Something new and exciting in the Betty Crocker kitchen!
Hello, I’m Betty Crocker... and we’re your hosts for this Betty Crocker aerobics video.
Betty Crocker knows what guys want: Potatoes.
Come on Betty, make my meal.

Betty Crocker isn’t real. You probably knew that. Most people know that. But it’s wild that by 1945, a woman who did not exist was the second most popular woman in America. Behind only Eleanor Roosevelt.

She started in the 1920s as a name on a flour bag. A marketing contrivance built to solve a problem that the industrial revolution had created: people didn't trust factory goods. They were used to buying flour from the local mill. The one whose smokestacks they could see from their front yards. Whose employees drank at the same taverns they did. Whose owners they could fight in the streets if the product was bad.

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A box on a shelf with a clever logo wasn't going to cut it. So you give the box a face. You give it warmth. You give it a name that focus groups determined was the most friendly and comforting name a woman could have. You give it Betty.

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Her first illustration was a composite, facial features pulled from several women in the General Mills Home Service Department, stitched together into an everywoman. And then, every twenty years or so, they'd redesign her. Stoic during the war. Warm and maternal after it. Jackie Kennedy energy by the sixties. Full-blown eighties professional chic by the eighties, should pads and all. Every redesign tracking almost perfectly to what the moment needed women to believe about themselves. Betty Crocker wasn't a mascot. She was a living brief. And the question driving every single one of those redesigns wasn't "who is the American woman." It was: who do we need her to be right now?

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To understand how we got to Betty Crocker,  and everything that came after,  you have to go back a little further. To a moment when the machinery that would eventually be used to sell women their own liberation was still being assembled.

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Today we remember suffragettes as the political movement that gained women the right to vote. But in the early 1910s in England, they were engaging in extreme acts of terror. 

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Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women's Social and Political Union had gone through a decade of polite lobbying for the right to vote, and it had gotten them nowhere. So they were trying something new.  Letter bombings. Hunger strikes. Splinter cells of women trained in jiu-jitsu. Their self-described "reign of terror" was intended to, in their own words, "make England and every department of English life insecure and unsafe."

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This was a genuine militant feminist insurgency, locked in a bitter stalemate with the British government. Then Britain declared war on Germany. And almost overnight, the deal changed.

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The government released every imprisoned suffragette. In exchange, the WSPU agreed to halt their militancy and redirect their organizational power toward the war effort. The government even handed Pankhurst two thousand pounds to help with the campaign.

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Pankhurst declared: "Fight for your country as you fought for the vote." She led 30,000 women through the streets of London. The march was called "Women's Right to Serve." They carried banners encouraging men to enlist. Many wore costumes. One woman dressed herself as battle-scarred Belgium and walked the entire route barefoot.

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When the White Feather Campaign launched, encouraging women to hand white feathers to any young man they saw in civilian dress, shaming them into service, the suffragettes embraced it. According to Pankhurst's own daughter Sylvia: "We thought we were doing our duty. We thought we were showing that women understood what it meant to sacrifice."

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Underneath all of it was a calculated bet: if women proved they were patriots, if they showed they would sacrifice for the nation, then the Victorian understanding of gender roles would be upended, and the nation would owe them something. Representation. The vote. Agency.

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In 1918, they got it. Women over thirty could now vote. But the price was steep. The most effective anti-establishment propaganda engine in Britain had become state propaganda.

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The suffragettes had a strategy, a target, and a measurable ask. They knew what winning looked like. And they achieved it. Yes women got the vote. But the price they paid was becoming instruments of the state, and the feminist movement in England became tainted for a generation.

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One of the founders of the White Feather movement, later disavowed it entirely, calling it an "amateur press-gang." Mob rule dressed up as patriotism. And the feminist movement would spend a generation culturally tainted by its role in recruiting men into a war that much of the public came to view as pointless and brutal.

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Meanwhile, in America, a similar dynamics playing out but this time it’s with corporations instead of governments, and the movement isn’t political, it’s cultural. 

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The 1920s were a time of liberation, especially for women. They had just won the right to vote.
They were entering the workforce. Cutting their hair short. Wearing shorter skirts. Smoking cigarettes, going to jazz clubs, dating multiple men, sometimes black ones. We called them flappers.

