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).