Aunt Jenny

Aunt Jenny was an advertising character created for Spry Vegetable Shortening. Primarily portrayed by Edith Spencer, Aunt Jenny was best known as host and narrator of the long-lived radio show, Aunt Jenny’s Real Life Stories (January 18, 1937 – November 16, 1956), but she was also seen promoting the product in drawings, photographs and cookbooks.

Origins

In 1936, Lever Brothers, part of the large corporation Unilever, introduced Spry Vegetable Shortening as a competitor to the long-successful shortening Crisco, produced by Procter & Gamble. Aunt Jenny was intended to give a pleasant face to what might otherwise be seen as a boring or at least uninspiring product, therefore presenting a challenge to writers of advertisement copy. Sometimes even Jenny’s enthusiastic writers seemed to be reaching for things to say—on the final page of the Aunt Jenny’s Favorite Recipes cookbook appears a blurb boasting that doughnuts made with Spry are “so light and digestible a child can eat ‘em.” For the most part, however, Aunt Jenny was successful, and within mere months Spry had consumed nearly half of Crisco’s considerable market share.