“Bring Joy to Your Home with the Real Frigidaire”: Advertising the Refrigerator to Belgian Female Consumers, 1955–1965

Abstract

Advertisements provide a link between the symbolical, ideal, practical and informative notions of domesticity and technology and shed light on the material culture of the home and domesticity. In this article, I focus on the home as a material place where technological and consumerist trends develop, how these trends were linked to meanings of domesticity, and how they affected gendered identities, practices, labor, and ultimately tastes of home. I argue that in the normalization of the refrigerator, the promotion of a technology-based domestic life was not uniform in its meanings, entitlements, or strategies. First, the consumer was confronted not with uniformity but with a multitude of meanings, arguments and promises that came with the refrigerator. Second, gender roles and identities were less varied. Third, the hard sell–soft sell dichotomy did not prevail, and emotional or hedonistic appeals were often combined with directly spelled-out advantages. The refrigerator advertisements studied here appeared in a Belgian women's magazine between 1955 and 1965 and constructed family life and tastes of home around elevated standards of comfort, care, aesthetics, and choice, more so than around a scientific rationalization of household work and organization.