Mary Beth Meehan: Hello Amherst friends and family. I'm Mary Bethany and class of '89 and I have the great pleasure of talking today with my old, dear friend and roommate Ellen Wayland Smith, class of '89 about a new book she has just published with the University of Chicago entitled, The Angel In The Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America. And so welcome Ellen. So good to see you.
Ellen Wayland-Smith: So good to see your face.
MBM: Ellen, this book focuses on a Madison Ave career woman at mid-century and there's so much in here that I know you've been interested in for a long time. But I'm wondering if you could talk about how you found Jean Wade Rindlaub and what interested you about her?
EWS: Right. So, well my first book, that came out in 2016, was about the Oneida Community. Uh the Oneida Community was a radical, free-love, socialist, Christian utopia in upstate New York, that also happened to be founded by my great, great, great grandparents. So, um, that book was sort of a mixture of history- cultural history but also family history. In any case they were interesting to me because after they had sort of played out their religious role as a... as an intentional community, and after the community broke up, they had been manufacturing silverware, as a way of keeping themselves alive financially. And so, they just sort of spun around and became Oneida silversmiths. Which over the course of the 20th century was, you know, the sort of premier silverware company in America. And a sort of shorthand for bourgeois, you know, domestic propriety and respectability. Quite a far cry from their their free love origins. But so what... how I found Rindlaub was that she- during the war, during World War II, Oneida reached out to Barton, Batten, Durstine and Osborn. I always forget the four names, BBD&O, the Madison Avenue mega, mega firm, in order to ... to do wartime ads for their silverware. And Jean Rindlaub, who was working for them at the time- this was in 1941-42, was tapped with the account. And what she created was this, you know, very sort of sentimental, heart tugging copy in which picturing sort of absent soldiers coming home and you know greeting their sweethearts with a big embrace, and a kiss. And of course, the sweetheart woman had prepared dinner using Oneida silverware ready... ready and waiting for her man. And the tagline was 'Back Home For Keeps'. So, it was very sort of sentimental, very kind of ... uh... cloying, and you know sort of playing on domestic ... domestic themes. And so it turned out that she... she, Jean Rindlaub, her daughter had recently donated all of her papers to the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. And so, you know out of curiosity I went and investigated her archive and it's actually quite voluminous. It's, you know, something like 51 cartons of papers. She saved sort of everything that she ever did professionally. So that's how I found her and that is how I got interested in writing. What interested me about her was the way in which she sort of was a catalyst in the 1940s and 50s for not only mark- she marketed, you know, everything from soap to cakes to silverware to American housewives, but she also played a really important role in sort of consolidating a certain political and economic status quo at mid-century which was sort of free markets, small government, what was called at the time "free enterprise" or the "American business system" and I was interested in the way that she was brought into sort of market not only products, corporate products and manufacturing products to women but also this sort of larger vision of what America is and was.
MBM: That's one of the things that really struck me about the book was that it's not just biography of her but it's as though she's stepping through the whole century and through her story you're able to talk about, really broadly, about capitalism, domesticity, consumerism, and these notions of patriotism, again, that I know have interested you for a long time. And I'm wondering if- and also the mass media I'm wondering if you could- of religion, you know the evolution of religious thought in the US, and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of those themes and how her story pulls those together for you.
