Rinso: Paw Wakes up

1940
Sound
2m

A Wild West wife learns to save fuel thanks to Rinso soap powder - and her layabout husband - in this proto-feminist wartime skit.

Screen advertising played a crucial role in the wartime drive to conserve fuel for military purposes. Soap brand Rinso was responsible for some particularly irreverant examples, often drawing on cinematic tropes - in this case the American western. Down on the range, Paw wakes briefly from his blissful slumber to 'mansplain' to his overworked wood-chopping wife that there's no need to boil clothes with Rinso (he read it in the paper). What she does next with that axe is left to our imagination.

Alongside traditional print advertising, soap brands sponsored daytime radio shows in America as early as the 1920s and Britain in the 1930s - hence the term 'soap opera'.

What Women Want?

Caring mums, hard-working housewives or independent, fun-loving 'new women' - the female consumer has long been a target of screen advertising.

In the cause of selling anything from baked beans to washing powders to all manner of labour-saving devices, advertisers have promised to make women's lives easier and to help them build happy homes and successful relationships.

There's no getting past the fact that women have all-too often been patronised and objectified by a male-dominated advertising industry. But screen advertising also tells (and sells) a more positive story of social progress for women, with increasing social and economic independence. This collection tracks the ups and downs of female empowerment in the 20th century, with its false steps as revealing as its forward ones.