7th September 2010 / 8 Comments
Woman's Weekly /
4th April 1969
Cor, advertisers really made you work back in the ’60s, didn’t they? Doing their work, specifically. Horlicks is still marketed as a bedtime drink, unlike Ovaltine, but audience participation seems to be less encouraged nowadays. Jocelyn seems like a nice girl, but I couldn’t care less whether she got her secretarial qualifications, to be honest. Also, check out the sleep chart, where ‘science’ is showing us what sleep is really like, and the reassurance that Horlicks isn’t a drug. Given some of the products on the market back then, I can see what they’re getting at…
Tags: dodgy advice, food, health, Horlicks, retail
31st July 2010 / 4 Comments
Woman's Weekly /
4th April 1969
We’ve already got an advert from the Cheese Bureau on here, but I couldn’t resist this one. She doesn’t even look fat! What this ad fails to mention is that cheese has a fat content, so may not be the ideal slimming food at all…
Tags: blatant sexism, cheese, Cheese Bureau, dodgy advice, food, health, kids
14th July 2010 / 3 Comments
Woman's Realm /
18th March 1967
Hm. “…the mystery of woman.” seems to equate to hiding your hair dye from your husband, lest he discover that you *gasp* age just like he does. Even if you’ve been married for 17 years.
Tags: beauty, blatant sexism, dodgy advice, retail
19th June 2010 / 6 Comments
Woman's Realm /
31st March 1967
I’m…not sure where to start with this one. Me and my boyfriend found ourselves writhing around in our seats with discomfort whilst reading the ad, and certainly the language alone is enough to put it in first place in the ‘Adverts Totally Made of Wrong’ category on Gypsy Creams. Actually, I may provide that as a category when the site’s given an overhaul later in the year.
But the language isn’t the only problem (although the ‘Berlei Teenform Littlest Darling’ is enough to distract you from anything else). This ad totally blows out of the water the oft-written about idea that the ‘Tweenage’ market is something new, with the odd name ‘beTweenager’, and the suspicious assertions that teenage girls need Berlei’s special bras. And that’s not all! Berlei have a whole range of girdles to ‘help’ your daughter’s posture. Oddly enough, in a world where girdles are no longer in fashion, we haven’t got young women bent double in the street, possibly because your posture is largely a matter for your core muscle groups, rather than a nylon strait-jacket.
As for the dire warnings that a teenager should NEVER wear an adult bra: well, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence to support this. I do remember reading a recommendation in a teenage magazine that girls shouldn’t wear an underwired bra until their breasts are fully grown, but I started wearing underwires from 14ish, and mine don’t seem to be an abnormal shape. In fact, the wide variance in size and shape of breasts suggests that there isn’t really that well defined a ‘norm’ to deviate from anyway, and there certainly doesn’t seem to be any evidence that there’s any connection between bras and breast cancer either.
So Berlei seem to have cooked up some copy here that The Daily Mail would be proud of: full of unsubstantiated assertions, scaremongering and of, frankly, a rather worrying tone. I must apologise for any nausea that results from reading this advert.
Tags: adverts totally made of wrong, beauty, Berlei, blatant sexism, dodgy advice, fashion, motherhood, teenagers
1st June 2010 / 3 Comments
Woman's Realm /
6th October 1967
Apart from the comedy value in the copy here, this is an interesting change of approach from Sanatogen: empathetic rather than condemnatory, as in this ad from 10 years previously. It also gives the lie to the common complaint that children are more trouble than they used to be, because this isn’t how the advertising industry would talk about children nowadays. And yes, this is yet another excuse for women to get drunk, dressed up as a medicinal preparation. We’ve been here before.
Tags: blatant sexism, dodgy advice, motherhood, retail, Sanatogen
23rd May 2010 / 4 Comments
Woman's Weekly /
11th March 1967
Oh dear. I’m pretty sure Mary meant well, but advising a worn-out and demotivated young mother to expend even more energy trying to keep her spoilt brat of a husband happy? Sounds like a sure-fire recipe for depression to me. Woe betide that the husband actually *help* with the baby that he helped create and grow the fuck up, eh?
Also, we have another one of the mysterious replies without the original letter! No prizes for guessing what the ‘habit’ might be…
Tags: blatant sexism, dodgy advice, marriage, Mary Marryat, pregnancy, problem page, social history, teenagers
18th May 2010 / 1 Comment
Woman's Realm /
11th March 1967
Ooh, what’s that ringing in my ears? Ah, of course. It’s my bullshit-o-meter going off. Also, I swear that woman’s got a different expression on her face than the one we see in the mirror…
Tags: beauty, blatant sexism, dodgy advice, retail
1st May 2010 / 2 Comments
Woman's Realm /
11th March 1967
Crikey. Girdles have never looked so exciting. Of course, they model them on a woman who clearly doesn’t need them, because, as I’ve said before, the fat has to go *somewhere*. Let’s hope any woman wearing this had a loose top.
Tags: beauty, blatant sexism, dodgy advice, retail, social history
25th April 2010 / 3 Comments
Woman and Home /
1st January 1962
Obviously, it was the South Africa ad which caught my eye here, but I thought you’d all enjoy the full page of adverts. I love the evocative nature of the Templeton’s and Flexcello ads, documenting a world long gone, and I found the Venner Autopoint ad interesting, as there’s been many attempts over the years to devise timers for electric devices, none of which have caught on.
Tags: beauty, blatant sexism, dodgy advice, fashion, household, social history
