Selling Women's History

Emily Westkaemper

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780813576336
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813576343
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art
• Index: Social Sciences

Only in recent decades has the American academic profession taken women’s history seriously. But the very concept of women’s history has a much longer past, one that’s intimately entwined with the development of American advertising and consumer culture.    Selling Women’s History reveals how, from the 1900s to the 1970s, popular culture helped teach Americans about the accomplishments of their foremothers, promoting an awareness of women’s wide-ranging capabilities. On one hand, Emily Westkaemper examines how this was a marketing ploy, as Madison Avenue co-opted women’s history to sell everything from Betsy Ross Red lipstick to Virginia Slims cigarettes. But she also shows how pioneering adwomen and female historians used consumer culture to publicize histories that were ignored elsewhere. Their feminist work challenged sexist assumptions about women’s subordinate roles.    Assessing a dazzling array of media, including soap operas, advertisements, films, magazines, calendars, and greeting cards, Selling Women’s History offers a new perspective on how early- and mid-twentieth-century women saw themselves. Rather than presuming a drought of female agency between the first and second waves of American feminism, it reveals the subtle messages about women’s empowerment that flooded the marketplace.     

Chapter 1

Martha Washington (Would Have) Shopped Here

Women’s History in Magazines and Ephemera, 1910–1935

This chapter explores the women’s history tropes that circulated in commercial print culture of the 1910s through the 1930s, attaining new meanings when applied by activists; corporations; and, ultimately, consumers. Following an introduction to the era’s women’s magazines and their portrayals of the past, an initial series of examples addresses feminist and activist histories appearing in print. Twentieth-century periodicals provided a platform for women historians, preservationists, and suffragists—groups who had used books and pageantry as nineteenth-century publicity tools. Good Housekeeping articles by historian Lucy Maynard Salmon and writer Alice Van Leer Carrick reconsidered the domestic past to advocate for change in modern women’s roles. Simultaneously, print media publicized suffragists’ and African American women activists’ strategic references to the past.

Then follows an analysis of promotional and advertising content in periodicals. Colonial domestic figures, particularly Martha Washington and her anonymous contemporaries, dominated commercial celebrations of domesticity. However, the Colonial Revival aesthetic, which began to flourish with 1876 centennial celebrations and peaked in home decor of the 1920s and 1930s, could also support alternative models for modern women’s roles.¹ In the 1920s, Eleanor Roosevelt capitalized on the style by endorsing Simmons Company beds and cofounding the furniture manufacturer Val-Kill Industries, projects she used to publicize the value of female entrepreneurship. Cosmetics advertisements serve as a further major example of popular histories’ multivalence. Commemorations of historical racial hierarchies and antebellum plantation scenes in pitches to white consumers stood in stark contrast with advertisements African American cosmetics companies placed in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s official magazine, the Crisis. That publication championed the history of black female entrepreneurship rather than of a passive feminine beauty ideal.

The chapter concludes with three examples reflecting consumption of mass-produced commercial imagery. To understand the social implications of popular histories, it is important to consider public reception of these cultural texts. While early twentieth-century consumer viewpoints were not compiled or preserved in ways that would enable a systematic empirical analysis, archival collections provide glimpses of individuals’ attention to and personal adaptation of mass-produced histories.² As shown in the cases examined here, use of a department store’s promotional calendar to record a personal diary, incorporation of newspaper clippings into a scrapbook celebrating George Washington, and circulation of mass-produced greeting cards featuring nostalgic imagery supplemented or subverted these texts’ meanings. The examples show that popular histories were not necessarily complete when they left the printing presses; consumers added their own stories.

