The Kitchen is Where Women Keep the Knives… to cut Sandwiches in Half: 1950s Advertising and the New Electric!! Canada and the United States emerged from the Second World War determined to prevent a return of the debilitating economic depression of the 1930s. The Cold War state of the late 1940s provided a unique opportunity for both government and businesses to firmly re-establish the definitions of ‘Western living’, ‘American’, and ‘family’ through the triedand-true process of capitalism, now heightened by the beginnings of the McCarthyism and lingering wartime nationalism. There was no greater time to manipulate past national trauma through the subtle wording of flashy advertisements and the overhaul of wartime factories for a dramatic new production of consumer goods. Through the art of advertising, the West was able to impose an ambitious nationalist vision of the perfect family on its 1950s citizens, a process which was merely a reintegration of the Victorian gender binary. In order to produce a capitalist nuclear family utopia, the people had to be sold on the idea that mass consumption was now an encouraged patriotism, rather than the very personal indulgence wartime propaganda warned against. This was achieved through a direct application of wartime nationalism, in which the sacrifice of one benefitted the whole, only this time the “sacrifice” was purchasing a new appliance. Advertisers argued to the people that “the dozens of things
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