Through my research I found it was obvious that women have come a long way from the homemaker image that was once so popular in the 1960's. Those homemaker ads are now called "vintage" not only because of their age but also because of the ideas, in my opinion. Like my grandmother stated, the portrayal of women in advertising changes as women grow and make more opportunities for themselves. If they keep pushing that glass ceiling and pushing for equality, the ads will show men and women as being more equal. Of course, there will always be ads that use women as sex symbols, and ones that use men as sex symbols. Sex sells in advertising. Women being held to such a traditional gender role shouldn't sell appliances though, not in the twenty-first century. Women won't buy into it.
None of the research I found contradicted my thoughts that advertising has gone from portraying "Betty Homemaker" in 1960 to soccer moms and working women in current ads. Advertising appliances now is a way to sell a lifestyle that comes with the appliance, not the actual product. Will it do something quicker, make me happier, etc. What will this do for me and what are the implications of that on my life. Time is money. Time is precious. In the 1960s the ads were heading in that direction, but the lifestyle wasn't as prevalent a theme as it is today. The product was always the center of attention, and the women was an accessory to the appliance. Now the women and the lifestyle shines bright, and you buy that product because you want the lifestyle that could accompany it. Women, let's keep on progressing and we'll have to see how ad agencies will keep up with us.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
A man?! In the kitchen?!? No way!!
A man and a fridge. Now that’s not something you see everyday, at least in the world of 1960s appliance advertising. That’s not the case anymore with current appliance ads. This ad, with what looks like a man taking food out of the fridge, is once again aimed at the lifestyle you can have, although this ad definitely errs more on the side of selling the product as much as the lifestyle. This is because the arrows and words draw your attention away from the couple and back to the fridge. While it is not as “lifestyle” motivated as the other two current LG ads, it certainly makes leaps and bounds in the department from the woman being portrayed as a homemaker with children. Once again, there is a man but no children in this ad, which may reflect the choices of working couple’s to wait a little while longer until they are in their 30’s to have children.
Another thing I noticed about this ad and the relationship between the man and the woman is that while the woman looks as though she is cooking, the man is helping. It shows equality, which is the polar opposite of 40 years ago when men were buying their wives mobile dishwashers as luxury Christmas presents. Sure, it may make dishwashing easier, but what does it say about your feelings towards her role in the marriage? That she is the housekeeper? That was more common and socially accepted then, but more and more now we see young couples with a division of chores, and working together because equality between the sexes is so important to many men and women, in every aspect of life. The two people in this ad represent a team, not a man and wife separated by their traditionally accepted gender roles. That’s an extremely different portrayal of the homemaker image and a beacon of light for advertising involving women.
The appliance as the background, not the model, of the ad.
The second ad I chose out of a series of lifestyle ads by LG is “Culinary Adventure.” This is the ultimate example of the appliance fitting into the consumer’s life and fitting the consumer’s needs. Even the copy says it loud and clear: “Adapts easily to your latest culinary adventure.” The woman in this ad is not surrounded by children, there is actually an absence of children in these ads, but there are men in all three LG ads I have chosen. The male in this ad is hanging out in the background, not a major part of the ad but still alluding that the woman may be involved with him somehow. Another thing is that while the woman is cooking in the ad, she isn’t being portrayed as “Betty Homemaker” because the appliance is behind her, she is in the forefront of the ad and she’s clearly only cutting fruit. She isn’t all made up with children at her feet, dirty dishes in her hands but still with a huge smile on her face. That’s unrealistic. This is much more believable. I would say this ad portrays more the young professional, or working mother, but not a homemaker. The progression that women have made it the workplace is reflected in the ads, even if the ad isn’t showing her in the office place it isn’t hard to imagine her in an office setting, where that setting was hard to imagine putting the women that appeared in 1960’s ads.
