Adwomen and Feminism: Networking and Mentorship in Advertising Women's Clubs, 1939–70

From the time of its emergence as a professional field in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, the advertising industry offered uncommon employment opportunities for women.  Male advertisers relied on female copywriters to pitch products to other, presumably like-minded, women.  Nevertheless, female advertisers faced marginalization, both in their own agencies and in the industry as a whole.   In response to their exclusion from important advertising professional societies, women created advertising clubs in such cities as New York (1912), Philadelphia (1916), St. Louis (1916), and Washington (1943).  Copywriters, advertising artists, merchants, department store buyers, magazine publishers, and corporate public relations officials joined these societies, allowing advertising women without female colleagues at their own workplaces to develop professional connections across diverse segments of the consumer economy.  Excluded from many formal networking opportunities, women workers made popular culture itself a forum for communication across industries and for broadcasting proof of women’s professional capabilities to local and national audiences.  Female advertisers, magazine editors, and department store executives frequently collaborated in women’s magazines, radio programs, and department store exhibits.  During and after World War II, women’s advertising clubs groups adjusted their activism, seeking to exploit expanded wartime opportunities for women’s employment and to navigate the restricted opportunities of the postwar period. 

From 1939 through 1970, women’s advertising clubs produced charity galas, career guidebooks, public relations campaigns celebrating female business leaders, consumer education programs, and free nighttime advertising courses for women.  Adwomen designed this outreach to the consumer and to the under-employed female worker, not only to help other women, but also to increase public recognition of women’s professional capabilities.  This work challenges the historiographic division of “first” and “second” wave feminism and demonstrates the under-studied role of mid-twentieth-century professional women in challenging gender norms.