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This paper aims to examine how women working in the advertising industry during the 1920s and 1930s encouraged and resisted stereotypes about women to establish a professional identity. This seemingly paradoxical approach provided women with opportunities for professional development and network building. Dorothy Dignam is presented as a case study of one such advertising woman. She was a market researcher, a teacher, an advocate for women’s employment in advertising, a historian of women’s advertising clubs and a supporter of and a contributor to women’s professional networking.

Archival material is drawn from the N. W. Ayer and Son archives at the Smithsonian Institute, the Advertising Women of New York archives and the Dorothy Dignam Papers at the Schlesinger Library, the Philadelphia Club of Advertising Women papers at Bryn Mawr, the Dignam Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Women’s Advertising Club of Chicago (WACC) archives at the University of Illinois, Chicago. A close reading method of analysis places the material in a historical context. Additionally, it provides a narrative structure to demonstrate the complementary relationship between advertising club work and professional identity.

Dignam’s career strategies helped her to construct a professional identity that situated her as a guide, teacher and role model for other women who worked in advertising. She supported and created an attitude that enabled aspiring career women to embark on their careers, and she assisted in creating a coalition of women who empowered each other through their advertising club work.

Dignam’s published work about careers for women in advertising, her own career and its advancement and her involvement with women’s advertising clubs all served a rhetorical purpose. Her professional life sought to change both men’s and women’s attitudes about the impact of women in professional roles. In turn, the influence of attitudes helped to create space for women in business, especially those seeking advertising careers.

This paper illustrates how Dignam’s career, accomplishments and publications coalesce to provide evidence of how women negotiated professional identities and claimed space for themselves in the business world and in the advertising industry.

This paper uses archival documents to begin to recover a history of women’s leadership in the advertising industry. In particular, this paper aims to identify the leadership styles of the first five presidents of the New York League of Advertising Women’s (NYLAW) club. Their leadership from 1912 to 1926 set the course for and influenced the culture of the New York League. These five women laid the foundations of a social club that would also contribute to the professionalization of women in advertising, building industry networks for women, forging leadership and mentorship links among women, providing advertising education exclusively for women and, finally, bolstering women’s status in all avenues of advertising. The first five presidents were, of course, different characters, but each exhibited the traits associated with “transformational leaders,” leaders who prepare the “demos” for their own leadership roles. The women’s styles converged with their situational context to give birth to a women’s advertising club that, like most clubs, did charity work and hosted social events, but which was developed by the first five presidents to give women the same kinds of professional opportunities as the advertising men’s clubs provided their membership. The first five presidents of the Advertising League had strong prior professional credibility because of the careers they had constructed for themselves among the men who dominated the advertising field in the first decade of the 20th century. As presidents of the NYLAW, they advocated for better jobs, equal rights at work and better pay for women working in the advertising industry.

This paper draws on women’s advertising archival material from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe and Wisconsin Historical Society to argue that the five founding mothers of the NYLAW provided what can best be described as transformational feminist leadership, which resulted in building an effective club for their members and setting it on a trajectory of advocacy and education that would benefit women in the advertising industry for the next several decades. These women did not refer to themselves as “leaders,” they probably would not have considered their work in organizing the New York club an exercise in leadership, nor might they have called themselves feminists or seen their club as a haven for feminist work. However, by using modern leadership theories, the study can gain insight into how these women instantiated feminist ideals through a transformational leadership paradigm. Thus, the historical documents provide insight into the leadership roles and styles of some of the first women working in American advertising in the early parts of the 20th century.

Archival documents from the women’s advertising clubs can help us to understand women’s leadership practices and to reconstruct a history of women’s leadership in the advertising industry. Eight years before women in America could vote, the first five presidents shared with the club their wealth of collective experience – over two decades worth – as advertising managers, copywriters and space buyers. The first league presidents oversaw the growth of an organization would benefit both women and the advertising industry when they proclaimed that the women’s clubs would “improve the level of taste, ethics and knowledge throughout the communications industry by example, education and dissemination of information” (Dignam, 1952, p. 9). In addition, the club structure gave ad-women a collective voice which emerged through its members’ participation in building the club and through the rallying efforts of transformational leaders.

Historically, the advertising industry in the USA has been “pioneered” by male industry leaders such as Claude Hopkins, Albert Lasker and David Ogilvy. However, when the authors look to archival documents, it was found that women have played leadership roles in the industry too. Drawing on historical methodology, this study reconstructs a history of women’s leadership in the advertising and marketing industries.

This paper helps to understand how women participated in leadership roles in the advertising industry, which, in turn, enabled other women to build careers in the industry.

A series of online searches of the Harvard University Library System – which includes the Baker Library, Houghton Library and the Radcliffe Institute’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library – on the History of Women in America revealed nearly 1,000 archive and manuscript holdings on advertising and related topics. This paper aims to investigate the extent of these holdings, to assess their value to advertising and marketing historians and to explore their potential for encouraging future research on under-investigated topics and questions.

Described are the extensive and valuable special collections and other holdings related to advertising, business and marketing of the Harvard Library System. Also described are the availability of the holdings and recommendations for accessing and studying the collections and artifacts.

The research reported here supports an overall conclusion that the Harvard Library System holds an important place among the world’s repositories of valuable historical advertisements and marketing ephemera. The research also supports four specific conclusions regarding the historical value of Harvard’s collections and archives. First, some of the collections offer access to artifacts and items from an under-investigated period – the first half of the 19th century. Second, many of the collections are international in scope. Third, the collections represent a wide array of 19th century non-periodical advertisements and ephemera, such as trade cards, posters and theatrical playbills. Fourth, and most important, the collections offer significant potential for addressing, among other under-investigated topics, the important role of women in the development of modern advertising theory and professional practices.

A prior search for the world’s largest and most historically significant archives and collections of advertisements and marketing ephemera (promotional objects or media executions created for a one-time, limited purpose) revealed a handful of library and museum collections of exceptional size or topical importance meriting further investigation. This paper adds to an extensive line of research published in the marketing and advertising historical literature exploring and describing the breadth, depth and historical value of the world’s important collections of historical advertisements and ephemera.