Do advertisements "reflect" social norms and practices? Roland Marchand's Advertising and the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. (1985) is the most influential work on the subject. He comes down firmly on the side of denying that ads ever reflect social reality in any simple, one-to-one fashion. Virtually all historians, however they disagree with particular views Marchand advanced, agree with him on this point. So it behooves me to state as clearly as I may just how I am using the "Modernizing Mother" campaign to measure changing social values.

I am not contending that the ads captured the reality of mother-daughter relationships at the end of the 1920s. I am contending that in identifying the product with the "modern young woman" the advertising agency and the manufacturer assumed that potential customers would recognize that, in the decade-long battles over dress, dance, and new kinds of behavior, the "modern young woman" had emerged triumphant. It was her mother who raised her hemlines. [In this context, see "MOTHERS WEAR SAME STYLES AS DAUGHTERS, 'N' SAME SIZES, TOO" in The saleslady by Frances R. Donovan (1929).] It was her mother who learned the Charleston and other new dances. Any number of social commentators during the decade noted how "matrons" were behaving as though they were coeds. The ads pointed to a social change everyone would recognize.