Katherine J. Parkin's study on gender roles in modern America analyzes the role of food advertising in creating and sustaining a connection between food and feminine gender roles. Using ads from a spectrum of mainstream magazines and insider records from advertising agencies, Parkin traces the commercial mechanisms that place women as the preparers, procurers, and servers of foods for their families. The meat of her argument contends that these unpaid roles of women in American families translate largely to the provisioning of love, and that advertisers sold the idea that this responsibility solely rests on the shoulders of women.
Parkin, in this study, wanted to see how these ads create a mosaic of ideal behavior for the readers and to explore how the ads and the advertisers "sought to shape their vision" of femininity within in the roles of wife and mother. To accomplish this, Parkin includes copies of actual ads that illustrate the kinds of tactics used to create a vision of the woman who happily caters to her family's desires and who gets personal satisfaction by doing so. The ads are highly effective in creating and sustaining her thesis of the uniform targeting of women over time and prove to be interesting and often humorous vignettes of bygone eras, until it becomes obvious through Parkin's keen eye for subtlety that the message remains the same.
Parkin uses a historical framework, outlining the demographic and ideological shifts in American population to juxtapose the startling sameness of food advertising. She shows that amidst all of this change, food was, and continues to be, marketed mainly to women. By showing their love with food, women fulfill their obligation to their families. It is this message that remains constant even as differing roles for women emerge because of suffrage and feminist movements. It's not to say, according to Parkin, that advertising did not change to accommodate the shift of more women in the workplace, it did. Ads changed as the food industry changed. Advertisers changed their methods to productively utilize this shift by campaigning to sell domestic duties as skills that must be managed effectively and knowingly.
Parkin has written a convincing argument that food advertisers maintained and hoped to sell this vision of women as primary food providers, but in the argument, there is no discussion for why advertisers may have clung to this ideal. As a historical discussion of gendered advertising this is an excellent example of what can happen when one takes a critical eye to the world around you. These representations of gender in advertising are still prevalent in the food industry. While the reader can explicitly see these connections between ads and gender, the argument is lacking when connecting the ads to the shaping and reinforcing of the woman as primary consumer. Where are these gender divisions coming from? How is advertising related to culture? A discussion of the possible reasons for why women are often assumed to be domestic denizens as well as a more in depth discussion of media and its relation to culture would be excellent additions to this book. As framed, in a historical context, the text lacks the meaty critical discussion that one has come to expect from the current level of scholarship emerging in gender and media studies. That advertisers commodified these attitudes there is no doubt, but that these attitudes were consumed by women as voraciously as was the food they advertised, is still up for debate.
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