Tomatoes dos

SECTION ICONSUMER CULTURE

“SPEAKING OF TOMATOES”: SUPERMARKETS, THESENSES, AND SEXUAL FANTASY IN MODERN AMERICA

By Adam Mack The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

In 1960, Chain Store Age reported that Publix Super Markets had hidden taperecorders in the produce departments of selected stores. Placed in a small barrelon a display island, the recording devices had been programmed, according to theretailing trade journal, to deliver “intriguing selling messages” to the Florida-basedchain’s best customers, middle-class women. Lest readers think that the turn tomechanical salesmanship furthered an atmosphere of sterility in Publix stores,Chain Store Age pointed out that the recorders complemented other enticementsintended to enhance the sensory pleasures of supermarket shopping. Customers,for instance, could enjoy the soothing sounds and pleasant smells of a floral de-partment that featured a “cascading fountain” installed behind a display of freshflowers. A series of spotlights hung above the produce department to provide vi-sual stimulation by accentuating the “ripe freshness” of the peaches, plums and ba-nanas for sale. Chain Store Age left it for readers to decide what women actuallythought when, as they passed the display island, the tape recorder delivered itsmessage: “What Peaches!” – followed by a whistle. Yet the follow-up, “luscious,delicious ripe peaches for you at special price,” clearly encouraged them to treattheir senses of touch and smell by handling the fresh merchandise. As the trademagazine suggested, Publix invited women to indulge their senses to stimulategreater sales through “impulse buying.”1

When Chain Store Age’s celebration of new techniques in produce sales ar-rived on readers’ desks, merchandising practices designed to stimulate the fivehuman senses could be found in supermarkets across the nation. Starting in themid-1930s, American supermarket companies, determined to make their largeself-service stores attractive to discerning female shoppers, developed a commer-cial aesthetic designed to loosen shoppers’ purse strings by, literally, stirring theirappetites. Since supermarket operators appealed directly to consumers’ eyes,noses, ears, hands and tongues, the development of supermarkets is especially ripefor an historical analysis of sensory perception, U.S. consumer culture, and gen-der politics. One of the chief values of such a study involves the practice of sen-sory history – a growing branch of the interdisciplinary social sciences literatureon the human senses that examines the role of seeing, hearing, smelling, touch-

journal of social history816 summer 2010

ing and tasting in shaping all sorts of past experience. Following germinativeworks by a small group of European historians and anthropologists, a series of in-fluential books by Richard Cullen Rath, Leigh Eric Schmidt, Mark M. Smith andEmily Thompson have established the significance of the sensate in U.S. historyby carefully tracing the role of one of the human senses – hearing, in these cases– in shaping events as disparate as the colonization of the Americas, American re-ligious practices, slavery and the coming of the U.S. Civil War, and the develop-ment of modern architecture.2 Sensory history has since expanded to include aneven broader range of topics, places, and time periods, leading practitioners torecommend methodologies that move beyond a single sense to the sensory appa-ratus as a whole.3 “We are now beginning to accumulate enough work for specificplaces and times, . .” writes Mark M. Smith, “where historians can profitably beginto think seriously about the interpretive value of examining how the sensesworked together, sometimes in complimentary fashion, sometimes in tension.”4

Anthropologist David Howes, also one of the first scholars to outline a researchagenda for the senses, has similarly called for historical work on “intersensorality,”a term he coined to describe the relationships among the individual senses.5 Thisessay takes up the calls of Smith and Howes by tracing how supermarket operators,between the 1930s and early 1960s, developed a multilayered sensory aestheticfor their stores. That is, how supermarket executives, store managers, and adver-tisers sought to excite consumers’ five senses simultaneously (and in differentways) to move merchandise.

The sensory approach to supermarket history promises to enrich the histori-ography of American commercial culture – a literature that has been weighedheavily in favor of one of the senses, vision. A large body of scholarship has madeclear that turn-of-the-century advancements in production and visual technol-ogy, the creation of a national advertising industry, the promotion of new leisurepursuits, and the development of a mass market gave rise to a modern, nationallydisseminated culture oriented around consumption.6 Since that culture intro-duced a plethora of new sights to American consumers – department store win-dow displays, motion pictures, brilliantly lit signage, for example – historians haveemphasized visual spectacle as the dominant expressive mode for those actors whoworked to create a “land of desire,” often implying that the other four senses playedlittle role in promoting consumption.7 As historian Grace Elizabeth Hale arguesin a study that deals with consumer culture and racial identity in the turn-of-the-century South, “the invention of photography and motion pictures and changesin lithography, engraving, and printing as well as the construction of museums, ex-positions, department stores, and amusement parks emphasized visibility, the actof looking and the authority of the eye – the spectacle.”8

There can be no doubt that the act of looking and spectacular visual displaysexpressed the values and promises of U.S. consumer culture in powerful ways, butit does not necessarily follow that historical actors neglected the other four sensesin creating a society organized around getting and spending. Howes, in fact, hasrecently suggested that modern selling – including product design and advertising

“SPEAKING OF TOMATOES” 817

– has become increasingly hyperesthetic over the course of the twentieth century.The “sensual logic of late capitalism,” he explains, has been marked by the de-velopment of ever more sophisticated efforts to engage “as many senses as possi-ble in the drive for product differentiation and the distraction / seduction of theconsumer,” a process exemplified by the turn-of-the-twenty-first-century attemptsto address shoppers’ senses at the subconscious level such as the ZMET (ZaltmanMetaphor Elicitation Technique) developed at Harvard University’s “Mind of theMarket” Laboratory.9 Howes’s concept of hyperesthesia is helpful because it en-courages a broad sensory approach to the study of commercial culture, but it hasyet to be elaborated historically. An examination of the rise of supermarkets is es-pecially valuable in this regard because it traces the long tradition of linking thesenses to consumer desire. At the same time, it tracks how changes in sensory-ori-ented selling shaped the dynamics of gender politics in specific historical circum-stances, in this case the changing conventions of gender roles, sexuality and familylife in the decades between the late 1930s and the late 1960s.

This effort to historicize the relationship among the senses, supermarkets andgender relations follows in the tradition of scholars who have examined how mer-chants and advertisers worked to outline the broad contours of American com-mercial culture.10 When supermarket operators sought to titillate shoppers’ sensesto increase grocery sales they assumed far greater powers to dictate spending thanthey deserved, but that is one of the reasons that their efforts are so revealing oftheir assumptions about consumer desire, sensation, and gender. A close analysisof the supermarket industry’s internal discussions – conducted in the industry’sextensive trade literature and reflected in advertising – reveals the prominence ofsensual and sexual themes in shaping male conceptions of female buyers.11 Themerchants who developed supermarkets clearly followed in the tradition of theurban department stores in using visual appeals to make consumption exciting, funand pleasurable. Yet supermarket leaders also invited customers to enjoy the rangeof sensory pleasures associated with food, a sharp break from the service-orientednature of traditional grocery sales and the “scientific” retailing of the chain storesof the World War I era.12 The supermarket approach represented continuities inthinking on the senses, however, because it rested on age-old gender stereotypesthat cast the desires of women’s noses, skin and tongues (that is, desires of the“lower” or proximate senses) as ones with a strong erotic charge.13 Leaders in thesupermarket business, in other words, deliberately targeted what they saw aswomen’s base physical desires, contending that female consumption derived notfrom rational calculations, but rather from irrational “impulses” encouraged bysellers who knew how to manipulate the female sensory apparatus.

The key interpretive point about grocers’ sensory approach revolves aroundthe suggestion that female consumers might fill the erotic and sexual voids of theirlives through supermarket shopping. Influential works on retail culture have con-sistently emphasized merchant’s efforts to attract women consumers by “feminiz-ing” the marketplace, an approach that, as Lizabeth Cohen has demonstrated,applied as much to the postwar suburban shopping center as it did to the turn-of-


the-century urban department store.14 Often implicitly understood as a visualphenomenon (embodied by Cohen, for instance, in color schemes or reassuringlyvisible security guards), “feminization” has yet to be explored as a complex sensoryphenomenon.15 When considered in sensory terms – that is, with attention tothe full range of sensations that retailers hoped to evoke in consumers – “femi-nization” takes on new, erotic and sexual meanings. The result is a view of su-permarket operators as key actors in creating a commercial culture that furtheredAmericans’ sense of security by promoting conservatively demarcated gender roles.As Elaine Tyler May has argued in her influential study of the domestic politics ofthe Cold War, Americans – scarred by the vicissitudes of the Great Depression,newly married as the nation joined in World War II, and responsible for raisingchildren in a new and dangerous Atomic age – increasingly looked to tame threat-ening forces, especially unrestrained female sexuality, by “containing” them inmarriage and the suburban, family home.16 Supermarket operators made an uniquecontribution to the ethos of “sexual containment” when they suggested that con-sumption would strengthen the family not only by enhancing it’s class profile, eas-ing housework, or promoting leisure-time “togetherness,” but also by serving asan outlet for female sexual energy.17 Grocery retailers, in other words, offered upthe sensorial excitements of supermarket shopping to exploit what they saw as afeminine longing for erotic excitement intensified by lives circumscribed by do-mestic norms. In so doing, they reinforced the notion that middle-class womenshould look to the excitements of the homemaker role itself – in this case, familyshopper – and not to challenges to existing gender arrangements for contentment.

