Feminism Ain’t Funny: Woman as “Fun-Killer,” Mother as Monster in the American Sitcom

Advances in Journalism and Communication

2013. Vol.1, No.1, 1-12

Published Online March 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ajc) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ajc.2013.11001

Feminism Ain’t Funny: Woman as “Fun-Killer,” Mother as

Monster in the American Sitcom

Jack Simmons1, Leigh E. Rich2

1Department of Languages, Literature and Philosophy, Armstrong Atlantic State University, Savannah, USA

2Department of Health Sciences, Armstrong Atlantic State University, Savannah, USA

Email: Leigh.Rich@armstrong.edu

Received February 1st, 2013; revised March 2nd, 2013; accepted March 10th, 2013

Whether America has realized President Herbert Hoover’s 20th-century vision of a “chicken in every pot”,

there is a television in nearly every home. Powerful and accessible, television programs, whether explic-

itly, convey values and messages to viewers and, thus, can play a role in reifying the status quo or affect-

ing social change. Given comedy programming’s roots in radio and Vaudeville, it is no surprise that a re-

current theme in situational comedies is the “war between the sexes”. Despite a surfeit of studies ex-

amining specific programs, however, there exists no comprehensive project exploring how gender depic-

tions have changed since television’s proliferation in post-WWII America. This time span is especially

important because it is bisected by second wave feminism. Regarding gender, TV shows need not fortify

traditional ideals. But how far has television come? Findings from a pilot study employing a Grounded

Theory analysis of selected US sitcoms from 1952 to 2004 suggest that, regardless of the progressive na-

ture of some programming, the most-watched sitcoms reaffirm mainstream stereotypes of women. What

has changed, however, is the hierarchical relationship between the sexes. While sitcoms have modified

roles of women in an effort to keep up with changing social norms, they have failed to meaningfully alter

traditional masculine narratives. What has been won is a superficial role reversal: Where once television

women were childlike subordinates to their male counterparts, now men are depicted as irresponsible

children women must mother and discipline.

Keywords: Television; Situational Comedy; Feminism; Representations of Women; Gender Roles;

Pleasure; Motherhood; Role Reversal; United States

The “Family Hour”

“Three things have been difficult to tame. The ocean,

fools, and women. We may soon be able to tame the

ocean, but fools and women will take a little longer1”.

—Vice President Spiro Agnew on the Women’s Strike for

Equality, August 26, 1970.

“Men want to have fun and wives want to walk that fun

deep into the woods and shoot it dead2”.

—Husband Eddie Stamm in ’til Death, September 7, 2006.

In 1951, I Love Lucy introduced American audiences to Lucy

Ricardo, “a talentless housewife ever hopeful of breaking into

showbiz” (McNeill, 1996: p. 401). While Mrs. Ricardo’s

star-studded dreams only amounted to funny fiascos, it would

not take long for comedienne Lucille Ball to succeed where her

most celebrated character always failed. In the 1952-53 televi-

sion season, I Love Lucy became the “first smash hit situation

comedy”, earning the highest average seasonal Nielsen ratings

and the distinction of America’s most-watched program, an

honor it would comfortably hold for four of its six years. In

1952-53, the wacky would-be redhead also became America’s

most-watched mother. Ball’s real-life pregnancy drove the

show’s second season storyline, and more than 10 million

homes tuned in to watch the screwball antics of television’s

favorite expectant parents (McNeill, 1996: p. 402).

I Love Lucy provides a stunning example of the power tele-

vision exerts in blending fact and fiction (McNeil, 1996),

bridging public and private life (Landay, 1999), and, thus, in-

corporating as well as influencing social mores.3 In sitcoms,

this is particularly true with regard to gender. It is no surprise,

given comedy programming’s roots in radio and Vaudeville,

that a recurrent theme is the “war between the sexes”. I Love

Lucy is the first in a long line of television influences that have

both mirrored and molded gender roles in general and the ma-

ternal in particular.

In one sense, I Love Lucy was progressive for its time. Born

from the radio program My Favorite Husband in which Ball

3While detractors may claim that television does not influence behavior, the

social experiments and Social Learning Theory of psychologist Albert

Bandura offer compelling evidence that media such as television play at

least a role in shaping our lives. Bandura’s 1961 “Bobo doll” study, in

which he showed children films of adults aggressively interacting with an

inflatable plastic clown and then observed the children’s subsequent unsu-

pervised play with Bobo, demonstrated that the children effectively mod-

eled the antisocial behavior and even extrapolated novel ways of attacking

the doll. Because of these findings, Bandura testified before Congress about

the links between television violence and aggressive behavior in children,

although he was blackballed by television network officials “from taking

part in the 1972 Surgeon General’s Report on Violence” (Griffin, 2003: p.

368; see also Bandura, 1977). We also contend that, were there no link

between television viewing and behavior, advertising would not be a multi-

billion-dollar industry.

1Quoted in an ABC News broadcast by anchorman Howard K. Smith (Doug-

las, 1995: p. 163).

2In this pilot episode aired on Fox, Eddie also states, “Because, in marriage,

women stop fun from happening”.

J. SIMMONS, L. E. RICH

had starred with Richard Denning, I Love Lucy showcased a

female comedic lead, both in name and content (McNeill, 1996).

Lucy Ricardo, as Lori Landay notes in “Millions ‘Love Lucy’”,

took on the role of the “trickster”:

A subversive, paradoxical fantasy figure who does what

we cannot or dare not by moving between social spaces,

roles, and categories that the culture has deemed opposi-

tional. When faced with a situation that appears to have

only two choices, the trickster is the kind of hero/ine who

creates a third possibility. (1999: p. 26)

Lucy, the 1950s housewife and mother who envies her hus-

band’s public life in the limelight, tries to transgress traditional

gender boundaries in nearly every episode. (Of course, Lucy

does not do this within the narrative as a conscious feminist

protest, but rather, like a child, to be the center of attention and

admired as talented and desirable.) However, what is funny is

Lucy’s glaring failure when she ventures beyond the bounds of

domesticity. Regardless of its “proto-feminist” themes and Lu-

cille Ball’s own career success, in the end I Love Lucy reifies

traditional gender roles and sends television women and moth-

ers back to the home and kitchen (with consumer product door-

prizes in exchange for real role revolution).

The “third possibility” in popular television is, apparently,

not possible. In the same vein as I Love Lucy, other early sit-

coms depict the woman/wife/mother as like a child to the

man/husband/father (e.g., Granny in The Beverly Hillbillies or

Aunt Bee in The Andy Griffith Show). Mothers are loved and

lovable, even if their incompetence (think Lucy Ricardo) or

Madonna-esque innocence (Edith Bunker in All in the Family)

routinely creates problems for men.

Twenty years after Lucy gave birth to Little Ricky, and in the

midst of a national debate over the ratification of the Equal

Rights Amendment, film theorist Laura Mulvey called for the

realization of Landay’s “third possibility” for viewers: a new

form of visual pleasure no longer slavishly dependent upon the

masculine, but one that recognizes the feminine and maternal

(Mulvey, 1992).4 As second wave feminists in the 1970s di-

rectly questioned traditional gender boundaries, contemporary

sitcoms incorporated such glass-ceiling struggles into storylines.

Top-ranked sitcoms such as All in the Family, Laverne and

Shirley, and Three’s Company exemplified the burgeoning

sexual awareness of the nation during prime time, that block of

evening viewing the networks would deem (at the behest of

Congress and the 1975 Federal Communications Commission)

the “family hour”. Even the mid-decade popularity of Happy

Days, with its romanticized, regressive idolization of the 1950s

as a time when men and women knew their place (and presi-

dents could be trusted), buoyed the reality of the transitioning

times simply by protesting too much.

Despite the efforts of Lucy/Lucille, Mulvey, and other for-

ward-looking women, the sexual revolution at least in popular

television comedies has been a pyrrhic victory. In this pilot

project, we chart the depiction of women, wives, and mothers

over a half-century of American sitcom history. Initial findings

suggest that, while television sitcoms have altered the roles of

women in an effort to keep up with changing social norms, they

have failed to meaningfully alter traditional masculine narra-

tives. Instead, what has been won is a superficial role reversal

—unthreatening and, thus, ultimately allowed by capitalism—

with sitcoms portraying men as children and women as mothers

responsible for disciplining them. Like Lucy, whose tomfoolery

predictably backfires and inevitably exposes her as the dupe

(Landay, 1999), women, wives, and mothers in top-rated sit-

coms such as The Cosby Show, Roseanne, Cheers, Home Im-

provement, Seinfeld, and Friends transform from lovable nui-

sances to not-so-lovable nags, or worse.

Methodology

Second and third wave feminism and an equal rights move-

ment seem to have only relieved television women of their

sense of humor and capacity for fun—a curious thematic de-

velopment in situational comedies. In this sitcom evolution,

woman becomes mother, mother becomes nag.

This finding has emerged from a pilot project examining si-

tuational comedies that earned the highest average seasonal

A. C. Nielsen Company ratings from the proliferation of televi-

sion in 1949 to the present (Nielsen Media Research, 2007;

McNeil, 1996). A Grounded Theory methodology (Glaser &

Strauss, 1967; Glaser, 1978; Strauss & Corbin, 1998) was used

to analyze emergent themes from a pilot sample of top-rated

sitcoms. Sitcoms, during this six-decade time span, have earned

the highest Nielsen rating 25 times. Because some sitcoms

earned the rank of being America’s most-watched prime-time

program more than once, of these 25 seasons there are 13 dis-

tinct shows (see Table 1). We focused our analysis on the epi-

sodes from the first season a sitcom garnered the highest Niel-

sens. When the first top-ranked season was unavailable, the

available season closest to it was used. An analysis of all sit-

coms or even sitcoms ranked in the yearly Nielsen “top 20” was

beyond the scope of this pilot project, which aimed to identify

dominant themes and patterns related to gender portrayal in the

most-popular sitcoms throughout the history of television. An

expansion of this pilot project involving a more-inclusive sam-

ple is currently being completed, with an article to follow. (This

second article focuses on three tropes related to gender that

have not changed over the course of television history, regard-

less of social reformations: woman as overly emotional, woman

as intolerably talkative, and woman as inherently costly for men.)

