An early advocate of freemarket boosterism as the housewife’s best bid to bring about a more perfect society was Christine Frederick, author of The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management (1913), which was first serialised in 1912 in The Ladies’ Home Journal. Housewives were ‘the great purchasing factor in modern life’, she wrote, and their most important duty was to educate themselves on their ‘proper relation … to the business world which makes and sells’, to understand the complex mechanics of getting an article from the factory to the purchaser in the most efficient and cost-effective way. Only by putting her weight behind such long-term cost-benefit practices as advertising, the one-price system and competitive branding would the housewife be fulfilling her true domestic duty. Frederick patiently explained how the use of brands ultimately resulted in lower costs and greater, more reliable distribution. Frederick likened the act of giving in to cut-rate and inferior substitutes for the brand-name article to a train jumping the track: ‘[I]t … cripples the whole distribution system,’ she warned, and ‘driv[es] the family and the nation into a wrong economic balance which makes panics, unhappiness, and lack of character and worth.’
Frederick’s rose-coloured trickle-down economics took a hit in the wake of the Depression and Franklin D Roosevelt’s federally funded New Deal. But by the Second World War, economic engines were back up and running in the US, making the time right for a resurgence of the freemarket domestic femininity pushed by Frederick. She found a very able successor in Jean Wade Rindlaub, a midcentury Madison Avenue power broker who made her career selling dreams of domestic bliss to American women. Rindlaub’s work for the gold-star Madison Avenue firm of Batten Barton Durstine and Osborn (BBDO), on ad campaigns for everything from Community Plate silverware to Betty Crocker cake mixes to Chiquita bananas, helped to build the enduring archetype of the postwar happy homemaker, a how-to kit for aspiring June Cleavers.
Like her predecessor, Rindlaub defended advertising as a vital ‘public service’ and ‘a closely knit part of our entire economic system’. Advertisers, she asserted, helped to streamline distribution and reduce consumer costs, spreading wealth equally across all races and classes. Indeed, in a memo dictated in 1948, she vented her frustration at the current fad for advertisements that hooked themselves to specific social causes (what we would today call corporate virtue signalling). ‘Advertising has always been a social force,’ Rindlaub insisted, simply by serving the smooth functioning of a freemarket economy. ‘The social consequences of mill shutdowns, layoffs, pay cuts and other grim results of failure to market the things a manufacturer makes are very real,’ she warned. Those who turned up their noses at ‘the profit system’, as they called the freemarket ideology, had nothing better to offer – and had thus better keep quiet. ‘Up to now nothing else has ever come along that has done so much in the way of material things for the comfort and happiness of its people,’ was her standard reply.
Whenever activist women sought systemic, public reforms under the banner of advancing ‘maternal’ values, or actively withheld their purchasing power to hold capital to account, white corporate capital stood at the ready with a more ladylike alternative: similar civilising results could be achieved, they argued, through trickle-down redistribution, leaving intact the freemarket model.