Janice Lynne Deitner is a postdoctoral researcher at Trinity College Dublin. Her work, funded by Research Ireland, situates American author Shirley Jackson within the postwar periodical landscape, with a focus on critically neglected magazines. In 2024 she completed her PhD on bodies and minds in Shirley Jackson’s American contexts, also at Trinity College Dublin. Her research interests include periodical studies, twenty-first century zombie narratives, and American popular culture, with a special interest in Science Fiction, Horror, the Gothic, and where they intersect. She has published work with The Irish Journal of American Studies, Shirley Jackson Studies, and in various edited collections. She is Assistant Editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and co-organizer of The Irish Network for Gothic and Horror Studies.

The May 1960 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal includes a short poem entitled “It’s Such Fun to be a Woman.” In the poem, a mother sees her young daughter as taking up the mantle of “the joy of living and reliving/The fun and loving ritual of woman’s beauty.” The mother includes her own mother, her daughter, and a fictional future granddaughter, in “a long parade” of figures embodying the same feminine norms, with “[t]heir new spring suits and lady gloves.” The mother also refers to “the look in [her daughter’s] eyes/That dazzled gaze that seems to say,/’I want to be like you,” demonstrating how those feminine norms are taught in childhood and adolescence through mimicry and repetition of the mother’s behaviors (“Such Fun” 61; original emphasis). Elsewhere in the same issue, Shirley Jackson’s story “Louisa, Please,”¹ is introduced with the byline, “What kind of girl would do this” (49), referring to the protagonist’s choice to leave home without notice. The magazine’s byline casts judgement on Jackson’s main character Louisa that her story does not. Reading this judgement in tandem with the sentiments expressed in the poem clearly delineates the boundaries of what was considered acceptable feminine agency and expression. As Tyler M. Dick notes, “much of Jackson’s short fiction in [women’s] magazines existed in subtle tension” with other magazine content (Dick). More pointedly and as made evident in this Journal issue, Jackson’s construction of adolescence sits in tension with hegemonic views of post-war² femininity such as that on display in the poem.

Furthermore, the poem allows only for maturation through example of a type of narrowly defined femininity. Instead, as is evident in Jackson’s work, there is space within the process of maturation, particularly in the liminal state of adolescence, that can allow for a blurring of feminine norms and constricting gender identities, as evidenced by a cartoon in the same issue with “Louisa” and “It’s Such Fun to be a Woman.” In the cartoon, two young women of indeterminate age, coded as tomboyish teenagers by their dress, look at each other as one says, “I must be at the dangerous age—whatever I want to do, either I’m too young or I’m old enough to know better” (“Cartoon” 110). In other words, either you are a child, or you should “know better,” i.e. adhere to the norms mentioned above on the way to becoming a woman. According to Deborah Martin, because the “female adolescent” is “both female and child, she twice challenges categorization […], embodying anxiety about categorization” itself “and posing a double threat to the power relations of patriarchy” (138). This article examines two representations of adolescent figures in Jackson’s work within the contexts of the magazines in which they first appeared. Though an increasing number of critics look at Jackson’s semi-autobiographical humor pieces which make up the bulk of her publications in women’s magazines, my focus instead is on two fiction pieces³: “Louisa, Please,” mentioned above, and “All She Said Was Yes,” published in Vogue in November 1962. In particular, “Louisa” and “All She Said” feature adolescent figures with non-normative physicality, outré lifestyle choices, or socially dangerous forms of knowledge. Louisa in the former story is technically no longer an adolescent but embraces a liminal adolescent playfulness. Vicky in the latter story is fifteen, but has been granted knowledge beyond her years, giving new meaning to the idea of “knowing better.”

The publications that printed these stories, Ladies’ Home Journal and Vogue, represent different views of narrowly defined femininity: the Journal emphasizing domesticity and motherhood and Vogue focusing on high fashion. This difference is indicative of a need to look more closely at these publications, rather than merely including them under the umbrella term of “women’s magazines.” Additionally, Jackson’s transgressive young women clash with many depictions of acceptable femininity reflected elsewhere in the pages around them, but they are not alone in complicating the often-prescriptive content of these publications. In discussing these adolescents, I first establish the role of women’s magazines in post-war America, touching on Jackson’s relationship with them. I use the work of Betty Friedan as a negative framework, as Friedan’s conception of women’s magazines is limiting. I then briefly discuss the position of the adolescent in post-war America, based on the work of popular Freudian psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, as introduction to a close reading of Jackson’s stories. Through this reading, we see that Jackson’s characters, because of either their adolescence mindset or their redefinition of “knowing better,” are able to embrace ways of living and being that exist outside of restrictive ideological norms of the era, presaging shifts in gender roles that occurred in the late 1960s and after.

To begin with the magazines: as briefly mentioned above, the term “women’s magazines” contains a multitude of publications with a great variety of editorial stances, ideas about content, and target audiences. To conflate these publications under a single categorical descriptor does a disservice to the variety of work included. In particular, Vogue and Journal have very different editorial stances and audiences, but they are both marketed to female readers, and they do contain material that creates and sells standards in a time of narrowing cultural norms regarding class, race and, most relevant for this article, gender. Through their content, including advertising, they “served as advice manuals, guides to fashion and home decor, cookbooks, marriage counselors, and catalogs of goods and services” (Walker, Women’s v). In an era with fewer options for communication and interaction, “[m]agazines thus […] both shape[d] and reflect[ed] the values, habits, and aspirations of American women and their families” (1). This is also why they were so important to a writer like Jackson, as they needed a large amount of material to meet popular demand and therefore provided a wide variety of publishing possibilities and financial opportunities.

