Analysis Of Mr Leggs Ad

760 Words2 Pages

The early 1940s to the 1960s truly exemplified the social constructs of a married couple, and with that, the stereotypes that followed. In this 1960 Mr. Leggs ad (see page 3), blatant stereotypes can be shown. The advertisement shows portrayals of chauvinism, strict gender roles, and gives a message to the mass on what is “normal” at the time. So many things can be seen that are wrong with this picture. A man (wearing his brand-spanking new pair of Mr. Leggs slacks) dominates over his tiger-skin rug wife with his foot pressed solidly to her head. An ad trying to sell slacks surely does spend a lot of energy trying to make it clear that the man holds all the power in this household; clearly, giving the fallacy that any man who wears this brand …show more content…

The man is wearing a suit - the man of the house, the breadwinner. The woman, being the homemaker, is subservient to him and, in this case, takes it to a whole new level. She is literally at his feet, completely under his control and order. What is interesting about this, however, is the fact she is still glamoured up and externally attractive even in the form of a rug. This gives the idea that women should be submissive to her husband and even in times of complete overpowering to her, she should always have the look of a perfect housewife, all dolled up and perfect to the public …show more content…

“It’s nice to have a girl around the house” the Mr. Leggs ad states. That gives the ideals of women and how she is the homemaker, the one to cook, clean, and entertain the children. “...our hero didn’t have to fire a shot to floor her.” Hero. The man is shown as a noble man while the woman is, yet again, dehumanized. He didn’t have to lay a hand on her to have her bow to his every whim. “After one look at his Mr. Leggs slacks, she was ready to have him walk over her.” As if she were willing for him to use her, treat her like nothing but a carpet...because he is wearing impressive slacks - or because he has the presence of a successful man, leading her, or any woman, to drop to the ground in submission for the chance to play housewife for him. “That noble styling soothes the savage heart.” Savage heart. Savage having various definitions such as violent or non

Show More
Related

  • Rhetorical Analysis Of Hanes Her Way '

    476 Words  | 1 Pages

    By quoting the commercial, and analyzing the logos and pathos, and ethos it uses, Gray has adequately used the rhetorical appeal of logos. She also supports her statements by comparing the Hanes commercial to other underwear commericials. “Underwear commercials in general seem to abound in their portrayal of morning sunrises and beautiful people making beds.” Throughout the entire article, from her describing the scene of the commercial, to talking about the stereotypical men, women, and underwear commercials, she is able to stir emotion from the audience. “Women on the other hand…know how to be women…Just show a woman good old fashioned love scene and most likely she’s sold.” Because Gray was just a Freshmen in college when she wrote this essay, she does not establish credibility in terms of her

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Lynn Peril Pink Think

    903 Words  | 2 Pages

    There has been a significant shift in this generation when it comes to gender roles and identity. In her book, Peril examines advertisements and propaganda from the 1940s to 1970s, when gender roles apparently influence stereotypes and societal pressure on women in America. In one of her examples, Betsy Martin McKinney told her readers of Ladies’ Home Journal that the sexual role of women is to have intercourse and complete it with pregnancy and childbirth and denying it would be denying her femininity.2 It is not right to take one person’s word and speak it fo...

    Read More

  • Metamorphosis of Woman in The Yellow Wallpaper and If I Were a Man by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    768 Words  | 2 Pages

    On their final day in the house she completes her plan by stripping all that she could of the rest of the wallpaper from the walls. Her intention was to bring a sense of shock to her husband. This seems to be her way of punishing him for the part he played in trapping her in the room with this hideous wallpaper. I think it goes further than just the room to make a statement of how she feels trapped in her entire life with her husband. She is “freeing” the woman who is trapped...

    Read More

  • Susan Glaspell's Trifles - The Loyalty of Mrs. Hale

    787 Words  | 2 Pages

    You notice this to be so because Mrs. Peters is struggling against what she is hearing the men say versus what she feels herself. When Mrs. Hale tells Mrs. Peters that she would hate for the men to be in her kitchen snooping around and criticizing, Mrs. Peters responds by saying "Of course it’s no more than their duty". This reflects to me a lady who has been so brain washed by the manly view of her time that she can’t even see the simple feelings that women feel for and between each other.

