science/technology

Here’s another great one from Elizabeth over at Blog of Stench (image originally found at Ad*Access):

The text:

Send for a FREE BOOK telling about this grave womanly offense. Learn how no other type liquid antiseptic-germicide tested for the douche is so powerful yet harmless! Isn’t it a shame when a woman doesn’t realize how important it is to always put ZONITE in her fountain syringe? Failure to practice hygiene (internal cleanliness) often results in such needless tragedies–homes broken up, few social invitations, the feeling of being shunned without without knowing why. A modern woman realizes how important hygiene is to health, married happiness, after her periods, and to combat an offensive odor even greater than bad breath or body odor–an odor she herself may not detect but is so apparent to people around her. And isn’t it reassuring to know that NO OTHER TYPE LIQUID ANTISEPTIC-GERMICIDE TESTED FOR THE DOUCHE IS SO POWERFUL YET SAFE TO TISSUES AS ZONITE! Developed by a famous surgeon and scientist–the ZONITE principle was the first in the world to be so powerfully effective yet so harmless. ZONITE is positively non-poisonous, non-irritating, non-burning. Remember that ZONITE is SAFE! SAFE! SAFE! to the most delicate tissues. You can use ZONITE as directed as often as needed without the slightest risk of injury. ZONITE deoderizes by not ‘masking’–it actually destroys, dissolves and removes odor-causing waste substances. And ZONITE has such a soothing effect. It promptly relieves any itching or irritation if present. ZONITE gives BOTH internal and external protection, leaving one with such a refreshed, dainty feeling–so c-l-e-a-n! Complete douching directions come with every bottle. Buy ZONITE today! Get it at any drugstore.

So women who don’t douche face, as Elizabeth says, “sexless marriages, social ostracism and general disaster.” I like how horrified the woman in the ad looks now that she’s figured out the cause of all her problems. On a side note, I think this is the only instance I’ve ever seen of a man being referred to as “frigid.”

Here’s another Zonite ad that I found at the Museum of Menstruation (who knew such a thing existed?):

I’m too lazy to transcribe the full text, but it’s basically the same story–if only she’d known about Zonite, she wouldn’t have suffered such social humiliations (and notice the scowl on the woman’s face).

These will be great for illustrating the ways women were (and still are) told they need to douche regularly or they would smell bad, as well as to have a healthy vagina–although the douches themselves often destroyed normal, healthy vaginal bacteria, causing the problems they claimed to solve. I’m going to use these in my women’s studies course in conjunction with our discussion of Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s book The Body Project, which discusses the rise of the feminine hygiene industry and the increases pressure on women to keep more and more parts of their bodies under control, whether through sanitary pads, bras, or anti-acne products.

Thanks, Elizabeth!

In the comments, Abby says,

This also ties into lessons about contraceptive history.  Andrea Tone has written about how Lysol (yes, that Lysol) and Zonite were ostensibly marketed as douches for “freshness” but were understood to be useful for preventing pregnancy.  If I recall correctly the main era for this was the 1930s, when most contraceptives were illegal.  There is a double meaning when these ads say that women can “banish their fears” – not just odor, but also unwanted pregnancy. (Never mind that douching with these chemicals is NOT healthy!)

As an example, Holly Mac. sent in this ad for a Lysol douche:

Text:

A man maries a woman because he loves her. So instead of blaming him if married love begins to cool, she should question herself. Is she truly trying to keep her husband and herself eager, happy married lovers? On most effective way to safeguard her dainty feminine allure is by practicing complete feminine hygiene as provided by vaginal douches with a scientifically correct preparation like ‘Lysol.’ So easy a way to banish the misgivings that often keep married lovers apart.

 

Germs destroyed swiftly

 

‘Lysol’ has amazing, proved power to kill germ-life on contact . . . truly cleanses the vaginal canal even in the presence of mucous matter. Thus ‘Lysol’ acts in a way that makeshifts like soap, salt or soda never can.

 

Appealing daintines is assured, because the very source of objectional odors is eliminated.

Use whenever needed!

 

Yet gentle, non-caustic ‘Lysol’ will not harm delicate tissue. Simple directions give correct douching solution. Many doctors advise their patients to douche regularly with ‘Lysol’ brand disinfectant, just to insure feminine daintiness alone, and to use it as often as necessary. No greasy aftereffect.

 

For feminine hygiene, three times more women use ‘Lysol’ than any other liquid preparation. No other is more reliable. You, too, can rely on ‘Lysol’ to help protect your married happiness . . . keep you desirable!

Notice the way in which “feminine allure” is described as “fragile.” I guess just a few years ago that relentless male sex drive was believed to be easily interrupted!

Also note the threat of divorce (and likely economic ruin) and the use of “science” to sell this product.

