Pears Soap Advertisement

“Pears soap ad.” McClure's Magazine (Vol. 14, No. 4): 10. New York: The S.S. McClure Co., 1900: 1. 

An illustration like the one featured in the Pears soap advertisement from McClure’s Magazine directly confronts cultural anxiety about a woman’s unnamed power and bewitching influence. The ad functions in two ways. First, it highlights a woman’s physical allure and portrays this allure as a kind of feminine “witchcraft.” Secondly, the ad hints at a woman’s consumer power through its engagement with the wider industry of beauty products and feminine consumer goods. The ad seems to suggest that beauty is a byproduct of using a bar of Pears soap. Companies began marketing hygiene items like soap to women as beauty products at the turn of the century, and the British soap company A. & F. Pears was one of the first companies to realize the profit potentials in doing so (Jones 81). In the early twentieth century, Pears was known for the quality and quantity of its print advertising and was spending more than $600,000 on print ads by 1907, a dramatic increase from the $700 it allotted to ads in the mid-1860s (81). The soap ad from 1900 was one of several marketed by the company to feature a witch figure. Taken together, these ads build a kind of print culture mythology that appeals to a common American trope of transgressive womanhood.

The illustration featured in this particular ad retools the trope, removing the threat of feminine transgression and replacing it with a kind of sanctioned mystique. With delicate facial features, porcelain skin, and luxurious hair swept into a loose bun, the woman in the ad recalls a Gibson Girl, a popular cultural image of the American New Woman first drawn by Charles Dana Gibson in the late nineteenth century (Patterson 3). She embodies a kind of approved sensuality and physical allure. The artist negotiates this feminine power through the use of humor in the caption. The soap, the woman says, “only is the witchcraft I have us’d.” The use of a word like “only” limits her powers to the realm of beauty and makes her “witchcraft” non-threatening. The background floral pattern and the design of her collar, which mimics the slopes and curves of rose petals, reinforce her soft docility and compliance. She offers an image of traditional femininity, and the illustration thus works to assuage the broader cultural apprehension about the women who increasingly challenged or altered this image and the femininity it sanctions.

Sources
Jones, Geoffrey. Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Print.
Patterson, Martha. Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimaging the American New Woman, 1895-1915. Urbana, IL: Illinois UP, 2005.