New Books In Biography

Ellen Wayland-Smith is an associate professor of writing at University of Southern California. Her book The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America (University of Chicago Press, 2020) follows the career of adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub who in the mid-twentieth century created the advertising campaigns selling consumer products to the average American housewife. More than products, Rindlaub sold a dream of domesticity and prosperity delivered through free-market capitalism and a Christian corporate order. The market offered an equitable allocation of products and resources to create the most efficient and comfortable society. Women found their place as patriotic housewives engaged in educated consumption and moral market choices. Rindlaub produced some of the most successful and award-winning advertising campaigns for such brands as Betty Crocker, Campbell’s soup, and Chiquita bananas. At the end of her career, Rindlaub began to question the ideas she had once promoted and