Gender stereotypes in Ukrainian, Polish, American press advertising of the 1930s

The purpose of this study is to introduce the factual material about gender stereotypes in advertisements of Ukrainian, Polish, and American periodicals of the 1930s into scientific circulation.

As part of the study, typological and retrospective methods have been used to analyse gender-marked advertisements of the Lviv’s daily newspaper “Novyj Сhas” (New Time), (1930-1939). In addition, we have used a synchronous method to identify the similarities and differences between the studied social objects and the advertisements of foreign magazines “Ladies Home Journal” (1933), “Gazeta dla Kobiet: miesięcznik ilustrowany” (1930-1939), “Moja Przyjaciółka: ilustrowany dwutygodnik kobiecy” (1930-1939), “Express Lubelski and Wolynski” (1935), “Przewodnik Katolicky” (1934).

As a conclusion, a comparative description of the Ukrainian ads with their American and Polish counterparts has been carried out and a directly proportional relationship between them has been revealed. Advertisements in the Lviv’s daily newspaper were not always broadcasted from the Polish press, very often they were translated from an English-language source, such as advertising of “Palmolive” soap, which was printed on the pages of the legendary American magazines “Ladies Home Journal” and “Woman’s Home Companion”. We have also synthesized the creative component of the marketing policy of foreign brands of food products, oriented on female audience.

The creative component of foreign brands advertisements of the 1930s is based on the doctors’ promotions of false “drugs” among consumers: cigarettes as headache tablets and milk chocolate as the basis of the baby diet. The only cosmetics in Galicia and puritan Western Europe in the 1930s were the “Nivea” cream and “Palmolive” soap. Catholicism, gender oppression, women’s rights movements greatly influenced cosmetics industry, and only in the USA, thanks to Hollywood’s Productions, women received the right to be beautiful much earlier than in Europe.

Keywords: daily newspaper «Novyj Сhas» (New Time), mass media, advertising, cosmetics, cooking, «women’s question», Polish magazines, American magazines.

doi: 10.32403/0554-4866-2019-1-77-152-161