Advertising as Social Tableaux
Roland Marchand

The scene opens upon the covered veranda of a spacious country club. In the foreground, two women and a man are seated in large, smartly designed wicker chairs around a low table.  They are carrying on a casual but obviously engaging conversation. A waiter in a white coat, black bow tie, and slicked-down hair stands near the table, opening a bottle. A golf bag rests beside one chair. The two women are seated with their backs to us, but their stylish cloche hats, their trim figures, and the slightly angular but nevertheless graceful way in which one leans forward toward the gentleman who is speaking unmistakably suggest fastidious demeanor and social confidence. The man faces us. He is impeccably dressed in a summer suit with his handkerchief precisely squared in his coat pocket. He has a tiny, trimmed mustache. As he speaks, he projects an image neither aggressive nor retiring, but simply confident and relaxed. His hands rest comfortably on his crossed knees.

The larger setting is opulent and refined. In the foreground and to the extreme right, a distinguished-looking man in knickers, seated in a wicker chair, serenely puffs a pipe and rests his book in his lap. He gazes out through the veranda's pillars toward the lawn, the boxed and sculpted trees by a low wall, and the golf course beyond. In the far background more waiters hover about several tables of genteel club members, as yet another couple emerges onto the veranda from the club-house doors. Everything suggests spaciousness as well as leisure. The central figures are well separated from each other with ample "talking room" and sufficient privacy from other tables. They are small. yet not dwarfed by the clubhouse. The pillars at the right, with several Italian cypress trees interspersed, open out for the entire length of the veranda, as far back as we can see, on the expansive open areas of the golf course. Several indistinct figures of golfers can be vaguely glimpsed. Although no color is apparent, the tiled floor of the veranda, the vines covering its roof and the grassy expanses convey a sense of vivid opulence. Tiny goblets on the table of the three characters in the foreground complete the image of fastidious restraint.

Having taken in the scene, we then learn something about the sprightly conversation that is unfolding at the table in the foreground and about some other characters soon to make an appearance: "A woman's laugh falls gaily upon their ears, and the company learns of a well-played match. The talk turns to yachting and a youth tells of winning the King of Spain's cup. Fleet horses engage their interest and a Master of Hounds recounts a thrilling hunt in Maryland."¹

The scene just described might have served as the opening tableau for a play, reproduced in precise detail from the instructions of a playwright who wished to convey an immediate impression of the characters and their society at the raising of the curtain. In fact, it appeared in a 1929 Canada Dry Ginger Ale ad from the Chicago Tribune. Advertising tableaux such as this confront us directly with the dilemma posed by the rather offhand but frequently repeated truism that "advertising reflects society."

We should recognize, first, that advertisements may be said to reflect society in several ways that have little relevance to the problems raised by the Canada Dry tableau. Advertisements depict and describe the material artifacts available for purchase at a given time. They reveal the state of technology, the current styles in clothing, furniture, and other products, and sometimes the relative prices commanded by various goods. Whereas archaeologists must deduce the probable social uses of the artifacts they unearth, and then interpret from them the economic and social structures of the society, advertisements provide us with ample guidelines to the social functions (or at least the suggested uses) of various products. They can supply this information about a society without depicting either a person or a social setting, merely by displaying and describing the products themselves.

Another way that advertisements can "reflect society" without actually depicting any social setting is through the testimonial ad. The endorser may be quoted without illustration; or he or she may be shown in close-up, with no suggestion of social context. But the choice of endorser will tell us what sort of person the advertising professionals, from their highly motivated study of popular attitudes and perhaps through sales or coupon tests, have determined that the public will best accept as an "authority." If the trend in testimonials moves away from business figures toward movie celebrities, we have glimpsed one reflection of attitudinal changes in the society.

The Concept of a Social Tableau

But the advertisements we are most likely to think of when we speak of ads as "reflections of society" are those, like the Canada Dry ad, that may be defined as "social tableaux." Within this category fall all advertisements in which persons are depicted in such a way as to suggest their relationships to each other or to a larger social structure. The depiction of a single person may qualify if that person is placed in a setting suggestive of social relationships with others.

I have adapted the phrase "social tableau" from the term "tableaux vivants" or "living pictures," a genre of theater entertainment that enjoyed a moment of popularity toward the end of the nineteenth century. The tableaux vivants were elaborately costumed and staged representations of familiar scenes, accomplished through the grouping of models who held sustained, motionless poses while the curtain remained open on the scene. Their entertainment value stemmed from the shock of recognition of a familiar scene suddenly "brought to life" in three dimensions with real persons. The scenes, therefore, had to be familiar to the audience. They usually consisted of famous paintings, historical or biblical scenes, or esthetically pleasing fantasies of "moonlight" or "springtime."'

Playwrights still occasionally employ the tableau technique to etch a scene vividly in the audience's memory. The actors are frozen in place as the curtain opens or the stage lights come on. They hold their poses for several seconds before the action and dialogue begin, so that the audience may take in the atmosphere of the stage set and the implications of the depicted social situation. These theater tableaux seem to me the genre most nearly analogous to printed advertisements that depict social scenes. Though both are static, both are as suggestive as possible of impending or arrested action.

The social tableau advertisement usually depicts a contemporary "slice-of-life" setting rather than a work of art or a legendary scene. But it still relies on scenes sufficiently stereotypical to bring immediate audience recognition. just as the tableaux vivants were defined as "vivid" representations, so the advertising tableaux often enhance social scenes through their brilliance of imagery and intensity of focus. With a little imagination, we might even interpret the texts of those ads as analogous to the program notes or spoken narratives that sometimes accompanied the nineteenth-century tableaux vivants.

But did the social tableau advertisements of the 1920s and 1930s serve, as they might seem to promise, as "mirrors" of American society in those decades? They usually purported to depict real, contemporary social scenes. But the Canada Dry tableau, which was not entirely unrepresentative of most advertisements, seemed to "reflect" only one very narrow stratum of American society. Other social strata, as manifested in urban slums, or working class households, or even apartment-house dwellers and families with boarders, found no reflection in advertising's "mirror." So prevalent was a "class atmosphere" in these social tableaux that a historian relying exclusively on their manifest evidence could only conclude that most Americans of that era enjoyed an exceedingly affluent and leisured mode of life.

Thus, before we attempt to evaluate the "evidence" of these social tableaux, we must recall that "reflecting society" was not the purpose of these ads. The content of a social tableau advertisement was determined primarily by merchandising strategy. Its purpose was to sell a product. Within the boundaries set by that strategy, its content was further shaped by pictorial conventions and by the desire to provide consumers with a scene into which they could comfortably and pleasurably place themselves. Given the assumption of advertisers, constantly reinforced by their observations of popular culture, that people preferred to identify with portrayals of themselves as they aspired to be, rather than as they "really were," we must assume that most social tableaux aimed at depicting settings at least "a step up" from the social circumstances of the readers.

If social tableau advertisements are too unrepresentative of social reality to provide us a "slice-of-life" semblance of America, perhaps they can be salvaged as evidence by interpreting them as reflective of the "reality" of the social aspirations of American consumers. After all, the tableaux were reflections of something, even though that something is more accurately described as "social fantasy" than "social reality." Fantasy images of "a step up" may also conceivably be employed to estimate the reality of the step below. Even highly selective and idealized images of one elevated rung of the social ladder may provide information on assumptions about class relationships and social structure that ad writers believed their audiences would accept without dissent.

But these "reflections" in the ads must still be evaluated in the light of another possible source of distortion - the impact of the advertisers' mission as apostles of modernity. The social tableaux depicted an ideal modern life - one to which consumers presumably aspired, but also one specifically discerned by the eyes of ad creators. As we explore the social roles portrayed by the players in these tableaux, we will find instances in which the distortions created by merchandising strategies and by the occupational biases of advertising agents resulted in images that accurately reflect neither the actual lives nor the authentic aspirations of consumers. But we may also discover situations in which the tableaux, because they sought to relate products to social needs, did graphically reflect central social and cultural dilemmas of the age.

Modern Woman as Businesswoman:
"The Little Woman, G.P.A."

The leading lady claimed the largest role in the advertising tableaux. Her qualifications for stardom were scarcely debatable; everyone acknowledged that she made at least 80 percent of all consumer purchases. To foster identification and illustrate consumer satisfactions advertisers kept her in the limelight. Although stereotyped characters abounded in the tableaux, the portrait of the American woman that emerged from the ads of the 1902s and 1930s is striking in its complexity. No other figure in the tableaux shifted roles and appearances so frequently. Yet the ultimate boundaries on the leading lady's scope of action were so clearly drawn that this apparent diversity of roles eventually came to seem less impressive.

The decisive separation of workplace and home during the previous century had inspired extremely polarized conceptions of the proclivities and capacities of men and women. Man's proper sphere had been increasingly defined by a life away from home in a world of ambition, severe competition, and the efficient, unsentimental manipulation of people and objects. In compensation, the home, now defined as the woman's sphere, had assumed the character of a sanctuary. Here the woman preserved the "softer" and more "cultured" qualities of sentiment, beauty, and repose, while progress proceeded apace in the "real world" outside.⁴

The home and its perpetual occupant, the wife, had thus acquired an archaic aura. According to this convention the home was not an agency of modernization, but rather a buffer against the harsher thrusts and shocks of progress. The women who guarded these havens did not contribute to the progress of the modern world. Rather, they preserved those qualities that helped to soften the necessary dislocations caused by progress and to salve the psychological wounds they inflicted.

Most social tableau advertisements of the 1920s and 1930^s perpetuated the notion of polarized sexual spheres. But advertisers strenuously resisted the implication that women represented archaic qualities. Jealous as they were of their self-proclaimed status as the most modern of men, advertising men still labeled women as the more modern of the sexes. Advertisers not only complimented women on their superior responsiveness to new ideas, they also made them look modern. Although Santa Claus retained his traditional girth and white hair in advertising tableaux and usually displayed an archaic, puckish charm, advertisers who employed "Mrs. Santa Claus" as a merchandising assistant insisted that she be a slim, chic, "modern little lady … who is up-to-the-minute on all present day matters. "⁵

Once again, however, the ambiguities of the concept of modernity intervened to prevent women from gaining complete respect for their apparent superiority. Ideas of modernity carried connotations drawn both from the realm of modern business progress (efficiency, control, rationality, technological sophistication) and from the realm of fashion (expressiveness, changeability, extravagance). Advertising tableaux cast women in "modern" roles in both of these senses of the word. But women's modest attainments in the higher, business sense of the term "modern" never achieved sufficient scope or stature to compensate for the un-serious implications of their modernity in fashion. In fact, the more that women achieved recognition for their modernity in consumption, the less they qualified for any true equality in the broader quest for modern progress.

