Gender and the Media

Media and the Female Consumer

Mass production requires mass consumption; mass consumption requires mass media to generate mass consumer demand for mass-produced goods. The history of mass media parallels the history of industrialization as innovations in technology made books, newspapers, magazines, and later radio and other media technologies widely available for purchase. Early media targeting women, including nineteenth-century women's magazines, played a significant role in the primary definition of women as consumers in the industrializing economies of Europe and the United States. For example, the origins of the Ladies' Home Journal can be traced to a women's column in Tribune and Farmer that reprinted articles from [Page 639]other publications and offered housekeeping advice to the wives of its male subscribers. Publications such as the Ladies' Home Journal assisted women with the transition from producer to consumer, guiding women to take seriously the immense responsibility of selecting goods for their families. Women needed to be taught how to shop, to make smart purchasing decisions, and to use these produced appropriately.

Women's role as consumption managers was well established by World War I. By the 1920s, estimates suggest that women purchased more than 80 percent of goods consumed within the household. As early advertising and consumer researchers learned that women were largely responsible for household purchasing, they developed more effective ways to reach female consumers, drawing on emerging psychological research on women. Roland Marchand describes advertisers' view of “consumer citizens,” the “emotional, feminized mass” of consumers who could be most effectively reached at the emotional rather than rational level. Advertising and marketing campaigns emphasized women's purchasing as their most important contribution to the family and household. Soap operas, sponsored by companies such as Procter and Gamble, targeted housewives with their story content and advertising, first on the radio and later television. As a target market for product advertising, women have been a driving force in determining a substantial amount of media content, from magazines and radio to television and the Internet.

Throughout the twentieth century, the mass media has used a variety of symbols of femininity and femaleness that would appeal to women as mothers, housewives, citizens, and, most importantly, consumers. The newly enfranchised woman of the 1920s was used to sell women a variety of products, including cosmetics, clothing, and automobiles. The new woman was an educated, savvy consumer whose independence and freedom was symbolized in the media by the automobile rather than the voting booth, notes E. Michele Ramsey. Media during World War II defined women's purchasing decisions as a significant contribution to the war effort, fighting on the “second front line” at home in their kitchens, according to Mei-ling Yang. The postwar world promised American housewives a consumer's paradise for women filled with technologies to virtually eliminate the arduous nature of housework. The wartime glorification of women's role as housewife praised women for their service to family and country, but postwar reality failed to liberate American women from their kitchens and laundry rooms. Postwar media messages portrayed housewives as “domestic managers” using new appliances and gadgets to increase the efficiency of, but not freeing women entirely from, housework.

...