Jackson published more often in women’s magazines not covered in this article, primarily Good Housekeeping, Charm, Woman’s Day, and Woman’s Home Companion, though she also had pieces in Mademoiselle, Red Book, and McCall’s; Ladies’ Home Journal and Vogue contain only a handful of Jackson pieces each. They also have very distinct and different editorial reputations and markets. “Vogue primarily addressed fashion and upper-class social interaction … and Ladies’ Home Journal presented perhaps the most diverse and comprehensive conception of domestic life” (Walker, Shaping viii), albeit with a middle-class focus. Both Journal and Vogue were shaped by male figures who, though no longer living by the post-war era, had huge impacts on the publishing standards of these respective publications. In 1889, Edward Bok took over editorship of the Journal and, in the words of Helen Woodward, “from this moment [it] began to develop into an American institution” (64). In 1921, Bok wrote a third-person autobiography in which he noted his intention to create “an authoritative clearing-house for all the problems confronting women in the home […] a magazine […] that would give light and leading [sic] in the woman’s world” (162). He also argued that “the public, while it knows what it wants when it sees it, cannot clearly express its wants.” The editor, instead, has to “edit rightly so that he may lead” (163-64). This sense of Journal as directing women’s lives recurs in much of the literature around it and, to a lesser extent, in discussions of other women’s magazines. Vogue is one such magazine that provided instruction for women, with the emphasis instead on fashion. Similar to Bok, publisher Condé Nast bought an existing magazine in 1909, implementing an editorial policy that made “Vogue […] the technical adviser—the consulting specialist—to the woman of fashion” (qtd. in Seebohm 76). Four years later he delineated his idea of “Class Publications,” writing that “the publisher, the editor, the advertising manager and circulation man must conspire not only to get all their readers from the one particular class to which the magazine is dedicated, but rigorously to exclude all others” (Seebohm 80; original emphasis). This belief system would make the magazine a closed, upper-class bastion. In fact, Nast originally excluded fiction from his version of Vogue because “fiction’s indiscriminate appeal … dilute[s] ‘class’ circulation” (118). Nast would revisit this idea in the early 1940s, particularly because of the success of fiction in other women’s magazines (336). However, in the 1960 issue I discuss here, Jackson’s story is the only piece of fiction in over one hundred and fifty pages.

In the post-war era, both of these publications were in a long period of transition, resulting in tension between the editorial principles that had shaped them and new editorial leadership. In 1935, married couple Bruce and Beatrice Blackmar Gould took over editorship of the Journal, only stepping down in 1962, two years after the publication of “Louisa.” Under the Goulds, circulation expanded. In the 1956 edition of his Magazines in the United States, James Playsted Wood noted that “the Goulds believed that the working intelligence of the average American woman was far greater than generally believed.” In response, they sought to “‘widen the boundaries of her traditional areas of interest’” (120). Wood also ponders the reason for “the Journal’s pre-eminence among women’s magazines. It seems … at once more feminine and feminist than its peers.” The Journal’s post-war “editorial philosophy” stated that “[a] magazine like ours is […] a moral force” (qtd in Wood 121). All of these assertions provide a complicated view of a powerful platform. Jackson only published a small number of stories with the Journal, and “Louisa” was the second. Joan Wylie Hall notes that the ending of Jackson’s final story, 1965’s “Home,” was changed at request of the editors because “the magazine’s fiction department was shocked and disappointed” by Jackson’s original version and requested a happy ending (89). Though the Goulds made it their mission to publish best-selling fiction of quality (Wood 121, Gould and Gould 250), there were pressures on writers to conform to editorial standards.

The Goulds also oversaw a growing focus on the youth, who by the 1950s were included in the target audiences of these publications (Walker, Women’s 2). Between the two editions of Wood’s history of American magazines, that is between 1949 and 1956, the Journal feature “How America Lives,” established in 1940, was tellingly retitled, “How Young America Lives” (120-121). Much of this content targeted at young audiences would continue to reinforce narrow ideals of femininity. Nancy A. Walker notes that “[m]agazine features for children and adolescents” not only broadened the readership, but certain articles also “reinforce[d] the idea that girls, like their mothers, had to be taught to perform their roles in society and suggest[ed] that these girls [would] be observed and judged” in the process of learning those roles (Shaping 138). For example, in the issue of the Journal that contains “Louisa,” an article entitled “Teenagers Want to Look Pretty Too” answers “beauty pleas” from young readers: “Though problems vary, all girls are uniformly sure of one thing: ‘We want to look pretty too!’” (Norman 86). In fact, uniformity is the intended outcome, with all young girls fitting the same thin and fashionable standard. Elsewhere in the issue, in a regular feature entitled “Pat Boone Talks to Teenagers,” religious heartthrob Boone advises young people that “the far goal of [their] dating days” is love, “which leads to marriage, and marriage leads to families, and families make nations” (82). However, in contrast to these conformist tendencies, the “Teenage Report to the Nation” the next page surveyed “hundreds of teenagers,” with mixed results. Quotes from teens appear below images: under a group of boys, “Adults tell us we should think for ourselves then don’t like it when we do”; under a girl on the phone, “Nothing is more important than friends” (“Teenage” 83). The gender divide is stark, yet the topics even for girls include sex, drinking, and autonomy, a more complicated view of youth and gender norms that more clearly emphasizes the space in the Journal for negotiation of those norms.

