Commercial fallout: The image of progress, the culture of war, and the feminine consumer, 1939-1959

This dissertation explores the role of consumer culture in World War II by examining how and why wartime advertising and commercial propaganda forged a link between the home, the middle-class housewife, and the theatre of war, and thereby set a precedent for the military rhetoric found in many Cold War advertisements featuring the promises of a super-powered domesticity that visually affirmed the presumed moral authority of American capitalism and the white, suburban middle class.By investigating wartime advertisements and articles found in women's magazines and business trade, design, architectural, and pop-science publications, women's recruitment and consumer war bond propaganda, and archival documents, the dissertation argues that consumer culture, the "consumer engineering" professions and the American corporate infrastructure shaped the war's public image--an aspect of World War II which has not been thoroughly explored, especially from the vantage point of art history.This dissertation reveals the ulterior political motives behind wartime commercial propaganda about the product conversion and postwar reconversion processes sponsored by corporate entities, including the War Advertising Council, the National Association of Manufactures, and many industrial designers. The American corporate infrastructure sought to build middle- and working-class confidence in big business and capitalism through commercial imagery depicting how industry was winning the war and would democratize higher standards of living in peace, thereby attempting to undermine the public's faith in the New Deal. The business community sought to ensure that the free-enterprise system, corporate authority, and a consumption-oriented society would prevail over wartime collectivism and New Deal business regulations by constructing an image of postwar progress in which a "new and improved" America would emerge, "revolutionized" with the technological advances, product designs, and prefabrication building techniques developed for the war.The dissertation also examines whether or not the wartime promises for a "democratized" and "revolutionized" domesticity came true after victory by exploring representations of gender and class identity, forecasts for the "house of tomorrow," as well as the paradoxes behind Levittown, the Atomic Age, and the role of African-American consumers in the mainstream vision of postwar progress.