It started with a pincushion and a puzzle. In 1921, Washburn Crosby, the makers of Gold Medal flour, held a national contest. If customers completed a jigsaw puzzle and sent it in, they would be mailed a prize: a pincushion shaped like a flour sack.
The Minnesota-based company was soon deluged in completed puzzles, along with something they didn’t expect: hundreds of letters from home cooks, asking for kitchen advice. The company took on the challenge gamely, responding to all the inquiries. According to Susan Marks, the author of Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America’s First Lady of Food, “The company felt like they should have a name attached when someone would respond back to them. And they didn’t think it should be a man. They thought that it should be a woman.”
So they invented a person. For her first name, Betty. “It was really nice and sweet, and everybody knew a Betty,” says Marks. Crocker was the last name of a well-liked company executive. The advertising department sought out female employees to respond to the letters, and eventually staffed an entire department with women who knew their way around a kitchen. “It all grew rather quickly from there,” Marks says.
Ever since, the image of a brunette white woman has stared out of advertisements, food packaging, and the pages of cookbooks. She was fictional, a marketing tool used to sell Gold Medal Flour, Bisquick, and other American staples. But at a time when women were discouraged from working outside the home, the real women behind the dozens of cookbooks, hundreds of advertisements, and thousands of letters emblazoned with the name “Betty Crocker” turned an illustration and a name into a corporate powerhouse. Despite prevalent gender discrimination, many remembered their time as “Crockettes” with immense fondness.
In 2002, Barbara Jo Davis sat down with Linda Cameron, an interviewer for the Minnesota Historical Society. Davis is an accomplished businesswoman, the president and owner of a barbecue sauce company and the first president of the Coalition for Black Development in Home Economics.
As a child, though, Davis didn’t want to grow up to be a businesswoman. “Actually, when I was about 12, I decided I wanted to be Betty Crocker,” Davis told Cameron. By the time Davis first heard of Betty Crocker, the brand had decades of experience in advertising their near-scientific but homey approach to food.