Cornell University Connections Film Question

The Feminine Mystique: Chapter 1
“The Problem that Has No Name”
Betty Friedan
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of
dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each
suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate
peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night–she
was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question–“Is this all?”
For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in
all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers.
Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire–no greater
destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed
children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a
dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and
act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from
growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or
physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political
rights–the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties
and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought
about them. A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do
was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.
By the end of the nineteen-fifties, the average marriage age of women in America dropped to 20, and was still dropping,
into the teens. Fourteen million girls were engaged by 17. The proportion of women attending college in comparison
with men dropped fro m 47 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1958. A century earlier, women had fought for higher
education; now girls went to college to get a husband. By the mid-fifties, 60 per cent dropped out of college to marry, or
because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar. Colleges built dormitories for “married students,”
but the students were almost always the husbands. A new degree was instituted for the wives–“Ph.T.” (Putting Husband
Through).
Then American girls began getting married in high school. And the women’s magazines, deploring the unhappy statistics
about these young marriages, urged that courses on marriage, and marriage counselors, be installed in the high schools.
Girls started going steady at twelve and thirteen, in junior high. Manufacturers put out brassieres with false bosoms of
foam rubber for little girls of ten. And on advertisement for a child’s dress, sizes 3-6x, in the New York Times in the fall
of 1960, said: “She Too Can Join the Man-Trap Set.”
By the end of the fifties, the United States birthrate was overtaking India’s. The birth-control movement, renamed
Planned Parenthood, was asked to find a method whereby women who had been advised that a third or fourth baby
would be born dead or defective might have it anyhow. Statisticians were especially astounded at the fantastic increase in
the number of babies among college women. Where once they had two children, now they had four, five, six. Women
who had once wanted careers were now making careers out of having babies. So rejoiced Life magazine in a 1956 paean
to the movement of American women back to the home.
In a New York hospital, a woman had a nervous breakdown when she found she could not breastfeed her baby. In other
hospitals, women dying of cancer refused a drug which research had proved might save their lives: its side effects were
said to be unfeminine. “If I have only one life, let me live it as a blonde,” a larger-than-life- sized picture of a pretty,
vacuous woman proclaimed from newspaper, magazine, and drugstore ads. And across America, three out of every ten
women dyed their hair blonde. They ate a chalk called Metrecal, instead of food, to shrink to the size of the thin young
models. Department-store buyers reported that American women, since 1939, had become three and four sizes smaller.
“Women are out to fit the clothes, instead of vice-versa,” one buyer said.
Interior decorators were designing kitchens with mosaic murals and original paintings, for kitchens were once again the
center of women’s lives. Home sewing became a million-dollar industry. Many women no longer left their homes, except
to shop, chauffeur their children, or attend a social engagement with their husbands. Girls were growing up in America
without ever having jobs outside the home. In the late fifties, a sociological phenomenon was suddenly remarked: a third
of American women now worked, but most were no longer young and very few were pursuing careers. They were
married women who held part-time jobs, selling or secretarial, to put their husbands through school, their sons through
college, or to help pay
the mortgage. Or they were widows supporting families. Fewer and fewer women were entering professional work. The
shortages in the nursing, social work, and teaching professions caused crises in almost every American city. Concerned
over the Soviet Union’s lead in the space race, scientists noted that America’s greatest source of unused brain-power was
women. But girls would not study physics: it was “unfeminine.” A girl refused a science fellowship at Johns Hopkins to
take a job in a real-estate office. All she wanted, she said, was what every other American girl wanted–to get married,
have four children and live in a nice house in a nice suburb.
The suburban housewife–she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women
all over the world. The American housewife–freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the
dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about
her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was
respected as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances,
supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of.
In the fifteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished and self-perpetuating
core of contemporary American culture. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the
American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their
stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor.
They baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children’s clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers
running all day. They changed the sheets on the beds twice a week instead of once, took the rughoolag class in adult
education, and pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career. Their only dream was to be
perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and
keep their husbands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the
men to make the major decisions. They gloried in their role as women, and wrote proudly on the census blank:
“Occupation: housewife.”
For over fifteen years, the words written for women, and the words women used when they talked to each other, while
their husbands sat on the other side of the room and talked shop or politics or septic tanks, were about problems with
their children, or how to keep their husbands happy, or improve their children’s school, or cook chicken or make
slipcovers. Nobody argued whether women were inferior or superior to men; they were simply different. Words like
“emancipation” and “career” sounded strange and embarrassing; no one had used them for years. When a Frenchwoman
named Simone de Beauvoir wrote a book called The Second Sex, an American critic commented that she obviously
“didn’t know what life was all about,” and besides, she was talking about French women. The “woman problem” in
America no longer existed.
If a woman had a problem in the 1950’s and 1960’s, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with
herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this
mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never knew
how many other women shared it. If she tried to tell her husband, he didn’t understand what she was talking about. She
did not really understand it herself.
For over fifteen years women in America found it harder to talk about the problem than about sex. Even the
psychoanalysts had no name for it. When a woman went to a psychiatrist for help, as many women did, she would say,
“I’m so ashamed,” or “I must be hopelessly neurotic.” “I don’t know what’s wrong with women today,” a suburban
psychiatrist said uneasily. “I only know something is wrong because most of my patients happen to be women. And their
problem isn’t sexual.” Most women with this problem did not go to see a psychoanalyst, however. “There’s nothing
wrong really,” they kept telling themselves, “There isn’t any problem.”
But on an April morning in 1959, I heard a mother of four, having coffee with four other mothers in a suburban
development fifteen miles from New York, say in a tone of quiet desperation, “the problem.” And the others knew,
without words, that she was not talking about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home. Suddenly they
realized they all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name. They began, hesitantly, to talk about it. Later,
after they had picked up their children at nursery school and taken them home to nap, two of the women cried, in sheer
relief, just to know they were not alone.
Gradually I came to realize that the problem that has no name was shared by countless women in America. As a
magazine writer I often interviewed women about problems with their children, or their marriages, or their houses, or
their communities. But after a while I began to recognize the telltale signs of this other problem. I saw the same signs in
suburban ranch houses and split-levels on Long Island and in New Jersey and Westchester County; in colonial houses in
a small Massachusetts town; on patios in Memphis; in suburban and city apartments; in living rooms in the Midwest.
Sometimes I sensed the problem, not as a reporter, but as a suburban housewife, for during this time I was also bringing
up my own three children in Rockland County, New York. I heard echoes of the problem in college dormitories and
semiprivate maternity wards, at PTA meetings and luncheons of the League of Women Voters, at suburban cocktail
parties, in station wagons waiting for trains, and in snatches of conversation overheard at Schrafft’s. The groping words I
heard from other women, on quiet afternoons when children were at school or on quiet evenings when husbands worked
late, I think I understood first as a woman long before I understood their larger social and psychological implications.
