In some images she's a prim schoolmarm,
in others she recalls a Midwestern Jacqueline
Kennedy. Then there's the look of a 1980s TV
anchor or a well-dressed soccer mom. Whatever
version we see, Betty Crocker is a blend of
powerful icon, unimpeachable advice-giver and
trusted friend.
In "Finding Betty Crocker" (Simon & Schuster, $23),
author Susan Marks delves into the colorful history and powerful
influence on American eating habits of this fictitious character,
who was created more than 80 years ago.
In a recent telephone interview, Marks, a Twin Cities native, discussed
the Betty behind the brand name.
How did you find yourself writing a Betty Crocker biography?
Several forces came together. I was working at the Minnesota Historical
Society as a tour guide. I always knew it would be a book, because
I could tell from giving those tours that there was a big story
there and that it resonated deeply. I was also starting graduate
school, so I decided to make it my master's thesis.
What is the origin of the Betty Crocker cult of personality?
The cornerstone of Betty's success were her radio shows, which
started in 1924 on WCCO and eventually went nationwide on all the
radio networks. The tone of these broadcasts was something you
might liken to a church circle meeting, a national dialogue where
women would gather and talk to one another about how to make their
lives better.
They had a cordial, familial tone, and the issues were mostly domestic.
It wasn't always about cooking -- husbands were interviewed and
asked what they loved about their wives -- although food played
an underlying role.
If a women were to write a question to Betty Crocker, she might
read it on the radio and ask other women how they would respond.
And women responded really well. Right away, there was lots of
mail. There were other radio shows with fictitious home economists,
but they lacked charm.
That quality came from the staff, who were listening to what homemakers
were asking and then responding appropriately. That continued very
heavily into the Depression, when so many people needed Betty Crocker;
that's when the letters got interesting.
During your research, what surprised you the most?
Probably when I discovered that Betty Crocker got 4,000 letters
a day in the 1940s. We're talking about millions and millions of
letters. I thought that all of these letters would be in the General
Mills archives, but that's not the case. Almost all have been thrown
away. There were excerpts, and a couple letters were fully intact.
A few really stuck out. One from 1925 said, 'I don't make your
fudge cake, I like white cake. But my neighbor makes fudge cake.
Is she going to steal my husband?' The associations of food and
love are strong.
What was Betty's role in the war effort?
Certainly her recipes, pamphlets and bulletins were all geared
to how homemakers could maximize ration points. But the War Office
asked General Mills to donate Betty Crocker's time, and asked NBC
to donate air time, and they produced programs along the lines
of, 'Here is information about salvaging meals, sending Christmas
cookies to the troops, learning about nutrition.' They weren't
plugs about selling Gold Medal flour.
General Mills felt that the war was far more important than worrying
about how to sell flour. It's interesting that the government asked
General Mills to donate Betty Crocker. They could have asked Pet
Milk for Mary Lee Taylor, for example, but they wanted Betty Crocker.
That says a lot.
What happened with Betty after the war?
An interesting phenomenon developed. Long before Betty Friedan
wrote "The Feminine Mystique," people wrote to Betty
Crocker asking the same thing: 'Something's wrong; I'm unhappy.
Other women seem fine; I'm not.'
Of course this problem was way bigger than Betty Crocker, and when
Betty Friedan's book came out it brought much more attention to
the issue. Betty Crocker couldn't fix it -- and neither could Betty
Friedan -- but people could see that it was a valid problem in
people's lives. Women were looking for more mental challenge, more
mental stimulation.
General Mills thought homemakers needed more recognition, that
any woman who does homemaking should be celebrated, whether they
were full- or part-time homemakers. They developed the Homemakers
Creed, which was a scroll that women put up in their kitchens to
remind them of the value in their work.
So what was the deal with cake mixes?
Everyone in the quick-mix industry wanted to know why pancake mixes
were doing well, but cake mixes weren't. General Mills sought the
advice of Ernest Dichter, a business psychologist who had done
endless studies of cake mixes.
He said that the cake itself was a symbolic gift that a woman gave
to her family or sweetheart, and a cake mix cheapened that love.
He thought that one way of gaining approval was to use cake mix
formulas that required adding fresh eggs rather than using powdered
eggs, and Betty Crocker mixes did require that. Through constant
advertising, people began to slowly accept them. Today they're
so common that we're shocked and surprised when cakes are made
from scratch.
How did Betty land in a class-action complaint?
The Minneapolis-St. Paul chapter of the National Organization of
Women [NOW] was behind it. From what I understand, anything that
represented a stereotypical or narrow view of women was being confronted.
Miss America pageants were being picketed, for example.
In their view, Betty Crocker represented a certain limiting stereotype.
What's surprising is that NOW met with a lot of opposition from
women who said that they took from Betty Crocker what they needed,
and the idea that she was so powerful that she told women what
they should be was ludicrous. Once the media lost interest, the
complaint went away.
What role did Betty play in the creation of the Pillsbury
Bake-Off?
It's fascinating to think that Pillsbury, General Mills' greatest
competitor, couldn't beat Betty Crocker. Pillsbury's advertising
agencies realized that anything they did would be eclipsed by Betty.
So they thought that if Betty gave recipes to homemakers, then
they should turn it around and ask homemakers to send in recipes
to the flour company. It became the Pillsbury Bake-Off, which is
probably the greatest cooking contest ever.
Were there pretenders, from rival food companies, to the Betty
Crocker throne?
In the 1950s you start to see a lot more of these home economists
-- Ann Pillsbury, for example -- but they didn't have the background,
the history that Betty did. She had all those years of building
up trust with the previous generation of women.
Was Betty ever headed toward the back burner?
Betty Crocker's image was used less and less in the 1960s and 1970s
in products and in advertising, as everyone questioned whether
Betty Crocker was relevant. But she had a comeback in the 1980s:
Betty as Everywoman, at home in the board room and the dining room,
and we began to see the image used more and more.
I don't think they're going to phase her out anytime soon. She's
a legend, she's too powerful. Nothing compares to her. There's
Aunt Jemima, who has been around longer, and had a radio show too.
But she was never presented as a figure that people went to for
advice. There are some similarities between Betty and Martha Stewart,
but the big differences are that there's probably not a jury that
would convict Betty of anything.
I imagine that, to a lot of people, Betty Crocker is a real person.
A 1945 Fortune magazine article outed Betty, that she wasn't one
person but many people working at General Mills. But it didn't
seem to matter, because people wanted to believe. They would travel
to the Betty Crocker Kitchens and would be heartbroken to find
out that Betty wasn't there.
Most of us don't make the trip to the North Pole and find out that
Santa Claus isn't there. That's why the home economists at General
Mills had to keep so much Kleenex around. People would stare in
disbelief when they were told that there really wasn't a Betty.
They would point to the Betty portraits as evidence.
I had many people send me e-mails and letters saying that I was
wrong, that Betty Crocker did exist, and that they had met her.
Of course they were referring to actresses, or the home economists
at General Mills.
I can't help but notice that we're talking about Betty
as if she were a living, breathing person.
Yeah, when I talk about Betty Crocker, I do catch myself saying,
'On her radio show she said this,' so I think that now I've had
a part in perpetuating the Betty Crocker myth.
Rick Nelson is at rdnelson@startribune.com.
© Copyright 2005 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
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