Meanwhile, as Anna Lebovic notes, Vogue was also undergoing an “editorial shift” in the mid-1950s (178), softening its attitude from a “dictatorial approach as a fashion ‘Bible’ during the 1940s” to “a more considered and circumspect tone” in the following decade (180). In 1952, new editor Jessica Daves “reorient[ed] the magazine towards the youthful demographic she had long identified as critical,” including features on college fashion for example, in an attempt to embrace the “the cultural Zeitgeist.” (Lebovic 186). This same editorial stance was firmly in place until Daves retired in early 1963, three months after publication of Jackson’s story. However, looking through the November 1962 issue that contains “Louisa,” the focus still appears to center what Mary McCarthy calls “the mature woman” (248). Unlike in the Journal, there are very few features focused on “teens.” One fashion feature with the clever name “Enfant-Terrific Night Looks” focuses on the high fashions of elite young women and their dates, including “a young Spanish diplomat” and heir to a shipping business (“Enfant-Terrific” 124-29), reinforcing the upper-class, sophisticated, and worldly reputation of the magazine. Similarly, the regular feature “People Are Talking About…” mentions the Cuban missile crisis, political thrillers, literature, theatre, art, and opera (“People” 108), however these topics are presented in sound-bite fashion for knowing, adult audiences. Much of the magazine is dedicated to imagery, advertising and fashion, giving the overall picture of a mature, sophisticated, expensive way of life, without the focus on youth visible in the Journal.

While there were editorial shifts in the magazines, and more focus on the youth, there were also growing critiques of women’s magazines. Former advertising executive Helen Woodward’s 1960 book The Lady Persuaders argued that “[t]o the uninitiated, a woman’s magazine may seem merely a powdery bit of fluff. No notion could be more unreal or deceptive … These publications involve a giant business investment, and have an overwhelming influence on American life” (1–2). Woodward claimed that the magazine editors infantilize readers – “they teach them, they command them, they threaten and promise them” (6–7) – and “indoctrinate them” into upending the gender hierarchy (11-12); yet, Woodward also believes that “many [editors] have fumbled, trying to guess what the reader really needs or wants,” making the editorial impact of the magazines ineffective (5, see also 8). Woodward’s critique is thus confused, but she was not alone in targeting the women’s magazines for their influence. Intellectual author Mary McCarthy’s 1950 critique of women’s magazines does not see their conforming ideas of womanhood as a problem, but complains instead about infantilization: “Vogue, in those days before Mademoiselle and Glamour and Charm and Seventeen,” all magazines targeting a younger audience, “was an almost forbidding monitor enforcing the discipline of Paris” (247). McCarthy’s complaint is that these publications which cater to the youth market have destabilized what should be a constant and constraining ideal of womanhood.

Conversely, Betty Friedan’s 1963 exploration of women’s status, The Feminine Mystique, analyzed women’s magazines to explore the “strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform” (1; see also Douglas 9, 51). This image, Friedan argues, was primarily constructed by the media, including the women’s magazines and the women who, like Jackson, wrote for them. She claims that “the new image of American woman” visible in the magazines “had hardened into a mystique, unquestioned and permitting no questions” (34). Though groundbreaking, The Feminine Mystique is a complicated and problematic text. For example, Friedan unfairly characterizes Jackson as one of a group of “Housewife Writers” who use their writing to uphold this constraining feminine ideal, concluding that “there is something about Housewife Writers that isn’t funny—like Uncle Tom or Amos and Andy” (40). Magazine pieces like Joyce Cary’s March 1951 Vogue feature “The Revolution of the Women” illustrate that Friedan did have a point. The “revolution” of the title refers to the androgynous fashions and broader gender definitions of the 1920s, here portrayed negatively. Cary argues that “[t]he young women” of the post-war era “not only accept the position” of mother, “they choose it,” this proper “sense of duty” a return to sanity from the woman of the 1920s who “denied her nature, cut her hair like a boy, dressed like an immature child” (99). This idea of childishness as a refusal of strict gender norms is useful for my discussion of “Louisa” below, but Cary sees it as indicative of an “age of confusion” that she happily declares “is past. Women are essentially free. They know what they want, and they can decide for themselves how to get it.” However, this freedom to decide is limited to choosing to work or not, while raising children and running a home, and feminine presentation, in her view, is naturally restricted to certain norms (149).

As mentioned, articles like Cary’s appear to uphold Friedan’s critique, but by looking at Jackson’s work in the context of these magazines, it is clear that the situation is more complicated than Friedan admits. In fact, Friedan previewed her concept of the “mystique” in women’s magazines, including the Journal, and while “the ‘huge’ response to the book excerpt in the January 1963 issue contained ‘more cons than pros’” (Coontz 30; see also 31, 146-47), Coontz also notes that despite her narrative, “Friedan had no lack of supporters in the women’s magazines,” highlighting sympathetic and even openly feminist editors (146). Thus, the reality is more complicated than Friedan argues. As Walker and other magazine scholars point out, while “the magazines by necessity tended to preserve the status quo in their editorial content and stances, they did not, as Betty Friedan claimed […] consistently promote homemaking as the only path to female fulfillment” (Women’s 8). They “offered clear and limited cultural definitions of womanhood” but also provided space to negotiate those definitions (Scanlon 2). Jennifer Scanlon and other periodical scholars believe that allowing women such space prepared the way for the following decade’s feminism (2). Wood noted in 1956 that from the end of the nineteenth century on women’s magazines helped women leave the domestic sphere, which he said seemed “paradoxica[l]” because “they were first directed to women as housewives and homemakers” (122). Jessamyn Neuhaus places Jackson within this matrix of negotiation, because “Jackson showed women” with her autobiographical writings that “they could transform” their “experiences within their proscribed social roles to challenge the limitations of domesticity” (129). In contrast to Friedan’s claims, Jackson and writers like her modeled other possibilities.