This is not to say that women gained no recognition from advertisers for their progress in business skills in the 1920s. Quite the contrary, copywriters constantly congratulated women for their presumed new capacities for management. But the proper field for these managerial talents remained the home. Nowhere did advertising men display so sincere a desire to flatter women for having achieved modernity than in the frequency with which they recast the old role of housewife as "family G.P.A." or general purchasing agent.⁶ To view the home, by analogy, as a business concern and the housewife as a business executive seemed, in a business-minded age, to banish the archaic aura of the home. As purchasing agents, women could command respect for exhibiting qualities previously honored primarily in men - capacities for planning, efficiency, and expert decision-making. In its ad "The Little Woman, G.P.A.," N.W. Ayer and Son stationed the housewife at the controls of a domestic communications center, and appended prestigious initials after her name in the same way that a professional man might add LL.D. or M.D.  "Businesses may have their treasurers, their controllers," noted Ayer. "But homes have their wives who do the same work in 25 million independent businesses, the households of America."⁷ An appliance company congratulated "the modern homemaker" for running her home "quite as efficiently as her husband does his business - perhaps more so." Scores of tableaux disclosed the housewife planning expenditures or paying bills at her home desk and labeled her role "manager" or "executive."⁸

Social tableaux also frequently portrayed women demonstrating their new competence as purchasing agents in forays outside the home. In an ad headlined "Women know these things now," Veedol Motor Oils complimented women on their refusal to "rely on the men folk for every little thing as women did a generation ago."⁹ Similarly, Piggly Wiggly stores, the pioneers in self-service food markets, congratulated women for their "self-reliant" new skill in shopping. "The women of yesterday probably could not have done it at all," Piggly Wiggly began patronizingly. "For the woman of today it is both easy and pleasant. Her new, wide knowledge of values, her new ability to decide for herself, is one of the wonders of the world we live in." By selecting products off the shelf with "no clerk to persuade her," proclaimed Piggly Wiggly, "she has astonished her husband … and the world."¹⁰

If her husband was astonished, still he suffered no loss of traditional dominance. If his wife was the home's purchasing agent - and thus analogous to a business executive of modest power - the husband was more elegantly defined, either implicitly or explicitly, as the home's "treasurer" or its "president."¹¹ The wife's expertise and efficiency within the realm of day-to-day consumer decision-making warranted praise, but her ultimate subordination to a higher executive remained unchallenged. As for her heralded new competence in decision-making, Piggly Wiggly characterized it as fully expressed in her "endorsement" of the Piggly Wiggly plan, and Veedol suggested that she exercise her new independence by relying on Veedol ads rather than on the advice of "men folk." For the upper-middle-class housewife, the new ascribed status of "purchasing agent" was particularly ironic. Just as she was receiving recognition with a managerial-sounding title, as Ruth Schwartz Cowan points out, she was often losing help from servants, relatives, and commercial service agencies and was slipping into a less managerial role as an unspecialized, "proletarianized" household worker."¹²

Even though the "President of Home, Inc." occasionally called her to account on expenses, the efficient home manager's goal was as much to save time as to save money. A "clever manager" not only claimed respect for her businesslike modernity, she also emancipated herself from withering isolation and cultural deprivation by creating time for outside activities. This she accomplished by giving housework even more attention but turning it into a science. So systematic was one home manager, in the fond vision of an advertising agent for a washing machine, that "when she shopped, she bought in twos. Two shirts exactly alike. Two sheets exactly alike. Two towels, two pairs of pajamas, two pairs of hose." She saw that each article had similar wear. "But one she sent out by the pound and the other she had washed at home with her electric washer .... . Then she balanced her cost - operating cost of machine, maid's time at 50 cents an hour, . . . machinery depreciation."¹³ For a somewhat less self-reliant but still eagerly scientific young housewife, Old Dutch Cleanser provided a white-coated scientist with a stopwatch to measure her cleaning speed .¹⁴

Leisure - For What?

The merchandising strategies of manufacturers of foods, soaps, waxes, disinfectants, and similar products usually dictated tableaux that elevated the standards for respectable housekeeping. Like the home economists, whom they often employed, these advertisers exalted "homemaking" as a career. As Ruth Cowan remarks, the image of housework changed: "it was no longer a trial and a chore, but something quite different - an emotional 'trip.'"¹⁵ And if the positive rewards of scientific perfection were not sufficient, there was always the goad of possible failure. "By Their Floors Ye Shall judge Them," admonished one floor polisher ad. "It is written that floors are like unto a mirror, reflecting the character of the housewife."¹⁶ But emphasis on higher standards of housework was not the main thrust of ads to women in the 1920s and 1930s. Scores of advertisers, including the producers of new home appliances, promised that their laborsaving products and services would bring women the most fulfilling reward - leisure time.

It is in the delineation by social tableau advertisements of these new self-fulfilling activities for women that we discover one of the purest instances of advertising as a social mirror. The particular merchandising bias of the advertisement for a time-saving home service or a drudgery-removing appliance was largely exhausted in the argument that it could, in fact, produce the desired increase in a woman's "free" time. How the leading ladies in these tableaux used the new discretionary time represented the best estimate by advertising copywriters and artists of the uses of discretionary time that women would find most attractive.

Many of these ads now showed the housewife enjoying her leisure - with the picture of the product absent or subordinated. The desirability of the depicted substitute activity was the very essence of the ad's appeal: to show women using their free time for gardening when most actually longed to go shopping for clothes would be an advertising blunder. If advertising men ever faced a situation in which their overriding task was to depict exactly what the audience wanted, uncontaminated by their own or the manufacturer's ulterior motives, these portrayals of the uses of leisure would seem to have offered that occasion.

Using these assumptions, we can attempt to reconstruct the aspirations of women readers of mass-circulation magazines in the 1902s from the advertising campaign of the American Laundry Machinery Company. This campaign stressed the time saved by sending family washing to a commercial laundry and described the activities women might choose in their free time. Each ad usually included three or more illustrated testimonials in which women described the particular joys of their expanded leisure. Since the ads included a large number of examples, we may be able to infer from them not only which activities women most desired, but also the boundaries of such desires. What these ads did not include may be as significant as what they specifically portrayed.

What uses of leisure time did the women in these ads find most appealing? A compilation of all activities described or depicted in eight of these ads in 1926 reveals that leisure for reading and for spending more time with their children far outranked all other choices, with twelve mentions each. Participation in club activities gained six mentions; golf, sewing, and part-time work outside the home numbered five each. Visits with friends, concerts and plays, home decoration, music, motoring, and sports ocher than golf all appeared in at least three testimonials or lists of possible leisure activities. No testimonial mentioned a career. Civic affairs gained only a single reference, and shopping and charity work each appeared only twice .¹⁷

A survey of ads for other laborsaving devices and services between 1926 and 1928 reveals an even heavier emphasis on "more time to devote to your children" or "companionship with your children" as the most desired benefit. Visits with friends, clubs, reading, golf, the theater, and bridge received lesser attention; part-time work, shopping, and civic affairs received none. Several years later, a Woman's Home Companion study of women's use of free time resulted in "a list so long and a range so wide that even we staunch believers in feminine progress were surprised." But the magazine still implicitly preserved certain outer boundaries of women's proper sphere by noting that the gamut of leisure activities extended from "kitchen to golf course - nursery to club room."¹⁸

This evidence could support the argument of Ruth Schwartz Cowan and others that new theories of child care - which called for expanded, expert attention to the child and the cultivation of a feeling of companionship between child and mother - had persuaded many women simply to shift their time from house maintenance to child nurture. Certainly advertisements seemed calculated to encourage that process. Social tableaux regularly offered warm scenes of mothers sharing their children's enjoyment of a book, a picnic, or a romp through a field of wildflowers . Ads warned that during children's early "plastic years … when they need 'mothering' most," a woman had precious little time to exert that crucial influence that would guide her children "safely through the shoals and narrows of childhood" and fortify them against the multitude of competing influences and attractions that might later induce them to "drift away."¹⁹

The social tableaux will not tell us, however, whether these visions of a new companionship with children actually came to pass. Nor will they reveal whether these choices for leisure time were authentic reflections of women's real attitudes. We must still take into account possible refractions in advertising's "mirror image." The testimonials may have revealed women's notions about praiseworthy uses of leisure time more clearly than it showed their real preferences. Certainly it is striking, despite mounting box-office figures and frequent comments in the trade press about the movie-madness of the age, that no women in these tableaux confessed to using their new leisure time to go to the matinee.

The American Laundry Machinery testimonials were undoubtedly edited by copywriters to avoid undue repetition and to establish the range of alternatives they wished. The resulting priorities may well have represented a judgment by male copywriters about what women ought to want. Finally, although these ads addressed women of middle-class status and above, the class and educational biases of advertising men still had a distorting effect. Whether golf really played so substantial a role, even in these women's fantasies of leisure, is certainly open to question. The extraordinary emphasis on reading may have been influenced by copywriters' own association of reading with enjoyable leisure, and by the frequency with which their trade journals bombarded them with clichéd pictures of the faithful woman subscriber to the advertised publication intently reading in her chair. ²⁰ This emphasis may also have arisen from the traditional convention of depicting the stereotyped woman-at-leisure as reposing in a chair or reclining in a chaise lounge, with one hand holding a book or magazine and the other poised over a box of chocolates nearby.²¹ In short, I suspect that female readers of these advertisements harbored real desires that were less refined, less intellectual, less golf-oriented, and perhaps even more consumption-minded than the ads suggested.

Many of the advertising tableaux presented women's new leisure pursuits as acts of individual self-expression. One American Laundry Machinery Company ad, having contrasted "Mrs. Weary Wife at Home" and "Mrs. Wise Wife at Liberty," suggested an open-ended, self-justifying notion of "female freedom" in a world of recreation and amusement where "there is so much to learn, so much to do, so much to see and hear."²² But more common were the tableaux that brought women back full-circle to their traditional roles: the new range of activities made them "better wives and mothers."

