Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 130

126 Popular Culture Review stylish dress wears waist-length pearls and an elegant picture frame hat as she cooks. The headline says, "Kitchen cool-dainty frockhomemade jelly," in the ad for Minute Jelly. Another woman in a matronly dress and apron measures spices into a bubbling pot. "The spicing is the secret," says the ad for Heinz Tomato Ketchup.^ ^ Advertisers were sending the message that cooking was a breeze with their food products. Another new image of women was that of capable advisor, a role that reflected the general emphasis during the period on a "scientific approach" to living. Frances Lee Barton was the spokeswoman for Swan's Down flour. In one ad, "Frances Lee Barton explains the most important point in cake making," the use of Swan's Down Cake Flour.^^ Women were depicted as cooking experts in the ads just described, but cooking, after all, was clearly a woman's domain. Other housekeeping details, especially those related to technical or mechanical details, required the advice of male experts. A Valspar paint ad that showed a smiling woman painting her kitchen also showed a male "expert" demonstrating to a woman the "famous Valspar boiling water test." Appliance ads frequently showed males demonstrating the appliances and explaining the features.^^ As in the Hoover ad above, the message was clear: women were smart enough to use products, but only men could understand them well enough to explain them. The "new" woman in the ads was very fashionable. The Lynds reported that business class housewives in Muncie "stayed dress^ up all the time,"^^ as in some of the ads I've just described. The advertising woman was stylish but conservative. For example, the housewife in the Hoover ad described above wore an elegant chemise as she vacuumed, stylish but loose-fitting without a plunging neckline. Her hair was short and curly, softer than the flapper's bob.^^ Remaining sexually attractive even as one did household chores was becoming the middle class standard, but it is doubtful that working class wives, the majority of American women, had the resources to risk ruining their best dresses by wearing them while canning jelly. Other aspects of these images defied reality for most American homemakers. The America of the nineteen twenties was a blue collar world. The 1920 census found only 25 per cent of workers in