Making Finance Familiar: Gender and the Domestication of Banks

This chapter highlights the new involvement of banks in family life, through the prism of gender and domesticity. I analyse bank adverts and campaigns directed at women, especially a recurring campaign by Handelsbanken for housewives in the 1960s. Interpreting these events as performances of the marketisation of domestic money and of the domestication of banking services, I argue that by playing on emotions, family life, consumerism and, literally, everydayness, the campaigns mobilised femininity to domesticate a new financial mindset—for women and men alike. The bank presented itself as a ‘department store of finance’. Older financial devices, such as the traditional budget sheets, were reinvented and popularised along with cleverly packaged and diversified types of bank accounts, mutual funds and equity investments. As the bank claimed a new expert role in the management of the family budget, topics like housekeeping money and financial equality between spouses were discussed in the same breath as investing in stocks. Female financial experts played a leading role in these campaigns, and the banks created a new expert position: that of the personal financial advisor to ordinary people, also known as ‘budget consultant’ or ‘family economics advisor’.