’I am tired – tired – tired!’ The Women’s Magazine Alle kvinners blad and the Critique of «the housewife’s paradise» in Norway in the 1950’s

Abstract

The 1950’s are generally remembered as “the Norwegian housewife’s paradise”, although in many ways, the decade represented a time of change. On the one hand a great number of married women were registered as housewives in this era. On the other hand, the housewife’s situation, and whether she ought to be an ideal for all married women, was up for discussion in academic circles, in feminist circles and among the general public. This article explores how the Norwegian women’s magazine Alle kvinners blad (Every Women’s Magazine) both responded to and contributed to this ongoing debate. The article also asks why the magazine later was left out of other cultural and scientific studies of the Norwegian gender and equality debates of the 1950’s, with an emphasis on the established gender history. Reading some of the central gender historic presentations of the new feminist wave in the 1970’s, we claim that the omission are grounded on the part the magazine came to play in these presentations, more precisely the part of a conservative producer of gender ideology, who only contributed to indoctrinate the housewives.