My great-grandmother, Mary Morris, was born in 1906 and stopped school in the third grade, working first in domestic service, then at Jenkins’s glass factory, and finally retiring as head of Kroger’s dairy department. Living until 1997, she witnessed many remarkable changes in American society. Certainly one of the most notable transformations took place in her kitchen and in kitchens across the country. Convenience foods sped up the cooking that had previously taken long, labor-intensive hours. Yet even as the cooking got easier, she, and not her husband, was responsible for it. This was true even though all of the...

White, elite men have always controlled the advertising industry. Many historians, cultural critics, and industry insiders have argued that their power not only led advertisers to be out of touch with their markets, but also to be disdainful and elitist in their approach. One key aspect of this argument was that advertisements did not reflect the broader society because of advertisers’ limited range of viewpoints. Critiques came mainly on three issues: the exclusion of African Americans from the industry; the nonexistent or limited role women had within agencies; and the distorting perspective of class that ad executives brought to their...

Advertisers’ most fundamental message to women, and one that underscored all others, was that food is love. In addition to more expected appeals to taste and quality, advertisers touted their products’ love value. They encouraged women to show their love for others with food and promised that women could earn their family’s love by serving certain foods. Finally, copywriters honed in on consumers’ nostalgia for the love and taste of times past, or imagined.

These positive ideals and the potential for creating pleasure were balanced, however, by advertisers’ efforts to create and exacerbate women’s anxieties. The homemaker role, with its...

Food advertisers throughout the twentieth century wanted white women to believe that they had the power to influence their families’ identity through their cooking. They targeted these women with patriotic, religious, class-based, racial, and ethnic appeals that suggested that women should see their purchasing decisions as opportunities to ensure their families’ stability and mobility. Even as ads adapted to changing social norms regarding ethnic, racial, and religious acceptance, they revealed a remarkable consistency in their promotion of traditional gender roles in food preparation and consumption. Advertisers maintained that only women could access the power that came from shopping and cooking....

Food advertisers directed their messages to women, but they wanted men to be the focal point of women’s role as the purchasing agent and cook for their families. Advertisements consistently suggested that women should serve men. They repeatedly emphasized that men’s happiness was paramount and suggested countless foods and recipes that would win their approval. While some ads promoted ideals, others played on and created women’s insecurities about fulfilling their role as homemaker.

Male figures frequently appeared as authorities on quality, taste, and value to convince women of the merits of the foods. However, their appearance in ads was more...

Throughout the twentieth century, food advertisers tried to persuade women that they were accountable for their family’s health, which enabled advertisers to exploit concerns about treating or preventing a whole host of ailments, both real and imagined. This strategy also reflected a continued desire to keep women as consumers, by suggesting that if they did not accept this responsibility, their families would suffer from neglect. In particular, advertisers sought to keep women accountable for the health of their husbands. Like most other advertisers, food advertisers also tried to use sexuality, as well as health and beauty ideals, to persuade women...

Children’s dependence on adults for food is a reality of their existence. At the beginning of the twentieth century, before the advent of readily available convenience foods, women’s breast milk was the primary food source for infants’ survival. The early twentieth-century development of pasteurized milk products, however, meant that even parents of tiny infants could buy foods to sustain them. The development of such foods challenged the inevitability of women’s responsibility for feeding their children. Advertisers played an important role in persuading Americans of the critical function mothers undertook in feeding their children. The expectation that mothers exclusively should nourish...

At the start of the twenty-first century, about 80 percent of mothers of school-age children brought home a paycheck, including more than half of mothers with children under the age of one. Still, as he brainstormed for a new ad campaign in 1988, Alan Waxenberg, publisher of Good Housekeeping, predicted that women in the 1990s were going to be “realists,” focused on the family and home. He decided on a campaign focused on women’s embrace of family. The first ad of the campaign featured a woman who had quit her job and moved to the suburbs to spend more time...