Because You’re Worth It

Amy Merrick considers the long and not-entirely-successful history of advertisers using feminist rhetoric to sell beauty products:

Almost as soon as images of women became prominent in the mass media, at the beginning of the twentieth century, marketers began trying to blend representations of women as independent and intelligent with traditional feminine notions of beauty. It was an awkward fit.

In 1924 – shortly after women got the right to vote, and long before Betabrand’s Ph.D.s – the Woman’s Copy Department at the J. Walter Thompson ad agency recruited distinguished women for a campaign for Pond’s cold cream, according to Kathy Peiss, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. Women such as Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who were chosen for their cultural significance rather than primarily for their beauty, gave testimonials about the benefits of Pond’s.

But many people didn’t understand the point, and consumers reported that they most liked the photographs of Princess Marie de Bourbon, a young and conventionally pretty endorser. In the Pond’s ads, the marketers “maintained that beautifying and achievement need not be mutually exclusive: caring for appearance could be seen as an aspect of women’s self-expression and dignity,” Peiss writes. “But this was a subtle and difficult argument to make, easily submerged in the celebration of female beauty as an end in itself.” For the most part, advertisers reverted to a simpler, more conventional message.