Just what was this problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it?
Sometimes a woman would say “I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete.” Or she would say, “I feel as if I don’t exist.”
Sometimes she blotted out the feeling with a tranquilizer. Sometimes she thought the problem was with her husband or
her children, or that what she really needed was to redecorate her house, or move to a better neighborhood, or have an
affair, or another baby. Sometimes, she went to a doctor with symptoms she could hardly describe: “A tired feeling. . . I
get so angry with the children it scares me . . . I feel like crying without any reason.” (A Cleveland doctor called it “the
housewife’s syndrome.”) A number of women told me about great bleeding blisters that break out on their hands and
arms. “I call it the house wife’s blight” said a family doctor in Pennsylvania. “I see it so often lately in these young
women with four, five and six children who bury themselves in their dishpans. But it isn’t caused by detergent and it isn’t
cured by cortisone.”
Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets.
Or she stays inside her house and cries. Or her children tell her a joke, and she doesn’t laugh because she doesn’t hear it. I
talked to women who had spent years on the analyst’s couch, working out their “adjustment to the feminine role,” their
blocks to “fulfillment as a wife and mother.” But the desperate tone in these women’s voices, and the look in their eyes,
was the same as the tone and the look of other women, who were sure they had no problem, even though they did have a
strange feeling of desperation.
A mother of four who left college at nineteen to get married told me:
I’ve tried everything women are supposed to do–hobbies, gardening, pickling, canning, being very social with my
neighbors, joining committees, running PTA teas. I can do it all, and I like it, but it doesn’t leave you anything to think
about–any feeling of who you are. I never had any career ambitions. All I wanted was to get married and have four
children. I love the kids and Bob and my home. There’s no problem you can even put a name to. But I’m desperate. I
begin to feel I have no personality. I’m a server of food and putter-on of pants and a bed maker, somebody who can be
called on when you want something. But who am I?
A twenty-three-year-old mother in blue jeans said:
I ask myself why I’m so dissatisfied. I’ve got my health, fine children, a lovely new home, enough money. My husband
has a real future as an electronics engineer. He doesn’t have any of these feelings. He says maybe I need a vacation, let’s
go to New York for a weekend. But that isn’t it. I always had this idea we should do everything together. I can’t sit down
and read a book alone. If the children are napping and I have one hour to myself I just walk through the house waiting
for them to wake up. I don’t make a move until I know where the rest of the crowd is going. It’s as if ever since you were
a little girl, there’s always been somebody or something that will take care of your life: your parents, or college, or falling
in love, or having a child, or moving to a new house. Then you wake up one morning and there’s nothing to look forward
to.
A young wife in a Long Island development said:
I seem to sleep so much. I don’t know why I should be so tired. This house isn’t nearly so hard to clean as the cold-water
Hat we had when I was working. The children are at school all day. It’s not the work. I just don’t feel alive.
In 1960, the problem that has no name burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife. In the
television commercials the pretty housewives still beamed over their foaming dishpans and Time’s cover story on “The
Suburban Wife, an American Phenomenon” protested: “Having too good a time . . . to believe that they should be
unhappy.” But the actual unhappiness of the American housewife was suddenly being reported–from the New York
Times and Newsweek to Good Housekeeping and CBS Television (“The Trapped Housewife”), although almost
everybody who talked about it found some superficial reason to dismiss it. It was attributed to incompetent appliance
repairmen (New York Times), or the distances children must be chauffeured in the suburbs (Time), or too much PTA
(Redbook). Some said it was the old problem–education: more and more women had education, which naturally made
them unhappy in their role as housewives. “The road from Freud to Frigidaire, from Sophocles to Spock, has turned out
to be a bumpy one,” reported the New York Times (June 28,1960). “Many young women–certainly not all–whose
education plunged them into a world of ideas feel stifled in their homes. They find their routine lives out of joint with
their training. Like shut-ins, they feel left out. In the last year, the problem of the educated housewife has provided the
meat of dozens of speeches made by troubled presidents of women’s colleges who maintain, in the face of complaints,
that sixteen years of academic training is realistic preparation for wifehood and motherhood.”
There was much sympathy for the educated housewife. (“Like a two-headed schizophrenic . . . once she wrote a paper on
the Graveyard poets; now she writes notes to the milkman. Once she determined the boiling point of sulphuric acid; now
she determine s her boiling point with the overdue repairman….The housewife often is reduced to screams and tears….
No one, it seems, is appreciative, least of all herself, of the kind of person she becomes in the process of turning from
poetess into shrew.”)
Home economists suggested more realistic preparation for housewives, such as high-school workshops in home
appliances. College educators suggested more discussion groups on home management and the family, to prepare women
for the adjustment to domestic life. A spate of articles appeared in the mass magazines offering “Fifty-eight Ways to
Make Your Marriage More Exciting.” No month went by without a new book by a psychiatrist or sexologist offering
technical advice on finding greater fulfillment through sex.
A male humorist joked in Harper’s Bazaar (July, 1960) that the problem could be solved by taking away woman’s right to
vote. (“In the pre-19th Amendment era, the American woman was placid, sheltered and sure of her role in American
society. She left all the political decisions to her husband and he, in turn, left all the family decisions to her. Today a
woman has to make both the family and the political decisions, and it’s too much for her.”)
A number of educators suggested seriously that women no longer be admitted to the four-year colleges and universities:
in the growing college crisis, the education which girls could not use as housewives was more urgently needed than ever
by boys to do the work of the atomic age.
The problem was also dismissed with drastic solutions no one could take seriously,. (A woman writer proposed in
Harper’s that women be drafted for compulsory service as nurses’ aides and baby-sitters.) And it was smoothed over with
the age-old panaceas: “love is their answer,” “the only answer is inner help,” “the secret of completeness–children,” “a
private means of intellectual fulfillment,” “to cure this toothache of the spirit–the simple formula of handling one’s self
and one’s will over to God.”1
The problem was dismissed by telling the housewife she doesn’t realize how lucky she is–her own boss, no time clock,
no junior executive gunning for her job. What if she isn’t happy–does she think men are happy in this world? Does she
really, secretly, still want to be a man? Doesn’t she know yet how lucky she is to be a woman?
