Essay On Women In The 1920s

The Female Body in Advertising in the US during the 1920s

The 1920s was a quite controversial decade concerning women’s position. People, trying to forget about the shock of the Great War, buried themselves in an unabashed materialism and hedonism. It was a decade when all old norms were extinguished not only for women but for the whole society. It was the time of one of the greatest changes American society ever experienced.

Probably, this change was especially true for women’s position. They acquired the voting right by the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which brought a great deal of freedom for them. This was the time when they made the greatest efforts to break away from the traditional norms of womanhood, and I assert
that this was the very time when today’s woman made her first unstable footsteps in history. I acknowledge that mainly positive changes happened concerning women’s position, but I argue that besides these positive changes there emerged new problems that they had to face.

The changes triggered by the Suffrage Amendment completely changed the way of life of women and thus transformed the way they were seen by men.
Nevertheless we have to mention the fact that these changes mainly affected the lives of middle-class and upper-class white citizens. Nonwhites and working class people were mainly left out from this discourse and experienced very little, if anything, from the transformation of society and especially from the way this transformation affected women. Consequently, when I talk about women here I actually mean white, middle and upper-class women in the US. They were the ones that became both the targets and the objects of consumer culture in the 1920s, while nonwhite and working class women were simply ignored, but it is not surprising since the consumer culture of the twenties was actually the consumer culture of the
middle-class.

The Woman Body in Advertisements and Magazines

“[An] ‘image industry” had emerged by the turn of the century, and advertising was the ‘quintessential institution’ in its development. The industry’s first major venue were the new mass magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal”[1], McClure’s or Cosmopolitan. These mass magazines had a great homogenizing effect on American culture promoting mass consumption and the transformed norms of the early 20th century to the average American household.

These magazines were heavily dependent on advertising and through advertisements they did not only invite the reader to buy, but also manipulated his or her view of the world and of himself or herself. These manipulations were totally conscious on behalf of the creators, while the audience accepted them as the new norms unconsciously. Of course, the masterminds behind these ads were all males, which makes it obvious why was the female body exploited in these advertisements while women were manipulated into believing that this was acceptable and even desirable.
This phenomenon is perfectly described by Gramsci as “the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.”[2] Viewing this description in terms of consumer culture we can say that in the first half of the 20th century this dominant group consisted exclusively of men, even more explicitly of white, upper and middle-class men, who dominated every field of American life. The newly emancipated woman could have absolutely no control over the issue due to the very fact that she had not been a fully recognized member of society before. This made her inferior to men and kept her inferior for a long time. “The effort to naturalize advertising and commodities was accommodated by the use of visual illustration.”[3] The use of photographs in place of the now obsolete drawings and illustrations made advertisements look more real and true. It gave them the truth that the potential customer needed to buy the product, and this veraciousness also played a crucial role in making these ads acceptable for the audience they targeted. This newly emerged way of advertising went hand in hand with the changes in women’s fashion which meant a much greater deal of nudity in advertisements.
Obviously, here I do not mean complete nudity, but I am talking about bare arms and legs that were huge changes in contrast to the fashion of earlier times. These changes in fashion were welcomed by the young, modern woman of the 1920s because for her these meant freedom of movement and more comfortable and attainable clothes, but while she reveled in her newly-found freedom, men also found something that they grasped immediately: in these much shorter and lighter clothes they discovered a new opportunity for the exploitation and objectification of the woman
body. COCA-COLA serves as a good example of how product advertising changed during the 1920s both in terms of imagery and slogans. When 1st introduced in the 1880s, the product was marketed as a medicine, with claims that it cured headaches, and that it “revived and sustained” a person. By the 1920s, seeking to build brand loyalty, the company emphasized it as a refreshment and a “fun food” & Persuaded consumers to demand the coca-cola at soda fountains pressuring stroreowners to stock it. Fig. 1.

Holeproof Hosiery ad with a

Coles Phillips illustration (1923)

This Holeproof Hosiery ad from the early 1920s is probably the most famous one being one of the first advertisements to show so much nudity and sexuality. Although it is not a photograph, only an illustration, the break from the old norms is made quite clear by it.
This ad was certainly targeted at women but its sexual implications cannot be missed. This young girl sits in a relaxed posture with her legs apart and it looks like as if she is touching her leg with her hand lending some activity to the picture, instead of the rigid and passive postures that had been used before the Roaring Twenties. Advertisements like this were dangerous for women not only because they tried to objectify the female body, but mainly because they had a great standardizing effect on people. The message of this advertisement is not only about good holeproof hosiery, but it also conveys messages of what is attractive and how women should look like. Advertisers tried to create images that “fed modern American girls the fantasy of sex appeal, and the legitimacy of [their] quest for pleasure”[4]. Advertisements targeted at women clearly emphasized sex appeal over their newly-found freedoms.

The problem was that women easily accepted this without realizing that this sexualized view deprived them from the opportunity of fully and truly exercising their freedom, reducing them to their body. So, in spite of the passage of the Suffrage Amendment women were still kept inferior to men by men.

I argue that this new attitude was created by men for women to make them try to live out their freedom through a loose morality and through seeking sexual pleasure, which certainly suited men’s desires, rather than women’s actual needs. Men craftily lured women to willingly become their objects of desire by manipulation through the growing mass media of the twenties.

Obsession with thinness

A new large market appeared for advertisers around the early 1920s, which was weight loss. Due to the changes in women’s fashion (the lighter and shorter clothes) women’s attention was focus more and more on their appearance and the newly emerged weight concerns created a great market for weight reducing products, such as La-Mar Reducing Soap (advertised on the 1st pic.) or cigarettes.

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[1] Bogardus, R. F., “The Reorientation of Paradise: Modern Mass Media and Narratives of Desire in the Making of American Consumer Culture,” American Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998): 511-512

[2] Lears, T. J. Jackson, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American Historical Review 90 (1985):568

[3] Bogardus, R. F., “The Reorientation of Paradise: Modern Mass Media and Narratives of Desire in the Making of American Consumer Culture,” American Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998): 516

[4] Bogardus, R. F., “The Reorientation of Paradise: Modern Mass Media and Narratives of Desire in the Making of American Consumer Culture,” American Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998): 522