THE TRAVEL SIZED BAR OF SOAP

Soap, for thousands of years it was the last word in clean.

Yet, in the West up until the mid-19th century buying a bar of soap solely for personal cleansing was a luxury few could afford. All-purpose soaps for the cattle, the kids, and the kitchen, usually homemade, were found in the home.

Then Pears and Lever in England, and Proctor and Gamble and Kirk's in the U.S., began marketing the notion of personal soap only for human skins, promising white, soft, gentle skin and promoting cultural racism at the same time.

Nicole Cohen, author of Selling Soap , states, "You could say that advertising is soap's little dirty secret."

"It started during the colonization of North America, when European settlers wiped Aboriginal populations off the land that is now Canada and the United States. According to Andrea Smith, who wrote Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, in order to justify the elimination of indigenous people, settlers had to construct Aboriginal bodies as "dirty" or "impure". An ad for Proctor and Gamble's Ivory soap helped popularize the myth of the "dirty native". The ad read:

We were once factious, fierce and wild,
In peaceful arts unreconciled
Our blankets smeared with grease and stains
From buffalo meat and settlers' veins.
Through summer's dust and heat content
From moon to moon unwashed we went,
But IVORY SOAP came like a ray
Of light across our darkened way
And now we're civil, kind and good
And keep the laws as people should,
We wear our linen, lawn and lace
As well as folks with paler face
And now I take, where'er we go
This cake of IVORY SOAP to show
What civilized my squaw and me
And made us clean and fair to see.

"The ad suggested that Ivory soap "civilized" Aboriginal people, while further fueling the colonists' racists ideas about them being dirty and uncivilized."

Judy Shoaf details the filthy advertising history of soap manufacturer Pears: "Two of the brand's promises in the 1890's through the 1920's were that the use of Pears would "civilize" and "whiten" a person." African Americans were demeaned in 'humorous' racist ads from the late 1890's:

"a little white girl on an outing comments of a passing black girl: "She needs to use Pears"; a little white boy gives a little black boy a tub bath,with the result that the latter is white from the neck down, or a black boy washing his hands in a bucket under the eye of a little white girl finds that his hands turn white, or a couple of black children comment, as a mother struggles to give her baby a tub bath, "She's gwine to turn that nigger white!"; a "native minister wins back his wandering congregation by washing with Pears, which turns his skin white."

Now, you may argue that the examples I am citing are from over a hundred years ago. This is where the dirty secret of soap advertising gets even dirtier.

Take a look at the Pure Fun: Ivory History web page and Pears' handy, dandy advertising retrospective.

Did you notice anything?

Well, the taglines today are interesting in terms of positioning the corporations in the publics' mind.

"IVORY, "The Name You Trust for Good, Clean Family Fun." "Don't worry! We aren't racist. It's all good, clean family fun.", is that the corporate message Ivory is trying to sell us now?

PEARS INTERNATIONAL...I like their new tagline, too: "Clearly kind to skin for generations." Obviously, racism is not skin deep when it comes to Pears. And, isn't it ironic that this venerated British soap manufacturer that promotes itself in one ad as the Queen's soap of choice, is now made exclusively in India, a country that once fell into their category of "uncivilized"?

But, what struck me as most amazing was the fact that in both of these advertising histories you will not see one example of their racist advertising from the past. Of course, it should come as no surprise that they cleaned up and "whitewashed" their corporate websites, should it?

After all, they sell us soap.