the good old days

For snarky humor aimed at the clumsy advertising of yesteryear, Kitchen Retro is always good for a laugh.

What 1936 Betty Crocker advised us: Men are incompetent housekeepers who transition from mooching off their mother to mooching off their wife, and of course are never satisfied with the cooking of the wife.

Which, if you think about it, means that cooking skills are quantitatively getting worse with every generation. In another few centuries, we’ll all be putting dirt on plates and sobbing apologies for not being able to get the worms “just like mother used to make”.

Maybe I should stop thinking about it.

Anyway, the biscuit-loving husband picture is a riot. Can’t say it much better than Lidian did…

Check him out, holding up the Bisquick biscuit and grinning. Getting to be a swell cook? Getting to be? How many goddamn batches of biscuits does a person have to make and shove down his throat before he coughs up an unadulterated compliment!

Gee, isn’t that swell?

Speaking from personal experience: this is totally what women in a factory look like.

Well, nowadays you really have to wear steel-toed leather boots for safety, but other than that… totally.

Office Courtesy: Meeting the Public (1952) reminded me slightly of why I quit a job years ago — I wasn’t willing to put up with the bullshit Barbara has to, although it’s her job to do so and it wasn’t mine.

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I’m amused by the mild undercurrent of familiar touching between the two roommates. I really doubt it’s the impression Encyclopaedia Britannica Films intended to portray, but hey, it’s 1952, an open-minded time that accepted everyone’s sexuality. But we’re here to learn about secretarial attitude, not lesbians!

It’s mildly fun to see Barbara and Ruth sitting there sniping about Mr. Franklin’s secretary (who, frankly, deserves it). Apparently future secretaries were best educated by showing them snarky bitchery. But it also drives home how annoying it really is to be a secretary. Do everything, be cheerful and friendly to everyone… jeez, you even need to swallow your gum whenever the boss walks in the room.

When I worked at a small company, I was eventually moved to a office by the front door. It’s a 30-person company, so I was asked to “chip in” by answering the door and greeting guests (when I objected, I got a lecture on my lack of team spirit). It was incredibly annoying; I constantly having my work interrupted, and it didn’t make it more “fun” if I had a cheerful, positive attitude towards whatever strange visitor was dropping by. (And I did have a cheerful, positive attitude, at least on the outside.) I’m an engineer, not a secretary, and so it was infuriating to be put in that position; it was one of the reasons I was happy to leave.

Shortly after I did move on, they hired a receptionist (who doubled as an HR something) for that office, but had an impossible time finding another manufacturing engineer to do the many things I had done… teaching another valuable lesson, prioritize your employees’ workload based on what you really need. They lost a lot more man-hours by having an incompetent engineer and a cheerful receptionist.

Having been out of town for ages, then having relatives visiting us, it’s taking days to catch up on my RSS feeds. I had no idea I read so much stuff. Good thing I’m being downsized, I’ll have more time for reading random blogs!

Two nice short olde tyme things from Modern Mechanix… Leg Falsies from 1953 (as if small boobs weren’t enough, now we need to worry about curvaceous calf muscles) or an 1950 ad for Americanized Judo (you don’t want to accidentally learn that Godless Commie Judo, after all).

Another tidbit of Office Etiquette dedicated to my fellow co-workers desperately seeking their next place of employment…

Unless you’re willing to sleep with the boss, you can’t call him by his first name.

Excerpted from a story in Love Romances #82 (July 1952) — thanks to Sleestak.

Typically cheesy romance-comic plot aside, it is damned annoying to see secretaries (or any woman in an office environment) called by their first name while male co-workers and superiors are entitled to the full respect of being called Mister Somebody.

The modern version is allowing everybody to use first names, but a surprising number of men think it’s just great to call me “sweetie” or “hon”. (This is almost always done by guys of a certain age. Except that snotty engineer my own age who’s just a total fucking idiot…) Many of them are in sales, trying to convince me to buy their piece of industrial equipment. Do they really think that sleazy overfamiliarity is likely to make me overlook an inflated price list and bad OEM-restrictive design?

So, your lesson for today: creepy pickup lines are not a reasonable substitution for good customer (or co-worker) rapport.

Dear Canadian Club Whiskey,

Your advertising department is a pack of shortsighted fools.

