Angel in the Marketplace

"Ellen Wayland-Smith's ambitious and revealing book is in one sense a biography of Jean Wade Rindlaub, a major yet little-known figure in postwar American advertising, responsible for many of the most influential campaigns for domestic products (Betty Crocker, Chiquita Bananas, etc.). Yet it goes much farther by plumbing not merely midcentury American corporate capitalism but the religious and geopolitical beliefs that advertising embodied and propounded. Rindlaub's own Calvinistic beliefs and her embrace of the corporation were central to the commodification and repackaging of American women's needs and desires in the postwar world. This is riveting cultural history built around a fascinating yet normative woman who used her considerable power in the workplace to encourage other women to stick to their kitchens, both figuratively and literally"--