Reconstruction 10.4 (2010)


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Me and Betty Crocker, or, from WASPy White to Mestiza: 75 Years of General Mills / Linda Heidenreich

Keywords: Race, Political Economy, Betty Crocker

<1> In the late twentieth-century, General Mills, one of the largest producers of baking products in the U.S., changed the image of one of its marketing icons; that icon was Betty Crocker.  For almost a century, the company had used the image to promote their baking products and cookbooks.  The image, from its inception had been of a white woman, sometimes older, sometimes younger, but always WASPy white.  In 1995 this image changed, and General Mills proposed a new Betty, a multi-cultural Betty, to appeal to an increasingly multi-cultural U.S. market (“General Mills Inc. to Create” E3; “General Mills Creating” 22; Zeigler B6).  Women from around the country were encouraged to send their photographs to General Mills, along with an essay and favorite Betty Crocker recipe.  While many U.S. Americans were enthusiastic about the change, sending in their own photos or photos of loved ones to become part of the new composite Betty, some were angry.  A majority of those who voiced anger at the proposed change were men–white men.  Their strong negative reaction to the proposed new Betty raises questions of the relationship of white men to Betty Crocker, and, perhaps more important, the power of advertizing icons to shape and challenge social structures in U.S. society.

<2> The most extreme response to the proposed icon came from Kevin Strom, chief deputy of the white supremacist U.S. American political group National Alliance, who posted an angry editorial on the website, Voices of Dissent [1].  Often, Strom and his cohort post angry articles and editorials on topics such as miscegenation and “Jewish banking conspiracies.” Strom’s article on Betty Crocker was rooted in his larger fear of miscegenation and of global conspiracies in which, he believed, General Mills was involved [2]. Writing from the National Alliance compound in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Kevin Strom responded to the perceived threat with an article titled “Icons and Eggs.”  He wrote,

What our would-be masters plan for America is symbolized by what they are planning for one of our country’s minor commercial icons . . .A few years back, General Mills removed Betty Crocker’s face from their packages. She was apparently too White–too suggestive of the old America of manicured lawns, safe neighborhoods, high standards, and Western culture–to be acceptable to the trendy New World Order camp followers in General Mill’s boardroom . . .

But the trendies at General Mills have something worse in store for us. They are going to put Betty back on their packages all right. But first, they are planning to create a new Betty Crocker. A non-White Betty Crocker. Oh They’re not man enough to come right out and say that’s what they’re doing. No, they are cloaking it in all kinds of deceptive verbiage. But making Betty Crocker into some kind of Third World mongrel is exactly what they have in mind.

Strom’s article raises questions about consumerism and social change in an increasingly market-driven society. The article was reflective of responses by less reactionary white men who published letters in mainstream periodicals such as the Seattle Post and the Wall Street Journal. Like Strom, such men waxed poetic about a romantic past. While their letters did not explicitly refer to “Western culture,” some, such as Steven Steward, writing to the Wall Street Journal, associated Betty with the good old days, when “Bacon ‘n eggs crackled on the stove . . . [and his] Schwinn Phantom . . . rested by the back door [3].”

<3> While ravings of extremists such as Strom may be easily dismissed, Steward’s response in the Wall Street Journal demonstrates that it was not just self-proclaimed white supremacists who claimed emotional attachments to a white Betty. What both Strom and Steward seemed to long for was a simpler past, one where men were men, white women–or underpaid Black women—made their dinner and diapered their children, and their neighbors looked just like them. Betty was part of this larger picture, and, I argue, played a role in constructing that fictive past.

<4> To map the significance of Strom’s and Steward’s responses, I apply a materialist analysis to the life of Betty Crocker. That is to say, I place her life in a deep historical context, map her place in the larger political economy of her time, and draw attention to the socio-economic relationships between her image and the status of Latinas and African American women at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The materialist analysis I bring to Betty’s story is most directly rooted in the early theoretical work of María Linda Apodaca and Rosaura Sánchez, who, in the 1970s and 80s, insisted that any materialist analysis be grounded in deep historical context and community experience and that it also address the function of race and gender in constructing the political economy of any time (Apodaca 70-89; Sánchez 1-29). The work of historians as diverse as Vicki Ruiz and Emma Pérez continues to develop and complicate such an approach, demonstrating that, at times, “the linguistic turn” is not the only or the best path to understanding political economy or resistance.[4]

<5> In the course of assessing the strong reactions of white men to the General Mills icon, I address three issues. The first of these is U.S. culture, which historically has been constructed by capitalist consumer culture. Within this context, I map the history of the Betty Crocker icon as part of a larger genre of advertising which, in the early twentieth century, policed white women’s behavior [5]. Next, I address issues of white American womanhood and the means by which the specifically white image of Betty Crocker, for the first 75 years of her existence, contributed to a popular ideology of white homemakers as real homemakers–or real U.S. American women. Like other constructions of white womanhood in the U.S., the white homemaker existed in opposition to women of color and precluded the inclusion of racialized minority women within dominant ideologies of American womanhood and domesticity.[6]  In this context, the strong reactions of some white male consumers to “mestiza Betty” is comprehensible because the icon represents a new configuration of U.S. womanhood. Perhaps most important, this paper closes with an examination of the intersections of popular representation and political economy. At the time that General Mills unveiled its multicultural Betty, what was the status of women of color in the U.S.? For the purpose of answering this question, I examine the status of African American women and Latinas–African American women because, historically, white women’s domesticity was created in opposition to Black women, and Latinas because the new Betty is said to look vaguely Latina, and because Latinas/os are now the largest minority within the U.S. Both communities are targeted by multicultural marketing ploys.

