A Mind to Shop: Advertising Trade Card Rhetoric and the Construction of a Public Space for Women, 1880-1900

Ricia Chansky

This paper traces the role of advertising trade cards in building a public zone for women to traverse as they made the transformation from existing almost exclusively in the domestic realm to moving through the public space with relative ease.

At the same time as the post-Civil War middleclass found their disposable incomes growing and the second wave of the Industrial Revolution provided more women with leisure time thanks to the production of timesaving domestic appliances, manufacturers began to produce surpluses of goods that could be shipped nationwide. This combination of factors created a desire to move women from their homes into the public space of a store.

Trade cards facilitated this move by grafting aspects of the domestic sphere onto this new public space in the form of visual-verbal propaganda. This genre of advertising, distributed gratis, not only utilized domestic imagery, it also used the exact same chromolithographed graphics as cards distributed by schools, churches, and personal acquaintances, thereby blurring the lines between the personal, educational, religious, and public-consumer spaces. Additionally, the Victorian proclivity for collecting extended to cards in all of their manifestations and albums included those from various sources displayed together without discretion, further intermingling the images of personal and private life.

This study of primary source materials is conducted through the lens of cultural geography studies, including the work of Doreen Massey and Nedra Reynolds, with consideration of tenants of feminist visual culture and advertising design, especially the work of Ellen Gruber Garvey and Robert Jay.