The problem was also, and finally, dismissed by shrugging that there are NO solutions: this is what being a woman
means, and what is wrong with American women that they can’t accept their role gracefully? As Newsweek put it (March
7, 1960):
She is dissatisfied with a lot that women of other lands can only dream of. Her discontent is deep, pervasive, and
impervious to the superficial remedies which are offered at every hand…. An army of professional explorers have already
charted the major sources of trouble…. From the beginning of time, the female cycle has defined and confined woman’s
role. As Freud was credited with saying: “Anatomy is destiny.” Though no group of women has ever pushed these
natural restrictions as far as the American wife, it seems that she still cannot accept them with good grace…. A young
mother with a beautiful family, charm, talent and brains is apt to dismiss her role apologetically. “What do I do?” you
hear her say. Why nothing. I’m just a housewife.” A good education, it seems, has given this paragon among women an
understanding of the value of everything except her own worth. . .
And so she must accept the fact that “American women’s unhappiness is merely the most recently won of women’s
rights,” and adjust and say with the happy housewife found by Newsweek: “We ought to salute the wonderful freedom
we all have and be proud of our lives today. I have had college and I’ve worked, but being a housewife is the most
rewarding and satisfying role…. My mother was never included in my father’s business affairs. . . she couldn’t get out of
the house and away from us children. But I am an equal to my husband; I can go along with him on business trips and to
social business affairs.”
The alternative offered was a choice that few women would contemplate. In the sympathetic words of the New York
Times: “All admit to being deeply frustrated at times by the lack of privacy, the physical burden, the routine of family
life, the confinement of it. However, none would give up her home and family if she had the choice to make again.”
Redbook commented: “Few women would want to thumb their noses at husbands, children and community and go off on
their own. Those who do may be talented individuals, but they rarely are successful women.”
The year American women’s discontent boiled over, it was also reported (Look) that the more than 21,000,000 American
women who are single, widowed, or divorced do not cease even after fifty their frenzied, desperate search for a man.
And the search begins early–for seventy per cent of all American women now marry before they are twenty-four. A
pretty twenty-five-year-old secretary took thirty-five different jobs in six months in the futile hope of finding a husband.
Women were moving from one political club to another, taking evening courses in accounting or sailing, learning to play
golf or ski, joining a number of churches in succession, going to bars alone, in their ceaseless search for a man.
Of the growing thousands of women currently getting private psychiatric help in the United States, the married ones
were reported dissatisfied with their marriages, the unmarried ones suffering from anxiety and, finally, depression.
Strangely, a number of psychiatrists stated that, in their experience, unmarried women patients were happier than married
ones. So the door of all those pretty suburban houses opened a crack to permit a glimpse of uncounted thousands of
American housewives who suffered alone from a problem that suddenly everyone was talking about, and beginning to
take for granted, as one of those unreal problems in American life that can never be solved-like the hydrogen bomb. By
1962 the plight of the trapped American housewife had become a national parlor game. Whole issues of magazines,
newspaper columns, books learned and frivolous, educational conferences and television panels were devoted to the
problem.
Even so, most men, and some women, still did not know that this problem was real. But those who had faced it honestly
knew that all the superficial remedies, the sympathetic advice, the scolding words and the cheering words were somehow
drowning the problem in unreality. A bitter laugh was beginning to be heard from American women. They were admired,
envied, pitied, theorized over until they were sick of it, offered drastic solutions or silly choices that no one could take
seriously. They got all kinds of advice from the growing armies of marriage and child-guidance counselors,
psychotherapists, and armchair psychologists, on how to adjust to their role as housewives. No other road to fulfillment
was offered to American women in the middle of the twentieth century. Most adjusted to their role and suffered or
ignored the problem that has no name. It can be less painful for a woman, not to hear the strange, dissatisfied voice
stirring within her.
It is NO longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women. This is not what
being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not
been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough. I do not accept the answer that there
is no problem because American women have luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of; part of the
strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty,
sickness, hunger, cold. The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill. It persists in women
whose husbands are struggling intern and law clerks, or prosperous doctors and lawyers; in wives of workers and
executives who make $5,000 a year or $50,000. It is not caused by lack of material advantages; it may not even be felt by
women preoccupied with desperate problems of hunger, poverty or illness. And women who think it will be solved by
more money, a bigger house, a second car, moving to a better suburb, often discover it gets worse.
It is no longer possible today to blame the problem on loss of femininity: to say that education and independence and
equality with men have made American women unfeminine. I have heard so many women try to deny this dissatisfied
voice within themselves because it does not fit the pretty picture of femininity the experts have given them. I think, in
fact, that this is the first clue to the mystery; the problem cannot be understood in the generally accepted terms by which
scientists have studied women, doctors have treated them, counselors have advised them, and writers have written about
them. Women who suffer this problem, in whom this voice is stirring, have lived their whole lives in the pursuit of
feminine fulfillment. They are not career women (although career women may have other problems); they are women
whose greatest ambition has been marriage and children. For the oldest of these women, these daughters of the American
middle class, no other dream was possible. The ones in their forties and fifties who once had other dreams gave them up
and threw themselves joyously into life as housewives. For the youngest, the new wives and mothers, this was the only
dream. They are the ones who quit high school and college to marry, or marked time in some job in which they had no
real interest until they married. These women are very “feminine” in the usual sense, and yet they still suffer the problem.
Are the women who finished college, the women who once had dreams beyond housewifery, the ones who suffer the
most? According to the experts they are, but listen to these four women:
My days are all busy, and dull, too. All I ever do is mess around. I get up at eight–I make breakfast, so I do the dishes,
have lunch, do some more dishes, and some laundry and cleaning in the afternoon. Then it’s supper dishes and I get to sit
down a few minutes, before the children have to be sent to bed. . . That’s all there is to my day. It’s just like any other
wife’s day. Humdrum. The biggest time, I am chasing kids.
Ye Gods, what do I do with my time? Well, I get up at six. I get my son dressed and then give him breakfast. After that I
wash dishes and bathe and feed the baby. Then I get lunch and while the children nap, I sew or mend or iron and do all
the other things I can’t get done before noon. Then I cook supper for the family and my husband watches TV while I do
the dishes. After I get the children to bed, I set my hair and then I go to bed.
The problem is always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife and never being myself.
A film made of any typical morning in my house would look like an old Marx Brothers’ comedy. I wash the dishes, rush
the older children off to school, dash out in the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in to make a phone call
about a committee meeting, help the youngest child build a blockhouse, spend fifteen minutes skimming the newspapers
so I can be well-informed, then scamper down to the washing machines where my thrice-weekly laundry includes
enough clothes to keep a primitive village going for an entire year. By noon I’m ready for a padded cell. Very little of
what I’ve done has been really necessary or important. Outside pressures lash me through the day. Yet I look upon myself
as one of the more relaxed housewives in the neighborhood. Many of my friends are even more frantic In the past sixty
years we have come full circle and the American housewife is once again trapped in a squirrel cage. If the cage is now a
modern plateglass -and-broadloom ranch house or a convenient modern apartment, the situation is no less painful than
when her grandmother sat over an embroidery hoop in her gilt-end-plush parlor and muttered angrily about women’s
rights.
