ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the New Woman in the context of the new brand symbolism of "the old" past and the dark community that populated it. "The old" in advertising comprised not only self-sufficient and strenuous domestic tasks but whatever problem and whatever type of "people" the rising consumer culture wanted to leave behind. Like the vanishing past of brand advertising, their scant numbers glossed the new leisure of the New Woman as a "natural", bodily immediacy. The chapter suggests that both the new brand past and the brand New Woman were the outgrowth of commodity marketing practices, which generated virtual epiphanies as part of the new, advance-marketing style. The power of national media emerged, the chapter suggests, as magazines styled reading materials with the organization of stories pitched toward the speed of advertising's virtual epiphanies, where controversy was quickly vanishing while the mess of "the old" reappeared in evident muddle on the bodies of "Negroes".
