On her book The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling Of America
Cover Interview of October 28, 2020
Lastly
One thing that surprised me when I was writing the book was
the way that race was an unspoken undercurrent in all that the advertising
industry did—something that perhaps should have been obvious, but that I wasn’t
expecting in undertaking a biography of a woman advertiser. When I first
started the project, I thought the “scoop” would be teasing out how Rindlaub
balanced the contradictions implicit in preaching domesticity while being a
powerful public presence, or how she was a vital link in the ad industry’s
efforts to weaponize women’s sentiment, divert their moral feeling into the
private realm of consumption so as to stop it from spilling over into more
public, political venues of social critique. What I found was what Kyla Schuler
has persuasively argued: that gender is a raced concept, and the ideal of
American “femininity” was developed and honed over the course of the nineteenth
century partially in order to shore up the structures of white supremacy.
The racialized underpinnings of the make-up industry were
obvious: Jean Rindlaub’s ads for Marvelous Make-up in the 1930s took place
against the backdrop of nativism, eugenics, and an expanding Hollywood film
industry where racial codes for whiteness were part and parcel of the larger
image-making system. Her make-up ads used whiteness and cleanliness—a quality
always associated with whiteness—as their main “emotional” selling point. But
even where the question of skin complexion was seemingly less obvious, race was
an unspoken driver of her work. In her testing and polling to make sure she had
her finger on the pulse of the “average American” housewife, whiteness was
assumed. National opinion polls and the expanding media of radio and film
sought to construct the average American as white and middle-class.
And perhaps most importantly, all her work in favor of
privatized, consumer-driven responses to social reform—her belief that an
untrammeled free market mechanism alone was the best way to guarantee America’s
pledge of equality and freedom—helped shore up white economic dominance. Rindlaub
helped create a narrative by which support for broad state-sponsored social
programs, in the tradition of nineteenth-century women’s reform movements among
poor and immigrant communities, was coded “unfeminine.” True (white) femininity
could only function as moral voice within the home and through private
purchasing power. This was all, of course, built on the racist premise that
government social programs disproportionately helped low-income, immigrant, and
Black communities.
If there is anything, in the wake of George Floyd’s death
and the Black Lives Matter protests, that I think is important about this
history I have written, it is this: it shines a light on how an ideal of white
middle-class femininity has for over a century been continuously exploited—increasingly
and ever-more tightly allied with Christian “family values,” free-market faith,
and small-government ideology—in order to buttress the structures of American
white supremacy. Remarkably, after she retired, Jean Wade Rindlaub herself came
to recognize the racism and classism that was embedded in her previous
free-market faith, and she tried to make amends for it. She’s a cautionary tale
for us today.
[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
Lastly
One thing that surprised me when I was writing the book was the way that race was an unspoken undercurrent in all that the advertising industry did—something that perhaps should have been obvious, but that I wasn’t expecting in undertaking a biography of a woman advertiser. When I first started the project, I thought the “scoop” would be teasing out how Rindlaub balanced the contradictions implicit in preaching domesticity while being a powerful public presence, or how she was a vital link in the ad industry’s efforts to weaponize women’s sentiment, divert their moral feeling into the private realm of consumption so as to stop it from spilling over into more public, political venues of social critique. What I found was what Kyla Schuler has persuasively argued: that gender is a raced concept, and the ideal of American “femininity” was developed and honed over the course of the nineteenth century partially in order to shore up the structures of white supremacy.
The racialized underpinnings of the make-up industry were obvious: Jean Rindlaub’s ads for Marvelous Make-up in the 1930s took place against the backdrop of nativism, eugenics, and an expanding Hollywood film industry where racial codes for whiteness were part and parcel of the larger image-making system. Her make-up ads used whiteness and cleanliness—a quality always associated with whiteness—as their main “emotional” selling point. But even where the question of skin complexion was seemingly less obvious, race was an unspoken driver of her work. In her testing and polling to make sure she had her finger on the pulse of the “average American” housewife, whiteness was assumed. National opinion polls and the expanding media of radio and film sought to construct the average American as white and middle-class.
And perhaps most importantly, all her work in favor of privatized, consumer-driven responses to social reform—her belief that an untrammeled free market mechanism alone was the best way to guarantee America’s pledge of equality and freedom—helped shore up white economic dominance. Rindlaub helped create a narrative by which support for broad state-sponsored social programs, in the tradition of nineteenth-century women’s reform movements among poor and immigrant communities, was coded “unfeminine.” True (white) femininity could only function as moral voice within the home and through private purchasing power. This was all, of course, built on the racist premise that government social programs disproportionately helped low-income, immigrant, and Black communities.
If there is anything, in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter protests, that I think is important about this history I have written, it is this: it shines a light on how an ideal of white middle-class femininity has for over a century been continuously exploited—increasingly and ever-more tightly allied with Christian “family values,” free-market faith, and small-government ideology—in order to buttress the structures of American white supremacy. Remarkably, after she retired, Jean Wade Rindlaub herself came to recognize the racism and classism that was embedded in her previous free-market faith, and she tried to make amends for it. She’s a cautionary tale for us today.