Though Friedan oversimplified the impact of the magazines and “exaggerated the ubiquity of the happy housewife” (Coontz 65), her work is frequently useful, particularly when she comments on the work of contemporary thinkers who contributed to the outlines of the “feminine mystique,” such as Freudian psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch. Deutsch’s work had a noticeable influence on post-war ideas of feminine development. Her two-volume The Psychology of Women (1944), covered adolescence in the first volume and motherhood in the second. As Rachel Devlin phrases it, “for a dense work on psychoanalysis” it was “a phenomenal success” and as the second “most widely read work on adolescence during the post-war period,” it “remained the unchallenged authority on all aspects of girls’ psychological passage from girlhood to womanhood” until feminists, starting with Friedan, began to take issue with Freud, leading to “disinterest in her work today” (222). Devlin centers Deutsch in her work on the popularity of post-war psychoanalysis, which, she argues, “was animated by the dominant preoccupations of the period,” most importantly the “changing behavior of adolescent girls” evident in “rising rates of juvenile delinquency among adolescent girls, sexual precocity, and the sense that paternal authority in particular was threatened by transformations in youth culture in the United States” (219)⁴. Thus, anxieties about girlhood were at the center of post-war fears, and Deutsch’s work framed the discussions about girlhood, while also determining norms for female adolescents.

Friedan depicts Deutsch as one of “Freud’s followers” who indulged in a “torturous attempt to fit their observations of real women into his theoretical framework” (95), but she correctly if sharply paraphrases Deutsch’s assertion that “‘[n]ormal’ femininity is achieved […] only in so far as the woman finally renounces all active goals of her own” (96). In Deutsch’s words, “Maturation in prepuberty consists in an aggressive thrust of activity that” eventually “disappears under pressure of more passive tendencies […] The passive tendencies are of the greatest important for the further development of the girl toward femininity” (Psychology 93). In fact, Deutsch claims, “the passive nature” of woman is “inherent in her biology and anatomy” (140).

Because The Psychology of Women “was used as a text for training analysts” (Webster 553), it framed much of the thought around women within the psychoanalytical industry, but it also entered popular discourse in a wide variety of magazines, though often not directly. In her 1947 Life Magazine article exploring the “woman question,” Frances Levison includes Deutsch in what she calls “antifeminists” who believe that “woman made her big mistake when she began to imitate man and made progress in the out-of-the-home working world,” adding that “Dr. Helene Deutsch … insists upon certain psychic qualities of femaleness that must not be denied.” Levison also includes Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg under the label of “antifeminists” (114). Farnham and Lundberg’s 1947 book Modern Woman: The Lost Sex argued that “contemporary women in very large numbers are psychologically disordered and that their disorder is having terrible social and personal effects” (Lundberg and Farnham v). An article by Farnham and Lundberg in the November 1944 issue of the Journal entitled “Men Have Lost Their Women” delineate the ideas that would eventually become Modern Woman. Both texts refer frequently to Deutsch, and it is clear they built their arguments from her work (see also Devlin 223). Friedan notes that Farnham and Lundberg’s book was “paraphrased ad nauseum in the magazines and in marriage courses, until most of its statements became a part of the conventional, accepted truth of our time” (94).

At the same time that Deutsch was influencing gender discourse and defining the process of female adolescence, the very concept of “youth” was being delineated in new ways. The word “teenager” was new, “coined during the early 1940s” for the benefit of “marketers and social reformers” (Hine 3–4). This new concept included “the assumption that all young people, regardless of their class, location, or ethnicity, should have essentially the same experience” (11). This experience, however, was differently gendered. Teenage norms were male-based, particularly when focused on rebellious or innovative worldviews, while girls instead were seen as complicit in post-war conformity (Breines 382). Transgressive female behavior was less visible because “[i]n contrast to boys, stricter gender rules for girls dictated covert dissidence” (384). Additionally, the anxieties regarding girls were explicitly sexual (Hine 177; see also Breines 384). Regular Journal contributor Dorothy Thompson published a satirically titled piece “It’s All the Fault of the Women!” in the same issue as “Louisa.” Though Thompson addresses ubiquitous outrage “about the failure of women to perform their proper function in society” (11), she also indulges in this fearmongering, referring to the “sexual and moral looseness” of the time. “Hundreds of thousands of parents” she announces, “don’t know where their sixteen-year-old daughters are at three o’clock in the morning!” (16). Of course, this fact is true for the parents of Louisa in Jackson’s story, “Louisa, Please,” whose actions directly evoke such fears.

Louisa decides on the eve of her sister’s wedding to leave home, and the story follows the first-person account of her thought processes and plans as she erases any connection to the person she used to be. The title quotes the plea from Louisa’s mother over the radio to “please come home,” because at the start of the story “three long, long years” have passed. Louisa tells us that her mother’s voice during these yearly pleas “always frightened me badly for a minute […] [e]ach time I heard it I was frightened again” (Jackson, “Louisa” 48). The story opens with this plea, with Louisa’s foregrounded fright, before jumping back in time to cover the steps of her escape. Though, as discussed above, Friedan unfairly represents women’s magazines, there are useful elements to The Feminine Mystique, for instance, when it directly reports the comments of women, including a group of popular, high school girls in the early 1960s who “were so terrified of becoming like their mothers that they could not see themselves at all. They were afraid to grow up.” (54–55; see also Coontz 96). Similarly, Jackson herself, on her seventeenth birthday, wrote in a diary, “I’m afraid I’m growing up” (SJP Box 1). Susan Douglas repeats a version of this sentiment: “[w]atching my mother […] there was one big lesson I got. Whatever this category ‘woman’ was, I didn’t want a big part of it […] But then puberty hit […] And it started to seem as if we had only two choices: sink or organize a mutiny” (60; see also Piercy 116). Roberta Rubenstein says this story “elaborate[s] on the psychological estrangement of mother and daughter” (134). For Louisa, as we will see, this estrangement is a choice in response to what her mother represents. There is a freedom in immaturity for Louisa and other Jackson protagonists, such as Merricat in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) and Natalie in Hangsaman (1951), a refusal to conform to a single, cohesive notion of womanhood. The fact that Louisa is nineteen, technically no longer a child, reinforces this choice to be a girl on the verge of womanhood, who refuses to follow what Douglas calls that “irreversible, inexorable, and excruciating” maturation into womanhood (60). This reading is supported by Louisa’s assertion that she “didn’t just up and leave.” She explains, “I always knew that I was going to run away sooner or later, and I had made plans ahead of time, for whenever I decided to go” (Jackson, “Louisa” 48). Louisa began planning her escape when still a child, through her adolescence, waiting until she was old enough to plausibly get away without interference.