The first two women never went to college. They live in developments in Levittown, New Jersey, and Tacoma,
Washington, and were interviewed by a team of sociologists studying workingmen’s wives. 2 The third, a minister’s wife,
wrote on the fifteenth reunion questionnaire of her college that she never had any career ambitions, but wishes now she
had. The fourth, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology, is today a Nebraska housewife with three children.. Their words seem
to indicate that housewives of all educational levels suffer the same feeling of desperation.
The fact is that NO one today is muttering angrily about “women’s rights,” even though more and more women have
gone to college. In a recent study of all the classes that have graduated from Barnard College, a significant minority of
earlier graduates blamed their education for making them want “rights,” later classes blamed their education far giving
them career dreams, but recent graduates blamed the college for making them feel it was not enough simply to be a
housewife and mother; they did not want to feel guilty if they did not read books or take part in community activities.
But if education is not the cause of the problem, the fact that education somehow festers in these women may be a due.
If the secret of feminine fulfillment is having children, never have many women, with the freedom to choose, had so
many children in so few years, so willingly. If the answer is love, never have women marched for love with such
determination. And yet there is a growing suspicion that the problem may not be sexual, though it must somehow relate
to sex. I have heard from many doctors evidence of new sexual problems between man and wife–sexual hunger in wives
so that their husbands cannot satisfy it. “We have made women a sex attire,” said a psychiatrist at the Margaret Sanger
marriage counseling clinic. “She has no identity except as a wife and mother. She does know who she is herself. She
waits all day for her husband to come home at night to make her feel alive. And now it is the husband who is interested.
It is terrible for the women, to lie there, night after night, tiny for her husband to make her feel alive.” Why is there such
a market for books and articles offering sexual advice? The kind of sexual orgasm which Kinsey found in statistical
plenitude in the recent generations of American women does not seem to make this problem go away.
On the contrary, new neuroses are being seen among women–and problems as yet unnamed as neuroses–which Freud
and his followers did not predict, with physical symptoms, anxieties, and defense mechanisms equal to those caused by
sexual repression. And strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers
were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework–an inability to endure pain or discipline or
pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life. Educators are increasingly uneasy about the
dependence, the lack of self-reliance, of the boys and girls who are entering college today. “We fight a continual battle to
make our students assume manhood,” said a Columbia dean.
A White House conference was held on the physical and muscular deterioration of American children: were they being
over-nurtured? Sociologists noted the astounding organization of suburban children’s lives: the lessons, parties,
entertainments, play and study groups organized for them. A suburban housewife in Portland, Oregon, wondered why the
children “need” Brownies and Boy Scouts out here. “This is not the slums. The kids out here have the great outdoors. I
think people are so bored. they organize the children, and then try to hook ever’ one else on it. And the poor kids have no
time left just to lie on their beds and daydream.”
Can the problem that has no name be somehow related to the domesroutine of the housewife? When a woman tries to put
the problem into words, she often merely describes the daily life she leads. What is there in this recital of comfortable
domestic detail that could possibly cause such a feeling of desperation? Is she trapped simply by the enormous demands
of her role as modern housewife: wife, mistress, mother, nurse, consumer, cook, chauffeur, expert on interior decoration
child care, appliance repair, furniture refinishing, nutrition, and education? Her day is fragmented as she rushes from
dishwasher to washing machine to telephone to dryer to station wagon to supermarket, and delivers Johnny to the Little
League field, takes Janey to dancing class, gets the lawnmower fixed and meets the 6:45. She can never spend more than
15 minutes on any one thing; she has no time to read books, only magazines; even if she had time, she has lost the power
to concentrate. At the end of the day, she is so terribly tired that sometimes her husband has to take over and put the
children to bed.
Thus terrible tiredness took so many women to doctors in the 1950’s that one decided to investigate it. He found,
surprisingly, that his patients suffering from “housewife’s fatigue’ slept more than an adult needed to sleep -as much as
ten hours a day- and that the actual energy they expended on housework did not tax their capacity. The real problem must
be something else, he decided-perhaps boredom. Some doctors told their women patients they must get out of the house
for a day, treat themselves to a movie in town. Others prescribed tranquilizers. Many suburban housewives were taking
tranquilizers like cough drops. You wake up in the morning, and you feel as if there’s no point in going on another day
like this. So you take a tranquilizer because it makes you not care so much that it’s pointless.”
It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban housewife, the continual demands on her time. But the chains
that bind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit. They are chains made up of mistaken ideas and
misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices. They are not easily seen and not easily shaken off.
How can any woman see the whole truth within the bounds of her own life? How can she believe that voice inside
herself, when it denies the conventional, accepted truths by which she has been living? And yet the women I have talked
to, who are finally listening to that inner voice, seem in some incredible way to be groping through to a truth that has
defied the experts.
I think the experts in a great many fields have been holding pieces of that truth under their microscopes for a long time
without realizing it. I found pieces of it in certain new research and theoretical developments in psychological, social and
biological science whose implications for women seem never to have been examined. I found many clues by talking to
suburban doctors, gynecologists, obstetricians, child-guidance clinicians, pediatricians, high-school guidance counselors,
college professors, marriage counselors, psychiatrists and ministers-questioning them not on their theories, but on their
actual experience in treating American women. I became aware of a growing body of evidence, much of which has not
been reported publicly because it does not fit current modes of thought about women–evidence which throws into
question the standards of feminine normality, feminine adjustment, feminine fulfillment, and feminine maturity by which
most women are still trying to live.
I began to see in a strange new light the American return to early marriage and the large families that are causing the
population explosion; the recent movement to natural childbirth and breastfeeding; suburban conformity, and the new
neuroses, character pathologies and sexual problems being reported by the doctors. I began to see new dimensions to old
problems that have long been taken for granted among women: menstrual difficulties, sexual frigidity, promiscuity,
pregnancy fears, childbirth depression, the high incidence of emotional breakdown and suicide among women in their
twenties and thirties, the menopause crises, the so-called passivity and immaturity of American men, the discrepancy
between women’s tested intellectual abilities in childhood and their adult achievement, the changing incidence of adult
sexual orgasm in American women, and persistent problems in psychotherapy and in women’s education.
