How Mass Media Created the Transgender Movement part 2: The Creation of Advertising
How the Industrial Revolution and Victorian Era Advertising changed the image of men and women
In the previous post, we looked at how male and female roles were clearly defined throughout most of history within the smaller social units of the family and village. While that was the norm for the world in the past, this is no longer the world we live in. Now, we turn to how things changed and how the new ideas of broader culture and mass media effected common views of men and women.
The industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution, often dated from around 1760-1840, caused a major upheaval in the very structure of society, and, therefore, the roles of husbands and wives in the family. When the Industrial Revolution took place, the creation of machinery to produce things on a large scale had several significant effects on society.
The first thing the Industrial Revolution did was to move the center of industry out of the home and into factories. Since the Industrial Revolution started with weaving machines, it effectively put the small weavers out of business. Up until this time, weaving was done by skilled weavers who worked out of their homes. Family life revolved around this occupation as well as other survival tasks. When weavers and then other occupations were supplanted by factories, work was split from the home. No longer were young children able to see and assist their fathers at work and the father started to be distanced from his children.
When the Industrial Revolution moved work out of the home, it also moved industry from being spread out around the countryside to centered in cities. This forced people to migrate from their hometown to a city to find work. In doing so, the ties to family, and therefore tradition, were broken. A boy could no longer look to his grandfather or uncle and a girl to her grandmother and aunt as examples, because they were often left behind in the hometown. While this was, essentially, a one-time break, it would be repeated time and again as new generations needed to find work in other areas.
Furthermore, by moving work out of the home setting, it was also often separated from gender roles. In fact, there were some factory jobs that sought out women as well as children because they tended to be of smaller stature and able to fit in between closely positioned machines. Suddenly, men and women would be competing for jobs instead of having clear, complimentary roles in society. When this happened, people started to look to other places to learn what it meant to be a man or woman.
The Victorian Era
Queen Victoria had one of the longest reigns of a British monarch from 1837-1901. This era is thus known as the Victorian era, and we have many images of what the Victorian era was like. However, it is important to understand that the Victorian era came at the end of the Industrial Revolution and is considered to be the time when society was more organized around industry and the enjoyment of the products of industry.
To be sure, the Industrial Revolution caused much misery, but coming out of it into the Victorian era, an interest in culture arose as products became cheaper and more people could live in ways historically limited to nobility. Since the home was no longer the center of work and life, the home and what it was for had to be redefined. Industry quickly moved to forms of advertising to convince the public that their product would be essential to a good life.
Therefore, there was a need to redefine what life should look like. Included in this was the rise of the newspaper and, therefore, mass advertising. Once widely advertising with pictures became affordable, images came to not only represent but also form opinions.
The Rise of Mass Media
As this new form of mass media arose, advertisers worked to put forth images of the way things should be, with the implication that if you buy their products, life would be as they depict. This meant now there could be a more universal view of what life should be like for everyone. This ended up creating a curious narrowing of how the sexes and gender roles were viewed.
A key example of this is how one dresses. Historically, the nature of how a man or woman would dress was based upon local tradition, what was available, and one’s social role or job. However, as the reshuffling of the Industrial Revolution happened, suddenly more options and variations became available. The relative wealth of the Victorian Era and the lower prices from industry allowed people more choices. This also led different dress and suit manufacturers to compete, so they would advertise. However, mass advertising would not be tailored to local villages or traditions, rather it aimed to be as broadly appealing as possible. This meant the advertisers sought to find men and women to depict what was considered universally appealing.
The rise of larger cities meant that there were more potential options for a spouse and therefore more competition. While a village may have had only five each of young men and women of marriageable age, a city may will have had hundreds, which made the finding of a spouse more competitive and the extended family could not help since they were not there. Unsurprisingly, advertisers took advantage of the perceived competition to find a spouse. Consider this Victorian corset ad:
Notice how the ad is trying to convince young women to purchase and wear their corset to attract a husband in the mass of the large city. However, a secondary effect of ads like this is to depict a certain feminine shape as the ideal, and women who are not shaped in this way are made to appear less feminine or at least less desirable.
At the same time, the gentleman became the ideal of masculinity. Most advertising depicted men as well dressed in a fancy hat and coat. At this point, advertising started to depict the ideal man as one who is well educated and clearly living a life of luxury. Even in the above ad, you will notice that the men are not depicted as blacksmiths, carpenters, or others who worked with their hands.
Another important thing to understand about advertising is that it is intended to show you how their product fills a need for you, which often means subtly creating that need through jealousy. The goal is to see the person depicted and wish we were like them and, therefore, be willing to purchase the product to make us more like them. In other words, advertising requires creating a certain amount of discontent in people. This often includes how one should look or act as a man or woman.
Through the combined forces of the separation from historic family and tradition on one side and the rise of mass advertising on the other, there was a shift from having your ideal of a man or woman formed by those around you who generally looked and acted alike to now having your ideal coming from a curated image intended to make you feel somehow inferior. This started a slow redefinition of what it meant to be a man or woman and naturally left many feeling like they could not measure up.
Next we will look at how the growth of mass media in the twentieth century affected the views of men and women.