Smoking seems to be a theme this week. I just saw the Stanford School of Medicine’s online tobacco-ad gallery where you can view images by theme or brand. Fascinating.
From the exhibit “Our intention is to tell—principally through advertising images—the story of how, between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, tobacco companies used deceptive and often patently false claims in an effort to reassure the public of the safety of their products.”
I found these vintage (1967-68) ads for Tiparillo cigars at Found in Mom’s Basement. All answer the question, “Should a gentleman offer a Tiparillo to…” a particular type of woman.
After a tough evening with the Beethoven crowd, she loves to relax and listen to her folk-rock records. Preferably, on your stereo. She’s open-minded. So maybe tonight you offer her a Tiparillo. She might like it–the slim cigar with a white tip. Elegant. And, you dog, you’ve got both kinds on hand, Tiparillo Regular and new Tiparillo M with menthol–her choice of mild smoke or cold smoke. Well? Should you offer? After all, if she likes the offer, she might start to play. No strings attached.
Underneath that pocket of pencils there beats the heart of a digital computer. This girl has already catalogued and cross-indexed the Tiparillo slim, elegant shape. And the neat, white tip. She knows that there are two Tiparillos. Regular, for a mild smoke. Or new Tiparillo M with menthol, for a cold smoke. She knows. She’s programmed. And she’s ready. But how about you? Which Tiparillo are you going to offer? Or are you just going to stand there and stare at her pencils?
She’ll read anything she can get her hands on. From Medieval History to How-to-Build-a-24-Foot-Iceboat. Loves books. Loves new ideas. Okay. No doubt, she’s seen the unusual, slim Tiparillo shape. She’s been intrigued by the neat, white tip. She may even know that there are two Tiparillos. Regular, for a mild smoke. And new Tiparillo M with menthol, for a cold smoke. Your only problem is which to offer. P.S. If she accepts your Tiparillo, remember to fumble with the matches until she decides to light it herself. That way, she’ll have to put down the book.
I found these next two on ebay (all these vintage ads can be purchased on ebay, it turns out):
Is this the old did-it-with-mirrors ploy? Look again. Okay, that’s enough looking. What you’ve got on your hands are carbon copy twins. And what you’ve got in your hands are Tiparillo and Tiparillo M with menthol. Since Tiparillo is the slim, elegant cigar with the neat tip, would it be statistically correct to offer it to this census-taking twosome? Because all they really want is your name, address, phone number and a few other factual facts. But what they get sort of depends on what you offer.
“The doctor is a little late, sir. Will you have a seat?” She’s the best thing to hit dentistry since novocaine. “Hey Dummy,” your mind says to you, “why didn’t you have this toothache sooner?” Maybe if…well, you could offer her a Tiparillo. Or a Tiparillo M with menthol. An elegant, tipped cigar. Slim. And your offer would be cleverly psychological. (If she’s a bit of a kook, she’ll take it. If not, she’ll be flattered that you thought she was a bit of a kook.) And who knows? Your next visit might be a house call.
I will lead it to you, dear reader, to decide if there was supposed to be anything else “cleverly psychological” in any of these ads.
I found this 1971 ad for Kenmore stoves over at Found in Mom’s Basement:
The woman says,
If you ever broke 14 nails cleaning an oven, you’d know why I want this new self-cleaning one. They say the Kenmore self-cleaning oven even gets the corners clean. You just set the dials. It locks itself and everything. And you know what a horrible job it is cleaning under the burners? No, I guess you don’t. Anyway, with this stove you just flip up the top and give it a wipe. The automatic timer on the oven’s great too. It’ll cook dinner even if I’m out shopping or something.
Her husband says,
That stove’s really put together right. And another good thing, you can sure depend on Sears service. Honey, you’re about to own a new stove.
We still frequently see this message–instead of getting men to share housework more equally, women should buy appliances that make their workload easier…and of course would need their husbands to pay for them. And then you should use it to cook for him, because that’s who it’s built for anyway.
