I love how this ad from the 1950s acknowledges how exhausting and mind-numbing housekeeping and childcare can be!

The ad also illustrates the post-WWII efforts to cultivate a market for new food technologies (easy and instant foods that were developed for the war).  This ad for Campbell’s soup describes the phenomenon in more detail.

For another vintage Jell-O ad that takes an entirely different approach, see here.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.