Of Icons and U.S. Consumer Culture

<6> Historians and anthropologists have argued that advertising icons are important to understanding capitalist social structures because they are both reflective of and constitutive of the eras in which they are manufactured; the social order depicted by advertisers reinforces the social hierarchies of a given dominant society (O’Barr 3-4). In U.S. advertising, these social hierarchies tend to be gendered, heteronormative, and raced. Women labor in the home, men labor in offices and factories. Men are taller than women and posed in positions so that their gaze is at the camera or down on their women and children. Families, even in twenty-first-century advertising, are heterosexual and reproductive. Most are mono-racial (Marchand 235-284; Coltrane and Messineo 363-389). Advertising has played a peculiar role in constructing U.S. social structures because the trademarks developed by agencies are often tied to U.S. American identities as consumers and citizens. Addressing this specific issue, Hal Morgan argued thus, “Trademarks and package designs form an important part of our experiences of being American. These are the symbols–the personalities–of the products we have bought, of the food we have eaten, and of the companies that we have relied on throughout our lives” (Morgan in Kern-Foxworth 106). Advertising icons reflect the values of the dominant culture that spawns them, at the same time, they play an important role in creating that dominant culture.

<7> In the U.S., the dominant culture often conflates its economic system, capitalism, with its political system, democracy, thus bolstering the role and value of the market in a nation that, ironically, claims to be “of the people” (Parenti 2).[7] As the U.S developed into a hyper-capitalist society, such ideologies, positing capitalism as integral to democracy, became part of the national fabric. As historians such as Stephanie Coontz argue, phenomena such as the Cold War and its effect on family life and consumerism were not aberrations, but a product of a society where democratic values were derived from and tied to the market economy. Today’s reinvigorations of Evangelical movements, which preach the virtues of prosperity, are more recent cultural byproducts of a market-driven society.[8]  

<8> Beginning in the early twentieth century advertising became increasingly important to the reproduction of this system. By the late twentieth century, advertisers were promoting not only their products, but a specific way of life dependent upon the success of American capital. With advertisements taking up a full 60 percent of newspaper space and over 20 percent of television time, the average American consumed ideologies of “the American way” and “the good life” that necessarily wedded American democracy to American capitalism (Parenti 62-63). In this larger context, consumer icons were and are significant brokers of values and status. In this framework Betty Crocker is not and cannot be a neutral or benign symbol; she is embedded in a larger socio-economic significance. Understanding Betty as a cultural market symbol immediately raises three questions. As a marketing icon, what is her deep historical context? What socio-economic ideologies does she reflect and reinscribe? What is the relationship between the image she projects and the lived realities of specific communities of women in the U.S.?

Scare Copy and the Cult of True White Womanhood

<9> Betty Crocker can be seen as both a product and a producer of dominant U.S. social structures. She was conceived in the late nineteen-teens, the era in which modern advertising, the kind of mass marketing with which we are familiar today, was developed (Allen 164).[9] This was an era of what media historians call scare copy—a specific kind of advertising that attempts to condition consumers to believe they need products in order to live healthy, fulfilled lives (Marchand xxi-xxii, 1-7; Lears 196-234). In this kind of advertising, stories or dramatic episodes present a main character who has a specific problem–for example, bad breath, a dirty sink, or dirty children–and this problem brings the disapproval of people such as neighbors and bosses. In a dramatized episode, a product steps forward–Listerine, Comet, Tide, or Kotex—and  rescues the character from the anti-social situation (Marchand 14). In the words of one twentieth-century political scientist, consumers are told,

that they are not doing right for baby’s needs or hubby’s or wifey’s desires; that they are failing in their careers because of poor appearance, sloppy dress, or bad breath; that they are not treating their complexion, hair, or nails properly . . . that they don’t know how to make the tastiest coffee, pie, pudding . . . nor, if left to their own devices, would they be able to clean their floors, sinks, and toilets (Parenti 64-65). 

In scare copy, the moral of the story is always the same: if you have bad breath, a dirty sink, etc., you have no one to blame but yourself; you should have taken the advice of your friendly product. In the early twentieth century, this kind of advertising created what Roland Marchand has called “normative expectations”--in other words, they created a standard of “normal behavior” and then sought to condition consumers to comply with that standard. With the rise of advertizing there was increased pressure to purchase more products in order to live “normal” lives (Marchand 14; Parenti 65-66).  It was within this context that Betty Crocker was created to give advice to consumers of Gold Medal Flour (Allen 164; Minnesota Pollution).[10] 

<10> Betty Crocker was also a product of American ideologies of white womanhood. By the opening of the twentieth-century, an ideology of domesticity had come to dominate U.S. popular culture. As noted by Barbara Welter, such ideologies held that good women labored in the home for their families, and bad women, or non-women, labored outside their homes, at times for other families. Throughout the nineteenth century, through the institution of slavery, but also with the rise of industry, white women’s labor had become firmly rooted in the home, with their status tied to their ability to maintain their households as safe havens for their spouse and children (151-174). Some white women labored for wages, such as young women working in factories prior to marriage, and married women performed homework, yet most wage labor carried with it a stigma (Kerber 9-40; Foner 1-5; Kessler-Harris 102-106). For women who were forced to work outside of the home, transgression into the public space of paid labor came at the price of their reputations and their access to protection by and from white men (Gordon Heroes, 82-108; Stansell 1-18). As the country progressed into the twentieth century, the cult of domesticity did not disappear, instead, according to scholars such as Evelyn Nakano Glenn, it shifted and morphed so that it improved the status of working-class white women. The labor of white working class women outside the home, however, meant that this status remained tenuous (Glenn 121-122).