In the modern, bureaucratized, less provincial business world, the ads warned women, their husbands might quickly outgrow them in sophistication, class standing, and breadth of tastes and experiences. To retain their husbands' affection, modern wives had to find time to educate themselves to be stimulating social and intellectual companions. They needed to preserve their youth so that they could beautify their husbands' lives and keep pace with them during evenings of dancing and theater . The Laundry Owners Association promised "the woman who could never think of reading like this on washday" that with her wash at the laundry, her new leisure would keep her "young-minded, fresh, and radiant." You will be, they told her, "a real partner in your husband's interests; a true companion to your children; an even better homemaker than you have ever been." ²³

In the crucial endeavor of becoming good companions and partners to their modern husbands, the tableaux further suggested, women's business efficiency in the home held value only as a necessary means. The new woman must apply the time saved through modern management to the cultivation of broader interests and a youthful, modern look. Diversification of her activities and her mastery of business methods did not alter the reality of a woman's "world." It was a world, in Roland Barthes' phrase, "entirely constituted by the gaze of man," one in which "man is everywhere around, he presses on all sides, he makes everything exist." Lady Esther Face Cream expressed the idea more hauntingly: "Men's eyes are magnifying mirrors."²⁴ Borrowing from a tradition well established in art, advertising illustrators generously supplied their female subjects with mirrors as surrogates and symbols of those judgmental gazes of the world outside the boudoir . Some advertisers clearly conveyed the idea that in presenting the formulaic scene of the woman seated before her dressing-table mirror they had captured the essence of "Woman" . For the male copywriter or illustrator, the mirror served to epitomize women's supposedly unrivaled addiction to vanity; for a woman, it served as a reminder of an inescapable "duty" beyond that of efficient homemaking - the duty "to catch and hold the springtime of her beauty."²⁵

Advertisers insistently reminded women that they might lose the very opportunity to embark on their "great adventure" of homemaking or fail to hold their treasured positions as companions unless they repeatedly won these privileges in the ongoing "beauty contest of life." The warnings could be positively intimidating. "What Do Men Think When They Look at You?" asked one Camay soap ad. "You against the Rest of Womankind; your Beauty … your Charm … your Skin," warned another. "Someone's eyes are forever searching your face ,comparing you with other women."²⁶  A corset manufacturer added that the "beauty contest of life" was an equal-opportunity competition, in which women must acquire beauty "as a personal achievement … not a birthright." Ivory soap rushed to the aid of mothers seeking to protect their daughters from failure in the most important "battle" of their lives. To gain a headstart on the competition, the mother in an Ivory tableau told her infant daughter, "I'm Starting Your Beauty Plans Now" .²⁷

Grotesque Moderne

Exactly what "look" women should adopt to play their modern roles was defined less by the close-ups of soap and cosmetic ads than by the stances, silhouettes, and accessories of women in the whole range of social tableau advertisements. The "Fisher Body girl" established the normative image for women in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The creation of illustrator McClelland Barclay, this heroine of the Fisher Body ads was slender, youthful, and sophisticated. Her finely etched facial features formed a slightly aloof smile, suggesting demure self-confidence in her obvious social prestige and her understated sexual allure. Attired elegantly, but not exotically, she stood tall and angular, her fingers and toes tapering to sharp points. In her role as a model of the proper feminine look, she gained credit for attracting the attention of women as much as men .²⁸

In one direction, this modal image of modern woman shaded off into that of the housewife and mother. Her outlines were usually softer and slightly .more rounded than the Fisher Body girl. Her posture was less self-consciously canted or accentuated, her neck and limbs slightly shorter .²⁹ In the other direction, the divergence from the Fisher Body model moved more abruptly toward striking "high-fashion" extremes, until the "modern woman" approached the status of a geometric abstraction.

It was in the increasingly abstract portrayals of this "high-fashion" version of the American woman that advertising men effectively propagated their contention that the "beloved buying sex" must also be the most modern.³⁰ Men were sometimes depicted in modernistic illustrations. But never did advertising artists distort and reshape men's bodies as they did when they transformed women into Art Deco figurines. Women in the tableaux, as symbols of modernity, sometimes added more than a foot to their everyday heights and stretched their elongated eyes, fingers, legs, arms, and necks to grotesque proportions . The proportions of some women in the tableaux suggested a height of over nine feet. In deference to the geometric motifs of popularized modern art in the 1920s, women's legs sometimes extended in cantilevers or absolutely straight lines from thigh to toe. Their pointed feet and toes appeared to have emerged fresh from a pencil sharpener. Foot-long fingers similarly tapered into icy stilettos. As for their legs, one advertising writer observed that they were "just as long as the artist cares to make them, and evidently he is paid by the running foot."³¹

Thus the woman of high fashion - and, by implication, all women of high social status - appeared in advertising tableaux as physically distinct from the woman of lower social position. By a Lamarckian process of natural selection, the lady of high class had acquired an elongated neck to accentuate her pearl necklace and her hat, and a body tall enough for the artistic drape of an evening dress. Her sculpted head evoked images of Grecian culture and aristocratic poise; her brittle, tapered appendages conformed to Thorstein Veblen's specifications for the look of conspicuous leisure. So extreme were some of these distortions that a comparison of advertising drawings with contemporary advertising photographs is often startling, even though the photographs themselves were often taken at extreme angles, in an effort to approximate the fashionable ideal. Even next to the moderately high-fashion drawings of the retail advertisements, women in the advertising photographs look squat, neckless, and beefy .³²

What relationship did the modern woman of these illustrations bear to social realities? Certainly the physical resemblance was meager. Fashion economist Paul Nystrom estimated in 1928 that only 17 percent of all American women were both "slender" and over 5 feet 3 inches in height.³³ The emphasis on youth and slimness, however, did reinforce the notion of women's new freedom of physical activity; and like the cut of women's clothes, the stance of fashion models, and the postures of modern dance, it fostered the image of the woman in actual or impending motion - the woman on the move.³⁴ The tubular shapes and angular lines also suggested a rejection of the traditional motherly image. In fact, advertising tableaux that cast women in maternal roles with children usually modified the modern image appreciably, rounding out the figure, bringing the proportions back toward normal, and softening the lines . Perhaps significantly, mothers looked like women of more modest social status.

If extreme height and exaggerated "artistic" postures gave the modern woman of the ads a certain claim to elegance and prestige, still she gained stature mainly in comparison to other, non-fashionable women. In relation to men, as Erving Goffman has intriguingly suggested in Gender Advertisements, distortions of women's shapes and gestures often convey messages about social subordination. Women, Goffman argues, appear in poses that are more "canted," more exaggerated and grotesque, more off-balance and tentative than those assumed by men. These stances and gestures imply a sense of dependence on the man for stability and balance, a willingness to make oneself into an interesting "object," and a greater vulnerability to the caprices of a dominating emotionality .³⁵

Particularly common in the illustrations of the 1920s and 1930s is the contrast, which Goffman noted in the 1960s, between the predominance of a solid, firmly planted stance for men and an unbalanced stance for women. Men in the tableaux usually balanced their weight on both feet. Women placed their weight on one foot while the other leg indulged in a "bashful knee bend" or complimented the supporting leg and foot by posing at an artistic angle . If such off-balance and tentative stances implied, as Goffman argues, a status of dependence and a "foregoing of full effort" to prepare for assertive, self-reliant action, then illustrators of the 1902s and 1930s certainly exaggerated these qualities in depicting the modern woman.³⁶

Advertising illustrations thus reinforced the tendency to interpret woman's modernity in a "fashion" sense and to define the status of "decorative object" as one of her natural and appropriate roles. Women took on the contours and angles of their modern art backdrops more decisively than men, suggesting their pliability in the service of art. In some tableaux, women with less distorted shapes and postures still functioned as decorations for the depicted room, as much as did the sculptured art objects or the curtains .³⁷ Even the distortions of body proportions, which elevated women of fashion and status to awesome heights of eight or nine feet, served more to accentuate their decorative potential than to suggest their commanding presence as new women of broader capacities and responsibilities.

Anticipations of Superwoman:
Finessing the Contradictions of Modernity

The compulsion of advertising men to relegate women's modernity to the realm of consumption and dependence found expression not only in pictorial styles but also in tableaux that sought to link products with the social and political freedoms of the new woman. Expansive rhetoric that heralded women's march toward freedom and equality often concluded by proclaiming their victory only in the narrower realm of consumer freedoms. In "When Lovely Women Vote," an immaculately groomed modern woman, well-educated and active in civic affairs, gazed idealistically outward and upward in the pose more recently adopted for political candidates with "vision." However, the question on which she was asked to vote was "What toothpaste do you use?" .38 Cannon Mills recalled that since women had first exercised the vote for political candidates in 1920, "that year we decided to let them vote on towels too."³⁹ The frequent conflation of consumer and sociopolitical freedoms found provocative expression in a 1930 Chicago Tribune ad entitled "Feminine Values": "Today's woman gets what she wants. The vote. Slim sheaths of silk to replace voluminous petticoats. Glassware in sapphire blue or glowing amber. The right to a career. Soap to match her bathroom's color scheme."⁴⁰

Although a devotion to matching soaps might seem trivial to some, women's responsibility for home decoration was linked with a much more significant issue. Whatever range of outside activities they might enjoy, women still bore full responsibility for maintaining the "saving atmosphere" of the home. In an age of rapid tempo and distracting amusements, women needed to respond to such centrifugal forces by making their homes adequate counter-attractions. Only by making her home a haven of beauty and cleanliness, and herself an energetic and alluring companion, could a wife shoulder that "burden of making a marriage successful [which] must always be chiefly on the woman."⁴¹ Ads for products ranging from laxatives to varnishes agreed that "one person" alone was responsible for the family's happiness. No tableau ever portrayed a housewife enjoying golf, a club meeting, or even a frolic with the children at the expense of her homemaking responsibilities. Nor did any tableau exempt her from the responsibility of beautifying herself and her surroundings. Men, the tableaux reiterated, fell in love, and stayed in love, with the beauty-minded, and ultimately home-oriented, "womanly woman." "Watch that you don't disappoint him," they warned. ⁴²

Thus the chain of women's roles in the tableaux came full circle: from the "business modernism" of the efficient home manager to the personal modernity afforded by leisure time and outside activities, then to the fashion modernism of the decorative object, and finally back to the hearth as home-beautifier and anchor against the winds of modern distractions. A woman's enthusiasm for stylistic modernity revealed a proper instinct for beautification, but it also inspired suspicions about her helpless susceptibility to the whims of change. It was not a modernity that contributed to significant social and economic progress.

In tableaux with titles such as "Her home is still her castle … but it has a drawbridge now," advertisers celebrated a woman's new freedom of activities.⁴³ But the drawbridge also led back into a castle (sometimes called a woman's "factory" in other tableaux) in which she was to continue to play the roles of queen and castellan . A truly modern woman would be so efficient as a "home manager and hostess" that she could blithely tee off at the fourteenth hole at four o'clock and still arrange a "dinner at seven for eight."⁴⁴ Sacrificing none of her former responsibilities as housewife, doting mother, and vision of loveliness, this modern superwoman would simultaneously display her talents as sportswoman, clubwoman, hostess, sophisticate, and home decorator. In advertising's fond reflection of "progressive" American ideology, she could attain every promise of the new while sacrificing nothing worthwhile of the old. Advertising men, it appeared, were not only apostles of modernity; more significantly, they were mediators who counseled women on how to adapt without cost to a consumption-oriented modernity that was appropriate for feminine instincts and capabilities.

