Overview

Most of the workers in advertising, the media, retail, and fashion are women. Holding key marketing and advertising positions, women shape the basic promotional appeal of almost every consumer product in America. How did the advertising business go from a handful of women in a man's world to women working in virtually every mass consumer goods industry in America in the space of the twentieth century? This book tells the story of how women have risen to the top of the advertising profession. Juliann Sivulka, a former marketing communications manager and now an advertising educator, describes how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the recognition of women as primary consumers resulted in the hiring of more women to promote products aimed at the women's market. At that time manufacturers began to emphasise colour, fashion, and style, while advertising embraced a new language of persuasion aimed at women consumers.Soon agencies were recruiting an ensemble of businesswomen - copywriters, product designers, merchandisers, fashion and beauty experts, home economists, editors, and publicists. Through close collaboration with manufacturers, mass media, and retailers, they participated in developing strategies to convince women to buy goods and wove their selling messages into women's reading, shopping, housework, and leisure activities. Sivulka follows three key periods in the history of American advertising, which represent eras of major social change for women (1880-1920, the 1920s, and the 1970s).She discusses the effect on advertising of such controversial issues as the women's movement, minorities, and consumer activism, and devotes an entire chapter to the contributions to advertising of African American, Hispanic, and Asian American women in the twentieth century. Copiously illustrated with portraits of early ad women and examples of their work, this thoroughly researched and engagingly written survey of women in advertising will fascinate marketing students, women's studies scholars, and everyday consumers.

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9781591026723

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Reviews

...a serious examination of women's impact on and careers in the industry. -- Booklist, October 15, 2008 -- 'With numerous illustrations and photographs, this thoroughly-researched and well-written history of the evolution of women in advertising will appeal to those in the field and those interested in the women's movement.' -Publishers Weekly December 1, 2008 [A] sweeping history of women's role in American advertising from the late 19th century to the present day - compelling . --Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2008 From her international perspective she has given us a view of social change that can be of important use to every professional. --Communication Arts magazine, Advertising Annual, December 1, 2008 To me, the book is most important for examining the fact that women were actually a part of advertising history in the larger context of business and economic development, and for conveying the radical nature of that view. Ad Women is not an adjustment of the existing story of advertising, but it rather presents an entirely new narrative. -- RoroToko.com, February 17, 2009 there's really so much [in the book] and I am really glad to have read it. -- Basket of Kisses--An Unofficial Mad Men blog, March 18, 2009 This book will interest those people involved with women's studies, general readers, and marketing students. -- Reference and Research Book News, February 2009 This volume will serve well in classrooms and elsewhere to introduce advertising principles, the history of feminism, and American consumer culture, as well as its primary focus, women in marketing. Highly Recommended. General readers: academic audiences, lower-division undergraduate and up: practitioners. -- Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Ad Women maintains a focus on the rise of women in advertising; but, more importantly, it does this in the context of economic, industrial, social, and cultural changes that affected the advertising industry and the status of women. It is this interplay that makes Sivulka's work an excellent text for courses on women and media as it explains how the vacuum of women in advertising in the late nineteenth century was filled with women in top positions and as heads of their own agencies by the beginning of the twenty-first century. -- Journalism History, Vol. 35, Issue 3, Fall 2009

Author Information

Juliann Sivulka (Tokyo, Japan) is the author of Stronger Than Dirt: A Cultural History of Advertising Personal Hygiene in America, 1890 to 1940 and Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising. She lives in Tokyo, Japan, where she is a professor of advertising and American studies at the School of International Liberal Studies of Waseda University.

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