Housework and Gender in American Television by Humphreys Kristi Rowan;

Author:Humphreys, Kristi Rowan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books

Figure 3.3 I Dream of Jeannie, Season Two, “How to be a Genie in Ten Easy Lessons,” © CPT Holdings, Inc., Courtesy Sony Pictures Television.

Family Affair (1966–1971)

Family Affair ran for five years on CBS and depicted the life of engineer and bachelor Bill Davis (Brian Keith), his butler Giles French (Sebastian Cabot), and his orphaned nieces and nephew Crissy (Kathy Garver) and twins Jody (Johnny Whitaker) and Buffy (Anissa Jones), whom he is attempting to rear. Family Affair adds another show to what Marc calls “a curious subgenre of domestic comedy . . . built around the principle of synthesizing suburbanesque Anderson-like family situations into urban bachelor households . . .”22 Like My Three Sons and The Andy Griffith Show, this show is lacking a typical mother figure, although Bill is not a widower—he is a bachelor. He chooses to be single. Consequently, the home is a Manhattan apartment and the caretaker, or surrogate mother figure, is an English gentleman butler, Mr. French, who is the very picture of sophistication. He performs all of the housework and begrudgingly in the beginning, the child-rearing too. Whereas this study does not analyze extensively Mr. French’s housework, it is important to include this show in the overall analysis because it introduces an interesting trend. When shows feature a single male living alone, as in Family Affair and later, Diff’rent Strokes and Benson, they have hired help perform the housework, as if television explicitly resists a male character who cleans his own home. However, when a show features one or multiple females living alone or together, as in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Laverne and Shirley, and Golden Girls, they do their own housework without hired help. Upon initial inspection, this fact about televised housework might lead to the conclusion that this is further reinforcement of gender stereotypes, where men are associated with logic and intelligence and women with intuition and domesticity, but the implications are deeper. From the perspective of housework as maternal practice, not as a desire merely to keep a clean house but a desire to preserve life, it would seem visual cultures regard females as desiring the preservation of life more strongly than male characters, and this is further indication of the feminine strength underscored in this study. These ideas will be explored later in many of these shows.

Here’s Lucy (1968–1974)

Here’s Lucy ran on CBS for six years and for a third time, starred Lucille Ball as Lucy Carter, a working single mother, and her two children Kim and Craig, who are played by Lucy’s real-life children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz, Jr. This show’s contribution to representations of housework is significant, as it is one of the first examples not only of an open-floor-plan house, where we can view living room, kitchen, and backyard at once, but also of a messy house. The series opens this way, in fact, with an emphasis on the mess and Lucy’s lack of time as a working mother to clean it alone.

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