Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America by Lynn Spigel

Author:Lynn Spigel [Spigel, Lynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology, Marriage & Family, Media Studies, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9780226769639
Google: qAkwAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0226769674
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-11-26T06:00:00+00:00

An angry housewife comes between her husband and another woman in this 1953 Collier’s cartoon.

In this 1951 Better Homes and Gardens cartoon, private and public amusements are divided along gender lines. (Courtesy Meredith Corp.)

Similar plots involved young girls whose loneliness was metaphorically represented through their relationship to television. Perhaps most melodramatic in this regard is the film version of Marty (1955), which shows the homely Clara who sits with her parents watching Ed Sullivan as she waits longingly for a call from her beau. In 1952, Colgate dental cream used this dilemma as a way to sell its product. An advertisement that ran in Ladies’ Home Journal showed a young woman sitting at home watching a love scene on her television set, complaining to her sister “All I do is sit and view. You have dates any time you want them, Sis! All I get is what TV has to offer.”⁷³ Of course, after she purchased the Colgate dental cream, she found her handsome dream date. Thus, as the Colgate company so well understood, the surrogate universe that television offered posed its own set of problems. For even if television programs promised to transport women into the outside world, it seems likely that women recognized the discrepancy between the domestic isolation television perpetuated and the imaginary sense of social integration its programming constructed.

In 1955, the working-class comedy, The Honeymooners, dramatized this dilemma in the first episode of the series, “TV or Not TV” As described in chapter 4, this program took as its central theme the installation of a television set into the Kramden household. The narrative was structured upon the contradiction between television’s Utopian promise of increased social life and the dystopian outcome of domestic seclusion. In an early scene, Alice begs her husband to buy a television set:

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