If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a matter of
loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone recognizes.
It is the key to these other new and old problems which have been torturing women and their husbands and children, and
puzzling their doctors and educators for years. It may well be the key to our future as a nation and a culture. We can no
longer ignore that voice within women that says: “I want something more than my husband and my children and my
home.”
NOTES
1. See the Seventy-fifth Anniversary Issue of Good Housekeeping, May, 1960, “The Gift of Self,” a symposium by
Margaret Mead, Jessamyn West, et al.
2. Lee Rainwater, Richard P. Coleman, and Gerald Handel, Workingman’s Wife, New York, 1959.
3. Betty Friedan, “If One Generation Can Ever Tell Another,” Smith Alumnae Quarterly, Northampton, Mass.,
Winter, 1961. I first became aware of “the problem that has no name” and its possible relationship to what I
finally called “the feminine mystique” in 1957, when I prepared an intensive questionnaire and conducted a
survey of my own Smith College classmates fifteen years after graduation. This questionnaire was later used by
alumnae classes of Radcliffe and other women’s colleges with similar results.
4. Jhan and June Robbins, “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped,” Redbook, September, 1960.
5. Marian Freda Poverman, “Alumnae on Parade,” Barnard Alumnae Magazine, July, 1957.
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A Simple Guide to Textual Analysis
Textual analysis is a qualitative method, closely linked with cultural studies, used to examine
content in media and popular culture, such as films, television programs, web series, and/or
video games.
Doing close readings yields a description of a moment, a scene or part of a scene, so detailed and
evocative that the reader can understand how your analysis without seeing the media text. By
using that information to elaborate upon, to illustrate and to provide support for your
interpretation/perspectives on the media text, you are doing textual analysis.
Provide TWO detailed examples of textual analysis based on the close of reading of specific
“moments” from your selected media text.
selected.
of exa examples
Below is an example of using textual analysis to show how Black comedy–in particular, Dave
of
Chappelle–offer a biting and hilarious socio-cultural/socio-historical commentary on racial bias
and inequality. First, look at the clip, then read the excerpt from Laughing Mad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75XKGVwGEt4 (Links to an external site.)
Haggins, Bambi. Laughing Mad : the Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America. New
Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 203-204.
The utilization of comic misdirection within the context of casual storytelling to make an incisive
sociopolitical point is the most useful weapon in Chappelle’s discursive arsenal. If one believes
that his most telling commentaries come at the moments when the incisive masquerades as the
outrageous and relatively benign, Chappelle’s routine that begins with the discussion of R.
Kelly’s alleged penchant for water sports, and the legal troubles that followed, is the Trojan
Horse of For What It’s Worth. After briefly engaging in a discussion of Kelly’s actions, which
were caught on tape, Chappelle makes a startling pronouncement :the issue that people should be
discussing is not whether or not Kelly actually “peed” on the girl. “The real issue is how old is
fifteen—that America really needs to decide once and for all.”
In one of the longest stories in the sixty-minute stand-up, Chappelle challenges the audience’s
reactions with multiple instances of comic misdirection, which at each juncture forces more
social (and personal) introspection. Chappelle winds through a discussion of his experiences of
being fifteen—when he had already begun doing stand-up, smoking a little weed, and watching
his friends deal crack—and suggests that “getting pissed on” would not have been what posed
the greatest threat to him. By inserting his own experience as a black teenager in urban America,
Chappelle foreshadows issues of differentiation that will come into play later in the story. He
calls into question why fifteen is seen as such a universally accepted age of innocence in his
discussion of the public’s concern over the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart, who was held for six
months eight miles away from her home. Contrasting the prolonged media frenzy over Smart’s
kidnapping with the virtual silence over the kidnapping of a little black girl, Chappelle recounts,
“During this half a year that [Elizabeth Smart] was missing, there is this seven-year-old
black girl who gets kidnapped in Philadelphia. Nobody knows her name [Erica Pratt] . . .
talked about it on the news two or three times, she shoulda been the top story because she
chewed through the ropes and had both of them motherfuckers in jail in forty-five
minutes. [Moderate applause from the audience.] I’m not making this up.”
In moving from Kelly (and the African American fifteen-year-old) to Smart to Pratt, Chappelle
shifts the conversation from sexual fetish to media and societal culpability over whose
innocence, safety, and story is valued. However, the critique is not complete. Responding to the
audible cooling of the audience, Chappelle addresses the discrepancies between the views of a
child of fifteen by telling the story of another fifteen-year-old black male in Florida, Lionel Tate,
who accidentally killed his neighbor doing the wrestling moves that he’d seen on television.
“Now was he a kid? No. They gave him life—they always try our fifteen-year-olds as adults
[silence from the audience]. . . . If you think it’s okay to give him life in jail, then it should be
legal to pee on ’em, that’s all I’m saying.”
The discursive movement that uses the banal to somewhat titillating Kelly sex scandal as its
beginning and end exemplifies Chappelle’s process of stretching his comedic boundaries. At
multiple points during this sequence he pushes the audience toward discomfort—and
interrogation—thus risking both a degree of his “likability” and the friendly relations he enjoys
with his multicultural audience. Far from opaque, these clear statements about inequity give a
glimpse of the implicit pedagogy that I would argue informs the politics of differentiation in
Chappelle’s comic persona. By forcing audiences to interrogate the interconnectedness of a
multiplicity of factors from daily life, from media, from our own long-held societal
assumptions—about race, class, and ethnicity—Chappelle provokes the audience and puts our
own notions of community, identity, and, of course, race, on the discursive table.
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The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television
Programs
Author(s): George Lipsitz
Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Nov., 1986), pp. 355-387
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656377
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The Meaning of Memory:
Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early
Network Television Programs
George Lipsitz
Program in American Studies
University of Minnesota
Almost every Friday night between 1949 and 1956, millions of Americans
watched Rosemary Rice turn the pages of an old photograph album. With music
from Edvard Grieg’s “Holverg Suite” playing in the background, and with pictures of tur-of-the-century San Francisco displayed on the album pages, Rice
assumed the identity of her television character, Katrin Hansen, on the CBS network program Mama. She told the audience about her memories of her girlhood,
her family’s house on Steiner Street, and her experiences there with her big
brother Nels, her little sister Dagmar, her Papa, and her Mama–“most of all,”
she said, “when I remember that San Francisco of so long ago, I remember
Mama” (Meehan and Ropes 1954).
