Digital Collection: Gender Roles in Cream of Wheat’s Comic Strip Advertisements Featuring Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae Katherine J. Parkin Abstract This digital collection offers insights into the Cream of Wheat campaign that built on the cultural cache of cartoonist Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic. The strip, created in 1934 and running until 1977, featured a cast of over one hundred white characters in a poor, rural, mountainous United States. It was wildly popular, sparking merchandise, restaurants, and a Broadway show. Starting in the 1940s, ads showcased the strong, handsome Li’l Abner consistently relying on Cream of Wheat’s 5-minutes-to-prepare hot cereal to rescue women and escape marriage, including on Sadie Hawkins Day, a day of gender role reversals. In the United States and around the world, people embraced Sadie Hawkins Day by having girls ask boys to a dance, a unique challenge to gender norms. The voluptuous, beautiful Daisy Mae suggested that women were always desperate to be married. When Capp had Li’l Abner marry in the early 1950s, Daisy Mae proclaimed her success in knowing that Cream of Wheat was the way to win men’s hearts. Advertising in this campaign served not only to sell Cream of Wheat, but advanced entrenched ideas about race and gender roles. Keywords: advertising, Al Capp, cereal, comic strip, courtship, Daisy Mae, dances, gender reversal, gender roles, race, Li’l Abner, marriage, post-World War II This digital collection considers magazine ads for Cream of Wheat that featured Li’l Abner and appeared in millions of homes across the country. As advertising and media historian Kyle Asquith notes, the corporation explicitly targeted children with their Cream of Wheat advertising starting in the 1920s, and by the late 1930s ads touted the cereal’s benefits for both young male children and their fathers. Ads with fathers in suit and tie represented one type of aspirational masculinity, but lacked the type of virility that the company found in Li’l Abner. Moreover, the other star of the advertising, Daisy Mae, offered the perfect counterpart to Li’l Abner. With his tall, muscular build and dark hair and her petite, large-bosomed frame and blond hair, the pair suggested to girls and boys, women and men, that eating Cream of Wheat cereal would transform them into attractive stars. 1 1 Katherine Parkin, “Sadie Hawkins in American Life, 1937–1957,” Journal of Family History (2021); Kyle Asquith, “Classic Campaign: From Consumers of Food to Participants in the ‘Modern’ Consumer Marketplace: How Cream of Wheat Approached Children, 1900–1935,” Advertising & Society Review 16, no. 1 (2015); Denise Kervin, “Advertising Masculinity: The Representation of Males in Esquire Advertisements,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 41, no. 1 (1990): 51–70. The company had worked with illustrious illustrators before, including N. C. Wyeth, but Capp was their first cartoonist. Al Capp set Li’l Abner in an imagined poor, rural, mountain community, Dogpatch. At times believed to be set in the Ozarks and in Appalachia, Capp used satire in this fictitious setting to create a new language, introducing words into American English; imagining new worlds; and in the case of Sadie Hawkins Day, introduced a new custom. Famed for his biting commentary, Capp used his characters to critique American society, particularly around socioeconomics and American identity, even as he and they reveled in it (Parkin, “Sadie Hawkins in American Life”; M. Thomas Inge, “Li’l Abner, Snuffy, Pogo, and Friends: The South in the American Comic Strip,” Southern Quarterly 48, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 6; Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon