Americans saw many social changes in the years immediately following World War II. Young women in post-war America looked to magazines for guidance and support, Seventeen magazine in particular. This study takes a closer look at the advertisements in Seventeen magazine for the years 1946, 1947, and 1948. A content analysis was performed using only full-page advertisements for the months of February, April, August, and November. The advertisements were analyzed according to their target audience, product category, and traditional message sent through the advertisement. Both quantitative and qualitative elements of the advertisements were analyzed.
Through research, both teenage girls (ages 12-16) and coming-of-age young women (ages 17-24) emerged as the target audiences for the advertisements. The groups were close in age, but differed in social, school, fashion, and romantic needs. Traditional messages of ‘looking good’ or ‘finding a man’ were discovered to be predominate in most advertisements. Through close examination, the products advertised were then
placed into the six product categories of dress defined for this study: clothing, shoes, lingerie, accessories, cosmetics, or grooming aids. The product category with the highest
percentage of full-page advertisements overall was clothing, followed by lingerie, shoes, accessories, cosmetics, and grooming aids.
Overall, the messages focused on beauty and romance, leaving career almost entirely out of the picture. The traditional roles of the new American dream of security, marriage, and home life (even if not for a few years) ran throughout the advertisements. Whether or not the quintessential housewife of the 1950s depicted in women’s magazines was the true result of the grooming of young women in Seventeen in the late 1940s is
debatable. If these young women did fulfill the traditional messages sent to them, it is quite possible that the advertisements in Seventeen aided in their decisions to take on
such roles.