Katrin Hansen’s memories of her Norwegian immigrant working-class family had powerful appeal for viewers in the early years of commercial network
broadcasting. Mama established itself as one of CBS’ most popular programs during its first season on the air, and it retained high ratings for the duration of its
prime time run (Mitz 1983:458). The show’s popularity coincided with that of
other situation comedies based on ethnic working-class family life-The Goldbergs, depicting the experiences of Jews in the Bronx; Amos ‘n Andy, blacks in
Harlem; The Honeymooners and Hey Jeannie, Irish working-class families in
Brooklyn; Life with Luigi, Italian immigrants in Chicago; and Life of Riley, working-class migrants to Los Angeles during and after World War II.’
The presence of this subgenre of ethnic, working-class situation comedies on
television network schedules seems to run contrary to the commercial and artistic
properties of the medium. Television delivers audiences to advertisers by glorifying consumption, not only during commercial breaks but in the programs them-
selves (Barouw 1979). The relative economic deprivation of ethnic workingclass households would seem to provide an inappropriate setting for the display
and promotion of commodities as desired by the networks and their commercial
sponsors. Furthermore, the mass audience required to repay the expense of network programming encourages the depiction of a homogenized mass society, not
the particularities and peculiarities of working-class communities. As an artistic
medium, television’s capacity for simultaneity conveys a sense of living in an
355
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356 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
infinitely renewable present-a quality inimical to the sense of history p
shows about working-class life. Yet whether set in the distant past like
located in the contemporaneous present, the subgenre of ethnic working
uation comedies in early network television evoked concrete historica
tions and memories in their audiences (Boorstin 1973:392-397).
Anomalous to the commercial and artistic properties of television, th
grams also ran counter to the dominant social trends in the era in which t
made. They presented ethnic families in working-class urban neighbo
the precise historical moment when a rising standard of living, urban
and suburbanization contributed to declines in ethnic and class identit
showed working-class families struggling for material satisfaction and
ment under conditions far removed from the embourgeoisement of the
class celebrated in popular literature about the postwar era. They displa
conflicts about family identity, consumer spending, ethnicity, class, an
roles that would appear to be disruptive and dysfunctional within a com
tions medium primarily devoted to stimulating commodity purchases (
1).
The dissonance between ethnic working-class situation comedies and their
artistic, commercial, and historical surroundings might be explained by the persistence of artistic cliches and the conservatism of the entertainment business.
Though four of these seven television programs previously existed as radio serials, radio popularity did not guarantee adaptation to television: many successful
radio series never made that transition, and television networks actually made
more profit from productions specially created for the new medium (Allen
1985:126, 164; de Cordova 1985). Even when radio programs did become television shows, they underwent significant changes in plot and premise. Television
versions of urban ethnic working-class situation comedies placed more emphasis
on nuclear families and less on extended kinship relations and ethnicity than did
their radio predecessors.3 Those changes reflect more than the differences between television and radio as media: they illuminate as well significant transformations in U.S. society during the 1950s, and they underscore the important role
played by television in explaining and legitimizing those transitions to a mass
audience.
More than their shared history in radio or their reliance on common theatrical
traditions from vaudeville and ethnic theater unites the subgenre of urban ethnic
working-class situation comedies. Through indirect but powerful demonstration,
all of these shows arbitrated complex tensions caused by economic and social
change in postwar America. They evoked the experiences of the past to lend legitimacy to the dominant ideology of the present. In the process they served important social and cultural functions, not just in returning profits to investors or
attracting audiences for advertisers, but most significantly as a means of ideological legitimation for a fundamental revolution in economic, social, and cultural
life.
The Meaning of Memory
In the midst of extraordinary social change, television became the most important discursive medium in American culture. As such, it was charged with
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Table 1.
Program Ethnicity Occupations Location Dw
Mama Norwegian Carpenter San Francisco h
The Goldbergs Jewish Tailor/Small Business Bronx/Long Island apa
Amos ‘n Andy Black Cab Driver/Hustler Harlem apa
The Honeymooners Irish Bus Driver/Sewer Worker Brooklyn a
Life with Luigi Italian Shopkeeper Chicago apar
Life of Riley Irish Machinist Los Angeles duple
Hey Jeannie Scottish/Irish Cab Driver Brooklyn apa
Table 2.
Program Star’s Gender Children Father or Male Lead Mother or Female
Mama Female Three Distant but warm Competent Re
The Goldbergs Female Two Distant but warm Competent
Amos ‘n Andy Male None Irresponsible Hostile Lodg
The Honeymooners Male None Irresponsible Hosti
Life with Luigi Male None Irresponsible Warm
Life of Riley Male Two Incompetent Warm
Hey Jeannie Female None Irresponsible Competent N
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358 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
special responsibilities for making new economic and social relations c
legitimate to audiences haunted by ghosts from the past. Urban ethni
class situation comedies provided one means of addressing the anxieti
tradictions emanating from the clash between the consumer present o
and collective social memory about the 1930s and 1940s.
The consumer consciousness emerging from economic and social
postwar America conflicted with the lessons of historical experienc
middle- and working-class American families. The Great Depression o
had not only damaged the economy, it also undercut the political an
legitimacy of American capitalism. Herbert Hoover had been a natio
the 1920s, with his credo of “rugged individualism” forming the ba
widely shared cultural ideal. But the depression discredited Hoover’s
and made him a symbol of yesterday’s blasted hopes to millions of Am
the 1930s, cultural ideals based on mutuality and collectivity eclipsed t
decade’s “rugged individualism” and helped propel massive union
drives, anti-eviction movements, and general strikes. President Roose
Deal attempted to harness and co-opt that grass roots mass activity in
to restore social order and recapture credibility and legitimacy for t
system (Romasco 1965). The social welfare legislation of the “Se
Deal” in 1935 went far beyond any measures previously favored by
and most of his advisors, but radical action proved necessary for the A
tion to contain the upsurge of activism that characterized the decade.
private sector, industrial corporations made more concessions to work
ked power realities necessitated because they feared the political cons
mass disillusionment with the system (Berger 1982).
World War II ended the depression and brought prosperity, but it
a basis even more collective than the New Deal of the 1930s. Government inter-
vention in the wartime economy reached unprecedented levels, bringing material
reward and shared purpose to a generation raised on the deprivation and sacrifice
of the depression. In the postwar years, the largest and most disruptive strike wave
in American history won major improvements in the standard of living for the
average worker, both through wage increases and through government commitments to insure full employment, decent housing, and expanded educational opportunities. Grass roots militancy and working-class direct action wrested concessions from a reluctant government and business elite-mostly because the public
at large viewed workers’ demands as more legitimate than the desires of capital
(Lipsitz 1981).
