Representation of Women in Adverts - Fairy Liquid

Advertising is an interesting area to look at when studying the representation of a group of people.

• Firstly; advertisements tend to represent the status quo of society at the time and any hegemonies that may exist. For example, that football is our countries national sport however the country plays a wide variety of sports. 
• Secondly; advertisements represent an ideal that people must aspire too.

In a series of Fairy Liquid advertisements from the 1960s up until the present day, we discovered that women are represented in a traditionally idealistic way. For example, in the 1960s adverts were almost exactly the same having a mother and a little girl who she is helping to learn (ie, books or building blocks) while washing up the dishes at the kitchen sink. The mother is teaching the little girl about the fairy liquid and how it is still strong enough to clean but soft enough to keep hand 'pretty', as if this is a priority for women of the time. The actors in the advert are 'well spoken', using received pronunciation. This emphasises the idea in the consumer that the people who use Fairy Liquid are of a high class, and therefore the product is of good quality. 

The modern advertisements are a bit more complex. Firstly, the little, innocent girls who is a reoccurring theme has been replaced with a slightly older (8-10) boy, and in the first (2012), we saw both a mother and father featuring, appearing to a wider demographic. There also featured a male voiceover however the emphasis is still on the mother bringing up an olympic athlete 'For mum to build an athlete', creating an equal tone. 

In the second (2009), the advert has a humorous tone with the little boy trying to fit his bike into the washing machine, and compared with the ones from the 60s, shows more informality and also an example of how adverts have changed behaviour with washing up (existence of washing machine).

Nowadays, this has become such an established product that in 2013, the company produced an advertisement showing a montage of the classic advertisements from the 1960s to the present day, over emphasising how little product you use every time to wash your dishes, it takes a decade to finish a bottle. 

All these Fairy Liquid advertisements are seen to be romanticising the past ideals of a woman in the kitchen and presenting a 'golden age' of which we can all aspire to. *sigh*