<11> U.S. ideologies of domesticity had their strongest roots the country’s violent past. According to Hazel Carby, the ideology of domesticity originated in the American institution of slavery and was mobilized to justify violence against enslaved women (20-39). Other scholars have mapped similar arguments demonstrating that prior to the Civil War, particularly in the South, slave owners established a “cult of true [white] womanhood” through which they could control female behavior. In mobilizing the ideals of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity, white men contained white women within the bounds of domesticity, and constructed Black women as non-women, beings outside of acceptable female gender roles, unworthy of basic social protections (Deirdra Davis 196). Thus, even from its earliest iterations, the ideology, or cult, of true white womanhood was part of a larger raced and gendered political economy. 

<12> From the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, then, discourses of domesticity were an integral part of American ideologies of white womanhood (Manring 7-11). Working class women continued to work for wages, but because of U.S. myths of domesticity and womanhood they often did so for starvation wages and with limited protection from the state. Even during the Great Depression, organizations as diverse as the Women’s Trade Union League and anti-NRA businesses argued that the best way to “protect” women was by making sure that men earned a livable wage (Kessler-Harris 62-69). While some white women held a very tenuous status because they worked outside the home, most women of color never held such protection within their grasp (Katzman 62; Williamson 59). 

<13> White women often played an active and dynamic role in constructing and maintaining this ideology. On one hand, the ideology functioned to divide women, inscribing a virgin-whore model of womanhood upon the national consciousness. Good, white women were domestic and maternal. If they stayed within their prescribed roles, as the bearers of the next generation of white citizens, they were worthy of the protection of white males, and in relation, the state. On the other hand, if they stepped outside their roles, they could share the fate of poor women and women of color, as exploitable bodies–the non-women of the nation. Some white women found ways to manipulate and benefit from the discourse. According to historians such as Bárbara O. Reyes and Linda Gordon, the lines between domestic female space and public masculine space were not clearly drawn, but existed in a dynamic relationship in which women used a rhetoric of motherhood and the home to gain access to public spaces and to influence public politics.[11] 

<14> At the turn of the century, a time when many historians argue the ideology of domesticity continued to dominate discourses about white women, white women used the language of domesticity to create a space for themselves in the public sphere, and this use of the rhetoric was not benign. White middle class women were able to carve out spaces for themselves as teachers in women’s colleges, in the growing field of women’s economics, and in social work. Yet, in constructing themselves as the experts in domesticity and home-making, they also constructed immigrant women and women of color as lacking in domestic skills and as lesser women. In the emerging home-maker literature white women constructed themselves as the civilizers of their own society and that of others (Kaplan 581-606).

The Birth of Betty Crocker

<15> When, in 1917, the Washburn Crosby Company gave birth to Betty Crocker, it was into this milieu of scare copy and white womanhood. By the early twentieth century the ideology of domesticity had saturated mainstream U.S. culture. White women had carved space for themselves in the home economics departments of universities and produced a new literature that reinscribed white domesticity into white U.S. American culture. Washburn Crosby took advantage of this new body of literature, hiring women with home economics degrees to work in their kitchens, and ultimately utilizing this new generation of professional white domestic women to aid them in their marketing. Thus, even at Washburn Crosby, the trend of white women utilizing an ideology of domesticity to gain access to public places held true. In later years, when the company was flooded with letters addressed to Betty Crocker, these women would also play a role in reconstructing American domesticity in their own image by answering the letters (Marks 14).

<16> By the early twentieth century, white homemakers were ready and eager to receive their own spokesperson. In 1917, there were several flour mills competing for the business of U.S. consumers. That year, in order to maintain and expand its corner of the market, Gold Medal Flour, owned by the Washburn Crosby Company, developed a publicity scheme in which the company advertised a puzzle contest in national magazines, promising a pin-cushion, shaped like a miniature Gold Medal Flour sack, to everyone who solved the puzzle. Unexpectedly, 30,000 people throughout the nation solved the puzzle and sent in requests for their free pin-cushions. Also unexpectedly, many women sent letters with their puzzles. These letters contained questions about cooking and homemaking. While the advertising staff struggled to find answers to the queries, they decided to create a personality to answer some of the letters and to expand their consumer base; hence the birth of Betty Crocker. Betty’s signature made its first appearance in a Gold Medal cookbook and appeared on letters from Washburn Crosby, now General Mills, from that time to the present.  The advertising scheme was a success. Soon, in addition to answering letters, Betty began a food service program on the radio. By 1925 there were 13 different Betty Crocker radio shows throughout the U.S., and the advertising division at General Mills was answering 4,000 letters a day, all signed by Betty Crocker (Allen 164; Marchand 353-354).

<17> At one level, Betty Crocker was a fiction–a personality created by the Washburn Crosby Company to appeal to white female consumers, white female consumers who were bombarded with scare-copy and looking for friendly yet informed advice. The men at Washburn chose the name “Betty” because it sounded friendly. And Betty received her last name in honor of William Crocker, a director of Washburn Crosby who was retiring at the time (Pendleton 8). In the words of one newspaper reporter, “Betty Crocker [was] a lie” (Preston 173). At another level, however, Betty was very real. Her original signature was penned by Florence Lindeberg, a female worker at General Mills, and William Crocker himself was flesh and blood (Allen 164). In that sense it can be argued that the original Betty was a product of the world that produced her –the white women who worked at General Mills as well as the successful male capitalist William Crocker. In 1936, when the second picture of Betty Crocker was designed, this image too was based on the female workers at General Mills.[12] That year, to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Betty Crocker, General Mills commissioned a composite portrait of Betty based on the images of several women who worked in their home services department (General Mills, Betty Crocker’s Cookbook 5).

