Australian Women in Advertising in the Twentieth Century

J. Dickenson

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137514349
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

When did Australian women first enter the advertising industry? The stereotypical advertising executive might be a pony-tailed, Ferrari-driving, young-ish man, but women have worked in Australian advertising agencies from the first years of the modern industry, and today they comprise half of the industry's workforce. Australian Women in Advertising in the Twentieth Century rescues these women from their obscurity. By employing a broader definition of advertising than usual, this study reveals the important role women have played in the development of the Australian advertising industry, sheds light on women's struggle to reach the higher echelons of the industry, and considers why the popular image of the advertising executive is at such variance from the reality. The experiences of these remarkable women across a century of Australian advertising provide valuable information on the role of gender in the development of this ubiquitous industry, as well as the encroachment of consumer culture.

1

Advertising: A Suitable Career?

Abstract: Dickenson shows that in the first decade of the twentieth century Australian women were attracted to advertising work by the promise of personal growth, good pay and the opportunity to travel. Reports arrived from overseas of women succeeding in the industry but support for women in advertising came with heavy caveats around the potential impact of advertising work on women’s ‘femininity’. Despite this ambivalence, Australian women responded to the siren call of the industry from its earliest days. Most then remained in support roles but, as this chapter shows, some went on to build strong and rewarding careers.

Dickenson, Jackie. Australian Women in Advertising in the Twentieth Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137514349.0007.

From the 1890s ‘The Business Girl’ became a familiar sight on Australia’s city streets: ‘Trim and wholesome in white-spotted navy print’, a business girl ‘invariably looked as if she had just left the morning shower, for the effect was fresh and sweet’.¹ She performed predominantly clerical work – typing, filing and stenography. These tasks required little initiative and women in Australia, as in other industrialised societies, were encouraged to be satisfied with such work, because pursuing more challenging careers might threaten the ‘traditional’ home. Those women who were satisfied with a support role in business could use their ‘wifely’ skills and ‘sunny personality’ to make themselves indispensable to the firm’s smooth running. Increasingly, though, the modern woman was attracted by the possibility of personal growth and satisfaction a business career offered.²

For such women, the advertising industry was ideal. The division of labour in the advertising office provided opportunities beyond clerical work for women with the skills and interest in pursuing them. As part of a bohemian world of creativity – a world of writers and artists – the industry seemed glamorous and varied. It even offered the possibility of travel. Reports arrived from overseas of women succeeding in the industry, and Australian women read English novels featuring advertising agencies in which women played prominent roles. But support for women in advertising came with heavy caveats around the potential impact of advertising work on women’s ‘femininity’. Despite this ambivalence, Australian women responded to the siren call of the industry from its earliest days. Most then remained in support roles but, as this chapter will show, some – more than is usually accounted for – built strong and rewarding careers.

From the end of the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of educated, middle-class Australian women sought paid work.³ Advertising provided an acceptable route for many of these women to enter the workforce, and Australian newspapers encouraged women to seek careers in the industry, promoting it as ‘just about the only profession in which women have equal chances to men’.⁴ This was because it was ‘a comparatively new profession free from the conventions and traditions’ which ‘often bar the progress of women in older established callings’. In advertising, ‘the clever girl’ soon made her way, and once her work began ‘to tell’, promotion was much more rapid than in ‘more stereotyped avenues of employment’.⁵

Women were advised to put aside their fears of failure and penury and embrace an interesting career; working hard at something that did not interest you made a woman sick, wrote one advertising woman. Jane Moore had started as a stenographer in an advertising agency (it is not clear whether in Australia, Britain or the United States) but found the work dull and now worked as private secretary to the manager of the same agency, earning four times her previous salary. The shift had saved her from a nervous breakdown. The work was fun: Moore recalled entering the office of ‘one of the most enthusiastic advertising solicitors [canvassers] I ever knew’. ‘The first thing that caught my eye’, she wrote, ‘was a big, handsome motto, which read: “There’s no work in this office, because we love what we are doing. It is all play.” ’⁶

America, the home of the modern advertising industry, provided the first role models for Australian women. As early as 1900, they were told of the ‘marvellous activity of American women’, especially in Boston, where women owned the two largest advertising agencies and employed only women.⁷ Two years later, Louisa Lawson’s feminist paper the Dawn noted that, although few Australian women were employed in advertising, in New York women were doing well in the industry.⁸ Perhaps American women were ‘more enterprising than their sisters elsewhere’, Lawson wrote, but then they did have ‘greater opportunities’. American advertising was reported to be ‘one of the best and richest fields for women’. Beatrice Hastings, the director of ‘one of the largest trade papers in New York’, was paid $25,000 (£5,000) a year (as much as the chief executive of the largest Australian company in any industry), and there were ‘several women’ who made $15,000 (£3,000) a year. These were known as ‘five-figure women’, and there were many of them in other businesses, too, including women bank managers in New York and directors of various trust companies.⁹ ‘One of the best paid women in the field of advertising’ was an American, Jane Johnston Martin, who earned £2,000 a year working as an advertisement manager in New York. She had started her working life as a stenographer with a ‘lace and embroidery house’, then, at 19, became a private secretary to the owner of a patent medicine firm, where she took on the role of the advertising manager.¹⁰ Reports also arrived in Australia in 1923 of the achievements of Margaret Woodrow Wilson, who was working as a partner in a national advertising agency ‘with headquarters in New York’. ‘The advertising game’ had particularly appealed to Wilson, the eldest daughter of the former American president, and she had ‘prepared herself for it by 12 months’ intensive study’.¹¹

Visits to Australia by successful British advertising women were also widely reported.¹² Arriving in Melbourne in 1928, Miss J. A. Reynolds, the managing director of Samson Clark Advertising in London, advised that: ‘to the modern woman the business of advertising offers the biggest scope and makes the most picturesque appeal.’ If a woman wanted to succeed in advertising she had to make her work ‘the chief object of her life’ and be prepared to sacrifice other things – marriage and children – for it. Women were particularly good at advertising because they were ‘more original [than men] – often more venturesome too’.¹³

Women’s gift for originality became a theme of this promotion. Leila Lewis wrote from London encouraging Australian women working in publicity and advertising to ‘be individual’ and ambitious. Her career had started in a Fleet Street advertising agency where ‘everything came my way – copywriting, ordering blocks and newspaper space, making up appropriations. I had to pass the proofs, type letters and, finally – never watch the clock!’ Lewis had ‘set out to get to the top of the [publicity] tree, which means ... that until I get the most important billet at the best salary that has ever been paid to a publicity manager I shall keep on toiling’.¹⁴ News also arrived from London of the formation of a Women’s Advertising Association, and its president Miss Foster introduced her team of ‘charming girls’ who worked in ‘an equally charming studio’ in ‘happy feminine activity’. According to Foster, the chances for success in advertising were ‘equally divided among men and women’; ‘the woman advertisement writer should prove herself a specialist’ in preparing advertisements for goods that ‘specially attract the woman buyer’.¹⁵ Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Advertising: A Suitable Career?
• 2  Educating Shoppers in the 1920s
• 3  Elma Kellys Empire: An Australian in Asia
• 4  Looking Out to the World
• 5  The Girls Who Made It
• 6  Advertising and Beyond
• 7  Women Experts and Consumer Culture
• 8  Selling Fashion after World War Two
• 9  Bold Invaders: The Impact of the Womens Movement
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index