    Read More

  • Angel in the House

    756 Words  | 2 Pages

    Patmore wrote that “Man must be pleased; but him to please is woman's pleasure.” This common concept of the nineteenth century reveals itself in this stanza. Women held one position in society, and it held constant throughout the eighteen hundreds: Please man. Ma, in The Little House series, is a prime example of the “Angel in the House.” Ma is always there for Pa. She realizes that he provides and she obeys. Ma, in The Little House in the Big Woods, had a schedule for each week. .She washed on Monday, Ironed on Tuesday, Mended on Wednesday, Churned on Thursday, Cleaned on Friday, and Baked on Saturday. On top of those chores, Ma prepared food and tended to Pa and the children. There wasn’t a day for Ma’s needs and desires. Ma presents herself as the stereotyp...

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Jack Solomon's Masters Of Desire: The Culture Of American Advertising

    1224 Words  | 3 Pages

    This phenomenon suggests that all women are required to remain loyal wives and stay at home mothers who aspire to achieve perfection. In “Mirrors of Masculinity: Representation and Identity in Advertising Images,” Jonathon E. Schroeder and Detlev Zwick claim that “highly abstract connections are made between the models, a lifestyle, and the brand” resulting in a need to associate these products with a specific way of living (25). Instead of simply displaying these luxurious bracelets and handbags, the ad creates an elegant environment through the incorporation of sophisticated items. The women are dressed elegantly in dresses and blouses, adding a conservative element to the ad. The ad presents a rather stereotypical image of the very successful heads-of-household type mothers who have brunch with other elite women in an exclusive circle. Everything from the merchandise they sport to the champagne glasses down to the neatly manicured fingernails provides insight into the class of women presented in this ad. The body language of the women strips the image of the reality element and instead appears to be staged or frozen in time. This directly contributes to the concept of the gendered American dream that urges women to put up a picture-perfect image for the world to see. Instead of embracing individual struggle and realities, the American dream encourages women to live out a fabricated

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Kellogg's Pp Cereal Advertisement

    1088 Words  | 3 Pages

    Through the application of physical appearance, audience and text the ad unfortunately paints women in a negative manner. The ad employs tactics that reel society into believing that women must put a man on a pedestal in order to gain his admiration. Women have the right to be treated equally and deserve to be represented in a positive light so the culture can fray away from following beliefs similarly portrayed in this 1930s advertisement. We must teach the next generation that although it is in our nature to nurture those around us, there are no boundaries or restrictions for women to excel in society for the

    Read More

  • City News City White Analysis

    1210 Words  | 3 Pages

    In this particular image, a blurred silhouette of a male onlooker with his arms folded hovers in the background. This factor, though undermining the the subject in a subtle way, perhaps captures the intention of the photographer in highlighting societal views of gender roles in the postwar years. During which time, women left the jobs they held during or before the war, and returned to their pre-war roles of caring for the household. Many of these women let go of their dreams at a career and instead were more than happy with their “occupation” of being a housewife. These women were domesticated, often living their lives according to how advertisement and magazine imagery told them to. These often included images of “the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over a spotless kitchen floor.” (Friedan 1963, 18) This was the ideal of “true feminine fulfillment” which was how Betty Friednan described women during the post war years in her book titled The Feminine Mystique

    Read More

  • The Dragon: Freudian Conscious Mind

    844 Words  | 2 Pages

    Due to the women having roles like men, this does not follow the patriarchal ideology that most stories do. To be specific, even in this day in age, most households are in charge by men and women do not have equal say, and in this story, it shows that the roles are being reversed. Although, it does not show complete gender equality because the husband is unemployed and just because his wife makes more than him, he is being disrespected. However, they are married she tends to be friends with males that her own husband does not like, and just because her husband is not unemployed she is taking advantage. To conclude, the women is being fully appreciated since she has a job and she is in charge of the household, but the women is oppressing her husband just how men oppress women these days.

