“It's Up to the Women”

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“It's Up to the Women”Jane MarcellusPublished online: 07 Nov 2011.

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“IT’S UP TO THE WOMEN”

Edward Bernays, Eleanor Roosevelt, and

feminist resistance to shopping for patriotism

Jane Marcellus

In 1932, Ladies’ Home Journal (LHJ) ran an extensive campaign, orchestrated by public relations

pioneer Edward Bernays, to persuade American women to end the Great Depression through

consumer purchases. Although the campaign failed, it is historically significant, illustrating how PR

and magazines worked together to prescribe women’s roles—a point little explored by feminist

historians. While some women read the campaign hegemonically, others resisted its message, even

adapting campaign language to suggest alternative plans. Foremost among these, I argue, was

Eleanor Roosevelt (ER), whose 1933 book title, It’s Up to the Women, is identical to the campaign’s

slogan. Attributed to ER alone, the slogan has been reprised in twenty-first-century Democratic

presidential campaigns and used elsewhere. Patriotic shopping has also reemerged in recent crises.

Although less important to feminists, FDR’s (Franklin D. Roosevelt) famous “fear” line from his First

Inaugural address resembles language in LHJ’s campaign. Thus, the campaign can be seen not

only as a site where the contested nature of women’s roles was played out but one that illustrates

how media language can be repurposed to shape changing cultural and political messages.

KEYWORDS Eleanor Roosevelt; Edward Bernays; women’s magazines; public relations;

consumer culture; Great Depression

Introduction

On the opening page of the January 1932 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, editor Loring

Schuler’s full-page editorial, “It’s Up to the Women,” calls on housewives, as “purchasing

agents of twenty-nine million American families,” to help restart America’s “wheels of

progress and prosperity.” Women, the editorial argues, were collectively responsible for

preparing eighty-seven million meals a day, for buying millions of pairs of shoes and

stockings “for children’s scuffling feet,” millions of cakes of soap and tubes of toothpaste

and cosmetics “for the sake of good looks that, depression or no depression, must be

maintained.” Moreover, “woman’s wants and woman’s voice” influenced major purchases

that married couples made together—motor cars, refrigerators, washing machines, and

homes. If women had the confidence to keep buying as if there were no Depression,

Schuler argues, prosperity would return. “For living standards must be maintained, and the

Journal reader and her family have it in their power to keep factories running, to keep labor

employed, to keep money in circulation. To trample depression underfoot right now”

(1932a, p. 3).

Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012ISSN 1468-0777 print/ISSN 1471-5902 online/12/030389-405

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The following month’s cover features a woman with a determined expression and a

bundle of packages leading a reluctant Uncle Sam by the arm, again with the slogan “It’s Up

to the Women.” Again, Schuler’s editorial tells women to end the Depression through

consumer purchases by maintaining “normal living conditions,” satisfying wants at current

prices, buying homes or updating existing ones, and joining the “Prosperity Parade.” Don’t

“spread calamity gossip,” he advises. Be “sane,” spread “good news,” and stop hoarding.

Although many families could not comply, he admits, others were able (1932b, p. 3). The

woman leading Uncle Sam by the arm is clearly one of the latter, with her fur-collared

coat and fashionable hat. The illustration and slogan appear in the magazine through

late 1932.

Although the campaign has been largely forgotten, its language remains part of

America’s lexicon. “There is nothing to fear—except fear,” proclaims Schuler in January

(1932a, p. 3), seeming to anticipate Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) “The only thing we have to

fear is fear itself” delivered in his First Inaugural address the following year. Public relations

pioneer Edward Bernays, hired by Schuler to devise the campaign, implies in his memoir

(1965) that LHJ was FDR’s source for the line.

More recently, the slogan “It’s Up to the Women” has resurfaced on buttons and

bumper stickers supporting John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign1 and Hillary Rodham

Clinton’s 2008 bid (Gloria Feldt 2007). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic

strategist Donna Brazile have also used the slogan,2 crediting Eleanor Roosevelt’s (ER) book,

It’s Up to the Women (1933). Yet ER obviously borrowed the title, since she contributed a

brief article to LHJ’s campaign (Roosevelt 1932).

The message that consumption is patriotic has been echoed as well, particularly

following the September 11, 2001 attacks (Janine Jackson 2001; Jill Vardy and Chris Wattie

2001) and ensuing recession (Art Carden 2008; Tom Leonard 2008). While such messages

are not as blatantly gendered as they were in 1932, shopping is still considered female,

making calls to shop for the good of the nation ones implicitly aimed at women.

Despite these echoes, the campaign has garnered little scholarly attention. Mary Ellen

Zuckerman (1988) mentions it in a chapter on interwar magazines. Joanne Meyerowitz (1993)

references it in a discussion of how post-WWII business manipulated social roles. David Welky

(2008) says it downplayed the Depression’s severity. Charles McGovern (2006) uses LHJ’s

illustration on his book’s cover, but says the series was less a “movement” than a “well-

organized publicity campaign” that failed “without price-cutting commitment from industries

and retail” (p. 235). Low prices, however, were a problem in the Depression, not a solution.

