Food is love: Food advertising and gender roles in 20th-century America

Twentieth-century food advertisers consistently targeted women as consumers for their products by promoting traditional gender roles. Even as women gained greater social and legal parity in American society, food advertisers urged men and women to embrace static sex roles in the kitchen and dining room, with women subservient to men.; This study is a comprehensive analysis of twentieth-century American food advertising. It examines how food advertisers tried to convince women to plan, purchase, and prepare meals for their households. To advertisers this responsibility may have seemed inevitable and appropriate, but many women did this unpaid work while also sharing with their husbands the burden of working for wages outside the home. Advertisers knew that men shopped for food, but unlike other industries that embraced both sexes, the food industry chose to limit their consumer base to just women.; The food industries consistently ranked as one of the largest advertisers in mass circulation magazines. Therefore, at this study's core is a systematic examination of food advertisements appearing the Ladies' Home Journal, one of the most important women's magazines of the twentieth century. Also significant were the papers of one of the premiere advertising agencies of the century, the J. Walter Thompson Company. Its archive contained memos, studies, and campaign proposals that offered unique perspectives into the strategies advertisers used to help food companies position their products. Moreover, studies conducted by Ernest Dichter, the founder of motivational research, afforded insights into what researchers and advertisers understood about consumers and their motivations.; While food advertisements adapted to changing social and economic climates over the course of the century, they used consistent messages to convince women that they should be responsible for providing food for their families. Three overarching themes characterize twentieth-century food advertising. First, women were accountable for the well being of their families, including their health, status, and happiness. Second, women should care above all about pleasing men. Third, in the hands of women, food is love. Food advertisers used these ideals to entangle women in an ideology of food and love throughout the twentieth century.