The Maidenform Bra Company, based in New York City, launched one of the most sustained advertising campaigns in twentieth-century history in 1949: 'I Dreamed I Was _ in My Maidenform Bra,' running until 1969. Each advertisement depicted a semi-undressed woman in a public setting — a surgeon, a socialite, an explorer — wearing only a bra above the waist, juxtaposing bodily exposure with professional and social aspiration. The campaign was simultaneously celebrated as aspirational and critiqued as objectifying, and it became one of the most studied examples in feminist media analysis.

The Maidenform campaign entered feminist literary discourse as a paradigmatic example of advertising's use of women's bodies and aspirations simultaneously. Sylvia Plath, who worked briefly in advertising in New York and was deeply conscious of women's bodily presentation, engaged with its imagery in her creative life and letters. Betty Friedan analysed this kind of advertising in The Feminine Mystique (1963), and its critique was foundational to the feminist poetry of the 1960s.