Soft Soap, Hard Sell: American Hygiene in an Age of Advertisement.

Today in U.S. society soaps, shampoos, hair styling aids, cosmetics, and the behaviors that accompany these, have been established as essential to self-esteem and social acceptance. Vincent Vinikas's study of the promotion of grooming products and services indicates that the adoption of this standard of grooming was not necessarily a "natural" outgrowth of industrialization and urbanization. Rather, this phenomenon was largely the conscious creation of those most likely to profit from these particular behaviors--the manufacturers of soap, cosmetics, mouthwash, toothpaste, and the purveyors of beauty and cosmetic services.

The title, taking its cue from the mavens of advertising, is slippery. It presents a deceptively reductionist impression of the contents of the monograph. Instead, the work explores multiple forces which coalesced to create a homogeneous, national culture of grooming, only one of which was advertising. The work is a series of surveys, as Vinikas calls them, focusing consecutively on the development of promotional magazines, the creation of demand for Listerine, the use of cosmetics, the triumph of the National Hairdressers Association in defining a separate sphere of cosmetology, and the activities of the Cleanliness Institute of the Association of American Soap and Glycerin producers. This approach allows Vinikas to carefully trace the contributions of particular groups to the new standard of personal hygiene. He provides fascinating details on the ways in which these business people sold, along with their products, a particularly American version of grooming.

Each of these essays follows a set pattern of development. First, he identifies the particular problem of the institution being examined. These problems are normally economic in nature--the need to establish a new financial base for magazine publication, Gerard Lambert's desire to make Listerine profitable, hairdressers' perceived loss of income to barbers when women began to bob their hair, the desire to sell soap in a society that seemed to need it less. In only one chapter is the "problem" non-financial; in the selling of cosmetics the problem Vinikas identifies is social demand rooted in the gender identity crisis of the 20s.

The author then places each of these problems, and the producers' solution for the problem, in its societal context. This may be the most important strength of the book. While Vinikas clearly sees advertising and the development of a national homogeneous marketplace as a fundamental influence on the way individuals groomed themselves, he is careful to note that advertising is not the sole cause of these behaviors and values. Urbanization and industrialization are accompanied by changes in acceptable social space, diet, gender roles, social status, standard of living, and consumption. Vinikas examines these phenomena for the impact they may have had on ideals of cleanliness. Still, each chapter is primarily concerned with illustrating the ways in which manufacturers, hairdressers, and promoters used a national system of advertising to sell old products in new ways to create a new, largely unconscious, reflex for cleanliness.

The strongest essay in the work focuses on the Cleanliness Institute.(1) This chapter best supports Vinikas's claim that advertising played a fundamental role in altering the way in which citizens of this nation approached their daily grooming. He ably shows that soap manufacturers, through the Cleanliness Institute, tried to create long-term changes in the reflex behaviors of consumers in order to sell a type of, rather than a particular, product. My only disagreement with his assessment of the Cleanliness Institute is one of degree. His emphasis, understandably, stresses the role of the Institute in influencing the cleaning behaviors of children and women. My research indicates that others, though not in league with the soap and glycerin manufacturers, were equally concerned with encouraging high standards of cleanliness. The popular Goop Tales (also called a manual of manners) by Gellett Burgess (aka Frank Gellett) which were published between 1900 and 1916 included, among a wide variety of behaviors, attention to self-cleaning as the sign of the perfect child. The following Burgess poem published in 1900 would certainly be competitive with the most didactic of the Cleanliness Institute's lessons.

The Goops they are spotted on chin and on cheek, You dig the dirt off with a trowel! But you wash your face twenty times every week, And you don't do it all with the towel!

The Goops are all dirty, and what do they do? They like to be dirty and stay so. But if you were dirty, you'd wash, wouldn't you? If you needed a bath, you would say so!(2)

Perhaps the Cleanliness Institute drowned our society in a flood of pro-cleaning rhetoric, but there are signs of rising concern with social standards of cleanliness much earlier. The manufacturers certainly did not create these values, even though they may have spread them far and wide.

I am least taken with the interpretive framework in the chapter on cosmetics. Arising from his graduate work in the early eighties this study does not take sufficient account of more recent interpretations of women's experience. As a result women in the 1920s are portrayed as embracing cosmetics to define themselves as still "womanly" in a world of increasingly topsy-turvy gender roles. Alternately, the sources he uses could be interpreted as illustrating that cosmetics served as a form of social control over women by reinforcing sex-role spillover as women entered the world of men. This conclusion is further supported in the emphasis on traditional subordinate roles for women by soap manufacturers, hairdressers, and the purveyors of mouthwash.

Overall, this work stirs interest in the subject at hand but begs further depth, elucidation, and integration of the topics it encompasses. Women loom largely in all of the topical chapters but his effort to draw these separate issues together in the last essay falls flat. The work cries out for greater integration of the individual topics into a framework that evaluates, rather than simply presents, the impact of advertising on the way we act and see ourselves. In his concluding paragraph Vinikas tells his readers, "Whether this outpouring of promotional literature was a cause for concern or a reason to celebrate resided with individual judgment." I wish he had exercised some of that judgment himself instead of remaining amazingly neutral to the end.

Luther College Jacqueline S. Wilkie

ENDNOTES

1. This chapter first appeared in 1989 in The Journal of Social History. The only fundamental change from the article is in Vinikas's use of inclusive language, which I applaud. The author has also consolidated some of the endnotes.

2. Gellett Burgess (aka Frank Gellett), Goops and how to be them; a manual of manners for polite infants inculcating many juvenile virtues both by precept and example (New York, 1900), no page numbers.