I offer a closer analysis, examining the campaign’s published articles and related

materials from Bernays’ papers in light of research on gender and consumer culture (Erika

Diane Rappaport 2000; Janice Williams Rutherford 2003; Jennifer Scanlon 2000), interwar

employed women (Alice Kessler-Harris 1982; Jane Marcellus 2011; Winifred Wandersee 1981),

and critical reader response theory (Judith Fetterley 1978; Stuart Hall 1980). Although Hall

(1980) has been criticized for failing to distinguish between oppositional readings and

disagreement with content (Greg Philo 2008), his approach remains invaluable. Fetterley’s

(1978) “resisting reader” addresses women’s responses to texts that “neither [leave] women

alone nor [allow] them to participate” (p. xii). As Patricia Bradley (2007) notes, Fetterley

“continues to resonate for feminists” (p. 138). My aim is to illuminate the process through which

magazines and PR worked together to prescribe women’s roles, as well as women’s response

to that effort, at a critical historical moment. I am also interested in the campaign’s echo—how

its language has been repurposed both during the Depression and more recently.

390 JANE MARCELLUS

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Figure 1

Housewives were urged to take Uncle Sam–depicted as a reluctant middle-class husband–on

a shopping trip to end the Great Depression. The image was displayed in Ladies’ Home

Journal throughout 1932 and seen in department store windows.

“IT’S UP TO THE WOMEN” 391

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Obviously, the campaign is problematic from a feminist political-economic

perspective, locating its patriotic imperative to shop in women’s reproductive role. My

focus, however, is different. While feminists have problematized the construction of women

as shoppers (Betty Friedan 1963; Angela Record 2002; Naomi Wolf 1991), they have not fully

examined the historical mechanisms through which the cultural mandate to shop was

created in media, particularly during the Depression, alongside women’s reactions. By

discovering how the campaign was devised and how women responded, I hope to add to

knowledge of gender and consumption, as well as to PR, magazine, and economic

history—seemingly disparate areas that are, in this campaign, intertwined. Textual analysis

(a close reading) is used, with the study presented as narrative. As James Startt and David

Sloan (2003) note, “without the narrative element history becomes something other than

history” since history “communicates through narrative” (2003, p. 211).

Ultimately, I argue, the campaign illustrates how magazines and PR—still a relatively new

field in 1932—together conflated gender, shopping, and patriotism at a critical historical

moment, when women’s roles were highly contested and discourses of thrift and consumption

competed in relation to patriotism. Magazine content was not simply the product of

hegemonic attitudes, but an intentional effort to shape society—a critical point for feminists,

since historical work on women’s magazine representation (Margaret Beetham 1996; Helen

Damon-Moore 1994; Marjorie Ferguson 1983; Carolyn Kitch 2001; Marcellus 2011; Scanlon

1995; Nancy Walker 2000) has not examined PR’s direct influence or how deeply imbricated

business—vis-a-vis PR—was in manipulating women to serve business needs and nationalism.

Yet women resisted. Letters in Bernays’ papers reveal that although some women engaged in

hegemonic decoding, others read oppositionally. Like the second-wave Ms. readers Linda

Steiner (1988) describes, Depression-era women actively deconstructed dominant texts and

reconstructed meanings. Seen in this light, ER’s 1933 book—often dismissed—can be

interpreted as feminist resistance. By reclaiming and reworking LHJ’s language, I argue, ER

sought to construct a more expansive view of what was “up to the women.”

The Campaign in Context

Americans in early 1932 were enduring the contraction phase of the Great

Depression. Since the 1929 stock market crash, the Gross National Product had dropped

thirty percent, prices had dropped twenty-three percent, and a quarter of the workforce

was unemployed. Explanations varied. One journalist said business trouble was “mainly

mental” and would change when attitudes did (William Trufant Foster 1932, p. XX12). As

banks failed, people hoarded cash in jars and mattresses. Yet President Herbert Hoover

refused federal aid to the poor, ultimately helping FDR win the 1932 election (Piers Brendon

2000; Michael Parrish 1992).

Women’s roles were controversial. Their participation in wartime industries and

passage of woman suffrage in 1920 had seemed to change public perception about their

workplace capabilities, but a backlash emerged in the late 1920s (Kessler-Harris 1982; Lois

Scharf 1980; Wandersee 1981). As values shifted from thrift to consumption, the tie

between domesticity and consumption was strengthened (Roland Marchand 1985). Cash-

strapped advertisers sought to conflate consumption and nationalism, with “advertising’s

service to corporate capital” granting “true hegemonic influence” (McGovern 2006, p. 222).

