Sitcoms worked to naturalize woman’s place in the home, and, as the Leonard review quoted above indicated, at the time of All in the Family‘s debut, sitcoms depicting women within familial settings were still a dominant form. The significance of the shift from this premise was underscored by the career trajectory of Brady Bunch that moved from playing an exemplary goodwife in The Dick Van Dyke Show for most of the 1960s to the consummate career woman of the 1970s, a fact noted in press coverage of All in the Family. All in the Family expanded the limited parameters of the single adult woman comedy, which, although existent since the beginning of television, was hardly a dominant form in the way that domestic sitcom was. At the very least, All in the Family liberated single-woman sitcoms from narratives dominated by husband hunting.
That media coverage ultimately functioned to divide the women’s movement into “legitimate feminism and illegitimate feminism” that, generally, followed the divide between liberal, reformist feminism and radical feminism calling for cultural transformation. The arguments purporting to demonstrate the existence of public discrimination against women received, by and large, more sympathetic treatment in the press. Wage disparity, discriminatory laws, and the low percentage of women in certain professions were easily documented with statistics, were understandable in terms of basic American values like equal opportunity, and were located in the public sphere, which reporters saw as the realm where legitimate news resided. The critique of sex roles, the patriarchal family, and the false consciousness created by the mythology of romance and heterosexuality were treated with much more scepticism and, often, outright ridicule. These issues were associated with the “angry” and “militant” radical feminists who were depicted as «ugly, humourless, disorderly man-haters desperately in need of some Nair” (Janet, 1992).
That Leave It to Beaver achieved solid popularity through its pairing with the most explicitly relevant sitcom of the 1970s, All in the Family, underscores the extent to which relevance became associated, both then and now, with situation comedy. It completes the pattern of the classic father and child problem-solving plot familiar from Leave It to Beaver. The child has a problem and goes to the father, who tells the child to do the right thing, which the child intuitively knows she should do anyway. With the advice and pressure of the parent, the child overcomes her reluctance, does what is required, and the situation is resolved happily, reaffirming the wisdom of the father.
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Sexism in Sitcoms: Leave it to Beaver
Leave it to Beaver has received substantial attention from television scholars. These discourses include popular understandings of second-wave feminism encouraged by media coverage of feminist activity, the generic parameters and functions of situation comedy, and the history of television representations of women. Leave it to Beaver is a fitting «baseline» example because of its popularity, longevity, and resonance in American cultural memory. Leave it to Beaver created important parameters for future television discourse representing feminism, parameters that include a focus on working women (and a concomitant avoidance of a critique of the traditional patriarchal family), the depiction of women’s lives without male romantic partners, the enactment of a ‘feminist lifestyle’ by young, attractive, white, heterosexual, female characters, and a reliance on the tenets of second-wave liberal or equity feminism (Janet, 1992).
However, at the same time that they note the popularity and importance of Brady Bunch as the generator of a new representational space for female audiences, television critics and historians take care to note the ways in which Brady Bunch offered a very qualified feminist vision that blended discourses of the ‘new woman’ – working and living on her own outside of the confines of past domestic sitcoms – with traditional messages about the need for women to continue fulfilling traditional female roles as caretakers and nurturers in the cobbled together ‘family’ of the workplace. The combination in these sitcoms of girl-next-door sweetness and old-fashioned attachment to honesty and integrity, on the one hand, and spunky New Woman, on the other, allows such sitcoms as Leave it to Beaver and All in the Family to ride the currents of social change, endorsing modernity at the same time as it hallows tradition.’ Through her functions as mother, daughter, and sister within her work-family, a journalist becomes the career “True Woman” as a television producer who nonetheless retains the equable charm and mediating skills of the well-brought-up girl (Fraiman, 1999). The appeal of such a character might lie in the fact that this is a difficult reconciliation to pull off in life, and therefore it is very satisfying – for men as well as women – to see on the small screen.
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Sexism in Sitcoms
This article discuses, analyzes and compares the feminism-related TV sitcoms of 1950-70s with current sitcoms. Both groups of sitcoms are focused on the life of thirtieth, unmarried, working women and their network of friends and co-workers in USA. Their authors were described by reviewers and critics as an example of original programming both during and after its seven seasons on TV. The claim to originality was based, among other things, on production factors, such as its status as the first of a series of highly successful programs that would be created by its parent companies, on its contribution to the situation comedy format as an exemplar of the move from domestic or home-based situations to situations based in the workplace, and on its social sensitivity and timeliness as a program focused on the life of a career-oriented, single woman.
One of the most popular journalist-author of sexism-related sitcoms is Mary Tyler Moore. Mary Tyler Moore is generally acknowledged as the first popular and long-running television series clearly to feature the influence of feminism. Although the show’s creators consistently claimed that Mary Tyler Moore was about character, not politics (an implied contrast to All in the Family), writer-producer James Brooks observed that «we sought to show someone from Mary Richards’ background being in a world where women’s rights were being talked about and it was having an impact». Mary Tyler Moore was not the first working-woman sitcom (Fraiman, 1999). Yet it is generally acknowledged as the first to assert that work was not just a prelude to marriage, or a substitute for it, but could form the center of a satisfying life for a woman in the way that it presumably did for men. This was, perhaps, the most consistent and explicit pro-feminist statement made by the sitcom.
Another such sitcom is Brady Bunch. Other «single woman on her own» programs that followed Brady Bunch would take this basic theme in different, more progressive directions, but the shadow of Brady Bunch hangs over them. Brady Bunch was not just innovative, it was also tremendously successful. It launched three spin-offs and is still popular in syndication almost twenty years after it left prime-time. The television producers recognized the power of its formula is evident in the numerous attempts to duplicate its premise throughout the 1960s and 1970s and in the fact that Brady Bunch still serves as a standard, or starting point, against which progressive television representations of women are judged, at least in popular media (Butler, 1993).
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