Dance the Night Away
This is clearly a more current ad and it is from a whole campaign of LG appliances that really are advertising a lifestyle that a consumer can get if they have the product, as opposed to directly selling the product. As you’ll notice, the nature of this ad is much different. A man and woman are dancing in the kitchen in rhythm with those dancing on the fridge television. The first thing I noticed was that an adult male was in the ad, because they are not featured in ads from the 1960s. Males are practically absent in every appliance advertisement, but they are the stars of car ads. One of the things that is different about this ad is that when you first look at it you see the couple dancing, then the product. The product will fit into your schedule and adapt into your life, not the other way around. In the ads from the 1960s the appliances were the stars of the ads with people around them. With this LG ad, it’s all about selling the lifestyle of fun, romance, class and comfort. The homemaker has turned into a woman swept off her feet by Prince Charming.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Look Honey, it’s a fridge just like the one you’ll own one day!
Check out my amazing fridge!
Once again though, notice the absence of an adult male figure. It is likely that the woman went and did the grocery shopping, because women make most of the household purchases, while the man was at work making the money. The only thing that could be misconstrued about this ad is the line “There’s always room for one more.” I am going to assume that is about the size of the fridge, since it is advertised as providing extra storage space, but I bet the copywriter realized the double meaning behind it, which in my thoughts is there’s always room for one more child. Perhaps that is just my thoughts when I analyzed this ad though, it could be taken in many different ways. While I don’t think this ad is as vintage as the others, I don’t think it is something that we would see today because of the appliance focus, and not the lifestyle focus.
Frigidaire Dishmobile…another perfect gift!
Here we have the ad for the Frigidaire Dishmobile, which I believe is a dishwasher that, judging by the illustration in the ad, is movable. The little jingle at the top left says “
An Electrolux Cleaner? For Christmas?! It’s just what I wanted!!
I know this is hard to see, but this is an ad from Ladies’ Home Journal, December 1958 (a little before the 60’s, I know, but it was too good to pass up). It is an ad for, obviously, the Electrolux Cleaner. The portrayal of the homemaker is so obvious in this, because whoever made this ad (I’m just taking a wild guess due to the year and saying it was a man) wrote in the copy that this would be the perfect Christmas gift. "Wonderful to give, wonderful to get." Speaking as a woman, I can honestly tell all men out there that unless your significant other specifically asks for a vacuum, you should not buy one as a gift. Especially for Christmas. The woman in this ad looks overjoyed at her gift, which comes with the burden of doing chores, because now it’s expected that the floors will be sparkling. This advertisement would not go over well in today’s market, and that is common sense, not research based. This is an obvious show of the changes in the portrayal of women. Women want to be equal to men, and it’s something that women have been fighting for decades over. Having this ad out in public in 2008 would be seen as completely sexist and belittling to women, because we are equal to men. My Interview
The lovely woman on the right in the photo accompanying this entry would be my grandmother, Jean Streinz. A little background on her is that she was born in 1926 and went to Florida State College. She is a well-spoken and well-read woman. Jean was married in 1953 and had her son (my father) in 1955. By the time she had to buy washers and dryers to keep up with the laundry of an energetic little boy, it was the 1960’s and she was being exposed to advertisements much like the ones I am researching. As I stated in a previously posted blog, Jean also worked as a graphic artist and although I am a little bias, her free hand drawings are absolutely brilliant.
My interview with my grandmother gave me some great information to work off of, mostly because I got a feel for what it was really like in the 1960s, though I knew it would be different from the ads. I have taken some of my interview with her and transcribed it so that the interesting parts and useful parts can be read in her actual words, instead of me trying to summarize them. The interview provided some great family stories as well, and it was fun to hear her recollections of the times and bring up events that hadn’t even crossed my mind. Here are some of the best parts of the interview:
Grandma (G): Before we get started on this interview I would just like to state some of my thoughts on the changes in advertising. I think that the changes in advertising sort of reflect the changes that women have made and are making in the world. Advertisements were very different back then from what they are now. For example, the housewives in their nicest dresses and aprons in the kitchen with heels! That never happened.
Katie (K): So what did you wear in the kitchen then?