The Businessman as Generic Man

In contrast to the women of the advertising tableaux, most of the other characters played less striking and less ambiguous roles. Men appeared almost as frequently as women, but often in nondescript, standardized parts as husbands or as businessmen at work. When the advertising message called for it, men appeared in a much larger variety of occupational roles than women - an accurate reflection of social realities. As doctors, dentists, or business executives, they might endorse the product; as truckers, delivery men, house painters, or mechanics they joined the tableaux to demonstrate the product's manufacture or use. But working-class men never appeared as consumers; an unspoken law decreed that the protagonist (and consumer surrogate) in every ad must be depicted as middle class . Not one motorist in a thousand, for instance, ever appeared in anything but a suit, tie, and hat or elite sporting togs.

When merchandising strategy did not call for a particular occupational function, the leading man, as Everyman, tended to conform to a single stereotype. Whenever his occupation was revealed, the man who played the role of husband was almost invariably identified as a businessman. Advertisers sought to flatter their male readers by opening the sales argument with "You are a business man." Remedies for nerves, fatigue, and constipation regularly attributed such ills to the "stress of business."⁴⁵ Among hundreds of thousands of advertisements in the 1920s and 1930s, I have yet to discover a single one in which the husband or the ambitious young man is defined as a factory worker, policeman, engineer, professor, architect, or government official, and I found only one in which he is a lawyer. Even doctors and dentists appeared only in their functional roles - not as typical husbands. As a McCall's advertisement put it, in an offhand manner that reflected the conventionality of this advertising stereotype: "The average man is just a business man."⁴⁶

Within the role of businessman, some slight differentiations emerged. Older men were likely to be cast as business executives. Young men were often salesmen, aspiring to the popular intermediate step of sales manager on a stereotyped business ladder. When husbands telephoned their wives to expect a dinner guest, they always brought home either a "sales manager" or a "client." Whatever his level of achievement in business, advertising's Mr. Everyman always left home bound for "the office," never for the shop, the factory, the garage, the courthouse, or the store. Copywriter A.B. Carson's "John Smith - typical citizen" worked "humped over a desk in a skyscraper." Coming home or leaving, he invariably wore a business suit. In the evening, at dinner parties, bridge games, or in restaurants and nightclubs, he usually adopted formal attire. One tableau defined the class position of typical men by describing the spectrum of their possible activities in the phrase "wherever they may be, at their desks or on the golf course." Advertisements that chronicled "a day in the life of a businessman" typically portrayed him at his desk, taking a customer out to dine, perhaps reading the ticker tape, and escorting a woman out for the evening . His office window, with its view of the tops of nearby skyscrapers, defined his employment as urban and his business affiliation as more likely a large corporation than a small retail concern. ⁴⁷

In contrast to many women of the advertising tableaux, men rarely assumed decorative poses or exaggerated bodily proportions. Their hands exemplified the contrast between the functional grasp of the male and the ethereal gesture of the female. In the struggle of business, suggested by harsh, competitive grasps, the man had often lost "a bit of the sentiment that used to abide in his heart," several ads noted. He had been "shackled to his desk" and might even need to slacken his pace, get to know his wife and children again, and experience those softer sentiments preserved within the shelter of the home.⁴⁸ But only for a brief respite. The competitive world of business helped make him a true man, and advertisers occasionally worried that the attempt to pretty him up for the collar ads and the nightclub scenes would sissify and weaken man's image, tailoring it too much to feminine tastes.⁴⁹

One collar manufacturer, seeking "to avoid the obvious danger of effeminacy" when women were introduced into collar ads, found a way to emphasize sexual differentiation by displaying the girl in color with many decorative accessories. She was looking at a man in a black-and-white photograph whose portrait, with its severe lines and matter-of-fact atmosphere, stood out in "virile contrast to the feminine charm of the girl and her colorful surroundings."⁵⁰ Edgeworth Smoking Tobacco even suggested that the growing number of women smokers had effeminized cigarettes; men should respond by turning to pipes. In a rare but strategically understandable display of pique at the recent advances of women, Edgeworth proclaimed: "A man looks like a man when he smokes a pipe."⁵¹

Men could dress conservatively, avoid distorted, modernistic poses, and return to traditional habits like pipe smoking because they did not have to prove themselves modern. All middle-class and upper-class men were businessmen, the tableaux implied. A businessman exemplified efficiency and control. If a woman's modernity was primarily decorative, a man's was primarily functional. In modeling the typical man on themselves, advertising men distorted the realities of occupational and class structures. By refusing to give men a distinct "look" as consumers, they preserved the assumption that dominant male instincts for production and functional modernity would counter any decadent tendencies of the consumption ethic.

Supporting Players

Of the supporting actors and actresses in the social tableaux, few were more stereotyped than the children. Two children invariably meant a boy and a girl, never two girls or two boys. Virtually never were children described or depicted in such a way as to suggest distinctly individual personalities. Except when the selling message specifically dictated otherwise, children were healthy, fastidiously groomed and attired, and impeccable in behavior. Magazines of the 1920s often conveyed "an image of youth out of control."⁵² Not so the advertising tableaux. Except on the few occasions when children or young people were called upon to influence the family's buying decisions through pleading or protest, they happily deferred to parental authority.

The elderly found their leading roles largely limited to ads for life insurance and grave-vaults; occasionally they gained "sit-in" parts as grandparents. Older men enjoyed a little greater latitude, since a silver-haired man could still find occasional work as a business executive, doctor, or experienced craftsman. Women whose hair had whitened found parts only as widows or grannies. Nothing so uniformly characterized the tableau roles of the elderly as a seemingly compulsory seated position. An observer from another century might well conclude, from studying advertisements alone, that men and women of the 1920s and 1930s lost the power of locomotion and upright stance after the age of fifty-five. Grandmothers sometimes still did handwork and both grandmothers and grandfathers held young children or read to them. Grandmothers bestirred themselves once or twice a year to put holiday turkey in the oven, but aside from that, most of them apparently did little more than daydream about the past . As if to confirm their distance from modernity, the elderly never appeared in explicitly urban settings.⁵³

If American films of the era, as Martha Wolfenstein has argued, placed their spotlight entirely on the younger generation and emphasized the discontinuity between present and past, advertising did so even more emphatically.⁵⁴ The elderly were not model consumers. Their needs and desires were less pressing than those of the younger generation and their ideas and habits were out-of-date. Usually, and perhaps mercifully, advertisers either removed them from sight or allowed them to sit quietly by the fire, rather than parading them on center stage as horrible examples. It would be easy to interpret a neglect of the older generation, and the prevalence of families with only one or two children, as an accurate reflection of certain social realities of the age: certainly nuclear families increasingly lived apart from grandparents, and the middle and upper classes adopted the ideal of the small family and practiced contraception.⁵⁵ But we must remember that the tactical considerations of advertising played as large a role as social realities in shaping such illustrations.

Children or the elderly usually gained parts in the tableaux for the limited purpose of conveying a single visual message - such as "family" or "child" or "extended family." Children appeared frequently, but in numbers no greater than needed to convey the required message. Only rarely did a family with more than two children appear, even in ads by newspapers and magazines that stressed the buying power of their subscriber families. Nor was the three-generation family called upon to convey an image of family buying power. Part of the reason stemmed from a law of artistic economy: don't clutter the picture with several figures when one child will adequately say "family" to the audience, and when a boy and a girl with parents will symbolize the whole universe of possible nuclear-family roles. A desire to focus the viewer's attention could lead to the decision to employ only a single child. Then, with the eyes of both mother and father turned solicitously toward the child, readers would be induced to look where the parents looked.  Such a focus of attention also carried the side effect of emphasizing the child's right to the parents' attentive concern.⁵⁶

The other reason for limiting the number of children and the appearances of grandparents was more attuned to social realities - or at least to the real attitudes of advertisers. To the upper-middle class, with its ideal of the smaller and more "democratic" family, a picture of a family with three or more children might suggest an absence of middle-class status. And the presence of three generations - except in the formulaic holiday dinner scene - might indicate an overcrowded and less affluent household. Social tableau families were the idealized families of artistic economy and social aspiration. Grandparents were removed from sight and mind and a favored child or two might receive doting attention.

Ethnic and racial minorities found virtually no employment in the advertisements of the 1920s and 1930s. The names and facial features of the central and supporting figures in the tableaux never suggested Southern or Eastern European origins. The names given to "typical" families or other leading figures tended heavily toward such standards as Brown, Anderson, Smith, Morton, and Jones. (Among these fictional names, the most suggestive of ethnic diversity I have encountered were Dougherty and Joyner.) Two rare tableaux allowed Italian men to speak broken English.⁵⁷ Asians found no role whatsoever in the ads; one "Mexican" washerwoman and an Eskimo washlady made single appearances as archaic foils for modern washing methods in a Procter and Gamble series. American Indians played their stereotyped roles in historical scenes, but they never appeared as contemporary figures. Categorically, ethnic and racial minorities failed to qualify as modern. Nor did crowd scenes depict racial and ethnic diversity, as they frequently do today. To immigrants, the message of advertising was implicit: only by complete fusion into the melting pot did one gain a place in the idealized American society of the advertising pages.⁵⁸

For blacks, the available roles in advertising, outside of those in the black press itself, were severely limited in scope as well as number. Finding little reason to use caricatures of blacks for humor, as other forms of popular culture did, advertisements largely confined them to roles as contented porters, janitors, wash-women, and houseboys . A few black trademark figures, such as Aunt Jemima and Rastus, the Cream of Wheat cook, at least managed to preserve a measure of humble dignity. Blacks never appeared as consumers, or as fellow workers with whites, or as skilled workers.⁵⁹ Primarily, they functioned as symbols of the capacity of the leading lady and leading man to command a variety of personal services. Certainly the tableaux distorted the diversity of functional roles that blacks played in the society and the extent of their satisfaction in servile positions, but the occasional presence of blacks did offer one perspective on the spectrum of social classes in that era. Perhaps if we turn from the predominantly stereotyped individual roles of the advertising tableaux to their broader delineations of classes and class relationships, we will find images more reflective of reality in advertising's "mirror."

Social Class in Advertising Tableaux

In People of Plenty, when David Potter defined advertising as the characteristic institution of an affluent society, he also suggested indirectly the affinities between advertising and a society of high social mobility and insecure social status. ⁶⁰ Expectations of mobility create the necessary openness to change; insecurities suggest an avenue of advertising appeal. It was particularly in a society of shifting relationships, without a fixed social hierarchy or authoritative standards, that products most readily served as an index of status.

