The Angel in the Marketplace by Ellen Wayland-Smith

Author:Ellen Wayland-Smith [Wayland-Smith, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

“Sentimentalism,” Ann Douglas writes of the nineteenth-century sanctification of the feminine virtues of home and hearth, “provides a way to protest against a power to which one has already in part capitulated.” The mythic, sentimentalized figure of the maternal “angel in the house” gained such traction in nineteenth-century America because it provided a counterweight to the moral misdeeds of market society. Women who advocated for domestic virtues, like the Beecher sisters, were thus “in the position of contestants in a fixed fight: they had agreed to put on a convincing show, and to lose. The fakery involved,” Douglas concludes grimly, “was finally crippling for all concerned.”26

Jean would not have described the face-off between the spheres as a fixed fight and would firmly have denied the charge of fakery. That there were losers in this arrangement, Jean knew. Her research taught her that the role of housewife, despite its rewards, also felt like a trap to many women. In her talk to Oneida executives in 1946, she convinced them that the modern young woman, aged eighteen to twenty-six, wanted nothing more than to get married, to have a home of her own. Yet Jean’s polling uncovered a puzzle: “What do they hate to do most? . . . [They] hate to stick to a budget, to bake and mend and sew and dust and mop and hang curtains. Do you notice how many of these things they hate are things they do at home—and yet, in spite of it all, they’re tumbling over themselves to get in one.”27 Having noted this contradiction, Jean said nothing more about it. Perhaps she dropped it in to emphasize the sacrifices women were willing to make to get their man. Perhaps—given that her audience was all men—it was a humorous jab at that oh-so-contradictory yet ultimately lovable creature, Woman.

Again and again, the housewives she interviewed confessed boredom; anxiety; a dimly felt desire to “make a difference” in the larger world, with no clear path to do so. In summarizing a study of women’s magazine readership in 1949, Jean noted the key features of “Mrs. Middle Majority”: “She is a housewife,” Jean started off the list, “with limited experience because her life is limited to a familiar, narrow routine and she lacks the background which would lead her to seek wider interests.” “She is fairly unimaginative,” Jean specified, “because her way of life does not call for any originality or imagination; instead, discourages it.” And finally, most damningly, but noted with the cool neutrality befitting the tone of an office memo, “she has a sense of futility because her life is pretty drab and monotonous.”28

But Jean’s responsibility as an advertiser was not to spring women from their trap. It was to make the trap more comfortable. Advertising was a kind of ministry by which she could help wives and mothers “adjust,” to use the therapeutic vocabulary of the age, to their prescribed roles. And while she gently acknowledged that these roles could chafe, she never seriously questioned them.

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