Also…14 nails? Like, she broke all 10, grew 4 more in real quick (or put on 4 fake ones), and then broke them too? Or was she somehow using her feet and some of them were toenails? Burk says that part of the ad makes women seem whiny and as though they exaggerate the difficulties of housework.
I must be a disgusting human being, because the only time I ever worry about cleaning my oven is when I move out of a place I’m renting and have to if I want my deposit back. I’ve never noticed it being particularly disgusting, but then I put a tray under everything to catch drips.
Even though I can’t read the text, I thought this ad was worth putting up. I think I get the gist of it just fine.
Via Vintage Ads.
Vintage Ads put up another example of an ad, this one from 1931, using the idea of the “savage.” In this one, her “impossible” behavior is compared to an Electrolux refridgerator.
NEW! Vintage Ads offered us another on this theme. The text reads: “make like a medicine man in Voodoo Shorts.” Don’t miss the spear.
During WWII, many companies stopped producing the civilian goods that they were best known for. Instead, these companies contributed to the war effort by making products necessary for American soldiers. Scranton Craftspun Curtains, for example, switched from making lace curtains to camouflage covers, mosquito nets and parachutes. By touting their wartime conversions, companies kept their brands in the public’s mind, while achieving patriotic cachet.
Here’s a WWII-era ad for Scranton Craftspun Curtains. Click on the thumbnail to see it larger and read the narrative.
The copy is written from the point of view of a trench soldier somewhere in Japan:
“Have you ever sat, inches from death, not daring to move a muscle, while Zeros zoomed overhead — looking for you — personally?
“Well — that’s my act out here. And it might be a whole lot worse, ’cause, you see, in between Tojo and me there’s a magic veil that even those dirty little squint-eyes can’t penetrate — a couple of yards of lace net that remind me of —
“Say, isn’t it the darndest thing what a fellow thinks of out here? Lace Curtains! Female stuff!
“Maybe. But, to me, Mom’s lace net curtains always spell home. Whenever it was curtain-washing time, round our house, it was like being caught with your camouflage down!
“And Mom loved her net curtains, too. Never forget her working on Pop for new ones for the living room. She, allowing that hers were five years old and completely out of style … and Pop telling her they were as good as new! That made her boil! She’d claim she’d never buy Scranton Craftspun ones again — they lasted too long, with their tied-in-place weave.
“I don’t guess Mom’s think much of my new net ‘curtains’ — and I’m sure she’d never go for swapping her window screens for my Scranton mosquito netting. But I have a hunch that this year she’ll be humming as she washes those old Scranton jobs — happy she’s helping keep that little extra something between Tojo and me.”
* * *Right now, the great looms that gave you exquisite Scranton Craftspun* Curtains and Lace Dinner Cloths are weaving weapons of war for the boys out there … camouflage nets and mosquito netting. Skilled workers, who sewed in hems and headings, are building parachutes. For, Scranton’s new line is the front line. So why not hang up a couple of Bonds instead — just between Tojo and you.
You could spend a few hours talking about all the subjects and rhetorical devices brought up by this ad. The phenomenon of advertising without a product to sell is interesting, but you could go beyond that. You could talk about the gendering of war vs. housework, the racist characterization of the Japanese, the appeals to patriotism, the construction of a personalized, in-your-face theater of battle where homefront=front line, etc.
Next time you feel all warm and fuzzy about how far we’ve come since the bad ol’ days when men weren’t encouraged to take of of children like they do now (by the way, they largely do not), remember this ad (found here):
I don’t detect a hint of sarcasm here. Do you? Or am I oh-so-not-in-touch with 1940s comedic culture? I could be wrong. Am I wrong?
