Giving Women a Helping Hand

This ketchup advertisement went into circulation in 1953, and it largely stayed unquestioned. A few years down the line and it started sparking controversy. The tagline is that the condiment doesn’t require a knife blade to pry open or the handy assistance of a husband. All that any woman had to do was twist its cap off to get to the bottle’s contents.

Touted as the “most cooperative cap” in the world, perhaps the only thing the promotional write-up forgot to mention was that women are absolutely helpless without men in the picture. Vintage ads also had the problematic approach of underlining certain words for emphasis while overall, painting women as the weaker gender.