Abstract
It’s a truly groundbreaking moment in the history of housework advertising, but don’t blink or you might miss it: for about three seconds in a 2009 commercial for Mr. Clean’s Magic Eraser, a husband (you can see his wedding ring) demonstrates the product by wiping soap scum off a bathtub. However, just in case the sight of a man kneeling by a bathtub to clean it comes too close to uncomfortably challenging our ideas about the gendered nature of housework, he quickly tosses the Magic Eraser out the window to another man, who uses it to swab down the patio chairs—a suitably masculine household cleaning task. Then he tosses it to another man washing a car, truly male-appropriate cleaning work. Maybe we will continue to see more husbands cleaning the bathroom in ads and commercials, but such an alteration would require a seismic change in housework advertising generally and bathroom cleaning products specifically. From 1900 to today, in print and television advertising for such products, men never, ever clean the toilet, sink, tub, or bathroom floor. The sole exception is if they are in the military and are on “latrine duty.”
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Notes
On early water home water systems, see Maureen Ogle, “Domestic Reform and American Household Plumbing, 1840–1870,” Winterthur Portfolio 28, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 36, 51.
On plumbing patents, new home building, and bathrooms in working-class homes, see Jacqueline Wilkie, “Submerged Sensuality: Technology and Perceptions of Bathing,” Journal of Social History 19, no. 4 (1986): 653–654.
On the siphon toilet, see Merritt Ierley, “The Bathroom: An Epic,” American Heritage 50, no. 3 (1999): 76–82, 84.
On porcelain and vitreous china fixtures, see May N. Stone, “The Plumbing Paradox: American Attitudes Towards Late Nineteenth-Century Domestic Sanitary Arrangements,” Winterthur Portfolio 14, no. 3 (1979): 286.
On built-in tubs and chrome fixtures, see Juliann Sivulka, Stronger Than Dirt: A Cultural History of Advertising Personal Hygiene in America, 1875–1940 (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 117–118, 169.
On different kinds of early bathing receptacles, see Wilkie, “Submerged Sensuality,” 650. See also Thomas C. Hubka and Judith Kenny, “Examining the American Dream: Housing Standards and the Emergence of a National Housing Culture, 1900–1930,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 13, no. 1 (2006): 46–69.
Maureen Ogle, All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Gail Caskey Winkler and Roger Moss, “How the Bathroom Got White Tiles … And Other Victorian Tales,” Historic Preservation 36, no. 1 (1984): 32–35.
Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 59–86.
Sivulka, Stronger Than Dirt, 112. As Lydia Martens and Sue Scott write: “Protecting the members of a domestic circle from harm has been conceived as a primary concern of the domestic practitioner, ingrained in the very meaning of homemaking and housewifery.” “Under the Kitchen Surface: Domestic Products and Conflicting Constructions of Home,” Home Cultures 3, no. 1 (2006): 42. See also Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
Warren Dotz and Jim Morton, What a Character! 20th Century American Advertising Icons (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1996), 9.
See also Julie Franz, “Spokescritters Speak Up from Retail Shelves,” Advertising Age, June 9, 1986, 11–12.
Judith A. Garretson and Scot Burton, “The Role of Spokescharacters as Advertisements and Package Cues in Integrated Marketing Communications,” Journal of Marketing, no. 4 (October 2005): 118–132.
Christine Mierau, Accept No Substitutes: The History of American Advertising (Minneapolis: Lerner, 2000), 76.
John Voight, “Mascot Makeover,” Adweek, July 7, 2003, 20.
Unless otherwise noted, all subsequently cited Old Dutch advertisements are from D’Arcy Collection, Communications Library, University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne (hereafter cited as D’Arcy Collection). On “house-cleaning,” see Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Henry Holt, 1982, 2000), 61–63.
On American expectations regarding the bathroom, see Strasser, Never Done, 102. On the bathroom of the 1920s, see Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1985), 125. See also Sivulka, Stronger Than Dirt, 161.
Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, The Bathroom, The Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1992), 26.
Ann McClintock discusses domestic labor and hands as fetish in Victorian England in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), 98–100.
See, for example, Annie S. Barnes, “White Mistresses and African-American Domestic Workers: Ideals for Change,” Anthropological Quarterly 66, no. 1 (1993): 22–36.
Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1990–1940 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994).
Bonnie Dill, Across the Boundaries of Race and Class: An Exploration of Work and Family Among Black Female Domestic Servants (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Brenda Clegg Grey, Black Domestics During the Depression in New York City, 1930–1949 (New York: Garland, 1993).
Susan Tucker, Telling Memories among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).
David Ford, “Diane Amos: Making a Tidy Living as Pine Sol Lady,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 15, 2002, WB4.
Lorraine Fuller, “Are We Seeing Things? The Pinesol Lady and the Ghost of Aunt Jemima,” Journal of Black Studies 32, no. 1 (2001): 120–131. On the other hand, a 2009 Pine Sol commercial plays with gender roles a bit. Amos enters a lavishly decorated, romantic bedroom. Reclining in a sultry nightgown, she admires a very handsome and young African American man, who is shirtless and sexily mopping the floor with Pine Sol. “That’s the power of Pine Sol, baby,” purrs Amos. However, this man is mopping the marble floor of a bedroom suite, not the bathroom.
R. Stephen Craig, “The Effect of Television Day Part on Gender Portrayals in Television Commercials: A Content Analysis,” Sex Roles 26, no. 5/6 (1992): 197–211.
Thomas W. Whipple and Mary K. McManamon, “Implications of Using Male and Female Voices in Commercials: An Exploratory Study,” Journal of Advertising 31, no. 2 (summer 2002): 79–91.
Michael McCoy, “The Greening Game,” Chemical and Engineering News, January 26, 2009, 13.
Garret Condon, “The Assault on Germs: Americans Wary of Unseen Dangers,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 28, 1993, C3.
Don Fernandez, “Swept Up in Need to Clean: In an Era of High Anxiety, We’re Finding Comfort in the Conquest of Grime, Germs, and Untidiness,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 28, 2004, MS1.
Becky Ebenkamp, “Sanitized for Your Perfection,” Brandweek. January 9, 2006, 17.
Lydia Martens and Sue Scott, “Under the Kitchen Surface: Domestic Products and Conflicting Constructions of Home,” Home Cultures 3, no. 1 (2006): 39–82.
Jack Neff, “Scrubbing Bubbles,” Advertising Age, November 13, 2006, 10.
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© 2011 Jessamyn Neuhaus
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Neuhaus, J. (2011). The Bathroom. In: Housework and Housewives in Modern American Advertising. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337978_3
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