An economic room of one's own : A study of commercial femininity in Swedish beauty advertising 1930–1950

Abstract: Based in the rapidly changing economic and cultural rooms of 1930s and 1940s Sweden, this study consults beauty advertising to find how advertiser’s endeavours to reconcile industrial mass consumption with individuality looked in the weekly press and how depictions of femininity changed throughout the interwar period and into the early-post war era. Advertisements found in woman’s weekly magazine Husmodern were studied through a methodology combining theories on narrative and performance, finding that individuality in advertising 1930–1950 was largely achieved in the latter part of the period through an increasingly personal style of advertising, using tropes of friendship and community to inspire consumption in contrast to the anonymity of the earlier period. Likewise, the rooms in which femininity was depicted changed from more anonymous “girl meets world”-tropes to more personal narratives such as “Ester secures Yngves devotion”. The 1930s advertisements portrayed the social scene more than the late 1940s, in which femininity was partial to the privacy provided by the bathroom. However, there was a similarly increased sense of anonymity taking place alongside the narrative of privacy, in which women also became less involved and more like blank canvases for advertisers to paint femininity upon. In conclusion, these two strong trends emerge in the 1940s, contrasting the more varied and anonymous trends of the 1930s. In conclusion, I argue that portrayals of femininity in advertising contributed to reproducing new, commercially created gender roles and ideals based in consumption as means of emancipation.