Gender representation in show and tell activities

¶ … 1960s-era print advertisement for the famous vacuum cleaner manufacturer, Electrolux. It perfectly exemplifies the ideas outlined by Betty Friedan in the Feminine Mystique (1963). Specifically, Freidan explains that during the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, women were bombarded by popular media images that promoted an extremely unrealistic ideal that was supposed to satisfy them at every level. Madison Avenue advertising initiatives and, more generally, the mass media, promoted the idea that the perfect home life was the harmonious juxtaposition of the female role as a good housewife for her husband and mother to her children with her role as a happily independent and autonomous woman of the modern age.

This is a fundamentally untrue characterization which the Electrolux advertisement image captures perfectly. It depicts the modern woman perfectly coiffed in femininely cut blouse and skirt and even high heels while vacuuming her immaculately clean home. Her little girl is similarly attired but in age-appropriate fashion and even her dog is playing happily in her immediate vicinity. The entire image conveys the idea that housework is nothing more than a minor task that need not even necessarily interfere with the woman's enjoyment of her wonderful modern life. It suggests that the only concession the woman need make to vacuum her home is to tie a protective apron around her pressed skirt briefly while she effortlessly lets the latest modern convenience, the electric vacuum cleaner do all the hard work of cleaning the carpets. Based on the image, one would believe that housework is nothing but a minor obligation that hardly even interferes with paying attention to children and pets.

As Friedan argues, that entire image was a false one that was designed to convince women that they could easily enjoy all of the new social and political freedoms of the modern age while simultaneously fulfilling their traditional homemaking responsibilities harmoniously and without any difficulty. The reality was very different, and as Friedan points out, that discrepancy was also the source of much anxiety, self-doubt, and even clinical depression in women. In reality, housework is hardly a minor chore; it requires considerable effort and it is time consuming and often dirty.