Bubbles & Beauty: Housewives in History

June 29 - September 1, 2010

This exhibit remembered the days of yesteryear as innovations to housekeeping progressed through the decades. The role of housewife has gone through drastic changes over time beginning with the basic homesteads after the land runs in the 1800's when the average homemaker in the nineteenth century walked 148 miles a year carrying 36 tons of water to today's modern, multi-tasking superwomen.

As time has marched forward many household innovations have been developed and marketed directly to women. Vintage advertisements and products from the early 1900s to the 1950s in this exhibit reveal the cultural expectation that women should maintain their own beauty as carefully as they were keeping their own homes.

Bubbles & Beauty featureed a variety of artifacts from the Edmond Historical Society Collections connected to homemakers like stoves, irons, sweepers, patterns, T.V. dinners, vacuums, wringer washers along with fashion, pearls and lipsticks. The domestic goddess of the 1950s was the archetype of the post-war ideal. This exploration of the kitschy culture of efficient homemakers and attentive wives at the height of the housewife heyday was a popular exhibit for museum patrons of all generations.