Most weeks I issue the same old plea to my work colleagues: What should this week’s Women2day page be about?

As a joke, one of them (a male, I might add) brought up an old tongue-in-cheek Harry Enfield sketch on Youtube set in the 1950s called ‘Women: Know your Limits’ - where Enfield and Paul Whitehouse poke fun at women by telling them how to behave.

We laughed like drains , but even though I knew it was only a joke, it started me thinking about how much advertising has changed since the 1950s - when in hindsight, companies back then could get away with some absolutely unbelievable sexism.

I decided to look into some examples, and dear me, were there were many.

Take when Kenwood launched The Chef, their famous food processor in 1950. The advert that shows a picture of a couple standing next to it, with the glamorous woman wearing a chef’s hat, was accompanied by the words: ‘The Chef does everything but cook - that’s what wives are for.’ At the bottom: ‘I’m giving my wife a Kenwood Chef’.

Well, the Kenwood Chef food processor might still be going strong more than 60 years later but thankfully, that advert is not.

Another, advertising a morning sickness drug shows a smiling pregnant woman happily cooking some bacon and eggs, adorned with the caption ‘Now she can cook breakfast again’.

Others include a sweater advert claiming ‘Men are better than women, although indoors women are useful...’ , a coffee advert with a terrified looking woman lying over her husband’s knee while he raises his hand, and a hoover advert that claims ‘She’ll be happier with a Hoover on Christmas morning’.

It seems that in the 1950s, a time before the sexual revolution of future decades, the most common adverts featured women being completely controlled and influenced by their husbands, feminine products to help impress their husbands, cleaning products, and endless cooking and references to the benefits of staying in the kitchen.

Back then, sexism against women was seen as normal and even expected - people appeared to just tolerate the female housewife stereotype.  But these days, society has evolved to a place where such blatant discrimination is seen in a negative light, and we can even see the funny side.

One website described the 50s adverts as ‘relics from a bygone era’, one in which sexism and even racism happened frequently. Looking at adverts like this now and being able to laugh with incredulity, shows how much society has moved on since - as is evident in the adverts of today, such as for Diet Coke or Maltesers.

I'm no feminist by any means, but women really don't tend to come off very well at all in these old adverts, so I'm thankful for how much the world has evolved since then, although it was only after influence from the Civil Rights Movement that  women’s rights activists were successful enough to lobby for things including equal educational and career opportunities with equal pay and freedom of choice.

And sexist adverts aren’t the only things that have changed over the years - so has society’s image of what is beautiful.

Back in the early 20th century the idea of a perfect woman was fair skin and a full and curvy figure with long blonde hair. As the decades have rolled by, the image of the ideal woman evolved into a slim, darker skinned woman, whereas nowadays it’s tanned skin and an even slimmer frame. 

One can't help wonder what this ideal will be  in the years to come.