Have a Vintage Christmas!
Title: “Christmas morning (and forever after) she’ll be happier with a Hoover”. Copy: “P.S. to husbands: She cares about her home, you know, so if you really care about her…wouldn’t it be a good idea to consider a Hoover for Christmas? Prices start at $??.??. Model 29 (shown here) $??.??. Low down payment; easy terms. See your Hoover dealer now.”
The resolution of the above scan was too rough to make out the prices, but they were less than now. I’m guessing that this one is from 1960, give or take five years. Such advertisements seem mighty crass in today’s “be all you can be” gender-neutral American culture and are presented now as humorous sources of “look how far we’ve come since then” pats on the back. After all, we have made advances. Today, we consider that the sprawled woman may be perusing the notecard and thinking, “Ooo, that bastard’s gonna get his…”
However, apart from the issues of unfair bias, equal opportunity, stereotyping, putting talent and capability to waste, and equal pay for equal work, we do tend to propagandize the past in order to validate where we are now. Utterly unable to look back and examine any culture in context, we tend to look back only with today’s lenses, and the view is upsetting or unsettling, a reminder of oppression of some sort or other. Without the context, our view can easily be distorted to resemble Read more…