Employed women were often blamed for the Depression (Kessler-Harris 1982), yet the idea

that women were family “purchasing agents” introduced business discourse into

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housewives’ consumer roles (Marchand 1985). Magazines promoted these ideas. LHJ was

particularly influential, having come “to define womanhood for the early twentieth century

and beyond and for the middle class and beyond” (Scanlon 1995, p. 7). Its implied reader

was a white, middle-class housewife whose “job” included presiding over family finances,

making her “one of the greatest conserving and distributing agents of the world,”

benefitting magazines economically (Damon-Moore 1994, p. 99).

PR, meanwhile, had emerged from earlier press agentry in the wake of turn-of-the-

century business expansion due to “a whole constellation of circumstances” (Richard Tedlow

1979, p. 18), including awareness of public opinion, muckrakers’ criticisms, and the “corporate

quest for social and moral legitimacy” (Marchand 1998, p. 3) through greater openness.

“Publicity” then meant “any activity which made information public” (Alan Raucher 1968, p. 6),

and business leaders hired representatives to provide company “publicity” to the press,

including emerging views on government alliances and “corporate collaborationism” (Marvin

Olasky 1987, p. 4). PR pioneer Ivy Lee stressed “prompt and accurate information . . .of value

and interest to the public” (Raucher 1968, p. 21). However, critics said he developed a “tactic of

factual accuracy to insinuate impressions” (Olasky 1987, p. 49).

The government used PR techniques to garner support for WWI, and PR was used in

politics. Hoover was the first president to use PR regularly, although it was FDR who

appointed the first press secretary (Craig Lloyd 1972; Tedlow 1979). Edward Bernays, a

division head for the wartime Committee on Public Information (CPI), originated the term

“counsel on public relations.” Influenced by his uncle, Sigmund Freud, and Walter

Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922), Bernays theorized propaganda as “a purposeful, directed

effort to overcome . . . the censorship of the group mind and the herd reaction” (1923, p.

122) with pro-social benefits (Burton St. John 2009). In 1932, The Atlantic put Bernays on a

“list of representative men in America” (Tedlow 1979, p. 48). Biographer Larry Tye later

called him “Big Think,” describing him as “part P.T. Barnum and part J.P Morgan, blended in

a way that was uniquely E.L. Bernays” (1998, p. 53). Yet Bernays was criticized by journalists

in the 1920s, who saw propaganda as corrosive to their ability to seek truth (St. John 2009).

Editor and Publisher called Bernays a “young Machiavelli” (Olasky 1987, p. 91).

LHJ’s identity was in flux in 1932. Schuler had become its fourth editor in nine years in

1928. Although he updated the magazine, advertisers still called LHJ the “Old Ladies’ Journal,”

and its rank slipped (Zuckerman 1998, p.105–106). Probably fearing for his job, Schuler—

“quiet, outwardly modest, inwardly ambitious”—approached Bernays for ways to impress his

boss, “the towering personality of George Horace Lorimer” (Bernays 1965, p. 513). Meanwhile,

Bernays and Doris Fleischman, his wife and business partner, were socializing with economists

Carl Snyder of the Federal Reserve and Warren Persons, recently of Harvard (Bernays 1965;

David Laidler and Roger Sandilands 2002). As Bernays (1965) wrote, “We often talked about the

part women might play in bringing about a return to normal conditions. My economist friends

were in agreement that women could play a part if they maintained normal spending and

saved instead of hoarding” (p. 513). He thought of Schuler. “What an opportunity for the

Journal and the country both—to have the women of the country carry out what I believed to

be the best advice of the ablest and wisest students of the problem” (p. 514).

The “American Economists Committee for Women’s Activities”

Exactly how “It’s Up to the Women” was developed is apparent from Bernays’ papers,

which include drafts, letters, telegrams, memoranda, press releases, speeches, brochures,


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and notes.3 Bernays (1931) pitched the plan in a memo to Schuler, tying propaganda,

consumerism, and women:

The technique of propaganda applied in the World War by the United States to regiment

the people of the nation to lay down their lives and give up their money, can be utilized

with equal effectiveness in peacetime activities. In commercial life, propaganda . . . has

won over the complete American public, and particularly the American woman, to entirely

new habits of spending and living, notably—the refrigerator, the radio, the automobile.

Bernays’ memo (1931) proposes a multi-part platform, “comparable to the 14 points

of Wilson, the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai” that would be an “authoritative

message to women from men who are scientifically trained,” gaining “public acceptance

and kudos for the Ladies’ Home Journal.” Endorsement from various “constituencies” would

make widespread support seem evident.

None of this is apparent in LHJ. A “preferred reader” (Hall 1980) who picked up the

January 1932 issue might think she was being asked to join a nascent yet hopeful

movement that might, if every woman helped, end the Depression:

When the buying public starts buying again, instead of wearing old clothes, driving old

cars, living with old furnishings . . . . Then retailers will start moving their stocks from their

shelves; manufacturers will start making new goods; labor will find full employment . . . .

And normalcy will have returned.