G: Well, sometimes pants. But I didn’t own many pants back then. I didn’t have any blue jeans. They weren’t common at all. They were for men but not for women. I might wear a dress but I would wear low heels or maybe no shoes at all. Sandals in the kitchen to cook and I wouldn’t wear good clothes, I certainly wouldn’t dress up with stockings and heels you know? (Laughs)
K: Yes (Laughs)
G: But then advertising is different it presents a more glamorous picture
K: So in the 1960’s or I guess when Dad was born [1955] too, that’s close enough, did you buy all the appliances or did you [and Grandpa] make joint decisions? Who handled the money in the household?
G: I paid the bills and Jimmy [her husband] brought home the money and I spent it, virtually. Usually for something that cost very much we usually would go together and look. Usually if we bought something like a stove or a refrigerator or anything that had a large outlay of money we would go together. For smaller things like a toaster or a bathroom heater I would just go myself and buy it.
I found that part of the interview to be interesting, because in a yearlong series of articles from Ladies’ Home Journal called “How America Spends Its Money” starting in January 1961, it was discovered that most American families had the males bringing home the money and the women making all the spending decisions, from appliances to school clothing. However, big items, such as cars, those decisions were more often than not a joint decision between husband and wife. I thought it was interesting that it so directly correlated with other American spending habits.
K: So you weren’t the typical housewife in the skirt and the apron that the ads portrayed then? But then again I guess nobody was?
G: No it was not typical, no. But I did stay at home and do all the cooking, and I was really quite happy. See I worked for about 6 years though before I got married so I kind of got that out of my system. And things weren’t all that great at that time with jobs for women. You were given clerical jobs, jobs with not potential. And even though I had a college degree it didn’t help me that much before I was married. So I was quite happy to be married and have a child. But a lot of women my age who did not have the same experience were unhappy. Have you ever read the Feminine Mystique?
K: No
G: You never have? Oh you should read that. Well, anyways Betty Friedan wrote this book which changed things a lot because it talked about how women felt because a lot of educated women at that time, after the war, because women had worked during the second World War, but see I was just slightly younger because I didn’t get out of college until the war was over and I didn’t work much during the war, nothing regular. But anyways women who had worked had learned the experience of earning money, good money, and doing something they liked to do, and doing something that was useful. The men came back from the war and the women all lost their jobs. The men came in and took the good jobs and then that’s when you had all the women that became housewives and the women were at home. And women weren’t as happy as the ads portrayed them. A lot of women were very unhappy because they had experienced the freedom and all of the interesting jobs during the war. Because all the men, you see during the second World War, were drafted. If they could walk, they were drafted. So there were lots of jobs available for women. So there seemed to be a movement, and probably the government was behind it to a certain degree of trying to make women happy back at the home by being the little housewife because there wasn’t any jobs for them any more. I wasn’t that generation though, I was just slightly younger. I went to work after I went to college and I could see how dead end most of my jobs were. I was happier being a housewife than a lot of women a little older than I.
K: Who were upset because they’d seen jobs?
G: Yes, right.
This part of the interview was extremely interesting to me because I hadn’t considered World War II, and the recollections of my grandmother add up to the history of it presented in Hill’s book, Advertising to the American Woman. Why didn’t the ads change then? It’s hard to say. I think that personally a large part of it is because of the glamour behind a housewife wearing heels and make-up. The homemaker image is much nicer to many women than some hurried working mother. Although starting in 1950, the ads did change a little bit to encompass components of the feminist movement. From there they kept changing and evolving into what they are today. As my grandmother stated, the changes in advertising reflect the changes women have made in the world. She's a very smart woman.
My Researching Methods
The primary materials I selected for my paper to analyze are appliance advertisements from the 1960’s, all from Look and Ladies’ Home Journal. I also have current appliance advertisements featuring females from the LG appliance ad campaign. Some of the advertisements are from the LG website, and one is from a Good Housekeeping magazine, but the downloaded image for the purpose of putting it online was found on the LG site. My grandmother was my primary source interview.