Judging by the social tableaux of the 1920s and 1930s, advertisers had evidently concluded that American consumers hungered for an authentic, certified social aristocracy against which they might measure their own gains in status. For women, who constituted the huge bulk of consumers, the pursuit of modernity offered fulfillment only if it brought secure social status in reasonable proximity to an authentic social aristocracy. The tableaux steadily promised such fulfillment in scenes of ornate hotel ballrooms, exclusive restaurants and cabarets, and country club verandas like the one presented in the Canada Dry Ginger Ale tableau described at the beginning of this chapter.

These tableaux, and many others of less pretentious social scenes, disclose a society that saw differences of social class more distinctly than we do now - and a society that often spoke frankly about them. Frankness, of course, is not a salient quality of advertisements in situations where the advertising writer or art director has any reason to suspect that it will provoke even the slightest negative reaction. But advertisers in the 1920s and 1930s apparently had no qualms about flaunting the image of an opulent, exclusive, and clearly defined elite class before their audience. According to the tableaux, "society," in the narrow, elitist sense of the word, deserved popular veneration. Illustrations pictured an American social aristocracy; advertising texts unflinchingly labeled it as "high society." Although illustrations of mansions, liveried chauffeurs, and polo matches would seem to have been sufficient to create the desired impression, copywriters sometimes bluntly underlined the point by referring explicitly to "the rich" and "the wealthy." In the depths of the depression, staff members of one advertising agency voted a preference for advertising copy for a baking powder that claimed the patronage of 36 out of 39 "millionaires in one square mile" over copy that simply implied the same thing by referring to homes in "the finest residential section of Brookline."⁶¹

The "society" of the wealthy, moreover, was an organized society. As revealed in advertisements, it had distinct boundaries and standards of admission. People who were "in society" could be confidently labeled as such; others could be described as seeking to "break in." For their own tactical purposes, advertisers simultaneously stressed both the clarity of such boundaries and the ease of crossing them - the first to enhance the exclusiveness and desirability of the life of the rich, and the second to suggest how easily the advertised product would eliminate barriers to upward mobility.

The ads that depicted America's wealthy elite never carried the least implication of satire. Nor did they suggest that the rich held any power - except, of course, the power to shape the esthetics of the society. "The rich" and "the fashionable," explicitly so labeled, strutted through the advertising tableaux as though expecting bedazzled deference from the audience.⁶² Since no formal aristocracy existed in America, advertisers felt impelled to certify the rich as having gained that status. The Packard Motor Company and Freed-Eisemann Radio specifically designated their patrons as "America's Aristocracy" . The Willys-Knight Motor Car Company counted among the admirers of its new "Great Six" the "world's elect," which included "those who by birthright move in America's most select social orbits."⁶³

In their campaigns to establish a socially authoritative American aristocracy, advertising men freely drew upon the aid of European kings, queens, dukes, and duchesses. If traditional American patriotism had prescribed a self-respecting, republican contempt for decadent European aristocrats, advertisers nevertheless sensed a powerful and insufficiently repressed American undercurrent of veneration for a titled nobility. Oneida silverware claimed a baronness, a princess, and a duchess as patrons. Pond's Cold Cream combed Europe for testimonials from titled ladies. Queen Marie of Romania replenished the royal coffers from her many appearances on American advertising pages. When Fleischmann's Yeast and Palmolive Soap sought expert testimony in Europe they chose an ample number of doctors and beauty advisors who were "graced by royal patronage."⁶⁴

Although endorsements by prominent American socialites drew gratifying responses in advertising coupon tests, the public seemed to prefer authenticated nobility. A study of the "pulling power" exerted by the various endorsers in Pond's Cold Cream ads in 1925 showed that European royalty and nobility held three of the top four positions, with Princess Marie de Bourbon well on top. Another study four years later revealed a commanding lead for the Duchesse de Richelieu, with Mrs. Reginald Vanderbilt narrowly edging out the overworked Marie, Queen of Romania, for second place. Given this bias for titled Europeans, advertisements regularly cast the mantle of aristocracy over rich American socialites by gossiping about their social intimacy with European nobility.⁶⁵

Yet few European duchesses or aristocratic American socialites dared appear before the consumer audience merely as grande dames in static, courtly tableaux. Despite their fastidious demeanor. they were also horsewomen, golfers, and tireless travelers, living activity-filled lives, fully in pace with the tempo of the age. The "gay round" of one "charming cosmopolitan," the audience learned, included "Newport for the brilliant summer season … a whirl of early autumn festivities in New York, then on to Melton Mowbray, England. for the fox hunting, winter in Italy or Egypt … spring in Paris."⁶⁶ Thus the dignity of inherited social eminence was fused with expertise on the up-to-date and fashionable. Moreover, any taint of decadence that might have been attached to unproductive, pleasure-seeking women of wealth and title was deflected by the strenuous activity they undertook. In seeming anticipation of the "fun morality" that Martha Wolfenstein discerned in American popular culture in the late 1940s, copywriters made their duchesses and debutantes work extremely hard at keeping up with the hectic pace of high society. Perhaps advertisers felt more comfortable glorifying these prototypes of a triumphant consumption ethic when so much "hard work" was involved. ⁶⁷

Having conferred upon America's wealthy the qualities of aristocratic stature and a sensitivity to the pace of modern life. advertisers then added a few finishing touches before setting them before the public as models and advisers. The wealth these people enjoyed, the advertisements pointed out, enabled them to choose products without regard to price; their social lineage gave them an "instinctive" sense of taste. Their fastidiousness and discrimination made them the "best people" in every conceivable sense. Thus the aristocratic rich were always the first to recognize products of quality; news of their choices gradually trickled down to influence the consumer masses. Advertisers found no reason to imagine that this picture of a superior social elite as supremely "in the know" might provoke skepticism or resentment in the broad consumer audience.

The word "fastidious" in an advertisement was always the highest compliment; it never suggested an irreverent snicker, as it might today. The fastidious ones were "people who know their way about in the world," people "with whom excellence in all their material possessions is a fetish." Canada Dry never doubted that "our best people" had the discrimination to select the best ginger ale. Camel cigarettes assured readers that "those who live well" easily recognized those "subtle differences in flavor … lost on some people." Kotex bluntly and repetitiously told readers both in upper-class women's magazines and in True Story that "women in the better walks of life" or "better class women" had overwhelmingly adopted Kotex.  So blithely did they assume that all new products of any quality must gain acceptance by the general public through the example of their social betters, that advertising writers greeted the success of vivid colors in Cutex nail polish as a surprising. new phenomenon - a product that had actually moved up in social acceptance from below.⁶⁸

The use of high-class social tableaux and high-society social models did not always follow the pattern of indulging the prospective consumer in a fantasy of merely moving "one step up" through acquisition of the advertised product. Sometimes the social fantasy assumed Cinderella proportions. Tableaux of rarefied high society and European aristocracy appeared almost as frequently in True Story or Photoplay as they did in Ladies' Home Journal or McCall's. Through True Story advertisements, young, working-class "Judy O'Gradys," as True Story often described its readers, learned how Lady Buchanan Jardine led "the gay whirl of smart young English society at balls and dances, famous race meetings, hunting and house parties" and how Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., "modern to her finger tips" and "ever on the wing," remained "entrancingly beautiful as this romantic world would wish her to be." Listerine Tooth Paste spoke frankly to True Story readers of "the dentifrice of the rich," and Camels depicted those discerning Camel smokers who were "to the manner born" .⁶⁹

Young working girls, advertisers calculated, savored social tableaux of high society just as much as those in the upper-middle class who might more realistically aspire to live the aristocratic life. "The average life is drab," observed a president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. The average family needed alluring dreams to compensate for its low income. Cecil B. De-Mille had already demonstrated the popularity of opulent movie scenes that provided modest housewives and working-class girls a glimpse of the life of the rich. Although agency people were indifferent to many such movies, an art director argued, they should take a lesson from Hollywood and give this matinee audience the same opportunity to participate vicariously in a life of fashionable luxury through advertisements.⁷⁰

Were these social tableaux, though unrepresentative of American society as a whole, at least accurate depictions of the nation's wealthiest families or faithful mirrors of the social fantasies of the public? Idealized though these scenes were, they did reflect a wider tendency of the media of the age to portray the wealthy, in Frank Fox's phrase, "as a separate genus of man."⁷¹ The "smart set" was still a highly visible and relatively cohesive group. Whether or not the pre-1929 rich truly "glittered as they walked," as Caroline Bird later recalled, advertising writers and artists strongly encouraged American consumers to think of them that way. Advertising not only reflected but exaggerated and embellished the steeper social pyramid of the late 1920s.⁷²

Still, while the social tableaux of the aristocratic rich undoubtedly provided satisfying social fantasies for the wider consumer audience, the particular needs and biases of the ad creators shaped that fantasy in ways that may not have reflected accurately even the "realities" of the public's fantasy life. Distinctly absent from these tableaux were displays of the more vulgar tastes of some of the nouveau riche or any suggestion of those naughty escapades of the rich that so attracted tabloid readers. The need to protect the reputation of the product and confirm the reasonableness of its price ensured that advertisers would place it in the company of only the most discriminating among the rich. One suspects that this made the aristocrats of the advertisements more fastidious than their "real life" counterparts. It also may have made them less extravagant and sensual in their tastes than they would have appeared in social fantasies of the public's own making.

Social tableau advertisements thus emphasized the importance of class distinctions and provided a flattering and conservative portrait of the lives of a "natural aristocracy" composed of the very rich. But what did they reveal of the larger class structure? Some tableaux suggested the extent of the class spectrum, although from a rather foreshortened viewpoint. Advertisers tended to make only gross distinctions below a level roughly constituting the upper-middle class."⁷³ One scheme of stratification identified the aristocratic rich with butlers and man-servants, the affluent or upper-middle class with maids, dinner parties, and tuxedos and evening dresses; the middle class with a white collar, home-loving existence - with, perhaps, a single maid - and the remainder of society as working class. Only those of the middle class and above ever appeared in the tableaux as consumers. Illustrators and copywriters frequently defined this spectrum of significant social classes through a mansion-bungalow comparison. The initial term of this comparison - the mansion - suggested that the contrast would span the universe of possible social stations. By implication, then, the cozy bungalow or "cottage" constituted the society's opposite pole of possible living standards. The inhabitants of these far-from-tiny bungalows were inevitably a young middle-class couple. The husband, like all tableau figures with ambitions of mobility, was invariably depicted as already middle class in clothing, occupation, and social setting.⁷⁴

The working class appeared in advertising tableaux only in supporting, functional roles such as garage mechanic, house painter, truck driver, store clerk, or household servant. Some of these supporting players - delivery boys, tailors, maids, and scrupulously attentive sales clerks - remind us of the reality of the far greater amenities of deferential personal service that were then available to those of the middle class and above.⁷⁵ Working-class people, including the emerging white-collar class of clerks and office employees, were never shown off the job in home situations or enjoying recreational pleasures. The task of depicting a home scene of a working-class family would have severely challenged the illustrators' capacities for social imagination. There is no evidence that they found occasion to attempt it.