I. The First “Warehouse” Supermarkets

Although grocery retailers admired and eventually borrowed from the mer-chandising techniques of the urban department stores, the independent merchantswho opened the first supermarkets strayed far from the aesthetic example of JohnWannamaker and Marshall Field. Opened in the early 1930s in the northeasternUnited States, the first supermarkets appealed to depression-weary Americanswith huge, no-frills stores that featured markedly low prices, including some itemssold below cost, termed “loss leaders.”18 Big Bear supermarkets, to take one cele-brated example, opened its doors in 1932 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Housed in anold automobile factory, Big Bear offered what an advertising manager admittedwere “ridiculous” price discounts, all made possible through bulk purchasing, self-service and low overhead.19 The strategy counted on a high sales volume to makeup for deep price discounts, an approach that proved successful. In its openingweeks, Big Bear attracted thousands of bargain-hungry shoppers (so much so thatlocal police had to be called out to help direct traffic) and considerably outsold es-tablished chains.20 By the mid-1930s, according to one industry official, twelvehundred imitators operated throughout the nation.21

Big Bear’s owners celebrated the festive atmosphere generated by the largecrowds and bargain shopping. Indeed, they often furthered that atmosphere


through promotional campaigns that featured lavish giveaways. Big Bear’s origi-nal unit in New Jersey, for example, awarded twelve automobiles to lucky shop-pers following its opening. In the summer of 1937, its store in Hoboken, NewJersey introduced a lottery promotion for customers that included a one thousanddollar grand prize and fifty-nine other cash awards. The following year, the Hobo-ken store spiked its overall sales 25 percent when it ran a “penny sale” that fea-tured forty grocery items priced at one cent.22 According to Super MarketMerchandising, an industry trade journal, Big Bear’s festive atmosphere enjoyedspecial appeal among female shoppers, particularly those with tight budgets. “Bar-gain-hunting women love crowds,” it told readers in 1936, “and they love to fol-low crowds.” “This element is thrilled by the carnival atmosphere. They willfollow the super market,” the trade publication predicted, “wherever they happento open up.”23 The author’s choice of metaphor – supermarkets as “carnivals” – istelling because it underscores precisely the kind of bargain-hunting revelry that re-tailers such as Big Bear believed would attract customers suffering the vicissitudesof the national economic crisis. Unlike the chain grocery stores that expanded sorapidly in the 1920s around the low prices, efficiencies and hygiene of the new sci-entific retailing, the first supermarkets reveled in the activity, excitement, andnoise generated by thousands of shoppers looking for bargains in the roughly ap-pointed stores.

Despite the celebrations that followed early success, however, the first super-markets came under criticism precisely because they resembled bargain-orientedcarnivals. Industry leaders became increasingly critical of “loss leader” pricing be-cause it sparked harmful, cutthroat competition and because it generated threatsof restrictive pricing legislation by lawmakers under pressure from established gro-cers. In 1936, M. M. Zimmerman, the founder of the industry’s first trade organ-ization, the Super Market Institute (SMI) and the editor of its journal, SuperMarket Merchandising, urged operators to abandon the practice. “All that loss-leader selling has ever done is create price wars resulting in bitterness and en-mity,” he wrote. “If reason and sound judgment are permitted to prevail in theindustry,” he continued, “there is only one conclusion . . . outlaw below cost sell-ing, before we are forced to do so by law.”24 Two years later the SMI followed Zim-merman’s advice when it passed a resolution condemning loss leaders.25 Theorganization suggested that members continue to offer the reasonable prices con-sumers had come to expect from supermarkets. Nevertheless, it told operators tomove away from aggressive cost cutting and instead to concentrate on the legiti-mate values they offered through high volume sales and self-service.26

At the same time, leaders in grocery retailing increasingly argued that theroughly appointed warehouse stores limited the potential of the supermarket overthe long term. Carl W. Dipman, editor of the trade publication, Progressive Gro-cer, penned some of the most critical assessments. In 1937, for example, he blastedthe “cheapness, messiness, [and] the ragged air of inferiority” of what he latertermed the “eastern monstrosity markets.”27 Zimmerman offered measured com-ments on the matter, but even he urged operators to consider designing stores that


seemed less like bargain-oriented carnivals. Writing in 1941, he respectfully cred-ited outfits like Big Bear with popularizing high-volume, self-service retailing. Henevertheless regretted how the complete lack of “service and luxury” in such storesled to riotous shop floors that turned off many consumers, especially those whomight have witnessed the occasional scuffle between women for bargains.28 Inaddition, the first supermarkets, “housed as they were in empty factory buildingsand garages,” failed to offer the positive “temptation of comfort” that he thoughtattracted the most discerning customers.29 In 1938 Paul S. Willis, the Presidentof the American Grocery Manufacturers Association (AGMA), summed up theobjections to warehouse supermarkets in an address to the second SMI conven-tion. No-frills selling attracted crowds, he told the audience, but only “the classof crowds which frequent department store basements, looking for bargains.”30

Much like Zimmerman, Willis feared that the warehouse supermarkets would at-tract only promiscuous, bargain-oriented shoppers, not those who would settledown with a single store.

II. Constructing the Sensory Supermarket

Established grocery retailers met the challenge of the first supermarkets byembracing the advantages of larger stores but rejecting the riotous bargain-hunt-ing atmosphere denounced by Dipman, Zimmerman and Willis. Starting in thelate 1930s and continuing through the post-World War II decade, both chain andindependent grocers dedicated themselves to an overall strategy of pursuing, asbusiness historian Tracey Deutsch concisely puts it, “bigger stores, better cus-tomers.”31 Deutsch’s study of grocery retailing in Chicago in the middle third ofthe twentieth century focuses on the reasons why – in the midst of a national eco-nomic crisis – both chain companies and independent grocers started buildinglarge, upscale supermarkets. Part of the explanation simply involved taking ad-vantage of the economic efficiencies of large-scale self-service to answer the com-petitive challenge broached by Big Bear et al. At the same time, Deutschemphasizes how political concerns including threats of anti-chain legislation, NewDeal relief measures, and World War II price controls provided important advan-tages to large, corporately managed supermarkets. Leading grocers believed thatthe gender preferences of middle- and upper-class women dictated stores that of-fered respectability – a quality missing in the warehouse supermarkets – along withlow prices. The result, explains Deutsch, was a widespread commitment in gro-cery retailing to large and “feminized” supermarkets.32

A sensory-oriented approach to the rise of the modern supermarket expandsexisting scholarship by tracing how merchants created the stores that came todominate food retailing, including the social values merchants attempted to in-fuse into the stores themselves. Conceptualizing the modern supermarket as sen-sual deepens, in particular, Deutsch’s notion of “feminization” – a conditioncharacterized by “clean, well-lighted, and (above all) orderly” stores.33 In 1938,when the supermarket industry as a whole began turning to the “bigger stores,


better customers” formula, Super Market Merchandising underscored the impor-tance of sensory retailing when it reminded readers that “there are only five waysin which a consumer can possibly be responsive to any selling appeal, namelythrough the senses of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling.”34 As itwent on to explain, the best supermarkets offered compelling visual displays com-bined with soothing appeals to the other senses, making the stores places of “com-fort and pleasure, as well as low prices.”35

Supermarket companies sought to further the sensory pleasures of food shop-ping by encouraging consumers to visit the multiple departments of their largestores, and, to linger in those departments as long as they wished, an approachfundamentally different from the scientific, self-service retailing of the World WarI era. Historian Lisa C. Tolbert has traced how the U.S. South’s Piggly Wiggly gro-cery chain – generally recognized as the key popularizer of the self-service ap-proach in the early twentieth century – introduced a linear, “assembly line” layoutthat featured a one-way traffic pattern to improve shopping efficiency and to pro-tect southern, white middle-class women from the social intermingling that couldmake grocery stores unfit places for “respectable” ladies.36 As architectural histo-rian Richard Longstreth notes in his study of commercial space in Los Angeles, thefirst supermarkets in southern California departed from the linear approach of ear-lier retailing forms, in this case the region’s drive-in markets, by developing a“nondirectional” store layout in which consumers were free to roam a large, rec-tangular selling floor divided into a number of similar, and mostly parallel, aisles.37

This is not to say that supermarket operators wanted shoppers to visit only thesections of their stores that carried the items on their shopping lists. Indeed, thegeneral industry standard dictated laying out supermarkets with the perishable de-partments set along the edges and four corners of the retailing floor to “pull” shop-pers through the entire selling space. Since the perishable departments oftenboasted the richest sensory environments, retailers believed that visiting the dif-ferent sections of the store served as a palpable, pleasurable demonstration of thevast array of foods available for sale. As the president of Publix, George Jenkinssuggested, the layout of the modern supermarket promised to “dramatize” food.38

That is, the overall approach, considered in positive sensory terms, promised tomake supermarket shopping far richer and exciting to female shoppers than the as-sembly-line retailing of early self-service formats with their emphasis on efficiency,order and cleanliness.39

