And sometimes the power of the suffragette movement itself was harnessed to sell to women. Imagine a floor cleaner with a feminist agenda; that is precisely what Old Dutch Cleanser claimed to be: a “Champion of Women’s Rights,” among which it included “freedom from household drudgery” and “the right to a clean home and the leisure to enjoy it.” By similar logic, an advertisement for Shredded Wheat argued that the cereal was a “Declaration of Independence” from cooking. Here, then, in the Women’s Editorial Department, we witness the birth of a nexus between products and the individual, one that serves advertisers to this day. Going far beyond the question of usefulness or even quality as a matter of brand development, advertisers began to imbue products with traits and associations that consumers could identify with.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 219