<18> The birth of Betty Crocker marked an improvement in the status of many white women. In addition to the increased staff required at the Washburn Crosby Company and the women who were hired to act as Betty Crocker on commercial radio, white women throughout the nation now had a public icon to speak to the importance of homemaking and to help them navigate their rapidly changing domestic worlds. Like earlier iterations of domesticity, the mobilization and utilization of Betty Crocker was multilayered. While the icon promoted domesticity as a virtue, the mobilization of scare-copy, especially on the radio, at times was extreme. In a 1924 airing, for example, one Betty advised her listeners, “If you load a man’s stomach with soggy boiled cabbage, [and] greasy fried potatoes . . . can you wonder that he wants to start a fight, or go out and commit a crime? We should be grateful that he does nothing worse than display a lot of temper” (Marks 30).

<19> Betty would set the standard for many U.S. American homes well into the twentieth century. During World War II, she was hired by the Office of War Information to host Our Nation’s Rations, a government-sponsored radio show designed to boost patriotism and to aid the public in making the best use of their scarce resources. That same year Fortune magazine called her the second best known woman in America–Eleanor Roosevelt was the first (Marks 107-115). Throughout the years, she would continue to promote white domesticity. The first composite Betty lasted nineteen years and set the norm for many years after. This Betty was not only white, she was a WASPy white. She gazed directly at her readers and wore her hair short, grey and practical. Her nose was small, her lips thin and pursed--she did not smile.[13] One critic described her as “matronly” (Beck F4). The next Betty, released in 1955, retained a whisp of grey hair. Like the first official Betty, she was WASPy and matronly with thin, slightly pursed lips, but this time with a hint of a smile (General Mills, Betty Crocker Portraits). It was not until 1965 that she lost her grey hair (General Mills, Betty Crocker Portraits). Unlike most U.S. women, Betty grew younger, not older over time, yet until 1996 Betty remained white.

Betty Crocker v. Aunt Jemima

<20> Before Betty Crocker, however, a different advertising icon was born. The birth of this icon can better help us understand Betty’s status as a fictive white woman. That other icon is Aunt Jemima, and she was brought forth into a world of violence. In 1896 the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, had ruled segregation constitutional, thus ushering in an era of increased racial discrimination. Between 1889 and 1902, in the U.S., whites lynched an average of 110 Blacks annually. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century also saw a revival of Black minstrelsy performances and a romantic reimagining of the South (Lemons 104-106; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness 115-131, 167-184). The revival was part of a larger north-south reconciliation, the same reconciliation that cemented the cult of true white womanhood as a national phenomenon. In this reconciliation, the status of some white women was bolstered, while the status of Black women underwent increased attacks. Thus, while the icon of Betty Crocker was created during a time of scare-copy, and helped to support the status of some white women, the icon of Aunt Jemima was created during a time of increased violence against Black communities and denigrated African American women.

<21> Aunt Jemima was born as an advertising icon during the second wave of U.S. American Blackface, just prior to Betty Crocker. Like her white counterpart, Aunt Jemima was, in a sense, male; “she began as a white man, in drag, wearing Blackface, singing on the minstrel stage” (Manring 1). Like Betty Crocker, Black mammy characters helped to maintain class distinctions between Black women and white women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Deck 79). Following the Chicago Exposition of 1893, white men constructed a fictionalized biography of Aunt Jemima. This biography claimed she was a former slave who was once famous throughout the South for her pancakes, and they utilized the fictive Aunt Jemima to depict a unified nation, one where former Black slaves gladly served white people from the U.S. North and South. Later, advertisers used excerpts from this story to sell their products, including a particularly troubling narrative in which General Lee met Aunt Jemima during the Civil War and later returned to the plantation where she was a slave--just so he could have her pancakes one more time. In the narrative, she happily made him pancakes, and one of the men in his party, a Northerner, persuaded her to sell him the recipe. North and South were thus united in pancakes and happy, subservient, Black advertising icons (Deck 75-76; Goings 30-32). 

<22> That African Americans found such imagery offensive was no secret to white marketers. Studies completed in the 1920s demonstrated that Black women and men deliberately avoided products that used mammy figures in their advertising. In two studies, one conducted in Nashville and the other conducted in Richmond, Black couples from various economic classes were asked for their reactions to a new Aunt Jemima advertisement. Reponses that Black women gave to the advertisement included the following: “Picture of Aunt Jemima actually keeps me from buying the flour,” “Picture reminds me of slavery,” “Not interested in picture of Black mammy,” and “Picture of Negro ‘mammy’ would keep me from reading the advertisement.” Men responded similarly: “I positively hate this illustration,” “Would not look twice because of picture,” and “Appearance of Aunt Jemima and log cabin sufficient to keep me from buying flour.” In fact, not one of the persons involved in the study had a positive comment about the advertisement (Kern-Foxworth 82-84). 