The overall approach to the modern supermarket rested on gender stereo-types that cast the female sensory apparatus as inherently delicate, renderingwomen especially vulnerable to the seductive power of sensations, especially thosethat stimulated the “lower” senses of smell, touch and taste.40 Such stereotypeslent an unmistakably erotic spirit to sensory supermarketing, one that grocersplayed up without hesitation or embarrassment. In 1954, when intense competi-tion and growing standardization in merchandise generated a spike in marketingadvice, Super Market Merchandising counseled readers that their “first considera-tion” in courting shoppers was “an emotional appeal to the five senses” which, it


explained, “work[ed] overtime” in women.41 Appeals to the senses worked best,the journal explained, when they stirred the imagination, making women feel “ro-mantic” and even “exhilarated” as they wandered the grocery aisles. The journalwent on to provide a particularly direct characterization of what it saw as the dif-ferences between how men and women perceived the supermarket: “Men’s fivesenses are robust; women’s are delicate. Men are impressed by facts; women by imag-ination.” The fundamental difference – “Men think; women feel” –suggested howretailers’ ideas on female shoppers, sensation, and desire comported with the no-tion that housewives, struggling to break up the monotony of their days, valuedsensory excitement and seduction as much as price values and reliable foods whenthey chose their supermarket.42

This is not to suggest that a concern for the visual landscape of the super-market served an unimportant role in store design or in retailers’ ideas about theroots of consumer desire; indeed, the rise of larger self-service stores (that is, storesin which shoppers were largely left alone to roam the selling floor) made seeingcrucial. In the late 1930s and 1940s, for example, retailers enthusiastically capi-talized on improvements in commercial lighting to brighten the shop floor and toshowcase their merchandise. As historian M. Jeffrey Hardwick demonstrates, the1930s and 1940s saw chain companies increasingly employ new forms of fluores-cent lighting. Before the development of fluorescent lighting, most merchantsrelied on incandescent globes, typically hung from the ceiling. Giving off direct,yellow illumination, incandescents presented difficulties for store operators be-cause they made it tricky to spotlight merchandise without darkening other partsof the selling floor and they tended to create shadowy corners. Fluorescents helpedto solve the problem because they used bulbs that lit gas instead of heating ele-ments, giving off a more diffuse and whiter light. Merchants increasingly turnedto a combination of fluorescent and incandescent lighting. While fluorescentsbathed stores evenly in white illumination, incandescents drew attention to se-lected merchandise with bright, yellow spotlights. As Hardwick points out, theresult was to brighten the visual landscape of chain stores, making looking andshopping easier and pleasant.43

Supermarket operators saw the new techniques in lighting as an opportunityto further distance themselves from the look of the early warehouse units. Re-jecting what commercial architect B. Sumner Gruzen termed the “cheap carnival”lighting of Big-Bear era stores, supermarket companies installed fluorescents, oftenin combination with incandescent lights.44 Still new in the early 1940s, fluores-cent lighting by itself could draw large crowds to supermarkets, as was the caseduring the 1940 opening of a New York market.45 As Super Market Merchandisingexplained, fluorescent lighting caught the attention of consumers because it cre-ated a spectacular “daylight effect” that promised to make all the merchandise onsale at a particular market visible for shoppers inside the store, even during theevening hours.46 Further, as the trade journal made clear in a report on a Dallassupermarket, fluorescent lighting helped “the merchandiser to make the most ofthe attractive qualities of labels and containers . . .”47 The reference to labeling in-


dicated how improvements in store lighting dovetailed with food manufacturers’ efforts todevelop visually-compelling packaging. The rise of large-scale self-service made thedevelopment of packages that symbolically reached out to grab consumers morepressing than ever before, encouraging the rise of transparent packaging to showoff the product itself and the greater use of pictures on food product labeling. Forsupermarket operators, improved lighting technology helped to, as one trade an-alyst put it, “bring out the full beauty of the food displays of the labels.”48

Improvements in commercial lighting also encouraged grocery retailers to in-stall new kinds of store windows. By the end of the 1930s, supermarket operatorshad started moving away from the display of merchandise in store windows, atechnique made famous by department stores and practiced on a smaller scale byearlier chain retailers. At the 1938 SMI convention, B. Sumner Gruzen explainedthat show windows worked best for businesses, like department stores, that soughtto entice nearby pedestrians. Since supermarket companies typically built theirstores in outlying areas, they concentrated on attracting motorists. As a result,more and more supermarket designers focused on large, plate glass windows freeof merchandise display, and often bedecked in colorful banners and advertise-ments, to attract the eyes of passing motorists.49 As Chain Store Age put it in 1941,“windows should let in light and let in sight.”50 The trade magazine might havenoted more accurately that supermarket windows “let in sight” most spectacularlyduring the nighttime hours, when the stores themselves could serve as giant showwindows. Nevertheless, at all hours, the large plate glass windows, combined withnew techniques in commercial lighting, promised to brighten the commerciallandscape by turning supermarkets into brightly-lit beacons of abundance, muchas the nineteenth-century department store brightened the commercial landscapeof urban America.

While operators of the 1930s and early 1940s manipulated lighting and glass,postwar operators began using color and iconography in new ways to enhance thesupermarket’s visual landscape. Postwar supermarket operators increasingly uti-lized the services of professional color engineers and the color planning servicesoffered by manufacturers to coordinate the appearance of store equipment, fix-tures, and interiors. Retailers also used new colors to decorate their stores. Whilesupermarkets of the Interwar period typically featured all-white walls and surfacesto project, as one trade writer termed it, “hospital cleanliness,” postwar unitsboasted pastel interiors.51 Part of the appeal of pastels had to do with its status asa fashion symbol. In 1959, Supermarket Newsmade just such a point when it toldreaders to choose “shades that are fashion wise as well as psychologically satisfy-ing.” Up-to-date choices of color, it explained, “does more than flatter the food– [it] flatters the customer and her tastes as well.”52 Pastel-colored supermarkets,much like the lime green and pink refrigerators that increasingly appeared in sub-urban kitchens, drew the attention of postwar consumers because they offered theprestige of a fashionable, middle-class lifestyle.53

Pastel colored supermarkets also offered consumers visual demonstrations ofthe exciting possibilities of postwar abundance. Art and cultural historian Karal


Ann Marling has demonstrated that bright colors, including pastels, enjoyed acentral place in the visual aesthetic of 1950s consumer culture. Arguing that pas-tels became fashionable precisely because they signaled a break from the dreari-ness of economic depression and the uniformity of military service, she suggeststhat colorful consumer goods provided Americans the thrill of newness. Beyonda symbol of “personal achievement,” Marling writes, pastels signaled “an adven-turous willingness to try something new.”54 Supermarket designers hoped pastelinteriors would encourage consumers to extend their shopping trips and thus spendmore money in their stores. Trade analysts’ references to the emotional conse-quences of color choice made it clear that they believed the right color could, asSuper Market Merchandising wrote, have a “dramatic influence on the state of mindof shoppers.”55 In 1953, Progressive Grocer told readers that pastels attracted shop-pers and, equally important, “put them in the mood to linger and buy once theyenter the store.” Pastels pampered shoppers’ sense of vision, creating “a feeling ofcheerfulness” that stood in contrast to what another trade analyst saw as a “clin-ical, impersonal” look of all-white stores.56 Colorful interiors, store designers con-tended, also made merchandise more attractive. Color must “convey the idea ofappetite appeal,” Howard Ketchum, a color and design engineer, argued in SuperMarket Merchandising. As he explained, a varied color scheme promised to “turnwindow shopping into actual shopping” by drawing consumers’ eyes to the sepa-rate departments as well as to particular displays.57 Providing gentler vistas thanstark white, colorful interiors encouraged shoppers to take a longer look, some-thing that, as Ketchum suggested, increased the chances that they would see moreand more items they found appetizing.58

The effort to create visually distinctive personalities for supermarkets alsopushed postwar operators to commission in-store artwork and commercial murals.In using such mediums to “brighten up [store] walls,” as Progressive Grocer mod-estly phrased it, grocers sought to stir shoppers’ desires with images of abundance,often with murals with imagery related to agricultural harvest.59 One unit of thePublix chain, to take a particularly revealing example, featured a mural by artistJohn Garth that pushed the boundaries of the iconography of abundance by fore-grounding an insubstantially dressed woman as a symbol of the supermarket’sbounty (Figure 1). Surrounded by exotic, tropical flora and outfitted in a sheerdress that renders her essentially bare-breasted, the figure stared directly at theviewer, offering up a selection of fresh foods from apparently faraway lands.Demonstrating how retailers employed imagery that combined themes of food,exoticism and desire to encourage shoppers to “feast” in the grocery aisles, themural serves as evidence of how supermarket artwork might grant shoppers per-mission to release their pecuniary and gustatory desires. If Garth meant for themural to show how supermarkets could satisfy desires for exotic and faraway tastes,the title of the Lookmagazine article that featured the mural – “George Pleasuresthem with Groceries” (in reference to George Jenkins, who appears to the right)– came even closer in its suggestion that supermarket shopping offered womenopportunities for physical exhilaration.


Figure 1

Figure 1: Image of Publix mural, "George Pleasures them with Groceries," Look, 5 May 1964, 106.

