Advertising

David Ogilvy (1985), "The Father of Advertising," argued: "I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and

persuasive." The more personal and "real life" these advertisements read to their audiences, the more "true and valid and persuasive." Advertisements, then, contribute to an understanding of what society believed represented the "real life" and "personal experience" of the housewife. A

visual analysis of the components of these advertisements to uncover their recurring thematic aspects defines the characteristics of housewife most important to the creation of housewife as the feminine ideal of the social imaginary.

Adkins Covert (2011) in her discussion of the role of advertisements and propaganda in encouraging correct gender performance during World War II defined different categories of magazines based on the primary focus of the magazine: pulp (entertainment, escapism for lower class women), service and home (whose middle class readership focus on the down to earth conceptions of what it means to be a housewife and mother) and fashion and society (whose depictions of upper class lifestyle is beyond the reach of the average American woman). Since advertisers focus their advertisements according to audience, I chose to focus on advertisements in service and home magazines because this audience is the one most likely to (attempt to) replicate the gender performance represented within the magazine, and these magazines are most likely to represent the chosen gender performance. As service and home is a recognized type of magazine from the era, and advertisers target their advertisements to audience, choosing the two most representative examples of this type of magazine covers the audience I am interested in investigating; the similarity and repetition of advertisements within these magazines

demonstrates the advertisements contained within are found across magazine type. As Adkins Covert noted, “Service magazines for women assumed a middle class readership and the advice, advertising, and fiction contained in these magazines oriented women to the middle class

lifestyle” (p. 26). The two most influential and longest running service and home magazines, Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, provided the basis for this research. Good Housekeeping, while not the most widely circulated or read magazine of this type, is perhaps the most representative of this style of magazine (White, 1970): its editorial mission to “produce and

perpetuate perfection—or as near unto perfection as may be attained in the Household” (Endres & Leuck, 1995). An important aspect of Good Housekeeping to any discussion of advertisements within magazines is the Good Housekeeping advertising guarantee located on page 6 of each issue analyzed; Good Housekeeping guarantees the products advertised within its pages fulfill each promise made within the advertisement, and removes advertisements from those who fail to meet this standard. Importantly for this discussion, this advertising promise demonstrates Good Housekeeping’s commitment to ensuring their readership’s experience with the materials advertised is the same as the advertisement’s representation of that product. Thus Good

Housekeeping contributes to the imaginary that advertising emulates and represents “real life.” Ladies Home Journal as the first magazine to reach a circulation of one million is the most circulated of the service and home magazines, and its focus is on fiction and entertainment, as well as domestic life and parenting, situates the magazine as representative of the type.

For this discussion, I analyze advertisements from Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping from 1945-1953. Several notable changes in advertisements occur in 1953 that lend to my decision to end my investigation there. First of all, the image of the housewife in advertisements in 1953 begins to slacken and allow for more informal portrayals; women begin to appear in slacks as opposed to dresses or skirts, and shoes begin to advertise flats instead of solely heeled options. Secondly, the image of the housewife stabilizes in the early 1950s; while multimodal representations of housewife are under construction in the early post-war period, the housewife shown varies in age and appearance, and as the social imaginary stabilizes so does the image of housewife into identifiable themes and parts.

I argue the ideal of housewife in the social imaginary defines gender performance to silence characteristics socially perceived to be dangerous in women. Housewife as a social

imaginary silences feminine sexuality and assertiveness by containing it within the institute of marriage. I use a contextual discussion of gender anxieties and social beliefs that inform why the housewife is socially preferable as a gender performance. The housewife of the social imaginary is defined and portrayed to confirm common social assumptions that women belong in and prefer the private and domestic sphere to create a representation with which women believe they should identify. The housewife also functions to isolate women, silencing opposition to its

representativeness, and encouraged women dissatisfied with the role to believe it a personal and not social malady.