Although researchers both in academia and advertising con-

cede that Nielsen television viewer ratings “are not without

measurement error” (Prior, 2009: p. 132), the A. C. Nielsen

Company has enjoyed a virtual monopoly in the audience re-

search industry since before the inception of television (Wood,

1962; Buzzard, 2002). Nielsen’s company began monitoring

the preferences and habits of television viewers in 1950, using

so-called “Nielsen families” selected from a random, represen-

tative sample of all American households based on US Census

Bureau data. Initially, this consisted of approximately 1200

homes, but sample size was increased in 1983 to roughly 1700

due to the proliferation of programs, the rise of cable, and the

newly identified need for demographically based “narrowcast-

ing” (Stoddard Jr., 1987). Industry competitors emerged in the

mid-1980s and pressured the Nielsen Company to increase its

sample size, which today numbers about 5000 households

(Nielsen Media Research, n.d.).

Nielsen ratings originally were calculated via two methods: a

patented Audimeter that attaches to a family’s television and

“record[s] automatically whether a set is on or off and to what

channel it is tuned” 365 days a year (Buzzard, 2002: p. 274)

4Written in 1973, Mulvey’s influential article “Visual Pleasure and Narra-

tive Cinema” was first published in 1975 in Screen, 16(3), 6-18.

J. SIMMONS, L. E. RICH

Table 1.

Broadcast network situation comedies with the highest seasonal Nielsen ratings from 1949 to the present.

Situation Comedy Network Broadcast Dates #1 Rank in Nielsensa Season Analyzedb

I Love Lucy CBS 15 October 1951-24 June 1957

1952-1953

1953-1954

1954-1955

1956-1957

1952-1953

The Beverly Hillbillies CBS 26 September 1962-7 September 1971 1962-1963

1963-1964 1962-1963

The Andy Griffith Show CBS 3 October 1960-16 September 1968 1967-1968 1964-1965

All in the Family CBS 12 January 1971-21 September 1983

1971-1972

1972-1973

1973-1974

1974-1975

1975-1976

1971-1972

Happy Days ABC 15 January 1974-12 July 1984 1976-1977 1974

Laverne and Shirley ABC 27 January 1976-10 May 1983 1977-1978 1976

Three’s Company ABC 15 March 1977-21 April 1977

11 August 1977-18 September 1984 1978-1979 1978-1979

The Cosby Show NBC 20 September 1984-17 September 1992

1985-1986

1986-1987

1987-1988

1988-1989

1985-1986

Roseanne ABC 18 October 1988-20 May 1997 1989-1990 1989-1990

Cheers NBC 30 September 1982-19 August 1993 1990-1991 1988-1989

Home Improvement ABC 17 September 1991-25 May 1999 1993-1994 1993-1994

Seinfeld NBC

31 July 1989

31 May 1990-21 June 1990

23 January 1991-26 June 1991

18 September 1991-14 May 1998

1994-1995

1997-1998 1994-1995

Friends NBC 22 September 1994-6 May 2004 2001-2002 2001-2002

aAs identified in McNeil (1996) and Nielsen Media Research (2007). bOur data sample includes the episodes from the first season a sitcom garnered the highest Nielsen

ratings. Four of these seasons, however, were unavailable and, thus, the available season closest to it was used: The Andy Griffith Show, 1964-1965; Happy Days, 1974

(midseason premiere); Lav erne an d Shir ley , 1976 (midseason premiere); and Cheers, 1988-1989.

and paper diaries in which individual viewers log what they

watch for one week during four to six “sweeps” months (Napo-

li, 2005). During the 1980s, Nielsen and its (now vanquished)

competitors developed the “Peoplemeter” in order to combine

and automate these two data collection tasks. Ironically, the

Peoplemeter was not necessarily an improvement in methodol-

ogy, both due to the costs and “the need for viewers to actively

participate in the ratings process” (Buzzard, 2002: p. 289).

What’s more, Nielsen’s dominance of the industry has proven

unflappable and today “Nielsen is alone in measuring TV rat-

ings despite attempts by four rivals to compete” (Buzzard, 2002:

p. 289). Nielsen thus provides the only comprehensive ratings

throughout the era of television and is used here for these rea-

sons, even though changes in data collection techniques over the

years and self-report diaries introduce methodological concerns.

Regardless, examining the nation’s most-popular television

programs offers insight into mainstream American culture.

Networks use Nielsen ratings to determine what to broadcast

and when (as well as how much commercial air time during

programs will cost). In a reciprocal way, viewers and television

ratings exert an influence on what popular culture exists from

season to season. Alternative and avant-garde programming

also have emerged and even flourished during the era of this

medium, particularly with the rise of cable and the Internet.

However, the consistent accessibility of broadcast prime-time

offerings places them in a unique position in the American

household to capture (and reflect) the attention of viewers and

to influence the collective consciousness.5

Viewing Pleasure and Gender Roles

The Traditional Wo man

In the early days of television, women were funny, wacky,

foolish, senseless, self-centered, impatient, impulsive, needy,

sweet, and mothering, or some combination thereof. Driven by

emotions rather than reason, their opinions and desires (real or

imagined) resulted in misadventure and, thus, entertaining plot

twists. In turn, their male counterparts, to whom they generally

deferred, often functioned as the “straight man”, caring for the

women and cleaning up their messes. Nearly every episode of I

Love Lucy centers on the silly schemes Lucy concocts that

Ricky ultimately must solve, whether it be Lucy handcuffing

herself to her husband (“The Handcuffs”, Oct. 6, 1952, episode

37), fighting with best friend Ethel (“The Club Elections”, Feb.

16, 1953, episode 47), wanting a bigger apartment (“The Ri-

cardos Change Apartments”, May 18, 1953, episode 61), or fal-

ling prey to less-than-reputable door-to-door salesmen (“Sales

Resistance”, Jan. 26, 1953, episode 45).6 A recurrent theme in I

Love Lucy is Lucy’s ineptitude. While the title to the Feb. 2,

1953, episode “The Inferiority Complex” suggests her lack of

talent is all in her head, the content underscores Lucy’s true

uselessness in everything nondomestic. Ricky, Fred, Ethel, and

even the psychiatrist Ricky hires collude in patronizing Lucy,

pretending her poorly told jokes are funny, her unreliable

J. SIMMONS, L. E. RICH

bridge-playing skills are every partner’s dream, and her cater-

wauling she considers singing is delightful. The psychiatrist

even goes so far as to woo Lucy, saying she is a “living doll”

and a “gorgeous creature”, when in the end, Lucy is no more

than a big baby, needing to be appeased and wailing in her

signature fashion whenever she fails to get her way (“The Infe-

riority Complex”, Feb. 2, 1953, episode 46). Women in other

sitcoms of this era are depicted similarly and must be managed

by their men. Granny and Aunt Pearl in The Beverly Hillbillies

cook up plots as frequently as they do vittles, and Mrs. Drys-

dale and other minor characters in this same show use men for

money.7 Even the voluptuous tomboy Elly May—an asexual

sex object who refuses to be feminized or “citified”—must be

coerced into wearing dresses and controlled when she climbs

trees, “wrassles” her cousin Jethro, and like a child mothers any

critter, domesticated or otherwise, she can find.

Reliable bank assistant Jane Hathaway may be the exception,

but the writers make clear in “Granny’s Spring Tonic” that she

has, unlike Elly May, consciously jettisoned her feminine de-

sires to be a wife and a mother. In this episode, Jane Hathaway

compliments new employee Gloria Buckles, who like Hatha-

way is a “modern” but mousy woman, for her dedication to her

job: “[A]lready she has displayed those qualities so rare in a

modern girl: eagerness to learn, willingness to work, loyalty to

the bank, devotion to duty… Unlike so many others, this girl is

not here to find a husband. She is here to work. Right, Gloria?”

(March 27, 1963, episode 27). While the humor in this episode

stems from the fact that Gloria Buckles, who transforms from

plain-Jane to pin-up with a change of clothes, is nothing but a

nefarious gold-digger after Jed’s millions ($34,783,127.34, as

she recites repeatedly in her head), Ms. Hathaway, with her

masculine, prim demeanor, is left holding the bag: forced to

simultaneously forsake her femininity but still predominantly

serve the needs of men, be it greedy boss Mr. Drysdale or wise

client Jed Clampett and his family. Her character foreshadows

the changes to come in sitcom women—the archetype of a

woman who is liberated yet still limited in the roles she may

play in a male-dominated society.

5Of course, sitcoms that have not earned the highest Nielsen ratings still have

been watched by millions of Americans (along with viewers abroad) and

also influence the broader culture. Due to the limited space an academic

ournal allows, we have focused our methodology for this article only on the

top-earning situational comedies. A more in-depth examination of 60 years

of comedic television programming is better suited to a book of its own and

is under way. Regardless, we contend that a majority of popular sitcoms

beyond our sample still conform to our main thesis. Shows such as The Mary

Tyler Moore Show, Married with Children, Murphy Brown, Scrubs, and 30

ock have been cited by some critics as alternatives to the mainstream fare.

Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards, however, is comparable to Laverne an

Shirley’s Shirley Feeney as a transitional female character: still funny but

increasingly responsible and, thus, “maternal” in com

arison to her zanier

compatriots. Peggy Bundy, the spandex-wearing, self-centered, buxom

spouse of Married with Children’s ne’er-do-well salesman, Al Bundy, is

anything but maternal. Sex-crazed and lazy, she is a far cry from the televi-

sion housewives of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s (whom actress Katey Sagal

parodies in her portrayal), and, for Al, she is certainly a nag. Bundy daughte

Kelly offers nothing new as the dumb, blonde sex object, leaving the only

female character befitting feminist ideals to be boyish neighbor Marcy

Rhoades/D’Arcy who dominates her husbands. Likewise, Candice Bergen’s

Murphy Brown commanded this late-1980s series as a grouchy, no-nonsense

television reporter and anchor who delighted in torturing her young, male

boss and was difficult to please, eventually forcing the weekly

arade of he

inept secretaries to form a support group. Two recent episodes of Scrubs and

30 Rock also are telling. In “My Nah Nah Nah”, surgeon Christopher Tur

informs a patient’s father that he wants to try an experimental procedure but

he must “clear it with his boss” first. Dr. Turk is next shown rushing past the

hospital’s chief of medicine and instead seeking permission from Carla, a

nurse and his wife (Scrubs, “My Nah Nah Nah”, March 18, 2009, episode

811). Like Carla, 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon, played by creator Tina Fey, serves

in a maternal role to her immature, irresponsible coworkers, including he

boss. Her competence, however, is isolated to the workplace, and she re-

peatedly bears the brunt of jokes about her inferior looks and inability to

“bag” a man. Even when Liz Lemon dates an attractive but incompetent and

overindulged doctor in “The Bubble”, 30 Rock’s jokes center around the

discrepancy in their looks but their common inadequacies in bed (March 19,

2009, episode 315). “Ethnic sitcoms” written by and/or featuring minority

entertainers have not followed the trend we de

ict in this paper to the same

degree. This may be due to the fact that they have had a tendency to “[take]

up the mantle of traditional parenting that white sitcoms have shed. For years

TV’s white parents have been crass (Roseanne), dumb (The Simpsons), even

abusive (Titus). On My Wife [and Kids] and Bernie Mac, black dads don

Ward Cleaver’s authority-figure sweater” (Poniewozik, 2002: p. 64; see also

Frazer & Frazer, 1993). Still, Poniewozik cites Damon Wayans’ depiction o

his fatherly character on My Wife and Kids as “a bit of a Neanderthal”, and

Susan Horsburgh and Ulrica Wihlborg describe Kellita Smith of The Bernie

ac Show as “rul[ing] the TV roost as Bernie Mac’s wife” (2002: p. 105).

6In the postwar world of television, the “solutions” to Lucy’s conundrums

typically involve the purchase of consumer products. See Landay’s (1999)

“Millions ‘Love Lucy’” for further discussion about how television helps

create perpetual, product-

ased desire as demanded by capitalism. It is also

interesting to note that, in both our pilot and our expanded samples of sit-

coms from the 60 years they have been broadcast into American homes, one

theme that has not changed is the idea that women cost men money. No

matter how liberated women become, male sitcom characters routinely

complain about the “costs” of interacting with women.

Similar to Lucy and Granny, matronly Aunt Bee in The Andy

Griffith Show is anything but liberated and, though she may

offer more stability and sage advice than either of her prede-

cessors, she too frequently must be placated by her younger,

male complement, Sheriff Andy Taylor. When Aunt Bee gets a

part in the town pageant, for example, Andy and his son, Opie,

make Bee feel guilty about leaving her “boys” alone. (As Opie

purposely states, “I’ll be glad when that pageant’s over. I’m

getting tired of eating at the diner”.) They do this not necessar-

ily for selfish reasons but because Bee, like Lucy, is terrible in

the play and the director has found someone better. Rather than

telling her and risk hurting her feelings, she is conned into

choosing motherhood over her own ambitions (“The Pageant”,

Nov. 30, 1964, episode 138). Archie Bunker in All in the Fam-

ily, on the other hand, does not mince words about his wife,

Edith, whom he calls “Dingbat” and constantly orders to “sti-

fle” herself. Although as the “fool” she technically depicts the

calm next to Archie Bunker’s blusterous storm, like Aunt Bee

she is an older, asexual matron without a fully formed identity.

Nowhere is this more apparent or more telling than in a 1972

episode called “Edith’s Problem”, focusing on Edith going

through “the change”. When Edith’s husband and daughter

Gloria seek medical attention for Edith’s menopause, the “gro-

inocologist” tells them to treat her with kid gloves and refrain

from upsetting her (now a “Super-Dingbat”, according to Ar-

chie, until the prescribed hormone supplements take effect). It

is also up to the daughter, a liberated woman, to educate the

mother about her body and herself. “Imagine, you having to tell

me what’s wrong”, Edith laments. “When I was a young girl I

didn’t know what every young girl should know. Now I’m

gonna be an old lady and I don’t know what every old lady

should know” (“Edith’s Problem”, Jan. 8, 1972, episode 214,

emphasis original).8

7For example, Granny and Pearl repeatedly try to marry off Granny’s

granddaughter, Elly May, and Pearl’s daughter, Jethrene (played by Max

Baer Jr. in drag). Pearl also tries to bag oilman Mr. Brewster for herself.

Mrs. Drysdale, moreover, is a hypochondriac who spends much of her time

visiting various doctors in Boston, and Mr. Drysdale also must pay for her

son, Sonny, to attend an Ivy League college back East.

J. SIMMONS, L. E. RICH

Despite the burdens these early sitcom women engender for

their men, their mature male counterparts cherish them none-

theless. As Mr. Drysdale says of his wife, Mildred, “She’s a

snob, she’s a hypochondriac, she’s not young and beautiful, but

I love her”. Granny, on the other hand, pities the banker, de-

claring to Jed: “Poor man. He’s got all of the trouble and none

of the fun” (“The Clampetts Meet Mrs. Drysdale”, Oct. 17,

1962, episode 4). In this way, the early American sitcoms lend

support to a patriarchal hierarchy, where women (like children)

represent a chaotic force that must be tamed, so that by show’s

end, the women are schooled from lessons learned and are ul-

timately dutiful, at least until the following week.

It is not unexpected that these early sitcoms represent women

in this fashion. As feminist Betty Friedan chronicles in her

1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, the notion of “The Happy

Housewife Heroine” began appearing repeatedly in the pages of

women’s magazines in 1949. What is surprising, however, is

that this “traditional” view of women/wives/mothers as but ac-

cessories to their men and concerned solely with the domestic

and familial spheres was new or at least re-imagined. In the

1930s and 1940s, as Friedan explains, the “majority of heroines

in the four major women’s magazines… were career women—

happily, proudly, adventurously, attractively career women”

(1997: p. 85). This shifted in the 1950s: “By the end of 1949,

only one out of three heroines in the women’s magazines was a

career woman—and she was shown in the act of renouncing her

career and discovering that what she really wanted was to be a

housewife” (1997: p. 93). Friedan notes that male (and even

female) magazine editors and writers determined that American

women of the 1950s and 1960s “were not interested in politics,

life outside the United States, national issues, art, science”, or

even abstract ideas (1997: p. 100), thus refashioning the image

of women in popular culture—no longer spirited and inde-

pendent but “housewife-mothers, who cherish their ‘different-

ness,’ their ‘unique femininity,’ the ‘receptivity and passivity

implicit in their sexual nature’” (1997: p. 110). This essentialist

depiction evident in magazines is repeated in early American

sitcoms, despite the fact that one in three women at the time

worked outside of the home (Freidan 1997).

The Liberated Woman

In the 1970s, TV’s top-rated sitcoms candidly confronted the

question of gender by creating characters that challenged earlier

maternal roles and sought a new visual pleasure for viewers—a

pleasure in step with the rise of second wave feminism, the

sexual revolution, and the federal adoption of the Equal Rights

Amendment. These sitcoms ushered in a succession of single

women (sometimes contrasted with the previous generation’s

matriarchs), whose roles are less well defined, question classi-

cal notions of maternity, and increasingly drive narrative action.

Shirley’s relationship with her mother in the sitcom Laverne

and Shirley embodies this second wave transition. When Lily

Feeney criticizes the company her daughter keeps (“You’re still

with shore patrol and bowlers and sewer workers and ‘Iggly’

and ‘Squiggly’ from upstairs”), Shirley tells her mother, “Well,

I think I’m old enough to pick my own friends”. And Laverne

comes to Shirley’s defense after Lily questions her daughter’s

choices and sexual reputation: Lily pleads, “Why can’t I go

back [to California] and say, ‘Oh, Shirley, Shirley has found a

wonderful man and they have a lovely house in the suburbs and

her life is going up, up’? … Well, Shirl, what’s it going to be?

Is it going to be the good life or bimbo city?” Laverne promises

Lily that she does not “have to worry about her [Shirley] be

coming no bimbo, ’cause I’m watching out for that”. Interest-

ingly, Lily’s first response is to ask, “Am I really a nag?”—

dialogue that simultaneously conveys that grown women need

no longer be treated like children and, unfortunately, that

women, particularly mothers, are to blame for this older, patri-

archal ideal that a woman’s place is in the home. If the conno-

tation here is too subtle, Shirley ends the conversation by tell-

ing her mother, “I know you love me. The trouble is, you don’t

like me”. Moreover, Lily is depicted as a failed role model of

the traditional ways: She is a divorcée who married “one of

those guys” and “end[ed] up trying to eat [her] way to happi-

ness” (“Mother Knows Worst”, May 18, 1976, episode 15).

In contrast, Shirley is employed, self-supporting, independ-

ent-minded, and attractive, though not necessarily a sex object.

Importantly, she is still funny. The same can be said of Laverne,

Janet from Three’s Company, and Gloria from All in the Fam-

ily. These characters take on roles traditionally deemed mascu-

line: Laverne and Shirley work in a brewery and endure the

juvenile antics of neighbors Lenny and Squiggy; “Good Old

Reliable Janet” heads a household that includes an innocent

bimbo and a not-so-innocent bumbler (Sept. 19, 1978, episode

301); and Gloria, although she lives with her parents (who il-

lustrate the old days), works while her husband attends college.

These women also are more in tune with their bodies and

themselves, actively pursuing personal interests and sexual

pleasure. In “Mike’s Problem”, for example, Gloria grows anx-

ious when her husband experiences stress-induced impotence

(Nov. 20, 1971, episode 208), and in “The Love Diary”, Janet,

who is juggling four suitors at once, has no desire to be “tied

down” by marriage (Sept. 26, 1978, episode 304). Even in

Laverne and Shirley, a sitcom set in the 1950s, the title charac-

ters straddle the line between classic gender roles and those of

the liberated woman. In “The Society Party”, Laverne tells

Shirley that a high society gentleman would only want Shirley

for “one reason—to have a good time, a few laughs, and a little

vo-de-o-do-do”. Although Shirley stops short of questioning

society’s sexual double standard (as a feminist in the mid-1970s

might do), she vocally stands up for herself: “I don’t vo-de-

o-do-do”. “You vo-de-o-do-do”, Laverne retorts knowingly and

with a smile. “I don’t vo-de-o-do-do”, Shirley emphasizes, as a

traditional woman would. “You vo-de-o”, Laverne responds,

and Shirley, the precursor of a modern woman, concedes:

“Once. I was going steady for a whole year” (Jan. 27, 1976,

episode 1, emphasis original).

