Is mom still doing it all?: Reexamining depictions of family work in popular advertising

Abstract

This study examines a sample of 299 advertisements from 4 of the top 10 circulated magazines of 2005 to see how contemporary advertising depicts household labor. Modeling after previous studies that examined the depiction of gender in family advertising, this study seeks to determine whether advertising reflects the changes in families that have occurred in contemporary American culture. The authors use Hochschild's (1989) typology of traditional, transitional, and egalitarian families to examine whether advertisements' portrayal of men and women in family situations resemble traditional (male breadwinner, female caregiver) or more contemporary parenting ideologies (men providing care, women in the labor force, etc.). © 2008 Sage Publications.