Food is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America (PARKIN, Katherine J.)

“Parkin delivers an engaging look at how food advertisements from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have both helped define and played up to the stereotypical gender roles prevalent in American culture. . . . An enlightening study of gender roles in advertising.” —Library Journal

“Food Is Love is well-written, comprehensive, and compelling, and makes a significant contribution to the literature on advertising history and women’s studies.” —Jennifer Scanlon, Bowdoin College

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.

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.

Katherine J. Parkin teaches history at Monmouth University.

Design: John Hubbard

Cover: 1957 advertisement for Green Giant peas. Courtesy of the General Mills Archives.