Growing Up White and Female During the American Great Depression: Popular Communication, Media, and Memory

Abstract

Using interviews and oral history, this research illuminates older women's experiences with mass media and popular communication during their teen years. In this essay, we analyze interviews with 14 Caucasian American women who were born in or before 1933. We conclude that these women gravitated toward adult-focused media, that they recalled “experiences” associated with media rather than its content, and that many of their memories were inextricably linked to the world events of their day.

Keywords:

• girlhood studies
• girls studies
• Great Depression
• mass media
• memory studies
• oral history
• World War II

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this essay was presented in May 2011 at the annual conference of the International Communication Association, Boston, MA.

The authors wish to give special thanks to all of the incredible women who participated in this study.

Notes

We recognize that our use of snowball sampling may have contributed to our study's lack of racial diversity, as we are all ourselves Caucasian. While we hoped the council on aging would help us locate women of color, the respondents from that source were all Caucasian as well.

In 1932, Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. While attempting to fly around the world, Earhart went missing on July 2, 1937—when most of our respondents were young girls (Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum, n.d.).

Gray was a staunch conservative, and he used many Annie strips to express his Republican views—for example, “his diehard opposition to gasoline rationing, income taxes, the welfare state, Madison Avenue, his version of Communism and ‘left-wingers’—an epithet he habitually applied to all democrats” (“Harold Gray, Creator,” 1968, p. 47).

The latter criticism foreshadowed more recent complaints about mediated depictions of violent girls such as the characters starring in The Powerpuff Girls and Kim Possible.

Although this use of newspaper as toilet paper might not necessarily have been an indication of poverty at this point in history, we also wanted to note that one of the informants from our larger data set (who was born in the late 1930s and not included in this analysis because she was younger) described her family as “very poor” growing up in rural Appalachia, said newspaper and magazines were routinely used as wallpaper and insulation in her home and her neighbors' homes as a child.