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In reality, the flapper subculture was actually pretty small. It was mostly young, middle-class women pushing back on Victorian gender norms. But it loomed enormous in the cultural consciousness, because Madison Avenue was watching very closely.

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On the other side of WW1, these liberated women who had their own jobs and lived on their own had money to spend. And the new consumer economy noticed. 

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The mechanism was elegant: tie freedom to consumption. You're free. Ffree to buy a car, free to wear cosmetics, free to smoke. The flapper becomes the symbol of a modern woman, and the modern woman is defined by what she purchases.

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Cartoonish, angular, scantily clad flapper drawings became the visual shorthand for the era — a cocktail-napkin woman who never had a boss or a bill to pay. The actual flappers, the real, complicated, rebellious young women who started this,  were abstracted into an aspiration most women couldn't reach. But they could consume toward it. They could buy the clothes, the cosmetics, the accessories. They could try to become the image.

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By 1928, ninety-seven percent of all advertising was aimed at women.

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The suffragettes got co-opted because they had a concrete goal. The flappers got co-opted for almost the opposite reason. They didn't have a political program. They had a vibe. A feeling. A set of aesthetic choices that signaled freedom without demanding anything specific from the institutions that controlled it. And a vibe is infinitely easier to extract, package, and sell back to people than an actual political movement is. There's nothing to negotiate with. You just take it.

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The proliferation of the flapper wasn't rebellion against the system. It was the system's newest iteration. A subculture extracted, amplified, and redeployed to sell products.  Leaving the genuine counterculture it came from neutralized in the process. What replaced it wasn't freedom. It was the aesthetic of freedom, infinitely purchasable, never quite arriving.

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Then came World War II, and the brief completely flipped. Before Rosie the Riveter was a magnet on your fridge, she was a song. Then a painting. Then a movie. The factories were empty. The men were overseas. The economy needed labor. So the same machinery that had spent twenty years telling women their highest calling was to look pretty and buy things now had a new assignment: get women into heavy industrial work. Get them building bombers.

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Rosie was a small part of a massive effort to shift women's understanding of their own place in society — from homemaking to making tanks and planes. And it worked. By 1944, nearly twenty million women were working. Six and a half million of them had entered the workforce specifically because of the war.

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More and more men are being called into the armed forces. Their jobs must be filled, and filled now! And who can fill them? You! You women! You're the ones who must fill them, who can give our boys what they need. 

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The war just turned the whole world upside down. Everything changed immediately. From the smallest things, the food you put on your table, to your relationship with your boyfriend. 

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Each morning, Sybil Lewis would wake up before the sun. Just enough time to peek in on her son, still asleep, before the car horn pierced the quiet. A 1937 Ford, headlights cutting through the dark, packed with women. Some single mothers like her, some of them barely nineteen. Almost none of them actually from here, and absolutely none of them imagining this is how their lives would turn out. 

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My husband thought it was utterly ridiculous. Women just didn’t do what he called factory work. 

As the sun rose, the dusty road would slowly give way to partially constructed ships, dotting the California coast line. Then factories, belching black smoke. 

The dirtiest job that anyone could imagine. The only thing I can compare it were the coal mines. And thats the way i looked when i come off that job.

For ten hours a day, Sybil operated a gas-powered rivet gun, punching eight-inch rods of steel into the chassis of a B-29 Bomber. She made ten times what she had as a waitress back in Oklahoma.

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When I got my first paycheck, I had never seen that much money.

It was like a whole new world haad opened up, and i never went back. I never wanted to go back. 

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Deep down in my heart, I didn’t have this loyalty, this patriotism, because let’s face it, i had never really experienced some of the things in life that i would have loved to experience, that maybe were worth fighting for. 

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Sybil Lewis: "In Sapulpa, all that women had to look forward to was keeping house and raising 

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When we remember this moment, we remember the poster. A white woman, bicep flexed. We don't remember the hundreds of thousands of Black women like Sybil Lewis, who confronted not just exclusionary management but animosity from their white female coworkers. Women who often threatened to go on strike entirely rather than work in a desegregated factory.

I was fearful. I had never been in close association with a white girl in this respect. Working together. She had never had this  experience. And we had to work through our hostitilies. Plus get the job done, we had a war to win. We had deadlines to meet. 

