Our most recent in class discussion sparked a lot of thoughts for me about gendered advertisements and what that means in the Victorian era as well as in our current contemporary time period. We discussed how in Victorian times women were the primary consumers, doing all the shopping for their households. Therefore, many advertisements at this time were targeted towards women, creating an extremely gendered advertising strategy that has carried through the decades. This gave women at the time the illusion of choice, seeing which advertisements catered to their assumed needs like soap that didn’t require hot water, or that it worked so well you barely needed to do any work scrubbing the clothes. However, they were still spending money that they were able to access through the labor of their husbands, purchasing items dictated by the demands of domesticity and the family, like washing materials or food. Advertisements became extremely gendered in their depictions of the body, like in one soap advertisement we discussed in class showing an endless line of maids with cinched waists, perfectly clean aprons, and porcelain white skin. In advertisements for men, such as a Cadbury’s Cocoa advertisement, the product is portrayed as making men stronger, resilient, one could even say more masculine while depicting them playing sports and in power poses. The very same product advertised to women as being “absolutely pure” and “the perfect food” and showing the drink being fed to a child by her mother almost as if it is an extension of herself, as we discussed in class.
These kinds of gendered advertisements have carried into our modern society, similarly around products concerning cleaning or self care, like deodorant or razors. Men’s deodorant has pictures of the kraken and named buzzwords like “swagger” or “captain”, while women’s is called “powder fresh” and has pink flowers on the container. What makes the difference in deodorant? Products that serve the same purpose such as deodorant are being gendered and arguing different proposed benefits, even though such products don’t inherently need a gender for marketing. To continue on the beat of deodorant, women’s deodorant commercials are oddly sensual, depicting close shots of the body, or show women dancing with their newly deodorized armpits. Men’s deodorant commercials often take place in locker rooms, playing sports or with men wearing only a towel around their waist, showing that men are additionally subject to having the body be used as a tool for marketing.
What started in the Victorian era as something to try and get women to purchase specific brands of soap or cocoa has exploded into a massive gendered marketing campaign for almost every product under the sun, dividing men and women into separate, binary consumer categories. Marketing styles have continued stereotypes and strategies such as dividing the same product into gendered categories that seem to have begun at the beginning of the advertising boom in the Victorian era, making it impossible for consumers to separate their actual needs from old Victorian ideals about gendered responsibility.
Victorian Visual Culture 
Your statement of how the body is used as a marketing tool in our modern era of advertising is so interesting. We are sold a lifestyle, a body type, instead of a bar of deodorant. We are promised a newfound confidence in these commercials. And when the product doesn’t deliver a new body, we blame ourselves, and pull out our cards to buy more. Great post!
By: Stella Rennard on October 13, 2025
at 1:13 pm
Very insightful exploration of some of the ways that advertising was intensely gendered… then and now! I agree with Stella that it is quite striking how we are sold a lifestyle as well as the promise of attaining a gender ideal, however problematic.
By: amartinmhc on October 14, 2025
at 9:39 pm
Great article Evie! I just wrote our essay on this topic and have been thinking about it in great depth, so it was really nice to read someone else’s thoughts on gendered advertising and get a different perspective. I like your comparison to modern day advertising — it is so interesting to compare highly gendered Victorian advertising, which seems so strange to us as a modern audience, to highly gendered contemporary advertising, which we don’t bat an eye at. I will be considering ads through a scholarly lens in the coming weeks as I am forced to experience them.
By: Abigail McKeon on October 26, 2025
at 9:12 am
This is such an interesting and important analysis, and one I’ve been thinking about a lot while writing our midterm on advertising and the intersections of Victorian gender and class. It does feel impossible to go through daily life without seeing the lifestyle and moralistic language used by advertisers to sell us products, and unfortunately that language hasn’t changed much since the 1800s, as you point out. I also think it’s interesting how advertising language has been so eagerly adopted by individuals who then pass that messaging on to each other. I’m thinking here of “choice feminism” and the people who say they wear makeup because they want to and it has nothing to do with broader societal messaging, etc. Your use of the phrase “illusion of choice” feels so relevant today, and it’s interesting to consider a time when that was a novelty and truly may have felt like empowerment for women.
By: Sophie Frank on October 27, 2025
at 12:17 pm
This is so interesting! Your contemporary connection feels particularly salient nowadays, as the visuality of advertising seems to permeate every aspect of our lives. It’s also interesting to think about how we are often unaware that we are looking at advertisements. On social media, content creators film themselves singing the praises of a particular product and usually don’t disclose that they’ve been paid by that particular company to promote the product.
Women are still very much expected to bear the brunt of household labor, and there are still massive amounts of advertisements out there that claim to make domestic labor easier. When advertisers feel that the market has been saturated, they simply invent new issues in the home that they can “solve” through their product.
By: hanso23e on November 8, 2025
at 3:44 pm
Excellent connection between Victorian advertisements and contemporary marketing strategies! I too have been contemplating the reasons behind the gendering of products. I remember in my intro to sociology course viewing an overwhelming number of gendered products for even the most trivial items: food, earplugs, and wipes, as if gendered self-care products were insufficient. In agreement with your observations, these campaigns present a narrow portrayal of gender performance/womanhood/manhood. It seems that the strategy of gendered marketing is dependent upon both the product and societal constructs of gender: the implication is that purchasing a particular product will enhance one’s femininity or masculinity, thereby enticing consumers to buy it.
By: Maire K on November 13, 2025
at 8:33 pm