Papers will be graded on the following criteria: selection and analysis of evidence (examining evidence for its underlying themes; assessing evidence in terms of its creators and their goals and assumptions; ability to generalize from evidence); locating materials in historical perspective (understanding and explaining the ways that advertisements reflected and shaped the values, institutional practices, and social relations of their time and place); quality of writing (clarity of exposition, use of appropriate vocabulary); organization (presenting evidence and ideas in a logical sequence, using topic sentences and transition sentences effectively); mechanics (spelling, punctuation, and so on); and the use of proper citation. Your papers should be original, i.e., based on your own research and written in your own words. All information in the paper, as well as all direct quotations, should be documented (accompanied by a footnote citing your sources).

This assignment requires that students locate advertisements from popular publications (magazines and newspapers) in the United States from the 1910s and 1940s (six each from each decade; 1940s ads should include war and postwar years). In each decade, the ads should come from a variety of publications and should advertise different kinds of products and services. When you turn in the papers, you should include copies of all the advertisements used in the paper with the source for each ad written on back of it with its library call number.

The papers should analyze the ways that advertisements represented women and men and how those representations structured gender as a power relation. In what kinds of roles and activities did they show women and men engaging? What norms about proper gender roles and relations did they advance? What kinds of women and men were shown (by social class, race, age, marital status, and other social attributes)? How did the ads link commercial goals (selling products) with social goals? How did ads for different products or in different kinds of publications differ in their representations of gender? Who was the intended audience for different ads? How did this affect the content and images in ads? What kinds of psychological appeals did the ads use? How did they show women and men in relation to technologies (automobiles, workplace machines, home appliances, computers, toys)? How were the figures in ads dressed? What does this tell you about the presentation of gender? How were women’s bodies used and represented? What does this tell you about women’s power and roles in society?

The papers must also place the advertisements in their historical context. How did understandings of gender change from the 1910s to the 1940s? How did they remain the same? How did advertisements reflect and affect these changes and continuities? Please use lecture notes and readings to help you place your evidence in historical perspective. For the 1910s, you might assess whether ads generally reflected middle class Victorian values and assumptions or made an appeal to the "New Woman." Did the ads reflect the influence of scientific motherhood? New household technologies? How did they reflect or shape the values of calling or dating? In the 1940s, did the ads make an appeal to women defense workers or homemakers during the war years? How did they represent either group? In the postwar years, what images of work, domesticity, or family life did they use? How did they differ from those in the war years? In either the 1910s or the 1940s, how was motherhood represented? Were the images of women’s bodies similar or different? Why? Did the ways in which ads used visual imagery or appeals to experts change?

Writing hints:

1. Organize your paper around a thesis statement
11. Document your conclusions with evidence from the advertisements. Your task is to show a skeptical reader why you are persuaded that your findings are the appropriate ones.
12. Take contradictory evidence into account. Explain why you choose one interpretation over another when the evidence could sustain another explanation.
13. Avoid passive voice. It is usually too vague; it does not indicate who was responsible for the action. "Mistakes were made."
14. Use past tense for past events.
15. Do not use contractions in formal papers.
16. Write a well-organized paper. The information in the paper should address the central questions posed by the paper. All information in a paragraph should follow from the topic sentence of the paragraph.
17. Be concise. Use enough evidence to sustain your conclusions, but no more. Avoid repetition in content. Do not repeat yourself. Redundancy is unnecessary if you have made the point effectively. If you say it again and again, you will just lose your reader’s interest. Right?
18. Make sure your footnotes are complete and that you have used the proper form.
19. Your papers should be original, i.e., based on your own research and written in your own words. All information in the paper, as well as all direct quotations, should be documented (accompanied by a footnote citing your sources).
20. Use direct quotations judiciously. They are most effective when they convey a person’s thoughts or motives in irreplaceable language. Otherwise, you should paraphrase the material rather than using a direct quotation. Paraphrasing requires that you revise the material from the source substantially. If you just make minor changes in the words or order of words from that source, you have engaged in plagiarism.
21. Each paper should use proper citation style to document its sources, including those that establish conclusions about the historical context. YOU MUST USE FOOTNOTES OR ENDNOTES. Parenthetical citation style is not acceptable! Sample footnote styles:

New York Times Magazine, September 21, 1924, p. 5.

U.S. News and World Report, July 2, 1955, p. 37.

Ladies’ Home Journal, January 4, 1996, p. 11.

Joan Jacobs Brumberg, "Fasting Girls: The Emerging Ideal of Slenderness in American Culture," in Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart, eds., Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 4^th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 374-382.

HIST 254, lecture, date.

In the text of your paper, footnote numbers can be placed either at the end of a sentence or a paragraph. Proper style would look like the following: These advertisements confirm Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s conclusion that the best word "to characterize the temper of the women’s magazines during the 1920s…would be ‘guilt.’"