Gendered sweat

Tonight I was briefly annoyed by a women's deodorant commercial. The company in the ad asked women to wear bells on their wrist for an entire day to show how much they move (wow, great set up, I'm hooked!), then went into some fancy science about motion activated deodorant. It was a weird commercial, but I wrote it off as one of the many ads aiming *so* high to capture the sophisticated women's intellect. Here is the British version of the commercial:



A few minutes later, I saw a commercial for men's deodorant that framed sweating in a completely different way: it featured "great men of history," working up a sweat doing important manly things like inventing cool things and ruling a country. I couldn't find the exact commercial, but watch the one below and you get the idea. The contrast between these two commercials is what made me start to think...



Obviously, marketers have long employed gendered advertising, especially for personal care products. First, it seems like products are either labeled "normal"/"regular" and "women's" separately, thus establishing masculinity as the norm, and femininity as the deviation. Second, general products are becoming less and less unisex (coming soon: toothpaste for women?).

So I know it's pretty bad that these commercials reinforce gender roles in such an obvious way and setting up women for low expectations (woo, riding public transportation, biking, tennis, and... what's that?... shaking out a rug? yay!), but I also know there's not much I can do about it. And hey, at least we've stopped believing that period sweat is toxic, right? Right... thus, I present you with some of my favorite internet things poking fun and gendered beauty products.

The timeless Sarah Haskins on the technoscience-beauty-industrial-complex:



Sociological Images and Stephen Colbert on, "Is your armpit unattractive?"

And finally, based on the Hyperbole and a Half comic, "Shower products for men":

Women scientists and Home economics

This article, coincidentally by a professor of history at Michigan State University, calls for a revival of Home Economics as a response to widespread obesity. The first half of the article is about the foundations of Home Economics, which was a legitimate science, albiet one run almost entirely by women. The unequivocal founder of Home Economics was Ellen Swallow Richards, who began her graduate career as a chemist, coined the english version of "ecology" (based on Haekel's Oekologie), taught at MIT, and was critical to the formation of no less than half a dozen applied science fields, such as sanitary science, nutrition science, domestic science, and human ecology.

Not coincidentally, I wrote a paper on Ellen Swallow Richards last fall and, dear reader, I'm happy to provide it to you. I was really interested in her theories human-environmental interactions, so I mostly focused on that. But some of my main points will interest environmental, women's studies, and history of science scholars:

• Ernst Haeckel introduced oekology (ecology) in 1866, defining it as:

“knowledge concerning the economy of nature—the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and its organic environment… the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence” (Foster, 2000:195)

• Richards envisions ecology as the science of the total environment, introducing it to America in 1892
• Swallow situated women as guardians of the home environment, emphasizing safety, efficiency, education and relief from drudgery
• As the "organismal" definition of ecology prevailed in the male-dominated sciences, Richards’ tried to re-brand her vision of ecology as domestic science, home economics, human ecology, and "euthenics"- as opposed to eugenics- as "the science of the controllable environment"

Some scholars recognize Ellen Swallow Richards as a proto-feminist, or even ecofeminist. Sandra Harding writes, "Might our understanding of nature and social life be different if the people who discovered the laws of nature were the same ones who cleaned up after them?” (Harding, 2001:27) Unfortunately, I believe that many of Swallow's theories on the environment disappeared after her death. Although she was a prominent chemist at the time, even appearing in books such as American Men of Science, she was marginalized because of her gender and her progressive views on human-environment interactions. Her version of Home Ecology was watered-down significantly over the next century. Nonetheless, I applaud the call for a reinvigoration of Home Economics- perhaps one that recognizes the role of men and women in the household.