Abstract
This essay reflects on the ways in which market research in Britain helped to produce understandings of and information about the “mass market housewife” in the 1950s and 1960s. The figure of the mass market housewife was central to postwar advertising and market research.1 Her preeminence as the lynchpin of domestic consumption owed much to the centrality of the household in the regime of mass consumption that came to dominate both American and European societies from the 1920s and especially in the years after 1945. Victoria de Grazia has shown how new standards of elementary comfort—indoor toilets, running water, heat, electricity, and piped gas—first pioneered in the United States, helped to shape a “new household” that was itself central to the displacing of an older regime of bourgeois consumption in Europe. Within this new household, domestic consumption was the responsibility of women above all, and de Grazia sees what she calls “Mrs. Consumer” as the privileged agent of this new regime of mass consumption.2 Within a context shaped by broader changes in the world of work, including the relative decline of domestic service, the role of Mrs. Consumer was elaborated upon by the manufacturers of domestic technologies and commodities, by architects and government planners, and by evangelists in women’s magazines.3 Market research, however, was also crucial in the “assembling” of the modern housewife.
Two archives were consulted for this study: J. Walter Thompson Collection, History of Advertising Trust (hereafter: JWT/HAT), Raveningham, Norfolk; and J. Walter Thompson Company Archives, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, Duke University, Durham, NC (hereafter: JWT). I am grateful to Mark Harvey, Angela McRobbie, and Mike Roper for their comments and support.
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Notes
The Times estimated that the housewife accounted for 90% of money spent on food and household goods; “The Housewife—A Sitting Target,” Times, October 18, 1962, vii; “The Women’s Market,” Advertiser’s Weekly, January 15, 1960, 24–34; “Selling to Women,” Advertiser’s Weekly, January 8, 1960, 40; “Young Homemakers,” Advertiser’s Weekly, April 20, 1962, 3; J. Walter Thompson, Shopping in Suburbia (London, 1962).
Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 417–54.
Some sense of the relative decline of domestic service is documented by Selina Todd, who notes that, in 1921, domestic service was the largest employer of women under twenty-five in the United Kingdom; however, by 1951, only 5% of these women were in service. The rest had moved into clerical work and retailing; Selina Todd, Young Women, Work, and Family in England 1918–1950 (Oxford, UK, 2005), 33. The “modern housewife” had her roots in the interwar period, and the Daily Mail was central to the promotion of this ideal in Britain, notably through the paper’s sponsorship of the Ideal Home Exhibition. Adrian Bingham notes, however, that the ideal of the “modern housewife” remained the preserve of the prosperous middle class until the 1950s;
Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, UK, 2004), 92.
On the role of women’s magazines, see Janice Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines (London, 1987).
For a compelling account of the French experience, particularly in relation to the role played by women’s magazines, see Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1996).
The classic work on the North American experience can be found in Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York, 1982).
Michel Callon, Cecile Meadal, and Vololona Rabeharisoa, “The Economy of Qualities,” Economy and Society 31, no. 2 (2002): 194–217;
Michel Callon and Fabian Muniesa, “Economic Markets as Collective Calculative Devices,” Organization Studies 26, no. 8 (2005): 1229–50;
Michel Callon, Yuval Millo, and Fabian Muniesa, eds., Market Devices (Oxford, UK, 2007);
Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, “Mobilizing the Consumer: Assembling the Subject of Consumption,” Theory, Culture and Society 14, no. 1 (1997): 1–36.
Callon also notes how consumers test products in their homes and how the social networks in which they are caught shape the process of evaluating goods. However, he asserts that these “informal evaluations” are “always based on material devices in which bodies are involved”; Michel Callon and Fabian Muniesa, “Economic Markets as Collective Calculative Devices,” Organization Studies 26, no. 8 (2005): 1245. These arguments are central to Callon’s claim that agency is not a capacity contained in human beings. Rather, agency is the product of hybrid collectivities comprising human beings and material and technical devices—what Callon calls “agencements.” See Callon, Milo, and Muniesa, eds., Market Devices.
