Betty Crocker: First Lady of Mass Culture
Betty Crocker was created in 1921 when The Washburn Crosby Company started expanding its business. During the time Betty Crocker was introduced, the flour milling company started to host cooking classes both in person and on the radio (bettycrocker.com). During this time, women were mostly stay at home and did the cooking and cleaning. This product was originally made to help mothers spend less time cooking, and have more free time. Betty Crocker was first advertised as being completely premade cake mixes. There was a powdered egg and milk substitute, so the women cooking did not have to do any work. This made it easy to have the taste of a home-cooked meal with little effort put in by the woman in the kitchen.
I embedded some advertisements produced during the 50s and 60s. These ads emphasized the importance of the consumer’s involvement in the cake baking process. Time spent in the kitchen is cut in half, better cakes are made, and the man is happy.
Throughout our discussions on mass culture and mass media, these delicious cakes came to my mind as an example of how mass culture can influence the masses. Pauline Kael once said, “a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation” (154). I have focused this paper on writing about original Betty Crocker cake mixes and the psychology behind the advertising of these delicious mixes. This product is an outcome based on some ideas authors in class have discussed. Betty Crocker Cake mixes is a prime example of what Adorno, Jameson, and Benjamin wrote about in their writings on free time, utopian society, and mass expertise.
Adorno had a lot to say about mass culture creating a false sense of freedom. One of the main goals for Betty Crocker was, supposedly, to give women freedom from the kitchen. Adorno says multiple times in his Free Time writing that free time is connected to its opposite; unfreedom (187). But was it really freedom women were gaining out of this? Were women given actual free time to enjoy more of their personal hobbies, or were these “quick fix” meals a way to distant women from real freedom? According to Adorno, “free time depends on the totality of social conditions” (187). The social conditions were being challenged during this time with the women’s rights movement and women’s suffrage around this time. It is an interesting notion since Betty Crocker came out around the same time as the women’s suffrage movements, that whether these simple cake mixes were a way to push women out of the kitchen, or further push them away from the rest of society. Concealing a hidden labor behind the slogan “You add the egg!”
Betty Crocker initially did not involve as much work as we know today. Even so, there is still relatively little effort needed to create a cake. The eggs and milk were prepackaged in a powder form, creating the ultimate convenience cake. Women were not buying it. The reason why Betty Crocker was not getting off the shelves was for one simple reason: women felt guilty. “Psychologists concluded that average American housewives felt bad using the product despite its convenience. It saved so much time and effort when compared with the traditional cake baking routine that they felt they were deceiving their husbands and guests” (Boyd.)Women were not working enough to get any satisfaction out of baking.
I bring in Jameson and his ideas on a Utopian society, because the cake mixes were trying to create a utopian kitchen experience. Jameson uses the example of Jaws and how each character represents something bigger. “The symbol-the killer shark-lies less in any single message or meaning than in its very capacity to absorb and organize all of these quite distinct anxieties together” (142). In this situation, the shark would be the egg, or lack of an egg. The societal issues happening around the time of Jaws is similar to the societal challenges for women and being in the kitchen. If Betty Crocker was used, the woman would be happier because she put less effort into preparing the dessert, and the man would find this cake delicious. Life is overall easier and people are less stressed with this product. Jameson’s idea on entertainment was that it is needed to create meaning, not only about free time outside of work. Betty Crocker used this same concept when reorganizing the company advertisements for the product. Instead of directly approaching the guilt in commercials, the company simply added an egg to the mix so women would feel more involved in the baking process (Boyd). This gave the cake more meaning. Therefore, allowed the woman to not feel guilty.
Another goal of the Betty Crocker product was to make it easier for anyone to make a homemade cake. Everyone can easily produce a delicious cake. Benjamin writes about mass expertise in his article, Reflections on Radio. His critic on mass media is not focused on the free time it can create, but on the knowledge media can pass on to the masses. According to Benjamin, mass culture has a responsibility to extend its expertise onto the masses. It needs to “take advantage of its own forms of technology, using them to create their own expertise” (391). Just how radio can help make everyone an expert in a topic, Betty Crocker can make anyone an expert in baking.
When does mass expertise and utopian ideas become standardization? Adorno writes about standardization of music which can be applied to the standardization of baking. These cake mixes became the new standard of homemade baking. Betty Crocker was a famous lady. “According to Fortune magazine in April 1945, she was the second best-known woman in America, following First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Betty Crocker was known as the First Lady of Food” (Boyd). This goes to show just how fast the standard of cooking changed.
Overall, Betty Crocker is a good example of what Adorno, Jameson, and Benjamin wrote about in their aspirations and fears of mass culture and mass media. These cake mixes supposedly created more free time for women. The ads conveyed a utopian society bettered by this product. This was a response by repeating the image of a happy wife and a happy husband. Betty Crocker introduces the idea that that anyone can be an expert in baking through convenience and speed. Yet, Betty Crocker also fueld a consumer society that furthered segregated women and men. Even though society expectations of women were being challenged and changed during this time, it is hard to tell whether these easy desserts were a response to these challenges, or an idea setting up and supporting the women’s rights movement. These cakes represented mass culture and were fed to the masses, furthering depriving them of a pure leisure time and individuality.
References:
Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music, edited by Richard D. Leppert, translated Susan H. Gillespie, U of California Press, 2002, 437-469.
Benjamin, Walter. “Reflections on Radio.” The Work of Art in the Age of its
Boyd, Drew. “A Creativity Lesson From Betty Crocker.” Psychology Today. N.p., 19 Jan. 2014. Web. 26 Feb. 2017.
Jameson, Fredric. Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture. Social Text, No. 1 (Winter, 1979), pp. 130-148 Published by: Duke University Press.
Kael, Pauline. “A Life in the Dark.” p.154.
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