Selling Women's History by Emily Westkaemper

Author:Emily Westkaemper [Westkaemper, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, Popular Culture, Design, Graphic Arts, Advertising, History, United States, General, Women, Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Sociology, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9780813576350
Google: 3cCpDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2017-01-09T05:24:55+00:00

Figure 5.1. A visual chronicle of Dorothy Dignam’s appearance accompanied her analysis of continuity and change in women’s employment. Dorothy Dignam, “More Women in Advertising Now Than in World War I,” Printers’ Ink, May 29, 1942, Dorothy Dignam Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Writing in 1944 for the three million readers of Woman’s Day—a magazine sold exclusively by A&P grocery stores and focused on domestic advice and product promotion—anthropologist Margaret Mead offered another method for reconciling women’s traditional roles with their modern employment.17 She argued that postwar women should be free to decide “where they belong—at home or in industry.” Some liked to “darn socks,” and some liked to “tend machines,” she reasoned, as the article’s photographs presented a visual parallel between a woman on an assembly line and a woman canning food at home. The ability to choose between these two forms of production, including the option of hiring someone to cook for one’s own family, would best serve society as a whole. Concluding that the postwar economy could accommodate all who chose paid employment, Mead argued that traditional social definitions of femininity provided the only true barrier to women’s careers. To encourage transformation of these ideals, she traced previous historical shifts in gender norms, from the initial entry of women into the public sphere to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In this analysis, society defined and limited women’s behavior, but history provided a guide for change; this reflected a different perspective from the celebrations of icons like Molly Pitcher, which often placed the burden on individual women to fulfill an ideal of feminine sacrifice.18

AVON

Throughout World War II, Avon Products cast its cosmetics as tools to help modern women serve as living embodiments of the nation’s patriotic heritage, a campaign that grew out of the company’s long-term growth strategy and its sales structure. Avon had evolved from the California Perfume Company, which began selling toiletries, food colorings and flavorings, and cleaning products door to door in 1886. In 1929, the “Avon” line first appeared, and within a decade the Suffern, New York, company officially adopted the Avon name and turned its focus to color cosmetics.19 The company recruited its exclusively female sales staff with the slogan “Now you are in business for yourself.” In reality, women could make some decisions about when and where they would canvas, but executives dictated products, prices, and promotional themes. There were minimal possibilities for advancement, and sales representatives’ status as contractors working entirely on commission excluded them from New Deal protections like the Social Security Act. Under this system, Avon remained profitable during the Great Depression, enabling its forays into national magazine advertising in the late 1930s.20 During the 1940s, the company used this platform to praise its saleswomen as morale-boosting patriots, echoing the government’s propaganda that equated the cosmetic beauty of female laborers and military recruits with the triumph of democracy.21 Many consumers embraced this mindset: women surveyed by the War Production Board identified lipstick as a necessity that should remain exempt from rationing.

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