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• 1 2025-03-28T01:16:18-04:00 The Purchasing Agent's Great Servant 20 plain 7937 2025-04-08T10:39:45-04:00
  The Great Servant
  
  In the 1920’s when women gained the right to vote in the USA and Canada, GE began to use marketing language that encouraged a woman’s access to and investment in new technology that will support her work in her “workshop”, equalizing any discrepancy between the value of a man or woman’s “work.” In this advertisement from the 1920s, GE posed electricity as a “great servant” that will enable women “to make her workshop the equal of her man’s”, so that women can save time and energy from doing all of her tasks by hand. Also noted on this ad is GE’s pledge to work “side by side” their partnering companies to “help lift drudgery [(tedious or unpleasant work)] from the shoulders of women as well as men.”
  
  
  Assuming the Managerial Role
  
  Designing products to relieve stress, provide opportunities for joy, and to support us in conserving time are strategies that seem reflective of the emotional impact on society after WWII. Although, cultural theorists and historians look at this time period through a more grim lens: consumerism, where personal consumption became “one of the most powerful social and economic forces” (Broad, 2013).
  
  Broad tells that “when the war erupted in September 1939, hardly anyone called on Canadians to make material sacrifice, because hardly anyone believed that such sacrifice would be necessary” (2013, 12).
  
  Then, as the traditional gender roles of masculine industrial labour and feminine domesticity began to blur, “the conception of women as wives, mothers, homemakers, and caregivers” persisted throughout the war as “society’s bulwark” and “the foundation of the country’s moral and economic defence against Nazi fascism,” (17). Middle-class women became the “managers of household consumption” and were deemed the best fit to decide “what money is going for this or that” (17).
  
  The following is a “Marketing” feature in Chatelaine’s September 1939 issue that preserves this shift in society’s expectations of a woman, referring to the bride as a “Purchasing Agent” and marriage as a “lifetime career in the business of homemaking.” Further propaganda included the narrative of consumerism being a “ready-made ‘war job’ for millions of women, one that did not ignite anxieties about gender roles in the way that participation in the industrial workforce or the armed forces was wont to do,” (Broad, 19). 
  
  
  
  
  This direction of narratives marketed to women carried on during the 1950s-1960s. The following advertisements side-by-side are examples of this communication to different target audience personas that surround women, the preferred consumer of kitchen and self-care appliances. The language of the Hudson Bay advertisement emphasizes “time saving”, while the second advertisement, showing a women multitasking, is directed to someone (most likely, her husband) who would buy the product for her, and the third advertisement is themed for mother’s day, promoting C.G.E.’s small appliances as gifts for the occasion.