I interviewed my grandmother, Jean Streinz, and she is relevant to the project because she was a wife, a mother, and a worker during the time period I am looking into. My grandmother has plenty of experience with being exposed to the advertisements of those days, as well as working as a graphic artist and struggling with being at home or at work.
My grandmother has worked in the magazine industry. As I stated, she was a graphic artist and among the many shops she worked for two were for magazines. One position was a production supervisor for a ceramics magazine and the other was a brief stint as Art Director for Seattle Weekly. Due to her involvement and interest in magazines already and her role as part stay-at-home mother and a graphic artist, she had an interesting take on the way advertisements were and still are. In addition, she’s a bit of a feminist so it was interesting.
In regards to analyzing my material, I did a lot of comparing and contrasting with the 1960’s images and the current appliance images. It helped to read Advertising to the American Woman by Daniel Delis Hill (a secondary source) and learn some of the background of the time before I began to look at the ads and their differences. It helped me to have a greater understanding of why they were different, beyond the “duh” conclusion of the times changing. After interviewing my grandmother, who brought up important points about World War II and the impact it had on women and advertising (something I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about), I went back and re-read that section in Hill’s book to analyze World War II and compare his take on it with my grandmother’s take on it. They had pretty much the same view, which is that there was discontent among women to return home after having worked and gained useful skills in addition to earning money.
To analyze many of the ads I just spent a lot of time looking at them. I looked at all the components of the ad, especially what the woman was doing and the copy (it is too bad but much of the copy doesn’t come through in the images). Much of the copy in the ads is aimed at women, persuading them to buy one new appliance or another, because they make most of the buying decisions for the household, especially regarding appliances seeing as how that was - stereotypically speaking – their area of expertise in addition to cooking. I compared the 1960s copy – long, paragraph form, explanatory – to LG’s advertisement copy, which is much shorter and much many of the ads have a sentence or two to grab attention, if not one snappy, short line. The differences there were interesting. I also looked at what the women in the more current appliance ads were shown doing, and compared that to the 1960s ads. Comparing and contrasting the ads is how I came up with my conclusion, which will be stated in a later blog entry.
Historians and the Homemaker Image
Hill addresses the homemaker portrayal of women multiple times in his book and even has a section on teaching daughters at a young age how to be a homemaker, mother and beauty all at once. It is obvious to him that the portrayal exists, because it is in almost every appliance ad made in that time period. Posted are advertisements from 1929 (General Electric) and 1960 (Kelvinator). Even though they were made 31 years apart the portrayal of the women as the homemaker, not to mention care taker of the children, is obvious. Due to these ads it is nearly impossible for historians not to note that the portrayal of “Betty Homemaker” was taking place. In a later blog entry, I will transcribe parts of my interview with my grandmother, who gives her views of the homemaker image of women in advertisements.
Hill writes in his chapter entitled “Home, Hearth and Housekeeping” that because women have historically all shared one thing in common, cooking, it is clear that women would be in advertisements with appliances to show other women how to make the sometimes strenuous job easier (Hill, 38). There have been ads since 1900 for freestanding case iron stoves that would make cooking easier, and of course a woman is cooking in it. Hill notes that because housekeeping is second in importance after cooking, that is why there are a great number of ads for washers and dryers, vacuums and dishwashers, among other items. Men were supposed to be out of the house working and earning the money and women were supposed to be homemakers and cook, clean and care for the family. That was just the division of labor for so long.
My grandmother hit on an interesting point in her interview, which is that during World War II, women worked in jobs that were normally dominated by men because so many men went to fight and there was a lack of laborers to keep industries running smoothly while they were gone. After women had gotten experience at a real job, learning a new skill, making money and having financial freedom, it was harder to go back to homemaker life when the military men returned. From that point on, many women showed discontent for the homemaker life. However, ads continued to portray it because a women cooking in the kitchen was much more attractive than a pre-made dinner thrown in the oven and an unkempt house because the woman was hard at work outside the home.