EWS: What I really try to follow- this sort of bigger story that I try to follow through Jean Rindlaub's life and work is the story of how, as a country, we imagined the relationship between the economy and the state or the government- right. And I think, you know, sort of today it's pretty clear that the neoliberal, small-government, free market ideology is going strong and is- is perhaps sort of the dominant model. But what was interesting to me is that it wasn't always the dominant model. There were at least two ways of thinking about how the state and the economy should interact. You know, up until the crash in 1929 there was a pretty robust support for this free market model that was evolving with corporate corporations as sort of these sort of entrusted leaders who, you know, would look out for everybody's interests and the idea was that you got a robust market working and it was a growth creator and a wealth creator and it was a, you know, it was going to- if you just left the market to its own devices, it would be a you know rising tide that would float all boats. That illusion was- was was shattered in 1929 and what you got in reaction to it was FDR and the New Deal and the idea that the state- in fact the market didn't regulate itself in the interests of everyone and that the state often had to come in and provide to, you know, to provide us a guiding hand and to make sure that the market worked in certain ways and worked more equitably and fairly, right. So what happens is sort of in the- what happens once the FDR in this sort of new activist state comes in is that, you know, the manufacturing and the corporate sector revolt- at least a large part of them do because they see this as as necessarily sort of stepping on their toes and- and, you know, regulating in a way that that might be adversarial. And so from really the 1930s through the post-war period you have this strong sort of conglomerate of institutions; corporations, advertising agencies, and the media, right, sort of working in tandem, with the ad agencies being the kind of middle-men between the corporations and the- at this point print and radio, right, sort of getting- getting the products and the advertisements out to the larger population. And they really try to sort of consolidate an idea of an "average American," which ends up being sort of a white middle-class male American and also the- the holding- holding aloft this idea of this sort of freedom- the free market as the American way, right? That only a free market will- will reliably work and reliably, sort of, protect freedoms and equality. So, these two sort of- these two sort of systems are, you know, in conflict with each other, with advertising industries, and corporations, and to some extent the media- the media as well sort of gunning for a free enterprise model. And the- the forces for again, sort of what today we would call "big government" or, you know, sort of a government more and more of regulation and the government or the state taking a more regulating hand in the economy, sort of losing out especially post World War Two. And so what I see- the interest I see in- in Jean Wade Rindlaub's story is the way in which she was able to use gender and appeals to, you know, very traditional, sort of, model of femininity, of domestic femininity in order not just to, you know, help her clients sell cakes and soap and silverware, but also to shore up this very sort of idealized image of who America was. Which was, you know, this sort of land of the free, home of the brave; all resting atop of the free market system. So, it's what one advertiser- or what one writer who writes about the role of advertising during the War called "the ad behind the ad". In other words, you know, advertisers like BBDO and Rinlaub were turning out ads for Betty Crocker or for Oneida silverware, for particular manufacturers or for particular corporations, but what they're really selling was the free market system, right? This was what the corporations and the ad industry and, again, to some extent the- the media themselves were sort of were interested in shoring up in addition to individual products.
MBM: One of the things that I loved about this book was how she- the role of gender in so many, so many threads. And not only is she a woman within this very male-dominated environment trying to attract women into the marketplace and create new products for them, create new consumers out of them, but also how women themselves- you start in the 19th century with women as activists and you talk about how this free market system is trying to draw women out of their activist roles by kind of confusing them with thinking that the cakes and the dinners are going to save the world, but in fact it's sort of the Chomsky idea that if you keep them consuming they won't notice what's happening around them. So can you talk a little bit about that? I know the role of women in this whole century has been of interest to you.
EWS: Yes, right yeah, I do, in- in the book, go into a history of sort of 19th century feminism ad 19th century women's activism. So, right, in the 19th century you have, you know, in the Victorian period this sort of idealization of the woman as the Angel of the House, right? that
MBM: Is that where the title came from?
EWS: That- yes that's where the title comes from, right. The Angel in the House meant in the, you know, sort of mid-19th century that the woman was this sort of master of her home, of her domus, and that she was supposed to be the man- it was at this point that we sort of came up with the idea of, you know, the public sphere versus the private sphere, right. Where the men were supposed to go out and sort of earn their hard-earned money in the marketplace, which was with this place of sort of competition and rugged individualism and it could get kind of, sort of nasty and morally dubious. And so the house- the home with the woman as Angel sort of presiding over it was, like, a moderating influence, right. So, the man had to do what he had to do to make his living out in the the rough and tumble world, but at least at home in this domestic space, sort of Christian values and love and tenderness and, you know, and- and goodness and kindness still reigned, you know, through the- the- the figurehead of the mother. So, women's role really became identified with this caretaking, maternal, sort of Christianized vision, that would work as a counter- counterweight to the- to the marketplace. So, but then