Image of the Week #27: Liberty Bonds

---

What Is It

An advertisement from the Wellesley News, the student newspaper of Wellesley College, from the late 1910s. 

Why I Find It Interesting

I'm regularly intrigued by the different strategies used for war bonds.  I remember seeing them a lot when I was reading comics of the 1940s as well as listening to old time radio.  The comic ads were different from the radio ads in how they appealed to the audience, and both of those are different from the liberty bond ads in the Wellesley News, which often make stronger moral appeals based upon the role of females (domestic roles, typically).  In this instance, using guilt and resourcefulness by claiming "You will NEVER be excused or forgiven for wasteful extravagance now.  SAVE and BUY LIBERTY BONDS.  Don't criticize--energize!".  The message also seems to play upon women's purity with the idea that they could be forever tarnished by a "wasteful extravagance."  


This submission is part of the Image of the Week series.  For access to all photos, which are open for reuse under a Creative Commons License, check out the full album on Flickr.


By Any Other Nerd Blog by Lance Eaton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.