<23> While Aunt Jemima was the most familiar mammy character to U.S. consumers, other, similar mammies proliferated throughout the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, while a white Betty dispensed advice to white homemakers, a stereotyped Black mammy character appeared on advertisements for Gold Medal Flour, and in at least one Betty Crocker cookbook. Most often, she was featured as an over-weight cartoon character with exaggerated facial features whipping up pancakes, or, “homey cakes” for her readers (Deck 70-72; General Mills, Betty Crocker’s Picture 71). In Betty Crocker cookbooks, while Betty always looked professional, well-groomed and fit, the mammy character was her opposite, she was fat and wore a handkerchief on her head (General Mills Betty Crocker Cook Book 1941; General Mills Betty Crocker Cook Book 1942; General Mills Betty Crocker Cook Book 1943; General Mills Betty Crocker’s Picture; Goings 14-32). As historian Marilyn Kern-Foxworth has pointed out, the physical attributes of mammy figures in U.S. American advertising were always the opposite of white beauty standards. 

<24> The positioning of white Betty on the outside of General Mill’s cookbooks, with white stereotypes of Black women on the inside and on flour sacks, was both reflective and constitutive of white and Black women’s social status. As Ann duCille has argued elsewhere, “difference is always relational and value-laden” (duCille 57). The difference between the Betty Crocker images and the caricatures of Black women utilized by General Mills were an important part of a larger early twentieth-century narrative of difference. 

<25> A product of white America’s imagination, the black mammy became a popular icon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Unlike white women, the mammy figure labored in other people’s homes--white people’s homes. Like other white stereotypes of Black women, such as the Jezebel or the Sapphire, the mammy was constructed to embody everything that white women were not, or were not supposed to be (Kern-Foxworth 87-88; Deck 70-76; Euell 672). She was created to represent reconciliation between North and South and, in relation, to recall a mythic, happy, antebellum South. And alongside her, Betty Crocker remained a white American icon for the next 75 years of her “life.” By the 1960s the blackface characters were eliminated from the Betty cookbooks, but, as the white supremacist quoted above noted, Betty always wore red, and she was always white.[14]

Imagining White Womanhood/Containing White Womanhood

<26> Betty directed her advice to white women, yet her advice was not necessarily benign: the behavior the icon normalized was restrictive and limiting. White women were to stay within domestic and heteronormative roles. Thus, even in Betty Crocker’s Dinner for Two, first published in 1958 and reprinted well into the 1970s, Betty’s advice served to contain white women. At a time when womanists and feminists from various women’s communities were creating many kinds of change throughout the country, Betty was offering white women this advice: “If you are a bride, a business girl, or a mother whose children are away from home–this book is for you . . . ” (1). There was no question whether or not the “business girl’s” significant other might help with domestic tasks. In the 1960s and 1970s world of Betty Crocker, if women did not stay in the kitchen, they returned to it when they finished their paid labor outside the home. Thus the Betty Crocker cookbooks of the mid-to-late twentieth century clung to a nineteenth-century ideology of white womanhood where good women were responsible for hearth and home. Real women, if they had to labor outside of the home, worked a double shift.

<27> It would appear, then, that while the Betty Crocker icon was created to answer the questions of white homemakers, she, in several concrete ways, was created by and for white men. The Betty Crocker division at General Mills was led exclusively by white men until 1994 when Christina Steiner was named to head the division (“General Mills Picks C. Steiner,” B2).  In addition, the ideology of true white womanhood that her icon supported was first developed and utilized by white men. Finally, the very harsh and racist reaction to the latest Betty Crocker, which introduced this article, was penned by a man. In fact, over half of the articles responding to new Betties in the 1980s through 1990s were penned by men, many of them personal pieces that viewed Betty Crocker as a figure who was constructed to please them.[15]  For example, when General Mills changed Betty’s image in the mid-nineteen eighties, Bob Green went to his word processor and keyed in the following letter to the Seattle Times:

This may say something about my advancing years, or it may say something else about me, but I find myself beset by a raw passionate, overwhelming lust for Betty Crocker.  

I am speaking of the new Betty Crocker–the 1986 version unveiled recently by General Mills.... People have commented the new Betty Crocker looks like a young, upscale working woman, while some of the old Betty Crockers used to look like stern Schoolmarms. I don’t know anything about that.  All I know is that whenever I look at the new Betty Crocker, I am overwhelmed by the most wanton thoughts imaginable. I have fallen head over heels for this woman, and my intentions are definitely not honorable.

While Green’s erotic desires for Betty stand out as unique from other Betty discourses, his tone–writing of her as if she were flesh and blood--is not.  A 1980s New York Times article addressing changes to the icon was titled, “Betty Crocker Gets a Facelift . . . .” Again, in the New York Times, J.D. Biersdorfer penned an article titled “Next They’ll Say Betty Crocker Isn’t Real, Either” (“Betty Crocker Gets a Facelift” D5; Biersdorfer G1).   While Biersdorfer’s title reads as tongue-in-cheek, it also pays tribute to the many ways some white consumers related to the icon–writing letters for advice, eroticizing her, and/or remembering her with fondness. This tendency seemed to be encouraged by General Mills spokespersons, such as Fletcher Waller, who referred to the icon as “her” (“Betty Crocker Gets a Facelift” D5).

<28> When the latest Betty was unveiled in 1996, once again it was men who voiced the strongest opinions about the icon. Some articles noted and/or berated General Mills for its attention at “political correctness” or becoming “politically correct” (Lewis 1; “Recipe for a New Betty” 1; “‘Facing’ Reality” 1A; Springfield 4); others, such as that penned by Green or Stephen Steward in the Wall Street Journal, were more personal responses to the new Betty. Steward began his article by reminiscing on his first encounters with Betty Crocker in the 1940s, he then gave a brief description of each Betty that followed; he closed his article with the following:

For me, it will always be the first Betty.  The sun pouring through the kitchen windows as my grandfather damned a man named Truman and praised a man named Eisenhower. Bacon ‘n eggs crackled on the stove...and the icons of the kitchen–Betty Crocker and the Cream of Wheat chef–smiled upon us.

