Living Up to the Ads: Gender Fictions of the 1920s

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An examination of commodity culture’s impact on popular notions of gender and identity during the 1920s. Arguing that the newly ascendant advertising industry introduced three metaphors for personhood - the ad man, the female consumer, and the often female advertising model or spokesperson - Simone Weil Davis traces the emergence of the pervasive gendering of American consumerism. Materials from advertising firms - including memos, manuals, meeting minutes and newsletters - are considered, alongside the fiction of Sinclair Lewis, Nella Larsen, Bruce Barton, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald. To illuminate the subjective, day-to-day experiences of 1920s consumerism in the USA, Davis juxtaposes print ads and industry manuals with works of fiction. Capturing the maverick of voices of some of the decade’s most influential advertisers and writers, she reveals the lines that were drawn between truths and lies, seduction and selling, white and black, and men and women.