Research Guides: American Women: Resources from the General Collections: Advertisements

Get fat on Lorings Fat-ten-u and corpula foods. c1895. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Advertisements in women's journals are a great source of information. From the latest household appliances to early advertisements for birth control. These advertisements provide historical depictions of gender roles, allowing an opportunity for comparative analysis by class, race, and region. Search catalog.loc.gov to determine if we have a periodical in print or on microfilm. To find materials on the topic of advertising, try searching the following subject headings:

Some periodicals can be requested online for delivery to any "general collections" research center at the Library of Congress, while others will have to be accessed in Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room.

For a full list of Library of Congress research centers, see the last section of this guide.

The subscription resources marked with a padlock are available to researchers on-site at the Library of Congress. If you are unable to visit the Library, you may be able to access these resources through your local public or academic library.

Vogue Archive External This link opens in a new window
This resource contains the entire run of Vogue magazine (US edition), from the first issue in 1892 to the current month, reproduced in high-resolution color page images. Every page, advertisement, cover and fold-out has been included, with rich indexing enabling you to find images by garment type, designer and brand names. The Vogue Archive preserves the work of the world's greatest fashion designers, stylists and photographers and is a unique record of American and international fashion, culture and society from the dawn of the modern era to the present day.
Harper's Bazaar Archive External This link opens in a new window
This archive includes the complete run of U.S. Harpers Bazaar, from 1867 to the present, fully indexed and searchable. This full color collection of approximately 350,000 pages provides a powerful lens into American and international popular culture from the mid-19th century forward, facilitating academic research in wide-ranging fields such as: womens studies, fashion, marketing, advertising, material culture, design, and more. A chronicle of some of the most influential work from world-renowned designers, models, photographers, stylists, and illustrators of the past two centuries, The Harpers Bazaar Archive captures this record of popular culture, facilitating searching, digital humanities projects, and multidisciplinary inquiries.
Trade Catalogues and the American Home External This link opens in a new window
Explore domestic consumerism, life and leisure in America between 1850-1950. Trade catalogues have been a prominent feature in commerce and manufacturing from the eighteenth century to the present day. Highly illustrated, they are an essential visual record of a variety of products and facilitate research into popular culture, material culture, social norms and attitudes, as well as the history of marketing, business, and technology. These documents provide evidence of the evolution of distribution and communication systems linking manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers across the emerging United States and beyond. They document the changing commercial tastes and fashions of the consumer over a period of rapid growth, expansion and crisis (both at home and overseas), revealing contemporary prices and economic expenditure for households and individuals on a range of products.
J. Walter Thompson: Advertising America External This link opens in a new window
Advertising has had a fascinating effect on the world through its interactions with consumer culture. J. Walter Thompson: Advertising America documents these interactions via the workings of one the world's oldest and biggest advertising agencies. The documents in this collection allow users to explore how advertising works, company culture, how decisions are made and ultimately examine the effect that the industry may have had over wider culture and how culture interacts with advertising. Publications (1887-2014) form one of the largest and most diverse selections of material featured in J. Walter Thompson: Advertising America. They range from annual reports to client lists, financial documents, guides to individual markets, and internal office documents from across the globe.

The field of advertising continues to grow. Because of this, it is likely that researchers will want to reference both historical and contemporary resources. The links below go to the Library's Electronic Resources Online Catalog (EROC) and point to individual eJournals.

The subscription resources below are available to researchers on-site at the Library of Congress. If you are unable to visit the Library, you may be able to access these eJouranls through your local public or academic library.

Advertising Age
Corresponds in part to the weekly print publication, Advertising Age. Includes links to "New and features, "Interactive daily," "International daily," "Jobbank," "AdMarket 50," and special reports through "Netmarketing," such as "Business to business advertisers top 100," and "Business to business websites top 200." Archives date from June 1995. Searching and viewing articles in the archives is free, but requires registration.
Journal of Advertising
Journal of current issues and research in advertising
Journal of Interactive Advertising
Journal of Advertising Education
Adweek

The following external websites contain primary source materials related to the advertising.

Ad*Access External
The Ad*Access Project, funded by the Duke Endowment "Library 2000" Fund, presents images and information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. Ad*Access concentrates on five main subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II, providing a coherent view of a number of major campaigns and companies through images preserved in one particular advertising collection available at Duke University. The advertisements are from the J. Walter Thompson Company Competitive Advertisements Collection of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History in Duke University's David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Marchand Archive, UC Davis History Project External
Contains over a thousand historical advertising images. To browse ads, select "Advanced Search" and select "Advertising" under Topic/Theme.
University of Illinois Advertising Collections External
Comprised of three collections, the Ad Council, D'Arcy Collection, and Woodward Collection.

The following books from the Library's collections examine the topics of advertising and women's history. The links will take you to bibliographic information about each book in the Library of Congress Online Catalog.

Sexism in the Media by Duchess Harris
ISBN: 9781532113116
Published/Created: 2018-01-01
Sexist depictions of women in the media have a negative impact on girls and women in America. This title examines the representations of women in various media formats and also discusses steps people can take to eliminate sexist practices. Features include a glossary, essential facts, references, websites, source notes, and an index. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.
Feminists, Feminisms, and Advertising by Kim Golombisky and Peggy J. Kreshel (Editors).
ISBN: 9781498528269
Published/Created: 2017-10-16
Women and advertising are both globally ubiquitous. Yet advertising remains one of the most unabashedly misogynist, heterosexist, and racist industries. This edited volume of original unpublished chapters is the first ever to offer explicitly feminist views on advertising. Feminists, Feminisms, and Advertising provides feminist analyses of the historical relationships between the advertising industry and the women's movement in the United States. Contributors consider the ways that advertisers encode race, ethnicity, gender, and heteronormativity into advertising practices and messages exported around the world. They further explore the ways that intersectional audiences such as women of color, Latinas, and lesbian and gay audiences decode, reinterpret, resist, and subvert advertising. With this book, the editors and contributors address the present lack of feminist scholarship, research, knowledge, or curriculum in advertising, and begin a more honest dialogue about diversity and intersectional gender in the advertising academy as well as the advertising industry.
Advertising and Reality by Amir Hetsroni (Editor)
ISBN: 9781441191946
Published/Created: 2012-08-16
Advertising and Reality: A Global Study of Representation¿and Content¿offers, for the first time, an extensive study of the way our life is represented in advertising. Leading scholars from different countries, who specialize in marketing communication and media studies, review and analyze different advertising contents and give us a truly cross-cultural view of the matter. Among the contents that are thoroughly discussed throughout the book one finds sexuality, violence, family activities, gender roles, vocations, minorities roles, periodical reconstruction and more. This book provides an up-to-date picture of the way modern life is portrayed in the most popular format of marketing communication worldwide.