Emily Westkaemper. Selling Women’s History: Packaging Feminism in Twentieth-Century American Popular Culture.

Emily Westkaemper’s Selling Women’s History traces the uses of historical material about women in various forms of popular culture—as well as in the professional discourses of women media workers—from 1910 through the 1970s. Wide-ranging at the expense of coherence, it is, at different moments, a chronicle of the rise of women in the advertising profession, a study of the use of women’s history to sell commercial products, and an account of how twentieth-century media narratives incorporated dramatizations of the lives of historical women. In the introduction, Westkaemper connects the book to historians’ challenges to the assumption that the decades between the first and second waves of feminism represented “a lull in women’s activism” (5). She also positions Selling Women’s History as an examination of popular history by and about women, a stronger claim given the book’s content. The focus on uses of women’s history unites all of the case studies in the book’s six chapters, while the feminist functions of those uses are evident only intermittently.

Westkaemper touts the feminist import of the activism of women advertising professionals, the central focus of the book’s second chapter and portions of two more. The extensive archives of Dorothy Dignam, a longtime member of the Philadelphia Club of Advertising Women (PCAW), are a key resource for discussion of early ad women’s decades-long use of women’s history as a rationale for their own professional advancement. In 1929, the PCAW adopted the Quaker Maid as its promotional icon, and Westkaemper teases out the myriad associations with the archetype, which was used to symbolize both transgression and tradition, a necessity given that ad women were caught between their own violation of gender norms and the need to sell products based on promoting women’s traditional roles. In the late 1930s, the PCAW was involved in producing local radio broadcasts that told the stories of women such as Susan B. Anthony and Amelia Earhart. That almost all of the women Westkaemper examines were white, and that almost all of the historical figures they promoted were as well, is something that she comments on now and again, and attempts to remedy at different points, as when she briefly considers African American women’s use of the Quaker Maid archetype and discusses the career of Bernice Dutrieuille, a black writer in Philadelphia who was excluded from PCAW membership because of her race.

The material in Selling Women’s History on the activities of the PCAW and other ad women’s organizations presents a version of the history of women working in advertising in the twentieth century, which is useful in itself, but Westkaemper sacrifices analysis in favor of detailed description of archival material, offering limited insight regarding the meaning or import of that material as either popular history or feminist activism. The claim that the PCAW “emphasized its intention to use the past to shape public attitudes about modern women’s roles” (80) is presented as sufficient evidence for the ad women’s feminist intent. That these women saw themselves as fighting for a place in their male-dominated field and used history as a tool toward that end is clearly established, but whether they were dedicated to political solutions for removing the barriers they and other women faced is far murkier.

A better case can be made for the feminist motivations of Mary Ritter Beard, Nancy Wilson Ross, and Rose Arnold Powell, three women who were dedicated to the “commemoration and documentation of women’s history” (126) in multiple mass media forms between 1935 and 1950, the focus of chapter 4. Beard, the only professional historian among them, became a consultant on a series of historical radio documentaries about women produced by NBC’s Blue (public service) Network, in partnership with various government agencies, between 1939 and 1940. Ross was a prolific writer whose 1944 book about women on the U.S. frontier, Westward the Women, was adapted for use in radio and magazines in the 1940s, and Ross sold the book’s title alone to a film in 1951. Powell worked tirelessly to promote attention to the life and work of Susan B. Anthony, and she succeeded in obtaining an installment on Anthony in the “Wonder Women of History” biographical narratives that appeared as inserts in the centerfold of the Wonder Woman comics beginning in 1942. Westkaemper’s case that the work these women did was feminist is convincing largely because the women themselves clearly articulated their purpose of facilitating the advancement of women as a group through the dissemination of women’s history.

Yet, partially because of the under-theorizing of feminism throughout the book, much of what Westkaemper examines cannot be termed feminist even within her expansive definition, which categorizes “historical narratives as feminist activism when they strove to change social norms, publicizing the past to open new political and economic opportunities for women” (5). The book’s real strength lies in its accounts of the commodification of women’s history for various purposes, feminist or not. Chapter 5 focuses primarily on the use of historical material about women to advertise various products between 1940 and 1950, much of it to promote women’s support for the war effort and to position consumption as patriotism. The final chapter returns to the history of women in advertising, combining it with treatment of the uses of women’s history in commercial media between 1950 and 1970. It includes a sustained and well-done case study of the corporate machinations behind the notorious Virginia Slims campaign, which began in 1968 and equated women’s liberation with smoking.

Westkaemper’s book is best understood as a work of media history focused on how historical appeals were deployed to inspire gender consciousness—women’s sense of themselves as a group sharing social and political interests—among media producers and consumers. But Selling Women’s History would benefit from more attention to the ways in which gender consciousness falls short of becoming feminist activism that promotes or pursues political solutions to the problems women share.