    Read More

  • Michael Stewart's Bye Bye Birdie

    768 Words  | 2 Pages

    A main theme in this small town’s culture is the issue of gender and the division of roles between the two. Not uncommon for the 1950’s, many women were taught from a young age to find a good man, who could provide for them and a family, settle down and have children – the ideal “happy family.” As Harry states after singing the showstopper “Kids,” “I have the All-American family: A great wife, 2 wonderful kids and a good job.”

    Read More

  • Investigation of Power in Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’

    1478 Words  | 3 Pages

    Initially he views his wife as a mere possession, a toy doll. which he is able to show off at party’s to the admiration of fellow. members of powerful society, ‘curtsy here, curtsy there – and the vision of loveliness was gone as they say in fairy tales.’ However.

    Read More

  • Classic Television Show: Leave It To Beaver

    930 Words  | 2 Pages

    During the 1950‘s suburbs such as Levitown were springing up all across the country, and the so-called American dream was easier to achieve for everyday Americans than ever before. They had just come out of two decades dominated by The Great Depression and World War Two, and finally prosperity was in sight. The need for women to work out of the home that was present during the war was no more, and women were overwhelmingly relegated to female-dominated professions like nursing, secretaries, and teachers, if they worked at all. Televisions became very popular, and quickly became part of the American cultural canon of entertainment. Leave It To Beaver is a classic American television show, encompassing values such as respect, responsibility and learning from your mistakes. But, at least in the episode used for this essay, it is also shockingly sexist to a modern viewer. This begs the question, what does the episode The Blind Date Committee1 say about the gender expectations of the 1950’s?

    Read More

  • A Jury of Her Peers, by Susan Glaspell

    937 Words  | 2 Pages

    Mrs. Hale feels a natural responsibility to defend and protect Minnie Foster Wright through her connection as a fellow woman and housewife. Upon her introduction to Minnie through her home, Mrs. Hale finds an immediate connection. She understands Minnie’s life as a homemaker and a farmer’s wife and is quick to defend her when her skills as a wife and woman come into question. When the men recognize Minnie’s lackluster cleaning of kitchen towels Mrs. Hale retorts “[m]en’s hands aren’t as clean as they might be” (Glaspell 160). She asserts her loyalty to Minnie and notes that men are not always perfect or without blame, without “clean hands”. As a woman, Mrs. Hale easily sees herself in Minnie’s place and comes to her defense as if she were defending herself. It is easier to share her loyalty with a woman so much like her than it is to be loyal to men that act superior and do not understand the challenges of being a housewife. The men find a woman’s chores as petty, nothing but “trifles” (Glaspell 160).Scholar Karen Stein argues that it is these commonalities that create the responsibility of everywoman to defend one another (Ortiz 165). Mrs. Hale sees herself in every...

    Read More

  • Advertisement Analysis

    1395 Words  | 3 Pages

    Attention is first drawn to the two figures in the advert, one man and one boy. The relationship between the two will be investigated later, but it is assumed that this advert, by only featuring two male figures, is targeted at men.

    Read More

  • Goffman Performance Theory

    1467 Words  | 3 Pages

    The two roles they are performing may be described as “cool and manly” when they are alone and “good husbands” when their wives are around. Through swicthing between the two masks the characters are trying to make corresponding impressions, with is either looking cool in the eyes of a friend through demonstrating sexist behaviour towards their wives or making an impression of loving husbands in the eyes of the wives. The two masks may be considered as performing two different roles, but taking into account the official status of one of the roles, namely, the “good husbands” and the performers’ anxiety in conveying the “information incompatible with the impression officially maintained during interaction” (1959, 108); the other role can be perceived as “acting out of character”. Not only the performers fear of leakage of the inconsistent information, which they communicate out of character, but also the change of the “decorations” make the division between the “inside” and “out of character” interaction visible. Interaction with the wives who in Goffman’s terms can be called the audience takes place mainly in the offical part of the house – the hallway

    Read More

More about Analysis Of Mr Leggs Ad

Open Document