Gender Stereo-Typing Essay, Research Paper

After the Second World War, and rationing was fading, many women were confined to tending children, and cleaning the house, while the men started careers after the strain of working with and for war-time efforts, that had dominated England for the previous eight years. The women, namely wives and daughters were predominantly dependent on the males and lowered themselves to answer their husband s beckoning call.

During the war, advertisers had mainly worked on producing army and airforce recruitment posters, but now realised that there was a niche in the market for companies wishing to advertise. Advertisements needed to influence the majority, and this could be achieved by aiming at women, these advertisers knew that women would generally be the ones having the time to read media, and newspapers more thoroughly, listen to radio broadcasting, and an increasing amount of time watching television.

Since the ending of the War, many American and Canadian GIs had made the UK their home, and were sustaining families, making futures for themselves, with them, they brought products not greatly known to us, or that were in great demand, such as Tights and Tomato Ketchup.

As American companies realised that there was a whole new market opening, they need to advertise effectively, so with contracts made to British advertising firms they set to work creating adverts that would appeal to the masses they tended to be for food-stuffs, and household amenities, here, women were greatly targeted.

The trend in adverts could be noticed where women were shown as lame beings with the product changing their lives. The adverts were always aimed at women, mainly housewives, this could be seen reflected in the media, such as a famous sauce brand, describing their newly designed bottle tops, the company remarked,

Even women can open it!

Continuing to comment that

It could be opened without a knife blade, bottle opener or even a husband.

This sort of commercial attitude was seen to be humorous and witty, and was more often welcomed with women to whom found this sort of comment un-offensive, and to an extent, funny. Men were generally classed as the leading force with the women acting as a sort of sidekick or assistant.

It was only towards the sixties, when women s rights activists caused trouble, they forcible introduced higher caliber jobs for themselves, and this is when major change occurred.

As women demanded these rights, the amount of women working in advertising meant that advert stereotyping changed dramatically. Women started to govern over the men in the adverts that were produced. They were often shown disciplining men or casting them out.

This was not greatly enjoyed by men and critics found that these reactions were over-reacting too much. This was agreed by the Independent Television Commission and the stereo-typing converted men from being lower than men, to women and men having an equality this was well thought of and sold products well. It was only towards the early 80s and 90s that women were again seen to be seducing men in adverts, men were seen to again take a weaker, less stable personality, being taken over by women and taken advantage of.

Again there were complaints, but even today some advertising firms still take to some minority sexism and sometimes racism but now adverts mostly depict smaller families sometimes with black friends of families, more Asian names are used in medial publications such as comedy shots, there vary such as Ranjit, and Anita are often.