In 1964, just a few months after British fashion designer Mary Quant became the center of controversy with her Bazaar boutique in Chelsea, the irreverent miniskirt arrived in Spanish society. Modernity was making strides. The consumer society was burgeoning in Spain, and advertising was avidly seeking new customers. The Regime of Franco – the fascist dictator who ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975 – prohibited the presence of women, particularly married women, in the labor market until the 1960s. In 1961 and 1962, new laws were passed to allow women to join the workforce. These laws gave some rights back to women, although married women still faced discrimination. In this eve of the consumption society women managed an increasing part of the family budget dedicated to purchasing household appliances, travel or vacations for the whole family. In addition, the growing incorporation of women into the labor market was another milestone of the period. This blog post is based on a journal article in Business History which looks at banking advertising aimed at women in the 1960s.
In this context, private banks began to take an interest in women as customers. The concept was innovative, even groundbreaking. For the first time, Spanish banks were constructing a discourse aimed at women. Banks were no strangers to female wealth: fortunes had always received the attention of banks, whether from a man or a woman. Now, the target was much broader, and banks targeted the incipient middle classes from urban areas.
Accessing bank documentation is intricate and laborious, firstly because, in many cases, it has not been preserved, and secondly, because it is difficult to access private archives. Researchers sometimes have to be imaginative in finding sources to overcome these limitations. We have therefore focused on the Historical Archive of the Bank of Spain. The researcher can find a collection of petitions sent by Spanish private banks requesting permission to advertise their products first in the media. From 1938 until the mid-1960s, the Spanish Press Law had a strict censorship, and the marketing addressed to banks had a particular group of censors. The Private Banking regulation obliged the bank to request permission for each advertising action, sending a copy and formal request. We have completed the archival source’s revision with a particular objective: to detect advertising requests with any allusions to women as consumers of financial products or as private banking clients. This material has been used to carry out several research and dissemination products.
Our paper, co-authored with Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo, argues that attracting women, particularly married women, to retail finance is essential to consumer culture and modernity.[1] Examining selected archival material has made it possible to map an evolution in banking strategies toward large-scale consumer banking. We identify three stages in this shift. The first phase encompasses a time when bank advertising is characterized by the institutional image and embodied by the headquarters or photograph of the bank’s buildings, retail branches, and, primarily, its head office. Our findings add to previous discussions by highlighting how women – and often men – appeared as mere supporting actors who add dynamism to the scene. A second stage coincided with the product diversification of commercial banks, where they sought to offer more services to their established customers and attract new (mainly female) customers. The long-term effect of expanding standardized products and services to middle-class and less well-off customers signified the end of personally negotiated offerings between retail bank branch managers and well-off clients. Meanwhile, this diversification of commercial banks, which pivots on marketing campaigns aimed at men, followed strict profiles marked by their profession. For women, there was a single profile defined by gender and age.
At the end of the 1960s, some banks launched specific campaigns aimed at the female public for the first time in their history with a language that emphasized communication in the first person. Banks adopted a discourse that included references to women’s rights, a new narrative that sought to connect with a younger, emancipated, sometimes highly educated, and independent public. These campaigns aimed exclusively at women by Spanish banks left iconic advertising images for posterity, but while they also included their domestic profile, their novelty resided in targeting professional women. Research in this paper placed the Spanish case inside a novel international debate. Similar campaigns had already been carried out in other European countries, where banks also aimed to attract women’s savings and encourage daily finances.
Opposing (old) advertising, which appealed to the corporate image embodied by the bank’s headquarters or in the founders’ image, a new wave of ads mirror modern and cheerful mannequins representing young housewives who see banking services as the perfect ally to alleviate their domestic duties. The analysis of bank advertisements suggests an evolution in the interaction between banks and their female customers. This creates a narrative in which women’s rights were the communicative banner of a traditional and conservative sector such as banking. As a result, this evolution is non-linear because the bank advertising trends described were not universal, and dominant adds with male voices remained long after.
To find out more, you can read the full study in Business History, which is open access.
Susana Martínez-Rodríguez is Associate Professor of Economic History at University of Murcia (Spain). Her main interests include commercial law, enterprise forms, and gender perspectives in economic history. Her current research focuses on the history of enterprise forms in Spain and on gender in business history.
Image credit: Archivo Histórico del Banco de España
[1] Susana Martínez-Rodríguez & Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo, ‘Gender and bankarization in Spain, 1949–1970’, Business History, (2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2023.2279730
