featuring beauty and fashion tips, relationship advice, and domestic advice. The magazine has been continuously published since 1883 and has the longest running magazine column, entitled "Can this marriage be saved?"
Good Housekeeping
Publication Date: 1885 to present
Good Housekeeping is a source for advice about food, diet, beauty, health, family, and home.
Cosmopolitan
Publication Date: 1886 to present
Originally described as a "first-class family magazine," Cosmopolitan was reborn in July 1965 when Helen Gurley Brown became its first female editor. The magazine addressed women as independent people capable of running their own career, social, and sexual lives.
Vogue
Publication Date: 1892 to present
A women's magazine focused on fashion and beauty.
Redbook
Publication Date: 1903 to present
A general interest women's magazine with a focus on fashion and beauty.
Vanity Fair
Publication Date: 1913 to present
A magazine for women with a strong focus on fashion.
Charm
Publication Date: 1915 to 1959
A fashion and beauty magazine for the "business girl" that was absorbed by Glamour in November 1959.
Better Homes and Gardens
Publication Date: 1922 to present
A magazine showcasing home improvement ideas and projects, recipes, gardening and entertainment ideas.
Parents
Publication Date: 1926 to present
A magazine offering parenting advice and discussing parenting issues.
Bride's
Publication Date: 1934 to present
A bridal magazine with articles on dresses and wedding planning.
Mademoiselle
Publication Date: 1935 to 2001
A magazine giving young women beauty and fashion advice.
Woman's Day
Publication Date: 1937 to present
A magazine that publishes a mix of homemaking advice for the budget-conscious, parenting advice, and other money and time savers.
Glamour
Publication Date: 1939 to present
Glamour magazine showcases the latest fashion trends, outfit ideas, and hair and makeup how-tos.
Seventeen
Publication Date: 1944 to present
A magazine devoted to teenage girls and their interests.
'Teen
Publication Date: 1956 to 2008
A magazine aimed at young girls ages 12-18, discussing topics such as acne, clothes, dating, and family squabbles.
Fashion in the 1950s saw a clear gender divide. While men and boy’s fashion moved towards a more casual day-to-day style, women and girl’s fashion prioritized elegance, formality, and perfectly matched accessories. Couture womenswear saw rapid change with new designers such as Cristobal Balenciaga and Hubert de Givenchy disrupting the overtly feminine silhouette popularized by Christian Dior while novel prints and colors marked a playfulness in fashion for both men and women.
Gloria Steinem on Smith in the '50s
By Allison J. Petrozziello '03
AJP: What was different about the traditional trajectory for Smith women when you went to school here in the '50s?
GS: It felt as if everything was different, but I'm sure that's not true. I'm sure there were individual students then who understood knowledge that wasn't mainstream. But the mainstream experience at Smith really was different. Administrators, professors, the president would say that they were educating women so there would be educated children. They would brag about having four times more male faculty than female faculty because it made it "serious."
Steinem speaks to women at a political gathering, c. 1970. Courtesy Smith College Archives.
The idea was that what women were learning here was similar to what was done at Harvard. That was a point of pride, instead of saying that actually, these students are going to mean something in the outside world that's a little different from the guys at Harvard, so maybe they could benefit by learning all of history, not just part of history.
It was really very different in the '50s, not all due to Smith, but because the '50s themselves colored everything. It was very conservative. People were trying to get women out of the paid labor force and into the suburbs. After the war, the idea was to get women to quit their jobs so men could take them. It was very conservative.
What about those social expectations for women, about getting married, having kids? Among your fellow students was it, "Oh I'll just get this education and maybe get a job and then settle down and find a husband"?
Yeah, maybe you had a job for a few years and then got married or maybe you got married right away. But the goal of the education was very often stated in the way that I said: "If we are ever to have educated children, we have to have educated mothers." So it wasn't about the paid labor force necessarily at all. I can remember worrying about the professors because there were so many [students wearing] these huge engagement rings in class, each one of which was [worth] more than the professor's annual salary. [Steinem laughs.] I worried about them! [I thought] they must really get depressed by this.
Now at the same time there were people who were leading different lives. Now Sylvia Plath was older than I, but [our years at Smith] overlapped by a year or two. Clearly she was a very different person. But the dominant atmosphere really bore little resemblance to what's happening now, although there probably still was more likelihood of debating in class because we were all women. The [culture] of sexual politics was not going on in the classroom..
To read more, click HERE.
https://www.smith.edu/newssmith/NSWint01/steinem.html
Business and Jobs in the 1950s
Jane McMaster Conroy
(Updated December 28, 2018)
Business and jobs in the 1950s differed significantly from what we see today. Comparatively, mom and pop shops thrived, men were the primary breadwinners and diversity in the workforce was lacking.
