¶ … Rosie to Lucy
An Analysis of Today's TV Sitcom, Media, and Reality
As is noted in "From Rosie to Lucy," Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was, to some extent, concerned about the image of woman as presented by the mass media. What Friedan reported was a kind of transformation from the woman of the 30s in magazines like Ladies Home Journal into the woman of the 50s -- the kind of hare-brained ditz of I Love Lucy. This paper will look at that relationship that struck Friedan so forcefully -- the relationship between media and reality -- and it will also argue that media tends to manipulate gender codes.
What Friedan observed in the magazines of the 30s showed a professional woman much like the nurses of Florence Nightingale's nurse corps. She was devoted to an activity that was respected and needed. What Friedan observed in the television sitcoms of the 50s was something else entirely: men and women were degraded: the men were portrayed as clueless but charming, and the women were portrayed as "young and frivolous, almost childlike; fluffy and feminine; passive; gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home." The reality of the 1950s, Friedan suggested, was being shaped by the way the media was representing gender codes. Friedan, ultimately, would begin a revolution against the 50s media representations that become known as the Woman's Movement -- but that Movement, to a large degree, has turned into something quite different in both reality and in today's media.
If the woman of 1950s television was an idealized form that never really existed and only served to create a shallow, superficial, and unsustainable environment that would be...
Women felt oppressed and men felt the need to take back their pre-war status as head of the household. These dynamics created a power-play between men and women that eventually culminated with the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Men struggled to retain their power, while women struggled to recapture what they had a taste of in the 1940s. Although most of the women of the Women's Liberation
The disparity in income of male vs. female heads of household is striking. Analysis of census data revealed that, in 1949, approximately thirty percent of households headed by white males were living in poverty, compared to just under thirteen percent a decade later. For women, more than half lived in poverty in 1949; by 1959, that figure declined to thirty-eight percent. The prosperity of the 1950s was not universally
But even May admits that images such as the bomb shelter do not always convey an accurate picture of reality, given that few Americans built such shelters in their homes, although the images of the media might suggest differently, and the way people respond to surveys does not always reflect their lived experience (May 107). May's analysis thus seems to fall into validating 'Leave it to Beaver' cliches about the
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