Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 131

Images of the Housewife

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professional, managerial, or clerical jobs. The remaining 75 per cent
worked in manual or service jobs or on farms.^^ Yet no advertisements
were found which depicted a home clearly belonging to a blue collar
or a farm family. Although advertisers held up the white collar,
middle class existence as the ideal, most people simply did not live in
this world.
Neither was there any depiction of a married woman who
worked outside the home. In 1920 nine per cent of nuirried women
worked outside the home, a figure that inched up to 11.7 per cent in
the 1930 c e n s u s . T h e Lynds concluded that whether a married
woman in Muncie worked outside the home was largely determined by
which class she belonged to. Only one in forty of the married business
class women reported having taken jobs in the previous five years, but
almost half of the working class women had worked outside the home
in the same period.^^ Neither did all wage earning women work
outside the home. These census figures did not reflect married women
who earned incomes within the home as laundresses, boardinghouse
keepers, or manufacturing homeworkers. Clearly the advertisers'
depiction of the married housewife with nothing to do all day except
see to the needs of her family was a middle class ideal which could
never be achieved by most women who found it necessary to assist in
the support of their families at least part of the time.
Many other elements of life were not depicted in advertisements.
While it is true that the majority of people now lived in urban areas,
in 1920 51.5 million people were still classified as rural residents.
This was 48 per cent of the population,^^ yet rural life was not
depicted in any general interest or woman's magazines. Neither was
city life portrayed in ads. Most ads depicted only the interior of
homes, but even those which showed outdoor scenes suggested quiet,
tree-lined suburban streets or the large estates of the wealthy. "There
were no scenes of street life or neighborhoods or even of the allAmerican small town. Indeed the ads conflated the suburban
standard of living with the national standard.
People of color were used only rarely, and then they were seen in
the position of servant, never as people living independent lives with
their own families or consuming the advertisers' products. Elderly
people were also virtually invisible, appearing occasionally as
sedentary and doting grandparents. Routine aspects of life were
ignored. In 1926 about 48 per cent of the population were members of