In addition to setting the visual landscape, store designers also worked hardto control what shoppers heard in supermarkets, an effort that revealed muchabout how they conceptualized “modern” grocery shopping and female shoppers.Historian Emily Thompson’s study of aural culture in the early twentieth centuryUnited States has traced how professionals in architectural design and acousticalscience collaborated to create a “modern” – that is, clear, efficient and uniform –style of sound for the built environment, a goal that necessitated, above all, thesuppression of ambient noise and reverberation.60 The association of noise sup-pression with “modern” business practices became especially important with therise of self-service, a format that severely limited the aural salesmanship of tradi-tional selling.61 Without clerks trained to discuss the advantages of their mer-chandise, supermarket operators increasingly focused on the “silent” salesmanshipof the store environment itself. In that context, unwanted noises became espe-cially disruptive. The greater number of customers, employees, and equipmentfound in modern supermarkets also made noise control more challenging thanever before. The clang and bustle of multiple cash registers, shelf restocking, andtraffic circulation all created a din that operators attempted to reduce with newtechnologies including new ceiling and floor insulation as well as “noiseless” shop-ping carts and checkout equipment.62

Illustrating the importance of noise reduction, trade analysts singled out op-erators who created quiet store floors. In 1940, Super Market Merchandising car-ried an article on Wyatt Food Stores, a regional chain headquartered in Dallas.


Recently remodeled, Wyatt stores featured sound-absorbing floor insulation aswell as carts with rubber tires that allowed employees to restock shelves “sound-lessly.” The author of the profile applauded the company for developing marketswith an “easy calm . . . even in the hours of maximum rush” that, according to him,set them “apart from the ordinary.” “Its operation has been silenced to what seemsto the observer the maximum degree. There is none of the clatter and din whichis usually associated with the bustle of business,” the author observed. Super Mar-ket Merchandising contended that Wyatt’s quiet stores demonstrated “scientificprecision” in retailing – that is, “the elimination of all those things which serveto slow down operation, whether the cause be physical ones or psychological.”63

As the article suggested, efforts to reduce the din of food retailing grew out of at-tempts to bring a sense of order and efficiency to modern supermarkets. Deliber-ating rejecting the raucous, free-for-all soundscape of Big Bear-era stores, modernsupermarket companies courted discerning shoppers by reducing the noises asso-ciated with the bustle of bargain basement shopping.

The other major technique for reducing noise – the use of in-store music todrown out unwanted sounds – demonstrated how retailers played on women’s earsto further fantasies of romantic seduction. While supermarket operators of the1930s and 1940s occasionally broke up the retailing silence with improvised am-plification systems that broadcast sporting events or radio programs, postwar re-tailers turned to music service companies. By 1963, according to the SMI, 86percent of its member stores featured “background music,” in many cases providedby companies like Muzak, Inc. and the Storecast System.64 “They say that thebackground of mood music,” Acme Markets’ newsletter contended, “relaxes theshopper.” “She . . . falls into the spell of the rhythm and enjoys her shoppingmore,” it explained.65 As the Acme newsletter indicated, retailers believed thatcarefully selected music had a soothing affect on consumers. It complimented in-sulated floors and ceilings and “silent” store equipment to reduce the disruptionscreated by unwanted noises to create what industry analyst Edward Brand termeda “shopping mood” by relaxing customers and helping them to forget about po-tential irritations like checkout lines or expensive grocery bills.66

Retailers made it clear that they considered the use of store music a form ofsupermarket seduction in the romantic vein. The 1956 Storecast System surveyindicated as much when it identified the particular kind of music played in su-permarkets. Few stores played rock and roll; rather, the survey reported, super-markets featured softer selections, including “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Lovelyto Look At,” and, most tellingly, “I’m in the Mood for Love.”67 The idea thatmood music added an erotic tone to grocers’ dealings with female shoppers, how-ever, was not left to those who read Storecast surveys. Supermarket advertise-ments consistently put the idea in front of the nation’s newspaper readers. In1960, for example, a Milwaukee supermarket, Sentry Foods, won an industry awardfor running newspaper copy that featured a male grocer pulling the pedals from asingle flower, over the caption, “She loves me . . . she loves me” (Figure 2). “Oncea gal steps into a Sentry Store,” the ad suggested, “a lifetime love affair begins.” It


explained: “For we cater to the ladies. We woo’em with pleasant lighting andsweet music . . . with soothing colors and wide aisles . . . with a dazzling array ofthe finest foods in all the land.”68 Although the ad stopped short of referencing anactual sexual encounter, it clearly portrayed Sentry managers as Casanovas who,much like George Jenkins, provided seductive appeals with stores that caressed thesenses as well as foods that tempted the palate.

Figure 2

Figure 2: Sentry Foods Advertisement ("Ad of the Week," Supermarket News, 17 October 1960, 4).

Of course, mood music had little appeal if supermarkets offended shoppers’sense of smell so grocers gave special attention to eliminating the odors of spoiledor rotting merchandise. “It would seem that in a food store,” Progressive Grocercontended in 1939, “[that the] governing sense of smell would be of greatest im-portance.”69 Urging readers to eliminate “S.O.” (Store Odor), the trade publica-tion identified smell as an essential ingredient in the efficient and clean


environments that attracted affluent consumers. “Clean, fresh smelling stores at-tracts better, more profitable trade,” it asserted simply.70 Two years later, ChainStore Age offered a similar analysis. “The more purchasing power the customerhas,” a chain store manager wrote, “the more she expects store and goods to besanitary and dust-free.”71 According to the manager, his insistence that employ-ees keep the store “sanitary” – a job that involved reducing the distasteful smellsof dirt, grime and aging food – attracted a healthy portion of the affluentshoppers who lived nearby. Weighing in on the issue of store odor, SuperMarket Merchandising gave special attention to the potentially stomach-turning smells generated by neglectful management of perishable departments.In an article on fish sales, for example, the trade magazine told operators to em-ploy ice and new refrigeration technology to create an ideally “odorless” envi-ronment.72 As the attention to the fish department suggests, supermarketcompanies faced unique challenges in addressing the issue of store odor. Largestores that carried a wide array of perishable merchandise as well as packaged gro-ceries, supermarkets required more sophisticated policies for controlling store odor.With far fewer salespeople to develop relationships with consumers, supermarketcompanies worked overtime to prevent a spoiling steak or a bad apple from cre-ating the offensive smells that robbed store environments of the refinement soimportant in attracting affluent shoppers.

The importance of eliminating the odors of aging merchandise, however, doesnot mean that supermarkets themselves became “odorless.” In fact, the perishabledepartments often served as the best places to introduce the pleasing, mouth-wa-tering scents of good food. Bakery departments provided grocers one of the bestopportunities to tempt shoppers with the smells of fresh bread, baked desserts andbreakfast pastries. Retailers gave special attention to baked goods merchandisingbecause they recognized that a desire for fresh bakery items encouraged moreweekly trips to the supermarket, and, because they identified baked desserts asprime “impulse” purchase items.73 For the largest stores, a full-scale on-premisebakery provided an excellent way to engage in olfactory merchandising, an ap-proach discussed at some length in the trade literature. In 1961, the owner ofTait’s Super Valu, a Minnesota supermarket, celebrated how his in-store bakerytempted consumers’ noses. One of the advantages of an in-store bakery that “can-not be seen but makes its presence known through the nose,” he wrote, was whathis customers invariably termed the “‘wonderful aroma’ or ‘appetizing smell’ em-anating from the bakery” and that spread to “dominate the store.”74

A full-scale, on premise bakery made little economic sense for operators ofsmaller supermarkets (in 1961, the owner of Tait’s Super Valu pegged the requiredminimum sales volume at $20,000 per week75) so many operators accepted ship-ments of raw product from a central bakery to bake in store ovens. The Safewaychain, in fact, identified the combined bakery operation as ideal for smaller unitsbecause the equipment took up less space, proved less expensive to operate, madequality control relatively easy (since the product could be made uniform at a cen-tral facility) and involved lower labor costs.76 At the same time, the combined


bakery approach sacrificed none of the aromas that retailers so valued. In 1963,Progressive Grocer described a machine that baked cookie dough on site in Cali-fornia’s Ralphs supermarkets: “Fragrant hot cookies which roll right out of theoven in full view of the customers at four of Ralphs Grocery Company’s stores inSouthern California exert a strong pull on shoppers’ sensibilities. Senses of sight,smell, and a pleasant warmth to the touch – all are aroused by the cookie ma-chine products at Ralphs. . . .”77

In the same year Progressive Grocer described the cookie oven at Ralphs su-permarkets, industry analysts pointed out that the approach to merchandisingbaked goods enjoyed success throughout the nation. By 1963, 85 units ofChicago’s Jewel supermarkets featured “pastry shops” where shoppers could selectfrom over 150 types of baked goods, many of which arrived at the store in theform of frozen dough to be baked in the store.78 Echoing its article on Safewayfrom the year before, Chain Store Age pointed out that the advantages of the com-bined approach included savings on labor costs, quality control, reduced lossesfrom stale items, and the all important “in-store aroma.”79 Other Chicago-areachains agreed. Before the end of 1964, Chain Store Age could report on imitationsof Jewel’s “pastry shops” in National Tea supermarket’s “Mary Lord” bakeries andby the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A & P), which introduced over30 frozen items (baked in store ovens) to its Chicago units.80