Adam Arvidsson, “The Therapy of Consumption: Motivation Research and the New Italian Housewife, 1958–62,” Journal of Material Culture 5, no. 3 (2000): 254;
Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (London, 1957).
J. Walter Thompson, 40 Berkeley Square (London, 1967), 3–4.
Formed in 1933, BMRB was tied to JWT London by shared board membership, and there was some movement of staff between the two companies. See “Early Days of BMRB,” JWT London, 1964, Edward G. Wilson papers, box 2, JWT; John Downham, BMRB International: The First Sixty Years (London, 1993).
JWT & BMRB, Dec 1957, Edward G. Wilson papers, box 2, JWT. Market research in Britain was dominated by practitioners with a background in economics and statistics. For example, many of the members of the Market Research Society had degrees in economics and allied studies from the London School of Economics. On the “LSE factor,” see Ian Blythe, The Making of an Industry: The Market Research Society1946–86 (London, 2005), 35.
Mark Abrams, Education, Social Class and Newspaper Reading (London, 1963), 4.
The best-known example of this approach was Mark Abrams, The Teenage Consumer (London, 1959), though other researchers sought to survey the youth market and drew attention less to the teenager than the “young married ” or “young homemakers.” See Advertiser’s Weekly, April 20, 1962, 11; December 2, 1960, 31, 32; February 21, 1958, 23, 26; January 23, 1959, 31, 32; July 3, 1964, 21.
Daniel Horowitz, Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979 (Amherst, MA, 2004), 57.
John Pearson and Graham Turner, The Persuasion Industry (London, 1965), 175.
IPA, Motivation Research (London, 1960).
For the debate on motivation research in Britain, see “Motivation Research today,” Advertiser’s Weekly, March 25, 1960, 22, 24; “The bases for creative advertising research,” Advertiser’s Weekly, August 19, 1960, 20, 22; “The sins of motivation research,” Advertiser’s Weekly, July 10, 1964, 22, 24; “Motivation Research Today 3,” Advertiser’s Weekly, September 9, 1960, 48–52; Times, April 17, 1959, 5; Times, April 22, 1959, 5; “Contribution from Some Personality Theories to Market Research,” Commentary: The Journal of the Market Research Society, no. 3 (1960): 1–15; Harry Henry, head of research at the U.S.-owned agency McCann-Erickson, developed a version of motivation research that was distinct from Dichter’s techniques. See Harry Henry, Motivation Research: Its Practice and Uses for Advertising (London, 1958);
Harry Henry, Motivation Research and the TV Commercial (London, 1959).
For evidence of some of the studies Dichter produced for British clients, see Stefan Schwarzkopf, “‘Culture’ and the Limits of Innovation in Marketing: Ernest Dichter, Motivation Studies and Psychoanalytic Consumer Research in Great Britain, 1950s–1970s,” Management and Organizational History 2, no. 3 (2007): 219–36.
See Hilde T. Himmelweit, Abraham Naftali Oppenheim, and Pamela Vince, Television and the Child: An Empirical Study of the Effect of Television on the Young (Oxford, UK, 1958).
On the “revolution” in domestic technologies, see Sue Bowden and Avner Offer, “The Technological Revolution that Never Was: Gender, Class, and the Home Appliance Market in Interwar England,” The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough (Berkeley, CA, 1996), 244–74;
and Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (Oxford, UK, 2006).
See, inter alia, Mike Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method (Oxford, UK, 2010).
For a discussion of what the study of “subjectivity” might entail, see Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London, 1994);
Michael Roper, “Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History,” History Workshop Journal 59, no. 1 (2005): 57–72.
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Nixon, S. (2012). Mrs. Housewife and the Ad Men: Advertising, Market Research, and Mass Consumption in Postwar Britain. In: Berghoff, H., Scranton, P., Spiekermann, U. (eds) The Rise of Marketing and Market Research. Worlds of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137071286_9
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