Captains Of Consciousness Advertising And The Social Roots Of The Consumer Culture

by Stuart Ewen

Through consumption, women could procure for their children the kind of life-long security and happiness that was associated with perpetual youth. Protecting and educating children was tantamount to training them from infancy in beneficial patterns of consumption. J. B. Watson’s emphasis on creating new forms of behavior through youth found its propagandistic realization. Colgate’s Dental Cream pictured a beautiful young woman, clearly viable on the sexuo-economic marketplace, embracing her child. Explaining that this mother had captured youth by beginning to use Colgate in 1908, the ad implied that an early introduction of training into beauty, and more importantly into consumption, was essential to the child. After brushing her own way to youthful beauty, “now her Daughter uses the same dental cream.”119