what happened is some women, who were justly bored at home just, you know, cooking and cleaning just and and being an Angel, decided, "Well we don't just have to be Angels in the home we can be- or we don't just have to be caretakers in the home; we can be community caretakers." So, in other words, you know, the purview of woman as this moral force is not just her domestic family- her private domestic family, but the public world. And so, you know, in the 19th century you have all of these social changes taking place; massive immigration with the growth of an- and industrialization with the growth of a very poor and underserved immigrant urban class, right. And so you have women saying, "look- no one's going to, sort of- no one's going to make these social problems go away unless we as women, you know, in our capacity as Angels and moral forces, go out there and do it.11 So you have these women like Jane Addams in the late 19th century going into Chicago, going into the tenements, and trying to organize and make a better life for poor people. And she's doing it in partnership with the state, she's saying, "Private charity is not going to solve these community problems, right. It's going to have to be- the government has to step in and help-
help regulate these problems." So from the beginning you have at least a certain class of women in the 19th century arguing that, yes, they're still being maternal, still being feminine, because they're only doing caretaking, they're just doing it on a larger, public scale. And this sort of works, people kind of buy that, yes, a woman in public- as long as she's doing it in the name of, you know, sort of social betterment, or helping the poor, helping the weak, that works. But then what you get in the 20th century as, you know, national markets get established and consumption, you know, nationally advertised and circulated goods sort of gets up and going is that women are now told, and Jean Rindlaub had a hand in doing this, that they, you know, yes, public action is fine, right? Going out and sort of helping the poor and the weak in the orphan is fine, but you can actually be more of a woman and a better woman if you just stay home and make good purchasing decisions. That your role as a woman is to make good market decisions, to buy, you know, to- to- by- simply by purchasing you are keeping this engine, this free-market, capitalist national engine up and going and then that is, eventually, going to be, you know, the wealth producer that will make everybody equal and everybody, you know, comfortable, right. And so you have this massive sort of privatization of the woman's role and what Jean Rinlaub was doing, essentially, was telling women that they, you know, by staying home, by baking cookies, by buying silverware, by creating this, you know, this wonderful loving home for their own private family, they weren't abdicating their their duty to be responsible community caretakers, they were just exercising it in a different channel, right? That by buying- by putting dollars back into the economy, they were helping to build this American free enterprise system that was going to, you know, sort of float the whole country.
MBM: Sort of like going shopping after 9/11.
EWS: Right, right, to- right, sort of boost- put dollars back into the economy. And it was a very, you know, simplistic idea. Essentially trickle down, right? That the, you know, the more you buy, the more money you put in consumers hands, the more they buy, the more they reproduce, the bigger- the more the economy grows. And that this is eventually going to trickle down to all sort of tiers of the ... of the- of the system and, you know, we know today that that doesn't work- um... or, you know, there's a pretty strong sort of evidential argument that- that that doesn't work, but it's a useful way of siphoning off criticism of a system, right. A capitalist system that can be unfair and unequal. Siphoning off that criticism away from actual, you know, political and public actions and into private purchasing and just saying, "If you- you just have to wait long enough and the system will work. You have to trust in the free market engine- it will work. And you just have to sort of just keep quiet and keep buying until that happens."
MBM: It's sort of ironic that she, as a woman who had this rare role within this very male Madison Ave industry, would then be siphoning the women off- as you're saying, siphoning the potential activists into this domestic sphere of purchasing, but- but she- so she- and she really minds that role intentionally and successfully and really becomes a figure for using the psychology of the woman to get new consumers and to create new products, but she has an evolution by the end of the book. Can you talk about that a little bit? Or is that giving away the-
EWS: No, no, no, not at all, yeah, yeah I think... right she- and she- so she always saw herself even in her she had this very sort of powerful role on Madison Ave and was kind of a tastemaker and was- was really respected by not only people within the advertising industry, but the corporations with which she- she worked. But she always had to temper that sort of power- you know that power broker role, with the caveat that she was only doing it in the service of America's housewives. So, you know, anytime people tried to sort of congratulate her on being this sort of corporate titan she would say, "That's- that's not why I do it. I don't do it for the money. I don't do it for the- for the fame or the power. I do it because I want to be of service to America's housewives." And service, at this point, was sort of a coded word that meant, you know, basically doing for others, right? Never doing for yourself and so in that way she kept herself sort of on the right side of the feminine equation, right. That women were never supposed to be ta do anything in terms of a career, if it were solely self serving, right? It was always ... had to be in some way funneled back into that Angel in the House paradigm and that they were doing it for others. And she really believed that she was helping women sort of cope and make better decisions and make happy homes and get better nutrition for their kids. And yeah and what- I think- what's interesting is that also the whole time she was doing this, she also had her own family; two kids and a husband. And she, of course, also had a live-in nanny because she was gone most of the time and so, that's also always an interesting