Women as Marketing Moving Targets

This assignment requires students to explore advertisements in the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History digital collections that highlight gender.  Students will then engage in a structured debate that discusses their findings.  Following the debate, students will submit a 500 word "reflection paper" summarizing the content of the debate and whom made the most persuasive argument for conveying whether single women, mothers, or married women were targeted most consistently and effectively.

Learning Objectives & Goals

Primary Source Literacy:

• Identify and communicate information found in primary sources.
• Critically evaluate the perspective of creators of primary sources.
• Situate a primary source in context by applying knowledge about the time and culture in which it was created.

Students will:

• Locate, evaluate, and analyze print advertisements from different time periods featuring single women, married women, and women as mothers.
• Compare the differing depictions of women during varying stages of young to middle adulthood and evaluate the actual power held by these groups.
• Evaluate chosen advertisements to determine the social, political, and economic impact that women had on 20th Century American society.
• Apply this knowledge in an interactive group activity and in a short reflection paper.

Source Digital Collections

• AdAccess: Approximately 7,000 print advertisements predominately from U.S. publications covering five categories: radio & television, transportation, beauty & hygiene, and World War II propaganda that date from circa 1911 to 1955.
• Ford Motor Company Advertisements: thousands of advertisements prepared by the J. Walter Thompson Co. advertising agency for Ford Motor Co's line of cars, trucks, vans, SUVs, and more ranging in date from 1945 to 2016. 
• Medicine and Madison Avenue: A collection of approximately 600 advertisements exploring the relationship between modern medicine and modern advertising.
• AdViews: Thousands of television commercials created by the D'Arcy, Masius, Benton & Bowles advertising agency for a diverse list of consumer companies such as General Foods, Post Cereals, Nabisco, and Proctor & Gamble.
• ROAD Outdoor Advertising Database: Derived from multiple archival collections related to outdoor advertising, this collection is comprised of mostly photographs of outdoor advertising in the 20th century.

The Rubenstein Library also offers several introductory videos to our digital collections.  They cover useful information on refining search results, navigating digitized items, proper citations and copyright.  Links to these videos are in the Additional Resources box on the left.

Students will be divided into three groups focusing on the following representations in print advertising:

• Single women
• Married women
• Mothers

Students will collect and analyze 5 - 10 print advertisements that fit into their respective group.  Students will then use historical frameworks to present their findings the political, social, and economic of the ads relative to their specific group.  The class will determine the efficacy of the advertisements and group assertions through the group debate/dialogue.