Simultaneously, these characters reject other feminine ste-

reotypes. Laverne cannot cook and neither can Janet or room-

mate Chrissy Snow, and unlike Lucy Ricardo, Shirley Feeney

was written out of Laverne and Shirley after a pregnant Cindy

Williams “chafed at working fourteen-hour days and demanded

that her hours be specified in writing” (McNeil, 1996: p. 470).

Unfortunately, a traditional “solution” to the pregnant employee

“problem” was instituted and marriage to medic Walter Meaney

was the vehicle used for Shirley’s demise (McNeil, 1996).

8Edith’s character as the “Dingbat” was, of course, intentionally ironic on

the part of the creators, and her lines often work double time as both funny

and wise. The same could perhaps also be said of Lucy Ricardo, Granny

Moses, or Marion Cunningham from Happy Days. With their traditional,

subservient roles in the household, however, each of these characters fails

to carve out a new possibility for television women significantly different

from the conventional housewife narrative.

Meanwhile, although Happy Days offered nostalgia in

content and form about a time when masculine narratives pre-

J. SIMMONS, L. E. RICH

sented young men pursuing young women (whose own narra-

tives remained untold), sitcoms in the 1970s introduced a ver-

sion of the modern man. In All in the Family, Gloria’s husband,

Michael Stivic, stands in sharp contrast to his sexist, racist, ho-

mophobic, bull-headed father-in-law. Unlike Archie, Mike

openly questions capitalism and the workings of government,

he knows more about menopause than his mother-in-law, and

he is taken to task by his wife for his sexual wanderings prior to

marriage. When one of Michael’s ex-girlfriends abandons her

child on the Bunkers’ doorstep, Edith, in a traditional role,

maintains, “You can’t blame him for having a good appetite”.

Liberated Gloria, however, grills him until “5:30 in the morn-

ing… [saying] everything there is to say. Twice” (“Mike’s

Mysterious Son”, Jan. 22, 1972, episode 218). Archie’s nick-

name for the man who married his daughter is “Meathead”,

hinting at a traditional disapproval of this new, modern man,

just as Shirley’s mother cringed at the burgeoning modern

woman. Three’s Company similarly introduces Jack Tripper,

who, in order to live among liberated women, pretends to be

gay.

As the authority of women in television comedies ascends,

then, traditional masculinity is rendered impotent. Yet, this role

reversal provides neither equality nor an unambiguous self-

image for women. While the traditional maternal role wanes,

woman’s identity blurs. Three’s Company reveals this dilemma

that will be perpetuated in sitcoms to come: Chrissy, a buxom

dumb blonde, is “everywhere… a girl”, while Janet, a “very

bright” modern woman, half-jokingly compares herself to a

“gorilla” and a “chimp” (“Pilot #2”, unaired). Like Lily Feeney,

Janet’s self-incriminations lay the blame for demonizing

women at feminism’s feet. Simultaneously, Jack, for even ap-

pearing to be the modern “good guy” who does not objectify

women, must suffer questions about his sexuality. In reality,

however, Jack’s desire to find a mature, monogamous relation-

ship is merely a façade he knowingly uses—in conjunction with

other outlandish lies—to pursue women. In “Double Date”,

Janet acknowledges she is wise to Jack’s true character. “But

you are a creep”, Janet says, to which Jack responds, “I know,

but I just didn’t want you to think it” (Sept. 12, 1978, episode

302, emphasis original). Jack and Janet, both masculine char-

acters, repeatedly impugn feminism in Three’s Company. In

“Jack Moves Out”, Jack replies to Janet’s complaint about how

he leaves the toilet seat up with, “Well, excuuuuuse moi. I sup-

pose you want me to apologize now for being a man” (May 8,

1979, episode 319, emphasis original), and Janet, in “Triangle

Troubles”, reduces the liberation of women to sexual exploita-

tion, telling Jack, “The last time you went out with an old-

fashioned girl we had to stay at the Regal Beagle [a neighbor-

hood bar] ’til you modernized her” (May 15, 1979, episode

321). In this way, Three’s Company seems to ask, rather than

tell the viewer, what will the modern woman be?

The Mode rn Woman

Not until the 1980s would America’s most-watched sitcoms

present clearly defined roles for the modern woman and mother.

In both The Cosby Show and Roseanne, viewers are treated to

married couples in which husband and wife occupy seemingly

equal positions. Cliff and Clair Huxtable work as physician and

lawyer, Roseanne and Dan Connor hold blue-collar jobs. In

each case, both adults share the parental burden (a far cry from

Lucy and Ricky) and, at first glance, intellectual common

ground. Roseanne goes a step further, offering a new type of

mother. For the first time, a top-rated sitcom depicts a woman

whose appeal is rooted primarily in her comedic ability to drive

the narrative. Although the same could be said of Lucille Ball,

Roseanne Barr’s physique is perhaps more illustrative of the

“everyday woman” than Ball’s more glamorous pin-up figure

forged in Hollywood.

Unfortunately, neither The Cosby Show nor Roseanne pro-

duces a radically new perspective on the feminine and maternal.

Both sitcoms overstate the dominance of their leading women,

thus completing the role reversal that began in the 1970s by

turning the woman/wife/mother into a seemingly classic “str-

aight man” in opposition to the now more fun-loving man/

husband/father. In the part of “straight woman”, Clair’s primary

activity in The Cosby Show is to discipline her endearing hus-

band (like she does her children), through knowing disapproval,

denying permission, scolding, or nagging. For example, ire-

sponsible about his diet, Cliff must sneak into the kitchen and

clandestinely obtain his favorite foods lest he be reprimanded

by his wife, and in the episode “Off to the Races”, the 50-

year-old physician seeks Clair’s permission to compete in a

charity relay race (May 8, 1986, episode 225). Bill Cosby’s

character, Cliff, dominates the comedic space of the household

in his playful interactions with children and friends, while Clair

looms as the distant authoritarian.

Roseanne’s character also conforms to the straight woman

motif, though not as straightforwardly as Clair. While Rose-

anne Barr’s sarcastic humor is relentless, her position as a “fun-

killer” (for both her husband and her children) is repeatedly

revealed week to week. This is taken to the extreme in the epi-

sode “Sweet Dreams”, where an exhausted Roseanne, who feels

like a “warden… responsible for everybody”, merely wants

“ten minutes alone in [her] own bathroom”, “a sink with a stop-

per that actually works”, and a bathtub that doesn’t leak. Un-

able to fulfill these desires, she falls asleep and dreams about

killing her self-centered children and bothersome husband.

When the judge sentences her to 25 years to life, Roseanne

replies, “I got 25 years to life when I married him”. However,

like the straight man, she quickly states for the record that this

“wasn’t a wise crack. I wanted 25 years to life. That’s why I

married him. I love him” (Nov. 7, 1989, episode 305). As illus-

trated here, Roseanne portrays the modern woman’s dilemma:

The true love she feels for a man is dangerous (in a tiresome,

“fun-killing” sense) to men and children. In this way, the

straight woman is “straighter” than the classic straight man.

Whereas classic straight men Ricky, Jed, Andy, and Howard

(from Happy Days) are likeable authoritarians (and admired as

a musician, millionaire, sheriff, and hardware store owner, re-

spectively), the modern woman comes across, at best, as an

annoyance and, at worst, as a Harpy. Because of this, the mod-

ern woman’s femininity and maternal fitness are put on trial. In

“Sweet Dreams”, Roseanne’s own friend, Crystal, takes the

stand against her:

Your honor, Roseanne had the best husband in the world

and what she did is unforgiveable… Let’s cut the crap

here, your honor. We all know Roseanne. We all know

what she’s like. She’s loud and she’s bossy and she talks

with her mouth full. She curses at people when she drives.

She feeds her children frozen fish sticks and high-calorie

sodas. And she doesn’t have proper grooming habits. And

most important, your honor, she’s married to the greatest

J. SIMMONS, L. E. RICH

man a woman could ever want and she don’t appreciate

him a lick. Dan Connor is tender and kind and loving and

loyal and strong and masculine and sexy and virile…

Your honor, I say hang the bitch. (“Sweet Dreams”, Nov.

7, 1989, episode 305)

According to Crystal, Roseanne fails as woman, wife, and

mother. In what is now an all-too-familiar anti-feminist “cat-

fight” trope (Douglas, 1995), Roseanne in turn judges Crystal’s

success as a woman, defined by her ability to keep a man: “You

had three men in your life and you lost them all. And I have

been telling you… the only way you can keep a man happy is

to treat him like dirt once in a while. Men do not like waify

little cream puffs” (“Sweet Dreams”, Nov. 7, 1989, episode

305). Roseanne’s dream all but prescribes the role of modern

women in future sitcoms as nagging, domineering, or demon-

ized fun-killers, and this shift corresponds to a transformation

in the roles of men, husbands, and fathers, who—if they refuse to

be emasculated by their women—become childish pleasure-

seekers around which the sitcom’s narrative develops. In these

new roles, the greatest threat to a man’s happiness is his wife.9

The quintessential example of these new roles is the 1990s

sitcom Home Improvement, in which stay-at-home wife and

mother Jill Taylor must bear the impulsive, reckless, perilous

antics of not only her three male children but also her husband,

talk-show host Tim, who lives primarily for hotrods and power

tools but—similar to Lucy Ricardo—masters them only in his

fantasies. And unlike Ricky from I Love Lucy, Jill’s repri-

mands border on vitriolic, as when she tells Tim to “do us all a

favor and shut up” or “I don’t dream about you, Tim. It’s bad

enough I have to see you when I’m awake” (“Dream On”, Jan.

12, 1994, episode A362).

Sitcoms, post-second wave feminism and in the midst of an

ill-defined third wave feminism, render the modern man a sim-

plistic boob. In fact, Three’s Company unashamedly brands

Jack with this designation. After Jack moves out of the apart-

ment he shares with Janet and Chrissy, Janet builds a booby

trap (which, ironically, consists of several pots and pans strung

together that neither woman ever uses for cooking) underneath

one of the windows that does not lock. When Jack later decides

to return home and climbs through the window because he has

forgotten his key, he trips the trap and causes a commotion.

