TV Family Values

Gender, Domestic Labor, and 1980s Sitcoms

Alice Leppert

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813592695
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

During the 1980s, U.S. television experienced a reinvigoration of the family sitcom genre. In TV Family Values, Alice Leppert focuses on the impact the decade's television shows had on middle class family structure. These sitcoms sought to appeal to upwardly mobile "career women" and were often structured around non-nuclear families and the reorganization of housework. Drawing on Foucauldian and feminist theories, Leppert examines the nature of sitcoms such as Full House, Family Ties, Growing Pains, The Cosby Show, and Who's the Boss? against the backdrop of a time period generally remembered as socially conservative and obsessed with traditional family values.

CHAPTER 1

SELLING MS. CONSUMER

In the early 1980s, U.S. network television was in trouble. Following two consecutive labor strikes and a football strike, compounded by sagging ratings, changing demographics, aging programs, and failed pilots, tides finally began to turn for the networks as they shifted their schedules toward family-oriented situation comedy. This shift was further precipitated by debates over the “family viewing hour” and pressure groups like the Coalition for Better Television, which decried a lack of morality on television. The networks’ financial troubles and their advertisers’ demands for desirable demographics led to an increase in cheaper, profit-driven programming that could attract young adults and children as well as a newly defined “working women” demographic—programming that had the potential to remain in prime time for many seasons while reaping more financial gains in syndication.1

Bob Knight, regular Variety television writer, sounded a whistle in January 1980, claiming that the networks were having trouble figuring out why their previously popular series were losing viewers. He suggested, “The possibility does exist that the mass audience is going through one of those changes in taste that occurs about every five years—and that could put a chill in any programmer at any web as he [sic] tries to fathom where that audience wants to go next.”2 Throughout the early 1980s, networks tried to buoy their failing, long-running sitcoms (Knight lists Happy Days [ABC, 1974–1984], Three’s Company [ABC, 1977–1984], Soap [ABC, 1977–1981], and Taxi [ABC, 1978–1982; NBC, 1982–1983], among others) by pairing them with new sitcoms and launching spin-offs like Joanie Loves Chachi (ABC, 1982–1983) and Benson (ABC, 1979–1986). Variety devoted countless columns to detailing the networks’ ordering of new sitcom pilots;3 in fact, NBC, running last place in the ratings for several consecutive seasons, saw a new emphasis on sitcoms as key to its comeback strategy.4 At the same time, NBC Entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff was quick to note that his 1980–1981 schedule would steer clear of “the standard half-hour sitcom—the one without a big star or a novel concept,” which he thought could be “heading into a declining phase, like the Western some years back.”5 A few critics debated the quality of the newer sitcoms, suggesting they were a far cry from the “edgy” sitcoms of the 1970s. Producer Norman Lear blamed obsession with the bottom line for this perceived “decline” in sitcom quality. Speaking at the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce in 1980, Lear complained that “the content of television comedy is in a state of regression, reminiscent of bland, mindless, unstimulating comedies of the 1950s.”6 Knight also admitted concern that prime-time programming was skewing toward “light-hearted” fare featuring “physically-fit hunks of manhood.”7

These “hunks of manhood” represented one strategy for reaching an upscale women’s audience, provided that they performed a particularly domestic form of masculinity. One marketing study suggested that commercials featuring “male models participating in household tasks” were well received among female consumers.8 Marketers scrambled during the late 1970s and 1980s to define and understand what they perceived as a newly fragmented women’s demographic. Rena Bartos became a prominent voice among advertisers and marketers with a series of articles and her book The Moving Target: What Every Marketer Should Know about Women,9 which divided women into four discrete categories: career working women, just-a-job working women, plan-to-work housewives, and stay-at-home housewives. Bartos’s research, which suggested that the intention or desire to be in the workforce was more important in establishing a woman’s consumer behavior than whether or not she was actually employed outside the home, was taken up in multiple studies and articles in the 1980s.10 In marketing journals, Bartos’s work was mobilized in the hopes of figuring out how to reach the largest number of women. As a 1985 article in the Journal of Advertising Research laments, “No longer do marketers have the luxury of advertising solely to the housewife to reach the majority of the market. In fact, it is not clear today that the dichotomy of the housewife versus the career woman is an appropriate categorization of the changing woman.”11

In 1981, Variety reported, “Housewives favor commercials of women in liberated roles more than commercials of femmes in the more traditional roles of wife and mother.”12 Julie D’Acci cites one advertising executive’s proposed solution to the problem: “Target the ‘professional woman.’ According to [corporate vice president of Colgate-Palmolive Tina] Santi, although professional women were still a small percentage of total working women, they were ‘the conspicuous consumers … the role models [who] have enormous influence on the 41,000,000 women who are wage earners today.’ ”13

