Mrs. Housewife and the Ad Men: Advertising, Market Research, and Mass Consumption in Postwar Britain

Abstract

This essay reflects on the ways in which market research in Britain helped to produce understandings of and information about the “mass market housewife” in the 1950s and 1960s. The figure of the mass market housewife was central to postwar advertising and market research.1 Her preeminence as the lynchpin of domestic consumption owed much to the centrality of the household in the regime of mass consumption that came to dominate both American and European societies from the 1920s and especially in the years after 1945. Victoria de Grazia has shown how new standards of elementary comfort—indoor toilets, running water, heat, electricity, and piped gas—first pioneered in the United States, helped to shape a “new household” that was itself central to the displacing of an older regime of bourgeois consumption in Europe. Within this new household, domestic consumption was the responsibility of women above all, and de Grazia sees what she calls “Mrs. Consumer” as the privileged agent of this new regime of mass consumption.2 Within a context shaped by broader changes in the world of work, including the relative decline of domestic service, the role of Mrs. Consumer was elaborated upon by the manufacturers of domestic technologies and commodities, by architects and government planners, and by evangelists in women’s magazines.3 Market research, however, was also crucial in the “assembling” of the modern housewife.