A wive's favorite gift

Kenwood Ads in the 1950's. Telovation. 27th of July 2009. Web 8th of Feb 2010

As I was browsing for an ad, i came across this one and it was surprising how deliberately it portrays women as the maid of the house, pretty much. In this ad you see both the man and women happy because they have this machine that makes it a little easier for the wife to make dinner. She’s shown with a chef's hat pretty much letting the audience know that she will be doing the cooking while the husband relaxes and waits dinner. I believe this ad in the 1950's was probably accepted and taken as a normal thing, but if something like this would appear now, there would be a lot of women who would find this disrespectful, because it shows that women are only good for one thing, cooking, helping around the house and taking care of the kids. This ad also shows how the woman is dress up to cook and how she has to be flawless when her husband is around. This ad is not realistic at least now in our time because of how much we as a society have changed throughout the years, it would have been realistic in the 5o's and nobody would have taken this ad as an insult, probably to those in the 1950's this was normal. This ad is trying to sell the product but also behind the message it’s trying to tell the audience that even though it does pretty much everything the wife still has to cook because that's what they are good for, just to cook. It’s actually pretty disrespectful for me as women to read this ad because the company that put this ad out didn't take in consideration how women can be, they can be executives, lawyers, chefs, professor, etc but no in this ad they are simply just the cooks of the house and nothing else. This portrays the women negatively but since it was printed in the 50's it was probably a positive image. This is a definitely a sexist ad, why can’t it be the other way around show the man with the chef hat and making his wife a dinner? As Judith Lorber said in her article is that throughout the years men and women have been slowly changing role (kirk p.64), you now see men in some commercials doing the laundry, well I’ve only seen it a few times on the Spanish channel but it shows how far we have come as a society to accept these changes. The body image in this ad shows her resting on her husband back but also the way that she is smiling makes you wonder if she is really happy to have one of these machines and if she is happy with her husband. Overall this ad pretty much shows that no matter what new kitchen invention is invented the wife still has to cook the food, still has to attend to her husbands needs and do domestic chores around the house.

Kirk, Gwyn, and Margo Okazawa-Rey. Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. Fifth Edition. Boston: McGraw Hill Higher Education, 2010. Print.