As Progressive Grocer’s report on Ralphs also suggested, appeals to shoppers’noses often worked in concert with appeals to the other proximate senses. Thetrade journal’s reference to the tactilic appeal of fresh baked cookies – “a pleasantwarmth to the touch” – indicated one of the ways retailers sought to induce shop-pers’ appetites through the skin. Grocers also appealed directly to shoppers’tongues. As a speaker at SMI’s 1955 convention suggested, “don’t forget thegrandma of food appeals – taste.”81 Urging supermarket managers to develop ad-vertising copy that made “food sound mouth-watering” to “stimulate the appetite,”the author’s recommendation applied with equal force to in-store sampling.82

Chain Store Age said so when, in 1940, it counseled readers on product demon-strations, including tastings. Sampling featured products promised to en-hance grocers’ “personal contacts with customers” and to add a bit ofexcitement to life of the typical housewife. Remember, the journal explained,“many a shopper comes in daily in an effort to break up the monotony of her ex-istence” – a monotony that could be shaken up by exciting the nose and tonguewith a cup of hot coffee, a bite of pancakes and syrup, a cup of fruit juice or a pieceof cheese.83 Such sampling is precisely the approach that many supermarkets withcombined bakery operations used, as was the case with Tolly’s Markets of Decatur,Illinois. In 1961, Tolly’s boasted of how it coupled olfactory and gustatory appealsby offering sample cookies for all the customers who “follow[ed] . . . their noses”to the store’s cookie machines, an approach that the store manager dubbed a “veryeffective lure.”84

Supermarket operators viewed appeals to smell and touch as crucial to thesuccess of their produce departments as well. Before the rise of supermarkets, food


sellers allowed buyers to handle perishable merchandise to a limited extent, typ-ically to counter suspicions of spoilage or low quality, and often under the watch-ful eye of the grocer.85 Supermarket companies, however, broke from the pastbecause they encouraged consumers to handle, pinch and smell their fresh fruitsand vegetables in the belief that it would increase sales (though they of coursefrowned on customers who abused their merchandise). Since produce was one ofthe few items typically sold without the assurances of a recognized brand name, su-permarket operators believed that consumers held them directly responsible for itsquality, so much so that they saw produce as the standard by which shoppersjudged the store as a whole. To grocery retailers, then, the smooth operation ofthe produce department amounted to one of their most important jobs, leading tolong discussions in the trade press about marketing strategies.

Grocers also saw produce – particularly exotic goods that consumers were notyet accustomed to seeing in the supermarket – as key impulse purchase items thatrounded out their overall appeal to shoppers’ senses. Yet impulse purchases fol-lowed only when consumers found the tactile qualities of the fresh fruits and veg-etables attractive enough to stimulate their appetites. “Are your fresh, perishablefoods really fresh, firm, crisp?” one speaker asked an audience at the 1954 SMIconvention.86 While grocers had of course always attempted to keep merchandisefresh, supermarket operators employed new technologies to ensure that shoppersin perishable departments found the freshest items. The use of air conditioninggenerated significant benefits. As early as 1939, Super Market Merchandisingmen-tioned the benefits of air conditioning on produce sales. “Vegetables retain theircrispness longer, and fruit remains firm,” it explained.87 Air conditioning alsohelped keep fruits and vegetables smelling fresh, an especially important draw forthe produce department. In 1958, motivational researcher Pierre Martineau toldreaders of Super Market Merchandising that success in a self-service produce de-partment meant highlighting the “aroma” and “mouth-watering aspects” of freshfoods. The most successful merchants brought “food as close to the shopper’s noseand mouth as it is possible to get it,” he argued.88

Crafting advertisements that highlighted the sensuous qualities of producemeant using language with a sexual charge, an approach supermarket companiesembraced. In 1953, a contributor to Super Market Manager, A. A. Irwin, recom-mended language that illustrated how retailers furthered the notion of an eroticpayoff in supermarket shopping. Urging grocers to use equal care in selecting boththe fruits and vegetables they pictured in their ads as well as “an appropriate mes-sage or phrase” to highlight the “emotional” appeals of those items, Irwin listedcombinations that he thought would move produce from the display case to theshopping cart.89 He recommended “so crisp they snap and ooze with juice,” asone option for apples. Bananas, Irwin wrote, could be sold with “firm, golden,yellow,” and, even more provocatively, “plump, ripe, ready-to-use.” Irwin’s ideason phrases to market grapefruit – “juicy, meaty” and “real giants – largest size grown” – like-wise demonstrated the importance of the tactile qualities of merchandise that, the ar-ticle strongly implied, excited more than shoppers’ taste buds. 90


A 1955 ad for Food Town, a Washington, D.C.-area supermarket, is particu-larly useful in uncovering retailers’ enthusiasm for language that linked themes ofsensation, desire and eroticism to sell produce. Highlighting Food Town’s “dewyfresh produce,” it featured a bikini-clad woman amidst the store’s tomatoes, oneof which she eyes much as A. A. Irwin might have imagined (Figure 3). The textabove the figure’s head – “Speaking of . . . Tomatoes” – unblushingly suggests a re-lationship between the figure’s breasts and the tomatoes; it continues in smaller,but easily legible, print below her knees: “Deliciously firm, lusciously ripe toma-toes. Bursting with that vine-ripened, home-grown flavor you love – for salads,slicing or however you prefer.”91

Figure 3

Figure 3: Food Town advertisement, Washington Post, 29 July 1955, 11.

A literal interpretation of the Food Town advertisement might hold that itwas meant for the men who increasingly roamed the aisles of the postwar super-market. As Lizabeth Cohen has pointed out, the central importance of con-sumption to ideas about the health of the nation state and the identity of thepostwar family led men to take a more visible role in grocery shopping, though


they most often did so in the company of their children or spouse, or both. Con-temporary industry observers also noted a growing male presence in the super-market. In response, retailers occasionally targeted ads at male shoppers thatplayed upon gender stereotypes, including male taste preferences for meat andother hearty foods.92

In addition, supermarket operators occasionally employed marketing ap-proaches that used female sexuality to attract men’s business, including the use ofbeauty pageant winners as attractions at store promotions. 1950, for instance, sawtwo D.C.-area supermarkets turn to such methods. In April, Shirley Food Storesurged customers to drop by to see “the gorgeous bathing beauties from MiamiBeach” as part of its effort to generate interest in its contest for a Florida vacation.93

Four months later, attendees at the grand opening of Buckingham Super Marketwere treated to an appearance by “Miss. Washington of 1949 and 1950” as well asthe standard opening-day merchandise giveaways.94 In 1963, Progressive Grocer re-ported the success of a “warm weather sales stimulator” in Wisconsin. The oper-ator in question apparently grew bored with his “County Fair Promotion” so heannounced via radio a prize for the first woman to arrive at his store dressed in abathing suit, high heels and fur coat. The publication offered no pictures of the“two brunettes” who showed up. Still, it suggested that the owner used picturesof the “stunning results” as publicity material for the following two weeks, demon-strating one of the ways supermarket operators addressed any troubling questionsabout how they courted other men as customers.95 Men came to the supermarket,according to these kinds of promotions, not for the subdued lighting and softmusic, but to ogle women and enjoy a form of locker-room humor.

Yet such direct references to the male gaze, and indeed to men in general, re-mained limited in supermarket advertising in the postwar decade. Retailers con-tinued to understand their most important customers as women, even those withhusbands and children in tow, as is evidenced in the continued focus on the habitsof female shoppers in the trade literature, the overwhelming appearance of house-wives in supermarket advertising, and the continued focus on women as the mostknowledgeable and seasoned grocery shoppers in the national media. Anotherinterpretation of the “Speaking of Tomatoes” advertisement, then, holds that thefemale figure represents not the bathing beauties that showed up at store openings,but, rather, the typical housewife, as conceptualized by grocers. The equation ofthe tactilic and taste features of tomatoes and breasts does not mean that super-market advertisers meant to literally promise women sexual thrills in the producesection. At minimum, however, the ad encouraged women to associate the phys-ical excitements of sexual experiences with the pleasures of touching, smellingand tasting fresh food. The ad, in other words, held out the image of the postwarhousewife as a highly sexual being, but one who happily contained her desireswithin the confines of an institution – the supermarket – that helped her fulfill aconservative domestic role.

A final advertisement sums up the full range of ways that operators portrayedsupermarket shopping as exciting for women, in both sensory and sexual terms. In


1950, Super Market Merchandising profiled advertisements by a California super-market, Hiram’s Shopping Center, one of which featured a female figure thatlooked similar to the Publix mural pictured in Look magazine years later (Figure4). “Everyday a Spring Day!” the ad announced. The copy pictured a busty, vi-vacious shopper floating through the clouds with a Horn of Plenty on her shoul-der, highlighting the gustatory delights of the natural bounty available at Hiram’s.Going on to declare that the “air-conditioned breezes” and “soothing music” madeshopping at Hiram’s “spring-filled markets” simply blissful, it listed the positivetactile and aural pleasures of shopping the store, leaving the other “modern” fea-tures of the supermarket (cleanliness, efficiency, brightness) implied. The eroticspirit of the copy comes through most explicitly at the bottom of the image, wheretwo flute-wielding Pans – the Greek god of shepherds, flocks, wilderness and for-nication, known especially for his sexual prowess – seem to be pulling all of thesensory strings, playing their instruments to induce the shopper’s blissful trance.96

Figure 4

Figure 4: Hiram's Advertisement (Del Chostner, "Hiram's Promotes Hiram's -- Not Specials," SuperMarket Merchandising, October 1950, 85.)