Steward’s editorial is especially intriguing because, while he does not juxtapose Betty Crocker and Aunt Jemima, he does place Betty Crocker and the Cream of Wheat chef together in his mythical, mystical past. Like Aunt Jemima, the Cream of Wheat chef was created for late nineteenth-century white consumers. Originally a generic image of a Black man with a pan over his shoulder, the image soon developed into a major marketing tool when one of the company’s owners met a Black waiter and liked his “smile and demeanor.” Like Aunt Jemima, the image served to serve white consumers; at times the icon was depicted serving white children. Like Aunt Jemima, the image recalled a simpler time by evoking a mythic antebellum South (Goings 34-38). 

<29> That white men would feel compelled to respond to new images of Betty Crocker is understandable in a larger context of advertising as reflective and constitutive of the society in which we live. The original Betty was made for white men and white women alike. White women were able to maintain their white woman status both because they had a marketing icon that looked like them and because they had a friend at General Mills who aided them in creating white domestic spaces. As a product of the early twentieth century, a time when scare copy was used to create social norms, Betty Crocker advised and influenced these consuming women. Yet white men also benefited from the icon. Betty Crocker reminded them of home and mother because she was the model to whom their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters were supposed to aspire. She was “America’s first lady of food” (“First T.V. Betty” B5). More importantly, Betty reflected a specific social order in which their own white status and that of their wives counted for something. With society divided into real women to be protected and non-women to be exploited, Betty reminded them that their women were real women, good women, worthy of their protection and that of the state. They, in turn, were “real men,” whose responsibility it was to protect Betty.

The Political Economy of Multiculturalism

<30> The shift to a multi-cultural Betty in 1996 disrupted the original binary of which the Washburn Crosby Company and the larger white U.S. society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were both products and producers. While white domesticity remained embedded in Betty’s cookbooks, she was no longer necessarily constructed in opposition to African American women. To a limited extent, she blurred the traditional U.S. race-caste line--thus the uproar by white men. Perhaps they felt insecure about losing their mother figures, or perhaps they feared an attack on their own status. Clearly however, at some level, some of them felt attacked.

<31> An initial examination of male responses to the 1996 Betty indicates that the advertising icon did, in fact, hold the potential to call into question larger racist and sexist social structures. White men as diverse as Kevin Strom and Stephen E. Steward, after all, were clearly upset by the announcement of a new Betty. Yet in the broader context of U.S. advertising, this potential is questionable. Did the new Betty disrupt anything? Did the icon produce anything beyond an initial flurry of letter writing on the part of white males? To answer this question, we need to examine the socio-economic status of African American women and Latinas at the turn of the century. 

<32> In the late 1980s and 1990s, multicultural marketing became a major trend in U.S. advertising. Companies such as Mattel poured resources into demographic studies, the results of which informed them that “Black and Hispanic middle classes [had] more disposable income than ever” (duCille 36). Mattel’s response, as was that of many other companies, was to target these specific consumer groups. Where in the past Mattel had produced Black and Latina dolls but marketed them as Barbie’s “friends” rather than as real Barbies, in the 1980s they marketed Black and Latina Barbies. In the 1990s, Mattel, along with the rest of corporate America, began to advertise their products in African American and Latina/o magazines as well as in television advertisements geared toward Black and Latina/o audiences (duCille 36-37; Rabin 56-57). American capital had discovered multi-cultural America.

<33> The production and consumption of multicultural products such as Latina Barbie and Mestiza Betty, however, served to mask differences and relationships – important historical relationships where white women maintain/ed status and physical safety at the expense of women of color (DuCille 44). Light brown women can now be Betty, but should we forget that our mothers and grandmothers cleaned the house of white Betty? Relatedly, while multicultural marketing has benefited Mattel and General Mills -- the communities to which these companies hawked their wares did not necessarily benefit from such marketing.

<34> If, as Ann duCille argues, multiculturalism, especially multicultural marketing, masks inequalities, what inequalities does Mestiza Betty mask?  And, if Betty masks inequalities, what might that tell us about the implications of other, more substantial cultural icons? David Roediger, in writing on the “New Eve” that appeared on the cover of Time magazine (1993), argued that rather than signifying an end to racism, popular multi-cultural images allow the larger white American public to reject the reality and the consequences of their racist past even while engaging in racist behaviors (3-14).[16] In order to address my final question, “was multi-cultural Betty a sign of progress, or did she function to mask inequalities in U.S. society?”  I examine two markers of social status in the U.S.: wages and educational achievement. 

<35> Mestiza Betty was created in the midst of a national economic boom (1991-1997). Inflation and unemployment were down and productivity was up (Boushey and Cherry 34-53; Kacapyr 16; Bernstein 60; Department of Labor). Yet not everyone shared equally in the boom. For women as an aggregate group, the gender pay gap stagnated in the 1990s. White women, especially professional white women, made some gains. For example, in 1990 only 2.6% of officers in Fortune 500 companies were white women; in 1999 11.9% of such positions were held by white women. In managerial positions, throughout the decade, their numbers increased. The point here is that white women’s numbers in such positions increased dramatically faster than those of women of color, causing one analyst to comment, “if white women face a glass ceiling, women of color face a concrete one” (Boushey and Cherry 34-39, 47).[17] In fact, when wages for white women and Black women were compared for these same years, economists Heather Boushey and Robert Cherry found that Black women’s wages deteriorated in relation to those of white women (49). 

