ABSTRACT
In the interwar years, Americans learned about how to care for their mouths and teeth in school, from their dentists, and perhaps most importantly, from advertisers of oral hygiene products. During these years, a thriving market for toothpastes developed, part of the mass marketing of consumer care products such as soap that developed at the turn of the century. This chapter provides a content analysis of toothpaste advertisements in leading magazines including: Good Housekeeping, the Ladies Home Journal and Life. Toothpaste advertising created new expectations for what the teeth should look like (straight, white and ‘glistening’). They told people (especially women) how often to smile and what their breath should smell like. This chapter will argue that even though there was no evidence that toothpaste had any health benefits in the years before fluoridated toothpaste, these advertisements persuaded many people to adopt a daily tooth brushing habit. They may have adopted these new habits less for health than for appearance. Even so, the toothbrushing habit gradually helped to improve oral health over the course of the twentieth century.
