ABSTRACT
For roughly a century of corporate capitalist growth in the United States, women have mended socks and smoothed life's shocks—and spent billions of dollars along the way. One of the most remarkable aspects of twentieth century consumer culture, in fact, is the degree to which women's spending, tremendously important to the national economy, remains depoliticized. The Ladies' Home Journal and its followers succeeded on many counts, but their efforts in this development certainly resulted in one of their most fascinating accomplishments. The Thompson agency and the Ladies' Home Journal promised women that soap, rather than attentive or cooperative husbands, would enhance marital happiness; vacuum cleaners, rather than economic analyses of women's and men's work, would improve women's social status. In making such offers, and in couching these offers in the language of choice and social progress, advertisers and women's magazines helped set the limits both on women's demands for change and on cultural expectations of men.