Although the advertising tableaux of the 1920s and 1930s spoke far more explicitly than their present-day counterparts about class position and frequently depicted characters who wore unmistakable badges of their exact class status, they never suggested that wide discrepancies in position should breed class resentment. On the contrary, the very tableaux that most vividly depicted the extent of the class spectrum often used the contrasts not to separate but to unite. Chauffeurs, maids, grocers, and department store clerks happily and deferentially served their exquisitely dressed patrons. The ad creators sufficiently shared the class prerogatives of the upper and upper-middle classes to wish to believe that those who provided menial services to their betters did so fondly and thankfully.

If advertisements, as Jib Fowles argues, serve as the clearest indicators of a society's unfulfilled needs, then prominent among those needs in the 1920s and 1930s was the need for a sense of confidence in having secured a hold on a clearly demarcated place in the social hierarchy.⁷⁶ Ads did not necessarily promise consumers a position in the highest echelons. The tableaux often assumed that members of the consumer audience would continue to admire the upper crust of high society from afar. But advertisers offered viewers who used the product the prospect of a secure foothold on some elevated rung of the social ladder.

The attainment of such a status, moreover, was clearly a palpable pleasure. Recent advertisements often celebrate pleasures of comradeship, sexuality, or gastronomy by showing people enjoying them either entirely independent of any particular class setting or in a variety of class settings. In contrast, the tableaux of the 1920s and early 1930s associated all ocher pleasures with an explicit "class" setting. Although ads portrayed people having fun at restaurants, ballrooms, nightclubs, and dinner parties, the major satisfaction they conveyed was that of simply being there, securely installed in the proper class setting, among the proper people, and appropriately defined as "belonging" by their attire. Advertisers assumed that their audience craved vicarious participation in displays of class standing and that it gladly imbibed the frank portrayals and discussions of the class hierarchy that were necessary to define the setting of the tableaux. Modernity in the realm of consumption, the wanton pursuit of style, did not afford complete gratification; some ultimate reward was required. The ads confidently addressed an audience willing to believe that class position itself constituted the supreme pleasure. All other pleasures contributed to it or flowed from it. The "good life" in these tableaux was a life lived in evening clothes.

Modern Maids and Atavistic Ambitions

Visual confirmation of a secure, elevated social status often called for the inclusion of a final supporting player in the social tableau - the modern maid. Ballrooms and polo fields provided a setting and required an attire that immediately conveyed the class atmosphere of a tableau. A maid provided the same visual index of class in a domestic scene. Although they served mainly as props and rarely gained speaking parts, these maids deserve our attention. Their prevalence in the advertising tableaux of the 1920s and early 1930s, and their particular physical characteristics, dramatically illustrate both the extreme distortions of reality sometimes reflected by advertising's "mirror" and certain larger truths about the society's cultural dilemmas.

If advertisers, as apostles of modernity, wanted to acquaint American society with the logical outcome of the process of industrial modernization, they should have emphasized the leveling of the hierarchy of classes and the fading of visible class distinctions. They should have reflected the tendency for people to find their identity more in occupational groups than in explicit distinctions of social class. They should have explained that "exclusiveness" through external display was necessarily declining with the advance of mass production and mass consumption. And they should have accurately recorded a decline in personal servants.⁷⁷ But they sensed that their audience was not eager to listen to such blunt messages. If Americans were not yet prepared to relinquish the vision of a highly visible and elegantly enthroned social aristocracy, even as the price for a presumed democratization of society, advertising men were willing to indulge them in nostalgic social fantasies. Again, advertising leaders acted more as mediators than as apostles of modernity, providing the audience with fantasies that would buffer their adaptation to modern realities.

The "modern maid" of the advertising tableau, epitomized the adaptive social fantasy in its nostalgic or atavistic form. One might have expected that the high demand for maids as a means of establishing a "class" atmosphere would have provided employment in the tableaux for many black and immigrant women. But such was not the case. In defiance of the realities of the American domestic working force, advertisers insisted upon the image of the "French maid" as the standard for social respectability. In Selling Mrs. Consumer, Christine Frederick conjured up images of domestic maids with such names as "Bridget, Maggie, Hulda, or Annushka," but the poise, demeanor, and facial characteristics of most advertising maids hardly suggested recent immigrant stock.⁷⁸ A few black women did make an appearance as maids or cleaning ladies, but they were outnumbered more than ten to one by young white women in immaculate caps and aprons. White maids older than thirty-five or with physiognomies distinctly different from that of the lady of the house were even scarcer than blacks.

Again and again, in advertisement after advertisement, the maid was young, poised, and slender. She possessed finely chiseled facial features and a smartly modern hairdo. Except for her dress, she was indistinguishable from the leading lady. Even in photographed tableaux, the models who posed as lady of the house and as the personal maid could have been interchanged. Of 186 advertising illustrations of maids I have recorded, 158 show maids who are young, white, slender, and have facial features very similar to those of the leading ladies, occasionally differing from them only in looking slightly younger or having a different hair color. In 13 instances the maids are somewhat dissimilar to the smart young leading lady, but are still young, white, and slender. In only 15 cases is the maid black, plump, or noticeably older than the mistress.⁷⁹

Such a phenomenon cannot be explained by any theory of advertisements as direct reflections of social realities. Most female domestic workers in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s were not young "French maids." In fact, most were blacks or recent immigrants. According to the 1930 census, 18 percent of the women listed under "other domestic and personal service" were foreign-born and 39 percent were black. By 1940 the percentage of blacks among female domestic servants would surpass 46 percent. Nor were the majority of actual maids young women in their early twenties, as the ads seemed to suggest. In 1930, 39 percent of female domestic servants were over thirty-five years of age. By 1940, those over thirty-five had increased to 47.8 percent.⁸⁰ The likelihood of an urban upper-middle-class family securing a maid who met all of the typical tableau specifications - slim, white, between twenty and thirty years old, and possessed of finely etched facial features - was slender indeed.

The persistent presence of maids in the advertising tableaux, moreover, contradicted broad social trends. The ratio of domestic servants to households had fallen sharply in the United States in the decade before 1920. In that year, according to figures cited by David Katzman for five Northern cities, female servants ranged from 35 to 79 per 1,000 families. Markedly lower ratios characterized rural areas. Although the number of female servants took an upturn in the 1902s, it had slumped again by 1940. Never after 1920 did female domestic servants exceed a national ratio of 67 per 1,000 households. Meanwhile, wages for domestic help increased in the 1920s. As a writer summarized the "servant problem" for the Saturday Evening Post in 1926, "only the very wealthy can afford the luxury of being insulted by high-priced domestics."⁸¹

Advertisers perceived that the public found fantasy fulfillment in visions of stylish maids, especially when they connoted both modernity and willing subordination. Upper-middle-class families were facing a complex "servant problem" to which the producers of household appliances were offering only a partial solution. Some of these families now did without full-time, live-in servants because of the shortage of cheap household labor and the acquisition of labor-saving products. They sought to get by with the once-or twice-a-week black washerwoman or immigrant cleaning lady.⁸² But the absence of a maid provoked fears of social inferiority. Through coupon tests, the J. Walter Thompson agency discovered that the most effective headlines for Lux dishwashing soap were "Do Women with Maids Have Lovelier Hands?" and "Need Your Hands Say 'I Have No Maid'?"⁸³ Consumers liked to think of themselves as entering that social class whose status was still symbolized, as a result of a kind of cultural-pictorial lag, by the visible presence of idealized, prestige-enhancing maids.

Even those who still retained domestic servants did not appreciate being reminded by the advertising pages of their problems with uncongenial, hard-to-manage, and less-than-exquisitely presentable household help. The tension-filled relationship of mistress and maid continued to be, in David Katzman's phrase, "an arena of intense cultural, racial, religious, and class conflict."⁸⁴ In short, this was an era in which the satisfactions of being attended by a maid were likely to be far greater in vicarious experience than in the reality. If the advertising tableau was going to depict a maid, there was ample reason not to stir the ill-humor of the reader by reminding her of such unpleasant realities as her dependence on ethnic minorities and blacks or on unstylish and hard-to-manage older women for domestic help. Instead, a parade of smart, efficient, and subservient young French maids might provide welcome psychological relief from the irritations and indignities of the "servant problem."

But the smart young maid, despite her passive role as a dehumanized stage prop, did more. Her modern, often glamorous, beauty added a Veblenesque increment to the image of conspicuous leisure in "class" advertisements. Her streamlined figure complemented the modern artifacts surrounding the leading lady of the tableau in an ensemble effect that would have been disrupted by the authentic depiction of a typical real maid of the era. The French maid's usual roles as dutiful, conscientious servant and ego-enhancing personal attendant offered readers a chance to retain in fantasy something that appliances-as-servants could not provide - the psychological pleasures of solicitous personal attention from an obvious subordinate.⁸⁵

Thus the advertising tableaux, despite their distortions of reality, did sometimes explore basic social dilemmas of the era. Modernization, in the form of mass production, improved standards of living; new leisure-creating technologies seemed to promise an opportunity to rise in society. But middle-class and upper--middle-class families were likely to find those promises a bit hollow unless that rise could be certified by visible signs of social arrival (such as a French maid). The ultimate reward they sought for modernity in style was ascension into a secure, exclusive level of society, enriched and made visible by dominion over attractive and attentive personal servants. Then they would be presumed tasteful and modern by instinct and birthright.

Logically, apostles of modernity should have characterized maids and other visible signs of aristocratic exclusivity as passé. Nothing in the theory of modernization suggested that women should look to Princess Marie de Bourbon, or even Mrs. Reginald Vanderbilt, for authoritative guidance. But if consumers wanted to believe that exclusiveness was still fully compatible with an age of mass-produced goods, advertising leaders were not prepared to undermine such expectations. On the contrary, they began to find a larger social function in accommodating their advertising strategies to any wistful fantasies and illogical faiths that would ease the continuing transition to modern society.

