Ideal Women In The 1920s

It was also the use of sexual ads that helped create the idea of the ideal women in America. In the 1920s, women were starting to break away from the fact that it was not acceptable for them to smoke or drink in public. The rebel against this the started wearing shorter skirts and sometimes even pants, to show that they were not just homemakers. The feminism fight really began at this time, when women were starting to dress like “flappers” and were started working outside the home. By the 1920s, 25 percent of women were employed and no longer just homemakers (Goodrum and Dalrymple, 1990. p.68). In the 1920s, the ideal woman was a flapper and in the 1940s it was Rosie the Riveter. As Frank Rowsome Jr. puts it, “ the ideal women is continuously

fighting and losing the battle over obsolescence. Every few years she needs to be rebuilt, not only with new hair arrangements, but also with a new figure and carriage, new expression, new mouth and eyebrows, and preferably, a reshaped skull” (1965, p.101). This was because advertisers wanted women to feel like they would not fit in unless they looked a certain way. It was an easy way to get them to buy a product because if you use the product that is advertising the look, you can easily achieve it. If we look back throughout history of women in advertising, it is easy to see what sort of makeup, fashion and hair trends that existed. Everyone wanted to be the advertisers concept of the ideal women.
The advertiser did not execute this method showing just the product, the women had to be doing something that made her appealing to the reader’s eye.

This was achieved not by close-ups of soap and cosmetic ads, but by stances, silhouettes, and accessories of women in the whole range of social advertisements (Marchand, 1986. p.179). In advertisements, “ men were sometimes depicted in modernistic illustrations. But never did advertising distort or reshape men’s bodies as they did when they transformed women into art deco figures. Women in the ads, were symbols of modernity, sometimes added more than a foot to their everyday heights and stretched their elongated eyes, fingers, legs, arms and neck to grotesque proportions” (Marchand, 1986. p.181-182). In the 1920s, it was also common for the advertiser to extend women’s legs in straight lines from thigh to toe (Marchand, 1986. p.182). What these advertisements show about this time period is that society was becoming less of everyone having a lot of the same things, and more people excepting the social class system. Women in the advertisements were shown as beauty figures, which created the standard for women. They no longer wanted to wear long skirts and have a clean face. The advertisements showed them a world where they could be sexy and wear make-up. They could cut, color and style their hair in many different ways. The 1920s was the decade where the ideal woman was created for America. Unfortunately at the end of this

decade something terrible happened, and it resulted in The Great Depression.