Economy was “a virtue, while thrift . . .may only be a vice” (Schuler 1932a, p. 3). In February,

this reader might think she was failing to join patriotic throngs if she did not follow the plan

introduced that month, for already “millions of American women are lined up behind it”

(Schuler 1932b, p. 3).

A skeptical reader might wonder how “millions” had joined a movement supposedly

new the previous month. One who read New York Times briefs (New York Times 1931) might

know it had been announced at a November luncheon of the Bankers Club hosted by LHJ.

The keynote was Persons, listed as chairman of the “American Economists Committee for

Women’s Activities.” In reality, Persons was a reluctant front man, and the “committee” was

comprised of economists who let Bernays use their names on letterhead—a typical Bernays

strategy (Scott Cutlip 1994; Tye 1998).4 “No obligation of time or anything except your

moral support is entailed,” the economists were told in telegrams from “J.E. Bailey,

Secretary, American Economists Committee for Women’s Activities” at One Wall Street—

Bernays’ office (J.E. Bailey 1931a). Bailey’s identity is uncertain, although internal

memoranda initialed “jeb” (secretaries commonly identified themselves with initials)

suggest that “J.E. Bailey” was, in a double entendre, truly the committee “secretary.”

Acceptance telegrams arrived from well-known economists, notably Irving Fisher,

Frank Fetter, Harry Jerome, Spurgeon Bell, and Horace Secrist. Yet several adamantly

refused. A telegram from Ira B. Cross (1931) says that he had

GREAT FAITH IN THE ABILITY OF MY GOOD FRIEND DOCTOR PERSONS AND I KNOW THE

WIDESPREAD INFLUENCE OF THE LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL BUT . . . A DEPRESSION IS AN

ECONOMIC PHENOMENON AND CANNOT BE CURED BY RESORTING TO THE METHODS OF

DOCTOR COUE OF FRANCE AS EMBODIED IN HIS FAMOUS SLOGAN QUOTE EVERY DAY IN

EVERY WAY WE ARE GETTING BETTER AND BETTER UNQUOTE STOP. 5

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Persons’ Harvard friend, J. L. Snider (1931) also declined. Clark Warburton’s letter (1931) runs

five pages, with endnotes, asking why economists should “join ignorant salesmen and

talkative politicians in spreading the magic formula that if people only will buy, prosperity is

at hand?” Jacob Viner’s reply (1931) says he had “no faith in hortatory method for relief of

depression,” and H. L. Reed (1931) says he could not ask individuals “to do the things which

might be disadvantageous to them as individuals even though desirable from group

viewpoint.” Garfield V. Cox accepted (1931a), but a subsequent letter to “Mr. Bailey” (1931b)

seeks more information, since colleagues questioned his participation.

Bernays ignored naysayers, prompting “jeb” to express fear that “one of them might

make a crack at the economists or the Ladies’ Home Journal in an unpleasant way” (JEB, n.d.-a).

That “jeb” did not think much of LHJ is clear in another note to Bernays (JEB, n.d.-b), criticizing its

“careless use of statistics” and presumption to speak for all women.

Business Support

Predictably, businessmen praised the plan. A form letter from “J. E. Bailey” (1931b)

asks them to jot endorsements on the back and return it. “It is a pleasure to endorse the ‘It’s

Up to the Women’ platform,” writes P. B. Zimmerman (1931) of the General Electric

Refrigeration Department. “With a superabundance of commodities available, this is the

first time that the American housewife can really be a patriot by buying up to the limit of

her purchasing power.” Walt R. Foss (1931) of the Wooster Brush Company writes that “You

have our hearty approval of your commendable plan and all good wishes for the success of

it.” A letter from advertising executive Charles Dowd (1931) welcomes the chance for

women to show that they “may be a little smarter in the present emergency than perhaps

we men are.” Albert Matthews (1931) of The American Laundry Machinery Co. says that

“The seven rules mentioned, if followed by everyone throughout the country, would

without question of doubt change the entire situation.”

The campaign was promoted widely. Schuler was invited to speak on The General

Electric Home Circle radio program, and NBC Radio aired a four-part series, featuring

Persons. Full-page newspaper ads touted the program, and Macy’s put the original painting

for the February cover in its New York store window. Even ministers were asked to help.

Schuler (1931) told Bernays that

The rector of my church is still palpitating for the economists’ material on which to preach

a sermon. He will surely preach a sermon for us, both because he’s interested and because

he’s an employee of the Journal to the extent of writing a monthly editorial.

Women Respond

Women’s endorsements were critical. As soon as enough economists joined the

“committee” to print letterhead, letters and pamphlets describing the campaign went to

women’s club officers, who were asked to return the letters with notes of support and

spread the word to members. This made it possible to claim that the program had reached

“millions.” Yet not all who returned the letters embraced the idea. Certainly, some were

preferred readers. Mrs. M.A. Neal (1931), president of the Junior Matron’s Federation Club of

Hazen, Arkansas, writes, “I heartily endorse your program and will be glad to have a dozen

or more of your free pamphlets to give out to our club members.” Mrs. Grant Williams


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(1931) of the Klio Association of Chicago says her club’s members “all expressed their entire

sympathy with you . . . and will certainly endeavor to carry on along suggested lines.” Mrs.

