Beyond Mrs consumer: competing femininities in Swedish advertising trade publications, 1900–1939

Abstract

This article follows the discussion on female consumers in Swedish advertising journals and handbooks. The aim is to problematise the gendered aspects of Swedish consumer and early advertising history, by studying how the notion of the female consumer intersected with notions of social class, marital status and sexuality. The article also closes in on the persons who were invited to embody the consuming women and what kind of interests they represented. The article concludes that, from the start of the twentieth century, gender and class was prevalent in the advertising literature. The married woman was also from the start seen as the head of the consuming family. Therefore, reaching her through advertising became key for facilitating the relations between producer and consumer. With time, different women’s organisations, the weekly press, and new theories of advertising from the US addressing the notion of ‘Mrs Consumer’ came to influence the Swedish advertising trade press. The result became the favouring of a certain kind of middle class, urban and rational kind of femininity, strongly connected to homemaking and women’s roles in purchasing for the family. However, this femininity also paralleled notions of ‘the flapper’ and the professional woman.

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