Portrayal Of Women In Advertising Essay

Words: 1654
Pages: 7

Women, Sex, and Food

The portrayal of women in advertising has been a controversial topic for decades. The submissive, provocative women in advertising was considered the norm in the 1920’s and was mainly used to target men into buying products or services. The degradation of women in adver-tising has sparked much social unrest, however, the evolution of the portrayal of women in adver-tising has somewhat improved as the years progressed. The portrayal of women in advertising has drastically changed throughout the progression of the 20th century, although the degrading and heavily sexualized image of women is still evident in advertisements today, women are beginning to be depicted as intelligent and elite members of society. Advertisers
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The ideal housewife has remained the model for advertising throughout the 1920’s. During this time, the 19th amendment to the Constitution was signed, granting women the right to vote. However, Libby’s baking products posted an ad of a women gazing out of her kitchen window with the slogan, “The Woman Who Never Went Out- What happened when she realized there was more in the world than the view from her kitchen window.” The add suggests that women were afraid to go beyond the walls of their kitchen, and they they were very unaware and lacked the knowledge of the political, economic, and social happenings in their local community and the rest of America. In 1943, during World War II, J. Howard Miller of Westinghouse Electric, designed Rosie the Riveter to boost morale during war-time as women took over jobs vacated by men who joined the military. Rosie the Riveter became one of the first depictions of an empowered women in an advertisement, and the poster was re-vived by the feminist movement in the 1980’s (Shultz). Since the appearance of Rosie the Rivet-er, women slowly started becoming known as intelligent and adventurous contributions to socie-ty, capable of more then