Dream girls: women in advertising - advertising history

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Jan, 1997 by Jan Kurtz

From the 1890s to the 1990s, women have played the starring role in America's drama of consumption. Since before the turn of the century, Mrs. Consumer,, has made 85% of household purchases. In addition to this powerful economic role, women have functioned as cultural icons, in art and politics as well as advertising, embodying concepts from peace to home to glamour. Meanwhile, during the 20th century, women as a group have shifted their role from isolated domestics to major business, political, and social players. Advertising unintentionally has served as a recorder of the century's cultural revolution in the external and internal lives of women.

The 1890s through the 1910s. In the post-Industrial Revolution era, abundance was not a product of the hands, but of the purse. Upper-class women were beneficiaries of male-directed mass production and decorators of the domestic haven.

As the century turned, they learned to buy rather than make. Advertising tutored them in die rituals of self-transformation and the rites of shopping within the labyrinth of new department stores. A skill for bargaining for bulk goods was replaced with an advertising education in competing claims of brand merchandise. The professionals of the new advertising industry created a stereotype of beauty for their appeals. The voluptuous, sensual woman of early trade cards became a giggling girl or devoted mother. Early advertising borrowed historical imagery of agrarian goddesses who bring prosperity to the home.

New women's magazines, including the Ladies Home Journal, McCall's, and House and Garden, reached unprecedented circulation among the middle class as they served as manuals for how to lead a proper feminine fife. Advertising became a trusted intermediary for many new domestic products that reached the households of a far-flung American populace.

The 1920s brought to the middle class a kaleidoscope of jazz, Paris fashions, household conveniences, and a titillating social mingling of the sexes. During the decade, advertisers learned to wrap products in the tissue of dreams.,, Instead of selling phonographs, they sold enjoyment. Rather than describing the attributes of a shirt, they painted glamour. Advertisers focused more on the consumer and less on the product In the process, they confirmed an elemental truth: the consumer was a she.

Advertising's New Woman embodied the promise of modernity - youth, sexual freedom, style, and conspicuous consumption. She embraced Me Look,, preached by the missionaries of the markets. Her life was an ensemble of new styles.

Women seized added power and freedom during the decade. In 1920, they won the right to vote. That year, every third worker was female. In die ensuing 10 years, die number of women college graduates increased by 300%.

With the 1920s, celebration of the female form came America's first war on fat. The ultra-glamorous flapper deliberately countered the suffragettes, dowdy attire and militant attitude.

Many ads showed powerful images of active women in control of their lives. However, copywriters urged even the most independent female to use her newly acquired leisure time to pursue domestic skills.

The 1930s. The Great Depression spawned a carnival culture, as the public craved escapism. Ad pages cluttered with supposed news-photo realism hawked discounted goods. Curvaceous celebrities offered women borrowed glamour.

Advertisers tried desperately to energize the depressed market with emotional appeals. Human tragedy, sexual innuendo, and confessional copy (inspired by True Story magazine sold everything from gum to toilet paper. The newly emerging comic-strip format offered the appeal of storytelling and the intimacy of eavesdropping.

The 1940s. Wartime propaganda encouraged women to labor for country and family rather than money, status. or security. Advertising urged female factory workers to keep up the glamour and the home cooking even while they were on the production line. By the wartime peak in I @,U. more than 19,000,000 women worked outside the home. When Johnny came marching home. they were fired by the thousands.

Advertising used images of mothers, daughters, girlfriends. and wives to embody homefront vulnerability and remind Americans cans what they were fighting for. Today, scholars debate whether these ads helped women's status or fed a post-war backlash. Advertisers also suggested that victories could be won on the homefront through beauty and patriotic shopping.

The 1950s. Advertising was staged primarily in the home, and the housewife often played the starring role. Advertising enacted dramas of romance. personal conflict, and family life. Women were the public performers of private ceremonies around middle-class commodities.

The decade built on the Industrial Revolution's separation of the home from the factory and on the barriers between the daily world of women and that of men. The commercial world, where goods were produced, and the home, where they were consumed, drew gem graphically and culturally further apart. In this context, advertising idealized the domestic sphere and women as its guardian. America's nuclear family was a haven of democratic virtue against the Cold War threat.