The agency implicit in Louisa’s actions enact a rebellion against the heteronormative constraints implicit in her sister’s Carole’s wedding, which is the background for her escape. She chooses to leave the day before the wedding “on purpose,” intentionally “leav[ing]” her sister “one bridesmaid short (48). Echoing Friedan’s sentiments about “the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform” (1), discussed above, there is a divide between how Louisa depicts herself, her representation of her lived reality, versus the media presentation constructed by her family, that of a “normal” conforming young girl. We can clearly see this divide through Louisa’s narration. She feels glee at “imagin[ing] Carole’s face” when her wedding party is impacted. Conversely, Carole publicly comments that Louisa “‘would never have meant to spoil my wedding,’” to which Louisa internally responds that Carole “know[s] perfectly well that that would be exactly what I’d meant” (48). She even reminds the reader of the wedding later in the story, as she celebrates her successful escape: “at seven in the morning of my sister’s wedding day I was so far away, in every sense, that I knew they would never find me” (140, emphasis original). The concept of being “so far away, in every sense” extends to the wedding and the life it represents. Louisa’s actions reveal a conscious and joyous rebellion against the constricting lack of choices for post-war women. She also treats the anniversary of running away “as though it were my birthday” (48), implying that the choice to leave is in fact a rebirth.

Indeed, the story goes into detail regarding Louisa’s plans and the lengths she goes to avoid detection, as if she has planned a murder of her normative self to allow for this rebirth. For example, she purchases a round-trip ticket “because it would make them think I was coming back—that was always the way they thought about things” (138). It is unclear if this “they” signifies her parents or the authorities (if there is a difference), but her awareness of the rationality of authority allows her to playact rationality while remaining stalwartly “irrational.” Patrycja Antoszek argues that “Jackson’s writing is political” partially because of her “rejection of rationality and the dominant ideologies of her times” (851), something that is evident in Louisa’s play with rationality. When Louisa later reveals that she recently left college “with nobody’s blessing” (Jackson, “Louisa” 139), again asserting her autonomy, she briefly ponders whether fearing parental retribution had actually been a catalyst for her disappearance, a theory put forward by unnamed commentators. She rejects this interpretation: “[I]f that had been all, I don’t think I would have left. No, I had been wanting to leave for so long, ever since I can remember” (140). She denies rational cause and effect, leaving for no other reason than she wants to, again an “irrational,” playful, and rebellious way of thinking.

A key moment in this rebellion is the purchase of a new raincoat, since her old raincoat belonged to her previous life. “My mother picked it out for me,” she tells us, the maternal figure shaping identity through clothing. Her old coat is also the reason she was last recognized, so there is a rational reason for the change, but she also likes the new coat because it is so unlike the one her mother picked. She admits, “I had never before owned a raincoat like that and my mother would have fainted dead away.” Her new raincoat and its accompanying identity are unacceptable by her mother’s, and the magazines’, beauty standards. She later calls it “shapeless” (139), which positions the garment against the type of advice given in “Teenagers Want to Look Pretty Too” that a girl’s clothing should “emphasiz[e] her naturally pretty proportions” (Norman 89). She also comments on her shoes, calling them “good solid shoes, the kind of comfortable old shoes you wear whenever you don’t really care how you look” (Jackson, “Louisa” 140), again refusing the dictates of fashion. Meanwhile, her pursuers are “looking for Louisa Tether, and I had stopped being Louisa Tether the minute I got rid of” the coat her mother gave her (139). Her last name, of course, is fitting. She is no longer tethered to the normative identity chosen for her by her mother⁵. As mentioned above, Deutsch believes the adolescent process results in passive femininity. Deutsch writes that to mature requires the “liberation of the growing child from infantile dependences,” including “the loosening of the old affective ties … some part of him [sic] seeks new possibilities of identification, rejecting the parents as objects” (Psychology 91-92). In other words, the child must reject identification with the parents to mature. Deutsch’s ideas of “liberation” mean only a freeing from childish dependence, and not political liberation. However, by untethering identification with her mother and refusing the passive femininity implied in matrimony and motherhood, Louisa remains immature. In fact, she deposits her old coat amongst the sale items “as though” it were merchandise and she’d “decided against it” (Jackson, “Louisa” 139), coopting consumerism to rid herself of former demands, and then dismissing the leftovers.

Jackson similarly comments on the interchangeability of feminine fashion, as “utilizing conformity to mask her identity […] Louisa closely watches others and uses material goods to strip and rebuild her identity” (Dick). As mentioned above, teenage girls were considered complicit in such conformity. “There is a time in the life of every American girl,” begins a Life magazine article from December 1944, “when the most important thing in the world is to be one of a crowd of other girls and to act and speak and dress exactly as they do” (qtd. in Schrum 150). Kelly Schrum notes that not all girls appreciated this view, and some pushed back against it (150). Jackson expressed her own exasperation with conformity in her autobiographical piece “On Girls of Thirteen”: “If everyone else is wearing white wool ankle socks these days […] everyone else has handed down the word and we conform, or we are different, which is a fate roughly equivalent to being pilloried in the public square” (360; original emphasis). Jackson adds that “young people […] ought by rights to be carrying around faces and minds of their own,” bemoaning when girls embrace such erasure of individual identity ( “On Girls” 360). Jackson critiques such uniformity as early as her 1941 story “My Life with R. H. Macy,” which contains “startlingly beautiful,” interchangeable, “young women in tailored suits […] All […] named Miss Cooper” (“Macy” 57). The narrator of “Macy,” ostensibly a Jackson stand-in, is wearing “a red velvet afternoon frock” (57-58), the wrong kind of feminine attire for the situation, which alerts the reader to her outsider status. Louisa, similarly, can see these pressures and use them, “relying on” the fact that “there must be thousands of girls in the country” who look like her (139). She uses uniformity to become invisible: “I behaved just like everyone else, and even thought like everyone else” (140; original emphasis). Friedan quotes a girl of seventeen who admits, “I want so badly to feel like the other girls […] just do what they do […] I guess I even started to make myself not different inside” (Friedan 55). Louisa here weaponizes this drive to obtain a degree of freedom yet still retains her agency: “I could look like whoever I decided to be” (Jackson, “Louisa” 140; emphasis added), the decision to conform or not ultimately her own.

