ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nature and complexity of that development, exploring first the work lives of a group of women working at the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency, and second, several of the Thompson campaigns launched in the Ladies' Home Journal. For the most part, historians have defined women's role in the cultural environment of consumer activity as that of the passive recipient, the consumer. Women who worked in the advertising business have been overlooked by historians of women, historians of advertising, and historians of consumer culture. In the J. Walter Thompson Women's Editorial Department, a group comprised largely of white, native-born, middle- or upper-middle class, college-educated women was able to carve out for themselves an unmistakably successful professional workplace. The Thompson Company archives reveal some information about what the women writers thought of their consuming constituents, of this "average" woman.
