Somebody Had to Break the Rules: Barbara Ségal’s Dash and Advertising
Veronica Murphy
Artist Barbara Ségal chisels, etches and inlays stone to craft ornate representations of children’s dresses, Birkin bags, and designer jackets that comment on status and material culture. In 1994, Ségal used Verona, Belgian black, onyx, rouge royal, and sienna marbles to form Dash. In the context of 1990s feminist reflections on American culture, the public’s growing criticism of general media, and identity politics, Ségal’s detergent bottle aptly weighs upon the artist’s upbringing of upper-middle-class American suburbia.
Concentrated Power envisions Dash as a catalyst for dialogue around mid-century family dynamics and the printed and televised media that reinforced them. American product advertisers focused on the suburbs of the 1950s and ‘60s - particularly the white, nuclear family, much like Ségal’s own. The loss of her father at age 10, however, left the young artist and her mother at odds with the commercialized, domestic lifestyles of women suggested by marketers. Dash detergent ad campaigns promoted the authority of a woman within the household— while Ségal’s Dash demonstrates the suppression of her jurisdiction outside of it.
Female empowerment of the ‘60s, as characterized by print media, often depended on a woman’s usefulness to her husband and children. Print campaigns depicted the devoted mother tasked with laundry and other housework, while assuming that dad, the breadwinner, was at work. In a Dash detergent ad from 1962 (fig.1) an overburdened but focused-looking mother and two children are tackling the household chores. Laundry is strewn about the kitchen on chairs and in baskets. The young boy’s presence here is ambiguous: is he adding a towel to the overflowing baskets, or helping her load the washer? The daughter, off in the corner, is presumably taking care of the dishes with her back turned. Though the mother and her son have partially hidden faces due to their positions in the ads, marketers hid the daughter's face completely, removing any focus on her.
There is clear division between what is expected of young boys and young girls, in Dash advertising from that era. Young boys deserve praise for assisting mothers while young girls are responsible for their own domestic undertakings, unloading some of the chores off of mom’s plate. In Céline Morin and Regan Kramer’s Women in American TV Series (1950s to 2000): Proto-Feminist Heroines? Morin and Kramer analyze the roles of women within the televised families of America over a recent 50-year span. Morin and Kramer argue, “Women, particularly mothers, were encouraged to be full-time homemakers... accompanying the post-war economic boom, society— and the media — focused powerfully on the family, where, it was hoped, clearly defined gender roles would reinforce social cohesion.”2 Midcentury Dash product advertising illustrated this desire to promote a lift style that unconsciously enforced gender roles in order to achieve social cohesion; in other words, the nuclear family. According to print marketing, delegating a domestic role with the duties of the home to women was their means of contributing to the functionality of a community. In the visual context provided by midcentury advertising campaigns and Morin & Kramer’s claim, women’s responsibilities as homemakers strengthened a status quo deemed fit for societal fulfillment. Under this assumption, Advertising in 1950s America proposed national morals based on the suburban homes of the upper-middle class. More specifically, how its families functioned within them.
Early efforts of advertisers for many companies like Dash attempted to create empowerment through the wisdom of ‘the lady-of-the-house.’ While the economy of 1950s and ‘60s America flourished, women were concurrently denied career opportunities—yet embraced as the predominant consumers. This deceptive encouragement of the homemaker as the preeminent example of womanhood created conditions in which men still dictated the terms of acceptable womanhood, seemingly empowering them through control of the home but in reality, women rarely had that either. The flaw for genuine social progression is that female empowerment still resides within a patriarchal lens. Ségal’s Dash offers a subconscious embodiment of the complications belonging to women that not only reject these power structures. but actively reclaim them.
Dash reflects the artist’s interrogation of media-defined, dutiful femininity. The enhanced detergent bottle form caricaturizes a culturally assigned women’s labor. Customarily, laundry is a gendered undertaking delegated to the woman of the home. Ségal redefines the symbolic toil of a detergent bottle by crafting a marble sculpture using complicated carving techniques--typically, a man’s craft, particularly in Italy and France where Ségal trained. Utilitarian plastic bottles of detergent become a polished product in Ségal’s work. The luxurious material of Italian marble, often used for Renaissance or Baroque sculptures, creates a compelling discourse between materiality in branding, advertising, and the woman’s place in the middle. Laundry, a household avocation of the feminine, is now memorialized in the artisan labor of the masculine.
By the late ‘60s, a Dash print campaign emerged with the slogan, “Somebody had to break the rules.” Advertisers referred to the product’s new formula with “concentrated power,” requiring less soap compared to their competition, while simultaneously attempting to align with women’s movements. In a 1967 print advertisement for Dash detergent (fig.2) a woman with bare shoulders, large ball earrings, bold eye makeup, and a geometric bob-style haircut looks directly at the viewer. Instead of the motherly trope familiar to the early ‘60s, this model is the modern, progressive woman of the late ‘60s. Small text beneath the image reads, “The woman who wore the first geometric haircut broke the rules. Columbus broke the rules. Florence Nightingale broke the rules. And Dash broke the rules.” Columbus, the explorer that sailed to America, and Florence Nightingale, a statistician and founder of modern nursing, match the revolutionary nature of women with geometric haircuts, according to Dash marketers.
Mass media acts as a key component to social constructions of reality. Martin P. Davidson in The Consumerist Manifesto (1992) outlines the intimate relationship between media, particularly advertising and marketing, and social dynamics. Product advertisers not only seek to create a lifestyle that consumers desire but one that aligns with their best interest according to the social standards of their time. The upper-middle-class nuclear family model served as a successful way of reinforcing material and family values for profit. “It is advertising’s job to communicate, if not actually create, the right added values.”3
Dash detergent’s new printed advertisements mimicked the changing images of women and let mothers out of the kitchen. Ségal’s Dash signals this departure from the status quo and symbolic detachment from homemaker expectations. While product advertisers attempted to ratify the shift in cultural dynamics for women, their efforts were insincere. Women continued to grapple with patriarchal social dynamics. To position Dash, detergent advertisements as the courier for women’s progressive movements complicated things further. Rather than pursuing true social reform, product advertisers were reiterating current conversations in order to sell.
Social movements and identity politics of the mid-nineties recalled the 1950s and ‘60s and sought to expand the prescribed culture of women, family, and tradition. Though the artist did not consciously imagine her work as a social commentary, Ségal’s sculpture materializes criticism of power structures existing throughout time. The work also acknowledges the complications of female domestic duties. Depictions of women in mainstream media gave rise to complicated social constructions of reality. The dutiful housewives on the television and in print advertisements became living, breathing entities that burdened real women with confining, domestic expectations. Ségal’s Dash offers an expansive reality that unconsciously performs an inverse of historically gendered expectations. Shifting the ways that we might think about women’s labor, the artist inverts the meaning of a detergent bottle by carving it out of marble. Reimagining the feminine trade of the domestic through the masculine labor of sculpting creates a narrative that mirrors the women’s movements. 2 Ségal’s sculpture becomes an object that rematerializes female representation of empowerment, craft, and labor in the ‘90s reflects the roots of Dash advertisers breaking the rules in the ‘60s.
“About.” Barbara Ségal. http://www.barbarasegal.com/about.
Céline Morin and Regan Kramer, “Women in American TV Series (1950s to 2000): Proto-Feminist Heroines?” Clio. Women, Gender, History 48, 2018, 251–270. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26946057.
Martin P. Davidson, The Consumerist Manifesto: Advertising in Postmodern Times (London: Routledge, 1994).
Karen Dill-Shackleford, How Fantasy Becomes Reality: Information and Entertainment Media in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).