While reconstructing her identity for escape, Louisa meets her new landlady, Mrs. Peacock⁶, which she describes as “the luckiest thing that ever happened to me” (140). Just as Louisa recreates herself, she creates an ideal family background to convince Mrs. Peacock that she is an upstanding young woman, but Mrs. Peacock. soon replaces both her imaginary and real families. Though Mrs. Peacock gives advice, Louisa notes, “just as if she had been my mother” (141), their relationship is more complicated. They speculate about what may have happened to Louisa Tether, delighting in the gory possibilities. “Mrs. Peacock,” Louisa says, “always loved anything about homicidal maniacs” (139), an unladylike preoccupation. They also daydream about “pool[ing] our savings and buy[ing] a little car, or go[ing] on a trip somewhere, or even a cruise” (141). This daydream and its implications come right before Louisa admits, “[w]hat I am saying is that I was free, and getting along fine, with never a thought that I knew of about ever going back” (141). Louisa’s freedom comes from financial independence, her upward mobility in a new job, and her relationship with Mrs. Peacock. In the same issue of the Journal as “Louisa,” a marriage counselor advises a bride-to-be who “would rather have a job than be a housekeeper” that “[h]er reason for working is questionable.” He delineates “certain principles” regarding women and work, notably that “[t]he wife’s earnings should not […] be regarded as the wife’s personal income to be spent for her own pleasure” (Adams 40). In choosing a life of financial independence and created family, Jackson’s Louisa pushes back against these “principles.” Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl is just one text from this era that uses the infantilizing moniker of “girl” for women who have not yet married or who choose, like Louisa, to stay unmarried. Brown herself became editor of the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan three years later. She writes in her book that “a job gives a single woman something to be. A married woman already is something” (80, emphasis original). Nevertheless that “something” is a wife, defined by her relationship to her husband and expected to live within the restrictive norms discussed above. Louisa chooses a position that, to society, consists of an infantilized, incomplete state, but within this liminality, outside of the strict gender norms of womanhood depicted in the magazines, she is free.

However, Jackson does not provide an easy resolution regarding Louisa’s chosen identity, or her freedom, after Louisa sees an old neighbor and reveals herself without thinking; her certainty then slips, thinking “[m]aybe I did want to go home.” When she is later brought back to her hometown against her will, it erases her experience as an independent woman: “for three years I hadn’t given a thought to that town” but after returning, “it was almost as though I had never been away at all.” Louisa “almost crie[s]” when she sees her parents’ house (141), though her exact feelings are not given, and she “shak[es]” and “shiver[s]” as she tries to avoid going in (142), a physical reaction that evokes the fear she earlier felt at hearing her mother’s voice. When her parents fail to recognize her, she reacts with a mix of childish impulse and adult rationality, “ready enough to cry, but now, when crying would make me look better, all I wanted to do was giggle.” She cannot do the “rational” thing which would “look better.” Her father dismisses her by saying, “[m]y daughter was younger than you are” (142), which is true because three years have passed but also because, in the process of recasting her as stranger, Louisa is no longer playful and adolescent in her attitude. She has the childish impulse that “a temper tantrum might bring them some fleeting recollection of their dear lost Louisa,” a childish feeling, but finally admits that “I hardly thought it would persuade them to invite me to stay” (142), a rational response. Louisa’s liminal freedom as working girl cannot happily exist within the confines of the family home.

Though he recognizes the break from “typical social expectations of femininity, such as docility and acceptable domesticity” in the story, Michael Dalpe, Jr. sees a “domestic yearning” here, reading “that moment of nonrecognition” as “the core horror of the story” (47). He also reads the end of the story as punishment, required because Louisa’s “actions threaten the greater good of the social order” (49). Dick sees the earlier sequence with the coat as “Louisa’s attempt at conformity” which eventually “results in the complete erasure of her identity,” arguing that Jackson’s “critique of conformity through mass consumption” is “destructive for individual identity” (Dick). However, the identity that is erased is one that Louisa no longer has a need for, and one that she cannot reclaim, though she momentarily desires to do so. When her former parents say, “Go back home where you belong,” and, “Go back to the people who love you,” Louisa responds internally, “That meant Mrs. Peacock, I guess” (Jackson, “Louisa” 142). Her “I guess” reveals the level of her conflicted response, just as women’s magazines presented an ambiguous and conflicted space to their audience. However, “Mrs. Peacock” really “seems to be all the family Louisa needs” (Hall 71). Ironically, Helene Deutsch herself did something similar to Louisa, writing in her autobiography that in “late adolescence, I wanted more than anything else to get away from home” (Deutsch Confrontations 28). She regularly connects this impulse to adolescence. Her schooling was “very limited” and her mother “extremely discouraging” so she “began [her] war against these obstacles. To an adolescent, the first step seemed obvious. I had to get away from home!” (81). Deutsch seems to bring this action in line with her beliefs by arguing elsewhere that “[u]sually a girl’s adolescent uproar and self-preoccupation end spontaneously when she reaches marriageable age and finds the right husband” (94), an assertion that, when applied to Louisa, implies that she remains in an “adolescent uproar.” Jackson allows for an ambiguity in the text that, through its own refusal to resolve, provides space for transgression, self-creation, confusion regarding identity to comfortably exist alongside a different concept of family.