<36> The majority of studies comparing women’s wages note that for the last two decades the position of African American women, relative to white women, has deteriorated (Anderson and Shapiro 273-286; Jaynes 9-24). There is some consensus on the causes for this deterioration. The first is a decline in the status of lower-skilled, or secondary sector, occupations; real wages for lower-skilled workers decreased throughout the last two decades of the twentieth century (Anderson and Shapiro 283-284; Bernstein 59-60).[18]  Because African American women are underrepresented in the professions and overrepresented in lower-skilled jobs, it is jobs in this secondary sector that most influence Black women’s wages. In the 1990s, decreasing wages in the secondary labor sector were due, in part, to a shift of manufacturing jobs to offshore production and the rise of the lower-paying service-industry in the U.S. A second cause for wage deterioration was an increase in racial discrimination. According to Anderson and Shapiro, race discrimination decreased between 1950 and 1980. Then, during the Reagan years, there was a wide spread “de-emphasis on combating discrimination” (283). The Supreme Court decisions of Wards Cove Packing v. Antonio, Patterson v. McLeon, and Martin v. Wilks, sent a clear message to employers that anti-discrimination legislation would not be strictly enforced (285-286).[19]

<37> According to the U.S. Department of Labor, economic trends in the 1990s did not mitigate wage differences between white workers and workers of color; by 2000, the average weekly earnings for white women were $521, African American women earned $451, and Latinas $385. White women’s earnings, at the close of the century, were thus 15.5% higher than Black women, and 35.3% higher than Latinas (Department of Labor). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a white male with a high school diploma earned more, on the average, than a Latina with a bachelor’s degree.[20] By the turn of the century multicultural Betty could be found on grocery shelves throughout the nation, yet it was still white Betty who was most likely to bring home a living wage. 

<38> Ironically, at the turn of the century, more Latinas than ever had access to higher education. In 2000, according to the U.S. Census, 9.2% of the U.S. Latina/o population obtained baccalaureate degrees– still significantly lower that the 22.8% of the “non-Hispanic” population, but significantly higher than our 1990 numbers. While these numbers are promising and indicate that growing numbers of Latinas earned college degrees, they also are part of a larger equation that does not bode well for Latina/o communities, and that is a growing gap between working class and middle class Latinas/os. For while more Latinas than ever earned college degrees, more Latinas than ever also dropped out of secondary school. The number of Latinas dropping out decreased to 26% in the mid-1990s, but then, following 1996, increased back to their earlier levels of 30% (Ginorio and Huston 2). While most of us would acknowledge that these young people do not drop out, but are pushed out, the numbers stand.[21]  

<39> Organizations such as the American Association of University Women (AAUW) have begun to utilize their resources to study push-out rates and the failure of our public school system to promote the success of Latinas in high schools. According to the AAUW, some of the causes of low achievement are easily remedied: too often Latina/o culture and history is ignored or degraded in the U.S. school system and, teachers and recruiters do not encourage young Latinas to think about higher education. Other factors contributing to unacceptable retention rates require more substantial structural change. Because public schools are supported by local taxes, students from poor neighborhoods attend poorly equipped schools, often in overcrowded classrooms with burned-out teachers. The drop out rates for those schools, for all student groups, is higher than at better-funded schools. Thus, until the U.S. changes the way public schools are funded, poor students will continue to receive a second-class education (Ginorio and Huston 29-34).

<40> Not surprisingly, the most significant factors affecting Latina graduation rates also affect Black students. Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, three-fourths of African American students continue to attend schools in which the student body is 90% or more minority student. Most of these schools are located in economically disadvantaged areas and, thus, poorly funded. In one study of Illinois high schools investigators found that the predominately white suburban high school in their study was able to spend roughly twice as much per student as the predominately Black urban school.  The suburban school had a 100% completion rate while the urban school struggled with a 50% push-out rate (Krieg and Wheelan 81-82).  Grammar school and high school curriculum continue to hold a Euro-centric bias–with a remarkable absence of Black women achievers in grammar school texts; and the majority of school teachers–90% at the high school level--remain white (Joseph 343).

<41> Perhaps Mestiza Betty is smiling because she can pass. While the 1996 Betty did blur the traditional white-Black/woman-nonwoman ideological binary, the status of white women and women of color remained demonstratively different even as we moved into the twenty-first century. As we moved into the twenty first century, white women earned 20 percent less that white men in the U.S., but they earned 35.3 percent more than Latinas. White women were more likely to graduate from college, and more likely to find employment in the primary labor sector.

<42> In thinking and teaching about popular culture in our twenty-first century classrooms, the most important lesson we can learn from Betty is that the limits of popular culture are firmly rooted in our country’s racialized and gendered past. While multicultural icons, including political leaders, can provide us with the hope that times have changed–that the white/non-white binary of the past is slowly fading away--it is that binary that constructed and continues to inform our present. While multicultural icons and advertisements are becoming more common, wage differences and access to education remain structured and limited by our troubled past. How we then strategically mobilize advertising icons and other aspects of popular culture remains an open and complex challenge. White reactions to the shifting image of Betty Crocker demonstrate that such shifts potentially disrupt the dominant raced and gendered ideologies that structure U.S. society–they make those who are invested in their white privilege nervous, at times angry. Placing Betty Crocker in a deep historical context, however, demonstrates both the causes of and the limits to such disruption. The road to dismantling socio-economic inequality is long ahead of us, in part, because the road constructing such inequality has a deep and layered foundation in U.S. history and culture.

