Ring Around The Collar

These commercials ran for years:  Ring Around The Collar--each featuring a wife looking pitifully chagrined when a parrot or a chorus of children screeched, "Ring around the collar, ring around the collar!"

"You've tried soaking them out, spraying them out, scrubbing them out," the male voiceover says to the women, as if giving them credit for all their hard work on their husbands' collars.  The pathetic sadness of the women's faces relaxes for a minute--they're getting credit from an invisible man for their strenuous attempts with their husbands' not-quite-perfectly cleaned white collars. The solution? Wisk!

Wisk rinses all that grime out of the collars and all that shame out of their wives, easy peasy. Until they get the solution, however, they are shamed by parrots, kids, neighbors, and others.  Some of the earlier commercials even used the words, "Shame on you."

Until this morning, when I checked out a few retro Wisk commercials, I couldn't remember the product being advertised, only the embarrassed faces of the women.

These--like so many television women--were part of the corps of role models for girls growing up in the Fifties, the Wisk Women the worst of the bunch.  What we saw on the 1950s screen helped lay down the foundation of our attitudes about our gender and what we could do.  If we were very very good, we could get our husband's collars presentable!

Avuncular Walter Cronkite reported the news.  Voiceovers were always male. In the culture at the time, almost all voices of authority were male voices. Church leaders, doctors, lawyers, legislators, judges, all men back then.

While there were a few women in some of those roles, they weren't featured on television or in the books we learned to read by.  Mother and Father had distinctly different roles in Dick and Jane. Father did real work in the real world, Mother baked cakes and dressed up for shopping trips into "the city." Father drove, Mother was passenger.

As always, I begin my day with NPR, and often end the day with snippets from  CNN or MSNBC.  In the realms of news, women are now as visible and outspoken as men, thank goodness!  Girls today will not grow up with gender-limiting stereotypes.  And they won't give a hoot about collars!