This was the message purveyed in a rash of new romance comics and magazines aimed specifically at young women, with titles such as Young Romance and Young Love. The age of marriage was falling in both the United States and Britain and it became common to think of oneself as “left on the shelf” if not married by 21.
Most of all, the idea of a girl meeting her prince, marrying young and living happily ever after chimed with the dreams of many young women in the 1950s. Both a Royal Wedding (1947) and the coronation of the young Elizabeth II (1953) fueled dreams of fairy-tale romance, golden coaches, dreamy dresses and sparkling crowns. In postwar Britain, a weariness with rationing and austerity helps to explain women’s delight in transformations and the idea of release from domestic drudgery. Why did the story have so much resonance in the late 1940s and 1950s? “Rags to Riches” stories had long appealed in North America. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter Shell Petroleum used an image of a fashionably dressed Cinderella exiting her pumpkin coach in an advertisement of the 1940s, Revlon lipstick boasted a new lipstick in a “Cinderella pumpkin” shade of orange, and Coty packaged perfume in a faux glass slipper.
References to Cinderella proliferated in popular culture and were widely used to sell consumer goods. Julie Andrews played Cinderella-neat as a new pin and not remotely servile.
Cinderella stories tv#
The CBS Rodgers and Hammerstein version of Cinderella, screened in 1957, attracted what was then the largest TV audience in history. But the story was already being retold in countless children’s picture books, romance literature, and in ballet and theater performances in the late 1940s. The story’s cultural dominance at that time in part reflected the phenomenal success of Walt Disney’s animated Cinderella, in 1950. Few moments in Cinderella history can compare to the 1950s in North America and Britain.