1899, LeRoy, New York. My great-great-great-uncle, Orator Woodward, bent over a contract, signing his name to the purchase agreement for a new product: Jell-O. He paid $450, the modern day equivalent of $4,000, a sum that became one of the most profitable business deals in American history, responsible for the ubiquity of Jell-O, the super-wealth generations of my family would inherit, and the curse they came to believe accompanied it.
It was through luck and marriage that my family came into the Jell-O legacy. My great-great-aunt, Edith, married Orator Woodward’s son, Ernest, in 1903. The next year, Jell-O sales spiked, driven by the advent of the assembly line and the disappearance of “the help” from the kitchens of the American middle class.
Short and serious, Ernest Woodward was obsessed with his horses, his hounds, and the Jell-O he made from the bones of less fortunate animals. (Today, in a top-secret process, the gelatin is still made from collagen rendered from the hides of pigs and cows.) It was Ernest who urged the company to install a sale-boosting assembly line—and Ernest who began the Jell-O brand’s long history of marketing to women by assuring them that self-sacrifice and caretaking were their primary purposes. Certainly, caretaking was the principal occupation of the Woodward women, who were absented from the family business, instead staying home with the children and lending their talent and time to various community boards and charities. Even after the company sold to Postum (which later became General Foods, and then Kraft) in 1925, even after the patriarchs died off, the Woodward women inherited trusts that were managed for them by teams of male bankers, who determined monthly allowances for each beneficiary. Women and finances simply did not mix, after all. But women and Jell-O? A match made in marketing heaven.
Early ads for Jell-O featured prominently in women’s magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal, and emphasized the product’s convenience for women who’d lost their housekeepers to lucrative factory work, and who were unaccustomed to cooking themselves. Even if you can’t cook, you can still make Jell-O dessert, ads read, claiming that Jell-O was so easy . . . even a child can do it and creating a mascot, “The Jell-O Girl,” to prove it. In old advertisements she stands, this Jell-O Girl, towheaded and blonde, clad in a white polka-dot dress and black buckled shoes, offering a platter of wobbling pink to a room full of her mother’s guests. At Christmastime she adds candied cherries to the mix while Mother fetches Daddy a drink.
In the 1930s and 40s, during the Depression and the Second World War, The Jell-O Girl was displaced by ads selling the product less as a dessert than an efficient food-stretcher. Jell-O salads were the perfect place to hide unsightly leftovers and the old contents of a winnowing pantry, from olives, tuna, and slaw, to bruised tomatoes and canned soup. By the 50s and 60s, Jell-O became a mirror for America’s obsession with feminine perfection and domesticity, simultaneously a diet food (delightfully lite!), a mode of expression in the absence of other artistic outlets (elaborate gelatin cheese loaves! fish towers!) and a clever vessel for hiding nutritive ingredients. Jell-O was A Bride’s Best Friend, read a 1959 magazine ad in which a cartoon housewife carries a perfect mold to her new husband.
It was no surprise then, that the divorce boom of the 1970s proved challenging for Jell-O. Bill Cosby—who would in years to come be termed “America’s Dad”—was enlisted as the company’s primary spokesman to help teach newly single, working moms that Jell-O should be seen as a quick snack for kids. Allegations of rape and assault were constant for Cosby over the years, with 14 women coming forward in 2005, airing stories dating back to the 1960s. But until recently, few of those stories (over 50 by the time Cosby was convicted in 2018) stuck. Cosby was beloved. For consumers he triggered childhood nostalgia, home and safety, and sweet, sweet Jell-O.
About the public’s refusal to believe these allegations my mother always rolled her eyes and mentioned the curse. When she was a little girl, growing up in the shadow of the Jell-O fortune, she’d been told that the family curse affected only men. “All of us,” her cousin John told her, “All the Woodward men are doomed—we rarely live past forty.” John’s father had died young on the heels of his own father’s mysterious death. John’s uncle Frank had also died early, plummeting from the open window of a hotel room, his white bathrobe spread around him where he landed like a broken-winged dove.
For all these losses, John blamed the wealth that Jell-O had generated, the malaise of so much time and privilege—so much space for alcoholism and despair and illness to fester. But my mother suspected otherwise. When she was 14 and her own mother suddenly died, her suspicion mounted, as it did when her cousin Joan committed suicide, and when her own psyche began to deteriorate. But any time she voiced her feelings, her fear, her grief —anytime she asked questions about her inheritance, the money that came to her in monthly sums, doled out by faceless men in suits—she was called hysterical, reminded to stay cute, stay pretty, stay silent, the same admonitions sold with each box of Jell-O. It wasn’t until cancer came for her that she understood these admonitions were the curse.
The curse wasn’t confined to men, she told me from her hospital bed, it came from them, from a social structure predicated on their power. The curse was the silence impressed upon her, her mother before her, and countless women before them. The curse was the silence sold to women by men like Ernest Woodward and Bill Cosby, by products like Jell-O, by America itself.
And so, even as she was dying, my mother wrote, typing feverishly, working compulsively, composing the memoir she would ultimately leave unfinished. This is how we save ourselves, she constantly reminded me. We break the curse through our words. If you remember nothing else, remember this, she said. And so I write, too, exorcising every word I ever swallowed in the service of a man, as if in doing so I can return to my mother’s body, her voice; as if in tracing the history of our family and, Jell-O, the product it sold, I can make meaning of the silence she left behind.
