Book Cover
E-book
Author Parkin, Katherine J

Title Food Is Love : Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America
Published Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, Jan. 2007

Copies

Description 1 online resource (304 pages) : illustrations
Series EBL-Schweitzer
Contents Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 Advertisers and Their Paradigm: Women as Consumers -- Chapter 2 Love, Fear, and Freedom: Selling Traditional Gender Roles -- Chapter 3 Women's Power to Make Us: Cooking Up a Family's Identity -- Chapter 4 Authority and Entitlement: Men in Food Advertising -- Chapter 5 Health, Beauty, and Sexuality: A Woman's Responsibility -- Chapter 6 A Mother's Love: Children and Food Advertising -- Epilogue -- Periodical and Archive Sources and Abbreviations -- Notes -- Index -- Acknowledgments
Summary Annotation. Modern advertising has changed dramatically since the early twentieth century, but when it comes to food, Katherine Parkin writes, the message has remained consistent. Advertisers have historically promoted food in distinctly gendered terms, returning repeatedly to themes that associated shopping and cooking with women. Foremost among them was that, regardless of the actual work involved, women should serve food to demonstrate love for their families. In identifying shopping and cooking as an expression of love, ads helped to both establish and reinforce the belief that kitchen work was women's work, even as women's participation in the labor force dramatically increased. Alternately flattering her skills as a homemaker and preying on her insecurities, advertisers suggested that using their products would give a woman irresistible sexual allure, a happy marriage, and healthy children. Ads also promised that by buying and making the right foods, a woman could help her family achieve social status, maintain its racial or ethnic identity, and assimilate into the American mainstream. Advertisers clung tenaciously to this paradigm throughout great upheavals in the patterns of American work, diet, and gender roles. To discover why, Food Is Lovedraws on thousands of ads that appeared in the most popular magazines of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including theLadies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Ebony, and the Saturday Evening Post. The book also cites the records of one of the nation's preeminent advertising firms, as well as the motivational research advertisers utilized to reach their customers
Audience College Audience University of Pennsylvania Press
Notes In English
Subject Sex role in advertising -- United States -- History
Advertising -- Food -- United States -- History
Women consumers -- United States -- History
Women in advertising -- United States -- History
Men in advertising -- United States -- History
HISTORY -- United States -- 20th Century.
Advertising -- Food
Men in advertising
Sex role in advertising
Women consumers
Women in advertising
United States
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780812219920
0812219929
9780812204070
0812204077