gender: history

Aaron B. sent in this 1947 video clip (found here), titled “Are You Popular?”:

Notice the caution to women: if you go “parking with all the boys,” you might think you’re popular, but you’ll ultimately find yourself ostracized and friendless. To be really popular, you need to be well-dressed, have the respect of girls at school, and carefully guard your reputation.

Thanks, Aaron!

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

In my post a few weeks back about stuff kids bring to college, I had a photo of a teddy bear lying atop a pile of belongings that included pink bed linens. Obviously, it belonged to a girl. (There was a purse in the picture, but even without it. . . .)

A couple of days later, Lisa at Sociological Images had a post reminding us that pink was once the color for boys. She linked to an article by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian.

The Sunday Sentinel in 1914 told American mothers: “If you like the colour note on the little one’s garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.”

Goldacre uses this bit of history to debunk the claim recently made by evolutionary psychologists that girls’ preference for pink was an outcome of evolution.

But what about the teddy bear? Isn’t there something feminine, a maternal instinct perhaps, that leads girls to keep these soft, childhood objects? It is only girls, right?

Wait, now I remember seeing NYC sanitation trucks with a teddy bear mounted on the grill like a bowsprit mermaid. And Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited who takes his bear Aloysius with him to Oxford.

Now there’s a DVD* about a Teddy bear snapshot exhibition by Canadian Ydessa Hendeles – thousands of photos from the early twentieth century of people posing with their bears. And it’s not just girls.

*The DVD is of a documentary film by Agnès Varda, who interviews the visitors to the exhibit.

Hat tip to Magda

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

In a comment a while back, Elena pointed out that Diego Velázquez’s painting “Infante Felipe Próspero” (from 1659) provides a good example of how pink was acceptable for males to wear…as were, in some cases, dresses, which the young prince is wearing:

Elena says,

…until the late 1700s little boys would wear dresses or petticoats for as long as they could until they could dress as miniature adults…This was mainly for ease of bodily functions.

Of course, today most parents would be appalled at the idea of dressing toddler boys in dresses–dresses with frills and ribbons, at that.

The painting “Pope Innocent X,” also by Velázquez (1650) shows the Pope in light pink clothing:

Both images found at the National Gallery’s Velázquez page.

You might also check out Kent State University Museum’s Centuries of Childhood exhibit for examples of how children’s clothing has changed over time.

Thanks for the tip, Elena!

Vintage Ads posted these three ads–one for an electric refrigerator and two for Gold Dust Cleaner–that compare the product to a Black servant. 

The copy in the refrigerator ad reads: “And So Electricity Is Made The Willing Servant.”  The accompanying image includes three white women looking leisurely and a Black servant. 

Similarly, these two Gold Dust ads personify the product as Black twin babies. The motto is: “Let the GOLD DUST TWINS do your work.”
 

I think these are fascinating in that they draw our attention to whose work technology is designed to replace. Earlier on this blog we’ve talked about how ads have offered to replace women’s work with the market and with technology.  In these cases, the market and technology were needed to ease women’s workload (they certainly couldn’t expect their husbands to do it).  In this case, Black servants serve to take women one step further from “women’s work.”  Instead of replacing women themselves, the product replace the servants who replaced women, making the comparison of the product to Black servants completely sensical at the time.

Penny R. sent in this image (found here via Pennamite) of a 1919 magazine cover.  The image is of two women embracing.  One represents “Justice” and the other “American Womanhood.”  It is captioned “At Last.”

Before there were flight attendants, there were stewardesses.  Below a vintage commercial for airlines (found here thanks to AdFreak, see also this print ad):

While pressure on airlines to be less sexist means that we don’t see ads like this anymore, Stephen W. alerted us to the ongoing sexism in “general aviation,” that is private planes and jets owned by individuals and companies.