POPULAR PERIODICALS AND WOMEN’S HISTORY

In the early twentieth century, women’s magazines flourished, supported by advertisers’ increasing efforts to target female customers. Tracking the nation’s history through narratives of benevolent corporations and patriotic consumers, advertisements and editorial content marshaled the past to justify magazines’ own commercial intrusions into the private space of the home. With reverent portrayals of capitalism’s role in the early republic, periodicals identified historical origins for modern mass production. This celebratory approach asserted precedent for the growing power of advertisements as magazines became the most influential American medium, consistently read by 60 percent of the population beginning in the 1920s.³ As Jennifer Scanlon has argued, popular women’s magazines typically placed consumption at the center of women’s identity, defining the “average” American woman as white; native born; middle class; married; and unemployed, her labor performed through product selection.⁴

Women’s magazines frequently offered the past as inspiration for this archetypal modern woman, celebrating her romantic and domestic roles as timeless. Martha Washington, Betsy Ross, and Molly Pitcher, along with their anonymous contemporaries, garnered praise. Periodicals printed idealized historical imagery, often without comment, alongside advice for contemporary living. The trend toward colonial dames and antebellum belles outlasted others, the ubiquity of these types asserting stability in women’s roles. In the early 1910s, Good Housekeeping published small illustrations of colonial men and women in courtship scenes, and of women in colonial dress washing dishes and making quilts. These sketches filled spaces between features, flanking advice columns that described the latest housekeeping techniques and products.⁵ Similarly, late 1920s and early 1930s issues of McCall’s featured silhouettes and drawings of figures in colonial and antebellum attire. This stock imagery even ornamented fictional stories set in “the youthful world of today” and chronicling the “modern merry-go-round” of socialites pursuing romance in the Great Depression. By using traditional imagery to illustrate modernity, McCall’s suggested a common thread of female focus on fashion and love across time.⁶

Nevertheless, women’s magazines also introduced more complex historical narratives. For example, the August 1911 issue of Good Housekeeping, which offered colonial cartoon figures on its title page and throughout, provided two historical essays: one celebrated the achievements of women sculptors; the other, “The Tyrant Rule of the Corset,” critiqued the history of fashion. Both pieces applauded change over time, presenting women as dynamic historical actors in a way that visual caricatures did not.⁷ The November 1930 issue of McCall’s used a nostalgic colonial image to illustrate a series of articles that celebrated modern women’s advances in public life by profiling a “girl from each state who has come to New York City, won fame for herself and brought distinction to her old home town,” praising these subjects for challenging their parents’ and peers’ expectations by pursuing careers in business, the arts, and aviation. The issue also promoted embroidery patterns for “quaint Colonial” silhouettes. As a whole, the magazine—initially established as a platform for promoting McCall’s Company clothing patterns—simultaneously urged readers to revere and to transgress earlier eras’ norms.⁸

As historian Mary Louise Roberts theorizes in Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France, periodicals that offer varied and conflicting models of womanhood challenge gender norms by producing a subversive “cultural illegibility.”⁹ Confounding expectations that a women’s publication be either “feminine” or “feminist,” female editors and writers of the modernist French newspaper La Fronde combined seemingly incongruous models of womanhood, simultaneously celebrating motherhood, professionalism, politics, and fashion. They thus strategized to disrupt essentialist models for female identity.¹⁰ Similarly, mass market magazines in the twentieth-century United States incorporated a variety of perspectives on women’s history. Alongside advertisements and nostalgic imagery promoting domesticity and feminine beauty, feminist historians contributed articles that reimagined familiar tropes and treated gender as a changeable social construction.

At the same time, publications co-opted feminism by constructing histories that legitimized the modern female consumer role. A 1914 Good Housekeeping article provided recipes and instructions for a “suffrage luncheon,” invoking the past both to praise contemporary activism as a unique historical development and to reconcile it with the magazine’s editorial mission to promote domesticity. The article opened with the line “Possibly there is ‘nothing new under the sun,’ but it is yet to be proved that those marvelous people the early Egyptians ever gave a suffrage luncheon.” Tempering this novelty, a decoration plan melded nostalgia and modernism. The article encouraged hostesses to make a paper cutout “suffrage figure” for each guest’s place setting, outfitted in a symbolic mix of styles characterized as “truly suffrage yet with a tiny touch of the Colonial”: a bonnet in yellow, the “suffrage color”; a dress with a blue bodice and red and white striped petticoat; and a “Votes for Women” sash.¹¹ This imagery positioned political activity as a valid extension of the early American legacy, while reassuring that, even with suffrage, women would maintain the familiar feminine ideals of homemaker and consumer.¹²

