The Cheerful Granny of 1974

Ebony, December 1974 Here’s another twist on the cheerful granny used as an advertising tool. As in other ads I’ve found, the grandmother is depicted inside the home. However, this ad in Ebony magazine shows an extended African American family at a holiday dinner. It is also a photograph, not a drawing, giving us much greater details about how the older women’s dress fits in with other family members. To my eye, three elements mark the woman at the center as older—her graying hair, her slightly old-fashioned glasses, and her button up shirtwaist style dress. While we can see the same elements in earlier ads with grandmothers, I think this photograph does not set the older woman so far apart from the others. Her graying hair is in a loose natural style—this is after all the seventies—not radically different than others at the table. Her glasses look a little like the jeweled cat-eyed shape of the fifties, but she does not stand out that much from the others. While her light blue dress…