Business
During the 1950s, there was a sense of confidence within the business community that almost any problem could be solved quickly. The government helped boost this confidence by imposing price controls on commonly used goods to slow quickly rising costs. They also passed antitrust regulations to prevent corporate takeovers from strangling competition in the market place. Small businesses were also abundant, including mom and pop stores such as newsstands, candy stores, shoe repair shops, drug stores and food markets. People shopped locally back then, and the small stores thrived.
Jobs
Men had jobs similar to those of today, without the computer and technology field, which wasn’t nearly what it is today. Jobs were mainly industrial or agricultural, with many men working in blue-collar jobs as mechanics, plumbers, bus drivers, warehouse workers and road construction workers. Some worked in office jobs as executives and middle management. If women did work, they were secretaries, teachers, nurses, stewardesses and stenographers.
The Economy
After World War II, America began to prosper, and by 1950 people generally recognized that the nation's economy affected every American personally. Job security, how much workers earned, and the cost of goods were all directly related to the health of the economy, and during the 1950s, the American economy was the strongest in the world.
Work Ethic
Workers in the 1950s were dedicated to their jobs, and many stayed with the same company for their entire career. They believed in following the rules, abiding by the law, and showing respect for authority in and outside of the workplace. Workers were also more formal than workers today, and those who worked in an office wore suits and ties everyday. Unlike workers today, they weren’t as aware of diversity in the workplace or of thinking globally, nor did they think too much about balancing work and their personal lives.
https://careertrend.com/info-8214885-business-jobs-1950s.html
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
Carrie Fisher’s ashes are in an urn designed to look like a Prozac pill. It’s fitting that in death she continues to be both brash and wryly funny about a treatment for depression.
The public grief over Carrie Fisher’s death was not only for an actress who played one of the most iconic roles in film history. It was also for one who spoke with wit and courage about her struggle with mental illness. In a way, the fearless General Leia Organa on screen was not much of an act.
Fisher’s bravery, though, was not just in fighting the stigma of her illness, but also in declaring in her memoir “Shockaholic” her voluntary use of a stigmatized treatment: electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), often known as shock treatment.
Many critics have portrayed ECT as a form of medical abuse, and depictions in film and television are usually scary. Yet many psychiatrists, and more importantly, patients, consider it to be a safe and effective treatment for severe depression and bipolar disorder. Few medical treatments have such disparate images.
I am a historian of psychiatry, and I have published a book on the history of ECT. I had, like many people, been exposed only to the frightening images of ECT, and I grew interested in the history of the treatment after learning how many clinicians and patients consider it a valuable treatment. My book asks the question: Why has this treatment been so controversial?
ECT’S ORIGINS IN THE 1930S
ECT works by using electricity to induce seizures. This is certainly a counterintuitive way of treating illness. But many medical treatments, such as chemotherapy for cancer, require us to undergo terrible physical experiences for therapeutic purposes. The conflicts over ECT have other sources.
ECT was invented in Italy in the late 1930s. Psychiatrists had already discovered that inducing seizures could relieve symptoms of mental illness. Before ECT, this was done with the use of chemicals, usually one called Metrazol. By many reports, patients experienced a feeling of terror after taking Metrazol, just before the seizure started. A Cleveland psychiatrist who was active then once told me that the doctors and nurses used to chase the patients around the room to get them to take Metrazol.
Ironically, given that ECT would become iconic as a frightening treatment, the Italian researchers who proposed using electricity instead were searching for a safer, more humane and less fearsome method of inducing the seizures. Their colleagues, internationally, believed they had succeeded. Within only a few years of its invention, ECT was widely used in mental hospitals all over the world.
ECT USED AS A THREAT IN HOSPITALS IN 1950S
Many depictions of ECT in film and television have portrayed the therapy as an abusive form of control. Most famous is the film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” in which an unruly patient is subjected to the procedure as a punishment. There is probably no fictional story that so haunts our consciousness of a medical treatment.
“Cuckoo’s Nest,” and many other depictions, are sensational, but we cannot grasp the historical background to the stigma around ECT if we do not acknowledge that “Cuckoo’s Nest,” while released as a movie in 1975, was not completely unrealistic for the era it depicts, the 1950s.
Click HERE for the full article from Scientific American.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/electroconvulsive-therapy-a-history-of-controversy-but-also-of-help/#:~:text=ECT%20used%20as%20a%20threat,the%20procedure%20as%20a%20punishment.