“The war taught us the power of propaganda,” one of the C.P.I. men said after the armistice. “Now, by God, when we have something to sell the American people, we know how to sell it.”

A few moments, it seemed, after the end of the war, “the nation” became “the marketplace” and the exalted word “citizen” was promptly replaced with the loathsome, bovine “consumer.” Women had achieved the vote just as civic discourse shifted from political rights to the “freedom” to buy ready-made dresses and lipstick and jewelry, or the “liberty” to drink and smoke and dance. With the world rendered safe for democracy, our civic duty was redefined: buy the cake and biscuit mixes, the canned meats and soups that had once fed the troops.

If the ad men had learned from the war that a good slogan could sway the masses, they learned from Dr. Sigmund Freud that people are governed less by reason than by unconscious sexual desires. “Critical eyes are sizing you up,” the advertisements warned, but Aqua Velva aftershave would make a man’s face “fresh, fit and firm!” All women were naturally homely and ordinary, but Elizabeth Arden and Coco Chanel could make us beautiful—for a price. Inattention to external appearance was no longer high-mindedness, a Vogue editorial warned; rather, it destroyed “those potential personalities that psychologists tell us are lurking behind our ordinary selves.”

It was insulting and demeaning, but if you hear something often enough and long enough? Your resistance gets ground down. Absurdities start to make sense. Yes, you start to think. How true …

Not even I could be oblivious forever to frayed cuffs, run-down shoes, and a threadbare antebellum overcoat. One dark day in late December, with nothing to look forward to as 19 21 approached, I came upon a newspaper ad for Halle’s Department Store. “When a woman begins to regard her appearance as a fixed, unalterable quality, that same moment some vital, shining part of her is extinguished forever.”