Woman / 21st April 1967
Well, that’s me speechless. Has anyone else seen a perfume ad as pretentious as this one? What are all those men planning? No wonder she looks pensive…
Tags: adverts totally made of wrong, beauty, blatant sexism, retail
Woman / 5th May 1967
Well, no, it doesn’t, but this advert is rather optimistic about the effect of a home perm, especially as it boasts about making your hair smell like lemons (which may please any wasps lurking around, but wouldn’t cheer me up). Anyway, wasn’t this woman’s hair quite nice to begin with?
Tags: beauty, blatant sexism, dodgy advice, perms, retail, Sandra Howard, social history
Woman / 5th May 1967
Hmm. Evidently not, as this isn’t a word I’ve heard before, suggesting this was a ill-fated ad campaign. Serves the patronising tossers right, too!
Tags: blatant sexism, household, retail, social history
Woman / 9th December 1967
Let’s face it, most of us like a good gossip, and there’s nothing like a magazine problem page to really reveal how a nation ticks. Woman‘s agony aunt was Evelyn Home (of whom nothing on the internet appears to have been written), although the famous Marje Proops also puts in a few appearances in Woman in 1967 (which isn’t covered by any obituaries I can find).
Evelyn gives level-headed, if unremarkable, advice, but this page is notable for her reply to the unprinted letter of Mr C.S.G. (Lancs.), which gave me a bit of a start. I’m far more used to it being discussed in the modern-day Scarlet (still, for some reason, causing feathers to ruffle in some areas of the Press), than in the 1967 Woman, and it’s interesting that (according to Wikipedia at least) Evelyn’s quite right to state that he’s actually committing an illegal act, as anal sex between heterosexual couples wasn’t legal until 1996.
Also, I hope everything turned out OK for Worried Girl (Lancs.). There’s a depressingly high number of these letters, and it’s almost criminal that over 40 years on, the UK still hasn’t really properly sorted out its sex education and support in this area.
Tags: Evelyn Home, misplaced morality, problem page, romance, social history
Woman / 9th December 1967
Ooh, blimey. Those of us born from the mid-70s onwards won’t have remembered that it was once normal for shampoo and the like to be in glass bottles. Just think about that for a moment. Ouch. I drop bottles in the shower almost every day!
Tags: beauty, retail, scary thoughts, social history
Woman / 9th December 1967
Ah, corsetry. Ever since women struggled out of whalebones, the fashion industry has been yelling at us to get back in them, albeit in different forms, whether it be the Bridget Joneseque control pants, or frantically doing toning exercises, as if being a bit cuddly was some sort of crime. Yes, I AM overweight and oversensitive, thank you for asking. My mother used a pantee girdle for years; I can assure you it made very little difference to her figure, and imagine my pre-pubesent horror when she informed me that it would soon be my turn to struggle into the elastic. Obviously, I didn’t follow in her footsteps (for reasons of fashion as well as principle), but looking at the large number of girdle ads in my collection, the elephant in the room looms larger and larger (if you’ll pardon the pun); where does the displaced fat GO?
Tags: blatant sexism, Carol Cleveland, fashion, retail, social history
Woman / 5th May 1967
They may have well just said: ‘Nyah nyah! Smelly!’. However, deodorant ads aren’t all that different nowadays, with this example proving the point, with the rather insidious phrase ‘Beauty is freedom’. Try telling that to political prisoners, you bunch of tits.
Tags: adverts totally made of wrong, Amplex, blatant sexism, health, retail