In her innovative and complex work, Selling Women’s History, Emily Westkaemper charts the various ways in which feminists have employed women’s history in popular culture from 1910 to 1970. In alignment with women’s historians such as Susan Ware and Nancy Hewitt, Westkaemper argues that contrary to previous assertions, feminism was alive and well in the years between suffrage and women’s liberation.^{Footnote 1} Using popular culture as her lens, Westkaemper explores in great detail how feminist academics, activists, and media industry workers, especially women in advertising, “packaged” women’s history across multiple media outlets, including mass-circulation print periodicals, trade journals, association newsletters, radio broadcasts, and television programs. The author also explores the ways in which the advertising industry employed women’s history as a marketing tool. What she demonstrates is that because women’s history was employed by individuals and groups with various motivations and objectives, the use of women’s history within popular culture was not monolithic. Instead, it varied according to the context in which it was being employed, which was usually along a spectrum, with claims of alignment and continuity with women’s historical experiences at one end and the juxtaposition of history with modern values at the other. Where the various public uses of women’s history landed along the spectrum was dependent on the goals of those who employed it and, at times, varied within the same project.

Using an impressively broad array of evidence from media, including print advertisements and articles, comic books, radio dramas and documentaries, films, and commercial television broadcasts, as well as the archival records of individual feminists, advertising agencies, corporations, and women’s advertising associations, in a series of six chapters the author details instances in which women’s history was used. Each chapter contains multiple, chronologically organized case studies too numerous to describe, ranging from examinations of activist Lucy Maynard Salmon’s publications in Good Housekeeping and the glorification of Martha Washington in promotional material for Wanamaker’s and Liquid Veneer in the 1910s to the 1930s; to the Philadelphia Women’s Advertising Club’s (PWAC) adoption and use of the Quaker Girl as its mascot and the club’s creation of the local radio program, Famous Philadelphia Women of Yesteryear during the 1930s; to Avon advertisements, musicals, and supermarket premiums during WWII and the Virginia Slims “You’ve come a long way, baby!” ad campaign in the postwar years. While Westkaemper provides some brief examples of the ways in which Black feminists and firms, such as the Madam C. J. Walker Company, employed women’s history, such cases are found primarily in the first chapter. As such, the bulk of the work focuses on the ways in which white feminists used and promoted the history of white women.

Though the range of examples presented does lead to a lack of cohesion at times, Westkaemper’s analysis of female advertisers’ uses of women’s history, to which she dedicates the better part of three chapters, adds a welcome degree of consistency. In this examination, the author demonstrates that through their motivation for legitimacy within the industry, female advertisers employed women’s history across multiple media to create a usable past that would support their professional goals. It is arguably the strongest part of her work and makes a significant contribution to the literature on gender and business history as she puts female ad workers, their gendered professional challenges, and their understandings and uses of history at the center of her analysis.

Westkaemper is not the first to explore female advertisers’ gendered experiences; however, her work presents an important departure in both approach and perspective. Whereas the works of historians such as Jennifer Scanlon, Simone Weil Davis, and Denise H. Sutton have laid crucial groundwork for the analysis of women’s historical experiences in advertising, they have largely done so in studying the topic from the perspective of the agency (especially J. Walter Thompson), through prominent figures such as Helen Lansdowne Resor, and in analyzing the by-women, for-women campaigns women advertisers created.^{Footnote 2} Westkaemper does build on the literature somewhat, highlighting the career of prominent advertiser and advertising club historian Dorothy Dignam who worked for N. W. Ayer & Sons in Philadelphia and New York and spearheaded the pathbreaking Ford V-8 campaign of the 1930s that targeted female drivers. Where this work differs is that Westkaemper approaches the history of women advertisers and their use of women’s history from the perspective of women’s advertising clubs, focusing on the PWAC, in addition to clubs in New York, Chicago, and St. Louis. Through this approach, Westkaemper presents histories of the clubs and analyzes how and why advertising women’s professional societies interacted with others in their industry and the public.

In detailing how women’s ad clubs used history to achieve their goals, Westkaemper offers a new perspective on the sociocultural history of the advertising industry itself. In her analysis she details social events such as dinner dances and fashion shows, which, she reveals, always included the attendance of all-male advertising club members. She also demonstrates that these events were used subversively. In the case of a PWAC fashion show, for instance, ad women openly rejected normative gender ideology, which suggested that such demonstrations indicated that women loved clothing and enjoyed the male gaze. Instead, PWAC members wore historical costumes related to the campaigns they had created to remind male audience members of their pathbreaking work and their influence within the industry. Through examples such as these, Westkaemper delves into the social world of business. She not only reveals what took place, which is important in and of itself; in interrogating the club members’ use of women’s history, she also skillfully uncovers the deeper professional and highly personal feminist meanings behind them.

Westkaemper explains that during the same period, retailers and manufacturers alike co-opted women’s history, highlighting women’s traditional roles as homemakers, mothers, and romantic objects to sell goods. While seemingly incongruent with women’s activism within the advertising industry as presented here, we know from the works of historians such as Scanlon and Sutton that despite examples that challenged gender norms, such as Dignam’s Ford campaign, female advertisers were chief among those creating this type of gender-limiting content. This brings into question Westkaemper’s wholesale claim that ad women were in fact feminists, suggesting at the very least, that this assertion requires further consideration and qualification. It forces one to ask whether ad women should be defined as feminists given that they advocated for themselves, but through the ads they created, they worked to solidify limiting gender norms for female consumers. While perhaps this is the point, as the author seeks to demonstrate how the use of women’s history within popular culture was complicated and disordered, especially as it pertained to the advertising industry, more consideration of the types of feminism explored would have better foregrounded the examples presented.

Despite this shortcoming, Westkaemper achieves what she sets out to do and does it well. She clearly demonstrates that from the 1910s until the 1970s, women’s history mattered within popular culture. She also demonstrates that it mattered in business both as a sales tool and as a means of changing the gendered landscape of the advertising industry, at least internally. In creating advertising appeals for final consumers in the pages of magazines, and later on television, in entertaining and educating listeners of commercial radio broadcasts, and in legitimizing women’s place in the advertising industry, women’s history and those who employed it played an important role in both redefining and shaping ideologies surrounding women’s place in business, the marketplace, and American culture. As such, Selling Women’s History serves as an important reminder of the intentional role played by feminists of varying degrees in shaping female-centered historical narratives, popular historical consciousness, workplace gender ideologies, and their own histories.