Chrissy’s dialogue needs no interpretation: “Janet! I think your

trap caught a booby!” (“Jack Moves Out”, May 8, 1979, epi-

sode 319).10 Like Jack, Sam Malone from Cheers, Kramer from

Seinfeld, and Joey Tribbiani from Friends are but unmarried

versions of Tim, with Sam’s predatory libido, Kramer’s playful

mischievousness, and Joey’s charming stupidity unchecked by

the modern woman. Viewers root for these male characters to

win, unlike their emasculated equivalents: gender-enlightened

Al Borland, whom Tim regularly and disdainfully compares to

a wife and mother (see also McEachern, 1999); Cheers patron

and psychiatrist Frasier Crane, who buckles under the thumbs

of know-it-all dilettante Diane Chambers and frigid shrink Li-

lith Stern; Seinfeld-sidekick George Costanza, who escapes the

unpleasant confines of marriage only after his fiancée (at one

time a lesbian) dies; and “friend” (and serial divorcé) Ross Gel-

ler, who finds himself cuckolded by another woman.

Women, wives, and mothers, whether merely nagging or truly

monstrous, threaten to end the modern man’s happiness, tying

him down and freezing the pleasure-driven sitcom narrative.

All hope, however, is not lost for the modern woman, though

it is at best tenuous. There is acknowledgement, whether overt

or subtle, in the more recent top-rated sitcoms regarding the

way both pop culture and society have portrayed women, and

there have been some attempts to change traditional ideals. In a

season eight episode of Roseanne, for instance, Roseanne and

her sister, Jackie, lament while on a road trip how the music of

their generation was largely “guy music” such as “Take a Let-

ter, Maria” (a secretary whom Roseanne says is “getting scre-

wed twice”) and “Baby, Baby, Don’t Get Hooked on Me”,

about a man who tells his female counterpart “don’t get hooked

on me/’Cause I’ll just use you, then I’ll set you free”. Like the

modern woman she is, Roseanne’s response to such a lothario

is: “Use me, I’ll set you on fire, you bastard”. Even Jackie’s

attempt to think of “all those sweet guys, you know, like Dono-

van and, and Jim Croce and The Beatles” ends with a discus-

sion of the main lyric in John Lennon’s “Run for Your Life”:

“I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another

man”. Roseanne and Jackie, of course, immediately consider

female greats such as Janis Joplin, Pat Benatar, Chrissie Hynde,

and Patti Smith and then move on to toying with an “idiot

trucker with the naked woman mud flaps” (“The Getaway,

Almost”, Nov. 14, 1995, episode 807). Unfortunately, this out-

right feminist discourse occurs in Roseanne’s penultimate sea-

son, when it slipped to 16th in national ratings compared to

ninth, fourth, and second in the three years prior (McNeil, 1996;

Nielsen Media Research, 2007).

Seinfeld also attempts to address feminist issues as part of the

show’s commentary on the always inconvenient and often il-

logical rules of society. For example, in an episode in which

Jerry dates a Romanian gymnast who earned a silver medal

inthe 1984 Olympics, Kramer convinces Jerry to pursue a more

intimate relationship with the woman, believing the gymnast’s

flexibility will result in unimaginable sexual pleasure. When

the reality fails to match this male myth, Jerry is saddled with

dating the woman longer than he had planned (a torturous task

limited to conversations about the horrors of Ceauşescu’s dic-

10Paradoxically, labeling modern men as “boobs” not only fails to challenge

the masculine narrative but also manages to usurp some of the feminine and

maternal from women. Jack Tripper, immature and girl-crazy though he

may be, is a culinary student with dreams of becoming a professional chef.

By taking responsibility for all of the cooking, Jack maintains a respected

position in the business world and in the household, simultaneously under-

scoring Janet’s masculinity and undermining her femininity. (Chrissy’s

blatant ineptitude in the kitchen fails to stand out in light of her—as a sex

object who yearns for a traditional relationship—implied receptive aptitude

in the bedroom.) Capable in the realm of men but not in that of women,

Janet’s nondomestic independence borders on the mannish and hints at the

monstrous femininity characters such as Roseanne, Carla from Cheers , and

Elaine from Seinfeld will exhibit. Boob or no, male sitcom characters con-

tinue to work outside of the household, maintaining at least some of the

power that defines traditional masculinity. What does change is their ac-

countability.

9It is not only in Roseanne’s dreams that this role reversal takes place. In

“Somebody Stole My Gal”, Roseanne half-jokingly warns Dan that he can’t

have any cookies “before you’ve had your dinner”, and she forgives him for

failing to fulfill a promise by telling him, “Honey, I’m your wife. I already

hate you” (Oct. 3, 1989, episode 304). In “Guilt by Disassociation”, more-

over, she in not so many words calls her husband fat: As Roseanne readies

herself for a job interview, Dan asks, “What do you know about packing

meat?” Roseanne replies, “Well, I’ve been living with rump roast for 15

years”. She also berates a confused Dan for not knowing where she is going:

ROSEANNE: Now, didn’t we lay in bed for two hours last night

talking about how important this was and now you’re saying,

“Where’re you going?”

DAN: [humorously hanging his head and placing it on Roseanne’s

shoulder] Forgive me. I’m the worst husband who ever lived.

(“Guilt by Disassociation”, Sept. 26, 1989, episode 302)

J. SIMMONS, L. E. RICH

tatorship) in order not to be cast as one of those men Roseanne

and modern women like her would set ablaze. Jerry eventually

discovers, however, that the gymnast was only dating him be-

cause of fables in her country about the sexual prowess of co-

medians, and she ends the relationship when Jerry comes up

short (“The Gymnast”, Nov. 3, 1994, episode 606). Although

this plotline and others in Seinfeld endeavor to even society’s

sexual score, the sitcom remains a story told from a male view:

In “The Gymnast”, Jerry tries to explain to Kramer that there is

always a price to pay for sexual dalliances—whether an esti-

mated three weeks of dating for one night of sex in order not to

be labeled the “bad guy” or embarrassment in being exposed as

a less than sexually satisfying man. Even Elaine, the one main

female character in the sitcom, is treated as “one of the guys”,

and when her femininity is recognized, it is as something in-

herently different. Nowhere is this more obvious than in “The

Contest” (Nov. 18, 1992, episode 411), in which Jerry, George,

and Kramer make a $100 bet to see who can forswear mastur-

bating the longest. When Elaine wants in, the men refuse, ex-

plaining “[i]t’s apples and oranges” and “[i]t’s easier for a

woman not to do it than a man”. They only way the men con-

cede is if Elaine gives them odds, with George demanding a

two-to-one $200 bet and Kramer upping it to $1000. Just like

the gymnast, a modernized Elaine loses the bet after succumb-

ing to primitive sexual desire—working out behind a span-

dex-clad John F. Kennedy Jr. in her aerobics class—suggest-

ing that men and women are essentially the same. This equality

in terms of (sexual) pleasure, however, has its consequences.

When John F. Kennedy Jr. finds out about the bet from Jerry’s

girlfriend, Marla, both Elaine and Jerry pay a price for engaging

in such childish (and stereotypically male) antics: John F. Ken-

nedy Jr. forgoes his date with Elaine to console Marla, who

loses her virginity to him instead of Jerry. (George, the least

“manly” character of the sitcom, is punished from the top of the

show after his overbearing mother catches him in the act and

ends up in the hospital because of it.) Failure to conform to

more traditional gender roles quashes everyone’s pleasure,

other than the virtuous (i.e., virginal) Marla, the quintessentially

masculine John F. Kennedy Jr., and Kramer, the “wild”,

Tim-like character in Seinfeld who makes no apologies for his

self-satisfaction. This motif is repeated in other episodes, in-

cluding “The Couch”, in which Elaine’s stance in favor of abor-

tion rights ruins not only an evening at a popular restaurant but

also Jerry’s couch and Elaine’s own relationship with a very

attractive delivery man (Oct. 29, 1994, episode 605).

Women seem to fare the best as part of an ensemble cast

such as Friends, where stories are told from the perspectives of

all six of the main characters. Moreover, the women, while still

predominantly in charge, are allowed to have fun. Two story

arcs from the season Friends earned the highest Nielsen ratings

focus on the women (although, again, in the more traditional,

domestic spheres): Monica’s marriage to Chandler and Ra-

chel’s unplanned pregnancy with Ross. Friends offers perhaps

the most agreeable depictions of modern marriage and parent-

hood of this sample of sitcoms: Chandler honestly tries to de-

cline having a bachelor party or patronizing a strip club with his

boss; newlywed Monica happily buys her husband porn for

Valentine’s Day; Ross looks forward to being a hands-on father

to his second child out of wedlock; and Rachel could not be

more of an idealized pregnant woman—thin, fashionable, and

desirable for most of the season regardless of her growing belly.

Although more nuanced (and at times more outlandish) in terms

of gender roles than earlier sitcoms, Friends still falls prey to

common sitcom themes. Joey, an actor man-child who cannot

manage much of his own life, beds the most women, while

Chandler and Ross often are emasculated (by Monica and Ra-

chel, among others) despite successful, respectable careers.

(Because of Monica, for example, Chandler knows the names

of several varieties of ribbon. As he offers Phoebe “lace, satin,

sateen, raffia, gingham, [or] felt” to decorate a present, Chan-

dler adds, “and I think my testicles may be in here, too” [“The

One in Massapequa”, March 28, 2002, episode 818].) A female

version of Joey may be found in Phoebe, an adventurous, free-

spirited masseuse who is more sexually aggressive than the

other women. In “The One Where Rachel Has the Baby: Part 1”

(May 16, 2002, episode 823), for instance, Phoebe meets a man

in the hospital where Rachel is about to give birth. Wanting to

find out more before she makes a move, Phoebe asks Joey to

question him. When Joey reports to Phoebe that the man is “not

into anything weird sexually”, Phoebe replies, “Enter Pheebs”.

