Advertising companies have long targeted “Mrs. Consumer” in their campaigns, seeing women, and particularly housewives, as the main audience for their ads. While early ads often portrayed the woman consumer as passive, emotional, and gullible, by the 1920s — as women became more active and visible in the public sphere — ads also changed their approach. Looking to capitalize on women’s new sense of citizenship leading up to and after the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, ad campaigns sought to convince women to exercise their political power not only at the ballot box but also in the store.
Even before the 19th Amendment, retailers and manufacturers were eager to cash in on women’s new sense of political agency by framing consumption as the manifestation of their rights. “Another Victory for Equal Rights!” an ad for The Royal Tailors company announced in 1914, proclaiming that they had begun to provide services for both men and women. Another 1914 ad for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes also adopted the suffrage slogan “Votes for Women,” featuring a march of little girls as if in a suffrage parade, claiming that “the women of this country have always voted ‘aye’” for the cereal.
The increasing numbers of women working in the advertising business also helped in shifting views on the woman consumer. Frances Maule — a veteran suffragist that made a career as an executive copywriter at J. Walter Thompson Advertising Company — argued in a Printers’ Ink article that “[w]hen we sit down…to try to visualize the woman purchaser, we should do well to recall to our minds the fact — so well expressed in the old suffrage slogan — that ‘Women Are People.’” Maule rejected the “good old conventional ‘angel-idiot’ conception of women,” and instead suggested to see women as a more complex group of types and interests.
Once the 19th Amendment had passed, advertisers grew even bolder in connecting voting with consumption. A 1923 General Electric ad titled “The Suffrage and the Switch” conflated the achievement of women’s suffrage with the progress that electricity brought to domestic life. Portraying a fashionable woman turning an electrical switch next to a smaller picture of a woman’s hand casting a ballot, the copy announced that “Woman suffrage made the American woman the political equal of her man. The little switch which commands the great servant Electricity is making her workshop the equal of her man’s.”