There is no question that over the years the media has portrayed women as a domestic woman whose favourite past-time seems to be chores and cooking, but it is significant to look at how little has changed over the past several decades. When people think of the 1950’s housewife, what comes to mind is the woman with her perfect hair and make-up, dress and apron, holding a pie welcoming her husband home from work. The media, in its films, TV shows, comic strips, and ads, shows representations of the ‘American’ or in our case, ‘Canadian’ dream, much like the family in Leave it to Beaver. Over the years there have been progressive changes in the role of women; voting rights, education, wage increase, and overall success, and the media has adapted to these changes by portraying less of the typical domestic housewife we all know so well from the 1950s. It is a passion of feminists in Canada to ensure that the respect of women is upheld, and this includes not narrowing their role down to being a housewife with goals that do not matter.
An example of a TV ad that illustrates the gender stereotype in the 1950’s is a vintage Tide laundry soap commercial. In this ad the woman seems to be having the time of her life doing her laundry in a breezy field with her box of Tide. This ad combines a desirable situation with the role of the woman in the family in the 1950s suggesting that she is happy with her role and is doing this for the people she loves.
Again, there have been many changes over the years concerning the role of women. Women are doctors, lawyers, professors, politicians, writers, etc. This does not mean that the role of women has completely changed; there are still many women who take pride in raising their families and staying at home taking care of the household while her husband works, and this is still considered a ‘success’. There is nothing wrong with this because women know they have the option to do whatever they put their mind to, and there are many men who become stay-at-home-dads without public scrutiny.
So, with all of these progressions in our society, why does it seem that gender roles still exist in the media? To be specific, Tide commercials from this decade still seem to insist that women are the only ones in the family who use this product. In ads such as these, the actors/actresses in the commercials are meant to represent the demographic to which the commercial is intended for. This suggests that the media and those who create advertisements still follow the stereotypical nature of gender roles, whether it be showing a woman’s hand turning the knob on a washing machine, a mother helping her daughter get a tough stain out of a pair of jeans, or a phrase thanking mom’s for doing laundry. It is extremely unlikely that a man ever appears in these commercials using the product. To add to the issue, the portrayal of women in this manner may also single out men who are stay-at-home-dads suggesting that they are going against the norm.
While the portrayal of women as domestic is not as harmful as other stereotypes such as racist stereotypes, it is still important to acknowledge that in our day and age it is not efficient to place responsibilities on people according to their gender, and the media still has room to grow in adapting to the changing roles of men and women.
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