Notes to Pages 166-175

1. Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1929, picture section, p. 4.
2. This approach parallels studies in the tradition of Leo Lowenthal's "Biographies in Popular Magazines," in Radio Research, 1942-1943, ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton (New York, 1944), pp. 507-48.
3. Jack W. McCullough, "Edward Kilanyi and American Tableaux Vivants." Theatre Survey 16 (1975): 25-28.
4. Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood," American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151-74; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, Conn., 1973), pp. 135-38, 152-54, 160-63; Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World (New York, 1977), pp. 5-6.
5. Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer (New York, 1929), pp. 29-31, 53, 245-46; Saturday Evening Post, Mar. 8, 1930, p. 84; June 1, 1929, pp. 114-15; American Magazine, July 1927, p. 183; Printers' Ink, Nov. 27, 1930, pp. 98-99.
6. I have come across over 45 such designations in the trade press and in advertisements. Occasional additional variations included "general manager" and "first vice-president in charge of purchasing." For examples, see Printer's Ink, Apr. 8, 1926, p. 10; Jan. 12, 1928, pp. 94-95; Advertising and Selling Fortnightly, Mar. 24, 1926, p. 45; Advertising and Selling, June 2, 1926, p. 94; Tide, Dec. 1932, p. 40; Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 8, 1930, p. 88.
7. Saturday Evening Post, Mar. 24, 1928, p. 53.
8. Saturday Evening Post, Apr. 18, 1925, p. 184; Oct. 24, 1925, p. 211; Nov. 7, 1925, p. 97; Advertising and Selling, June 2, 1926, p. 94.
9. Saturday Evening Post, July 24, 1926, p. 37. See also Saturday Evening Post, May 4, 1929, p. 79.
10. Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 8, 1928, p. 93; May 5, 1928, p. 184; Good Housekeeping, Oct. 1927, p. 145.
11. Saturday Evening Post, July 18, 1931, p. 101; Oct. 10, 1931, p. 111; Advertising Age, July 23, 1932, p. 9; Printers' Ink, Oct. 13, 1932, p. 75.
12. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "The Industrial Revolution in the Home; Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century," Technology and Culture 17 (1976): 23.
13. Saturday Evening Post, Apr. 8, 1933, p. 65.
14. Ladies' Home Journal, Mar. 1931, fourth cover.
15. Cowan, "The Industrial Revolution in the Home," p. 16.
16. Chicago Tribune, Nov. 16, 1926, p. 21.
17. Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 23, 1926, p. 102; Feb. 20, 1926, p. 74; Mar. 20, 1926, p. 145; Apr. 24, 1926, p. 94; May 22, 1926, p. 171; June 26, 1926, p. 124; July 24, 1926, p. 54; Oct. 9, 1926, p. 133.
18. For examples see American Magazine, Mar. 1926, p. 117; Apr. 1928, p. 121; Saturday Evening Post, July 21, 1928, p. 111; July 14, 1928, p. 143; Nov. 3, 1928, p. 38; Tide, Feb. 1935, p. 31.
19. Cowan, "The Industrial Revolution in the Home," p. 13; Saturday Evening Post, May 24, 1924, p. 107; Apr. 25, 1925, p. 48; May 2, 1925, p. 42; Sept. 19, 1925, p. 171; Nov. 21, 1925, p. 106; July 10, 1926, pp. 50-51; June 18, 1927, p. 95; June 1, 1929, pp. 58-59; "Album 1918-1948," insertion for August 1925, and The Ibaisaic, July 28, 1927, p. 3, The Hoover Company Archives, North Canton, Ohio.
20. Printers' Ink, Jan. 20, 1927, p. 98; Apr. 26, 1928, p. 121; Printers' Ink Monthly, Apr. 1933, p. 47; Advertising and Selling, June 30, 1926, p. 47; Mar. 12, 1936, p. 2.
21. See, for example, Saturday Evening Post, Aug. 20, 1927, p. 95; Oct. 23, 1926, p. 59; Sept. 18, 1926, p. 83; Advertising and Selling, Dec. 25, 1929, pp. 62-63.
22. Saturday Evening Post, July 23, 1927, p. 98.
23. "Less Work for Mother and Better Food for All," Box 34-31, N.W. Ayer and Son, Inc., Archives, New York City; Saturday Evening Post, Aug. 23, 1924, p. 104; Jan. 3, 1925, pp. 76-77; June 5, 1926, pp. 142-43; Aug. 10, 1929, p. 144; Better Homes and Gardens, Oct. 1929, p. 111; Dec. 1929, p. 63; Mar. 1930, p. 97; Woman's Home Companion, July 1928, p. 103.
24. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London, 1972), p. 51; Tide, Aug. 1935, p. 15; John Berger et al., Ways of Seeing (London, 1972), pp. 46-47; Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer, pp. 189-91; Printers' Ink Monthly, Aug. 1932, p. 29; Redbook, Sept. 1935, p. 73.
25. Printers' Ink Monthly, July 1932, p. 3: Ladies' Home Journal, Jan. 1931, p. 29. For examples of this "mirror image of woman," see American Weekly, July 8, 1928, p. 15; Photoplay Magazine, Dec. 1928, p. 93; Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 18, 1926, p. 57; Delineator, Jan. 1932, p. 63; Apr. 1932, p 3; Chicago Tribune, Feb. 21, 1926, magazine section, p. 6; Printers' Ink, June 3, 1926, p. 2; Printers' Ink Monthly, July 1928, p. 7; Jan. 1933, p. 73. On the tradition of the mirror in art and its relation to women, see Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (New York, 1978), pp. 393-405. On women and mirrors in advertising, see Stuart Ewen, "Advertising as a Way of life," Liberation, Jan. 1975, p. 31, and Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York, 1976), pp. 177-80. Since beauty and health were so difficult to retain, a Kellogg's All-Bran ad commented, it was no wonder that women's mirrors so often revealed "the furtive glances of the afraid" (Chicago Tribune, Nov. 19, 1926, p. 38).
26. Saturday Evening Post, Dec. 3, 1927, p. 33; American Magazine, Sept. 1931, p. 14; True Story, Apr. 1933, p. 7; Tide, Oct. 1932, p. 46; Ladies' Home Journal, July 1931, p. 113; Apr. 1933, p. 37.
27. American Magazine, June 1926, p. 92; Ladies' Home Journal, Feb. 1931, p. 114; Apr. 1931, p. 97, May 1931, p. 148; July 1931, p. 113; True Story, June 1933, p. 18; Better Homes and Gardens, June 1930, p. 89. On the tradition of beauty as a woman's "duty" and as available to all, see Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (Chicago, 1983), pp. 9, 16, 205-208, 249, 264.
28. Chicago Tribune, Jan 15, 1928, picture section, p. 6; Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 2, 1929, p. 30; Feb. 16, 1929, p. 32; Mar. 16, 1929, p. 34; May 25, 1929, p. 42; James R. Adams, Sparks Off My Anvil (New York, 1958), p. 97. The Fisher Body girl also appeared occasionally in ads for other products. See, for example, Saturday Evening Post, May 11, 1929, p. 70; Mar. 16, 1929, pp. 81-81; Mar. 23, 1929, p. 163.
29. Saturday Evening Post, June 19, 1926, p. 127; July 27, 1935, p. 25; American Magazine, Mar. 1926, p. 117; McCall's, July 1928, p. 44; Ladies' Home Journal, Sept. 1926, p. 166; Oct. 1926, p. 55.
30. Printers' Ink, Aug. 1926, p. 87; Printers' Ink, May 12, 1927, p. 88.
31. Printers' Ink, Aug. 25, 1927, p. 18; Advertising and Selling Fortnightly, Mar. 10, 1926, p. 27; Printers' Ink Monthly, Feb. 1929, p. 132. For salient examples of the woman as modern art object, see American Weekly, Feb. 20, 1927, p. 24; Apr. 17, 1927, p. 19; Chicago Tribune, Dec. 21, 1927, p. 24; Nov. 10, 1926, p. 8; June 28, 1929, p. 17; Oct. 3, 1930, p. 10; Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 18, 1928, p. 2; Jan. 5, 1929, pp. 72-73; Mar. 22, 1930, p. 137; Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1929, part III, p. 3; Aug. 10, 1930, part III, p. 5; Aug. 13, 1930, part II, p. 8; True Story, May 1930, p. 107.
32. For instance, compared with the women in the department store ad on page 24 of the Chicago Tribune, June 12, 1929, the woman photographed on the following page appeared to have no neck at all. See also Saturday Evening Post, Aug. 6, 1927, p. 142; Dec. 8, 1928, p. 139; Apr. 6, 1929, p. 48; May 4, 1929, p. 217; Sept. 14, 1929, p. 168. A contemporary advertising woman estimated that the camera could only distort a model to appear about one head higher than her stature, whereas drawings regularly elongated her figure more strikingly (Advertising and Selling, Oct 24, 1935. p. 30).
33. Paul H. Nystrom, Economics of Fashion (New York, 1928), p. 466.
34. Elizabeth Kendall, Where She Danced (New York, 1979), pp. 208-209; Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, pp. 339-41.
35. 35. Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (New York, 1979), pp. 45-47.
36. Ibid, p. 45. For examples of the two common types of gender-specific stances, see Saturday Evening Post, Mar. 2, 1929, p. 92; June 22, 1929, pp. 124, 129; June 29, 1929, pp. 4, 36; Aug. 10, 1929, p. 63; Aug. 17, 1929, pp. 60, 176; Aug. 24, 1929, p. 40; Collier's, May 26, 1928, p. 49. Arthur William Brown, a prolific illustrator for Saturday Evening Post fiction and for advertisements, created a kind of visual formula out of such contrasts in stance. See Saturday Evening Post, June 15, 1929, pp. 6-7; Nov. 2, 1929, p. 154; Nov. 15, 1930, pp. 3, 5; Nov. 22, 1930, pp. 16-17, 20.
37. Chicago Tribune, Nov. 10, 1926, p. 8; Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 11, 1926, p. 186; Nov. 13, 1926, p. 139; July 2, 1927, p. 42; Aug. 13, 1927, p. 78; Feb. 19, 1927, p. 48; June 1, 1929, pp. 114-15.
38. American Magazine, Oct. 1932, p. 1. See also Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 21, 1933, p. 75. On the "appropriation" of feminist demands to promote consumerism, see also Ewen, Captains of Consciousness, pp. 160-61.
39. Printers' Ink Monthly, June 1935, p. 52.
40. Ibid, Mar. 1930, fourth cover.
41. American Magazine, July 1927, p. 183; Mar. 1935, p. 141, Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 5, 1929, p. 75; Nov. 9, 1929, p. 172; Better Homes and Gardens, Jan. 1930, p. 9.
42. Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 29, 1927, p. 60; Jan. 24, 1931, p. 72; Ladies' Home Journal, Apr. 1931, p. 97; American Magazine, Sept. 1929, p. 183.
43. Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 23, 1926, p. 102; Aug. 11, 1934, pp. 44-45.
