Gender and Representation

1950s romance comics feature plenty of female characters, although I doubt any of the comics themselves would pass the Bechdel test [1]. A simple Google search of ‘ young romance comics’ yields a huge amount of results, and the majority of the most popular images depict a young, white woman in distress- her big beautiful eyes brimming with tears (the thick, spidery mascara never budges an inch.) When I first saw these images, I could only feel a slight sadness for the young, impressionable girls of the 1950s, who sought tales of love and romance with eager eyes only to be greeted with image after image of women clearly in turmoil, not a particularly positive representation of both women, and indeed love itself.

If I were to appear in of the aforementioned comic strips I may have looked like the image below.

Ink and Brush line work in the style of Jack Kirby 

 During 1947 comic book artists Jack Kirby and Joe Simon were inspired by the success of the ‘True Story' magazine [2], a publication which features anecdotal experiences submitted by readers and covered topics such as affairs, pre marital relationships and unemployment. After World War Two there were a decline in superhero comic books, and so ‘Young Romance’ was born and became hugely popular. Tales of love, jealously and heartbreak adorned the pages, although also reflected the changing ideals of the American dating scene. Whereas the 1920s True Story magazine featured stories of drinking and dancing, the Young Romance comics reinforce the practise of ‘going steady’. According to Linda Lindquist Dorr in her piece ‘The Perils of the backseat: Date Rape, Race and Gender in 1950s America; she describes going steady as: ‘Starting as early as junior high, boys and girls paired off into exclusive relationships that could last anywhere from a few days to a few years.’ [3] Compared to the 1920s and 1930s, where both men and women were able to date freely [4], by the 1950s the whole scene had changed and young adults felt pressure to meet one partner and then settle down. As Dorr goes on to suggest, this may have offered a type of stability that the people of 1950s America were craving at a particularly unstable time.

Although at a first glance I once thought these depictions of women in ‘Young Romance’ were belittling and unrealistic, when looking at the pressures women were facing in 1950s America I would probably be crying constantly too.  You only have to look at the now seemingly kitsch and vintage advertisements of the 1950s which scream taglines such as ‘Tide’s got women want!’ and ‘Married? No need to neglect stockings!’ and see that there was constant pressure to be a perfect housewife and mother.

Image owned by LUX. 

Jeanne Emerson Gardener says of the ‘Young Romance’ comics ‘… despite a degree of sympathetic treatment of their female characters, romance comics manifested a fundamentally conservative attitude towards premarital sexual activity. This attitude was necessary in the early 1950s as a generation of adults “worried about propaganda, ‘brain- washing,’ and un-American activities” [5]

Maybe if these comics had occurred in the 1920s, where the original true stories were much more centred on partying and ‘petting’, the covers would have featured women having a lot more fun.  I think the women of the ‘Young  Romance’ comics could reflect how torn women of that time felt, not just between their love interests, but also torn between having a career and a husband, not to mention the turmoil of experiencing sexual attraction but being made to feel those feelings are immoral or ‘un-American’.   

References:

1.     TV TROPES, 2015

2.     EMERSON GARDENER, 2013

3.     LINQUIST DORR, 2008

4.     LINDQUIST DORR, 2008

5.     EMERSON GARDENER, 2013

Bibliography

TV TROPES.  2015.  Useful Notes- The Bechdel Test. [Online] [Accessed 16^th March 2015]. Available from:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheBechdelTest

Emerson, GJ. 2013. 'She Got Her Man But Could She Keep Him? Love and Marriage in American Romance Comics, 1947-1954'. The Journal of American Culture. [Online] 36 (1), pp.16-19. [Accessed 20 March 2015]. Available from:

http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=hlh&AN=86147310&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s1123095

Dorr, LL. 2008. 'The Perils of the Back Seat: Date Rape, Race and Gender in 1950s America'. Gender & History. [Online} 20 (1) pp. 27-47[Accessed 20 March 2015]. Available from: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=sih&AN=31207188&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s1123095