(Unlike Joey, however, Phoebe, having grown up on the streets,

can take care of herself.) Rachel at times resembles Phoebe

(carefree and sexually forward, as when she hits on Ross prior

to the pregnancy or is overly lustful in her fourth month due to

the hormones) but at times is more like Monica (neurotic and

needing to be in control, such as harping at Ross for his infidel-

ity when they “were on a break” or irritably bossing him around

in the last days of her pregnancy [“The One Where Rachel Is

Late”, May 9, 2002, episode 822]). Ironically, although Ra-

chel’s pregnancy as a single woman is depicted as rather idyllic,

Ross emerges as the most capable parent in the room (at Ra-

chel’s traditional, all-female baby shower). As Rachel frets

about whether she will make a good mother and Rachel’s

mother offers live-in help for the first two months, Ross con-

vinces both women that no assistance is needed: “Look, um,

you know what, even if she [Rachel] doesn’t know anything, I

do. And I’ll be there to show her… The point is, when the baby

comes, I will be there to, to feed her [the baby] and bathe her

and change her. And more than that, I want to do all those

things” (“The One with the Baby Shower”, April 25, 2002,

episode 820).

Interestingly in Friends, mothers are not very maternal. Even

though Rachel’s mom (Marlo Thomas from That Girl) wants to

help with the new baby, she admits that she relied on nannies,

housekeepers, and alimony when her children were young, and

Chandler’s mom (played by Morgan Fairchild) spends most of

Monica and Chandler’s wedding having sex with her date in

one of the hotel bathroom stalls. Throughout the sitcom, more-

over, Monica’s relationship with her mother is marked by the

latter’s unceasing critical disapproval, despite the fact that

Monica is a successful chef, friend, sister, and wife. Like Sein-

feld, Friends tries to paint a more modern picture of the sexes

while poking fun at them simultaneously, but its jokes are bit-

tersweet. For instance, after the gang regretfully watches a

video of an actual birth, Monica exclaims, “Oh, my God! No

wonder my mother hates me!” (“The One with the Birthing

Video”, Feb. 7, 2002, episode 815)

Role Reversal

There are certainly several ways to interpret this data, and an

optimist might argue that shifting mothers from the clownish

housewife in I Love Lucy to the earnest disciplinarian in Home

Improvement represents at least a change and perhaps an im-

J. SIMMONS, L. E. RICH

provement. We contend that this role reversal demonstrates

only a superficial transformation in the communal notions of

femininity and motherhood and, ironically, maintains the long-

standing form of masculine visual pleasure first identified in

Laura Mulvey’s 1975 paper, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative

Cinema”. Mulvey famously argued that visual pleasure in

popular film involves a masculine narrative and that, to date,

this appears to be the only narrative available to cinema-goers,

even if they are women.11 Because the narrative is fundamen-

tally masculine and ultimately concerned with man’s work, his

adventure, and his consumption of objects, women on-screen

represent either a distraction from or a threat to the masculine

narrative. To alleviate this “anti-male” threat, which Mulvey

links to Freudian castration anxiety, the woman must be dis-

armed and either reduced to an object—which has no narrative

of its own—or absorbed into the masculine narrative. Conse-

quently, the masculine narrative presents women with only two

possible roles: that of “The Perfect Product”, the traditional role

of sex object existing on-screen for the sake of the audience’s

(masculine) visual pleasure, or “The Bearer of Guilt”, the ob-

stacle thwarting masculine pleasure that must justifiably be

punished, rescued, or subdued. In the role of “anti-male”, the

woman symbolizes castration and reminds viewers that while

she may be the bearer of children, the bearer of culture, and the

bearer of meaning in a narrative, she is not the maker of any-

thing.

As the traditional sex object, the woman’s visual presence

on-screen “tends to work against the development of a story

line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contem-

plation” (Mulvey, 1992: p. 750). “In herself the woman has not

the slightest importance” (Budd Boetticher quoted in Mulvey,

1992: p. 750). Instead, she is, as Mulvey describes her, the

“perfect product” for man’s consumption, like the “Tool Time”

girl in Home Improvement who plays a part no more substan-

tive than boxing’s bikini-clad ring card girls. In this role the

woman is outside of the narrative; for narrative cohesion, then,

the perfect product may be brought into the story as a fetish that

inspires desire, love, fear, etc., and hence action in the on-

screen hero. While characters such as Chrissy Snow and Elly

May enjoy larger roles than the “Tool Time” girl, it is only for

the sake of the masculine gaze and does not change these

women’s function as the male’s sex-object-to-be-looked-at. In

The Beverly Hillbillies, for example, Mrs. Drysdale’s Ivy Lea-

gue son, Sonny, courts Elly May, openly telling her he is going

to mold the perfect woman, worthy of the perfect man (him-

self):

SONNY: Oh you woodland spirit. You forest little bird.

You are so refreshing after all those intellectual types at

Vassar and Wellesley. You make me feel superior.

ELLY MAY: Is that good?

SONNY: Good? It’s divine. (“Elly’s First Date”, Nov. 21,

1962, episode 9)

Of course, as sex-object-to-be-looked-at, Elly May’s ro-

mance ends immediately so that the primary masculine narra-

tive—the Clampett family’s enjoyment of capitalist consump-

tion in Beverly Hills—may continue.

On the other hand, allowing the woman to be a part the nar-

rative does not bode well for her, either. When not the tradi-

tional sex object, woman must be the “bearer of guilt”, whether

as a loveable Lucy who needs to be rescued and controlled or a

not-so-loveable Jill Taylor who, like Lisa in Alfred Hitchcock’s

Rear Window, is “a drag” (Mulvey, 1992: p. 755). This is ex-

actly what George Costanza discovers in Seinfeld after he in-

tentionally hires a secretary who will not distract him sexually.

Despite her mousy looks, George ends up having sex with her

—in part because of her great organizational skills—and in the

process promises her a raise. He complains to his boss, however,

when he learns that she now makes more than him: “But, Mr.

Steinbrenner, how can I be expected to perform my job prop-

erly knowing that my subordinate is making more than I am?

With all due respect, sir, it’s out of whack” (“The Secretary”,

Dec. 8, 1994, episode 609). There is little difference, then, be-

tween Ms. Hathaway from The Beverly Hillbillies and Geo-

rge’s secretary, who are allowed to transgress conventional

gender roles only at the expense of their fun and/or their femi-

ninity.

After second and during third wave feminism, television

women acquire enough power beyond the private sphere and no

longer require punishment, rescue, or submission. The “bearer

of guilt” or “anti-male” woman, then, as Mulvey has described

her, accrues characteristics that are also “anti-female”, thus

transforming her into something “unnatural”. As a stand-up

comedienne, for example, actress Roseanne Barr became infa-

mous for grabbing her crotch while singing the national anthem.

Failing to meet the culture’s overblown qualifications for sex

object, she is forced to act like a man in order to participate in

the masculine narrative. But acting like a man produces indi-

vidual and cultural consequences for women. Rejecting tradi-

tional marriage roles may result in divorce or spinsterhood (or

even institutionalization!);12 delayed childbearing may lead to

infertility;13 and unchecked sexuality can turn mothers into

monsters. Hence, the fun-loving Phoebe in Friends enters into

motherhood in a nontraditional way, as a surrogate for her

childishly naïve brother and his much older wife. In this same

sitcom, Chandler Bing’s parents represent the “monstrous con-

sequences” of the sexual and gender freedom that feminism has

long sought. Chandler’s mother is depicted as a traditional sex

object but also, because of her active and thus “out of control”

sexual appetite, an absent mother. Chandler’s father, moreover,

is a drag queen, and there is something humorous, yet some-

thing sexist and scandalous, about the attractive and sultry

11This visual pleasure that Mulvey identifies in film with regard to looking

or gazing also is similar in other media, including art and television (Pol-

lock, 1992a, 1992b). In fact, the effect may be more pronounced in televi-

sion, as TV is a more intimate medium that more closely mimics reality:

“The more interesting television characters grow and change over time,

creating layers of depth in their metamorphoses. We may even come to

know these characters better than our own co-workers”. Moreover, the “use

of the story arc in television series helps to create a sense of realism…

Story arcs help create an illusion that the characters have existed before and

continue living between and after episodes” (Porter, Larson, Harthcock, &

ellis, 2002: pp. 23-24). It also may be argued that television shows such as

sitcoms linger in the popular culture longer as many are repeatedly broad-

cast via syndication.

12After Diane leaves Sam at the altar in Cheers, she ends up in a mental

asylum, where she meets Frasier Crane, whom she also later leaves at the

altar. During the course of Seinfeld, moreover, Jerry never seriously asks

Elaine to marry him, and in the series finale, Elaine is sentenced to a year in

prison with her three male partners-in-crime, Jerry, George, and Kramer.

13Monica, one of the more traditional Friends, faces infertility issues in the

final season of the show, although the sitcom makes clear in an even-

handed way that both she and husband Chandler are equally at “fault”.

Since the 19th century, however, American medical literature has linked

“women’s emancipation with their fertility status”, and infertility is often

couched in moral discussions as the “reproductive price of women’s ex-

panded freedoms” (Sandelowski, 1990: p. 476).

J. SIMMONS, L. E. RICH

Kathleen Turner playing a man playing a woman. Friends in-

dicts Chandler’s “improperly gendered” parents—a masculine

mother and, thus, an emasculated father—as responsible for his

neuroses, which marry nicely with wife Monica’s obsessive,

controlling demeanor (stemming from once having been fat,

which in current American culture is equated with the mon-

strous). The ultimate example, however, is Carla from Cheers.

As “one of the guys”, this unmarried but permanently pregnant

waitress pays a price, personally, for emulating the sexual

promiscuity of her boss Sam Malone and, culturally, for joining

the bar’s patrons in harassing and bullying other women (par-

ticularly Diane Chambers and her successor Rebecca Howe).14

Carla, like Roseanne, bears little resemblance to a typical on-

screen sex object. Instead, while raising her children as a work-

ing single mom, she is a misogynist who literally and figura-

tively serves men.