III. Conclusion

Advertisements that featured Greek Pans providing women with erotic sen-sations in the supermarket illustrate the most visible way that grocers worked topromote conservative values of domesticity. The history of that effort throws lighton the extent to which merchants – seeking to make profits – pushed the bound-aries of what was deemed culturally acceptable or “normal” at any one moment intime, in this case the values related to family roles, sex and gender in mid-twen-tieth century commercial culture. Representing one interpretive approach,Christopher Holmes Smith, a media and cultural studies scholar, has found imagesof the housewife-as-sexpot in postwar advertisements for frozen food. Writing inreference to May’s sexual containment thesis, he suggests that the ribald imagescan be understood as a “subversive discourse that undermined the normalized fe-male sexuality deemed appropriate to domestic preparedness in the atomic age.”97

Alongside more conservative discourses of motherhood, in other words, ad menoffered up images that undermined prevailing norms of sexuality and gender. Inthis sense, ad men (and the advertisements they created) offered critical com-mentary on postwar culture because they presented views of housewives thatopenly conflicted with conservative domestic norms.98

Historians of postwar culture have produced slightly more nuanced views ofhow merchants wrestled with cultural norms related to family life. One approachexplores how writers and other social commentators used humor and satire to pokefun at prevailing norms, a practice that revealed deep-seated discomfort with thosenorms.99 Closely related are studies that trace how advertisers subtly pushed on the bound-aries of what viewers deemed culturally acceptable by promising housewives notsubversive forms of sexual expression, but rather, limited forms of independencefrom the confines of family responsibilities. As Andrew Hurley has argued in astudy of diners, bowling alleys and trailer parks in postwar culture, marketers oftencreated advertisements that subtlety acknowledged how women might use con-sumption as a brief, leisurely respite from the confines of family life. Ad men, inthis view, offered subtle winks to housewives, but never in ways that openly con-flicted with the “sacred conventions of a proper family life.”100

The evidence from the sensory supermarket is more congruent with the in-terpretive approach taken by Hurley, but it suggests something even more con-servative at work in the minds of grocery retailers. In Food Is Love: FoodAdvertising and Gender Roles in Modern America, historian Katherine J. Parkinstresses the thematic coherence – a “surprising sameness,” she terms it – of twen-tieth century food advertising.101 Producing copy that relentlessly remindedwomen that meal preparation constituted an expression of commitment (“love”)to their families, the food industry sold both its products and a conservative, gen-dered division of household labor. Advertisements with images of homemakers,dutifully working in the kitchen to express a deep commitment to the nuclearfamily, bolster historical interpretations that stress the concept of “containment”as the main organizing principle of mid-twentieth century domestic culture.102


The hypersexual housewives who roamed the pages of the supermarket trade lit-erature and the food pages of the nation’s newspapers illustrate the central role ofconsumption, sensuality, eroticism and sex in the promotion of these deeply con-servative notions of gender arrangements. Parkin suggests that portrayals ofwomen in food advertising may have actually inhibited women’s embrace of iden-tities outside the confines of the family,103 but it may be that promises of erotic ful-fillment in the supermarket eventually provided the next generation of womenwith a handy reference point to articulate their frustrations. In The Feminine Mys-tique, Betty Friedan described the unnerving confusion in the minds of many post-war women when they failed to achieve “mysterious fulfillment” (rendered“orgasm,” in the introductory material to later editions) when they waxed thekitchen floor, a comment that she just as easily could have made about super-market shopping.104

Department of Liberal ArtsChicago, IL 60603

ENDNOTES

I presented versions of this paper at the annual meetings of the American Studies Association and theOrganization of American Historians as well as to the working seminar of the Market Cultures NYCGroup. Thanks to everyone who offered constructive criticism and encouragement, especiallyMichelle Feather, Tracey Deutsch, Larry Grubbs, Lawrence Glickman, Mark Smith, Noël Sturgeon,and the members of the Market Cultures Group.

1. “Publix Aims Store Openings at Year-Round Customers,” Chain Store Age (hereafter CSA) (Gro-cery Managers Edition), November 1960, 72-73 (all quotations).

2. The origins of the sensory-oriented approach to history go back at least to the work of two Frenchhistorians, Lucien Febvre and Alain Corbin, published in English in the 1980s (Alain Corbin, The Fouland the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, trans. Miriam Kochan, Roy Porter, and Christo-pher Prendergast [Cambridge, 1986]; Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century:The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb [Cambridge, 1982]). As early as 1991, Anthropolo-gist David Howes edited a collection of essays that outlined a research agenda for an Anthropologicalapproach to the senses (David Howes, ed., The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook on the An-thropology of the Senses [Toronto, 1991]). Four years later, George H. Roeder, Jr. issued the first call forwork on the senses in U.S. history (George H. Roeder, Jr. “Coming to Our Senses,” Journal of Ameri-can History 81 [1994]: 1112-1122). Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, 2003);Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge,2000); Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 2001); Emily Thomp-son, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge, 2002). Richard Cullen Rath holds that the reasons for the focus on hearing thatcharacterized this first generation of scholarship are simply unclear (Richard Cullen Rath, “HearingAmerican History,” Journal of American History 95 [2008]: 420).

3. Recently published roundtables in two of the historical profession’s leading journals, the Journal ofAmerican History and the Journal of Social History, illustrate sensory history’s expanding profile (“His-tory of the Senses,” Journal of Social History 40 [2007]: 841-914; Mark M. Smith, ed., “The Senses inAmerican History: A Round Table,” Journal of American History 95 [2008]: 378-451). The new in-


terdisciplinary series in sensory studies by Berg publishers (Sensory Formations, ed. David Howes) andsensory history by the University of Illinois Press (Studies in Sensory History, ed. Mark M. Smith) as wellas the 2006 debut of the journal, The Senses & Society, also highlight the growing interest in the sensesand sensory perception in the humanities and social sciences.

Berg’s Sensory Formations series also illustrates the tendency to focus research on one of the fivesenses. To date, Berg has published volumes on hearing (Michael Bull and Les Back, eds., The Audi-tory Culture Reader [Oxford, 2003]); smell (Jim Drobnick, ed., The Smell Culture Reader [Oxford, 2006]);taste (Carolyn Korsmeyer, ed., The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink [Oxford, 2005]);touch (Constance Classen, ed., The Book of Touch [Oxford, 2005]); and vision (Elizabeth Edwards andKaushik Bhaumik, eds., Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader [Oxford, 2008]). Two influential exceptionsto the tendency to focus on one of the senses in favor of a multisensory approach are Peter Charles Hof-fer, Sensory Worlds of Early America (Baltimore, 2004) and Mark M. Smith, How Race is Made: Slav-ery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill, 2006).

4. Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berke-ley, 2007), 126. Such an approach is especially welcome because it challenges a fundamental prem-ise of long-standing thinking on the senses, namely the notion of a western sensory hierarchy in whichvision, because of its association with distance and rationality, achieved pride of place and thus fargreater emphasis in modern institutions than the proximate, “lower” senses of taste, touch, and smell.The idea of a western sensory hierarchy with vision at the top is occasionally termed the “Great Di-vide” thesis, in reference to the elevation of sight in western thought that followed from the influenceof the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The thesis, which Smith has termed “the most influen-tial framework shaping how historians have examined the senses,” is, as he notes, most often associ-ated with the work of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, particularly McLuhan’s The GutenbergGalaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto, 1962) (Smith, Sensing the Past, 8-9).

5. David Howes, “Can These Dry Bones Live? An Anthropological Approach to the History of theSenses,” Journal of American History 95 (2008): 448-9.

6. Standard works include Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Moder-nity (Berkeley, 1985); T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising inAmerica (New York, 1994); William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a NewAmerican Culture (New York, 1993); Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-ClassShoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York, 1989); Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed:The Making of the American Mass Market (New York, 1989); Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved:The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York, 1990); Richard Butsch, ed., For Fun and Profit: TheTransformation of Leisure into Consumption (Philadelphia, 1990); John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million:Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1978).

7. As early as the 1970s, historians Neil Harris and John Kasson published influential books that ex-plored the power of spectacular new sights to stimulate the development of a consumption-orientedculture in the United States (Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum [Chicago, 1973]; Kasson,Amusing the Million). As James W. Cook has recently pointed out, Harris and Kasson’s studies precededthe publication of the English version of Guy DeBord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), a powerfullyargued study that further stimulated work in the visualist vein (James W. Cook, “Seeing the Visual inU.S. History,” Journal of American History 95 [2008]: 435; Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle,trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith [Cambridge, 1995]). The emphasis on vision, as it relates to retailing,is arguably most prominent in the work on department stores, especially Leach’s Land of Desire andWilliam Leach, “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890-1925,” Journal of American History 71 (1984): 319-42. The key work on the post-World War II UnitedStates is Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cam-bridge, 1994).

8. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (NewYork, 1999), 7-8.


9. David Howes, “Hyperesthesia, or, The Sensual Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Empire of the Senses:The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes (Oxford, 2005), 288-92, 291 (quotation). Unlike stan-dard consumer surveys, the ZMET requires subjects to complete a series of interviews, collect imagesthat reflect their thinking on the interview questions, and create a digital presentation of those im-ages. The goal is to help researchers determine consumers’ subconscious attitudes – including sensoryassociations – towards particular brands or products in hopes of enhancing the persuasiveness of ad-vertising and product design. For a general summary of the ZMET, see Martha Lagace, “The Mind ofthe Market: Extending the Frontiers of Marketing Thought,” Harvard Business School Working Knowl-edge (22 February 2000) http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/1318.html (accessed November 13, 2008).

10. Examples of influential books that stress merchants’ efforts to outline the broad contours of con-sumer culture are Marchand, Advertising the American Dream; Lears, Fables of Abundance; Strasser, Sat-isfaction Guaranteed; Tedlow, New and Improved; Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politicsof Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003), especially chapter 6; Andrew Hurley, Din-ers, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Consumer Culture (NewYork, 2001).

11. For a guide to the debate on prescriptive literature as a source for research in history – in thisessay, industry trade journals – see the comprehensive and helpful “Essay on Sources” in JessamynNeuhaus, Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America (Balti-more, 2003), especially 319-20.

12. Susan Strasser has pointed out that the chain owned and operated stores of the World War I eraembodied the “scientific retailing.” The term derives from the chains’ emphasis on an assembly lineapproach to retailing that allowed merchants to move goods faster and in greater quantities than everbefore. The three basic characteristics of the approach, as it related to retailing in general, were afixed price (or, one-price) policy, an emphasis on a high turnover of merchandise, and departmental-ized stores. Starting in the second decade of the twentieth century, chain grocers added self-serviceto the mix, a format that expanded slowly over the course of the 1910s and 1920s (Strasser, Satisfac-tion Guaranteed, 204-06). On the chain company that popularized self-service in grocery sales, PigglyWiggly, see Lisa C. Tolbert, “The Aristocracy of the Market Basket: Self-Service Food Shopping in theNew South,” in Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart, ed. Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz(Philadelphia, 2009), 179-95.

As Tracey Deutsch has suggested, the chain groceries of the first few decades of the twentieth cen-tury – the long forerunner to supermarkets – appealed to consumers chiefly on the basis of low prices,reliable and safe food, and the depersonalized (and hence private) shopping derived from standardizedretailing policies (Tracey Deutsch, “Untangling Alliances: Social Tensions Surrounding IndependentGrocery Stores and the Rise of Mass Retailing,” in Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies, ed.Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton [New York, 2002], 165-6).

13. Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca, 1999), 5. On the long his-tory of gendered sensory stereotypes see Constance Classen, “The Witch’s Senses: Sensory Ideologiesand Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity,” in Empire of the Senses, ed. Howes,70-84; Constance Classen, The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination (NewYork, 1998).

14. On department stores see, William Leach’s Land of Desire and Elaine Abelson’s When Ladies GoA-Thieving. As noted above, Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumers’ Republic (especially chapter 6) dealswith the “feminization” of the shopping centers of the post-World War II suburbs. Tracey Deutsch hasexamined grocers’ efforts to “feminize” supermarkets, a point that I address later in the essay (TraceyDeutsch, “Making Change at the Grocery Store: Government, Grocers, and the Problem of Women’sAutonomy in the Creation of Chicago’s Supermarkets, 1920-1950,” Enterprise & Society 5 [2004]: 607-16; Tracey Ann Deutsch, “Making Change at the Grocery Store: Government, Grocers, and the Prob-lem of Women’s Autonomy in the Creation of Chicago’s Supermarkets, 1920-1950,” (Ph.D. diss.,University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2001), chapter 4.


15. Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 278.

16. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, rev. ed. (New York,2008).

17. “Sexual containment” is May’s term (May, Homeward Bound, 99).

18. Industry chroniclers and most academic historians identify two northeastern grocery retailers –King Kullen’s Grocery Company and Big Bear supermarkets – as the originators of the supermarket ap-proach. In these treatments, King Kullen’s, an independent retailing operation that opened its firstunit in Jamaica, New York in 1930, is usually labeled as the “first” supermarket. Big Bear, an inde-pendent operation that opened its first unit in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1932, is identified as a key pop-ularizer. The new “supermarkets” differed from the early self-service groceries and other chain groceriesin that they featured larger, departmentalized selling floors and boasted greater annual sales. The of-ficial industry history of the rise of the supermarket is M. M. Zimmerman, The Super Market: A Revo-lution in Distribution (New York, 1955). On the first American supermarkets see also Tracey Deutsch,“From ‘Wild Animal Stores’ to Women’s Sphere: Supermarkets and the Politics of Mass Consumption,1930-1950,” Business and Economic History 28 (1999): 143-53.

To date there has been little academic work on the history of supermarkets in the United States,a surprising oversight given the deep economic and cultural footprint of the institutions. The publishedstudies have mostly covered the spread of the supermarket in post-World War II Europe (Victoria deGrazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through 20th-Century Europe [Cambridge, 2005], chap-ter 8; Emanuela Scarpellini, “Shopping American-Style: The Arrival of the Supermarket in PostwarItaly,” Enterprise & Society 5 (2004): 625-668; Gareth Shaw, Louise Curth, and Andrew Alexander,“Selling Self-Service and the Supermarket: The Americanisation of Food Retailing in Britain, 1945-1960,” Business History 46 (2004): 568-582. Tracey Deutsch’s work on the origins of supermarkets inChicago in the 1930s and 1940s (note 12 and 14, above) is the exception to the general oversight.

19. Joel Lifflander, “Big Bear and How It Grew,” Super Market Merchandising (hereafter SMM), March1937, 14.

20. According to Richard Tedlow, Big Bear’s sales volume for its first three days almost surpassed whatindividual outlets in the nation’s leading grocery chain, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company(A&P), sold in six months (Tedlow, New and Improved, 233).

21. Deutsch, “From ‘Wild Animal Stores’ to Women’s Sphere,” 145-7; Lifflander, “Big Bear and Howit Grew,” 15.

22. Joseph Neubauer, “Do Flamboyant Advertising Headlines Pay?” SMM, October 1938, 55; “BigBear’s Prize Contests Dispel Usual July Slump,” SMM, August 1937, 8; “Pennies Into Dollars Grow,”SMM, August 1938, 41.

23. “The Consumer Accepts the Super Market,” SMM, November 1936, 15 (all quotations).

24. M. M. Zimmerman, “Super Market Take the Lead in Eliminating This Evil?” SMM, December1936, 3 (emphasis in original).

25. In 1937, Zimmerman helped establish the SMI (Zimmerman, The Super Market, 69-70).

26. “Institute’s Convention Brilliantly Realized,” SMM, October 1938, 8; M. M. Zimmerman, “Fac-ing 1939: The Present State of the Super Market,” SMM, February 1939, 46.

27. Carl W. Dipman, “The Self-Service Store – Things to Do in Planning,” Progressive Grocer (here-after PG), November 1937, 71; Carl W. Dipman and John E. O’Brien, “Self-Service Plans for LargeStores,” PG, March 1938, 42.


28. M. M. Zimmerman, “The Super Market and the Changing Retail Structure,” SMM, January1941, 53.

29. Ibid., 52.

30. Paul S. Willis, “The Manufacturer and the Super Market,” SMM, October 1938, 28.

31. Deutsch, “Making Change at the Grocery Store,” Ph.D. diss., 232.

32. Deutsch, “Making Change at the Grocery Store,” Ph.D. diss., 228. As Deutsch points out, thespread of the supermarket format quickened significantly after the end of the building restrictions ofWorld War II. By 1954, the U.S. Census of Business considered 55 percent of all grocery stores inAmerica “supermarkets”; that percentage reached 71 percent by the mid-1960s (Deutsch, “MakingChange at the Grocery Store,” Ph.D. diss., 318-19).

33. Deutsch, “Making Change at the Grocery Store,” Enterprise & Society, 614.

34. Marcus M. McLean, “Better Lighting for Better Profits,” SMM, September 1938, 22.

35. Robert A. Latimer, “Rapp Opens New $100,000 Super,” SMM, September 1940, 14.

36. Tolbert, 179-95.

37. Richard Longstreth, The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space inLos Angeles, 1914-1941 (Cambridge, 1999), xiii (quotation), 111. On the physical development of ear-lier types of food stores see also, James M. Mayo, The American Grocery Store: The Business Evolutionof an Architectural Space (Westport, 1993); Helen Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nine-teenth-Century America (Baltimore, 2003).

38. Harold H. Martin, “The Grocer the Girls All Love,” Saturday Evening Post, 16 October 1954, 39.

39. Tolbert, 183.

40. Constance Classen, “The Witch’s Senses,” 70-84. See note 13, above.

41. On increased competition and merchandise standardization, see “Not Much More Room to Grow,”Business Week, 4 June 1960, 45-6, 48, 50; “Supermarkets: The Stalled Revolution,” Fortune, July 1962,146-7; Mayo, The American Grocery Store, 171.

