My daughter came home from school a couple weeks ago during digital citizenship week and announced, with the authority of someone who had just been handed a secret,
“Mom, today I learned that not everything you see online is real. You have to ask who made it and why they made it.”
I told her that was possibly the most important thing she’d learn all year and that a lot of adults still haven’t figured that out.
She looked at me like she couldn’t believe adults still needed to be told that.
The most famous “not real” lady
In 1921, a flour company called Washburn-Crosby ran a jigsaw puzzle contest in the Saturday Evening Post. Along with the completed puzzles, thousands of letters came back, mostly from women, asking questions about baking.
The company’s advertising department was all men. They didn’t feel right signing their names on letters offering domestic advice to housewives, so they made someone up.
They picked the name Betty because it sounded friendly. Crocker came from a recently retired company director. A female employee won an internal contest to create her signature.
It worked and the letters kept coming.
With that success, they decided to give her a voice. In 1924, Washburn-Crosby bought a radio station in Minneapolis and launched the Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air, voiced by one of the company’s home economists. By the following year, thirteen radio stations were carrying the show. Each station had its own woman reading from the same scripts, all written at headquarters in Minneapolis.
That worked too and so they kept going.
At her peak during the Second World War, Betty Crocker was receiving four to five thousand letters a day. Women were writing to Betty about their kitchens, their families, their worries about rationing.
So a team of twenty-five home economists were hired to answer letters under Betty’s name. Marjorie Husted, the woman who ran the operation, took home briefcases full of these letters every night.
It’s starting to sound like the Santa Claus operation
By 1945, Fortune magazine named Betty Crocker the second most famous woman in America, behind only Eleanor Roosevelt. That same year, Fortune also ran a piece calling her a fake and a fraud.
But that didn’t stop the raving fans.
The company commissioned a portrait of Betty in 1936 - painted by blending the features of the women in the Home Service Department into one face. They put her on television from 1949 to 1964, played by an actress.
Her portrait was updated eight times between 1936 and 1996, changing her hair and clothes to match whatever decade she was supposed to be living in. The most recent version is a digital composite of seventy-five real women’s faces, merged into one.
I think Betty is in need of another image refresh. Although I really don’t know how they (or AI, probably) would decide how she should look in 2026.
Digital citizenship in the age of AI is obviously important. It is interesting to me that we’re only responding to it now when the line between what’s real and made up blurred a long, long time ago.
When my daughter shared what she learnt with me, I told her that if she forgot everything else she learned this year, to remember that one thing. That it is one of the most important things she’ll ever learn.
She rolled her eyes at me - or tried to, anyway. She hasn’t quite figured out how to work her eye muscles that way yet.
“Mom. What are you even talking about? Of course I’m going to remember more than one thing.”
See what’s there. Choose what stays.
A thought to carry forward:
The hole got deeper because every step worked. That’s usually how it goes with things that aren’t real.