During the postwar era, Americans were quickly moving to the suburbs. There was an increase in spending on housing, cars, furniture, clothes, and household appliances (“Suburban Growth”). In the 1950s, the television rapidly became popular in American homes. The television industry promoted American consumer culture, which allowed the advertising industry to boom as Americans wanted to buy more. Television media products endorsed a homogenous depiction of the perfect suburban family- one where women were expected to be the housewife. This housewife image was perpetuated by advertisements that marketed products that the ideal housewife should want to buy (Courtney and Lockeretz).

Before the Civil Rights Movement, African American women were underrepresented in mainstream media. Those who did appear in media were often light-skinned or depicted in negative stereotypes to sell products to a white audience. During the Civil Rights Movement, there was an increase in representation as more advertisers started to market to African American consumers, but stereotypes still heavily prevailed (“African-Americans: Representations in Advertising”).

I built this archive to demonstrate the ways women were portrayed in advertisements from the 1950s to the 1970s. Through this archive, I would like to bring attention to the insidious ways these trends are still at play in advertisements today. This archive consists of three collections of popular ad campaigns from the 50s to 70s that demonstrate the idealized version of femininity that was marketed to women. While searching for advertisements to include in this archive, I found that there was a severe lack of advertisements featuring women of color in any open-source archive. Therefore, the collections included in this archive are very whitewashed, which further demonstrates trends at play in advertisement structure. To address this archival silence, I have included a page in this archive focused on analyzing African American women in advertisements. While navigating this archive, keep in mind the limited number of ways women were depicted in these advertisements and the impact this had for people who did not fit into these defined categories. At the end, take a look at the Current Page to learn more about how, while subtler, these trends are still at play and continue to impact women today.