Paw Wakes up (Rinso Advert)

A Wild West wife learns to save fuel thanks to Rinso soap powder - and her layabout husband - in this proto-feminist wartime skit.

Screen advertising played a crucial role in the wartime drive to conserve fuel for military purposes. Soap brand Rinso was responsible for some particularly irreverant examples, often drawing on cinematic tropes – in this case the American western. Down on the range, Paw wakes briefly from his blissful slumber to ‘mansplain’ to his overworked wood-chopping wife that there’s no need to boil clothes with Rinso (he read it in the paper). What she does next with that axe is left to our imagination.

Alongside traditional print advertising, soap brands sponsored daytime radio shows in America as early as the 1920s and Britain in the 1930s - hence the term 'soap opera'.