Capitalizing on the popularity of the flapper style in the 1920s, when many young women rejected existing fashion standards in favor of more streamlined aesthetics, advertisers wielded historical imagery to define products as simultaneously natural and modern.¹³ Advertisements emphasized the value of remembering the past in order to better appreciate the convenience of the present. Appearing in Woman’s Home Companion, one advertisement promoted Resinol facial soap by juxtaposing the image of a modern woman with bobbed hair and a framed portrait of a colonial woman in ornate dress and hairstyle. The text explained, “Artificiality as the key note of woman’s beauty is past. No longer does the powdered wig, the enameled skin and the beauty patch find favor.” Drawings of a colonial woman daintily watering her garden and a more vigorous modern woman golfing illustrated the claim that Resinol’s mild efficacy supported both an active lifestyle and “the natural beauty and simplicity” of “today’s girl.”¹⁴

Similarly, after late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformers had criticized the negative health effects of corsets and high-heeled shoes, manufacturers of these products used historical imagery to promise that their brands’ mix of comfort and innovation made them compatible with timeless ideals of beauty and with the latest 1920s styles.¹⁵ A 1921 advertisement promoted the Gossard brand of “modern corsets” for “the most active woman” with an illustrated retrospective of women’s fashions from ancient history through the present. Placed in the center of the advertisement, a sketch of a woman modeling the current drop-waist style for dresses suggested the continued importance of corsetry, even to the readers whose fashion selections disrupted the earlier norm of the tightly cinched waist. The ad’s headline, “The Beauty Which Endures,” encouraged potential customers to think beyond the latest trends.¹⁶ Similarly, a 1922 advertisement for the Selby Shoe Company, placed in publications such as Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Home Companion, asserted that the manufacturer’s Arch Preserver Shoe distilled the best of the past and the present to satisfy “both Nature and Fashion.” The illustration united the archetypal Eve, unencumbered by clothing, and a formally dressed colonial dame, proudly displaying her own high-heeled footwear. Both looked on approvingly as a modern woman tried on the shoe touted in accompanying text for a “scientifically-designed, built-in arch-bridge” that supported the foot while enabling the high heel that “Fashion demands.”¹⁷ This sales strategy criticized certain styles for constricting women’s activities but nevertheless touted reliance on products as the pathway to greater freedom. The Selby Shoe Company acknowledged that women’s experiences were socially constructed, shaped by the dictates of fashion, but the advertisement also suggested that women across time were linked by a common desire to balance practicality and beauty.

As popular culture co-opted feminist themes, feminists publicized their own narratives of women’s history by staging dramatic events that earned newspaper coverage. In the 1910s, suffragists deployed historical parades and pageantry to advocate progressive change. Women workers in predominantly male fields, including medicine, banking, and business, formed professional organizations that strove to improve employment opportunities by transforming public perceptions of women’s historical roles.¹⁸ Adapting popular fascination with the past to their activist aims, scholars and professionals encouraged alternative readings of popular iconography. Nevertheless, many feminist portrayals of the past adopted gender stereotypes, attributing women’s instincts, personalities, and skills to their biological sex. Accepting some so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Martha Washington (Would Have) Shopped Here: Women’s History in Magazines and Ephemera, 1910–1935
• 2. “The Quaker Girl Turns Modern”: How Adwomen Promoted History, 1910–1940
• 3. Broadcasting Yesteryear: Women’s History on Commercial Radio, 1930–1945
• 4. Gallant American Women: Feminist Historians and the Mass Media, 1935–1950
• 5. Betsy Ross Red Lipstick: Products as Artifacts and Inspiration, 1940–1950
• 6. “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby”: Women’s History in Consumer Culture from World War II to Women’s Liberation
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author