Selling Women’s History: Packaging Feminism in Twentieth-Century American Popular Culture by Emily Westkaemper (review)

In her innovative and complex work, Selling Women’s History, Emily Westkaemper charts the various ways in which feminists have employed women’s history in popular culture from 1910 to 1970. In alignment with women’s historians such as Susan Ware and Nancy Hewitt, Westkaemper argues that contrary to previous assertions, feminism was alive and well in the years between suffrage and women’s liberation.¹ Using popular culture as her lens, Westkaemper explores in great detail how feminist academics, activists, and media industry workers, especially women in advertising, “packaged” women’s history across multiple media outlets, including mass-circulation print periodicals, trade journals, association newsletters, radio broadcasts, and television programs. The author also explores the ways in which the advertising industry employed women’s history as a marketing tool. What she demonstrates is that because women’s history was employed by individuals and groups with various motivations and objectives, the use of women’s history within popular culture was not monolithic. Instead, it varied according to the context in which it was being employed, which was usually along a spectrum, with claims of alignment and continuity with women’s historical experiences at one end and the juxtaposition of history with modern values at the other. Where the various public uses of women’s history landed along the spectrum was dependent on the goals of those who employed it and, at times, varied within the same project.

Using an impressively broad array of evidence from media, including print advertisements and articles, comic books, radio dramas and documentaries, films, and commercial television broadcasts, as well as the archival records of individual feminists, advertising agencies, corporations, and women’s advertising associations, in a series of six chapters the author details instances in which women’s history was used. Each chapter contains multiple, chronologically organized case studies too numerous to describe, ranging from examinations of activist Lucy Maynard Salmon’s publications in Good Housekeeping and the glorification of Martha Washington in promotional material for Wanamaker’s and Liquid Veneer in the 1910s to the 1930s; to the Philadelphia Women’s Advertising Club’s (PWAC) adoption and use of the Quaker Girl as its mascot and the club’s creation of the local radio program, Famous Philadelphia Women of Yesteryear during the 1930s; to Avon advertisements, musicals, and supermarket premiums during WWII and the Virginia Slims “You’ve come a long way, baby!” ad campaign in the postwar years. While Westkaemper provides some brief examples of the ways in which Black feminists and firms, such as the Madam C. J. Walker Company, employed women’s history, such cases are found primarily in the first chapter. As such, the bulk of the work focuses on the ways in which white feminists used and promoted the history of white women.

Though the range of examples presented does lead to a lack of cohesion at times, Westkaemper’s analysis of female advertisers’ uses of women’s history, to which she dedicates the better part of three chapters, adds a welcome degree of consistency. In this examination, the author demonstrates that through their motivation for legitimacy within the industry, female advertisers employed women’s history across multiple media to create a usable past that would support their professional goals. It is arguably the strongest part of her work and makes a significant contribution to the literature on gender and business history as she puts female ad workers, their gendered professional challenges, and their understandings and uses of history at the center of her analysis.

Westkaemper is not the first to explore female advertisers’ gendered experiences; however, her work presents an important departure in both approach and perspective. Whereas the works of historians such as Jennifer Scanlon, Simone Weil Davis, and Denise H. Sutton have laid crucial groundwork for the analysis of women’s...