On her book The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling Of America
Cover Interview of October 28, 2020
A close-up
One of the chapters I had the most fun writing was Chapter
7, “Believing in Betty Crocker,” if only because the advertising strategy
Rindlaub devised to sell cake mixes is so shocking to twenty-first century
feminist sensibilities. Rindlaub’s ads assured the anxious housewife that
baking a cake would cure all manner of family and social ills, from mending
quarrels with her husband to keeping her children from becoming “juvenile
delinquents” (that peculiar 1950s bogeyman). After the success of her “Back
Home for Keeps” advertising campaign for Oneida silverware in 1942, Rindlaub
would go on to repeat the winning formula in most of her subsequent work:
deploying what she called “heart-tug” or “love-and-kisses” appeals to women’s
tender, caretaking instincts.
Rindlaub believed that as creatures “naturally” drawn to
caretaking, women couldn’t help but worry about big-world problems like nuclear
war and poverty and crime, but didn’t have the tools to confront these issues
head on. She gave housewives a way to feel useful, to feel they were doing the “right”
thing, by simply buying a cake mix and making their own little family circle a
bit happier. She tutored women in the sentimental language of capitalism and
offered them a script that helped them square their inherited sense of
Christian feminine virtue with the cold, unequal logic of the market. This was
Rindlaub’s true talent. She could say these preposterously corny things and
somehow make them sound heartfelt.
The overtly sexist content of these 1950s ads hasn’t aged
that well, but the use of vague, “timeless” sentimental appeals to blunt
political criticism or downplay analysis is still one of the most potent tricks
in populist politics. The advertising industry played a huge role in shaping
American political discourse and the language of presidential political
campaigns—a topic I cover in a chapter analyzing campaign sound-bytes Rindlaub
wrote, at BBDO’s behest, for Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1952 presidential bid.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
One of the chapters I had the most fun writing was Chapter 7, “Believing in Betty Crocker,” if only because the advertising strategy Rindlaub devised to sell cake mixes is so shocking to twenty-first century feminist sensibilities. Rindlaub’s ads assured the anxious housewife that baking a cake would cure all manner of family and social ills, from mending quarrels with her husband to keeping her children from becoming “juvenile delinquents” (that peculiar 1950s bogeyman). After the success of her “Back Home for Keeps” advertising campaign for Oneida silverware in 1942, Rindlaub would go on to repeat the winning formula in most of her subsequent work: deploying what she called “heart-tug” or “love-and-kisses” appeals to women’s tender, caretaking instincts.
Rindlaub believed that as creatures “naturally” drawn to caretaking, women couldn’t help but worry about big-world problems like nuclear war and poverty and crime, but didn’t have the tools to confront these issues head on. She gave housewives a way to feel useful, to feel they were doing the “right” thing, by simply buying a cake mix and making their own little family circle a bit happier. She tutored women in the sentimental language of capitalism and offered them a script that helped them square their inherited sense of Christian feminine virtue with the cold, unequal logic of the market. This was Rindlaub’s true talent. She could say these preposterously corny things and somehow make them sound heartfelt.
The overtly sexist content of these 1950s ads hasn’t aged that well, but the use of vague, “timeless” sentimental appeals to blunt political criticism or downplay analysis is still one of the most potent tricks in populist politics. The advertising industry played a huge role in shaping American political discourse and the language of presidential political campaigns—a topic I cover in a chapter analyzing campaign sound-bytes Rindlaub wrote, at BBDO’s behest, for Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1952 presidential bid.