Indeed, as Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis found in their audience study of The Cosby Show (NBC, 1984–1992), “Although middle class viewers enjoyed seeing themselves reflected on the screen, most working class or lower middle class viewers simply did not want to see a family that was, in a material sense, more like them.”14 In order to reach these “role model” professional women, television networks produced sitcoms featuring female characters these demographically desirable women could aspire to—successful career women who were emotionally supported by domesticated dads who picked up household chores and childcare without hesitation or complaint. The networks received positive feedback on this trend from the National Commission on Working Women, which praised “ ‘the emergence of men as nurturers as one of the most encouraging signs’ of the fall lineup. ‘Instead of being locked into aggressive roles, some male tv characters on the new fall shows actually care for their children, love their children—and do so without being objects of ridicule,’ the report said.”15 The report noted that 76 percent of female characters on television were working outside the home. Still, sitcom career women maintained many elements of the homemaker image, perhaps so as not to completely alienate a fragment of the women’s market. Thus family sitcoms both managed to appeal to their target market of career women while providing a fantasy of seamless combination of career and family for women who may not have been career women themselves, but who were attracted to the popular media image of the “new woman.” In order to distance themselves from the iconic traditional family sitcoms of the 1950s that loom large in the cultural imagination, 1980s family sitcoms playfully and self-consciously engage with the changing television industry, its place in the American home, and its address to the professional woman and her family.

TARGETING THE “WORKING WOMAN” OF THE 1980S

In the 1970s, marketers struggled to understand what they loosely defined as “working women,” a supposedly new demographic group with enhanced spending power that complicated earlier monolithic notions of the housewife, often known as “Mrs. Consumer.”16 Bartos urged her marketing colleagues to stop conceiving of the women’s market under the common umbrella of “any housewife, eighteen to forty-nine.”17 As Ved Prakash narrates the development of this strand of marketing research, studies began by comparing working and nonworking women,18 then compared women’s political views,19 and finally looked at different types of women’s employment and their attitudes toward their work.20 Many of Prakash’s citations come from the Journal of Marketing’s July 1977 issue, which published eight articles about the importance of finding new ways of marketing to a diversified women’s demographic.21 Barbara Hackman Franklin, then commissioner of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, opened the issue with an editorial that proclaimed, “Marketers, take heed: Consumerism and the women’s movement are strong, active allies that reinforce each other.”22 (Bartos echoes this sentiment in her book, with the pithy aside, “This isn’t women’s lib, it’s marketing lib.”)23 Franklin further suggested that marketers needed to drastically revise their strategies for reaching female consumers, warning that “women no longer find their hopes and dreams in a jar or behind a mop; they can be turned off if you try to tell them they should.”24

In the same issue, Suzanne H. McCall introduced what she termed the “workwife,” whose impact on marketing she deemed “revolutionary.”25 McCall furthered Franklin’s claim, arguing that this vital demographic could not be reached through advertising images of women as housewives or sex symbols. She also warned marketers that the most desirable workwives, those under age fifty-five, rarely looked at newspaper advertisements; rather, two-thirds of them spent their free time watching television.26 McCall sketched the workwife in great detail, describing her influence over family members, her increased purchasing power, and perhaps most importantly, her role as a “trendsetter” who inspires other women to follow in her consumer footsteps.27 The working woman’s spending power created much excitement in many accounts. While women had long been perceived as the primary household consumers, according to many market researchers, working women exercised more independence over big-ticket or luxury items, rather than waiting to consult their husbands.28 These observations made their way into the popular press as well, with the New York Times labeling professional women “free-wheeling spenders”29 and noting that they are “likeliest to have the most disposable income.”30

Bartos suggested that the most important demographic shift that marketers should be aware of was not simply the increase in women with professional careers, but more specifically that the fastest growing segment of married women entering the workforce had young children. Bucking Bartos’s expectations, many mothers opted against delaying their careers until their children started elementary school.31 She considered this statistic to be “the most revolutionary one of all of the demographic facts reported in this chapter. It was so unexpected that it caught some of the pundits in the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other governmental groups by surprise.”32 Suzanne McCall likewise observed that “of the 36 million women in the labor force, some 22.4 million (62.3%) of them are married and wielding consumer power over 78.4 million family members,” further underscoring the desirability of working women with children.33 Of note to the television industry, Bartos found that career women without children watched very little television. In fact, the only television series they reliably watched was Rhoda (CBS, 1974–1978).34 Career women who were married with children watched more television, including a wide range of sitcoms, but Bartos notes that plan-to-work housewives outpaced all other female demographics in television viewership, again suggesting that appealing to the fantasies of women who would like to be in the workforce would be a lucrative strategy for advertisers and television producers. Bartos also charted a significant attitude shift, reporting that in a study conducted by the National Commission on the Observance of International Woman’s Year, “nine out of ten women under thirty-five years of age do not aspire to be ‘mainly a homemaker’ for life.”35 Especially given advertisers’ preferences for younger consumers, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Selling Ms. Consumer
• 2. “I Can’t Help Feeling Maternal—I’m a Father!”: Domesticated Dads and Career Women
• 3. Solving the Day-Care Crisis, One Episode at a Time: Family Sitcoms and Privatized Childcare in the 1980s
• 4. “You Could Call Me the Maid—but I Wouldn’t”: Lessons in Masculine Domestic Labor
• 5. Disrupting the Fantasy: Reagan Era Realities and Feminist Pedagogies
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author