Housework and Gender in American Television: Coming Clean [Paperback]

Housework and Gender in American Television: Coming Clean examines representations of housework and their relationships with gender in sixty of the most popular television shows of the 1950s through the 1980s, searching for trends, similarities, inconsistencies, and meaning. Much of the critical scholarship addressing mid-century televised housework claims that domestic activities marginalize female characters, removing them from scenes involving important familial discussions and placing them in devalued positions. This book challenges the notion that housework functions primarily as a mechanism through which female characters are marginalized, devalued, invisible, or passive, and instead proposes a different reading of housework in television, one that brings to the fore the loving, sacrificial, and active qualities so crucial and foundational to housework activity in both representation and reality. These qualities, in turn, attach a strength to female characters, and male characters when applicable, that is often ignored in standard feminist analyses of television. This study reveals roughly twenty trends established in four decades of televised housework, from the housewives of the fifties, to the witches and genies of the sixties, to the elimination of male domestic labor in the seventies, to the dominance of male housekeepers in the eighties.Kristi Rowan Humphreys is lecturer at Baylor University

Humphreys uses textual analysis and personal experience to examine representations of housework and gender from four decades (1950s80s) of television programs in the US. Humphreys identifies more than 20 trends across these representations, including how 1950s representations of housework and parenting showed both men and women involved in such tasks whereas 1960s70s representations were less egalitarian, how 1970s programs (e.g., The Partridge Family) featuring a single female as the head of a household showed her and children doing household tasks yet programslÓi