44. Printers' Ink, Mar. 22, 1934, pp. 56-57.
45. American Weekly, Nov. 10, 1929, p. 28; Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 6, 1926, p. 153; July 3, 1926, p. 32; Apr. 14, 1928, p. 93; Dec. 7, 1929, p. 76; Mar. 9, 1935, p. 99; American Magazine, Mar. 1926, p. 94; Sept. 1930, second cover.
46. Advertising and Selling, May 11, 1933, p. 6.
47. Saturday Evening Post, Apr. 11, 1925, p. 164; Oct. 10, 1925, p. 87; Feb. 10, 1934, p. 91; Oct. 6, 1928, pp. 140-41; May 4, 1935, p. 1; Mar. 16, 1935, pp. 67, 97; American Magazine, Aug. 1929, p. 103; Printers' Ink Monthly, Oct. 1925, p. 41; June 1928, pp. 19ff; Advertising and Selling, Sept. 19, 1928, p. 28.
48. Fortune, June 1933, p. 9; Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 23, 1929, pp. 98-99.
49. Printers' Ink, May 19, 1927, p. 10.
50. Ibid.
51. American Magazine, June 1931, p. 110; Aug. 1931, p. 110.
52. Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York, 1977), p. 20.
53. for examples of such scenes, see Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 9, 1928, p. 140; Sept. 15, 1928, p. 69; Jan. 12, 1929, p. 1; Feb. 23, 1929, p. 2; Dec. 27, 1930, p. 80; American Magazine, Apr. 1926, p. 229; Sept. 1928, p. 119; Sept. 1930, p. 128; Feb. 1933, p. 108; Better Homes and Gardens, May 1930, p. 114; Mar. 1933, p. 42. See also Printers' Ink, Nov. 25, 1926, pp. 98-99.
54. Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study (Glencoe, Ill., 1950), p. 103.
55. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, pp. 59-60.
56. Ibid, pp. 55, 63, 102; Scrapbook 379 (Electric Refrigeration Bureau, NELA), Lord and Thomas Archives, housed at Foote, Cone and Belding Communications, Inc., Chicago; Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 23, 1926, p. 135; Feb. 6, 1926, p. 156; July 27, 1935, p. 35; May 1, 1926, p. 176; American Magazine, July 1933, pp. 109, 119.
57. Printers' Ink, Nov. 19, 1931, p. 5; Saturday Evening Post, Mar. 2, 1935, p. 41; Dec. 19, 1936, p. 48.
58. Better Homes and Gardens, Sept. 1929, p. 12; Ladies' home Journal, Apr. 1931, p. 2; Printers' Ink, May 20, 1926, p. 1; Mar. 4, 1926, p. 115.
59. Saturday Evening Post, July 2, 1927, p. 65; May 9, 1931, p. 126; Jan. 30, 1937, p. 93; Better Homes and Gardens, Sept. 1928, p. 119; American Magazine, Sept. 1933, p. 97; May 1934, p. 119. Stanley Cavell, in The World Viewed (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 35, notes a similar absence of blacks in films acting as consumers and "making an ordinary purchase."
60. David M. Potter, People of Plenty (Chicago, 1954), pp. 103-107, 167.
61. American Magazine, Dec. 1926, p. 6; Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 7, 1928, p. 129; Aug. 7, 1926, pp. 72-73; Ladies' Home Journal, Apr. 1931, p. 37; "Minutes of Creative Staff Meeting," Oct. 26, 1932, pp. 8-10, J. Walter Thompson Company (JWT) Archives, New York City.
62. San Francisco Examiner, Aug. 5, 1928, p. 9; Saturday Evening Post, June 25, 1927, p. 167; Jan. 7, 1928, pp. 128, 163; Sept. 4, 1926, p. 95; Aug. 21, 1925, pp. 68-69; American Magazine, July 1926, p. 145.
63. Saturday Evening Post, July 10, 1926, p. 37; Nov. 13, 1926, pp. 160-61; Aug. 7, 1926, pp. 72-73; Printers' Ink, Dec. 12, 1929, p. 200; American Magazine, Oct. 1929, p. 110.
64. Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 23, 1926, p.2; Chicago Tribune, Nov. 7, 1926, magazine section, p. 12; Nov. 14, 1925, pt. 9, p. 2; The Ibaisaic, Mar. 3, 1927, p. 4, The Hoover Company Archives; American Magazine, May 1931, p. 99; Saturday Evening Post, July 20, 1929, p. 1; Nov. 22, 1930, p. 45; Ladies' Home Journal, Feb. 1931, pp. 84-85.
65. Chicago Tribune, Nov. 7, 1926, magazine section, p. 12; June 27, 1929, p. 4; Saturday Evening Post, Aug. 7, 1926, pp. 72-73; Ladies' Home Journal, Apr. 1931, p. 37; JWT News Letter, May 13, 1926, pp. 119-20, JWT Archives; Carroll Rheinstrom, Psyching the Ads: The Case Book of Advertising (New York, 1929), pp. 37-38.
66. Ladies' Home Journal, July 1931, p. 27. See also Chicago Tribune, Nov. 7, 1926, magazine section, p. 12; Oct. 5, 1930, picture section, pt. 2, p. 12; American Magazine, Nov. 1930, p. 122; Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 29, 1927, p. 152; Sept. 3, 1927, p. 59; True Story, Mar. 1928, p. 79; May 1930, p. 151; Rheinstrom, Psyching the Ads, p. 38; San Francisco Examiner, Aug. 5, 1928, p. 9; Better Homes and Gardens, Oct. 1928, p. 57.
67. Martha Wolfenstein, "The Emergence of Fun Morality," Journal of Social Issues 7 (1951): 22-24.
68. Saturday Evening Post, May 14, 1927, p. 180; Dec. 25, 1933, p. 37; Feb. 19, 1927, p. 119; Mar. 17, 1928, pp. 98-99; Sept. 3, 1927, pp. 82-83; American Magazine, Aug. 1933, p. 76; San Francisco Examiner, Nov. 3, 1929, section *[sic], p. 7; Scrapbook 198 (True Story copy, Cellucotton Products Co.), Lord and Thomas Archives.
69. True Story, Apr. 1929, p. 85; Jan. 1930, pp. 31, fourth cover; May 1930, p. 12; Photoplay Magazine, Mar. 1929, p. 69.
70. Advertising Age, June 6, 1938, p. 18; True Story, June 1933, p. 17; May 1933, p. 51; Mar. 1933, p. 109; Mar. 1938, p. 123; Nov. 1925, p. 81; "Minutes of Representatives Meeting," May 5, 1931, pp. 6-7, JWT Archives. See also Photoplay Magazine, Jan. 1930, p. 11; Mar. 1930, p. 82; May 1930, p. 9.
71. Frank Wayne Fox, "Advertisements as Documents in Social and Cultural History" (M.A. thesis, University of Utah, June 1929), p. 56.
72. Caroline Bird, The Invisible Scar (New York, 1966), pp. 2, 317.
73. On the tendency of those in the higher classes to make rather fine distinctions among those social groups nearest to them in status, and then to group all those considerably lower into only one or two very broad categories, see Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South: A Social-Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago, 1941), p. 65.
74. Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 6, 1926, p. 104; Sept. 7, 1928, p. 170; Printers' Ink, Apr. 26, 1929, pp. 30-31; Ladies' Home Journal, Oct. 1931, p. 134; Feb. 1933, p. 57; Dec. 1933, p. 49; Jan. 1933, p. 21; The Ibaisaic, Sept. 29, 1932, p. 8; Oct. 13, 1932, p. 16, The Hoover Company Archives. An example of the refusal to contemplate living circumstances inferior to the comfortable, single-family bungalow occurs in a long series of Procter and Gamble ads between 1926 and 1931. These "slice-of-life" ads, entitled "Actual Visits to P&G Homes" or "Actual Letters from P&G Homes," promoted a laundry soap, a mass-market product that would logically seek its constituency among those of nearly every level of society. Yet not one tableau of the 32 that I located revealed a home of less than middle-class status. Not one "P&G home" was an urban apartment, a rented home, or a multi-family structure.
75. Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 6, 1928, p. 169; May 31, 1930, p. 122; Mar. 7, 1931, pp. 44, 53; Printers' Ink, Apr. 24, 1930, p. 13.
76. Jib Fowles, Mass Advertising as Social Forecast: A Method for Futures Research (Westport, Conn., 1976).
77. Cyril E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York 1900), pp. 21-23; Marion J. Levy, Jr., Modernization and the Structure of Societies (Princeton, N.J., 1966), pp. 273-76; Roland Marchand, "Visions of Classlessness; Quests for Dominion: American Popular Culture, 1945-1960," in Reshaping America: Society and Institutions, 1945-1960, ed. Robert H. Bremner and Gary W. Reichard (Columbus, Ohio, 1982), pp. 165-70; Daniel Sutherland, Americans and Their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States from 1800 to 1920 (Baton Rouge, La., 1981), p. 183; David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week, Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York, 1975), pp. 47, 49.
78. Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer, p. 169.
79. Printers' Ink Monthly, May 1928, p. 23. The distinctions involved in such categorizations as "similar" or "somewhat dissimilar" are necessarily subjective. If the maid is shown alone, with no "lady of the house" present, I have counted her as "similar" as long as she is slender, young, white, and has the standard, finely etched features. If the lady of the house is also present in the picture, I have counted the maid as similar even if her hair color and hairdo are different, as long as she is of the same build, posture, and facial features as her mistress and her mistress' friends and is as young or younger.
80. Department of Commerce, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census, 1930, Occupations, p. 582; Sixteenth Census, 1940, Occupations, pp. 90, 199, 222.
81. Katzman, Seven Days a Week, pp. 47, 49, 66, 71-82, 228, 286; Department of Commerce, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Comparative Occupation Statistics for the United States, 1870 to 1940, comp. Alba M. Edwards (Washington, D.C., 1943), p. 129; Sixteenth Census, 1940, Occupations, p. 199; Department of Commerce, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1975), 1: 43; Saturday Evening Post, May 15, 1926, p. 177.
82. Cowan, "Industrial Revolution in the Home," pp. 9-10; Advertising and Selling, May 4, 1927, p. 20; Katzman, Seven Days a Week, pp. 131-32, 145, 228, 278.
83. "Minutes of Representatives Meeting," Dec. 3, 1929, p. 6, JWT Archives. See also American Magazine, Aug. 1931, p. 18, and Ladies' Home Journal, Oct. 1931, p. 134.
84. Katzman, Seven Days a Week, p. 146.
85. Ibid, pp. 146, 149, 237, 240. For examples of the image of solicitous personal attendance, see Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 8, 1928, p. 99; June 4, 1927, pp. 108-109; July 20, 1927, p. 115; Apr. 9, 1927, p. 57; Nov. 12, 1927, p. 1; Aug. 2, 1930, p. 2; Printers' Ink Monthly, May 1928, pp. 23, 132.