Series of Picture Books for Children

This paper explores the gender stereotypes about children in advertisement and posters during the period from 1890 to 1970s. This work is aimed to find out gender stereotypes in the image of children which is appeal in muss culture during chosen time period. In order to prepare a diploma work focused on the Russian consumer, I need to see how the images of boys and girls in Russia are presented. For comparison, I selected the most representative country of Western culture – the United States. Whereas the project is mainly comparative I have chosen to emphasize the lack of similarity in USA and Russian muss culture. The historical time scale chosen for the research is full of important events that have a tremendous bearing on our modern culture. The general purpose will be to attempt to explore the tendency to repeat certain stereotypes and to follow their change over time, to determine whether they change at all or repeat from time to time. The central research question could be framed as follows: what is the reason of using image of the child in advertising. An additional point is determining identify the common between the image of the child in Russia and the United States, if it exists. It could be said that in the framework of my research I decided to step aside from large amount of visual material which is not contain information about the sex of the represented child. The trend to make a unisex image of children is present in both countries in the early twentieth century, and during wars. Such phenomenon occurs quite often in the process of research, but is not appropriate in the project context. To conclude, the project is an attempt to advance our understanding of connections between global events, such as revolution and world wars, and children's images representation in selected media of USA and Russia. This connection has highlighted a number of reasons why prejudices and gender stereotypes are conveyed.