The Laundry Room

Abstract

This chapter traces the reframing of laundry work as gendered house-work and homemaking via the figure of the housewife and the house-wife mom in ads and commercials for laundry products beginning during the emergence of modern advertising in the late 1800s. Early soap ads and the first detergent marketing depicted housewives eagerly embracing these products as a way to reduce the hard work of doing laundry but also as an aid to good homemaking and care for the family. Advertising from the 1890s through the 1950s emphasized not only the almost magical ability of a soap product to thoroughly clean clothes and linens with ease, but also its ability to help wives and mothers keep their families safe and healthy. Agency documents indicate that although a variety of marketing strategies shaped laundry advertising, ad makers returned again and again to images and copy linking laundry soaps with good homemaking.