Airports have FBOs (or “fixed based operators”) which are, essentially, glorified gas stations for planes.  A private pilot can choose which airport and thus FBO, or which FBO at which airport, to patronize.  So FBOs will compete for customers.  Stephen pointed to one strategy: plying pilots, assumed to be men, with sex.

This website allows pilots to see what “FBO Girls” all over the country, the women working behind the counters at FBOs, look like.  Another website, FBO Hotties, allows pilots to submit their favorite girls.

Flower Aviation promises that you will be guided into your parking spot by “girls in short ‘skorts’ and tank tops.”

Here are some of the images from the website, notice that when you spend money on fuel, they reward you with red meat (and fresh baked chocolate chip cookies):

So, there you have it.  Private aviation, still very much a man’s world.

Other than the objectification, I think an interesting sociological question might be: Why have the airlines dropped overt sexist advertising, while general aviation has not? One possibility is that general aviation is, literally, less public and, thus, less vulnerable to public censor. Another may be that pilots are still overwhelmingly men, unlike the customers served by airlines, and so there may still be profit in sexism for general aviation, but not in commercial aviation. I’d welcome your thoughts as well.

Next time you feel all warm and fuzzy about how far we’ve come since the bad ol’ days when men weren’t encouraged to take of of children like they do now (by the way, they largely do not), remember this ad (found here):

I don’t detect a hint of sarcasm here. Do you? Or am I oh-so-not-in-touch with 1940s comedic culture?  I could be wrong.  Am I wrong?

In her book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, Joan Jacobs Brumberg has a chaptered titled “Perfect Skin” in which she looks at the rise of acne as a significant concern among adolescent girls. Because pimples and blackheads were believed by some people to be a sign of immorality–masturbation, lascivious thoughts, or promiscuity–both teenagers and their parents were quite distressed at the appearance of teen acne. Though teens had long been concerned about their appearances, the widespread use of mirrors in bathrooms starting in the Victorian Era gave them many more opportunities to examine their faces and find themselves lacking. And girls tended to be more concerned about their faces than boys, perhaps because girls were judged more harshly for any perceived sexual immorality. A whole industry arose to sell generally useless products to teens, particularly girls, to cure their acne.

Marketers for soap and other products used concerns about morality in their ads. Here is an ad for Hand Sapolio, a popular soap in the early 1900s (found in a 1906 issue of McClure’s Magazine):

Notice how the text in the top box mentions that cosmetics, which might be used to cover pimples, were being “inveighed against from the very pulpits,” meaning good moral girls couldn’t use cosmetics to hide their acne. Also I like how the title (“Be Fair to Your Skin, and It Will Be Fair to You–and to Others”) implies that if you aren’t fair to your skin, it is going to do something dreadful to the people around you…presumably busting out into a hideous display of pimples that will pain people to look upon.

I zoomed in and did a couple of smaller screen captures of some sections of the text that also stress morality or “goodness”:

Be clean, both in and out. We cannot undertake the former task–that lies with yourself–but the latter we can aid with HAND SAPOLIO.

This section of text makes it clear that good skin is essential for popularity, at least among the “best” people:

This Hand Sapolio ad (from a 1903 issue of New England Magazine), sums it up:

The first step away from self-respect is lack of care in personal cleanliness: the first move in building up a proper pride in man, woman, or child, is a visit to the Bathtub. You can’t be healthy, or pretty, or even good, unless you are clean. HAND SAPOLIO is a true missionary.

So there we see a connection being made between having good skin and being “good,” which means that, like missionaries who help save heathens, Hand Sapolio is a “missionary” spreading moral goodness and self-respect. Because what could build up self-respect more than being told that if you have less than perfectly clean skin, you can’t be pretty or good?

These could be useful for discussions of how physical appearances were steadily connected to ideas of morality and how biological processes, like getting pimples in adolescence, were turned into diseases that required (often expensive) intervention to “cure.” They could also be good for a discussion of marketing, particularly how ideas of morality were tied to particular products, such that goodness was commodified–by buying the item, you were buying goodness.