Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 127

Images of the Housewife 123 excluded completely. In later years such ads would disappear from woman's magazines as advertisers came to believe that women did not buy financial services products. If the husband was duty-bound to provide financial security, advertisers communicated that the wife's first responsibility was to make her husband happy and content, a feat easily accomplished through the use of the advertiser's product. One such ad shows an angry man leaning forward in his chair shaking a finger at his wife. Their small daughter clutches Mom's skirts in apparent fright. The headline reads "Grouchy Husbands," and the copy promises that Postum Cereal will cure the irregularity that causes his irritability. In an ad for Listerene Shaving Cream a matronly wife in a white apron tries to serve food to a man lounging in his easy chair, but he waves her away. The copy never makes it clear how using Listerene will cure the man's bad humor, but this is the implication. Even cleaning products found a way to use this theme. A Lysol ad proclaimed, "From the moment he enters the house, his health is in your hands."® These ads place the responsibility for the husband's attitude and health squarely on the wife and offer a simple solutionuse of a consunrter product Another simple solution to the needs of the housewife was the automobile. Some historians have noted that advertisers at that time understood that women influenced family car buying decisions, believing that men focused on the mechanical details while women were concerned with functional and decorative details.^ Indeed the ads featuring women emphasized dependability and value. For example, a Collier's ad showed a woman climbing into a sleek Chevy Coupe. The headline read, "For daughter, wife or mother . . . . With it the wife can drive the family provider to and from the station or the children to and from school." Ad copy emphasized the dependability of the car. A Dodge Brothers ad showed a smiling woman climbing into a car as her smiling daughter waved to the reader. The ad promised dependability, value and long life from a Dodge car.^® It was about this time that the homemaker acquired a new rolethat of family chauffeur. As in the Chevy ad above, most ads implied that the automobile had become a necessary tool for the homemaker. Apparently the American public agreed. In their landnuirk study of life in Muncie, Indiana, Robert and Helen Lynd