Advertisements exist to sell us products. That simple truth has remained constant for over a century, even as the methods and messages have transformed beyond recognition. What has changed dramatically is our understanding of who gets targeted and how those targets are portrayed.
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Women were recognized as a distinct consumer market long before modern advertising emerged. By the late 1800s, department stores and the culture around shopping already spoke directly to women and treated them as key customers.
What evolved over the decades wasn’t the recognition that women bought things, but rather the increasingly sophisticated psychological tactics used to influence those purchases.
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Soap companies became masters of speaking to housewives through guilt and aspiration. A 1930s Lysol campaign actually marketed the disinfectant as a feminine hygiene product, with ads suggesting that women who failed to use it risked losing their husbands.
The copy was clinical and authoritative, borrowing medical language to create anxiety where none existed before. The campaigns sold entire value systems about what made a woman worthy alongside the cleaning products themselves.
Kitchen appliances became central to advertising in the postwar boom. Refrigerators and washing machines appeared in ads as solutions to domestic drudgery, promising to transform the daily grind of housework.
A smiling woman in heels and pearls would pose next to her new vacuum cleaner, dressed as if ready for an evening out. The ads suggested that modern technology would make housework so effortless that women could look immaculate while doing it.
These machines were sold as labor-saving devices, yet the women in the ads always seemed to be performing for an invisible audience.
Listerine turned ordinary bad breath into a social disaster during the 1920s with their halitosis campaign. The ads featured stories about women like Edna, who remained a bridesmaid but never a bride because of her bad breath.
The campaign worked by suggesting that friends would never tell you about the problem, leaving you to face rejection without knowing why. Within seven years, revenues jumped from $115,000 to over $8 million as the company convinced people they had a medical problem that needed fixing.
Beauty advertising has long worked by making women feel insecure. Mid-century beauty and fashion ads helped shape narrow ideas of femininity and “acceptable” appearance, repeatedly tying self-worth and social approval to how women looked.
Women got the message that their natural appearance needed fixing and constant attention. The ads promised younger-looking skin, flawless complexions, and the kind of beauty that would make them worthy of admiration.
The regulatory picture started changing in the 1970s as women’s groups protested against demeaning portrayals. Norway banned gender stereotyping in advertising in 1978, becoming one of the first countries to legally recognize that commercial messages could cause social harm.
The United Kingdom established similar guidelines decades later through the Advertising Standards Authority. These regulations work from the idea that ads shape culture rather than just reflecting it, influencing what people think is normal.
