Clark County Museum visitors can explore housework from yesteryear, such as the common household products pictured here. Photo by: Justin M. Bowen

In 1952 Westinghouse ran a refrigerator advertisement that portrays a fashionably dressed woman who has broken through the iron bonds (literally, a fence) of archaic housework and is throwing her arms into the air and smiling to the words “Whee! Now I can be free! I have a 1952 Westinghouse Frost-Free.”

It would be another few decades before she was free to pursue a life truly of her own, but the burden of housewife labor was lifting, and midcentury ad men were there to tell you that life could be better if you just bought this new technology. The economy was booming, and people were moving to the suburbs and latching onto the latest household products that came with so much ease they must be “magical.”

The Clark County Museum revisits the advertisements, television commercials and products in its exhibit, Domestic Technology: Making Housework Easier, which looks at the evolution of household products for the past 150 years. There are incarnations of toasters, coffee pots, washing machines, waffle makers, food storage and irons. (Who knew that irons operating from gas or coal were used in the home?) Even food storage—glass jars to Tupperware and Ziploc baggies—is discussed in this fun exhibit, augmented by an hour’s worth of jingly commercials. Pieced together by Dawna Joliff, curator of exhibits for the museum, who mostly plucked from the museum’s own collection (including some of the decorated historical homes on the museum’s Heritage Street), Domestic walks you right into a world where everything was “New!” “Magic!” “So much easier!” and “All the gals love Dormeyer!”