Woman's Weekly / 4th April 1969
Eeh, look at her. She’s no better than she should be, with her plastic wall coverings that you can WIPE CLEAN. What were people using before, then?
Tags: blatant sexism, household, retail, Vymura
Woman's Realm / 18th March 1967
A rather clever competition dealing with the main problem of a consumer society: where to put it all. It’s doubtful that people before the late ’60s had storage as a real issue. As a child of the ’80s, I grew up with overflowing cupboards, and am currently using this post as an excuse to avoid dealing with the large amount of crap upstairs. Probably the best thing we could do for our children is to teach them about the folly of continually buying stuff to make themselves feel better, isn’t it? Yeah, I don’t think that’s likely to happen either…
Tags: blatant sexism, consumerism, household, social history
Woman's Weekly / 4th April 1969
Edna covered *everything* with her cherished Stretchovers. It took her 2 days to find the cat.
Woman's Realm / 11th March 1967
Well, the message is clear: marriage brings wisdom, and a Hoover washing machine. Lord alone knows what those other slatterns bought!
Tags: blatant sexism, Hoover, household, retail
Woman's Own / 4th April 1969
Horray for Super 8! Thanks to this instructive site, I can tell you that this was a Kodak Instamatic M12, the bottom of the Instamatic movie camera line, which took a Super 8 cartridge and had a single speed shutter. These cameras were an extension of the famous Instamatic photo camera range, which took 110 and 126 film, which I vaguely remember from my childhood, along with flashcubes. As the ad suggests, this was a reasonably-priced home-cine camera, which is probably a good indication of when home movie-making began to become a popular activity, rather than one confined to professionals or the rich. An interesting article about Super 8 can be found here, and BBC Two recently broadcast the fascinating Home Movie Roadshow.
Woman's Weekly / 4th April 1969
Groo. Still, they sound nice and flammable from the description, so you can easily ‘accidentally’ set fire to them. Burning down the rest of the house would almost be worth it.
Woman's Realm / 18th March 1967
I picked this for the marvellous language and colours used in the shoe ad, but I thought I’d leave in the iron ad as evidence that in 40 years, the only real change in iron technology is the steam generator iron. As an aside, I remember a lodger my family had in the early ’80s asking for a steam iron, and my mother having to tell him that we hadn’t got one: we couldn’t afford it! Steam irons are a lot cheaper nowadays…
Woman's Weekly / 25th April 1969
Never mind about putting your feet up with some chocs, or flying off on holiday, REAL indulgence is, erm, a new cooker. The High Speed Gas people ARE being good to us!
Woman's Realm / 6th October 1967
If you came from a working class background, like myself, then you’ll probably recognise these. My grandmother had a Moppet painting, along with all matter of tasteless figurines, which I presume she picked up from ads just like these. Lovely.
Woman's Realm / 6th October 1967
I’ve noticed a fair bit of sexual innuendo in some of these ads, but I bet the copywriters didn’t spot the ‘flick of a knob’ joke. Hur hur. It’s easy to forget that an alarm clock used to be a far louder affair than the half-hearted beeping that my clock radio gives out. I did use a traditional alarm clock for a limited period 10 years ago, but soon got fed up with being awoken with a heart-stopping crescendo of clangs. I remember my dad having one of these, though, so perhaps the innuendo worked on my mother…
Tags: blatant sexism, household, retail