Housework and Housewives in American Advertising: Married to the Mop

Housework and Housewives in American Advertising traces the surprisingly persistent depiction of housework as women's work in advertising from the late 1800s to today. Jessamyn Neuhaus shows advertising to be our most significant public discourse about housework, analyzing print ads and TV commercials, as well as ad agency documents and trade journals, to demonstrate how the housewife figure framed household labor as exclusively feminine care for the family. Paying particular attention to the transitional decades of the 1970s and 1980s, Neuhaus demonstrates that even when overtly stereotypical images of housewives became unmarketable, advertising continued to gender housework with the more racially diverse and socially acceptable 'housewife moms' of today.