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By the dawn of the twentieth century, advertising had become pervasive in the United States. As it gathered force, it began transforming American society. For one thing, by stimulating demand among consumers for more and more products, advertising helped manufacturers create whole new markets. The resulting brisk sales also enabled companies to recover their product-development costs quickly. In addition, advertising made people hungry for technological advances by showing how new machines—vacuum cleaners, washing machines, cars—might make daily life easier or better. All this encouraged economic growth by increasing sales of a wide range of goods.

Advertising also began influencing Americans’ values. As just one example, ads for household-related products (mops, cleaning solutions, washing machines) conveyed the message that “good” wives were happy to vanquish dirt from their homes. By the early 1900s, business leaders and ad agencies believed that women, who constituted as much as 70 to 80 percent of newspaper and magazine readerships, controlled most household purchasing decisions. Agencies developed simple ads tailored to supposedly feminine characteristics—ads featuring emotional and even irrational content. For instance, many such ads portrayed cleaning products and household appliances as “heroic” and showed grateful women gushing about how the product “saved” them from the shame of a dirty house or the hard labor of doing laundry by hand.