Food is love : food advertising and gender roles in modern America / Katherine J. Parkin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Parkin, Katherine J.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sex role in advertising--United States--History.

Sex role in advertising.

Advertising--Food--United States--History.

Advertising.

Women consumers--United States--History.

Women consumers.

Women in advertising--United States--History.

Women in advertising.

Men in advertising--United States--History.

Men in advertising.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (305 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia [Pa.] : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 Love draws on thousands of ads that appeared in the most popular magazines of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including the Ladies' 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.

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

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786613212184

9781283212182

1283212188

9780812204070

0812204077

OCLC:

759158229