most of them aren't wealthy enough to guillotine, just enough to be annoying

[cimorene]

I am fascinated by reading antique magazines and the fiction published in them, and I don't want to imply that I'm not enjoying it, but... sometimes it's very hard to sympathize with the wealthy, or even the upper middle class.

Of course I'm used to literature being by and for the wealthy further back in history, and I don't say that I read about them without class consciousness, but somehow it's not as hard when it's from the 19th century or earlier. Maybe it's just that it's longer ago, or maybe it's because the society is more alien to me and harder to view through a personal lens.

But with these American upper middle class magazines from 1900-1940... well, the middle class was exploding in size and not all fiction or nonfiction was by and for the wealthy!

It's disorienting reading things about "every American girl" or "every new bride" in the 1920s that actually mean every American debutante. All four of my great-grandmothers got married in America around that time and none of them were worried about cruise ships and couture hats. (One was a nurse, one was a schoolteacher, one was a farmer's daughter and a farmer's wife, and one was a daughter of servants, from a big Catholic family.)

My tolerance for the wealthy perspective in fiction and nonfiction is lower the closer it gets to the present. I always have to overcome a strong impulse of disbelief that you're supposed to seriously sympathize with the idle rich, or people with maids, or the sphere where only people from recognizable New England families "count". Of course those people exist, but this is a big circulation women's magazine! Where are the average middle class women? The average middle class housewife was not a former debutante in 1908! But Woman's Home Companion could easily give the impression that she was. (Maybe there was a competing magazine that was preferred by the working middle classes. I'll try to find out.)

Comments

[oracne]

LOL! This.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Haha, my great-grandmother Mildred (pictured) was raised wealthy in 1900-1920. When my mother asked her to write about her childhood in the 1970s, her description included phrases like "Every house had a grandfather clock."

And my mother, telling this story to me, was like, "No, the Hungarian woman who did her laundry did not have a grandfather clock or presumably even a house. The houses little Mildred was *allowed to visit* had grandfather clocks, and notice how she doesn't question it."

(Mildred quickly fell from upper class to middle class to food insecurity levels of poverty in her early adulthood, so 1920 is the last we hear of any wealth in our family tree.)

ETA: Oh, I found it! I do have a scan of the description in her own handwriting. "Every home had tall grandfather clock that 'bonged' the hour." That's the first sentence. Oh, hey, nearly every home had an organ or piano. Who knew? Not the servants mentioned in this description, certainly.

[cimorene]

Lol! That's priceless.

It reminds me of when my niece was a toddler and one time politely asked me where our summer house was. I said that we didn't have one, and she responded wisely, "Oh, you haven't bought it yet."

[mildred_of_midgard]

Haha! I still haven't bought my summer house either, lol. :P

[princessofgeeks]

SO MUCH THIS OMG.

And unfortunately I think this POV has continued to the present day in certain blogs and certainly with a lot of correspondents for magazines like The Atlantic.

It is next to impossible to find the Labor perspective in today's media.

i am not up on modern literary fiction, having confined myself to genre reading for mot of the last 20 years. Well and fanfic too.

[cimorene]

Yeah, the middle class assumption is sometimes extremely widespread in American media, but the bar for nauseating suburban wasphood in the last few decades is actually still less rich and less snobby than these bourgeois mags before ww2, to my surprise and dismay. Although it's still infuriating today.