Hope in an Ad: Teaching Consumerism, Beauty Culture, and Idealized Womanhood Using 1920s Advertisements

Advertising is an effective way to teach college students in United States history survey courses about American culture. Advertisements that center on women and focus on beauty rituals and hygienic practices are particularly effective in tying together issues useful in understanding the fullness, complexities, and contradictions of United States culture in the 1920s, as presented through mainstream print media. This paper outlines how Carter-David uses advertisements to help students understand the developing aims of advertising as an omnipresent industry by the Second Gilded Age, its relationship to the consumerism of the emergent white-collar class, and their connection to changing notions of baseline material comforts in American life. This paper explains the ways that students learn how advertising aimed at single and married middle-class, white women in that era sought to tap into their insecurities by using age-old ideas about women’s roles, more novel “scientific” reasoning, and new ideas about women’s beauty and sexuality. It also illustrates how they learn that advertising, through its silences, excluded poor, white women and women of color from the public face of American life. Finally, this paper illustrates how students might understand the contemporary relevance of advertising, consumerism, beauty culture, and sexism in women’s representations in the media, and how it might impact their own lives in contemporary contexts.