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(Top,
right) Fatima cigarettes, April 5, 1913: “This [illustrates]
how the [magazine] really focused on men. What’s really interesting
about the thesis ad is that a lot of cigarette companies saw
cigarettes as a way to help your thinking and to get rid of
stress. Also, the whole motif of Fatima cigarettes [including
the depiction of a veiled woman on the package] was male-oriented,
and it fits into the whole history of Orientalism in American
society—the stereotypical idea of seduction and life’s secret
pleasures coming from the Near East.”
(Above)
Chesterfields, June 1, 1937: “In the 1930s it was
more acceptable for a woman to be smoking. This is a more
traditional kind of ad for cigarettes. You’re in a clear country
atmosphere, which is ironic. And there’s this association
of cigarettes with relaxation and fun and open air.”
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Turning
the brittle pages of the alumni magazine’s oldest
issues, one notices many things: perhaps first, the headache-inducing
fumes of the old binding glue, then maybe a curious photograph
of men in white gymnasium suits performing a dance drill
for physical-education class, and then, surely, at least
one of the ads for burlap flour bags, photo-plays, or flat
clasp garters.
From the florid
copy of the Walnut Street Theatre in 1905, promising “great,
flaming, glaring pictures” of the Chicago Board of Trade
in its upcoming matinee, The Pit, to pronouncements
during the Roaring Twenties that Penn’s athletes drink Gold
Medal Milk while training, the old advertisements in their
sum recall a different era for the world, the University,
and the Gazette’s alumni readership.
Dr. Joseph
Turow, professor of communications at the Annenberg School
for Communication and an expert on advertising, agreed to
peruse a sampling of ads from the Gazette’s earliest
days to more contemporary times, and provide some impromptu
comments.
“One overarching
kind of phenomenon I saw is a movement of Penn from being
a kind of upscale, local university to a nationally important
place with far-flung, upscale alumni. Also,” he says, “it
seems the Gazette was very much a male-oriented magazine,
with women basically being [looked upon as] ornamentation
or the responsibility of the man to take care of. Despite
the fact that women were at Penn” during the early 20th
century, “one would read the Gazette as not having
anything to do with them, at least from the ads.
In the magazine’s earlier days, he adds, “I believe many
of the ads were put there to show support for the university
and its alumni magazine rather than to sell products and
services. I think you have less of that now. It’s a much
more targeted medium for advertisers that’s designed to
sell things. A sense of local community has been lost” with
Penn’s entrance to the Ivy League Network, “and the assumption
is that this is a much more cosmopolitan group of people”—both
men and women—“whom major advertisers are interested in
reaching.”
next page
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By
Susan Frith