An Unpresidential Labor Day Postscript: Marketing the Endless Shift

This Labor Day, I was thinking about the bayonets Cleveland sent to Chicago and the soldiers Eisenhower sent to Little Rock — but also the quieter conscription that never ended: women still doing more than twice as much unpaid labor as men.

Men’s labor had troops to enforce it; women’s labor had ads reminding men that labor enforcement began at home.

The postwar boom plastered magazines with ads that turned housework into patriotic duty: the gleaming floor, the perfect roast, the wrinkle-free shirt.

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Women weren’t just encouraged to consume — they were conscripted into unpaid, invisible labor that advertisers sold back to them as love, beauty, and survival.

Labor Day commemorates the bloody fight for the eight-hour workday, but women never got one.

Ads in the mid-20th century made sure of it: they dressed up endless domestic work as aspiration, not exploitation. A strike might win men time off; a detergent ad told women their job was never done.

That disparity isn’t a relic—it’s present-day, stubbornly slow to change. American women still bear nearly two and a half times as much household and care work as men—logging an average of 12.6 hours a week compared to just 5.7 for men while working as much or more outside the home. It’s not about easing the burden, it’s about structural reform.

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