A real-life “Rosie the Riveter” operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, TN, working on an A-31 Vengeance dive bomber, February, 1943. (Author: Alfred T. Palmer, U.S. Office of War Information).

As I scroll up and down our blog and read each post I come across again and again the iconic image of muscle-baring, bandana tied, uniform ,and mascara wearing Rosie the Riveter and cannot help but be a little disturbed by it. Some of you reading this you might go "WHAT! She is a symbol of strength, independence and courage, traits the challenged and rebelled against traditional gender roles-an image that empowered women, and made them aware that they are as competent and self-sufficient as any man." Which I agree with on the surface. With many ads we glance at or pass by the surface doesn't seem as damaging until you go in for a second look and do some critical thinking. As Bell Hook states critical thinking leads to transformation. Transformation in the way we output and input media images. 

The first thing that comes to mind when I see the Rosie the Riveter ad is what I don't see as with many ads I come across today. When I flip through a magazine the female or male lead in a fashion spread are White, food ads are catered to an female audience as alcohol beverages are catered to males, with a token black man here and black woman over there. Men retain this dominant, powerful role as women are submissive, superficial, and have one thing in mind and that is pleasing men. Unfortunately, we see this play out repetitively in today's advertising rhetoric. Of course ads branch out into more complex ideas but still mainly defaulting on traditional stereotypes. 

Oh tradition, that word thats thrown around in the advertising world the refers back to archaic ways of thinking. It advocates where our proper place in society is, but no longer relates to the present day but still finds it way into our magazines, billboards and TV's. As a history major I did some digging of my past reads in search of the beginnings of such social constructs in media and came across a paper by CUNY Professor Bilge Yesil titled,‘Who Said this is a Man’s War?’: propaganda, advertising discourse and the representation of war worker women during the Second World War (2004). In his paper he speaks about how propaganda encouraged women into the work force by manipulating they're views on gender roles (temporarily of course) by using images such as Rosie the Riveter.

However, what stuck out to me the most was the unfortunate relevance it has today. Yesil "focuses on three dominant themes in propaganda and advertising rhetoric that portrayed working women’s experiences: their role in the war effort depicted as secondary to that of men, their motivation to work characterized as away to win the approval of men, and their supposed concern with beauty and womanliness." Therefore, war-time propaganda help shape this media driven social construct of gender roles and what defines being female and its "failure to recognize the varied experiences of African American women, older women or married women in the labour market." Doesn't that sound familiar, talk about embedding these notions into our culture. Female secondary in the workplace, sole motivation of women is to "win the approval of men", and superficiality beware of losing your femininity because your role becomes questionable in society. And as for being a person of color your presence in advertisements is completely absent or limited, introducing the issue of recognition. 

Melissa V. Harry-Perry in 'Crooked Room' a chapter from her book Sister Citizen touches upon Hegel's theory of recognition and states that "To be deemed fair, a system must offer its citizens equal opportunities of public recognition, and groups cannot systematically suffer from misrecognition in the from of stereotype and stigma." It is blatantly obvious and unfortunate that these stereotypes are still used in advertising today. In order to correct these media driven social stigmas we must challenge those who limit recognition of people of different social groups. And with higher recognition of different groups comes a greater participation in the "public sphere" allowing for a new conversation to take place.