Food Is Love

Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America

Katherine J. Parkin

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812204070
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

Chapter 1

Advertisers and Their Paradigm: Women as Consumers

The consumer isn’t a moron. She is your wife.

—David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man

White, elite men have always controlled the advertising industry. Many historians, cultural critics, and industry insiders have argued that their power not only led advertisers to be out of touch with their markets, but also to be disdainful and elitist in their approach. One key aspect of this argument was that advertisements did not reflect the broader society because of advertisers’ limited range of viewpoints. Critiques came mainly on three issues: the exclusion of African Americans from the industry; the nonexistent or limited role women had within agencies; and the distorting perspective of class that ad executives brought to their work. Historian Pamela Walker Laird wrote of twentieth century advertisers, “they observed their targets through their own experiences—biased and distanced by class and gender; moreover, they were writing, in effect, for another audience altogether—their peers.” She could also have noted their race, as largely the same kind of people shaped advertising messages, particularly at the highest decision-making level. Perhaps heterosexuality could also be added to the list of factors shaping their vision of American consumers.¹

Women as Consumers: The Advertising Paradigm

When national food advertising exploded in the early 1900s, advertisers believed that women were the major consumers of household goods. They tried to insure that white middle- and upper-class women would be their customers by directing their financial resources toward the growing number of women’s magazines. Thereafter, food ads appeared throughout the country in magazines and newspapers, as well as on billboards and public transportation. As radio, television, and the Internet developed, they too became prime media for advertisers. Even as the kinds of ads and the types of media expanded, the focus on white female consumers remained constant.

Research demonstrated the appeal of convenience foods to the poor and working classes, but whether through their own socioeconomic bias or the preferences of their clients, advertisers remained reluctant to include them in their target audience. One factor shaping the decision was that throughout the century the middle class sought to maintain the distinctions that separated them from the working class. Seeking to position their products as status symbols in that class struggle, advertisers kept a clear eye on salaries as a key determinant as to whom they wanted to attract. Indeed, many hoped that the loss of outside help would force middle-class women to turn to their products to facilitate housework. Even as evidence poured in that other groups consumed their products, food advertisers ignored the potential of other markets. They wanted white middle- and upper-class women as consumers.²

Food advertisers in particular remained hesitant to associate their products with African Americans and resisted including their images in mainstream advertisements. One of the largest publishers in the country, the Curtis Publishing Company, excluded blacks from its famed market research and discouraged circulation agents from promoting its periodicals in neighborhoods and towns inhabited by African Americans. Even at the end of the century, African Americans commonly appeared in promotions for a wide range of products, including automobiles, fashion, and household goods, but food advertisers continued to be uniquely uninterested in reaching African American consumers.³

The rare exception was companies like Kellogg’s, which initiated an aggressive campaign to promote Corn Flakes cereal to black consumers as early as the mid-1930s. These efforts were notable because Kellogg’s advertised widely in the black press, but in keeping with the broader industry trend did not include African Americans in appeals in mainstream periodicals. It was not until the late twentieth century, largely due to lawsuits and social pressures, that a few large corporations broke this pattern. Perhaps able to withstand an anticipated racial fallout from whites because of the near universality of their base products, Kraft and Campbell began to run ads featuring African Americans. These companies largely remain the exception to the rule, which is that food advertisers did not want African American consumers, especially at what they believed would be the expense of white consumers.⁴

In the archives of the J. Walter Thompson Company (JWT), there are only rare references to nonwhite consumers and no indication that they sought them out. Even when they considered African Americans, it was usually in relation to how it would affect white consumers. A 1933 study of “Magazine Coverage of Native White Families” was unusual for its use of the qualifier “white.” Likewise, a 1941 study on the “Frequency of Visiting a Grocery Store” was unusual for its categorization, “New York and Chicago white non-relief families.” These exceptions are telling in both their racial and class explicitness, but most surveys did not delineate race, taking whiteness as a given in their vision of their market.⁵ Corporate files, covering the period from 1887 to the 1990s, reflect that the agency began to monitor industry articles about African Americans as a market in the 1960s, but there is little evidence that food advertisers acted on this data. In fact, the JWT case files reveal that time and again, they targeted white, middle-class women.

