Title: "Selling the Couple: Advertising, Consumerism, and Companionate Marriage in the 1920s"

Author: Liza Burbank-Gilb

Primary advisor: Judith Smith

Secondary advisor: Rachel Rubin

Graduation date: June 2005

Abstract:
This paper considers the relationship between the consolidation of consumer culture and the rise of advertising in the 1920s, and the shift during that same time toward the middle-class ideal of companionate marriage. I examined all issues of the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies' Home Journal from January 1920 through December 1929, paying attention specifically to advertisements that represented the couple as a distinct unit, in an attempt to understand how images of romance and the new companionate couple were used by advertisers to sell consumer goods. Drawing on the rich body of existing scholarly work in social and cultural history of the 1920s to provide the historical context for the appearance of these ads, I argue that the "couple ads" of the Post and the Journal can be read as potential answers posed by advertisers to questions and uncertainties about the new companionate marriage ideal, questions and uncertainties which were exacerbated by other broad social changes (including the development of mass culture, changes in women's roles and lives, and tensions between Victorian and modern cultural values). How should women and men go about attracting a potential spouse? What were the qualities most important in a mate? Was it possible to keep the romance and excitement of courtship alive after marriage? How would men and women experience their roles as defined by the new expectations, and how would they negotiate the tensions between old values and new? How would this new kind of married couple interact with the world outside the home? As the goal of advertisers is to sell goods, it is not surprising that the ads suggested that proper consumption would alleviate all these uncertainties. I conclude that the couple ads of the Post and the Journal taught readers what romantic couples might look like, and reassured them that the correct consumption choices would help them live up to the gendered roles required by the ideal of companionate marriage and consumer culture. At the same time, the ads acknowledged the tensions created by the collision of Victorian and modern values and the potential inadequacy of the new marriage ideal to meet people's, especially women's, needs.

Who might be interested in reading this work?
Anyone with an interest in the history of advertising or consumer culture, or twentieth-century gender history, might find this research useful.