Finding Betty Crocker Quotes

“Extensive market research conducted in 1953 by psychologists Ernest Dichter and Burleigh Gardner concluded that a Depression-era Betty did not suit the new prosperous postwar America.... By 1954, six commissioned artists, including Norman Rockwell, painted... six portraits, plus McMein's version and portrait of Adelaide Hawley, [and] were presented to a cross-section of 1,600 homemakers, who were asked to consider: Would you want her as a friend? Does she look honest? Does she look like a housewife or a career woman? Does she look relaxed or tense?”
― Susan Marks, Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America's First Lady of Food

“[McMein's] portrait was enthusiastically approved, then unveiled with great ceremony in November of 1936... According the General Mills Historian James Gray, McMein gave Betty "a fine Nordic brow and shape of skull, a jaw of slightly Slavic resolution and features that might be claimed contentedly by various European groups - eyes, Irish; nose, classic Roman - the perfect composite of the twentieth-century American woman.”
― Susan Marks, Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America's First Lady of Food

“The [Betty Crocker] Kitchens also include America's largest corporate cookbook library. Home economists conduct recipe and food trend research using 9,000 titles, which occupy 1,260 feet of high-density, easy-access rolling bookshelves.”
― Susan Marks, Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America's First Lady of Food

“Receptionists [for the Betty Crocker Kitchen tours] had tissues and sympathy for guests grappling with the cold reality that it was impossible to meet Betty Crocker.”
― Susan Marks, Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America's First Lady of Food

“For some, the Betty Crocker Kitchens experience was a tearful one. "Betty Crocker isn't one woman,". visitors were told, "but many women who work under her name." ... People don't usually travel all the way to the North Pole, meet the elves, and then find out the truth about Santa. But what happened at the Betty Crocker Kitchen was "worse because Betty was their hero.”
― Susan Marks, Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America's First Lady of Food

“And incidents of clandestine cake mix use were not isolated! Busybodies excused themselves from parties just long enough to rifle through the kitchen trash cans for empty cake mix boxes.”
― Susan Marks, Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America's First Lady of Food