Visual Tropes
The Housewife and the Sex Object
“The first thing that happened, was that we went from the kind of stereotype when I started out – women as sex objects or women as wives and mothers, women obsessed with cleanliness, with making your kitchen fit for surgery – and then what happened with the coming of the second wave of feminism, and the co-optation of feminists, was the image of Super Women.”
–Jean Kilbourne, 2019
Although women accounted for almost half of the workforce by the 70s, advertisements had not caught up. A series of ads showed the normal situations of women serving for their families.
