Text:
The things women have to put up with. Most husbands, nowadays, have stopped beating their wives, but what can be more agonizing to a sensitive soul than a man’s boredom at meals. Yet, lady, there must be a reason. If your cooking and not your conversation is monotonous, that’s easily fixed. [Ed. – Though apparently boring conversation is a life sentence.] Start using soups more often, with lighter, more varied dishes to follow. Heinz makes 18 varieties. You can serve a different one every day for three weeks. Use them in your cooking too, and strike some new flavours that will lift ordinary dishes out of the commonplace.
Vintage ad found here thanks to Laura R.
Comments 6
Dangger — September 25, 2008
Very nice ad, good material for class.
Bob M. — September 25, 2008
Wow... just, wow...
And yet the advertisement relies on a picture of a MALE chef to drive its point across?!?
Village Idiot — September 26, 2008
I find it interesting that many of the comments on flickr about it call the ad fake. They have nothing to back that claim up with besides the belief that in 'those days' nobody talked about domestic violence at all, much less in ad copy.
I've noticed that in the digital age, anything we see in the media that we really don't like or find disturbing at some level can be called 'fake!' and we can move on feeling satisfied that our world is still exactly the way we already know it to be, or was they way we always thought it was.
Frankly, the authoritarian way the ad was written makes me think I might be beaten if I don't do what Heinz says and start using soups more often followed by lighter, more varied fare and that I make sure I never serve the same meal twice in a three week period. The threatening tone tells me the beatings referred to at the beginning of the ad must have only very recently stopped (for most women, that is).
Noumenon — September 26, 2008
If Laura would provide a few details about the provenance of the ad, I would feel more assured that it's not fake.
Dubi — September 26, 2008
Village Idiot - if I knew what year we were talking about, I'd feel more confident. The fact is that from the 1920's up till the very end of the 60's, nobody DID talk about wife beating. There wasn't even a word for it. The first women's refuge was created in the UK in 1970 by a women's group that discovered(!) that wives being beaten by husbands is a widespread problem in their community, and even then it took awhile for it to sink in that the problem wasn't localized.
Village Idiot — September 26, 2008
Yeah, it's so bizarre that it probably is fake, but if so then it's a totally pointless fake, as in what the hell is the point?!?
And though there may not have been any specific terms for domestic violence at the time, to me that makes the ad seem more plausibly real since a lack of awareness of the problem would allow an ad like this to get approved in the first place. "Huh? You mean some men really do beat their wives? Oops!"
People did talk about wives as far back as we want to consider, and about beatings, so it seems to me that talking (or joking) about beating wives would've happened occasionally (or frequently), even if there were no terms that specifically referred to abuse or domestic violence. Until strong negative connotations became associated with the terminology of spousal abuse, it was not considered a problem and therefore could have been fair game for jokes or ads (just my speculation).