Clean, sweep, polish. Even if it is hard to imagine her mop in hand, Valérie Pécresse, campaigning for the regionals in 2015, proudly affirmed: “Nothing like a woman to do the housework. » And for good reason. From the end of the Second World War, little girls learned to behave as perfect housewives thanks to school textbooks: “We must measure the magnitude of the task which naturally falls to women, whatever their social condition. She must therefore learn the science of housekeeping. It will thus avoid costly errors, useless fatigue, cruel disappointments. said The Science of the House by Mme E. Mate, “Professor of home economics at the Technical Colleges of Paris” (1947).
In the 1950s, “Moulinex liberates women” with household robots. All the slogans then extolling the merits of choppers, mixers and pressure cookers promise these ladies to save time on chores, and their husbands a more fulfilled woman. Bad luck, it’s to better take care of the children… and the housework. Luckily the vacuum cleaner is a perfect Christmas present, ‘the woman’ looks so happy (Electrolux poster) and can even vacuum while sitting on her sofa – while phoning her girlfriends, since now she has time (“It’s easier with Hoover”). “The housewife under 50 was invented by advertising; this woman queen of the hearth and fairy of the house, emptied of all mystery and antipoetic, who coexists with household objects »describes Ronan Chastellier, sociologist of advertising.
Laundry, the first ad in history
At the end of the 1960s, the washing machine was accessible to most homes. And, if there’s one thing that women have mastered, it’s laundry. It was also the subject of the first commercial in history, in 1897, broadcast in the emerging cinema, with black and white seamstresses. Until the 2010s, we will not see the shadow of a man in front of a washing machine.
In 1985, the Mir Express series (“Mamaaaaaan, where is my Kimono? ? ! ! “) only translates this dirty habit that teenagers have of noticing that their sportswear is not freshly folded in their closet twenty minutes before their lesson. The kimono is filthy and mom is sorry in advance to have to ” to rub “ by hand (she just finished a machine, it’s nerd). It would never occur to him to send his offspring for a walk, old enough to wash their clothes (since with Mir Express, we dive into the water, and presto, it’s nickel) or to ask dad (Where are you?) to manage the crisis (note that the question of drying time is not addressed; a detail, surely, for creative people).
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