Toy ads through time & that gender thing

[xenith]

There's been much talk lately about the gendering of children's toys and the marketing thereof. I was idly curious about how much division of the sexes occurred in early toy advertising so I wandered over and looked for some ads from a hundred years ago (March 1914).

I searched in advertising with some key words (e.g. toys, dolls) and these are the first ads I came across for a toy shop or department (hence the number of regional publications). So no deliberate selection.


The Gundagai Independent and Pastoral, Agricultural & Mining Advocate



Northern Argus (Clare, SA)


Werribee Shire Banner


Rainbow Argus

I went back another fifty years to March 1864. A little harder to find suitable ads because most of ones just had a line or two for toys. This is the first one I found with a "substantial" section of toys (and bricks for boys), and then a toy-only ad.


Goulburn Herald


Freeman's Journal

Back another fifty years (1814) but the selection was too slim. Only one newspaper.


Sydney Gazette

So I jumped forward to 1824 and found one merchant just advertising toys. (There were two other toy adverts later in the decade, so I put them on the end there, for a bit of completeness.)


The Australian


Sydney Gazette


Hobart Town Courier, 1828


Sydney Gazette

Comments

[littlerdog.livejournal.com]

One gendered reference? Hmm. H'interesting.

[monissaw.livejournal.com]

Dolls are for children.

I expected some mixture (e.g. general toys, dolls for girl's and blocks boy's blocks). How did they stay in business? :)

I wonder when it changed. I have seen a some ads for a local toy shop between the wars that had more of a mixture.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

It might be worth checking the Coles' Emporium in Melbourne. It may have been the gamechanger.

Also, the A Polack in your clip is the other A Polack - came to Sydney as a convict in the 1820s and became very rich. His descendants lost their Judaism. My A Polack came out a bit later (to Melbourne as a free convict) and *his* descendents are mostly still Jewish. There were members of the other family in Canberra when I moved here and we solved the conundrum of Jewish Abraham Polacks in Australia in the 19th century, for it really looked as if it was one person from a distance. The Sydney one was rather well known and not always entirely respectable. The Melbourne one was a respected pawnbroker whose only appearance in newspapers appears to have been social events (when, say, his wife and daughters attend a Function) and when he gave evidence in court. The generations are long in that side of my family, for he was my great-grandfather.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

(Which means my grandmother was born in the 1890s, just in case you were wondering!)

[monissaw.livejournal.com]

That's a thought on the Coles thing. Possibly the big city papers were different too. I had some other ideas I wanted to follow up too.

Curious on the name. Well, I find it curious. Have seen people with more apparent differences (e.g. unrelated occupations) turn out to be the same person. So the opposite is always interesting.

(And yes, it has taken me this long to get back to "regular scheduling". *sigh* I wasn't ignoring you.)
(Also I was trying to work out how your grandmother could possibly have been born in the 1890s, when I realised it was your father's mother.)