Food Is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America by Katherine J. Parkin


Food Is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America
Title : Food Is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0812219929
ISBN-10 : 9780812219920
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 304
Publication : First published June 8, 2006

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.

Food Is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America Reviews

  • Anne

    Usually I rate my reading more on the basis of entertainment quotient but this time around I'm going more on content because it's a very well-done scholarly work. Essentially, the author analyzed over 100 years of food advertising in women's magazine and reports that depressingly little changed over that century. Apparently it was an entire century of food advertising aimed at reinforcing traditional gender role stereotypes - only women shop for and cook for their families. Well, the "good" ones, anyway. The author does include discussions of minorities and men as they were portrayed in ads, as well.

    While not exactly an entertaining read, it was by no means a dry reguritation of facts. Rather it was an interesting in-depth analysis of a very specific section of the advertising industry. I would have given it five stars, but it did get a little repetitive. Also, I would have liked to have seen more of the ads themselves in the book.

  • Courtney

    The organization of the work was a little bothersome. Every chapter starts at 1900 n goes up to the late 1990s, Parkin sorts her information by theme. Not much context but the ads are undeniably interesting. Some of them are frightening in how they managed to convince anyone to buy the product---OR YOUR HUSBAND WILL LEAVE YOU! OR YOUR BABY WILL DIE! OR YOU WON'T BE ATTRACTIVE! Gasp! Unfortunately the milder techniques are still used in contemporary advertising despite most Americans not living the experience the ad men are selling.

  • Sara

    This book is a comprehensive look at food advertising during the late 19th century into the 21st. While a little repetitive at times, this work is well-detailed, using ad agency files and magazines/newspaper advertising to show the gender roles companies were trying to maintain. A must read for students of American history, gender/women's studies and mass communications.

  • Kerry Murtagh Ramsay

    Interesting but nothing new.

    It’s a nice, if somewhat disjointed review of the history of how women are portrayed in advertising but it never approaches the question of why? What is the correlation with sales? Does the tone of the add change with the political tenor of the country? Does print advertising differ from other types of advertising? There’s so much more to be explored.

  • Caroline

    Though the author brings up interesting points about the history of food advertising, the book quickly becomes repetitive. I read this for a class.

  • Michelle

    Despite being published in 2007, history seems to stop in the 90s. I would have liked to see Parkin go past the millennium, but everything prior was interesting, well nuanced, and thought provoking.

  • Anita Smith

    Interesting, but nothing I didn't already know. Also very dense.