About the Project
An archive of everyday commerce.
Exponent Advertisements is a public, searchable collection of advertisements that appeared in the Woman's Exponent newspaper from 1872 to 1914. Complete issue scans are available from the Harold B. Lee Library and Utah Digital Newspapers; this site adds full-text transcriptions, vendor categorizations, and date-indexed search across the entire run.
The aim is to aid scholars and general readers interested in the daily life of the American West and Utah in particular. Advertisements are often overlooked artifacts — they record prices, products, tastes, and anxieties that more formal newspaper content tends to omit. We hope the archive surfaces those details alongside the content for which the Exponent is more frequently consulted.
About the Newspaper
The Woman's Exponent
Issued once or twice per month from Salt Lake City between 1872 and 1914, the Woman's Exponent was one of the longest-running women's newspapers in the American West. It became a noted suffragist outlet, and its pages provide today's scholars with insight into the daily life of the women who wrote and read it.
Complete scans are held at BYU's Harold B. Lee Library and Utah Digital Newspapers.
Usage & Licensing
Public-domain images
All advertisement scans on this site are in the public domain and free to use for any purpose. All other content — transcriptions, taxonomies, visualizations — is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Use it freely; please attribute Exponent Advertisements and link back.
A formatted citation is provided at the bottom of each advertisement's page.
Acknowledgements
A collaboration
This project grew out of an online exhibit created by Digital Matters and the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, in cooperation with the Office of Digital Humanities and the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.