Selling womens history : packaging feminism in twentieth century American popular culture Machine generated contents note: Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1Martha Washington (Would Have) Shopped Here: Womens History in Magazines and Ephemera 1910 1935 2 The Quaker Girl Turns Modern : How Adwomen Promoted History 1910 1940 3Broadcasting Yesteryear: Womens History on Commercial Radio 1930 1945 4Gallant American Women: Feminist Historians and the Mass Media 1935 1950 5 Betsy Ross Red Lipstick: 1940s Products as Inspirations and Artifacts 6 Youve Come a Long Way Baby : Womens History in Consumer Culture from World War II to Womens Liberation Epilogue NotesIndex Long before American feminists of the 1960s and the 1970s persuaded universities and the public to treat womens history as a valid subject for serious study popular culture dramatized womens pasts. Sentimentalized visions of eighteenth and nineteenth century domestic life saturated the twentieth century consumer culture landscape. Advertisements lobbied housewives to select Betsy Ross Red lipstick and muffin mix containing Early American flour. Womens magazines radio broadcasts and comic books featured historical biographies of famous and forgotten women including entrepreneurs activists educators and wives of notable men. Selling Womens History provides the first analysis of these diverse messages about womens histories. As twentieth century American women assumed new social political and economic roles many historical narratives emphasized continuity sentimentalizing historical figures like Martha Washington as models for the present. Yet women advertisers script writers historians and consumers responded constructing more dynamic narratives to promote feminism. This work prefigured the subject matter and analytical approach of academic historians of gender tracking changes in the expectations for womens behavior over time to demonstrate that society rather than biology had limited women. Advertising womens professional societies established to expand womens employment opportunities promoted new facets of such familiar icons as the patriotic Colonial Dame and the Quaker Maid destabilizing the assertion of feminine domesticity made in advertisements themselves Only in recent decades has the American academic profession taken womens history seriously. But the very concept of womens history has a much longer past one thats intimately entwined with the development of American advertising and consumer culture.Selling Womens History reveals how from the 1900s to the 1970s popular culture helped teach Americans about the accomplishments of their foremothers promoting an awareness of womens wide ranging capabilities. On one hand Emily Westkaemper examines how this was a marketing ploy as Madison Avenue co opted womens history to sell everything from Betsy Ross Red lipstick to Virginia Slims cigarettes. But she also shows how pioneering adwomen and female historians used consumer culture to publicize histories that were ignored elsewhere. Their feminist work challenged sexist assumptions about womens subordinate roles.Assessing a dazzling array of media including soap operas advertisements films magazines calendars and greeting cards Selling Womens History offers a new perspective on how early and mid twentieth century women saw themselves. Rather than presuming a drought of female agency between the first and second waves of American feminism it reveals the subtle messages about womens empowerment that flooded the marketplace