Maude M. Ewing (1931) of the Albany Women’s Club in Illinois writes that if the platform

were adopted,

In a short time the country would be back to normal, the unemployed would be

employed, business would be better, and, in fact, all America would rejoice in the thought

that, after all, depression is not so hard to overcome when we put our shoulders to the

wheel and show our real American spirit.

Many, however, read critically. Mrs. W. Pier (1931), president of the Center Country

Club of Knox, Indiana, says that,

in this rural community your program is of very little value [since] Corn . . .brings just

about half what it did last year, wheat less than half, eggs bring 28 cents that usually bring

45, hogs are less than half, milk and cream a little over half. The reason we are not

spending is because we haven’t got it to spend.

Similarly, Mrs. A.G. Fish (1931), president of The Home Garden Club of Denver, says it took

“too much courage to suggest that this precious saving which is all that stands between

them and poverty should be spent in the ways mentioned in the pamphlet.” She invokes

the myth of an earlier American patriotism conflated with frugality, not consumption,

calling for “the simple life and the rigid economy of our forefathers.” Katherine Kretschmer

(1931) of National City, California, calls for laws sending “the men responsible for the

trouble” to the front lines and preventing profit made through war. The LHJ platform, she

says, “reminds me of putting nice pink salve on a case of cancer.”

A lengthy letter from Helen Humphrey Bradley of Woodbury, Connecticut suggests

an alternative plan (1931), adapting campaign language directly. She calls LHJ’s program

“simply another attempt to make Americans rush madly on accumulating material things of

passing value, until the strain and the emptiness drive us in ever increasing numbers to

sanitarium or suicide.” She and her husband lost their savings in the crash. She says their

troubled son needed private schooling, and she worries about her husband’s health. For

extra income, she had suggested they rent out their house for the summer and move to a

tent in the woods nearby.

The joyous success of the experiment, our improved physiques, the wholesome contacts

with our friends who sought us out with more frequency . . . and the resultant mental

outlook, are too long a story to tell you in detail. I had declared war on a standard of living

which was crushing our spirits . . . it was up to me.

Her plan includes “a nice balance between what you want and what you can have” and

advises people to “Boil your wants down to essentials” and “Buy only what you really

want—not what your friends or the advertisers tell you to want.”

Meanwhile, a “symposium”—a double-page spread featuring brief articles by

prominent women—was planned. A Bernays memo (1932a) says it would be “amply

supported” by “outstanding women.” The list was to be diverse, including “(a) Color. It is

important that all races be included” and “(b) Places of origin.” However, “Color” and “Places

of origin” are pencilled out and “Nationality” inserted. Item (c) is club women, and (d) is

professional women in “advertising, teaching, drama, nursing, social welfare, home

economics, journalism, literature, and designing and styling.” The racial diversity is

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intriguing in light of Bernays’ attempt the previous year to get American Tobacco, makers

of Lucky Strike, to court black customers. American Tobacco declined, fearing white

disapproval (Tye 1998). The inclusion of employed women may reflect the influence of

Fleischman, who had edited a book (1928) advocating women’s career choices and

authored an LHJ series arguing that “Women may be lovely and feminine and be successful

in a career. They may marry and have children—and still work” (1930, p. 62).

In the magazine, the “symposium” includes ER (then first lady of New York), former

suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt, beauty mogul Elizabeth Arden, and Lena Madesin

Phillips, president of the International Federation of Business and Professional Women’s

Clubs (IFBPW), plus the presidents of the League of Women Voters, General Federation of

Women’s Clubs, National Council of Jewish Women, and International Federation of

Catholic Alumnae. “It’s Up to the Women: Leaders of Millions of Women Support the Seven-

Point Plan for Normal Living,” proclaims the headline, yet several offer negotiated views.

Phillips urges women to “spend intelligently.” Arden advocates consumption of fruits and

vegetables for beauty, while Catt, co-founder of the Woman’s Peace Party, says women

should “use their influence to end the cause of depression—war” (Ladies’ Home Journal

1932, pp. 6– 7). ER (1932, p. 7) addresses hoarding: “No one can ask people to spend money

they haven’t got. But we may ask people to spend what they have to the best advantage,

and give employment to as many people as possible.”

The Campaign Fades

The campaign dominates the magazine through spring, with guilt and fear invoked

to urge participation. “I have been spending more than I should this winter—bearing as a

matter of principle the burden of some other woman who is spending less than she should

and can afford,” writes popular mystery writer and frequent LHJ contributor Mary Roberts

Rinehart (1932, p. 20). Businessman Samuel Crowther (1932) warns that, “The woman who

dresses badly . . .may find herself dressing for the divorce court” (p. 3).

