Hyper-Sexualization of Women 
In Food Ads

 Women are represented as objects in food ads that are shown everywhere you look. This perpetuates the problem of the hyper-sexualization of women by creating an association between food and women as sex symbols. The exhibit will explore the history of food advertising that appeared in popular American magazines to understand better how they are encoding ideologies of gender, sexuality, race, and class into people's minds even today.

This exhibition shows the general shifting of social expectations of women in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, such as women's domestic responsibilities as wives and mothers to other equally problematic stereotypes about working women. These slim, successful, and liberated women figures in food advertisements created the extra stress women felt that they needed to be both successful in the workplace and domestic chores at home.

All works included are a part of the Walt Reed Illustration Collection in the Dowd Illustration Research Archive at Washington University Libraries.

Visual Tropes

Although women accounted for almost half of the workforce by the 70s, advertisements had not caught up. A series of ads showed the normal situations of women serving for their families.



<The Housewife and the Sex Object>



Gender Tropes

After WWil, women were almost exclusively displayed as housewives and sex objects. In response to the demographic shift of women into the workforce and the women's liberation movement in the 60s and 70s, advertisements started to adopt a glamorized version of the working woman, dubbed the "new woman" or "superwoman."


<  New Woman, New Stereotypes: CoCa-Cola >

< Exhibit Movable Board>

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