For Women Only: McCall's Answers Readers' Questions About Advertising

Introduction Beginning in February 1963 and continuing through November 1964, McCall's magazine ran a 2/3 page feature column titled "Q & Advertising." This column purportedly answered McCall's readers' questions about advertising. With the column's debut, McCall's told its almost exclusively female audience: If a woman has eyes and ears, advertising cannot fail to be part of her life. Its slogans and jingles are her grownup nursery rhymes. Its information helps her make wise decisions in the bewildering assortment of today's products (6,000 items in the average supermarket, for example). Most advertising is aimed at women. Sometimes women get the urge to aim back, with questions about the whys and wherefores of advertising. To answer some of these questions, McCall's has established this special department, which will answer your questions about advertising. ("Q & Advertising" Feb. 1962, 10) This paper examines the 20 "Q & Advertising" columns that ran in McCall's. The paper begins with a description of the political and social climate in which McCall's devoted, in 2001 rates (SRDS Consumer Magazine Advertising Source, 849)* approximately $1.7 million worth of advertising space to an industry set upon explaining itself to its most important consumer of the time, women. Literature regarding the importance of women's magazines as disseminators of information and consumer culture is then reviewed, followed by a qualitative content analysis of the 20 McCall's columns. The analysis forms the focus of the paper and its goal is to find out what were the issues, the points of view, and the rationales for advertising itself and for advertising practices in the 1960s as presented to women. The implications of the column are then discussed. Advertising in the 1960s To understand the relevance of the McCall's column, one must have a feel for the social context in which the column was conceived. John Mack Carter, editor of McCall's at the time of the column, described it as a response, in part, to the public's view of advertising during the early 1960s. For the advertising industry, the 1960s were a time of mistrust on the part of the consumer, threatened intervention by government regulatory agencies, and introspection by those employed in the field (Fox 299-302). In short, the 1960s was a decade of consumerism. A contemporary consumer movement, consumerism encompassed the intertwined activities of government, business, independent organizations, and concerned citizens. Consumerism's main goal was to protect and enhance the rights of consumers. The consumer movement of the 1960s was not the first wave of consumerism; such movements also occurred at the turn of the century and in the years following the Depression (Lears 239-40). However, WWII derailed the 1930s movement, which didn't get back on track until 1959. Advertising fell upon unhappy times beginning in October of that year, which marked the beginning of the era of bad feeling in advertising-government relations. In part, the resurgence of this most recent era of consumerism was the outcome of the quiz show and disk jockey payola scandals; however, the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 also helped advance the movement (Simon 412). Kennedy, a pro-consumerism candidate, acknowledged the importance of protecting the public; during the 1960 campaign, Kennedy and other democrats stressed their intention of giving the government a pro-consumer orientation (Cohen, "U.S. Enforcement" 109; "JFK Seen" 3). A mistrust of advertising formed one of the roots of consumerism (others included disillusionment with "the system," the gap between the promise and performance of new products, wariness against invasions of privacy and a need to protect disadvantaged groups in society). While advertising was at the core of the existing information system, many ads were perceived by consumers as uninformative and misleading (Aaker and Day). …