Ben O. sent in a link to several ads for douches and feminine deodorants (all at Found in Mom’s Basement). This douche ad makes it clear that douching is about pleasing your male partner:

Notice this feminine deodorant is called Pristeen; it promises to help make “girls” attractive:

From the text:

The real problem, as you very well know, is how to keep the most girl part of you–the vaginal area–fresh and free of any worry-making odors…Whatever starts those those troublesome vaginal odors, Pristeen stops them–effectively. And nicely…Why take chances? Starting today, why not make Pristeen as much a part of your daily life as your bath or shower. It’s just as essential to your cleanliness. And to your peace of mind about being a girl. An attractive, nice-to-be-with girl.

Bidette Towelettes promise to give women “all-day daintiness”:

Thanks, Ben!

Kim D. sent us in another example, found at the Museum of Menstruation:

NEW! Taylor D. sent in a link to eleven more vintage Lysol douche ads, including this one:

Via Scatterplot.

In this ad for Union Carbide is an excellent example of the dichotomization of “tradition” and “modernity” and the conflation of “modernity” with the West.  Text:

Science helps build a new India.

Oxen working the fields . . . the eternal river Ganges . . . jeweled elephants on parade.  Today these symbols of ancient India exist side by side with a new sight–modern industry.  India has developed bold new plans to build its economy and bring the promise of a bright future to its more than 400,000,000 poeple.  But India needs the technical knowledge of the western world.  For example, working with Indian engineers and technicians, Union Carbide recently made available its vast scientific resources to help build a major chemicals and plastics plant near Bombay.  Throughout the free world, Union Carbide has been actively engaged in building plants for the manufacture of chemicals, plastics, carbons, gases, and metals.  The people of Union Carbide welcome the opportunity to use their knowledge and sills in partnership with the citizens of so many great countries.

UPDATE:  In the comments, Village Idiot mentioned the imagery which I, ironically, lost sight of in favor of the text.  The great white hand (of God?) pouring what looks like blood out of a scientific beaker onto a scene of dark figures!  Wow!

Found at Vintage Ads thanks to Ben O.

In a New York Times article today, Patricia Cohen describes the changing demographics of the American professoriate. It had two main points:

(1) Profs are WAY OLDER now then they used to be.

(2) The older ones appear to be more liberal than the younger ones, so we can expect academia to be more moderate as the older profs retire. This table shows how “liberal,” “moderate,” and “conservative” professors report being by age and academic field (click to enlarge so you can see it better).

Cohen summarizes this table as follows:

‘Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,’ they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third.

I’m not sure I buy it.

First, notice that they’re comparing two groups (26-35 and 50-64) and making a claim about a trend instead of a claim about group difference. You can’t do that. Look at the data on the age group between them (36-49), they are all over the place, not neatly sitated between the age groups that sandwich them. (This also points to the always interesting question of how the data looks if you chop up your continuous variables–in this case, age–differently.)

Second, if you stick to group differences, they are comparing the youngest group and the second to oldest group in their data. Why? If you compare the youngest to the oldest group, the data looks a bit different.

Third, their interpretation of the overall “trend”–that is, the average difference across all fields–is obscuring some really interesting variation by subfield! So maybe the overall interpretation works for the social sciences, but wow look at the physical and biological sciences! Again, here we see a choice about reporting that obscures one finding in favor of another. The choice to emphasize averages/means/medians versus ranges/variety has consequences for how we understand our world.

Finally, there is the possibility that what it means to be “liberal,” “moderate,” and “conservative” differs in a systematic way across age groups. The reporter doesn’t address this at all.

There’s are also some really interesting assumptions about what counts as “political” in the article. Cohen points to the fact that quantitative research is somehow thought to be inherently less ideological than pure theory or qualitative research. And she quotes Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright saying: “in the late ’60s and ’70s, the Marxist impulse was central for those interested in social justice.” “Now,” Cohen adds, “it resides at the margins.” But it seems to me that it is Cohen who is assuming that quantitative research isn’t justice-oriented. Her example of a not-so-politicized younger professor is Sara Goldrick-Rab, also a sociologist, who says, “My generation is not so ideologically driven.” But whose projects, detailed in the story, include college opportunities for low-income students and the way that welfare reform decreased college attendance by the poor. Goldrick-Rab also complains about the lack of support for women academics who are also mothers. Those all sound damn political to me. But Cohen writes, partially quoting Goldrick-Rab: “They [older professors] want to question values and norms; ‘we [younger professors] are more driven by data.’ ” In this sentence, Cohen puts values and data on opposite ends of a spectrum. (It’s also interesting how she opposes Goldrick-Rab’s quote to her own words, we have no idea what Goldrick-Rab meant to oppose to being data-driven.)

I am troubled by the reproduction of the binary between “objective” and “normative” “science.”

I love, however, seeing the places and people of my alma mater described! Go Wisconsin!!!

The graph below, from the New York Times, challenges a stereotype about Asian-Americans and their choice of major in college.  The author writes:

The report found that contrary to stereotype, most of the bachelor’s degrees that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders received in 2003 were in business, management, social sciences or humanities, not in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering or math.

The article also discusses the way in which the category “Asian-American/Pacific Islander” makes invisible the dramatic discrepancy between the educational attainments of Asians who’s families immigrated from different places.  For example, they write:

…while most of the nation’s Hmong and Cambodian adults have never finished high school, most Pakistanis and Indians have at least a bachelor’s degree.