By summer, the campaign was fading. A news release on Bernays’ proposed

“revamped platform” was okay, Schuler (1932d) says, “but I wouldn’t spend much money on

sending it out. I don’t think you will get it printed very widely because it is a little too boastful

of the Ladies’ Home Journal and the movement in general.” (Pencilled next to this: “I don’t

either—JEB.”) In May, the “rearranged” plan emphasizes hoarding. A June article by Hoover

himself explains his proposed Home Mortgage Discount Banks, with businessmen

supporting him (Hoover 1932a; Chesla Sherlock 1932).6 Yet when Bernays (1932b) proposed

devising groups of supporters, Schuler (1932e) declined, saying the groups resembled

Hoover’s ideas and “the results have not been worth a hoot to him or to anyone else.”

Tension with Persons is evident. Schuler had forwarded him a letter from a minister

who feared banks were unsound. A letter from Persons (1931) says the minister deserved an

answer, as did Warburton, but “I am a quarter-in-the-slot gas meter. I operate until the

stimulus is exhausted. So far as I am concerned, the stimulus of the ‘It’s Up to the Women’

campaign of the Ladies’ Home Journal is exhausted.” Whether Persons truly believed in the

plan is unclear. His speech at the Bankers’ Club apparently focused less on women than on

“industrial and credit expansion on a gold basis” (New York Times 1931, p. 25).

By October, even Schuler embraced thrift as a discourse of nationalism, calling for

“reviving the ideals” of America’s founders, securing the home, and turning to God. “There is a

new American thrift for new pioneers—a thrift of endeavor and accomplishment. As a


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people, we are learning to make our own good times—instead of buying them” (Schuler

1932c). The slogan appears through November—the month FDR was elected—then is gone.

ER’s It’s Up to the Women

Obviously, the LHJ campaign situates responsibility for ending the Depression in an

idealized domestic sphere, charging women with following the advice of male experts. That

advice is to shop, and the Uncle Sam illustration suggests women should do so with a militant

sense of duty—an approach that, admittedly, would be echoed in the “Buy Now” campaign

of FDR’s National Recovery Administration (NRA). Yet LHJ’s campaign admonishes women to

remain feminine, maintaining “good looks . . . depression or no depression” and cheerfully

spreading “good news.” While this may seem like typical women’s magazine fare, it is

intriguing in light of the cultural conflict over women’s employment. The backlash against

women’s workplace gains, firmly in place by 1929, intensified with male job loss (Kessler-

Harris 1982). The campaign plays into that conflict, for if a woman’s duty to shop America out

of the Depression had become part of her domestic role, then pursuing a career was now not

only unfeminine, but unpatriotic. Fleischman’s earlier notion that women might pursue

careers and motherhood seems to have been forgotten. Although Schuler had been editor

when her 1930 series ran, he saw ideal readers as “on their way up” if their husbands were

doing well professionally (Zuckerman 1998, p. 134).

Clearly tied to business, the campaign was also tied to politics. That Hoover

supported the campaign enough to contribute an article illuminates the tie between his

conservative, pro-business approach and LHJ’s vision for women. Hoover’s involvement

makes the Roosevelts’ later use of LHJ’s rhetoric particularly intriguing. Scholars have long

debated the origins of the “fear” line. Blanche Wiesen Cook (1994) suggests that FDR

himself added it. But Halford Ryan (1988) says longtime aide Louis Howe did, noting that

Howe’s source “has eluded later researchers” (p. 77). “To this day, scholars do not know the

source of Howe’s sublime aphorism,” writes Davis Houck (2002, p. 149). Yet it seems

plausible that it came from media, since FDR aide Raymond Moley (1966) says he clearly

remembered “that the phrase appeared in a department store’s newspaper advertisement

some time earlier in February” (p.115). He also credits Howe—a former journalist who was

FDR’s “political guru” and ER’s mentor (Maurine Beasley 2010, p. 132). Raymond Moley

(1966) also says Howe saw the ad. Meanwhile, ER (1958) says she often gave FDR magazine

items she thought useful for his work, and Howe brought her drafts of speeches to critique

(Beasley 2010), including the First Inaugural the night before FDR delivered it (Lorena

Hickok 1962). Although the idea that the famous aphorism came from a popular women’s

magazine may be anathema to FDR scholars, and while evidence is circumstantial, the

possibility is undeniable.

Why was ER’s title the same? Titles cannot be copyrighted, but given the campaign’s

sustained promotion, the duplication is curious, particularly since she was working on the

book before the inauguration (Beasley 2010), not long after LHJ’s campaign ended.