In her book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, Joan Jacobs Brumberg has a chaptered titled “Perfect Skin” in which she looks at the rise of acne as a significant concern among adolescent girls. Because pimples and blackheads were believed by some people to be a sign of immorality–masturbation, lascivious thoughts, or promiscuity–both teenagers and their parents were quite distressed at the appearance of teen acne. Though teens had long been concerned about their appearances, the widespread use of mirrors in bathrooms starting in the Victorian Era gave them many more opportunities to examine their faces and find themselves lacking. And girls tended to be more concerned about their faces than boys, perhaps because girls were judged more harshly for any perceived sexual immorality. A whole industry arose to sell generally useless products to teens, particularly girls, to cure their acne.
Marketers for soap and other products used concerns about morality in their ads. Here is an ad for Hand Sapolio, a popular soap in the early 1900s (found in a 1906 issue of McClure’s Magazine):
Notice how the text in the top box mentions that cosmetics, which might be used to cover pimples, were being “inveighed against from the very pulpits,” meaning good moral girls couldn’t use cosmetics to hide their acne. Also I like how the title (“Be Fair to Your Skin, and It Will Be Fair to You–and to Others”) implies that if you aren’t fair to your skin, it is going to do something dreadful to the people around you…presumably busting out into a hideous display of pimples that will pain people to look upon.
I zoomed in and did a couple of smaller screen captures of some sections of the text that also stress morality or “goodness”:
Be clean, both in and out. We cannot undertake the former task–that lies with yourself–but the latter we can aid with HAND SAPOLIO.
This section of text makes it clear that good skin is essential for popularity, at least among the “best” people:
This Hand Sapolio ad (from a 1903 issue of New England Magazine), sums it up:
The first step away from self-respect is lack of care in personal cleanliness: the first move in building up a proper pride in man, woman, or child, is a visit to the Bathtub. You can’t be healthy, or pretty, or even good, unless you are clean. HAND SAPOLIO is a true missionary.
So there we see a connection being made between having good skin and being “good,” which means that, like missionaries who help save heathens, Hand Sapolio is a “missionary” spreading moral goodness and self-respect. Because what could build up self-respect more than being told that if you have less than perfectly clean skin, you can’t be pretty or good?
These could be useful for discussions of how physical appearances were steadily connected to ideas of morality and how biological processes, like getting pimples in adolescence, were turned into diseases that required (often expensive) intervention to “cure.” They could also be good for a discussion of marketing, particularly how ideas of morality were tied to particular products, such that goodness was commodified–by buying the item, you were buying goodness.
Eric S. sent us a link to the webpage for the Sun-Maid Girl, the girl used to represent Sun-Maid raisins. Here is the original painting of the first Sun-Maid Girl, Lorraine Collett Peterson:
The logo was most recently updated in 1970; here is the current incarnation:
In discussing the original painting, the website says,
Sometimes we forget that in 1915 there were no electric hair dryers, that television would not be invented for decades to come, and that automobiles were not in every home. Life was much simpler, more rural, a lot less hectic and sunbonnets were still part of women’s fashion in California.
I like the romanticization of the past there. In 1915…World War I was going on. I guess life was “less hectic” in that you didn’t have a Blackberry to check every 15 seconds, but overall, I’m not sure I’d say it was “simpler” in a way that implies everyone had time to just sit around eating raisins and drying their hair in the sun.
Also from the website:
To Payne, the sight of the red sunbonnet and the pretty girl in the morning sun was the ideal personification of E.A. Berg’s brand name SUN-MAID.
This might be an interesting addition to some of the images in this, this, and this post about the sexualization of food. Whereas the women in those instances are mostly explicitly sexualized, in this case, the product is being associated with an idealized, non-sexual “maiden” version of femininity. I just thought it might make a good contrast if you’re discussing connections between women and food–the use of female sexuality and idealized female chasteness as marketing tactics related to food products. I wonder if Sun-Maid has stayed with the de-sexualized icon because raisins are associated with children?
FYI, Sun-Maid was one of the companies boycotted by United Farm Workers of America, the group let by Cesar Chavez.
Thanks, Eric S.!
NEW: In a comment Adriana pointed us to Ester Hernandez’s parody of the Sun-Maid girl:
Thanks, Adriana!