In his chapter on Achieving Independence, Hill dates the catalyst for the feminist movement back to a conference in 1848 where the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments was drawn up. By the 1950s, the feminist movement was roaring and women were upset about having the freedom to work real jobs and make real money during World War II taken away. Advertisements started responding to the feminist movement early on, and by the 1930s there were ads for career women followed by ads with women picking out their own cars, having diverse jobs and going to college in the coming years. Women were gaining independence in their advertisements and by the 1970s there were ads featuring female telephone operators, radio DJs and even a businesswoman. The appliance ads with Betty Homemaker had started to decrease and change to adjust to women having college educations and working out of the home (Hill, 167-190). According to Hill “by the close of the 1990s, the working woman had become such an integral part of the social and economic matrices of
Advertising in the recent years depicts a lifestyle. It is about fitting the appliance into your life, on your schedule and making sure you use your time more efficiently, since Americans are constantly on the go. I will examine this change from Betty Homemaker to what I believe is the “working mom and soccer mom” portrayal through looking at past appliance ads with women and comparing them to a more current ad campaign from 2005 and 2007 that LG Appliances produced.
My Big Question
How has the image of women in appliance advertisements changed from the 1960’s to present day through ads in women’s magazines?
The way women are portrayed in advertising is the topic I chose to investigate for my paper. I specifically picked out appliance ads from the 1960’s because that was part of the couple of decades where women were portrayed as Betty Homemaker in appliance ads. I wanted to investigate why this was and look at how the portrayal of women has changed. There are many reasons why this topic is important to me and why it’s a significant topic. Women have been portrayed so many ways in advertising, with it currently being more of a sex symbol portrayal, and while it’s interesting to investigate it, it’s important to know why ads are like that, especially with more women coming into creative roles in advertising firms. It’s also an important topic close to my heart because my major is advertising and I love looking at the different way ads are put together with images and copy.
I approached the issue by looking at many appliance advertisements from Ladies’ Home Journal magazines from the 1960’s, as well as Look magazine, which was a lifestyle magazine for women that has since gone out of production. In addition to looking at those advertisements I looked for current appliance advertisements with women featured in them to see if there was a clear difference to actually make a case out of. Obviously, there is a difference.
The secondary source most helpful to me was Advertising to the American Woman by Daniel Delis Hill. In his book Hill addresses that women have been primary market consumers since after the Civil War and notes that a number of sources suggested that 85 percent of all manufactured consumer goods were purchased by women in the nineteenth – century (Hill, vii). The trend of women shopping for the family stuck, and is still prevalent today. The American woman remains the target for many marketers. This isn’t to say that males don’t shop or buy for their families, or that marketers disregard them, however it’s a known fact that men don’t shop as much as women. Haggar Clothing Company conducted a survey in 1998 about men’s clothing and found that “89 percent of all men’s clothing purchased from department stores is chosen by women” (Hill, vii). Women make a lot of important buying decisions for the home, and it has been that way since before the Civil War.
Advertising in magazines, especially women’s magazines, didn’t begin until the last quarter of the nineteenth – century. By the end of the century however, advertising had become an economic necessity as well as another channel of getting marketing messages across to American women who received magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping (Hill, 12).
According to the book The Lady Persuaders by Helen Woodward, Ladies’ Home Journal was quite popular in the late nineteenth-century with a large circulation. The magazine began as a column in a newspaper called “Women and the Home” written by Mrs. Curtis, the wife of Cyrus Curtis, who published the weekly newspaper. The column became so popular that in 1883 they made it a separate magazine, called the Ladies Journal, although there was a printing mistake that included the word “home”, which has obviously remained in the title. Edward Bok took over the magazine in 1889 and by that time the circulation was 700,000 and the cost of the magazine was $1 for a year’s subscription. Within a short time of Bok becoming editor, his brilliant skills shot up the circulation number (Woodward, 63-68). Ladies’ Home Journal was reaching many women during that time period, and that continued well into the 1900’s. The magazine contained advertising as well, having 21 percent of their magazine pages as ads by 1998 (Hill, 19).
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