There is a different type of tension between gender expectations and family dynamics in “All She Said Was ‘Yes.’” Like in “Louisa,” there is a first-person narrator, though here it is not the adolescent figure, Vicky Lanson, who tells the story but an adult neighbor who is a representative of the status quo. When the Lansons die in a car accident and the narrator is forced to cancel a trip to care for Vicky, her thoughts, which deserve to be quoted in full, reveal a constant disparagement of the Lansons according to normalized models of femininity and domesticity, while the narrator and her daughter Dorrie display the proper “training”:

First I had to unpack those suitcases and put everything away so it wouldn’t wrinkle. Also, I thought I kind of ought to go over to the Lansons’ and straighten up—Helen Lanson always left things in a mess and I certainly wouldn’t have been surprised to find her dinner dishes still dirty in her sink; that girl wouldn’t lift a finger to wash them, I know now, after having her in my house. Not one thing did she do. […] I’d just like to see my Dorrie act like that no matter what happened. I mean, even if I was dead it would give me comfort to know that my daughter didn’t forget her training, and the nice manners I taught her. (Jackson, “Yes” 171, emphasis original)

Jackson expertly depicts this narrator as externally beholden to proper behavior while revealing an internal hypocrisy in her narration. She judges Vicky’s passivity in housework without noting that she is a child, a guest in her home, and, most importantly, grieving. She frames herself as “frank and open” while complaining about the openness of the Lansons: “they were never secret about things and expected us to be the same” (142). This openness is fully on display in fifteen-year-old Vicky, who we soon learn can see future events and talks about them without reservation. This ability means that Vicky has known about her parents’ deaths for months, but it also means that she does not respond or grieve the way the narrator expects.

The title of the story comes from Vicky’s muted response to the news of her parents’ death, which the narrator uses as another opportunity for comparison with her daughter, Dorrie: “I just hope that if ever anything happens to me my daughter will have the grace to sit there and shed a tear” (143; original emphasis). The reader knows that this is because of Vicky’s horrible knowledge of future events, and that Vicky has lived with knowledge of her parents’ deaths for months. Returning to Helene Deutsch, it is worth noting that she centers emotion in her discussion of the adolescent process towards passive femininity. “The emotions,” she writes, have a “close connection with the instinctual life” expected of women (Psychology 91). Deutsch also centers the emotions in this severing of ties required for maturation, as “they constitute the most elementary reaction of the individual to the outside world” (91). Vicky’s lack of emotion should code her as mature beyond her years, but instead the narrator uses Vicky’s lack of emotional response as more ammunition against her inability to live up to feminine norms.

Almost every statement from the narrator contains a judgement on Vicky and her deceased parents, but her most direct judgement, as we have already seen, is reserved for comparison with the narrator’s daughter Dorrie. Dorrie does not directly appear in the story, so the narrator’s comments about her may be just as biased, but her absence makes her the adolescent feminine ideal in the narrator’s ideological framing. The narrator discovers that Vicky has no toys in her room, which in general contains, “nothing…well, soft” (169). The narrator presents Dorrie, also fifteen, as connected with soft things and toys, particularly a blue lion. The narrator proudly admits, “you can tell when Dorrie’s upset […] because she takes her blue lion to bed” (143). Dorrie, infantilized by her mother, does not speak when upset but plays with toys, expressing her emotions through acceptable childish play, not like the transgressive adolescent play of Louisa. In contrast to Dorrie, Vicky speaks directly, not only about her feelings but also about everything she knows, including, as we will see, things that as a teenage girl she is not supposed to know.

Though the narrator attempts to frame her critique of Vicky through these comparisons, early on she bluntly admits, “I don’t like Vicky […] I couldn’t make myself like her.” Like Dorrie, we only see Vicky through the narrator’s eyes, and her dislike continually reveals a physical disgust of Vicky, initially prompted by the perceived need to touch her in order to give her comfort: “[s]he was so big and clumsy and ugly that I really couldn’t face the thought of having to put my arms around her and comfort her—I hated the idea of patting her hand, or stroking her hair” (142). Replicating society’s confusing messages, as Brenda Boudreau argues, adolescence for girls means that “self-identities become closely linked to the physical body,” but “the body” also “becomes an obstacle to autonomy and self-agency” due to “the demands of a socially proscribed gendered identity” (43). The adolescent female body as a site of both conventionality and resistance are key to both the way women in general are depicted and discussed in post-war women’s magazines and in the ways that Jackson’s protagonists push back against expectations. Additionally, the body perceived by society to be “non-normative,” refuses these “socially proscribed” demands. The narrator’s feelings of disgust escalate once Vicky is put in Dorrie’s room, the disgust framed through Vicky’s supposed “non-normative” physicality contrasted with Dorrie’s acceptable femininity: “you couldn’t think of that great dull girl sleeping with Dorrie’s pretty little pictures and dolls […] all around her.” Furthermore, she reads Vicky as “much too big for Dorrie’s bed,” saying “she fit in Dorrie’s room like Dorrie would fit in a dollhouse” (169). With the prospect of guests arriving to pay their respects, the narrator says, “I just wanted her there looking proper” (171). She tries to make Vicky appear “neat and clean” (143), telling “her to dress nicely and comb her hair” (171). Her wording implies a failure in that attempt. The narrator also refers to Vicky’s constant eating, an unfeminine pastime. She also implies that Vicky is dirty “because [the bedding] would have to be cleaned […] before Dorrie came home” (169). She has to admit, despite her constant implication that the Lanson house is filthy, that “Vicky kept that room of hers at home looking so swept and bare” (171), a quick aside that belies her depiction of Vicky while reiterating the lack of girlish adornment.

