[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or1oEWbN2Lw[/youtube]
Heather from HeatherShow, who uploaded this gem, says:
This infamously botched Public Service Announcement from 1969 confused an entire generation of children into thinking that they too can be attractive, successful, and happy, if only they could get their hands on VD… whatever it is… Sign me up! I want some too!
I guess this is what sexism used to look like (before it looked like this and this and this and this and this):
These Folgers commercials are doozies:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VprIbx4QkPc[/youtube]
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnjjkgIO3Ck[/youtube]
Thanks David P. for sending us both the ad, found here, and the commercial!
* I stole the title of this post from HeatherShow.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
This ad “liberates” women from the kitchen through technology and capitalism… but not, alas, through true partnerships with men. Women should spend less time cooking, but it’s still HER job.
Oh, also, the reason women haven’t achieved greatness in the United States is because she’s too busy to be bothered. It has absolutely nothing to do with sexism and institutional constraints.
Thanks to Julie C!
This ad, from the 1970s (I think), has the exact same message: “For women with more exciting things to do than scrub floors: ‘One-step floor care.'” Congratulations women, now you can scrub floors faster… but don’t think you can get out of scrubbing floors.
Found at Vintage Ads.
And this one, from the 1950s (I think) is extra creepy (found here). Like the other ads, it replaces “women’s work” with a technological solution. And that solution a gift from her husband. The text:
The one gift that quietly ends garbage ‘trudgery’ — frees the little woman from disagreeable trips to the garbage can… She’ll thank you every time she uses it…
The centaur scene in Disney’s highly acclaimed cartoon Fantasia (1940) clearly communicates gendered expectations for men and women, but there are also racial politics. First, note that, in the film as released, all of the centaurs end up in color-matched heterosexual pairs. Second, most people do not know that the original centaur scene included a pickaninny slave to the centaur females and exotic, brown-skinned zebra-girl servants.
Here’s a link to the whole thing (embedding disabled, but it works as of Feb. ’11).
A clear still in black and white:
Fuzzy color stills from the youtube clip:
Don’t miss our post showing bugs bunny in blackface, too.
Warning: It’s a Hustler cover. May not be safe for your workplace (you see a woman’s legs sticking out of a meat grinder).
The caption to the photo said, “New York plastic surgeon Jacob Sarnoff drew this vision of total transformation–entitled ‘diagrammatic illustration of common deformities amenable to plastic surgery’–in 1936.”
I found this in Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery, by Elizabeth Haiken (1997), page 13.
I use these, along with some of the “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” Virginia Slims ads, to show how “women’s liberation” is used by advertisers to sell products, as well as to imply that “now” (whenever “now” is) is always better than “then” (some indeterminate point in the past) and that the struggle for equality and freedom is over.
Before ADD/ADHD, ritalin was prescribed to tired, overworked mothers. This 1967 ad claimed that ritalin could cure “Tired Mom Syndrome”:
Amazing!
Thanks to my friend, Jake L!
