SSR 2 on Hsu-Ming Teo’s article 

The Americanisation of Romantic Love in Australia

By Mark Bradley

 

Complete citation:

Teo, Hsu-Ming, “The Americanisation of Romantic Love in Australia.” Connected

Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective. Edited by Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake,. Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2016. 171-92. Retrieved from 

http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p97101/pdf/cw_part3.pdf

 

Image Credit: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036734/mediaviewer/rm3752723200, accessed 29 October 2020

 

Key Words: Romance, advertisement, Consumption, Americanisation, marriage, culture, transnational.

Brief Overview: A detailed analysis of the American influence of consumer capitalism on the culture of romantic love in Australia during the twentieth century.

 

Summary of Key points:

* The transnational reach of American capitalism resulted in other countries adopting their marketing strategies.

* Due to Hollywood films and Advertisements in women’s magazines, Australian women adopted, before Australian men, American ideas of romance, creating conflict between the two nationalities.

 

Important Quotations:

“Australians generally tended to have more concrete and prosaic ideas about love. This was partly due to the fact that, unlike American culture, romantic love was not sacralised in Australian culture.”

 “Increasingly the visual style of Australian women’s magazine advertisements became more American, sometimes brazenly copied with minor adjustments to ‘Australianise’ the image.”

“Significantly, it was only after American magazines began to be imported to Australia in the postwar years, and the style of Australian advertising directed at men changed to a focus on them as consumers, that love letters from Australian men demonstrate the same notion of commodified romance that Australian women had become familiar with earlier in the century”

 

Usefulness to our group topic or individual project:

This chapter would assist in explaining how the romance in Hollywood movies influenced Australian societies ideas of romance. This influence then travelled through Australian magazines as advertisements for the commodification of love, affecting women first and creating conflict between Australian women, men and American soldiers.