The SAT scores of Asian-Americans, it said, like those of other Americans, tend to correlate with the income and educational level of their parents.

And, to a great degree, the success of a given Asian immigrant group in this society is correlated with the wealth of the nation from which they immigrated.

The relationship between clear skin and sexuality has an interesting history.  In an effort to establish dermatology as a medical subspeciality, aspiring dermatologists strategically linked, in the popular imagination, young women’s acne and lasciviousness.  Doctors argued that acne was a sign of sexual desire or God forbid, masturbation or worse.  Parents worried, then, that this would make their daughters unacceptable marriage partners (at a time when that was disasterous for women) and so would pay a great deal of money to doctors who would promise to cure their daughters of this scarlet dot.  Thus, dermatology was born.

Later, of course, acne became seen as a boy’s issue… But since we had different expectations for boys (in terms of both beauty and sexuality), acne was seen as a “stage” to be endured instead of a “problem” to be cured.  This is more or less like it was when I was a kid in the 1980s.

But today, of course, clear skin is linked to sexual attractiveness, especially for women (thanks, in part, to our friend evolutionary psychology).  And, with dermatologists at their beck and call, upper class teenagers (and adults) no longer have to endure bad skin. Thus, science, sex and skin care seem like natural bed fellows.  Consider this ad:

It’s a subtle threat: “Why not wake up in great skin.” Why would we care?  Who is laying next to you?  Does he know what you look like without make-up?  Without beer goggles?  Without make-up and beer goggles!? And what happens if he finds you disgusting in the bright light of morning?  (This, of course, is a very effective marketing tool because sexual attractiveness is linked to happiness. There is a price to pay for not finding a mate and, we are told over and over and over, that price is very high.)

I also see in the ad a perpetuation of the medicalization of sexual desirability (whether that be “purity” or “beauty”). The “3-step skin care” and “consultation” is a subtle medicalizing and scientizing of the make-up industry.  Lots of make-up companies use the notion of “science” to market their product (i.e., “Prescriptives”) and many of them link this with what is “natural” as well (i.e., Aveda).

Thanks to Jason for sending along the image!

Lisa and I went to the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas today. We were not allowed to take pictures! However, we were inspired to post about the word “atomic.” Below are some pictures related to the U.S. bombing of Nagasaki during WWII. They are followed by some examples of the way in which the word “atomic” has been taken up in popular culture

The mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, Japan:

Nagasaki before and after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb (found here):

Together the bombs dropped by the U.S. on Nagasaki and Hiroshima killed between 150,000 and 220,000 people immediately (that is, not considering the long-term morbidity and mortality). For more on the science of atomic bombs and the structural and human casualties of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, click here. Our point here is to point out that at this point in history, the word “atomic” referred to something incredibly devastating to human life.

Given this, we find it fascinating that the word came to mean something like “cool,” “super extra much,” “hot and spicy” and numerous other vague references to awesomeness. Then, the adjective could be used to describe anything at all. Consider the following examples

Clothes and sporting equipment:

Music-related stuff:

Candy:

So at some time and for some reason, the word “atomic” came to refer not to something very, very serious and instead to something very, very fun. How odd. We did a search for the etymology of the word “atomic” and there was nothing to explain how the word came to be used that way in popular American culture. In fact, there was no reference to its non-scientific use at all.

P.S. – If you’re ever in Las Vegas and want to see something very, very weird (sociologically, we mean), we suggest the Atomic Testing Museum. There, you can learn about America’s proud “atomic testing heritage.”

UPDATE: Commenter Elena pointed out that before the creation of the atomic bomb, people thought radiation promoted health. An ad for a radioactive “solar pad,” basically a radioactive belt people were supposed to wear:

Found here.

A radium water filter:

Found here.

It seems odd to me that after the devastation the atomic bombs caused in Japan, the word “atomic” and atomic materials such as uranium retained any positive connotations in the public realm.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

“Because everything in her home is waterproof, the housewife of 2000 can do her daily cleaning with a hose.”

If only. I have started vacuuming my dogs, which seems more efficient than letting them shed and then vacuuming their hair off the carpet, but that’s a long way from just being able to hose the house down every day.

This image, found here, is a good illustration of visions of the future and the intense belief in science and technology to completely change daily life (except who does housework) that was so common in the 1950s.
It could also be useful for a discussion of how new household appliances and technologies actually changed women’s lives. In some cases, new electrical appliances clearly reduced women’s domestic workload. My great-grandma had a lifelong devotion to Franklin D. Roosevelt because his New Deal rural electrification project eventually made it possible for her to get an electric washer. She had 7 kids and swore to me multiple times that the electric washing machine was the single greatest thing that ever happened to women (birth control being a close second). On the other hand, as more household appliances became available, our standards of cleanliness increased, so in many cases women ended up doing more housework in an effort to meet the more stringent cleanliness (and to use their electric vacuum to vacuum a peacock-fan-shaped pattern into the carpet, among other useful skills some home economics courses imparted).

Thanks to Ben G. for sending this along!