14 DAY TRIAL // The other day, a photo of a new ad for Swiffer steam-mop from Procter & Gamble emerged online, after Heather Beschizza posted it on her Instagram. A general outcry followed, with the company eventually deciding to pull the offensive ad.
You can see the photo attached to this article. The outcry was caused by the obvious similarity between the woman in the ad and Rosie the Riveter (second photo attached here), a WWII feminist icon.
With her “We can do it!” words of encouragement, Rosie told women to leave the house and go work in factories to help the country at war. It also stood – and still does to this day – for a woman’s ability to be more than just a housewife, though she can be that too.
In other words, the new Swiffer ad took an image that was iconic and turned it upside down by using it to promote the very thing Rosie stood against: housework.
According to a statement from Procter & Gamble to Shine Yahoo!, that was the intention.
“It was not our intention to offend any group with the image, and we are working to make changes to where it is used as quickly as possible,” the company says.
The changes it deemed necessary to make was to pull the ad altogether but, according to many voices online, the damage is already done because the ad, with its message that women belong exclusively inside the house (and in the kitchen), took feminism back by 50 years.
Perhaps just as bad, it did that to promote a silly little thing like a fancy mop.
“Swiffer tells women ‘We can do it!’ ‘It’ in this case being housework. We're super unimpressed,” the Women’s Fund of New Hampshire says.
“Because nothing says, ‘I can’t wait to rush home from my full-time job to start my second shift of devalued, unpaid household labor with my Swiffer Bissel Steam Boost!’ like Rosie the Riveter,” Maya writes on Feministing.