My mother’s father actually did drink whiskey regularly. Very regularly. In fact, he was severely alcoholic. And when he drank, he was abusive. The emotional impact of that has scarred my mother, aunt, and uncles for the rest of their lives. So “YOUR DAD DRANK LOTS OF OUR WHISKEY” gives me a strong, visceral, anti-your-whiskey reaction.

Beyond that personal experience: I wouldn’t want to be like any of the people in your ads. I wouldn’t want to be a male slut. I wouldn’t want to be the old-time manly man. Part of this is because I just haven’t got the manly equipment, being a woman and all — but trust me, even if I was a man, those are not characters I would ever aspire to.

I have multiple relatives who are mildly or wildly fond of whiskey; I will not be buying any of them Canadian Club as a gift ever again. I will not have it in my own house under any circumstances; any bottles in our cabinet will be poured down the drain, and it will never be purchased by us again. My liquor budget for gifts and personal use is no more than a couple hundred dollars a year, but I doubt I’m the only one who’s strongly offended by your advertisements. Hopefully the loss of customers will far outweigh any gains.

Sincerely Loathing Your Company,
Me

Positively, though, Project: Canadian Club - Your Mom Had Groupies has put a beautifully inclusive, humorous spin on this otherwise pointless, misogynistic, homophobic ad campaign. One of my favorites so far:

The factory I work at is scheduled to close at the end of June, so we’re all being given an amazing amount of leeway while looking for new jobs. This includes having a job search consultant who works on our resumes, gives us interviewing tips, and so on.

However, I recently stumbled across a lovely guide for interviewing etiquette. From a 1953 issue of the comic book Cinderella Love (#13)…

The mostly-male engineering team is sure to benefit from this advice A thousand thanks to the women’s movement and modern computers, for letting me have a career that doesn’t involve typing and stenography.

There are also tips for holding the job once you’ve got it — read more here. Sleestak comes up with some awesome stuff.

It’s weird looking back at different media struggling to reconcile “men want to go on dates and have a good time with women” with “men want to marry a woman who knows how to cook, clean, raise kids, all while wearing high heels”. The mental hygiene genre of classroom films tend to push you in the latter direction. Comic books, however…

Here’s a bit of vintage dating advice.

IF, YOU FEEL YOU’RE NOT AS POPULAR AS YOU MIGHT BE, ARE YOU SURE YOU’RE AS ALERT AS YOU COULD BE? PERHAPS THE FELLOW WHO WORKS AT THE NEXT DESK IS A LITTLE SHY–MAYBE HE’S BEEN THROWING HINTS YOUR WAY AND YOU HAVEN’T BEEN CATCHING THEM!

PERHAPS YOU’RE SO BUSY WAITING FOR YOUR DREAM MAN TO COME ALONG YOU’RE OVERLOOKING SOME VERY GOOD BETS! SOMETIMES A GIRL HAS SUCH A DETAILED PICTURE OF HER “HERO” IN MIND THAT SHE OVERLOOKS HIM IF HE SHOULD SHOW UP IN SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT GARB!

Rule 1: Stop being so damn picky. No wonder you’re single if you won’t eat food you hate and don’t date anybody who asks.

ARE YOU MAKING THE MOST OF AVAILABLE OPPORTUNITIES TO MEET YOUNG MEN YOUR AGE? IN SHORT, DO YOU GO PLACES WHERE THE YOUNG MEN ARE? JOIN A SOCIAL CLUB OR TRY THE SWIMMING POOL AT THE LOCAL “Y”! YOU MIGHT BE SURPRISED AT THE RESULTS!

ARE YOU TOO ANXIOUS? DOES YOUR WHOLE ATTITUDE ADVERTISE THE FACT THAT YOU’RE MAN HUNGRY? BE CAREFUL NOT TO SCARE POTENTIAL DATES AWAY WITH OVER EAGERNESS!

Rule 2: Flaunt your stuff. Guys don’t want to meet your parents, they want to see what you look like in a bathing suit.

THIS IS NO TIME TO BE TOO PROUD! LET YOUR FRIENDS KNOW YOU’D LIKE TO MEET SOME ELIGIBLE YOUNG MEN! THEY’RE USUALLY VERY GLAD TO COOPERATE!

ARE YOU FRIENDLY AND SWEET TO EVERYONE–NOT JUST THE MEN ON WHOM YOU WANT TO MAKE AN IMPRESSION! PERHAPS–JUST PERHAPS THE NICE OLD COUPLE DOWN THE STREET MAY BE THE ONES TO INTRODUCE YOU TO HIM IF THEY LIKE YOU!