piece in these- these stories of you know power- powerhouse women who can have it all, right? They have the career and they have the family- well they can't have the family unless they have, like, a surrogate mother home, taking care of things. And she, in this case she had- it was an aunt. Like her father's sister or her mother's sister who moved in with them and- and basically, you know, was sort of like a wife. But she um... you know, she- she really bought into this idea that she was helping housewives and that she was helping America, that she was helping build a stronger America; an America where sort of freedoms, you know, whether it be religious freedoms, or political freedoms, or consumer freedoms were protected and that, eventually, this was all in- you know, this was all going to build towards a much kinder, more equitable system. And then what happens when she retires is that she gets involved in sort of more, almost 19th century throwback women's organizations, right? So, these women's organizations that, again, are still doing this kind of 19th century- old-fashioned 19th century caretaking of advocating for the poor, for the sick, for the disadvantaged, and she begins to realize as she's doing this- it also coincides with the civil rights movement, so she's getting involved in the March On Washington, which also corresponded with the Poor People's March, right? Organized by Martin Luther King; this is in 1963. And so this sort of twin problems of racial- racial inequality and economic inequality are highlighted and she actually goes to Washington in 1963, you know, as part of this kind of very bourgeois, white woman activism, but she begins to see that her model (which was you know always based on a sort of ideal, white, middle-class subject) doesn't- doesn't take into consideration, sort of, vast swaths of the population and doesn't take into consideration the systemic ways in which... uh, you know, the- the free market is not going to do it. So, uhm, this actually- this in addition to sending her daughter to Radcliff- so her daughter went to a private school and then went to Radcliffe and, as was fairly typical in the 1950s, got married while she was an undergraduate and had a child right out of undergraduate, I believe, but then decided she wanted to go to grad school in anthropology, um, and found herself in a really tough place because she had a family and how she's supposed to be a student and a- a full time student and a full time mother? And I think this actually revolutionized Jean's thinking as well; that suddenly she realized, you know, that women staying home;
- it's not that fulfilling, you know, here's my daughter who doesn't want to do it full time; she wants to
have something outside of it. And, B. it's impossible if, you know, the- all the- the- the caretaking falls to the woman, right? So, she really has sort of a change of heart and ends up in, again, after she retires, working- helping women's activists. She actually writes some copy for the ERA and the attempt to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, which is really striking because all throughout her time in Madison Ave she poo-pooed the idea that women were given, you know, a second- second-class status she said, "Oh, you know, if you're not moving up the letter as a woman it's because you don't want to, because you're lazy-"
MBM: You're not working hard enough.
EWS: "You're not working hard enough, because you're choosing your home over your career, you know, if you want it if you want it all- you can have it!" So, she comes around to the realization, no, this isn't true that the, you know, discrimination in the workplace is real and that women should have recourse against it. And I think, you know, most importantly she begins to see that this sort of idealistic idea that just by buying into, you know, just by being good consumers, we're going to revolutionize the world and make things equal. She realizes that's not going to happen.
MBM: I have two more questions. Are we good- probably. Wanna do thumbs up in the chat. Ellen, do you think it's important to point out, or do you think it's important to really name that, when we're talking about women, relative to this book and to her life, we're talking about white women, we're talking about white women of a certain class and buying power. I mean, you want to talk about that a little bit or do you think that that's understood?
EWS: No I, I don't think it's understood and I think, you know, when I went into this book I- I initially thought, "well-" just sort of not having gone through the archive and just having sort of a sense of what I'd find there, I thought, you know, the scoop will be sort of trying to tally how she became this corporate sort of professional powerhouse, how she tallied that with convincing millions of housewives to- to stay home and be happy baking cakes, right? And, you know, more that I- the more- the deeper I got into it, the more I discovered that the- and this is something that probably should have been obvious from- to me going in, but wasn't exactly- how white her audience was. And white not just by sort of omission but white by design. That, you know, a lot of what the advertising industry during this time relied upon in terms of coming up with marketing campaigns and scoping out new markets, it relied on opinion polls and research done by corporate research instruments. And they almost always only pulled white middle-class subjects and they, you know- they even had a term for people who sort of fell outside of that white middle-class range; they called them "unreachables". And that meant that they were difficult to reach, they sometimes didn't have telephones, or they didn't have addresses, or if, you know, a white researcher pollster walked up to a black person's house and knocked on the door, they weren't likely to invite them in and answer questions. So, it really was an all white world and, again, by design- um and uh I think this is also something that she realized, again, once she sort of joined into the civil rights movement and 1963. It was- suddenly became apparent to her that all of her, sort of, preaching about the you know the gospel of the free market and the way in which this would be this was a- a way forward, as a progressive mechanism for sort of raising all fortunes. She recognized how- without saying it, she never says this directly, but I think it's pretty clear she recognized how white, how myopic that viewpoint was.
