Eureka!

Ads in old copies of The Swarthmorean are always fun to read. The prices alone make me long for the miracle of time travel. A brand-new Chevrolet for less than $525? A five-bedroom stone house in the Swarthmore Hills, complete with stable, for $9,500? What’s not to like?

The way advertisers represented their customers reveals a lot about how potential buyers wanted to imagine themselves. In the late 1920s, illustrators drew middle-aged men as sober captains of industry — often sporting fedoras and, sometimes, a monocle over one eye — and young men as athletic types dressed for tennis or riding horses. Even boys would be dressed in suits, albeit with breeches buckled at their knees. 

Women in these ads, like their male counterparts, were invariably white and immediately recognizable as well-to-do. In sketches, they were young, thin, and clad in body-hugging dresses typical of the “flapper.” Their hair was usually short, bobbed, and tucked coyly under a cloche hat. If kitchen items were being sold, an apron would be added to a woman’s outfit, but always over a stylish dress and with some indication, like a strand of pearls around the neck, signifying that this was the lady of the house.

Ads for cars tended to feature men, but ads for domestic items invariably used illustrations of women. The Swarthmorean was full of advertisements designed to catch the eye of middle-class housewives, or, perhaps, of their considerate husbands. With electricity in more and more houses, families with enough money could buy refrigerators, irons, washing machines, and other devices touted as indispensable to the modern home. 

Often, sellers found ways to attract customers with reduced prices and deferred payments. Take, for example, Delaware County Electric Co.’s ad for the Eureka Vacuum Cleaner “Junior,” whose price dropped from $19.50 to $12.50 when bought in tandem with a Eureka “Standard” or a Eureka “Special.” For “only $2.50 down,” buyers could take advantage of the vacuum cleaner’s “countless uses.”

One of these was how the Junior doubled as a hair dryer. By detaching the bag and slipping on the “heating-drying attachment,” consumers could coax an entirely new function from their vacuum cleaner. In this ad from November 1929, we see the mini vacuum poised on a shelf to blow hot air in the direction of the hair (bobbed, of course) of a young woman. I’d like to see a Roomba top that!

Retired history professor and former Swarthmore resident Laurie Bernstein has been busying herself during the pandemic by developing a database of back issues of The Swarthmorean, starting with Volume I, Number 1, from 1929. From time to time, we reprint an article she selects from our archives, along with her commentary.