This chapter is concerned with ways in which Iranian women’s magazines conveyed the idea of "the modern woman" while presenting themselves as family guides and experts to modern day living. Appealing to the family, provided these magazines a traditional and familiar framework to present divergent notions of womanhood by a range of experts, and simultaneously debate with their audiences on them. Catering the family and the re-signification of the housewife’s status within the confines of the home by way of enhanced scientific motherhood, glamorizing technological domestic labor, and maternal nationalism, was a form of symbolic defense against perceived threats to older values and fears, especially with women entering into the salaried workforce in swelling numbers. While the magazines expressed their absolute support of women’s education, they were more ambivalent toward women’s work outside the home. Their depiction of the domestic sphere in the 1960s and 1970s continued to convey the conservative ideology of “a good wife and educated mother” that had been cultivated in previous decades. At the same time, they underscored women’s civic duties and role in the Pahlavi campaign of pre-Islamic national revivalism.

This chapter explores personal property and the desire for possessions as a dimension of private life in Nazi Germany. It examines the regime’s promotion of ‘German advertising’ as part of its drive against ‘Jewish’ business and asks how far, if at all, popular aspirations for consumer goods were accommodated within a dictatorship that was geared to a war economy at the expense of private consumption. It goes on to ask how far and with what arguments the regime in wartime encouraged private saving, and it shows that the promotional material used by savings banks often encouraged private saving using arguments – even in wartime – that focused less on patriotic duty than on personal dreams of material possessions. In promoting wartime saving, the regime thus in many respects continued its pre-war encouragement of private consumer aspirations, even if such aspirations were largely deferred.

This chapter examines the career of the novelist and advice columnist Walther von Hollander during the Third Reich, setting it in the context of his longer career before and after Nazism and in particular his prominence as an advice columnist in post-war West Germany. It argues that von Hollander’s books and letters to his readers during the Nazi period contained an ambivalent mix of messages. On one hand, he promoted the idea that individual personal happiness could be achieved during self-optimisation and conscious effort applied to personal relationships. This notion, characteristic of contemporary Western societies, was not specific to Nazism. On the other hand, his advice was also tinged with elements of Nazi ideology that promised to dissolve and eradicate the disappointments associated with individuality through an orientation towards the wider community and the nation.