Previous Intro Note: The Automobile: Consumerism on Wheels
"The advertising trade journals commonly attributed 85 percent of all consumer spending to women. Scarcely anyone estimated women as comprising less than 80 percent of the consumer audience," according to Roland Marchand in his 1985 study of modern advertising, Advertising the American Dream (p. 66). Women's home-making became one of the most important yardsticks for measuring levels of consumer prosperity and subscription to the consumerist ethos. The home was the showplace of the individual family's membership in good standing in the consumer society, as manifested by home improvements and conveniences, home furnishing, and home decoration.
Those who proselytized efficiency in home-making were indebted to Frederick W. Taylor's ideas about scientific management in industry. Taylorism bore fruit in "the science of household management" (INTRO NOTE Taylorism). Christine Frederick, consulting household editor of the Ladies' Home Journal and head of the Home Management Department of The Designer magazine during the twenties, authored The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management (1912; not in our collection) and the seminal work Selling Mrs. Consumer (1929). (DETAIL NOTE Christine Frederick)
The supposed goal of instituting efficiency science in the home was to help women cut down on the amount of time and drudgery spent in housework. Labor-saving household devices and appliances, such as vacuum cleaners, were extraordinarily popular. Radios, too, were part of the consumerism-and-the-home world view; they were purchased for their ability to help women pass the time doing housework with less sense of monotony. (INTRO NOTE Radio)
It was in the New York offices of the Butterick Publishing Company's household magazine The Delineator, in 1922, that the organization Better Homes in America was established. (DETAIL NOTE Butterick) The goal of the Better Homes Movement was the building of a responsible consumerism, one that would insulate mass consumerism from its dangerous tendencies -- one in which the housewife would be educated to spend money wisely and the family would spend time together in wholesome forms of leisure (INTRO NOTE Leisure). President Coolidge himself was honorary chairman of the Advisory Council of the Better Homes in America, and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, a prime mover in the formation of the organization, was president of the Board of Directors. Subsequently, the Better Homes in America organization was headquartered in Washington, D.C.
As Better Homes in America. Guidebook for Better Homes Campaigns in Rural Communities and Small Towns. Guidebook for Better Homes Campaigns in Cities and Towns. (1927) shows, the annual Better Homes in America campaigns celebrated home ownership, home maintenance and improvement, and home decoration in towns and cities across the country. In addition, the values affirmed in these campaigns were institutionalized in the nation's schools, through such courses of study at the secondary school level as are described in the Better Homes in America publication School Cottages for Training in Home-Making: A Study of School Practice Houses and Home Economics Cottages (1926).
Members of the Advisory Council of Better Homes in America, which called itself "an educational organization," read like a "Who's Who" of national organizations and agencies whose work fed into and supported the growth of the mass consumer society. It is essential to recognize the interconnectedness of this coalition which, as in the case of the coalition behind the Thrift Movement, with which it overlapped, bound together many seemingly disparate interests and groups representing society at its most powerful. (INTRO NOTE Thrift)
Included on the Better Homes in America Advisory Council were representatives from the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Agriculture, Interior and Labor; the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; the Girl Scouts of America; the American Home Economics Association; the General Federation of Women's Clubs; the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs; the Garden Club of America; and the National Congress of Parents and Teachers.
An important pronouncement on home ownership by then-Vice President Coolidge, honorary chairman of the organization's Advisory Council, in the Better Homes in America Plan Book for Demonstration Week, October 9 to 14, 1922 (1922), commingles material, political and spiritual values: "There are two shrines at which mankind has always worshipped, must always worship: the altar which represents religion, and the hearthstone which represents the home. . . . We believe in the right to acquire, to hold, and transmit property. . . . It is of little avail to assert that there is an inherent right to own property unless there is an open opportunity that this right may be enjoyed in a fair degree by all. That which is referred to in such critical terms as capitalism cannot prevail unless it is adapted to the general requirements. . . . It is time to demonstrate more effectively that property is of the people. It is time to transfer some of the approbation and effort that has gone into the building of public works to the building, ornamenting, and owning of private homes by the people at large. . . . Let them begin, however slender their means, the building and perfecting of the national character by the building and adorning of a home which shall be worthy of the habitation of an American family, calm in the assurance that "the gods send thread for a web begun" (pp. 5-6). (INTRO NOTE Spirituality)
In the same Better Homes in America Plan Book, Secretary of Commerce Hoover's essay "The Home as An Investment" invokes connections among owning and adorning a home, solid law-abiding American citizenship, and consumer thrift: "In the main because of the diversion of our economic strength from permanent construction to manufacturing of consumable commodities during and after the war, we are short about a million homes. . . . It means that in practically every American city of more than 200,000 . . . thousands of families are forced into unsanitary and dangerous quarters. This condition, in turn, means . . . that unrest which inevitably results from inhibition of the primal instinct in us all for home ownership. It makes for nomads and vagrants. . . . There is no incentive to thrift like the ownership of property" (p. 7). (INTRO NOTE Thrift)
As the references to law-abiding American citizenship in Hoover's Plan Book essay suggest, the Better Homes Movement also attempted to bring low-income citizens -- whether white native-born, African American or foreign-born -- into the consumer economy. Annual campaigns not only encouraged citizens to own or build their own homes, but also to remodel, beautify, or otherwise improve the homes they already had, and instructed them in how to make their own home furnishings and decorations. As an instrument of "Americanization" for immigrant women, in particular, this training in how to be a consumer was thought to ease passage into the mainstream society. (DETAIL NOTE Immigrants)
Home ownership and home furnishing were not the only ways in which mass-consumerism entered the household domain; home economics (DETAIL NOTE Home Economics) and the purchase of perishable mass-produced goods -- food stuffs -- provided additional avenues by means of which mass-consumerism rooted itself in the home. The Story of a Pantry Shelf: An Outline History of Grocery Specialties (1925), with photographic illustrations of grocery specialties of the time, gives some background on this aspect of the consumer economy.
Densely textured, fascinating glimpses into the daily life of an activist consumer-homemaker in a large metropolitan area during the first part of the 1920s are provided particularly by two folders in the Anna Kelton Wiley Papers. (DIRECTORY NOTE Anna Kelton Wiley Papers) Homemaker-Consumer Life in Washington, D.C., 1922-23 airs such hotly contested issues as whether loaves of bread should be standardized by weight, and also whether the loaves should be sold in wrappers to keep children from sneezing on them and dogs from drooling on them. It brings to light President Coolidge's preferences in bread (an Evening Star article, "Coolidge, Champion of Wholewheat Bread . . .") and reflects the debate over the trapping and killing of animals to make fur garments for women. (Mrs. Wiley's Papers preserve pamphlets produced for the Anti-Steel-Trap League.)
A second folder in her papers, Homemaker-Consumer Life in Washington, D.C. 1924, reflects the debate about whether women consumers will stick with bread that they themselves bake at home, or prefer quality-standardized, mass-produced bread (every loaf exactly the same), claimed to be more scientifically nutritious.
Previous Intro Note: The Automobile: Consumerism on Wheels