Visual Economy of Advertisements – Globalism and Yugoslavism in Gender Discourse

The paper focuses on illustrated advertisements that appeared in Croatian print media in two different historical periods and socio-economic systems, namely, the interwar period when Croatia formed part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Kingdom of Yugoslavia) and the communist period when it was a constituent of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. The advertisements of the interwar period represented products of the Georg Schicht factory, founded in 1921 in Zagreb. In 1928, the company merged with the Dutch company Margarine Unie and in 1930 formed part of Unilever, the world’s largest multinational company in the oils and fats business. After the Second World War and the process of nationalisation, the production of cleaning and washing products and toiletries in Croatia was continued by Saponia Osijek, which grew out of Georg Schicht and was managed by its employees collectively, which was at the time congruent with the state’s politics and philosophy of self-governing socialism. Taking different socio-economic circumstances of these two period as the backdrop for a discursive analysis of ads, the paper aims to show the construction of gender that is based upon meanings arising from primarily visual elements in the ads, though in a mutual relationship with the accompanying text. The meanings that were detected taking shape in this relationship and set against findings from the literature, revealed three dominant tendencies in the communicative work of the ads, which to a bigger or lesser extent characterize both periods. The first tendency carries overtones of social equality most noticeable in the decade following the world wars when social promises or, rather, suggestions of emancipation arose from women’s involvement in the labour market. In the years of peace, the newly received economic and social purpose presented an opportunity for self-realisation to all the women who saw themselves in opposition to the traditionally defined roles. Depicted in loose and shorter clothes or partaking in activities in which it would be unimaginable to see women before the First World War (Fig 1), modern ladies enjoyed the social image of free individuality and modernity, a chance to be present in the public life and spending leisure time daily or nightly without being supervised by mothers or chaperones. In somewhat different context after the World War II, Yugoslav women were actively involved in the formation of the socialist state. Yugoslavia was on a mission to implement (though declaratively) the idea of equality. Class differences disappeared (at least seemingly), and a multitude of identities built in the ads were used to form meta-narratives of modern social values and progress. The prerogative of a collective construction of the socialist state resulted in an improved social status of women – political and health security rights, right to work, receive education and make personal decisions regarding childbearing (Ramet 1999). Depiction of social identities in socialist commercials were much more numerous than in the previous period. Their societal roles were based on their life in a classless society. The transformation from peasants or female partisans into workers at an office or wives shown in everyday situations, such as family holidays, trips to the coast and the like, was not only possible but also desirable. It occurred in socialism within the context of new female consumers, equal to mens, who contributes to social development (Fig. 5). Normativity and instruction represent the tendency that made women, more or less subtly, adopt a proper and appropriate conduct in both public and private spheres. The biggest part of the interwar social circles believed that an entire generation of self-confident women had been corrupt with a “dangerous” combination of independently earned money, unsupervised leisure time and decadent Hollywood films. A collective presence of liberated women therefore needed to be erased from the public life. The period after the First World War gave birth to the fear of female masculinisation due to their public work-related status, as well as the fear that women might take over the title of breadwinner, which would have disturbed the “natural” state of gender roles (Thébaud, 1994). For that reason, women had to be taken back to the household and their social role fixed within domestic work, which was considered as an integral part of the national economy, and not merely as belonging to the sphere of private life. Equating women with domestic work, consumerism and control over the household budget was present almost in all western media in the interwar period (Brown, 1981., Pumphrey, 1987., Roberts, 1988., Felski, 1995., Macdonald, 2004., Giles, 2007., Stanley, 2008). In addition to self-directed learning about how to become modern consumers, women received free instructions on proper gender roles, which were imposed by the traditional, patriarchal and nationalistic groups through various media from the 1920s on (Fig. 4). In the post-war Yugoslavia, the Communist Party insisted upon gender equality by propagating it in media but there was nevertheless a ring of ambiguity to the efforts of emancipation. That can be attested by the words of the leading Yugoslav politician and sociologist Stipe Šuvar: „Our ideal is to make women architects of society on an equal footing as men. Women›s contribution to social development is much stronger than merely having women in decision-making positions“ (Ramet 1999:90). These words can be interpreted as a manifestation of the Marxist concept of unpaid domestic work that served as the basis of the society and the economic system although it was never given any financial or mental reward (Ramet 1990). However, they can also be interpreted as a certain type of ambivalence of the socialist system, since despite all its reliance on the repertoire of modernisation, progress and equality, the position of women in the context of family life, and especially cleaning and maintaining the household, did not change at all (Fig. 7). The third tendency, abstraction and objectification entails the depiction of women primarily as objects to be seen, which originated in the images of beautiful and delightful modern women of the interwar ads (Fig.2, 3), and developed in the late 20th century into women being presented as symbols, deprived of any socio-cultural context. Mass media enabled the distribution of the image of New Women by encouraging consumerism but also by promoting the new image of a liberated woman – the one who had to tone down her excessively assertive wishes for personal freedom, economic independence and the style of life heretofore reserved for men. However, they were merely seemingly freed from the shackles of past because they were allowed only so much emancipation as was socially acceptable. A combination of visual ads, fashion pages and front pages of illustrated magazines suggested a clear difference between the past and the present, constantly using the female body for the articulation of modernity. In such a visual, but also textual discourse, female individuality is based more on the needs of production and consumption than women’s real needs. Even though the visual vocabulary has no ties with family life and domestic work, a young, delightful woman was nevertheless associated with a box of soap or washing powder only because she is a woman. Claims that sexualized depictions of women changed from early to late 20th-century ads reflect the view that there was a shift from a relatively innocent representation to overtly sexually attractive women (Sivulka 2003). The principle was, nevertheless, the same: visual and textual abstraction from a living context and reduction to the body, which was according to Baudrillard transformed in advertising into an instrument, or a code, for the purposes of production and consumption (Baudrillard 1998). Advertisers recognized that using desire to attract the opposite sex was a more effective selling strategy than a discourse on technical features of a washing powder such as that, for example, it safeguards against skin irritation (Fig. 6). Sex was a powerful and increasingly frequent ingredient in ads ever since the 1920s, but from the 1960s, the (beautiful) female body served not only a means of reaching success on the “marriage market”. Rather, it became a privileged vehicle of beauty, sexuality and managed narcissism, and something that, supposedly, all women wanted to achieve. Images of beautiful women grew into a powerful symbol of identification (Goldman 1992). From the late 1960s, and the introduction of the socialist programme more open to market capitalism, Croatian (Yugoslav) ads for cleaning and washing products became increasingly more similar to their western counterparts. The manner in which women were represented from that period on – as (sexualized) bodies or protagonists of family tableaux – followed the path of the western tradition that wanted to place women back into the household or have a free-thinking women participating in the labour market and equalling their appearance with male independence. What occurred in little more than fifty years of ads for cleaning products and toiletries in Croatian print media, from the 1920s to the 19970s, can be summed up as a process of reducing the identities of women to the care about the husband and children on the one hand, and a sexually liberated and appealing object on the other. Whatever promises of social equality existed, or were implied through the ads, were never, in fact, realized fully in society