During the last third of the nineteenth century, the United States experienced the rise of a new mass market that reshaped social, political and economic relationships. Changes in transportation and development of new technologies, as well as shifting trends in immigration and labour, brought with them a restructuring of business practices and a surge in mass production that ushered in a modern era of consumption. New patterns of merchandising, display and distribution enabled more and more people to gain access to new products, creating a distinct culture that historian William Leach defines as ‘Consumer Capitalism’. This culture was based on celebration of the ‘new’, the valorisation of individual pleasure and the heralding of monetary value as the predominant measure of worth, and placed consumption and the circulation of goods at the centre of its aesthetic and moral sensibilities (Leach 1994: xiii–xiv). The advertising industry, together with other consumer institutions such as department stores and the press, was instrumental to the development and entrenchment of this modern consumer culture through the shaping of social and cultural attitudes. By promoting a modernist aesthetics and using new print technologies, advertising offered Americans, who had traditionally welcomed modernisation and technological progress, advice on how to negotiate their search for identity in a changing world, pushing products as answers to the public’s concerns and fears (Marchand 1985: 9–13).

Advertising – both as communication technology and as a profession – created a new visual language that capitalised on the increasingly visual orientation of a society that emphasised appearance and personality. The use of images for commercial purposes grew in conjunction with the popularisation of mass media and technological improvements in printing. By the 1890s, many big monthly magazines – Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Delineator, Woman’s Home Companion and Pictorial Review among them – dropped their price to ten cents, becoming more dependent on advertising revenues than on subscribers for profits. This move not only expanded these magazines’ circulation and outreach dramatically, but also turned them into a profitable arena for advertisers, who tapped into potential new consumers. The gradual introduction of colour printing and the increasing numbers of illustrations added to the visual appeal of magazines as an advertising space. As advertisements became an integral part of magazine content, their commercial message also entered contemporaries’ daily lives and homes (Scanlon 1995: 9; Laird 1998: 220–7; Peiss 1998a).