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Rosie the Riveter was a propaganda image. And like all propaganda images, it flattened the complexity of the real thing into something easier to deploy.

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What this did that nothing before it had dared to do was insist  openly, in art and music and film, that women could do what men could do. That they could be strong. That they could be essential not as consumers or as moral guardians, but as workers.

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And unlike the flapper image, it was pointing at something real. These women went and did the thing. The propaganda was true. And that distinction matters more than it might seem, because it's the difference between an image that collapses when the moment passes and one that proves something that can't be unproven.

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As black people began to experience the niceties of life, you could see that the ladies would get restless, they would never be satisfied with the way they had lived before, and the expectations began to change, they began to expect more. 

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Edith Stoner’s husband is in Alaska. She took this job for the duration. How do you like your job Mrs. Stoner? I love it! And what about after the war? Are you gonna keep working? I should think not. I’m gonna be busy back at home. Good for you! 

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The government had always understood women's wartime status as temporary. Empowering them was a means to an end, not a deeply held belief. But for the women who had consumed the art, the music, the stories, it had become one.

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A few years before that I would have been afraid with a small child to have struck out on my own. But by this time, I knew I could make a living. But the reason I knew it was because I had done it already, I had been there. 

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When the war was over, 75% of women wanted to keep their jobs. But as the men returned home from overseas, we not only needed a job market that could accommodate veterans, they also expected that the women they had told they were fighting for would be there. Dutiful wives that looked like Betty Grable, not jacked factory workers. 

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People often asked what I dreamed about when I was overseas and I can tell you I dreamed about coming home to a beautiful wife, establishing home, having kids. And it was this dream, this wonderful dream, that sustained me and kept me going. 

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There was resentment among the men toward the women that worked there in the steel mill. I think that this was directly related to the question: when the war is over, what will happen to our jobs? 

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In Highland Park, Michigan, two hundred women laid off from the Ford plant protested. Their signs read: "Stop Discrimination Because of Sex" and "How Come No Work For Women?"

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I feel I am as big a war casualty as anyone who was maimed, or crippled during the war. 

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A supervisor at Ford later remembered: "We didn't even allow them in the building — all these women with whom I had become so close, who had worked seven days a week for years and had been commended so many times by the Navy for the work they were doing."

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We were so glad to have them home. We didn’t want to cause any problems. But deep down inside we were fighting a terrific battle, because all of a sudden everything is taken out of our hands. The checkbook, oh you don’t know how to balance the checkbook. We’d been doing it for four years. 

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So Madison Avenue had a project. For at least the fifth time in fifty years, female empowerment would be co-opted to reimagine the identity of the American woman.

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I thought after the war, it’ll be like paradise. New refrigerators will be made, washing machines, and who knows what else. And we’ll be able to buy em! Even I might buy a new car. 

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There are three types of women in this world. At least according to a Madison Avenue dossier produced soon after the war. One is the traditional housewife.  The traditional housewife, who sees appliances and packaged conveniences as a threat to her purpose. The career woman, who views housework as a waste of time. If you’re selling home goods, neither of these women are the consumers you want. 

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So you define a third segment. The woman that both groups want to be. The modern woman. 

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The modern woman finds fulfillment not in the world of work, but in the careful management of her home. In the selection of the right products, the right meals, the right choices for her family. This is her true power. I'm not just cleaning. I'm creating a safe space for my family. I'm not just cooking. I'm expressing my love through food. I'm not just shopping. I'm making intelligent choices.

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The mechanism was subtle and devastating. It took the language of capability and skill and professionalism that the war had handed women, and redirected it inward. Not toward the world, but toward the home. Not toward building, but toward maintaining. A woman's education, her capability, her independence, all applied to making the American family the cornerstone of a capitalist democracy.

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And crucially, this wasn't just an advertising strategy. The professional housewife was a collaboration between Madison Avenue and the state. It met a consumer need, but it also served a government function. Birth rates needed to climb. The post-war economy needed a new engine. And America needed to show the world what the free market was capable of. And the GI bills low interest home loans ensured the suburban dream could be bought, as long as you were white. The ideal woman was a statement about who counted. 

