Advertising was the mechanism responsible for Americans' sudden embrace of new standards of hygiene and grooming. By tracking the influence of advertising on changing habits of everyday life, Vincent Vinikas also traces the emergence of advertising as an agency of socialization in modern America. In Soft Soap, Hard Sell, Vinikas shows how advertising functions as a social institution, telling people who they are and how they fit in. He does this by exploring: how advertisers like Lambert Pharmacal created new consumer needs, convincing the public overnight to gargle with a product that previously had been used only to disinfect homes and hospitals; how a barrage of advertising for cosmetics led to a new look for women as Americans grappled with the emancipation of the New Woman of the 1920s; how managing consumer demand through public relations resulted in the birth of the modern beauty parlor; how soap manufacturers united to form the Cleanliness Institute to teach Americans the importance of using soap lavishly; and how popular magazines became the vehicle of both national advertising and national culture in the early twentieth century. Soft Soap, Hard Sell is for the reader interested in the history of social trends and American popular culture. It is a valuable supplementary study for courses in American social and business history, women's studies, and modern mass culture.

Advertising was the mechanism responsible for Americans' sudden embrace of new standards of hygiene and grooming. By tracking the influence of advertising on changing habits of everyday life, Vincent Vinikas also traces the emergence of advertising as an agency of socialization in modern America. In Soft Soap, Hard Sell, Vinikas shows how advertising functions as a social institution, telling people who they are and how they fit in. He does this by exploring: how advertisers like Lambert Pharmacal created new consumer needs, convincing the public overnight to gargle with a product that previously had been used only to disinfect homes and hospitals; how a barrage of advertising for cosmetics led to a new look for women as Americans grappled with the emancipation of the New Woman of the 1920s; how managing consumer demand through public relations resulted in the birth of the modern beauty parlor; how soap manufacturers united to form the Cleanliness Institute to teach Americans the importance of using soap lavishly; and how popular magazines became the vehicle of both national advertising and national culture in the early twentieth century. Soft Soap, Hard Sell is for the reader interested in the history of social trends and American popular culture. It is a valuable supplementary study for courses in American social and business history, women's studies, and modern mass culture.

Basic philosophies - Advertisers - Agencies - Creative approach - Traps for the unwary - Early days - The media - Print - Television - Radio - Outdoor - Cinema - Direct mail - Consumer movement - Research - Government and politics.

This book is an unorthodox biography of William Hesketh Lever, 1st Lord Leverhulme (1851-1925), the founder of the Lever Brothers’ Sunlight Soap empire. Unlike previous biographies, which have focused on the man’s life story and eccentricities, or just considered one aspect of his career, So clean places him squarely in his social and cultural context and is fully informed by recent historical scholarship. Much more than a warts-and-all biography, the book uses Lever as an entry-point for contextualized and comparative essays on the history of advertising; on factory paternalism, town planning, the Garden City movement and their ramifications across the twentieth century; and on colonialism and forced labour in the Belgian Congo and the South Pacific. It concludes with a discussion of his extraordinary attempt, in his final years, to transform crofting and fishing in the Outer Hebrides. Written in an engaging and accessible style, So Clean will appeal to academics and students working in business, social, cultural and imperial history.

Flapper is a dazzling look at the women who heralded a radical change in American culture and launched the first truly modern decade. The New Woman of the 1920s puffed cigarettes, snuck gin, hiked her hemlines, danced the Charleston, and necked in roadsters. More important, she earned her own keep, controlled her own destiny, and secured liberties that modern women take for granted. Flapper is an inside look at the 1920s. With tales of Coco Chanel, the French orphan who redefined the feminine form; Lois Long, the woman who christened herself “Lipstick” and gave New Yorker readers a thrilling entrée into Manhattan’s extravagant Jazz Age nightlife; three of America’s first celebrities: Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks; Dallas-born fashion artist Gordon Conway; Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, whose swift ascent and spectacular fall embodied the glamour and excess of the era; and more, this is the story of America’s first sexual revolution, its first merchants of cool, its first celebrities, and its most sparkling advertisement for the right to pursue happiness. Whisking us from the Alabama country club where Zelda Sayre first caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald to Muncie, Indiana, where would-be flappers begged their mothers for silk stockings, to the Manhattan speakeasies where patrons partied till daybreak, historian Joshua Zeitz brings the 1920s to exhilarating life.