Rule 3: It’s all about networking. Swallow your pride, girls, you need to settle! Grab whatever your friends and neighbors scrape together. See Rule 1.

And just in case you’re wondering — modern tips for increasing your dateability (found by Google, of course) include things like having lots of interests, and buying a good digital camera to get a high-quality picture for your profile at online dating sites. I don’t know if that’s much of an improvement.

I got these images from Lady, That’s My Skull originally, but can’t find the exact post now.

I wonder what the modern hotel would do in response to a letter from a female guest who wished to inform them she would have no male companion.

Ladies Alone In American Hotels

If you have never been in a hotel alone but you are of sufficient years, well behaved and dignified in appearance, you need have no fear as to the treatment you will receive. But you should write to the hotel in advance—whether here or in Europe. In this country you register in the office and are shown to your room, or rooms, by a bell-boy—in some hotels by a bell-boy and a maid….

A lady traveling alone with her maid (or without one), of necessity has her meals alone in her own sitting-room, if she has one. If she goes to the dining-room, she usually takes a book because hotel service seems endless to one used to meals at home and nothing is duller than to sit long alone with nothing to do but look at the tablecloth, which is scarcely diverting, or at other people, which is impolite.

I am not entirely sure why she bothered to separate American and European hotels, as the guidelines are roughly the same: write in advance.

Ladies Traveling Alone In Europe

Europeans can not possibly understand how any lady of social position can be without a maid. A lady traveling alone, therefore, has this trifling handicap to start with. It is a very snobbish opinion, and one who has the temerity to attempt traveling all by herself has undoubtedly the ability to see it through. She need after all merely behave with extreme quietness and dignity and she can go from one end of the world to the other without molestation or even difficulty—especially if she is anything of a linguist.

In going from one place to another, it is wiser to write as long as possible ahead for accommodations—possibly giving the name of the one (if any) who recommended the hotel. But in going far off into Asia or other “difficult” countries, she would better join friends or at least a personally conducted tour, unless she has the mettle of a Burton or a Stanley.

I had already planned this post when I read last week’s post Lone Female Traveller at Skepchick. Take a gander at that as well; the hooker stereotype certainly explains why you might write to the hotel in advance (what prostitute does that?), but Emily Post unfortunately did not provide advice on dealing with the in-room porn choices

Today’s selection is brought to you from Etiquette (1922). Hurray for Project Gutenberg.

Two management training films. Both attempt to teach men how to deal with having to manage women. (Because women are incomprehensible, I guess.) No real deep message or analysis here, just interesting viewing, especially if you’re a woman who works outside the home.

From 1944, Supervising Women Workers

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Apparently, there were some “new and different problems” involved in women working in factories. (Well, in machine shops, that is. Women were in mills and other industries for years.) Intriguingly, the very appropriate advice to not sexually harass your employees is explained as a way to prevent jealousy between them. Bleargh.

I liked the bit where the guy was demonstrating a lathe.

Now if anybody wants a framspan, give with the left-handed double gerrywrench on account of it might surbobulate the orange crepe to the tappet…

Here’s a tip, Joe: maybe you should have your machine shop instructor use real words instead of total gibberish. No wonder World War II was rough: women were surbobulating things. (Oh, I know, they’re just demonstrating how unfamiliar words can sound like total gibberish. But isn’t it funnier to think of warships built with crepes?)

“Surbobulate” is now my new favorite word to use in the factory. Yeah, I work in a factory — I’m an engineer. And the boys nowadays are just as ignorant as the girls. (No, this doesn’t mean men got dumber in the last sixty years. It means the women were never as stupid as the men feared.)

Take the weak-minded, jealous, defensive women that this film suggests are in factories everywhere. Now take Rosie the Riveter. Which one would you find more inspirational as a potential factory worker recruit?

Moving out of the factory and into the office, we have 1958’s The Bright Young Newcomer

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Once you get past the cringe-worthy use of “girl” to describe all the women in the office, you can get to the root of the manager’s problem: he’s ignoring what happens in his department, even as he promises an employee that he’ll deal with it. He says he’s busy and that’s why he couldn’t deal with it, but it’s pretty clear that he’s busy because ignores his job (MANAGING people) until a situation blows up in his face.

There’s also no particular reason why this scenario should have to have a male manager trying to figure out what to do with the “girls” around him. If it was just to get the probably-male audience more interested in the film’s message by putting lots of breasts and skirts in it, why is Betty so unappealing?