Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Dorothy Dignam’s advocacy for women’s careers in advertising: 1920-1950

Dorothy Dignam’s advocacy for women’s careers in advertising: 1920-1950 This paper aims to examine how women working in the advertising industry during the 1920s and 1930s encouraged and resisted stereotypes about women to establish a professional identity. This seemingly paradoxical approach provided women with opportunities for professional development and network building. Dorothy Dignam is presented as a case study of one such advertising woman. She was a market researcher, a teacher, an advocate for women’s employment in advertising, a historian of women’s advertising clubs and a supporter of and a contributor to women’s professional networking.Design/methodology/approachArchival material is drawn from the N. W. Ayer and Son archives at the Smithsonian Institute, the Advertising Women of New York archives and the Dorothy Dignam Papers at the Schlesinger Library, the Philadelphia Club of Advertising Women papers at Bryn Mawr, the Dignam Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Women’s Advertising Club of Chicago (WACC) archives at the University of Illinois, Chicago. A close reading method of analysis places the material in a historical context. Additionally, it provides a narrative structure to demonstrate the complementary relationship between advertising club work and professional identity.FindingsDignam’s career strategies helped her to construct a professional identity that situated her as a guide, teacher and role model for other women who worked in advertising. She supported and created an attitude that enabled aspiring career women to embark on their careers, and she assisted in creating a coalition of women who empowered each other through their advertising club work.Practical implicationsDignam’s published work about careers for women in advertising, her own career and its advancement and her involvement with women’s advertising clubs all served a rhetorical purpose. Her professional life sought to change both men’s and women’s attitudes about the impact of women in professional roles. In turn, the influence of attitudes helped to create space for women in business, especially those seeking advertising careers.Originality/valueThis paper illustrates how Dignam’s career, accomplishments and publications coalesce to provide evidence of how women negotiated professional identities and claimed space for themselves in the business world and in the advertising industry. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Historical Research in Marketing Emerald Publishing

Dorothy Dignam’s advocacy for women’s careers in advertising: 1920-1950

Wills, Jeanie
Journal of Historical Research in Marketing , Volume 10 (1): 16 – Feb 14, 2018
Download PDF
16 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/emerald-publishing/dorothy-dignam-s-advocacy-for-women-s-careers-in-advertising-1920-1950-Ye0CyxaBKO
Publisher
Emerald Publishing
Copyright
© Emerald Publishing Limited
ISSN
1755-750X
DOI
10.1108/jhrm-01-2016-0001
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This paper aims to examine how women working in the advertising industry during the 1920s and 1930s encouraged and resisted stereotypes about women to establish a professional identity. This seemingly paradoxical approach provided women with opportunities for professional development and network building. Dorothy Dignam is presented as a case study of one such advertising woman. She was a market researcher, a teacher, an advocate for women’s employment in advertising, a historian of women’s advertising clubs and a supporter of and a contributor to women’s professional networking.Design/methodology/approachArchival material is drawn from the N. W. Ayer and Son archives at the Smithsonian Institute, the Advertising Women of New York archives and the Dorothy Dignam Papers at the Schlesinger Library, the Philadelphia Club of Advertising Women papers at Bryn Mawr, the Dignam Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Women’s Advertising Club of Chicago (WACC) archives at the University of Illinois, Chicago. A close reading method of analysis places the material in a historical context. Additionally, it provides a narrative structure to demonstrate the complementary relationship between advertising club work and professional identity.FindingsDignam’s career strategies helped her to construct a professional identity that situated her as a guide, teacher and role model for other women who worked in advertising. She supported and created an attitude that enabled aspiring career women to embark on their careers, and she assisted in creating a coalition of women who empowered each other through their advertising club work.Practical implicationsDignam’s published work about careers for women in advertising, her own career and its advancement and her involvement with women’s advertising clubs all served a rhetorical purpose. Her professional life sought to change both men’s and women’s attitudes about the impact of women in professional roles. In turn, the influence of attitudes helped to create space for women in business, especially those seeking advertising careers.Originality/valueThis paper illustrates how Dignam’s career, accomplishments and publications coalesce to provide evidence of how women negotiated professional identities and claimed space for themselves in the business world and in the advertising industry.

Journal

Journal of Historical Research in Marketing – Emerald Publishing

Published: Feb 14, 2018

Keywords: Advertising history; Business history; Advertising women of New York; Dorothy Dignam; Philadelphia club of advertising women; Women’s advertising club of Chicago

References

  • Letter
    Culpepper, J.
  • Beyond ‘caste-typing’? Caroline Robinson Jones, advertising pioneer and trailblazer
    Davis, J.F.
  • As Britain changes: gas and coke
    Dignam, D.
  • France wants American appliances
    Dignam, D.
  • Keep the homes fires burning
    Dignam, D.
  • The British like cold toast for breakfast
    Dignam, D.
  • We stand accused of too much colour scheming
    Dignam, D.
  • What two can do in home service: with only two young women comprising their staff, the Stockholm gas works carries on ten lines of home service activity
    Dignam, D.
  • Up the ladder we must go
    Dignam, D.
  • Women know women
    Dignam, D.
  • Ideas and copy
    Dignam, D.
  • Message to women: never be afraid of any advertising job
    Dignam, D.
  • Women’s place in advertising
    Dignam, D.; McBride, M.
  • Bequest of Americana from an early advertising writer
    Dignam, D.
  • Conventions: biographers statement
    Dignam, D.
  • Scrapbook
    Dignam, D.
  • The woman advertiser and her place in early advertising
    Dignam, D.
  • What a young woman should know
    Dignam, D.
  • Lillian Gilbreth’s psychologically enriched scientific management of women consumers
    Graham, L.D.
  • Pauline Arnold (1894-1974): pioneer in market research
    Jones, D.G.B.
  • Pioneering consumer economist: Elizabeth Ellis Hoyt (1893-1980)
    Parsons, E.
  • Letter from Edgewater home school
    Reid, M.J.
  • A foot in each sphere: Christine Frederick and early Twentieth-Century advertising
    Rutherford, J.W.
  • A dozen ideas to the minute’: advertising women, advertising to women
    Scanlon, J.
  • Helen Woodward and Hazel Kyrk: economic radicalism, consumption symbolism and female contributions to marketing theory and advertising practice
    Tadajewski, M.
  • Remembering female contributors to marketing theory, thought, and practice
    Tadajewski, M.; MacLaren, P.
  • Training a nation: the general federation of women’s clubs’ rhetorical education and American citizenship
    White, K.K.
  • Who’s Who Abroad – Miss Dorothy Dignam
  • Martha Van Rensselaer and the Delineator’s homemaking department
    Zuckerman, M.E.