• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1978 0

“too busy to bake”? (“I don’t use the mix because I don’t do any baking at all. It’s too much trouble. I live in a sprawled-out apartment and what with keeping it clean and looking after my child and my part-time job, I don’t have time for baking.”) What to do about their “feeling of disappointment” when the biscuits come out of the oven, and they’re really only bread and there is no feeling of creative achievement? (“Why should I bake my own biscuits when there are so many good things on the market that just need to be heated up? It just doesn’t make any sense at all to go through all the trouble of mixing your own and then greasing the tin and baking them.”) What to do when the woman doesn’t get the feeling her mother got, when the cake had to be made from scratch? (“The way my mother made them, you had to sift the flour yourself and add the eggs and the butter and you knew you’d really made something you could be proud of.”)

The problem can be handled, the report assured:

By using X Mix the woman can prove herself as a wife and mother, not only by baking, but by spending more time with her family…. Of course, it must also be made clear that home-baked foods are in every way preferable to bakery-shop foods…

Above all, give X Mix “a therapeutic value” by downplaying the easy recipes, emphasizing instead “the stimulating effort of baking.” From an advertising viewpoint, this means stressing that “with X Mix in the home, you will be a different woman…a happier woman.”

Further, the client was told that a phrase in his ad “and you make that cake the easiest, laziest way there is” evoked a “negative response” in American housewives—it hit too close to their “underlying guilt.” (“Since they never feel that they are really exerting sufficient effort, it is certainly wrong to tell them that baking with X Mix is the lazy way.”) Supposing, he suggested, that this devoted wife and mother behind the kitchen stove, anxiously preparing a cake or pie for her husband or children “is simply indulging her own hunger for sweets.” The very fact that baking is work for the housewife helps her dispel any doubts that she might have about her real motivations.

But there are even ways to manipulate the housewives’ guilt, the report said:

It might be possible to suggest through advertising that not to take advantage of all 12 uses of X Mix is to limit your efforts to give pleasure to your family. A transfer of guilt might be achieved. Rather than feeling guilty about using X Mix for dessert food, the woman would be made to feel guilty if she doesn’t take advantage of this opportunity to give her family 12 different and delicious treats. “Don’t waste your skill; don’t limit yourself.”

By the mid-fifties, the surveys reported with pleasure that the Career Woman (“the woman who clamored for equality—almost for identity in every sphere of life, the woman who reacted to ‘domestic slavery’ with indignation and vehemence”) was gone, replaced by the “less worldly, less sophisticated” woman whose activity in PTA gives her “broad contacts with the world outside her home,” but who “finds in housework a medium of expression for her femininity and individuality.” She’s not like the old-fashioned self-sacrificing housewife; she considers herself the equal of man. But she still feels “lazy, neglectful, haunted by guilt feelings” because she doesn’t have enough work to do. The advertiser must manipulate her need for a “feeling of creativeness” into the buying of his product.

After an initial resistance, she now tends to accept instant coffee, frozen foods, precooked foods, and labor-saving items as part of her routine. But she needs a justification and she finds it in the thought that “by using frozen foods I’m freeing myself to accomplish other important tasks as a modern mother and wife.”

Creativeness is the modern woman’s dialectical answer to the problem of her changed position in the household. Thesis: I’m a housewife. Antithesis: I hate drudgery. Synthesis: I’m creative!

This means essentially that even though the housewife may