Week 2-Blog Assignment

From the spatial arrangement, figures positions, and clothing styles in the advertisements, I can see that they emphasized/reinforced the role of women, men and an ideal of middle-class family. Women’s jobs was doing domestic works such as cooking, laundry, childcare and be supportive for their husband; while men were responsible for non-domestic jobs and confidently behave like center, breadwinner of the family.  From my perspective, these advertisements reaffirm the power of men in family and quietly “teach” women how to be an “ideal” with underling meaning: don’t do anything, your job is to stay inactive and serve your family, which is very wrong, women have a right to do everything else besides doing domestic jobs, unfortunately, during that period, that was an ideal for a happy family and some women actually perceived that as happy marriage life.

As the text have mentioned, since 1960, television was a family’s entertainment, more than 60% households owned T.V sets,   we could imagine how much time people spent to watch T.V. I think that was one of reason why advertisers thought these advertisements would sell consumer good and network programming; also advertisers knew exactly who they should target to, women-family purchasing agents, who mainly stay home, doing housework and watch T.V every day. Since they have such market with good distribution and right consumers, these were factors that helped advertisers in my opinion.

Like I said, T.V was entertainment for the whole family, it

brought family together after long day of hardship, it also brought people closer regarding ethnicity, race, or class. Black was on a friendly term on T.V with White, even though they still acted as a maid, they were “upper” maid whom in sitcom, acted as a big mama in the family, a grandmother who received love from their boss.








 Not only T.V showed the change in ethnicity, race and class, gender roles also have changed a lot
since 1950. An “ideal” woman is being replaced by strong, independent, intellectual woman who could do both non-domestic and domestic jobs. Equality is the main topic on T.V. Also, an ideal of healthy family is not the same as those times; sharing the work, respect each other are criteria for healthy family. And one thing that I find interesting is men get intimidated by women in family is on every show (movie, series) on T.V.  That is big change.