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There are a few ads for hair-care products in the 1902 Ladies' Home Journal, for a woman's hair has always been her power and her glory. Ironically, the magazine's advice column says that women should wash their hair no more than once every two or three weeks. (Probably true, some old folks have told me that women's hair back then was much more luxuriant, thicker and glossier.) But that kind of advice is heretical in a consumer age. In a consumer age, our desires are manufactured as much as the products -truth is elusive and messages always come mixed. (Notice that this soap is a 'shampoo' as well as a face wash and even can clean clothes. A product's versatility is a selling point; but it doesn't do much for the corporate bottom line. In the 70's there was one Herbal Essences Shampoo, today there many types of this one brand to be used on different 'types' of hair.)
So it can be said that Edith, Marion and Flora, as 'new women' and suffragists living in an exciting new era were being freed from some tired old Victorian concepts of womanhood (click for 'The Corset'; Click for 1910 Cover Art) but were being caught up in something perhaps as diminishing and as controlling: consumerism and a world of endless desire and bottomless dissatisfaction with who we are and what we look like.
Today, according to Shari Graydon, media literacy expert, advertisers are more predatory than ever, even aiming ads directly at babies still in diapers, if you can imagine. Graydon has two excellent books out:
Made-You-Look: How Advertising Works and What You Should Know and In Your Face: The Culture of Beauty and You. (made-you-look.ca).
Also check out:Helen Damon-Moore's MAGAZINES FOR THE MILLIONS Gender and Commerce in the Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880-1910
Publisher: State University Of New York Press 1994
Click here for ALL Tighsolas Fashion Pages
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