Yet the collective nature of working-class mass activity in the postwar era
posed severe problems for capital. In sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts,
workers placed the interests of their class ahead of their own individual material
aspirations. Strikes over safety and job control far outnumbered wage strikes, revealing aspirations to control the process of production that conflicted with capitalist labor-management relations. Mass demonstrations demanding government
employment and housing programs indicated a collective political response to
problems previously adjudicated on a personal level. Radical challenges to the
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THE MEANING OF MEMORY 359
authority of capital (like the 1946 United Auto Workers’ strike dema
increases come out of corporate profits rather than from price hikes
consumers), demonstrated a social responsibility and a commitmen
distributing wealth, rare in the history of American labor (Lipsitz 1
Capital attempted to regain the initiative in the postwar years
qualified concessions to working-class pressures for redistribution o
power. Rather than paying wage increases out of corporate profits, b
ers instead worked to expand the economy through increases in go
spending, foreign trade, and consumer debt. Such expansion could m
mands of workers and consumers without undermining capital’s dom
the economy. On the presumption that “a rising tide lifts all boats
leaders sought to connect working-class aspirations for a better life to
insured a commensurate rise in corporate profits, thereby leaving the d
of wealth unaffected. Federal defense spending, highway constructio
and home loan policies expanded the economy at home in a manner c
the interests of capital, while the Truman Doctrine and Marshall P
models for enhanced access to foreign markets and raw materials fo
corporations. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 banned the class-consciou
activities most threatening to capital (mass strikes, sympathy strike
boycotts); the leaders of labor, government, and business accepted
the practice of paying wage hikes for organized workers out of th
consumers and unorganized workers, in the form of higher prices (L
Commercial network television played an important role in thi
economy, functioning as a significant object of consumer purchases
important marketing medium. Sales of sets jumped from three millio
entire decade of the 1940s to over five million a year during the 195
1980:141). But television’s most important economic function came f
as an instrument of legitimation for transformations in values initiated
economic imperatives of postwar America. For Americans to accept
world of 1950s’ consumerism, they had to make a break with the past
sion years had helped generate fears about installment buying and e
terialism, while the new Deal and wartime mobilization had provoked
about individual acquisitiveness and upward mobility. Depression er
time scarcities of consumer goods had led workers to internalize d
frugality while nurturing networks of mutual support through family
class associations. Government policies after the war encouraged an a
quisitive consumerism at odds with the lessons of the past. At the
federal home loan policies stimulated migrations to the suburbs from
urban ethnic working.class neighborhoods. The entry of television int
ican home disrupted previous patterns of family life and encouraged
tion of the family into separate segments of the consumer market.4
of consumerism in the economy at large and on television may have
ganic and unplanned, but conscious policy decisions by officials from
and public sectors shaped the contours of the consumer economy and
role within it.
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360 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Commercial Television and Economic Change
Government policies during and after World War II shaped the
tours of home television as an advertising medium. Government-s
search and development during the war perfected the technology of
sion while federal tax policies solidified its economic base. The gov
lowed corporations to deduct the cost of advertising from their tax
during the war, despite the fact that rationing and defense production
with few products to market. Consequently, manufacturers kept the n
products before the public while lowering their tax obligations on h
profits. Their advertising expenditures supplied radio networks and
agencies with the capital reserves and business infrastructure that enab
dominate the television industry in the postwar era. After the war, fed
action against the motion picture studios broke up the “network” sys
ies, while the FCC sanctioned the network system in television. In a
decisions to allocate stations on the narrow VHF band, to grant the net
ership and operation rights over stations in prime markets, and to p
on the licensing of new stations during the important years betw
1952 all combined to guarantee that advertising-oriented programm
the model of radio would triumph over theater TV, educational TV,
form (Boddy 1985; Allen 1983). Government decisions, not market
tablished the dominance of commercial television, but these decision
view of the American economy and its needs which had become so w
at the top levels of business and government that it had virtually be
ficial state economic policy.
Fearing both renewed depression and awakened militancy amon
influential corporate and business leaders considered increases
spending-increases of 30% to 50%-to be necessary to perpetuate pr
the postwar era (Lipsitz 1981:46, 120-121). Defense spending for th
and Korean Conflict had complemented an aggressive trade policy to
state of the economy, but it appeared that the key to an expanding eco
in increased consumer spending fueled by an expansion of credit (
Klein 1967; Jezer 1982). Here too, government policies led the way
with regard to stimulating credit purchases of homes and automo
World War II, the marginal tax rate for most wage earners jumped
25%, making the home ownership deduction more desirable. Feder
loan policies favored construction of new single family detached su
ing over renovation or construction of central city multifamily units.
bered home ownership in accord with these policies stimulated const
million new housing units in just twenty years, bringing the percentag
owning Americans from below 40% in 1940 to more than 60% by 19
policies encouraging long term debt and low down payments freed
other consumer purchases, while government highway building pol
mined mass transit systems and contributed to increased demand fo
(Hartman 1982:165-168). Partly as a result of these policies, consum
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THE MEANING OF MEMORY 361
on private cars averaged $7.5 billion per year in the 1930s and 194
to $22 billion per year in 1950 and almost $30 billion by 1955
1983:111).
For the first time in U.S. history, middle-class and working-c
could routinely expect to own homes or buy new cars every few ye
1946 and 1965 residential mortgage debt rose three times as fast as
tional product and disposable income. Mortgage debt accounted for
18% of disposable income in 1946, but it grew to almost 55% by 1
1983:122). In order to insure eventual payment of current debts, the
to generate tremendous expansion and growth, further stimulating th
crease consumer spending. Manufacturers had to find new ways o
consumers to buy ever increasing amounts of commodities, and te
vided an important means of accomplishing that end.
Television advertised individual products, but it also provided a
flow of information and persuasion that placed acts of consumption
everyday life. The physical fragmentation of suburban growth and dec
tion picture attendance created an audience more likely to stay at h
ceive entertainment there than ever before. But television also prov
redefining American ethnic, class, and family identities into consum
In order to accomplish this task effectively, television programs ha
some of the psychic, moral, and political obstacles to consumption
public at large.