It is vital to Jackson’s story that Vicky is not bothered by the narrator’s disgust and disdain, existing within her own understanding of reality that refuses the boundaries of “acceptable” behavior. This fact becomes clear when the Lanson’s many friends come by to pay their respects, and Vicky starts sharing their secrets. She tells one partygoer that her grandson will “be caught with a girl in his room and expelled” from medical school, another that his “wife finally has the evidence to divorce” him. She continues to release her knowledge of future events as if she can no longer contain it, disregarding the narrator’s repeated reaction that “[y]oung ladies should speak politely in company, Vicky,” and of course that “Dorrie would never have said a thing like that” (174). Vicky, however, does not only speak of future events, but of adult topics, beyond her supposed knowledge, seemingly compelled to break the bounds of etiquette and adolescence. The narrator misreads all of these assertions (175). When, at the end of the story, the narrator receives Vicky’s little red notebook full of prophecies, which she had previously misread as a diary (an acceptable outlet for adolescent writing) (169) she sees them only as “gossipy little paragraphs […] not at all the kind of thing you like to think about a child dwelling on” (175). The narrator has missed every warning because of her insistence on reading Vicky and her behavior through the lens of “acceptable” adolescence and normalized femininity. Vicky has told her throughout to avoid boats, and her final word to the reader is “we’re all going to go on a cruise” (175). Again, the reader knows what the outcome will be.

In contrast to Louisa, Vicky is an adolescent, and her knowledge has forced her into an adult-like persona, though the adults in her life insist on her childishness. When Vicky tells her father’s lawyer “that the papers in his office were going to be burned up in a big fire,” the greedy narrator can only see Vicky’s words as connected to her parents’ will, to which, the narrator claims, “she reacted like a spiteful baby” (175). Here she infantilizes Vicky in her mind, while Vicky herself is just trying to give a warning. Before their deaths, Vicky was also infantilized by her parents through their psychological jargon. When Vicky complains that she tried to alert her parents about “‘the accident and their dying,’” she adds, “she wouldn’t listen to me, no one ever does. She said it was an adolescent fantasy.” The narrator uses this as another reason to disparage Vicky’s mother, “Adolescent fantasy is the way she talked […] I can tell you that Dorrie got spanked when she did something wrong, and none of this psychological jargon to make her think it was my fault, either.” The narrator similarly blames this “psychological jargon” for Vicky’s odd behaviour; when she sees that Vicky is well-adjusted after the news, she thinks, “maybe some of Helen Lanson’s psychology paid off, in a way she might not like so much” (143). This sense of an “adolescent fantasy” is an attempt to infantilize Vicky while denying her any agency over her knowledge. While Louisa embraces an adolescent persona in her sense of play and mystery, Vicky, though an actual adolescent, is old before her time, but her knowledge allows her to read the world from outside of the narrator’s judgement or normalizing influence, providing space for a different way of life. When the narrator attempts to passive aggressively manipulate Vicky by “mention[ing] [a set of wineglasses] and sa[ying] how much I coveted them, [Vicky] only stare[s]” in response (171). She cannot or will not read the narrator’s social cues. Additionally, Vicky declares, through her knowledge, “I’m going to like London England,” living with her aunt and “study[ing] hard” (143). It is just a glimpse of a happy life outside of the norms imposed by her neighbor. Lenemaja Friedman reads Vicky as a “victi[m]” of her neighbor (76), but Vicky’s inability or refusal to internalize the neighbor’s understanding of the world, and her happy future in London with her aunt, like Louisa’s freedom, allows for a life outside of these constricting norms.

In one of her books on women’s magazines, Walker quotes writing advice given in 1955 by author “Sheila Sibley, who had contributed stories to Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, andWoman’s Home Companion […] ‘The heroine has got to be a nice girl, high-spirited, if you will, but no vice in her, or if there is vice, you’ve got to work yourself to the bone to justify it. If she’s acting awfully strange, it’s because of that neglected childhood or that fractured romance’” (Shaping 141, emphasis original). Jackson’s stories in women’s magazines do not adhere to Sibley’s advice. Not only does she refuse to explain many of the choices of her heroines, but she also allows them space to construct lives for themselves outside of the restrictive gender norms on display elsewhere in the magazines around them. Biographer Ruth Franklin argues that “the stories [Jackson] tells form a powerful counternarrative to the ‘feminine mystique’” (6), but they also form various counternarratives to Friedan’s critique, to Deutsch’s perception of adolescence, and to the editorial philosophies of the magazines in which she published.

It is important to remember, however, that the magazines themselves often provided space for negotiation of strict norms. While examining Vogue in post-war America, Lebovic notes that “Vogue aided and abetted the feminist cause” through 1950s editorial shifts, part of “the unexpected ways in which American women have utilized these spaces” of popular culture “to advance their personal and political autonomy” (189). Jackson’s stories in these magazines comprise some of those spaces, the adolescent figures at their core pushing back against restricting norms visible on the pages around them while embracing the ambiguity implied in what Walker calls the “overt contradictions” in magazine content (Shaping 23). In general, post-war adolescent girlss were “so relentlessly isolated as a distinct market segment,” it led them to believe “that they might be important culturally, and then politically, as a generation” (Douglas 14). The contradictions of the 1950s enabled feminism to coalesce and grow, and Jackson’s work, including her framing of female adolescent difference, is integral in creating spaces for transgressive play, reconstruction of identity, renegotiation of gender roles, and alternative ideas of family. Louisa and Vicky, left without resolutions that explain away their behavior or confirm gender norms, embrace and embody adolescent liminality beyond the boundaries that otherwise would be placed upon them.


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