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