Women in today’s sitcoms, defined by these newer, more

masculine notions of femininity and maternity, threaten to end

men’s adventure and power. By casting and castigating TV

females as anti-male/anti-female abominations, they make lou-

sy role models for women and men (during what is supposed to

be the “family hour”) and ultimately reify patriarchal forms of

viewing pleasure.15

Since the 2001-2002 season of Friends, publicly broadcast

television has yet to produce a sitcom earning the highest Niel-

sen ratings, and some of this may be attributed to the rise of

reality TV. Nonetheless, the notion of women/wives/mothers as

fun-killers has thoroughly infiltrated the collective sitcom con-

sciousness in the 21st century. Shows such as Everybody Loves

Raymond, ’til Death, How I Met Your Mother, Gary Unmar-

ried, and Two and a Half Men play upon this new trope—

woman as man’s worst enemy.16 From this perspective, the role

reversal in 60 years of popular television sitcoms has reversed

neither of the visual dilemmas Mulvey identifies, except that

the bearer of guilt is, like a monster, no longer funny. The sit-

com narrative continues to revolve around masculine pleasure,

and the woman/wife/mother is relegated to serving as either a

sadistic obstacle to or a fetishistic object of this pleasure. Fe-

male characters openly acknowledged this in the 1970s and

1980s. In Three’s Company, Janet abhors being the only re-

sponsible member of the household. “Reliable is dull and dull is

boring and boring’s no fun”, she tells herself. To solve this

problem, however, she and her sex-starved landlady, Mrs.

Roper, decide to join a nude protest on a nearby beach. Appar-

ently, modern women, to avoid being taken for granted and to

recoup their humor and humanity, must turn themselves (back)

into sex objects. As Janet notes, “Let’s go down to that beach

and prove that we’re people, too” (“Good Old Reliable Janet”,

Sept. 19, 1978, episode 301).17

Other feminist theorists have argued for alternatives to Mul-

vey’s framework for spectatorship or that the role of sex object

bestows significant power to the woman. Mary Ann Doane

(1991) suggests that a woman can view rather than be viewed

by deliberately wearing a mask of femininity and assuming a

destabilizing distance between herself and the images on-

screen. This masquerade, Doane maintains, allows the woman

to avoid both masochistically over-identifying with the female

images and narcissistically becoming her “own object of de-

sire”, leaving her in a position to hide from the male gaze (by

deflecting it onto the manufactured identity) and to manipulate

the masquerade for her own gains (Doane, 1991). “[I]n flaunt-

ing femininity” and understanding womanliness as “a mask

which can be worn or removed”, female spectators can “disar-

ticulat[e] male systems of viewing” (Doane, 1991: pp. 25-26).

Carol J. Clover (1992) sees feminine visual pleasure in the “fi-

nal girl” of horror films, where both male and female viewers

identify with the last-standing heroine who overpowers the

serial killer and ends the narrative threat. Doane’s and Clover’s

roles, however, offer viewers fairly bleak options for feminine

or maternal pleasure: hiding from the male gaze (as behind a

veil) or successfully avoiding horrific murder (through a com-

14Elaine from Seinfeld pays a similar price for being one of the guys—and

not just with her incarceration in the series finale. In “The Soup Nazi”, for

example, she is banned from the Soup Nazi’s restaurant for an entire year

after vocally expressing her opinions in public about her soup likes and

dislikes and impersonating Al Pacino’s character from Scent of a Woman

(complete with renditions of the lieutenant colonel’s guttural “hoo-ahs”).

She exacts her revenge, however, when she finds the Soup Nazi’s recipes

and threatens to expose his culinary secrets. Like the modern sitcom woman

she is, her retaliation threatens to end her male pals’ fun. As George ex-

lains: “Elaine’s down there causing all kinds of commotion. Somehow she

got a hold of his reci

es and she says she’s gonna drive him out of business.

The Soup Nazi said that now that his reci

es are out, he’s not gonna make

any more soup. He’s moving out of the country, moving to Argentina! No

more soup, Jerry! No more soup for any of us!” (Nov. 2 1995, episode 706).

15The 1971-1972 season finale of All in the Family, for example, launched

the pilot episode of Maude, a sitcom about a brash, liberated matriarch who

lives with her fourth husband, Walter, and her divorced daughter, Carol, a

single mom (“Maude”, March 11, 1972, episode 224). This episode centers

around Carol’s second wedding—an atypical affair where the mother of the

bride and the bride-to-

e cast marriage and even women in a poor light. As

they discuss how many bridal showers each has thrown for the other, hus-

bands and children emerge as the disposable objects of modern mothers and

wives:

MAUDE: I eloped with your father and with Fred, not Albert.

CAROL: I threw you a shower, and it wasn’t Albert.

MAUDE: Listen to me, in 12 years we have had three showers,

right? So that means you threw me either Albert or Walter because I

threw you Peter and David.

CAROL: I threw you Walter, but you did not throw me Peter and

David, just David.

MAUDE: Four days before you married Peter I threw you a shower.

CAROL: Mother, that’s impossible. Pete and I were living together.

People thought we were already married.

MAUDE: [realizing their calculation mistake] That’s it—it was a

baby shower.

bination of wielding chastity and phallic weaponry).

Gaylyn Studlar (1988) and Camille Paglia (1990) claim that

16Characters in sitcoms about non-Caucasian families seem to fare a little

better, at least in terms of gender portrayals. African-American sitcoms in

the 1990s and beyond may not pigeonhole fathers as incompetent boobs to

the same degree as their Caucasian counterparts, but future research is

needed in this area. Unfortunately, since the turn of the millennium, there

has been a decline in the number of African-American sitcoms and most are

often relegated to Fox, CW (formerly UPN and WB), or cable networks

(Moore, 2008; see also Gillespie, 2006). There are even fewer choices for

Latino, Asian, and other viewers, and these programs do not seem to offer

new forms of viewing pleasure, either. ABC’s The George Lopez Showwas

one option, although its father figure is at times childish and disobedient

and, based in part on Lopez’s life, has a contentious relationship with an

unloving mother. NBC’s Will and Grace, moreover, which depicted non-

heterosexual relationships and ranked in the top 20 during its run, portrayed

Will, a gay man, as the responsible nag (who is repeatedly accused of being

oth fat and a girl) and Grace, a heterosexual woman, as the masculine,

flat-chested, irresponsible slob.

17A similar theme about the nature of “fun” women also can be found in

The Andy Griffith Show. So-called “fun girls” Skippy and Daphne, recur-

ring bit characters who appear in similarly titled episodes such as “Fun

Girls” (April 13, 1964, episode 427) and “The Arrest of the Fun Girls”

(April 5, 1965, episode 528), create trouble for Sheriff Andy Taylor and

Deputy Barney Fife, who must juggle the pleasurable advances of these two

free-spirited women and the not-so-

leasurable dating demands of their

stead

irlfriends.

J. SIMMONS, L. E. RICH

female sexuality sometimes gets the upper hand, as in the case

of the femme fatale (e.g., Marlene Dietrich in the 1930 film

Morocco). We remain dubious of theories that rationalize or

glorify the objectification of women. At best, the femme fatale

suggests to the viewer that some obstacles, or in this case sex

objects, cannot be overcome. In this A Bridge Too Far motif (or

perhaps we should say, “A Woman Too Far”), the woman’s

power manifests as a sex object that resists the male narrative

of conquest—a plot element necessary to maintain the suspense

and realism of the masculine narrative of pleasure—while pre-

serving the sadistic voyeurism of the femme spectacle. At worst,

the femme fatale finds that only by playing the masculine role,

as Dietrich does in Morocco when she puts on a man’s top hat,

ogles a woman in a bar, and then kisses her full on the lips, can

she participate in the narrative of visual pleasure (Smelik,

1999).

Capitalism

The role reversal evident in America’s top sitcoms has left

intact the masculine visual pleasure described by Mulvey

(woman/wife/mother as either perfect product or bearer of

guilt), revealing the mysterious power of capital identified by

Karl Marx that transcends superficial gender roles. As Marx

notes in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,

money has the power to transform “fidelity into infidelity, love

into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, ser-

vant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence

and intelligence into idiocy” (1964: p. 169). In other words,

both power and the masculine narrative of visual pleasure do

not reside with the man. “The major cultural apparatuses are

not patriarchal, therefore, because they are dominated by men”,

art historian and feminist Griselda Pollock explains; “it is rather

that they service masculine fantasies and needs in the conflicts

that human subjectivity and its predominant forms of sexual

difference generate” (1992a: p. 33). These “cultural appara-

tuses” include the structure of visual pleasure operative in tele-

vision’s most-popular sitcoms. For this reason, capital can turn

the hierarchical relationship between men and women on its

head without dismantling oppressive narratives that model the

conditions of capitalist consumption.18

In reversing the roles of intellectual and idiot, women con-

tinue to bear the guilt and now also the responsibility of derail-

ing male pleasure. Men, concomitantly, have been reduced to

the intellectual equivalents of children, seeking gratification in

games and toys (objects of consumption like power tools or

women). When women attempt to escape their role as bearers

of guilt and acquire pleasure, they must do so either by becom-

ing “men” or turning themselves back into sex objects. Like

The Cosby Show, Roseanne represented a small window of

opportunity at the intersection of these role transitions in which

women might have maintained both the humor of Lucy and the

maturity of Home Improvement’s Jill. But in the end, comedi-

enne Roseanne, who successfully doffs the shackles of sex

object, must appropriate masculine behavior (grabbing her cro-

tch on stage and generally representing “macho-feminist feroc-

ity” [Stanley, 2008: p. 190]), thus repeating a patriarchal ten-

dency that Pollock identifies in Degas’ Woman with a Lor-

gnette (1866) and other similar paintings—“[t]he collapse of

the feminine into the monstrous” (1992b: p. 106). So too with

the third possibility in sitcoms: A funny feminism that offers a

more dynamic view of woman/wife/mother stopped being

funny. The fact that female stand-up pioneers such as Roseanne

Barr and Joan Rivers “are now almost as well known for drastic

cosmetic surgery as for comedy is either a cautionary tale or a

very sad punch line” (Stanley, 2008: p. 190).

