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Social Identity Formation in Midpassage: American Advertising Imagery in the 1940s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Victor J. Viser
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Extract

As indicators of historical thought, advertisements stand as potential conveyers of cultural moods, concerns, and habits. Their images tell the tales of a social identity agenda set to guide the domestic domain from the corporate sphere. Insofar as meanings in advertising images are literally (and intentionally) framed into a currency of signs, we may seek to understand this ideological process within the various social codes of behavior put forth by the advertisement itself. It is in this way that advertisements can provide windows into the intentions of the people of the past who generated them, as well as into the receptions of those who were their intended audiences. Of great interest in looking at the United States in the mid-20th century is that advertising images were produced and distributed by a business world that found itself having to abandon the production of consumer goods in exchange for a direct collaboration with the government, due to the unique exigencies of a post-Depression recovery followed by war, followed further by an affluence resultant of victory in that war. In other words, advertising imagery provided Americans in the 1940s a means by which they could make sense of not only public policies, but of their own private, domestic lives as well.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 27 , October 2002 , pp. 515 - 546
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

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References

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