Notes

[1] Strom was chief deputy of the National Alliance, a white supremacist group founded by William Pierce. Strom is also founder of the Voice of Tomorrow, a racist, far-right pirate radio station. See “Inside the Alliance: A Former Insider Speaks,” and “Sharks in the Mainstream: Racism Underlies Influential ‘Conservative’ Group,” both at Southern Poverty Law Center, <http://www.splcenter.org/intelligenceproject/ip-4i5.html> (accessed March 2, 1996).

[2] Examples of other Strom articles include “The Beast as Saint: The Truth about Martin Luther King” and “The Piranhas, the Birds and the Liberal,” <http://www.Kevin-Strom.com/>. Strom and his wife, Kirsten Kaiser, lived on William Pierces’s National Alliance compound from 1991 to 1995. Kaiser left Strom in 1997, after rejecting his white supremacist ideologies. See “Inside the Alliance: A Former Insider Speaks out.”

[3] In the early twentieth-century, Schwinn bicycles were the most common brand sold in the U.S.

[4] Pérez’s work is especially helpful for engaging a Chicana materialist approach to history while mapping fissures and opportunities for the disruption of linear narratives and social inequalities.

[5] For texts that address the role of advertising in policing women’s behavior see Sherrie A. Inness, ed. Kitchen Culture in American: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic, 1988).

[6] While Angela Davis is perhaps the mostly widely read scholar on this topic, many other scholars such as Marilyn Kern-Foxworth and Aida Hurtado have produced related work. See Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End, 1981); Aida Hurtado The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996); Adrien Katherine Wing, ed. Critical Race Feminism: A Reader (New York: New York U, 1997); Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994).

[7] This conflation is not unique to the U.S.; in fact, its origins can be found in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writings of John Locke and Adam Smith (both British), where both writers argued that a primary function of government is to protect property.

[8] Thus, Pat Robinson alienated many fundamentalists from his campaign when he criticized corporations for hurting working families and advocated a “Year of Jubilee” when debt would be forgiven. He was able to rebuild and strengthen his base when he launched the Christian Coalition and focused on traditional evangelical issues such as sexual ethics. See Clyde Wilcox, “Laying up Treasures in Heaven: The Christian Right and Evangelical Politics in the Twentieth Century and Beyond” (Magazine of History 17, No. 2 (2003): 26-27).

[9] While General Mills publications place her creation in the early 1920s, Bob Allen located a Washburn Crosby Cookbook with a signature page by Betty Crocker from 1917. 

[10] Washburn Crosby later merged with 11 other mills to become General Mills. Because Washburn Crosby was the largest company, its board of directors dominated the new company. The company also brought with it its Betty Crocker icon.

[11] While Gordon’s work is sometimes problematic, normalizing the racism of the white women of her study as “parent’s very love for their children” (318), she does provide a fine example of white women using ideologies of domesticity to influence public spaces.

[12] The first image of Betty Crocker appeared only twice, as a consequence, most histories, even those produced by General Mills, do not mention it. For a description of this first image, see Bob Allen, 164-165.

[13] In this early General Mills cookbook, Betty is the only image featured on the front of the cookbook.

[14] Writing for the Washington Post, Charles Freund described her as “a blue-eyed Heartland Anglo-Saxon.” See Charles Paul Freund, “The New Face of Betty Crocker: Her Portrait as Drawn by Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand” (Washington Post, 14 Apr. 1996: C5). Actually, as noted by Susan Marks, one of the earliest Betties once wore green (she too was white). See Marks, 218.

[15] Using ProQuest databases, the author surveyed seven periodicals: Seattle Times, Spokesman Review, Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, News Tribune, and Seattle Post. For the years of 1986-1996, 56% of the letters regarding General Mills’s new or prospective Betties were written by men.

[16] In 1993 Time newsmagazine featured “Eve, The New Face of America” on the cover of one issue. The image was a composite of fourteen models from different ethnic and racial backgrounds. A feature article in the same issue argued that it was time to move beyond race and a “politics of separation.”

[17] Similarly, Inés Pinto Alicea has referred to the barriers Latinas face as the “Adobe Ceiling.” See Alicea, “The Dense, Impenetrable Adobe Ceiling” (Hispanic Outlook 24 Feb. 2003: 16-17).

[18] According to Bernstein, “the real wage of the typical worker...fell 3.7 percent between 1979 and 1989, and 3.1 percent between 1989 and 1994” (59).

[19] In Wards Cove Packing v. Antonio, the Supreme Court increased the burden of proof for victims of discrimination by requiring plaintiffs to provide detailed statistics comparing labor pools and skill sets with those employed by the corporation. Justice Stephens dissented, noting that the decision went against precedent and weakened Title VII protections. In Patterson v. McLeon the Court ruled in favor of an employer who had harassed a women of color, explaining that the harassing behavior had not violated their employment contract; and in Martin v. Wilks the Court ruled in favor of white firefighters who challenged the promotion of minority firefighters when race was taken into consideration.  In all three cases, the ability of minorities to challenge discrimination under title VII of the Civil Rights Act was diminished.

[20] National Committee on Pay Equity, “Pay Equity Information,” <http://www.pay-equity.org/info-education.html> (accessed June 16, 2004). The NCPE used data from the U.S. Census Bureau, “Current Population Survey, March 2002” for persons 25 years and older.

[21] In some states, such as Texas, the numbers are much higher. In 2002 over 51% of Latinos were leaving high-school without diplomas (”High School Drop Rate Should be a Cause for Concern,” La Prensa 3 Nov. 2002: 11A).

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