Food advertisers kept this focus over the course of the twentieth century, even as the United States faced many dramatic experiences: devastating economic crises and resounding prosperity; racial polarization and attempts at reconciliation; fluctuating immigration, with new groups gaining admittance in the first and last quarters, but many stymied at mid-century; two world wars and several other international conflicts; and changing gender roles. Nevertheless, while other types of advertising changed dramatically in response to changing media and events, food companies continually sought white middle- and upper-class women as consumers and remained remarkably consistent in their messages.⁶

Food advertisers had a unique relationship with women. Unlike other industries, such as automobile and credit card companies, that sought out women as new consumers or imagined new roles for women, food companies wanted to maintain the status quo and rarely considered men as consumers. The one change they did embrace more fully was women who worked outside the home, hoping to position their products to capitalize on their desire for balance as they sought to maintain their home and work outside the home. In so doing, they reinforced traditional gender roles and entrenched the work of food preparation firmly in the hands of women.

“Vats of Frothy Pink Irrationality”

At the outset of the twentieth century, researchers and advertisers developed the general perceptions that would occupy them into the next century. While it was difficult, especially early on, to determine who was consuming, the question of why people bought the things they did remained particularly elusive. Perceptions of consumers, therefore, often proved to be contradictory. That they did not fully understand consumers or know how to reach them did not deter advertisers from their efforts to appeal to women. Indeed, starting with the premise that women were the primary consumers for the home, advertisers, from about 1910 on, undertook countless studies to determine why women bought what they did.

While most observers assumed that women were the country’s primary consumers for most goods, market researchers did evaluate men’s buying habits. As was true for women, advertisers’ understanding of male consumers also continually vacillated. While they hungered for their potential payoff, most food advertisers shied away from male consumers because they dismissed them as unpredictable. Most studies did not result in follow-up efforts to find ways to steady the male market and make it more accessible or reliable. Instead, most researchers and food advertisers appear to have thrown up their hands in resignation and focused all of their energy on women.

Occasionally newspapers or men’s magazines touted the importance of their male audience as a consumer base. For example, the Standard Farm Papers advertised in the trade journal Printers’ Ink in 1908, claiming that, “Men Are the Buyers,” buying “not only men’s goods, household goods and farm tools, but actually women’s clothes.” Their argument centered on the premise that “Every Home Centres Round a Man,” where a wife’s “thought is always to please him . . . no new thing or new line of goods is ever bought without it first receives his approval.”⁷

Advertiser Albert Leffingwell, an early proponent of advertising to men, also maintained that men made good consumers, arguing that they were more irrational and hence easier to manipulate. His article, “The Practical Appeal in Advertising to Men,” appeared in a 1922 JWT newsletter and observed that advertisements geared toward women were “concrete, practical, informative—while a surprising amount of advertising to men still relies chiefly on staccato enthusiasm.” He wondered, “Are men natural-born spenders . . . Or is it rather that women, as purchasers for the whole household, have got to count the pennies more carefully than men?” If others shared Leffingwell’s beliefs, advertisers might have focused on men. Instead, food advertisers decided to forgo the male market and focus instead on women, whom they presumably thought they could better persuade.⁸

Still, even though they decided to target women nearly exclusively for food advertising, researchers and advertisers struggled throughout the century to understand the female psyche. For example, many believed that women were completely emotional and irrational. Historian T. J. Jackson Lears found that early advertisers held the “tacit assumption that women’s minds were vats of frothy pink irrationality.” This perception of women as easily manipulable falls at one end of the research and advertising spectrum. On the other end was the belief that women were tough, competent, and rational consumers. While a range of ideas vied for dominance, women remained the focus. Regardless of the swirling debates in the advertising industry and its periodicals, advertisers rarely took their eyes off “that enigmatic and glittering prize, the female consumer.”⁹