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In 1959, this ideology went geopolitical. The Cold War thawed briefly, and both superpowers used the opening to flex. The USSR sent a delegation to New York displaying manufacturing equipment and rocketry advances. At the time they were genuinely outpacing American industrial output. The United States responded by sending a delegation to Moscow: a massive dome housing the latest and greatest of free-market capitalism. IBM computers. Giant screens playing twenty-four-hour films of typical American life.

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At the center of it all, a prefabricated American home, split down the middle so visitors could see inside. Paid actors. Every gadget and appliance the professional housewife could want.

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Then-Vice President Nixon and Khrushchev toured the space together and had the following exchange:

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Nixon: "This is our newest model. This is the kind which is built in thousands of units for direct installations in the houses. In America, we like to make life easier for women..."

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Khrushchev: "Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under Communism."

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Nixon: "I think that this attitude towards women is universal. What we want to do is make life easier for our housewives."

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Khrushchev: "You are a lawyer for capitalism. I am a lawyer for communism. Let’s kiss.” 

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Sadly, the two world leaders did not kiss. But, the "Kitchen Debate" did become a flashbulb moment in the Cold War. The CIA would later describe the entire American National Exhibition as "probably the most productive single psychological warfare effort ever launched by the U.S. in any communist country."

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What's easy to miss in the cultural memory of this moment is the actual comparison underneath it. Nixon was framing consumer appliances as female liberation. Labor-saving devices that freed women from drudgery. Khrushchev was arguing that under communism, women were liberated through full participation in the workforce, not through appliances. At the time, thirty-five percent of American women were employed, mostly in secretarial or service roles. In the USSR, thirty percent of engineers were women.

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Two competing definitions of liberation. Both deployed as propaganda for an ideology.. Neither of them actually asking women what they wanted. And both, in their own way, descending from the same fifty-year pattern: take the energy of female empowerment, point it somewhere useful, and call it freedom.

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According to Madison Avenue there are three types of women. And in our story, there are three Bettys. First there’s Betty Grable. Then there’s Betty Crocker. And last, there’s Betty Friednan, who finally put language to what all of this had done to the female psyche. 

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She called it "the problem with no name." A widespread despair among educated, middle-class American women who had everything they were supposed to want. The husband, the children, the house, the appliances but still  felt profoundly, inexplicably empty.

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At that time the focus had to be on breaking through the feminine mystique that defined us solely in terms of family so that we could start our own personhood in society and break through the barriers of sex and discrimination. 

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When The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, it gave women a history. It showed them that what they'd been experiencing wasn't personal failure or individual neurosis.  It was systemic. It was the result of fifty years of deliberate, coordinated propaganda that had told them exactly who to be.  It showed them that it wasn’t their identity that was hollow. It was the images they had been shown. Images that had been discarded without ceremony every time a new crisis demanded they be reshaped, or reimagined.

And then something unexpected happened. Second-wave feminism reached into the past and pulled Rosie out of it. Recontextualized her. Made her a symbol not of what the government needed women to do, but of what women had proven they could do.

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The government and Madison Avenue had spent fifty years shattering the image of the American woman: flapper, factory worker, housewife, pinup expecting those shapes to hold. But they didn't. 

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That's the thing about releasing something into culture, you can aim it, but you can't steer it forever. Once it becomes part of people's lived experience, it belongs to them. It can be reinterpreted, recontextualized, weaponized in ways the creator never intended.

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The suffragettes had their energy extracted by the state. The flappers had their vibe extracted by the market. But the Rosie image survived both because it was attached to something real. 

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The feminine image, broken apart by decades of competing propaganda, became the raw material for a revolution.

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It was like a flash ignition it was like lighting a gas furnace it just went boom 

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To have a job to have respect to not be viewed as a piece of meat 

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Are you saying that there should be no black professional women? Are you trying to deny black women the right to be creative? The right to function? 

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Are you a feminist? Yes. Right on. 

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The military, as it always does, eventually had to get with the times.

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When the Vietnam War ended in 1973, so did the draft. The armed forces shifted to an all-volunteer model, they needed bodies. The institution that had spent the entire twentieth century learning how to weaponize femininity now faced its sharpest contradiction yet: the women used to sell war would now also become the soldiers fighting it.

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That's how it goes. The brief changes. The image gets redesigned. Betty Crocker gets a new face.

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And this is propaganda.

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