Image of the Week #33: "Just Like Brother Wears!"

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What Is It

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

Why I Find It Interesting

It's fascinating to see what shows up in early ads and in this case, "Lady Sealpax" has "Athletic Underwear for Women--Just like brother wears!".  I'm impressed with the aspirations towards being like men (though not in the sense that it is applauding the male idea, but just in the idea that it is saying women can be more than feminine).  I'm also curious how long this particular campaign--women as equal to men--stayed the norm for Sealpax after World War I ended and in which publications such ads were effective.  I'm dubious that such a campaign was as effective in Ladies Home Journal as it might be in this women's college newspaper, wherein readers might actually participate in sports.



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.