Some saw the advertising industry as possessing more savvy and control than female consumers, but advertisers simultaneously feared women’s power as consumers. Debates about women’s nature raged in the pages of company organs and industry publications. In a 1922 company newsletter, Frances Maule of JWT’s Women’s Department encouraged her colleagues to respect women and their power. She predicated her formula for success on a central insight: “Woman is the practical animal.” She suggested that it was better to give women “substantial reasons” to buy their products and listed practical ones: “price, quantity, quality, and service,” rather than relying on emotional factors to sell them.¹⁰

In 1924, in the heady period when women had been empowered by their suffrage victory and other social and political advances during the Progressive era, Maule suggested that advertisers should remember, “the fact—so well expressed in the old suffrage slogan—that ‘Women Are People.’ ” She cautioned that in their efforts to reach women, advertisers tended to “over-feminize” their appeal, relying too heavily on the “angel-idiot” stereotype of women. She disagreed with Leffingwell’s assessment of advertisements directed at women as “informative” and wanted advertisers to adopt a hard-sell approach to reach women on the merits of their products. She believed that “Practically every normal woman has an innate instinctive sympathy with the needs of the home and of children that cause them to think more deeply on these subjects than do most men.”¹¹

Still, the belief that women were not rational fueled the industry. According to historian Michael Schudson, the transformation in the first half of the century from informative to emotional ads came about not because of a changed conception of human nature but because of whom advertisers perceived their consumers to be. Early in the century advertisers shifted away from men, whom they viewed as rational, to women, whom they considered emotional and irrational.¹²

Advertisers commonly believed that women and men spoke “different languages,” that their minds worked differently, and that women relied on intuition while men thought things through to their logical conclusions. In an essay on how to handle written inquiries from women, businessman Charles R. Wiers suggested that “the language used in letters and advertisements for women should be common and sensible instead of technical or of the kind that is ordinarily used to influence men.” He believed that “A woman is also a combination of whims and peculiarities. She doesn’t like our methods of reasoning; she has methods of her own,” and speculated that, “their more delicate natures make them keenly sensitive about the little things.”¹³

Marian Hertha Clarke tried to enlighten her mostly male advertising colleagues in a 1926 Printers’ Ink article. Predicated on difference, as so many findings were throughout the century, Clarke posited that while women may not be technically minded, they were careful shoppers, with a highly developed sense of values. She encouraged advertisers to respond to women’s “instinctive and creative demand for atmosphere” and to sell a woman on the ability of a product to make her life “easier and happier—if it will add anything to the health and well-being of herself or her family—she will find a way to afford it.”¹⁴ Like the industry itself, women in advertising, such as Maule and Clarke, found themselves conflicted as to how best to approach the female consumer. Generally, women writers, while they still attributed to women gendered homemaking traits, took the female consumer seriously and remained respectful of her work in the home.

Most men writing on this subject, however, were dismissive of the female consumer, noting as marketer Tom Masson did in 1928, “With the female, buying is a passion; all of her faculties and emotions are bound up in it. It is closely allied with the hunting instinct of the male.” He claimed, “Under the hypnosis of the bargain complex they yield to a widely advertised idea like sheep.”¹⁵ Depending on the sex of the researcher, gender impressions of consumers, then, could be wildly different.

What remained the same regardless of their perceptions was that food advertisers wanted women as their consumers. Whatever the attributes with which they credited (or discredited) women, food advertisers remained convinced that women should be their targets. Because they believed they were the principal purchasers, advertisers resolved themselves to coping with f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Advertisers and Their Paradigm: Women as Consumers
• 2. Love, Fear, and Freedom: Selling Traditional Gender Roles
• 3. Women’s Power to Make Us: Cooking Up a Family’s Identity
• 4. Authority and Entitlement: Men in Food Advertising
• 5. Health, Beauty, and Sexuality: A Woman’s Responsibility
• 6. A Mother’s Love: Children and Food Advertising
• Epilogue
• Periodical and Archival Sources and Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments