Industry Change Makes History

From issue 18 onwards, the Advertising & Society Review will be renamed as the Advertising & Society Quarterly, and will welcome William M. O’Barr, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, and Edward Timke, Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, as its new editor and associate editor respectively. Emma Hymas, publications specialist at Duke University, will serve as managing editor.

In this last issue, it is our pleasure to feature an interview with the Advertising Educational Foundation’s former CEO, Paula Alex, who retired in June 2016. Alex traces the history of the foundation from its inception in 1983, to its merger with the Association of National Advertisers in 2015. In so doing, she situates many of its initiatives, including the Advertising & Society Review and ADText.

In ‘Breaking the Pattern: The Origins and Intentions of Take Our Daughters to Work Day’, Linda Scott details the impact of the event and the wider societal changes it entailed. She begins by recounting its origins based on an interview with Nell Merlino, the creator behind the original campaign. The event was a success, but was eventually pressured into dropping its explicitly feminist aims. This pressure came, in part, from a change in the educational demographic that some suggested represented a backlash against boys—a hypothesis that Scott dispels with a review of the evidence at hand.

We end with a book review by Cheryl Williams, who comments on Jackie Dickenson’s Australian Women in Advertising in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Dickenson, Williams argues, has written a compelling account of how Australian women—much like their American counterparts—were instrumental in the development of the industry, and how the industry provided career avenues when these were difficult to come by. Dickenson does not, to Williams’ regret, highlight the serious difficulties that women would have faced in the workplace, but her documentation of the inherent complexities these women faced in navigating ‘a man’s world’ does warrant a read.