The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [132]
Does she…or doesn’t she? She’s as full of fun as her kids—and just as fresh looking! Her naturalness, the way her hair sparkles and catches the light—as though she’s found the secret of making time stand still. And in a way she has…
With increasing skill, the ads glorify her “role” as an American housewife—knowing that her very lack of identity in that role will make her fall for whatever they are selling.
Who is she? She gets as excited as her six-year-old about the opening of school. She reckons her days in trains met, lunches packed, fingers bandaged, and 1,001 details. She could be you, needing a special kind of clothes for your busy, rewarding life.
Are you this woman? Giving your kids the fun and advantages you want for them? Taking them places and helping them do things? Taking the part that’s expected of you in church and community affairs…developing your talents so you’ll be more interesting? You can be the woman you yearn to be with a Plymouth all your own…. Go where you want, when you want in a beautiful Plymouth that’s yours and nobody else’s…
But a new stove or a softer toilet paper do not make a woman a better wife or mother, even if she thinks that’s what she needs to be. Dyeing her hair cannot stop time; buying a Plymouth will not give her a new identity; smoking a Marlboro will not get her an invitation to bed, even if that’s what she thinks she wants. But those unfulfilled promises can keep her endlessly hungry for things, keep her from ever knowing what she really needs or wants.
A full-page ad in the New York Times, June 10, 1962, was “Dedicated to the woman who spends a lifetime living up to her potential!” Under the picture of a beautiful woman, adorned by evening dress and jewels and two handsome children, it said: “The only totally integrated program of nutrient make-up and skin care—designed to lift a woman’s good looks to their absolute peak. The woman who uses ‘Ultima’ feels a deep sense of fulfillment. A new kind of pride. For this luxurious Cosmetic Collection is the ultimate…beyond it there is nothing.”
It all seems so ludicrous when you understand what they are up to. Perhaps the housewife has no one but herself to blame if she lets the manipulators flatter or threaten her into buying things that neither fill her family’s needs nor her own. But if the ads and commercials are a clear case of caveat emptor, the same sexual sell disguised in the editorial content of a magazine or a television program is both less ridiculous and more insidious. Here the housewife is often an unaware victim. I have written for some of the magazines in which the sexual sell is inextricably linked with the editorial content. Consciously or unconsciously, the editors know what the advertiser wants.
The heart of X magazine is service—complete service to the whole woman who is the American homemaker; service in all the areas of greatest interest to advertisers, who are also business men. It delivers to the advertiser a strong concentration of serious, conscientious, dedicated homemakers. Women more interested in the home and products for the home. Women more willing and able to pay…
A memo need never be written, a sentence need never be spoken at an editorial conference; the men and women who make the editorial decisions often compromise their own very high standards in the interests of the advertising dollar. Often, as a former editor of McCall’s recently revealed,2 the advertiser’s influence is less than subtle. The kind of home pictured in the “service” pages is dictated in no uncertain terms by the boys over in advertising.
And yet, a company has to make a profit on its products; a magazine, a network needs advertising to survive. But even if profit is the only motive, and the only standard of success, I wonder if the media are not making a mistake when they give the client what they think he wants. I wonder if the challenge and the opportunities for the American economy and for business itself might not