Supporting and Challenging Female Stereotypes
A new book explores the stereotypes that women overcame, as well as their accomplishments achieved, when contributing to the war effort in WWII.
Published January 1, 2003
By Jeffrey Penn
Academy Contributor

Advertising and other visual images during the past century have helped shape and challenge prevailing stereotypes about the role of women at home and in society, according to a social historian who recently addressed a gathering at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) on the subject of “Woman and the Machine: Changing Images.”
“These contrasting images reveal signs of ambivalence in deeply felt social attitudes about women’s roles and technical abilities,” said Julie Wosk, professor of Art History, English, and Studio Painting at SUNY Maritime College and author of the recently published Women and the Machine: Representations From the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (Johns Hopkins University Press).
Breaking Old Frameworks
It was recognized soon after new machines and technologies became widespread following the Industrial Revolution that the breaking of old frameworks could have a disorienting effect on people. “In early images that anxiety was often expressed visually in people being confused or torn apart by exploding steam-powered machines,” Wosk said.
Commenting on a series of slides, Wosk noted that many of the early images portrayed machines as the tools that could liberate women from the drudgery associated with the manual labor of domestic life. “Machines and technology have often been sold as liberating to women,” she said, “but there also has been an enslaving of women.” New electrical appliances, for example, were supposed to emancipate women from housework. “But there were often heightened expectations about increased cleanliness,” Wosk said, “and a belief that the new appliances would permit women to do even more work.”
Although some images challenged stereotyped assumptions about the relationship of women to machines, just as many used women as mere decorations or sentimental and romantic adornments to whatever was being marketed. “Women were early portrayed as childlike and naive, requiring simple machines in contrast to men, whose sphere was assumed to be machines and technology,” Wosk said. “Women were often portrayed as aghast at machines, technologically challenged, forlorn and baffled.”

Riding Old Assumptions
In early advertisements and motion pictures associated with electricity and electrical devices, women often appeared as “daffy and fearful,” Wosk noted, “or, occasionally, as electrically created facsimiles of females compliant to men.” There were, however, some positive female images in early advertisements related to electricity. But the ambivalence was still there, Wosk suggested, seen in the notion that gas engine automobiles were masculine and electric automobiles were especially suited for women because they were clean and easy to operate.
More than in any other advertising genre, visual images related to transportation – particularly bicycles, automobiles and airplanes – have both supported and challenged conventional assumptions about the role of women, Wosk said.
Early bicycle advertising included images of women, but the invention of the safety bicycle in the 1890s “contributed most to the idea that women could be fully independent and mobile,” Wosk said. “A bicycle-riding craze began because bicycles were lighter, more stable, and the closed gears permitted women to ride bikes without their skirts getting caught. The invention of coaster brakes and a drop-frame bicycle for women also encouraged them to take up bike riding.”
Even though many images portrayed women on bicycles, they often contained a subtle suggestion. In satiric stereoscopic photos, she said, “You often see men in the background looking nervous that women might just ride away from their responsibilities at home.”
The advent of automobiles, however, helped women refute stereotypes that they were inept, she said. Female images were increasingly used to market the vehicles, and magazine photos included portrayals of so-called “flappers” displaying their sense of independence in cars.
A Cultural Ambivalence

Again, however, many early images of women with autos revealed a cultural ambivalence. “You often find that women in advertising images are presented as being more interested in the color and upholstery of the interior of cars than in the mechanics of the internal combustion engine,” Wosk said. And she pointed out that artists’ images sometimes supported the notion that women “were harebrained, maniacal drivers.”
The invention of the airplane, Wosk believes, combined with rapid social change during both world wars to transform the image of women in visual and advertising images. “With airplanes there was a sense that women could transcend the earth and the confining cultural notions about women’s lack of technical abilities.” As one early female aviator wrote, “Flying is the only real freedom we are privileged to possess.”
Service During WWI
Although the shift in expectations regarding women during World War II is well documented, Wosk noted that women were recruited to serve as machine tool operators, automobile repairers and workers in airline manufacturing as early as World War I.
“During World War II, women began to redefine their roles and sense of patriotic duty as they learned new jobs vacated by men who entered the military,” Wosk said. Many new images portrayed women in jobs formerly held only by men, including famous renderings of “Rosie the Riveter.” Yet even in those images, “Rosie often was portrayed with a makeup compact in her pocket.” In many of the new images, Wosk said, “women were portrayed as changing their clothes – a practical requirement related to the new jobs they were doing, but also a symbol of transformation.”
After World War II, advertising images attempted to persuade women to revert to their former clothing styles and occupations. “Women were encouraged to become enamored of their home appliances again,” Wosk concluded.
Also read:Celebrating Girls and Women in Science
About Prof. Wosk
Professor Julie Wosk received a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis (graduating magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), an M.A. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. She has twice been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in art history – at Princeton and Columbia University. She is also an artist whose oil paintings and large-format color photographs have been exhibited in New York and Connecticut galleries.