A Short Background on Gendered Food Advertising in the U.S. (And Why it Matters)

The specific reaction that children in advertisements can elicit ("aww!") is an intentional mechanism in advertising. Advertisements are not just pointed images; they are a reflection on the values of a society. As markets expert Liz McFall argues, advertisements reveal more about societies, cultures, and economies than they do about advertising itself (McFall 2). More specifically for this project, Thurston, Morris, and Steiman argue in their comprehensive work on coffee that advertising in popular magazines “reinforced the notion that the way that American housewives prepared and served coffee was an important marker of their status and value in and outside the home” (Thurston et. al 220). Therefore, coffee advertisements specifically revealed something culturally significant about a woman's work. And as Gillian Rose explains, it is important to understand what images “do” and not just what they depict (Rose 21). 

Therefore, my research question is significant because, as historian Katherine Parkin argues, the popular media played a role in maintaining traditional domestic expectations for women, in the kitchen and as general caretakers of their family, and it is important to explore what methods were used in this maintenance of the status quo.

In general, Parkin feels that images of children were used to promote the idea that women should show love for their family and maintain their health through food (Parkin 194). Additionally, she argues that 20th century food advertisers "assumed girls' inevitable involvement in the kitchen," as seen by their suggestions that girls should know about food from a young age (205).

Parkin lists six themes that advertisers employed when marketing food to women: showing that women should show their love for their families through food, preying on women’s insecurities and lavishing them with false praise, suggesting that they had power through cooking, using representations of men to suggest that women were subservient, suggesting that a woman’s cooking influenced her family’s health, using beauty and sexuality to appeal to women, and charging women with sole responsibility for their children’s well-being (8-10). Many of these themes can be found in the coffee advertisements featured in this project.