42. Edythe Fern Melrose, “What Men Don’t Know About Women,” SMM, June 1954, 82, 84 (em-phasis in original). This is not to suggest that retailers’ marketing efforts completely neglected maleshoppers, a point I discuss later in the essay.

43. M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia,2004), 65-9.

44. B. Sumner Gruzen, “Specifications for the Modern Super,” SMM, May 1939, 34.

45. Arnold Marks, “Fluorescent Lighting a Feature of N.Y. Super,” SMM, June 1940, 12, 55.

46. Matt Hall, “Akron Gets New Pre-Fabricated Super,” SMM, June 1941, 29.

47. John D. Mueller, “Changing Trend Viewed in Dallas,” SMM, February 1940, 26.

48. “A Streamlined Package for the Streamlined Super,” SMM, February 1941, 50. On changes inpackaging generated by changes in retailing see, “Stores and Packaging March Together in Parade of


Progress,” CSA (Grocery Managers Edition), March 1939, 40; “Packaging Steps Up To Super-MarketPace,” CSA (Grocery Managers Edition), April 1941, 48.

49. B. Sumner Gruzen, “How the Architect Plans the Modern Super Market,” SMM, October 1938,80. See also B. Sumner Gruzen, “Automobile Shopping Centers,” SMM, September 1938, 44-7, 54.

50. J. S. Harrison, “The Self-Service Store of Tomorrow Functioning Today!” CSA (Grocery Man-agers Edition), January 1941, 26.

51. Everett L. Finch, “Schaffer Extends Self-Service to Meat Department,” SMM, June 1941, 22.

52. “Designer Eyes New Concepts,” Supermarket News (hereafter SM News), 19 October 1959, 42.

53. “Come Alive with Color,” SMM, November 1956, 68; Howard Ketchum, “Color Gives ‘It’ to YourMarket,” SMM, April 1953, 85, 88; Howard Ketchum, “Color-Styling Livens Acme Markets,” SMM,November 1955, 50; Howard Ketchum, “In the Night All Stores Are Gray,” SMM, June 1954, 108;Marling, As Seen on TV, 220, 263-4.

54. Marling, As Seen on TV, 263-6.

55. “Using Color for Profit in the Super,” SMM, October 1949, 138.

56. “New Food Fair Unit Utilizes Lighting, Floor Decorations, Color, to Control Traffic, Induce Sales,”PG, October 1953, 62; Ketchum, “In the Night,” 108.

57. Ketchum, “Color-Styling,” 50.

58. Marling, As Seen on TV, 220, 263-4.

59. “Murals Brighten Walls, Gives Stores Individuality,” PG, April 1950, 78-9.

60. Emily Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, 3-4.

61. Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (New York, 2001), 35.

62. On the challenges of noise control in the modern supermarket see Niles Hansell, “American FoodCounter,” SMM, April 1940, 49; Robert Latimer, “St. Louis Launches Shopping Center,” SMM, Feb-ruary 1940, 33; “Mass Display and Modern Fixtures,” CSA (Grocery Managers Edition), September1940, 40.

63. “Wyatt Meets Competition With Expansion Program,” SMM, September 1940, 90 (all quota-tions).

64. “The Glamorous ‘Prestige’ Store,” Food Topics, June 1963, 16.

65. “No Rock for Grocery Cart Rolling,” The Trumpter [Acme Markets], (April 1968), clipping file,folder: “Shopper Services: Music,” no p.n., Food Marketing Institute Information Service Library(hereafter FMI library), Food Marketing Institute, Washington, D.C.

66. Edward A. Brand, Modern Supermarket Operation (New York, 1963), 7, 188 (quotation).

67. “No Rock for Grocery Cart Rolling”; “What Songs Do Shoppers Like? Here’s Answer,” newspa-per clipping, 1 May 1956, clipping file, folder: “Shoppers Services: Music, FMI Library, Washington,D.C.; “Shopping to Music,” New York Times, 18 November 1956, sec. 10, 6.


68. “Ad of the Week,” SM News, 17 October 1960, 4.

69. Charles M. Anderson, “Nobody Loves a Store That Has ‘S.O.’,” PG, March 1939, 56.

70. Ibid., 57, 182.

71. I. M. Baker, “Steps to Success in a Self-Service Store,” CSA (Grocery Managers Edition), January1941, 31.

72. E. R. Cline, “Good Refrigeration ‘De-odorizes’ Sea Foods Department,” SMM, April 1941, 34.

73. “Baked Goods Sections Increase Store Traffic,” CSA (Grocery Managers Edition), October 1959,156; “Are You Behind the Times in Baked Goods Merchandise,” PG, October 1948, 61.

74. “On-Premises Bakery: Profitable and then Some,” PG, October 1961, 52; “Frozen and Fancy BakedGoods,” CSA (Grocery Managers Edition), November 1956, 58.

75. “On-Premises Bakery: Profitable and Then Some,” PG, October 1961, 52.

76. “More Modified In-Store Bakeries for Safeway,” CSA (Grocery Managers Edition), July 1962, 58.

77. “Store Cookie Machines Provide Strong Pull for Ralphs,” PG, September 1963, 145.

78. “Why the Bakery Explosion?” CSA (Supermarket Edition), January 1963, 52.

79. Ibid., 52.

80. “Frozen Bakery Boom Hits Chains,” CSA (Supermarket Executives Edition), April 1963, 132.

81. Virginia Miles, “You’ve Got to Know What She Wants,” SMM, May 1955, 188.

82. Ibid.

83. “Demonstrations,” CSA (Grocery Managers Edition), January 1940, 34, 64.

84. “Are You In On In-Store Baking?” SMM, December 1961, 47.

85. Bowlby, 103. As House Beautiful suggested in 1951, “The inherited attitude about good, frugalhousekeeping is that you must treat your grocer and his supplies with suspicion, pinching, inspecting,bargaining, watching his scales with your own eyes, and shopping around for a few cents of advantageon this or that. But all that is a relic from the days before refrigeration, canning, packaging, and mod-ern distribution methods” (“What You Keep on Hand is the Key to Your Leisure,” House Beautiful,March 1951, 87).

86. Edythe Fern Melrose, “What Men Don’t Know About Women,” SMM, June 1954, 82.

87. William B. Henderson, “Air-Conditioning a Factor in Comfort and Profit,” SMM, July 1939, 6,23.

88. Pierre Martineau, “The Importance of Store Personality,” SMM, October 1958, 51-2.

89. Ibid., 20.

90. A. A. Irwin, “How to Get the Most from Your Produce Advertising Dollar,” Super Market Man-ager, April 1953, 18, 32.


91. Food Town advertisement, Washington Post (hereafter WP), 29 July 1955, 11.

92. Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 146-50.

93. Shirley Food Stores advertisement, WP, 7 April 1950, 19.

94. Buckingham Super Market advertisement, WP, 29 September 1950.

95. “Profit Talk,” Progressive Grocer, February 1963, 68.

96. Del Chostner, “Hiram’s Promotes Hiram’s – Not Specials,” SMM, October 1950, 85.

97. Christopher Holmes Smith, “Freeze Frames: Frozen Foods and Memories of the Postwar Ameri-can Family,” in Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race, ed. Sher-rie A. Inness (Philadelphia, 2001), 203.

98. Holmes’s approach reflects the stream of work on post World War II America that explores howforms of popular culture subvert social norms (For an example and overview see the essays in JoelForeman, ed., The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury Icons [Urbana, 1997]).

99. As it relates to postwar gender norms see, Neuhaus, Manly Meals, chapter 11; Nancy Walker,“Humor and Gender Roles: The ‘Funny’ Feminism of the Post-World War II Suburbs,” American Quar-terly 37 (1985): 99-113. The leading work on “liberal satire” in the 1950s and 1960s United States isStephen E. Kercher’s Revel With a Cause (Chicago, 2006).

100. Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks, 291.

101. Katherine J. Parkin, Food Is Love: Food Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America (Philadel-phia, 2006), 8.

102. This is of course not to say that “domestic containment” represented the sole reference point forthinking on gender and the family in postwar culture. A large body of work has shown how someAmericans adopted alternative reference points and behavior. An excellent starting point that dealswith women and family life is Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Post-war America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia, 1994).

103. Parkin, 53, 68-9, 96-7.

104. In the original edition of The Feminine Mystique, Friedan wrote, “If a woman had a problem inthe 1950’s and 1960’s, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. . .. What kind of woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor”(Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, Norton edition [New York, 1997], 19). In the Introduction tothe Tenth Anniversary edition of the book, she wrote, “locked as we were in that mystique, which keptus passive and apart, and kept us from seeing our real problems and possibilities, I, like other women,thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchenfloor” (Friedan, 1997 Norton edition, 3). And in the introductory essay, “Metamorphosis,” to Nor-ton’s 1997 edition, “that image, which I called the ‘feminine mystique,’ was so pervasive, . . that eachwoman thought she was alone, it was her personal guilt, if she didn’t have an orgasm waxing the fam-ily room floor (Friedan, 1997 Norton edition, xv-xvi).

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