Correspondence with Stokes, ER’s publisher, reveals no discussion of the title.7 In the book,

ER writes,

The title of this book will suggest the thought which I have in mind in writing it—namely,

that we are going through a great crisis in this country and that the women have a big

part to play if we are coming through it successfully. (1933, p. vii)

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Yet ER was no media novice. She had made her first radio appearance in 1925 and

had been editor of a political magazine, Women’s Democratic News, and a popular

magazine, Babies, Just Babies. As Beasley (2010) notes, “Beneath her gracious patrician

manner lay a sharp-minded political operative” (p. 109). Read superficially, the book seems

mundane and unfocused. A 1933 Time article says ER “spread her talent very thin,” although

her “volume and catholicity of subjects . . . from preparing stuffed eggs to the NRA” proved

her “a lady of illimitable interests” (Time 1933). Time does not mention the duplicate titles,

nor does the New York Times review (Rose C. Feld 1933). Although LHJ omits the book from

a March 1933 ER profile, it does revive the slogan in unrelated stories that month and the

next, as if reminding readers that LHJ coined the phrase (Ladies’ Home Journal 1933;

Catherine Oglesby 1933).

Few scholars have analyzed the book. Although McGovern (2006) says in an endnote

that it offers “a more expansive interpretation for the political potential of women” than the

campaign, he does not elaborate (p. 439, note 65). Diane Blair (2001) calls it an early

example of ER’s focus on crisis and change. Lois Scharf (1980) calls it self-contradictory,

saying ER urged women to get involved in public life, but “harked back to traditional ideals

of feminine goals strangely at odds with her own growing influence” (p. 96), a criticism

consistent with those who believe ER “cannot be counted as a full-scale feminist because

she did not acknowledge the overall effects of gender on society” (Beasley 2010, p. 4). Yet

while it may seem unusual to find advice for making Scotch wafers and joining a labor

union in one volume, the “catholicity of subjects” can also be seen as a strategy to reach

many women—an approach not unlike Bernays’. Read this way, the book’s early focus on

household budgets and child-rearing and its later focus on women’s employment, public

life, and the NRA suggest ER cast a wide net, drawing in traditional women for whom overt

feminism was threatening before moving on to her political message. This would be

consistent with her other journalism, which attempted “to merge traditional and modern

roles” (Beasley 2010, p. 41) and her recognition that “politics sometimes meant taking

gradual steps toward desired goals” (2010, p. 144).

While LHJ constructs a world dominated by middle-class housewives, ER includes

poor women, farm women, and career women. She refutes materialism:

Sometimes I think the most troubled people I know are the very rich . . . . They have

never known what it was to deny themselves anything that they really wanted, and

now they have to learn to do it cheerfully and without a feeling of martyrdom.

(Roosevelt 1933, p. 1)

Those who have had “an opportunity to live simply” know that “luxuries of life are not really

essential to happiness” (1933, pp. 2–3). Like LHJ’s resisting readers, ER ties nationalism to a

past in which American women weathered hardship heroically. “Undoubtedly . . . the

women who landed from the Mayflower faced in that first winter in the stern New England

country the first great crisis in the development of our nation” (p. vii). The Revolution would

never have been won “unless women had been able to bear the hardships and privations”

(p. viii). Similarly, “it was ‘up to the women’ to carry on while the men were fighting” in the

Civil War. “And I hold it equally true that in this present crisis it is going to be the women

who will tip the scales and bring us safely out of it” (p. ix).

ER rejects, as Fleischman had (Margot Opdycke Lamme 2001), the binary between

work and home, a direct contrast to LHJ: “I never like to think of this subject of a woman’s


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career and a woman’s home as being a controversy,” she writes (p. 145) in what Beasley

(2010, pp. 55–56) calls her “most controversial chapter.” Finally, she addresses the NRA.

Although later declared unconstitutional, it was, in 1933, the lynchpin of the New Deal, with

elaborate government codes setting prices high so manufacturers could make a profit and

rehire workers. Consumers were urged to patronize only participating businesses. This too,

of course, tied shopping and patriotism. However, ER’s message differs markedly from LHJ’s:

It is up to the women . . . to see that they live within their incomes, that they buy as fairly as

possible from the fair merchants and buy only such goods as are manufactured by fair

manufacturers. (Roosevelt 1933, p. 248)

Urging women to avoid the “evil of installment buying” (p. 250), she reassures them

that she does not advocate returning to traditional roles.

I am merely pointing out that women, whether subtly or vociferously, have always been a

tremendous power in the destiny of the world and with so many of them now holding

important positions and receiving recognition and earning the respect of the men as well

as the members of their own sex, it seems more important than ever that in this crisis, “It’s

Up to the Women!”. (Roosevelt 1933, p. 263)

Conclusion

In The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan asks,

Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve

as housewives is tobuymore things for thehouse? In all the talk of femininity and woman’s role,

one forgets that the real business of America is business. (p. 197, her emphasis)

That Friedan asked this question three decades after LHJ’s campaign, and that she located the

answer after WWII, referencing a man who “got in on the ground floor of the hidden persuasion

business in 1945” (p. 198), speaks to the amnesia surrounding Depression-era efforts.

