The Angel in the Marketplace

The postwar American advertising agency was an unusually powerful institution. Ads and the desires they articulated (or created) played outsized roles in shaping a new suburban order and the gender relations it embodied. Jean Wade Rindlaub, a pathbreaking and strong but perhaps alienated woman, made her name on ad campaigns for Chiquita and other companies that ironically encouraged other women to stay in the kitchen. Ellen Wayland-Smith will use Rindlaub's story as a framework for a cultural history of how women's desires were codified and packaged by the postwar advertising industry--and how they came to have unexpected geopolitical impact.