Right at Home: Freedom and Domesticity in the Language and Imagery of Beer Advertising 1933–1960

Abstract

Historians have contended that the stigma associated with women’s alcohol consumption was largely eliminated by the 1940s. This paper, building on the work done by those historians, seeks to explore and, hopefully, complicate the concepts of gender, class, beer and American culture in the mid-twentieth century through the lens of beer advertisements. Beer advertisements from the 1930s through the 1950s suggest that the brewing industry didn’t simply offer women uninhibited entry into the masculine world of drink, but rather redefined that world in terms of the domestic sphere and a woman’s role therein. Between the repeal of prohibition in 1933 and industry consolidation at the end of the 1950s, beer advertisements reflected and engaged many broad social questions and concerns. Distinctly gendered, many beer ads reflected debates about the proper role of women, the importance of domesticity, and the aspirations of a consumption-based American middle class. In an effort to create as broad a market as possible without alienating key consumers or giving ground to dry advocates, brewers offered a vision of American society in which the maligned saloon was replaced by the home, in which drinking beer was a man’s (and eventually a nation’s) inalienable right and providing it for him was a woman’s obligation. This paper is based on beer advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, American brewery archives and other published materials.