It seems the woman who wants to be fun and funny must re-

turn to the status of sex object. As Alessandra Stanley argues in

an April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair, the television “industry

demands that they [comedic women] keep growing prettier”, an

assertion bolstered by America’s new funny girls: Sarah Sil-

verman, Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, and Tina

Fey. “With television, it’s just expected that every person be

better-looking”, admits Tina Fey when confronted with her own

beauty (Stanley, 2008: p. 185). Poehler agrees: “For funny la-

dies, we’re attractive” (Stanley, 2008: p. 190). This trend may

help explain why the Parents Television Council (2007) con-

tinues to object to the overt sexuality of sitcoms aired during

the family hour.

Yearning “Beyond the Frame”

While the proliferation of channels has provided room for

alternative modes of visual expression, and no doubt some have

succeeded, mainstream sitcoms have interpreted second and

third wave feminism by portraying women with access to re-

sources such as education, meaningful employment, and power

—within as well as beyond the household—as “fun-killers”. An

increase in civil rights and participation in all forms of capital,

then, has come at a price for television’s woman, simultane-

ously demonized for encroaching into traditionally masculine

roles and held responsible for the childish antics of their male

counterparts.

Today’s top-rated television sitcoms demonstrate a general

failure to transcend oppressive forms of visual pleasure or pro-

duce a third possibility for feminine or maternal pleasure—a

form of pleasure that might also threaten our culture of con-

sumption maintained primarily through advertising. Though

television sitcoms made a clear and distinct effort to transform

the roles of women in the 1970s and 1980s, women in general

and mothers in particular have been left to seek positive ex-

pressions of the feminine and maternal outside of the family

hour. This is nothing new. Simple role reversals do not change

the hierarchies of looking and pleasure. Pollock points out the

woeful inadequacy of similar transformative efforts in art in the

1800s. Pollock finds that Mary Cassatt’s proto-feminist Woman

at the Opera (1879/1880), who gazes from her loge to the stage

off-canvas, is merely left to yearn “beyond the frame” and is

not much of an improvement over Degas’ bug-eyed Woman

with a Lorgnette (1866) and similar pieces. Moreover, Cassatt’s

“imageries of mother and child” such as Marie Looking Up at

the Mother (1897) “are often embarrassingly dismissed, even

by feminist critics, for banality and sentimentality” (Pollock,

18The situational comedy, whether on the radio or television, is, in part,

nothing more than a vehicle for advertising and, at times, an extended

commercial in itself. See Landay (1999) for a discussion of I Love Lucyas a

portrayal of America’s mass consumer culture ideology and the “good life”

understood as the acquisition of commodities. In fact, in “Never Do Busi-

ness with Friends” (June 29, 1953, episode 67), Lucy begs Ricky for a new

washing machine and, in turn, Lucy and Ethel convince Ricky to sell Fred

the old washing machine. When the characters individually discover how

valuable the used washing machine is, each couple surreptitiously attempts

to sell the machine for a profit, regardless of the strife this causes in their

relationships. I Love Lucy, in this episode and others, absolves our capitalist

and consumerist priorities by hiding them behind a morality tale of friend-

ship.

J. SIMMONS, L. E. RICH

1992b: pp. 124-125). It is not surprising that second wave femi-

nism continued this abjection of such maternal notions and

instead opted to concentrate on sexual freedoms: Leaders of the

second wave movement were predominantly middle-class Cau-

casian women who already enjoyed access to prenatal and ob-

stetrical care (Ruzek, Clarke, & Olesen, 1997). Moreover, fo-

cusing on the maternal risks essentialism—womanhood being

equated with deterministic ideas that “woman’s physical struc-

ture and the performance of maternal functions place her at a

disadvantage” (and that “a proper discharge of her maternal

functions” involves “not merely her own health, but the well-

being of the race”), as the US Supreme Court case Muller v.

Oregon (1908: pp. 421-422) concluded. Our six-decade review

of America’s highest-ranked sitcoms underscores the power-

lessness of mainstream television to “conceive a new language

of desire” (Mulvey, 1992: p. 748), leaving woman yearning,

“suspecting that there is more than the social world envisages

for her” (Pollock, 1992b: pp. 123-124).

Acknowledgements

The pilot project that forms the basis of this paper, written in

April 2009, was funded by a 2006 Armstrong Atlantic State

University faculty development award. Final revisions of the

paper were completed as part of a Brocher Foundation visiting

researcher residency in Hermance, Switzerland, in 2011. The

authors also would like to thank all peer reviewers as well as

several colleagues who have provided feedback on multiple

versions of this manuscript.

REFERENCES

Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

Prentice-Hall.

Buzzard, K. (2002). The Peoplemeter wars: A case study of techno-

logical innovation and diffusion in the ratings industry. Journal of

Media Economics, 15, 273-291. doi:10.1207/S15327736ME1504_4

Clover, C. J. (1992). Men, women, and chain saws: Gender in the

modern horror film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Doane, M. A. (1991). Femme fatales: Feminism, film theory, psycho-

analysis. New York: Routledge.

Douglas, S. J. (1995). Where the girls are: Growing up female with the

mass media. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Frazier, J. M., & Frazer, T. C. (1993). “Father Knows Best” and “The

Cosby Show”: Nostalgia and the sitcom tradition. Journal of Popular

Culture, 27, 163-172. doi:10.1111/j.0022-3840.1993.00163.x`

Friedan, B. (1997). The feminine mystique. New York: W.W. Norton &

Company.

Gillespie, F. (2006). Major networks black out African American

comedies. Crisis, 113, 57-58.

Glaser, B. G. (1978). Theoretical sensitivity: Advances in the method-

ology of grounded theory . Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press.

Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded the-

ory: Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago, IL: Aldine Trans-

action.

Griffin, E. (2003). A first look at communication theory (5th ed.). Bos-

ton, MA: McGraw-Hill.

Horsburgh, S., & Wihlborg, U. (2002). Moxie lady. People, 58, 105.

Landay, L. (1999). Millions “Love Lucy”: Commodification and the

Lucy phenomenon. NWSA Journal, 11, 25-47.

doi:10.1353/nwsa.1999.0013

Marx, K. (1964). Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. In

D. J. Struik (Ed.), & M. Milligan (Trans.), New York: International

Publishers.

McEachern, C. (1999). Comic interventions: Passion and the men’s

movement in the situation comedy, Home Improvement. Journal of

Gender Studies, 8, 5-18. doi:10.1080/095892399102788

McNeil, A. (1996). Total television: The comprehensive guide to pro-

gramming from 1948 to the present (4th ed.). New York: Penguin

Books.

Moore, M. L. (2008). The demise of the black sitcom. Starpulse Enter-

tainment News Blog. URL

http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2008/08/13/the_demise_o

f_the_black_sitcom

Mulvey, L. (1992). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In G. Mast,

M. Cohen, & L. Braudy (Eds.), Film theory and criticism: Introduc-

tory readings (pp. 746-757). New York: Oxford University Press.

Napoli, P. M. (2005). Audience measurement and media policy: Audi-

ence economics, the diversity principle, and the local People Meter.

Communication Law & Policy, 10, 349-382.

doi:10.1207/s15326926clp1004_1

Nielsen Media Research (n.d.). Measuring through representative sam-

ples. URL

http://www.nielsenmedia.com/ethnicmeasure/sampling.html

Nielsen Media Research (2007). Prime time top 20 programs [Data file].

The Nielsen Company Web Site, URL

http://www.nielsenmedia.com

Paglia, C. (1990). Sexual personae: Art and decadence from Nefertiti to

Emily Dickinson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Parents Television Council (2007). The alarming Family Hour… no

place for children: A content analysis of sex, foul language and vio-

lence during network television’s Family Hour (executive summary).

URL

http://www.parentstv.org/ptc/publications/reports/familyhour/family

hour-92007-finalPDF.pdf

Pollock, G. (1992a). Degas/images/women; women/Degas/images:

What difference does feminism make to art history? In R. Kendall, &

G. Pollock (Eds.), Dealing with Degas: Representations of women

and the politics of vision (pp. 22-39). New York: Universe.

Pollock, G. (1992b). The gaze and the look: Women with binoculars—

A question of difference. In R. Kendall, & G. Pollock (Eds.), Dealing

with Degas: Representations of women and the politics of vision (pp.

106-130). New York: Universe.

Poniewozik, J. (2002). Color crosses over. Time, 159, 64.

Porter, M. J., Larson, D. L., Harthcock, A., & Nellis, K. B. (2002).

Redefining narrative events: Examining television narrative struc-

ture. Journal of Popular Film and T el e vi s i on , 30, 23-30.

doi:10.1080/01956050209605556

Prior, M. (2009). The immensely inflated news audience: Assessing

bias in self-reported news exposure. Public Opinion Quarterly, 73,

130-143. doi:10.1093/poq/nfp002

Ruzek, S. B., Clarke, A. E., & Olesen, V. L. (1997). Social, biomedical,

and feminist models of women’s health. In S. B. Ruzek, V. L. Ole-

sen, & A. E. Clarke (Eds.), Women’s health: Complexities and dif-

ferences (pp. 11-28). Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Sandelowski, M. J. (1990). Failures of volition: Female agency and

infertility in historical perspective. Signs: Journal of Women in Cul-

ture and Society, 15, 475-499. doi:10.1086/494606

Smelik, A. (1999). Feminist film theory. In P. Cook, & M. Bernink

(Eds.), The cinema book (pp. 353-365). London: British Film Insti-

tute.

Stoddard Jr., L. (1987). The history of People Meters: How we got to

where we are (and why). Journal of Advertising Research, 27, RC-

10-RC-12.

Strauss, A. L., & Corbin, J. M. (1998). Basics of qualitative research:

Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (2nd ed.).

Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Stanley, A. (2008). Who says women aren’t funny? Vanity Fair, 251,

182-191.

Studlar, G. (1988). In the realm of pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich,

and the masochistic aesthetic. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of

Illinois Press.

US Supreme Court (1908). Muller v. Oregon (208 US 412). Washing-

ton, DC.

Wood, J. (1962). Leaders in marketing: Arthur C. Nielsen. Journal of

Marketing, 26, 77-78. doi:10.2307/1248309

上一篇:Decision Making in Internation 下一篇:Analysis on the International

我要分享到：

职称论文发表交流平台！

Feminism Ain’t Funny: Woman as “Fun-Killer,” Mother as Monster in the American Sitcom

最新文章NEWS

推荐期刊Tui Jian

热点文章HOT