MBM: I was so struck by the marketing with the cakes and the- the, you know, that the soldier is going to come back to this well lit home and this- and this yummy cake and this lovely bride and reap the benefits of the GI Bill to build this American middle class, for which- which is not available to the black soldiers coming back and not available to such a huge part of the- of the country.
EWS: Exactly.
MBM: It's such an interesting decision that she made, or maybe it was just so part of the culture, as we know, to just not see outside one's own whiteness.
EWS: Yeah, I think it was part of the culture and she actually has, you know, in one of her later- and this is in the late 1950s, she was doing work for Campbell Soup and at this point, people- this sort of idea of doing social- social issue advertising, you know, sort of using advertising in order to sort of back particularly- you know, it was basically a way for corporations to make themselves look useful and ethical in the face of criticism. She actually, in doing advertisements for Campbell Soup in the late 50s, floated this idea, "Why don't we have you know an advertisement that says, 'Soup is good for everyone!' And have a multiracial cast of children eating soup." And it was shot down. They said, "That's too- you know, we- we're just not going to go there." So, yeah I think, you know, she herself at this point where I think was getting interested in questions of- of, you know, racial justice and so forth and she saw a way of possibly sort of working it in, trying to get a more diverse representation, diverse faces in advertising and it was absolutely not something that the- the- the firm was interested in doing.
MBM: So my last question is, so much about this book- I loved it so much and I felt like by reading it, you were explaining to me so much about how we got to this current moment and a lot of it was depressing, and a lot of it was sort of made me feel hopeful that this pendulum can swing back and forth and it can swing back into thinking that possibly the free market- that trickle down ideas are not working. So, you know- and so, you know, and the ways in which the branding of certain- certain responses you know, certain- certain objections to how things are functioning in our country are now branded as unpatriotic and therefore dismissed, no matter how rooted in truth they might be. This branding that- this role of the advertising industry in connection with the government and in connection with free market is really pushing us to think a certain way and really trying to marginalize people who are trying to critique- trying to critique the system the way it works. And so, I really felt like this work helped me understand where we are in this moment and I'm wondering if you could talk about that- that was something in the back of your mind, or if this exploration for you, you know, led you to know insights about- about the now.
EWS: Right, yeah. I think, I mean- I think as I was writing the book, it was always informed by my sense of the "the now". In fact, I wrote a book, I mean, rather, I wrote an article about- right on the eve of Donald Trump's election in 2016- about the- about the sort of unholy alliance between business and Christianity and Donald Trump, right?
MBM: And where was that article published, Ellen? Let's make sure-
EWS: It was published in the New Republic. And... yeah I can't- it was- it came out, I think it was in ...Yeah, February 2017. Anyway, it was- it was, you know, looking at how this- this sort of tight narrative linking patriotism, free market faith, and, you know, sort of neoliberal, you know, individualist reading, you know, small government- all the the sort of trilogy of values, had really come to a head in Donald Trump. And, you know, of course we're just four years later, that much sort of deeper into that into that paradigm, right? So, yeah, I think, you know, I'm- I'm heartened to hear that you took- that you were encouraged that, you know, that the moment that we're in now, it's not new, right? We've been here before. There's a long history of, again, this sort of push and pull be- between free market dogma, you know, dogmatism and a more, you know, a larger role for- for the state in sort of regulating the hand of the market and making sure that it functions more equally. You know, I don't think that story is over. I think we're in a particularly bad place right now, you know, ever since- basically since Reagan onwards- I mean the dismantling of- of regulation, dismantling of the unions, all of these- all of these sort of institutions and things that worked as a- as a check on, you know, the free market sort of spinning ever spinning the money ever upwards into sort of an oligarchic class. All of these things have disappeared over the last 40 years or been attenuated over the last 40 years. I think we are sort of in a nadir from my perspective, but I don't think that it's over and, yeah, I think if we can sort of reclaim the dirty word of "socialism," I mean anytime anybody suggests that, you know, the state should have a regulatory hand or that you know the- the state should, in some way, again, step in and- and have a bigger partnership with there should be a bigger sort of private-public coordination of- of the market and of economics. People immediately cry socialism or communism. You know, this goes back 100 years- this was exactly what was being bandied about in 1917, you know, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. So, what's funny, to some extent, is how little we've moved on. The same scare tactics- the same sort of boogeyman, the same sort of ideological specters are still haunting us. Yeah, maybe, we'll finally break through that.
MBM: Well, I think this is such a wonderful book. And I hope our Amherst friends and family will run right out and get it.