Old TV Ads Show Change in Women's Roles

Aug. 17, 2001 -- If women have come a long way from housework to the workplace, television ads depicting women have made the journey with them.

Looking back, TV commercials from the 1950s and '60s feature women in a more traditional domestic role, explains Charles Sable, curator of a new exhibit on women in advertising at Milwaukee's Eisner Museum of Advertising and Design. Their themes could be summed up as catching and then caring for their man.

A prime example, says Sable, is a 1956 Listerine campaign that features a woman named Marge whose halitosis prevents her from finding a mate. Only when she uses Listerine is she able to get her man — and the coveted ring on her finger.

Woman's domesticity was implicit in the whole genre of 1950s ads. A commercial for condensed milk, for instance, features two women shooing the man of the house out of the kitchen while they finish dinner. Says Sable, "Of course, that's women's work, and men are not supposed to be in the kitchen."

Getting Out of the Kitchen

With the social revolution of the 1960s, television began to change as well. "Advertisers start to look at younger women," says Sable. "They start to look at women dressed up more. They start to show women more in the workplace."

A typical 1965 Mr. Clean spot, for example, begins to show the shift in roles. While women are still depicted as doing the housework, they're shown as younger, hipper, more forceful. It's the way they're doing the work that marks the real change, Sable says. "They're glamorizing housework now."

Later in '60s and '70s, ads starting showcasing women in the workplace, albeit in secondary secretarial and assistant roles. Some ads even featured women protesting and taking more active roles in society.

By the 1980s, secretaries had become executives, and advertisers tried to capitalize. One example, an Excedrin commercial, showed a woman frazzled but at least "one of the boys," says Sable.

Some campaigns, such as one in 1988 for Charlie perfume, had fun by playing up role reversals. One spot shows a woman in a business suit carrying an attache case and aggressively invading a male colleague's work space.

Today, at least some ads depict women in a more realistic light. Sable's favorite: A spot from Lean Cuisine that shows a group of women bantering about food, except in this case they're at the office talking about the dinners they had the previous night — a bowl of cereal and six pickles, three cookies and a crock of cheese spread, and a four-day-old burrito.