Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 127
Images of the Housewife
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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