'Bring Joy to Your Home with the Real Frigidaire': Advertising the Refrigerator to Belgian Female Consumers, 1955-1965

摘要

Advertisements provide a link between the symbolical, ideal, practical and informative notions of domesticity and technology and shed light on the material culture of the home and domesticity. In this article, I focus on the home as a material place where technological and consumerist trends develop, how these trends were linked to meanings of domesticity, and how they affected gendered identities, practices, labor, and ultimately tastes of home. I argue that in the normalization of the refrigerator, the promotion of a technology-based domestic life was not uniform in its meanings, entitlements, or strategies. First, the consumer was confronted not with uniformity but with a multitude of meanings, arguments and promises that came with the refrigerator. Second, gender roles and identities were less varied. Third, the hard sell-soft sell dichotomy did not prevail, and emotional or hedonistic appeals were often combined with directly spelled-out advantages. The refrigerator advertisements studied here appeared in a Belgian women's magazine between 1955 and 1965 and constructed family life and tastes of home around elevated standards of comfort, care, aesthetics, and choice, more so than around a scientific rationalization of household work and organization.