Review by Choice Review
Extensively researched in advertising archives, mass magazines, and scholarly studies, this book persuasively argues that advertising for cleaning, food, and other household products has changed only modestly over the past 110 years. Ads continue to assume women are the principal buyers and users of household products despite fundamental changes in household structure, women's paid employment, and popular attitudes about women's educational attainment, career options, and married women's wage work. Since the early 1970s, advertisers have modified their approach to marketing household products in two ways. Responding to feminist and civil rights critics, advertisers replaced the dumb housewife drudge stereotype with the housewife mom image, and they introduced women of color--African American, Asian, and Hispanic--to diversify the target populations shown using their products. Unfortunately, the chapter content varies little. Whether devoted to the laundry room, bathroom, kitchen, or living room, each chapter repeats the same two points again and again, reducing the intrinsic interest to the specific examples. The book lacks a persuasive analysis for advertisers' modest changes in their ads despite the profound structural and value changes in gender expectations in the US. Summing Up: Optional. Accessible to all levels. M. Greenwald University of Pittsburgh
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
