In 1886 Ladies' Home Journal editor Louisa Knapp complained about men teasing women who read advertisements. Knapp's complaint reflected the special relationship between advertising and femininity that had developed in the United States by the late 1880s, was consolidated at the turn of the last century, and has persisted with some variations until the present day.
The nineteenth-century United States saw the Industrial Revolution paralleled by a consumer revolution, which coalesced in the 1880s when mass production expanded rapidly, transportation networks improved, and national markets grew. A number of the earliest mass-produced items, such as cereals, canned goods, and cleaning powders, were assumed to be of interest to women because of their domestic role, and therefore a significant proportion of early advertising was targeted specifically to women. As markets became national, gender-related assumptions provided a language through which advertisers could reach a specific yet sizable audience. Thus, advertisers sacrificed a potentially broader audience—both women and men—for the narrower gender-targeted audience.
In the 1880s magazines such as the Ladies' Home Journal replaced newspapers as the primary forum for commercial messages. These magazines sold for as little as a nickel, supplementing their rock-bottom subscription prices with advertisements that filled one-quarter to one-third of their pages. The magazines promoted advertisements by placing them in careful proximity to relevant editorial copy; by "ad-stripping," where editorial copy was continued to the back of the magazine and surrounded by advertisements; and by leaving editorial pages uncut (the reader had to detach each page from the next) but carefully cutting those pages featuring the most advertising.
Magazine editors believed that reading and attending to commercial messages would benefit women, since increased consuming would be a legitimate route to power and autonomy within marriage. This belief fueled the evolution in these years from advocating that women could be consumers to identifying women as properly, and even primarily, consumers.
The first products advertised to women were household items. Beauty products entered the market and proliferated in the early twentieth century. Women from this point on were often objectified in and targeted by advertising. The changing portrayal of women in beauty advertising paralleled the evolution in the image of women as consumers, moving from the position that women can be beautiful to the message that women must be beautiful. The solution again, according to the commercial media, was for women to buy more products.
However, women did not blindly or unthinkingly buy all the products pitched to them. They supported some commercial messages, for mainstream products like Pearline Washing Powder, and not others, like the more risqué Rose Blush (which was "guaranteed to draw the men"), and they enjoyed purchasing particular goods when they had the means. They actively confronted the commercialized media, deciding what to read, listen to, and watch, and whether to purchase a given product.
In addition, women did not make choices uniformly as a gender group. Historically, advertising has been targeted to segmented audiences, known variously as "class," "mass," or "ethnic" audiences. The class market represented higher-priced lines sold to wealthy white women in department stores and salons and advertised in fashion magazines such as Vogue. "Mass" cosmetics were sold in pharmacies and discount stores and marketed in women's magazines catering mainly to white middle-class and upwardly mobile working-class women. The ethnic market consisted primarily of the African American beauty industry, although it also included Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and other women of color. Advertisers created desires across the economic spectrum from the turn of the century until after World War I, although some women were better positioned to satisfy those desires.
Some advertisers focused their energies in a different direction in the 1940s, working with media producers and the government to create an elaborate propaganda campaign aimed at convincing women to support the war effort. Advertising messages again targeted different classes and ethnicities. White, middle-class women were pictured and addressed as people in control of their destiny who could triumph over obstacles to fulfill their wartime role of self-sacrificing martyr. Working-class white women, in contrast, were portrayed as highly dependent upon male authority, responding to the call to work because they lacked other options. Images of women of color were virtually nonexistent in advertisements, despite the fact that women of color were breaking barriers in some areas of the United States to perform critically needed war work.
Whatever the nature of their portrayal in wartime commercial propaganda, all women were treated similarly as the war drew to a close. Their contributions to the war effort were downplayed, and many women's interest in and need to continue working were summarily dismissed in the media. Some women did remain in the work force, but they disappeared from public view and were replaced almost completely in advertising and the commercial media by images of happy homemakers and sexy seductresses. Advertising previously limited to the print media profoundly affected the new media, first radio and then television. Critics, from Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963) to Erving Goffman, pioneer of analyzing advertisements for stereotyping and sexism (1970s), to Gloria Steinem ("Sex, Lies and Advertising," 1990), have protested advertising's power to shape as well as to embody gender construction ever since.
Attending to such critics and becoming critics ourselves is central to strengthening women's position vis-à-vis commercial media. It is critical that we teach media literacy; boycott offensive materials; support women in advertising and positive, women-centered advertising campaigns; and support ad-free media such as Ms. Above all, it is crucial to separate the construction of gender roles from the realm of commerce, if we are ever to break the link forged between advertising and womanhood over a century ago.
William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New America (New York: Pantheon, 1993); Kathy Peiss, "Making Faces: The Cosmetics Industry and the Cultural Construction of Gender, 1890-1930," GENDERS 7 (spring 1990): 143-169; Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York: Basic, 1984).
Helen Damon-Moore
See also
Beauty Culture;
Consumerism and Consumption;
Images of Women.