Of course, LHJ’s campaign failed, as McGovern (2006) notes. But what would success

have looked like? Even if all middle-class women had signed on, lockstep, would that have

ended the Depression? Its wrongheadedness notwithstanding, the fact that Bernays and

Schuler were able to launch an extensive campaign that included eminent economists

speaks to the field’s growing power, some economists’ naivete, and desperate times. Yet

some women, including ER, resisted.

Although the campaign addresses housewives, employed women are implicit in its

message. Interwar magazines’ response to the controversy over women’s employment was

to reinscribe them into a domestic discourse (Marcellus 2011). “It’s Up to the Women” is

consistent with that effort, for if women had supposedly caused the Depression by taking

men’s jobs, it was “up to” them to end it by taking a “job” that was traditionally a domestic

duty and was now a patriotic one—shopping. By advocating careful spending and

women’s career choices, ER refutes that argument. Thus, It’s Up to the Women can be read as

a rejoinder to “It’s Up to the Women,” illustrating the competing discourses of patriotism in

relation to consumption, with the contested nature of women’s labor integral to each.

Given Fleischman’s views on women’s employment, it seems contradictory that

Bernays believed women would follow a “committee for women’s activities.” In its editorial

policies, LHJ idealized domesticity, but Bernays, a member of the Lucy Stone League, was

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no stranger to feminism. Perhaps he rationalized that it was feminist to empower

housewives to effect economic change in the public sphere. Certainly, professional

women’s inclusion in the “symposium” suggests that he did not see home-vs.-employment

as a binary, as Fleischman did not. Whether Fleischman worked on LHJ’s campaign is not

clear, but Susan Henry (1997) says she often worked anonymously. If so, it is intriguing that

in A Wife is Many Women (1955), which she published as Doris Fleischman Bernays, she

argues that “housework is a concealed expense because our whole economic system is

based on free wife-work” (1955, p. 8) and advocates paying housewives as professionals,

although “Eddie questions the logic” (1955, p. 53). Clearly, they grappled with these issues,

however inconsistently. Fleischman, paradoxically, hated to shop, writing, “It is hard for me

to understand women who love shopping for its own sake” (1955, p. 119).

That LHJ’s campaign underestimates women’s intelligence and fails to address their

diversity of thought was arguably its downfall. Although the “symposium” memo reveals

awareness of difference, including race, the campaign rests on the assumption that women

would self-homogenize into a chorus supporting male authority. Fetterley says such

“palpable designs” on women are possible when they are “immasculated”—taught “to

identify with a male point of view” (1978, p. xx). Clearly, Bernays underestimated women’s

ability to critically decode his efforts. Although they came from different worlds, Arden and

Catt, like Helen Humphrey Bradley, resisted immasculation, using campaign language for

their own purposes—astutely taking advantage of free magazine space to do so.

The campaign was apparently forgotten by late 1933, when ER’s book appeared.

Although journalists may have refrained from mentioning the title duplication out of

respect for the first lady, it seems more likely that the campaign was a casuality of the

ephemeral nature of media, its Hoover-era, pro-business arguments lost in the shifting

political winds that swept in the New Deal. It apparently had been forgotten eight years

later, when ER started her regular column, “If You Ask Me,” for LHJ. Meanwhile, FDR’s “fear”

line has become part of America’s mythology, along with the mystery of its origins. Indeed,

the myth is in the mystery.

Yet vestiges of the campaign remain, a discursive ghost whose ideas and language

linger. That the slogan has been reappropriated by twenty-first-century feminists in the

Democratic party reflects ER’s continued status as a cultural icon. That it came from a largely

anti-feminist, pro-Hoover campaign from the Depression is, if nothing else, ironic.

NOTES

1. See www2.demstore.com/cgi-local/SoftCart.exe/scstore/Kerry/women.html.

2. See www.speakerpelosi.com and www.brazileassociates.com/viewBlog, respectively.

3. Papers related to LHJ are in Edward L. Bernays Collection, Manuscript Division. Library of

Congress, Box I: 215, 216, 217, 218, and 219. All LHJ campaign articles were examined, with

items from Bernays’ papers chosen for relevance.

4. Bernays called this strategy “leader approval” (Raucher 1968, p. 105). Such front groups were

later called into legal question and are now considered unethical in PR (Cutlip 1998).

5. Coue was a psychologist who promoted “autosuggestion” in the 1920s.

6. Hoover signed the Home Loan Bank Bill on 22 July, 1932. He said it would perform “a

function for homeowners somewhat similar to that performed in the commercial field by

the Federal Reserve banks” (Herbert Hoover 1932b).


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7. Alycia Vivona, archivist, e-mail correspondence with author, 8 July and 16 July, 2009; phone

conversation with author 21 July, 2009.

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Jane Marcellus is an associate professor at Middle Tennessee State University. She is the

author of Business Girls and Two-Job Wives: Emerging Media Stereotypes of Employed

Women (Hampton Press, 2011). E-mail: [email protected]


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“It's Up to the Women”