help disecting newspaper?

I think the issue of the ads and the women scrubbing clothes or whatever is obvious. Advertisements have always used attractive models or drawings of attractive people. The idea is to associate the product with good looks, to suggest that if you use it, you, too, will look like the models, even if it's not a beauty product. These ads for remedies are saying, "Once you use this product, your life will improve, you will be serene and relaxed, enjoying a new feeling of well-being, and your looks will improve, too!"

Just as a side note: the ailments mentioned were often euphemisms for depression or anxiety (especially headaches and "nerves") experienced by unhappy, dissatified women. The remedies sold were not infrequently high in alcohol or opiates.

As for the happy housewives, of course women's lives were mostly domestic, so products for the home were pitched to them. Again, the pretty models or drawings of models were meant to make the products seem attractive by association -- and perhaps to suggest that with these wonderful labor-saving devices, you could still look good instead of like a domestic drudge.

Finally, you don't say where these newspapers were printed, but it was common for papers in relatively small towns and cities to print "social news" about people's vacations or the guests they had in their homes or how well Tommy Jones had done at school. Social news like this was fairly standard if the newspaper wasn't printing a lot of national or international news because bigger papers covered that material. No one thought it was intrusive; they thought it was interesting and would even feed the information to whoever wrote the social news items. The items were part and parcel of local social life and news; they could make an otherwise boring or quiet, humdrum existence seem a touch more exciting.