Ladies' Pages : : African American Women's Magazines and the Culture That Made Them / / Noliwe M. Rooks.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Rutgers University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Rooks, Noliwe M.,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2004]; ©2004
• Year of Publication: 2004
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (224 p.)

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, mainstream magazines established ideal images of white female culture, while comparable African American periodicals were cast among the shadows. Noliwe M. Rooks's Ladies' Pages sheds light on the most influential African American women's magazines--Ringwood's Afro-American Journal of Fashion, Half-Century Magazine for the Colored Homemaker, Tan Confessions, Essence, and O, the Oprah Magazine--and their little-known success in shaping the lives of black women. Ladies' Pages demonstrates how these rare and thought-provoking publications contributed to the development of African American culture and the ways in which they in turn reflect important historical changes in black communities. What African American women wore, bought, consumed, read, cooked, and did at home with their families were all fair game, and each of the magazines offered copious amounts of advice about what such choices could and did mean. At the same time, these periodicals helped African American women to find work and to develop a strong communications network. Rooks reveals in detail how these publications contributed to the concepts of black sexual identity, rape, migration, urbanization, fashion, domesticity, consumerism, and education. Her book is essential reading for everyone interested in the history and culture of African Americans.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Scattered Pages: Magazines, Sex, and the Culture of Migration -- 2. Refashioning Rape: Ringwood's Afro-American Journal of Fashion -- 3. To Make a Lady Black and Bid Her Sing: Clothes, Class, and Color -- 4. "Colored Faces Looking Out of Fashion Plates.Well!": Twentieth-Century Fashion,Migration, and Urbanization -- 5. No Place Like Home: Domesticity, Domestic Work, and Consumerism -- 6. Urban Confessions and Tan Fantasies: The Commodification of Marriage and Sexual Desire in African American Magazine Fiction -- 7. But Is It Black and Female?: Essence,O, and American Magazine Publishing -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author