The television and advertising industries knew that they had t
these obstacles. Marketing expert and motivational specialist Er
stated that “one of the basic problems of this prosperity is to giv
sanction and justification to enjoy it and to demonstrate that the h
proach to life is a moral one, not an immoral one” (Jezer 1982:127).
on to note the many barriers that inhibited consumer acceptance of
hedonism, and he called on advertisers “to train the average citize
growth of his country and its economy as his growth rather than as
frightening event” (Dichter 1960:210). One method of encouraging
tance, according to Dichter, consisted of identifying new products
consumption with traditional, historically sanctioned practices and
noted that such an approach held particular relevance in addressin
who had only recently acquired the means to spend freely and who
a lingering conservatism based on their previous experiences (Dichte
Insecurities and anxieties among consumers compelled network t
address the complex legacies of the 1930s and 1940s in order to pr
sumption in the 1950s. In the middle of its appeals to change the
present through purchase of the appropriate commodities, commer
television in its early years also presented programs rooted in the h
periences and aspirations of diverse working-class traditions. From t
of the depression era that permeated the world of The Honeymoone
cycled minstrel show stereotypes of Amos ‘n Andy, from the textu
immigrant experience underpinning the drama and charm of The G
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362 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Mama, to the reenactment of immigration in contemporaneous circu
Life of Riley, Life with Luigi, and Hey Jeannie, the medium of the in
newable present turned to past traditions and practices in order to e
legitimate fundamentally new social relations in the present.
Family Formation and the Economy-The Television View
Advertisers incorporated their messages into urban ethnic work
comedies through indirect and direct means. Tensions developed in th
often found indirect resolution in commercials. Thus Jeannnie MacClennan’s
search for an American sweetheart in one episode of Hey Jeannie set up commercials proclaiming the abilities of Drene shampoo to keep one prepared to accept last minute dates and of Crest toothpaste to produce an attractive smile (Hey
Jeannie: “The Rock and Roll Kid”). Conversations about shopping for new furniture in an episode of The Goldbergs directed viewers’ attention to furnishings
in the Goldberg home provided for the show by Macy’s department store in exchange for a commercial acknowledgment (The Goldbergs: “The In-laws”).
But the content of the shows themselves offered even more direct emphasis
on consumer spending. In one episode of The Goldbergs, Molly expresses disapproval of her future daughter-in-law’s plan to buy a washing machine on the
installment plan. “I know Papa and me never bought anything unless we had the
money to pay for it,” she intones with logic familiar to a generation with memories of the Great Depression. Her son, Sammy, confronts this “deviance” by
saying, “Listen, Ma, almost everybody in this country lives above their meansand everybody enjoys it.” Doubtful at first, Molly eventually learns from her children and announces her conversion to the legitimacy of installment buying by
proposing that the family buy two cars so as to “live above our means-the Amer-
ican way” (The Goldbergs: “The In-laws”). In a subsequent episode, Molly’s
daughter, Rosalie, assumes the role of ideological tutor to her mother. When plan-
ning a move out of their Bronx apartment to a new house in the suburbs, Molly
ruminates about where to place her furniture in the new home. “You don’t mean
we’re going to take all this junk with us into a brand new house?” asks an exas-
perated Rosalie. With traditionalist sentiment Molly answers, “Junk’? My furni-
ture’s junk? My furniture that I lived with and loved for twenty years is junk?”
But in the end she accepts Rosalie’s argument-even selling off all her old furniture to help meet the down payment on the new house, and deciding to buy new
furniture on the installment plan (The Goldbergs: “Moving Day”).
Chester A. Riley confronts similar choices about family and commodities in
The Life of Riley. His wife complains that he only takes her out to the neighborhood bowling alley and restaurant, not to “interesting places.” Riley searches for
ways to impress her and discovers from a friend that a waiter at the fancy Club
Morambo will let them eat first and pay later, at a dollar a week plus ten percent
interest. “Ain’t that dishonest?” asks Riley. “No, it’s usury,” his friend replies.
Riley does not borrow the money, but he impresses his wife anyway by taking the
family out to dinner on the proceeds of a prize that he received for being the one-
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THE MEANING OF MEMORY 363
thousandth customer in a local flower shop. Though we eventually lea
Riley only wanted attention, not an expensive meal, the happy endin
isode hinges totally on Riley’s prestige, restored when he demonstrat
to provide a luxury outing for the family (Life of Riley: R228).
The same episode of The Life of Riley reveals another consumeri
common to this subgenre. When Riley protests that he lacks the mon
fulfill Peg’s desires, she answers that he would have plenty if he did
much on “needless gadgets.” His shortage of cash becomes a pers
caused by incompetent behavior as a consumer. Nowhere do we hea
size of his paycheck, relations between his union and his employer,
matter, the relationship between the value of his labor and the wages
by the Stevenson Aircraft Company. Like Uncle David in The Goldb
buys a statue of Hamlet shaking hands with Shakespeare and an elk’s
the Gettysburg address carved on it-Riley’s comic character stems in
a flaw which in theory could be attributed to the entire consumer
preoccupation with “needless gadgets.” By contrast, Peg Riley’s des
evening out is portrayed as reasonable and modest-as reparation due
inevitable tedium of housework. The solution to her unhappiness, o
comes from an evening out rather than from a change in her own w
stances. Even within the home, television elevates consumption over
production is assumed to be a constant-only consumption can be va
more than enjoyment is at stake: unless Riley can provide her with
night on the town, he will fail in his obligations as a husband (Life of
The Goldbergs: “Bad Companions”).
A similar theme provides the crisis in an episode of Mama. Dag
youngest child, “innocently” expresses envy of a friend whose fathe
promotion and consequently put up new wallpaper in his house. “W
Papa get promoted?” Dagmar chirps, “Everyone else does.” Whe
plains that a carpenter makes less money than other fathers, Dagma
wouldn’t be smarter for Papa to work in a bank. Overhearing this d
decides to accept his boss’ offer to promote him to foreman, even
knows it will ruin his friendships with the other workers. The logic of
instructs us that fathers will lose their standing if they disappoint th
desires for new commodities (Mama: “Mama and the Carpenter”
ploring tensions between family obligations and commodity purchas
assert that money cannot buy love, but they seem less clear about whet
trade material wealth for affection. Even the usually self-absorbed K
Amos ‘n Andy gives in to his nephew Stanley’s wish for “a birthday
lots of expensive presents,” while Jeannie MacClennan’s search for r
fers a setback when a prospective suitor sees her shabby apartment w
quated furniture (Amos ‘n Andy: ‘Andy the Godfather’; Hey Jeannie
and Roll Kid”). On The Goldbergs, a young woman is forbidden to m
man she loves because, her mother says, “I didn’t raise my daughter t
er’s wife” (The Goldbergs: “Die Fledermaus”); and Alice Kramden in
eymooners can always gain the upper hand in arguments with her
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364 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
pointing to his inadequacies as a provider. In each of these programs,
choices close the ruptures in personal relations, enabling the episode t
rative and ideological closure.
One episode of Mama typifies the confusion between consumer
and family happiness pervading urban ethnic working-class situation
early network television. “Mama’s Birthday,” broadcast in 1954, del
tensions between family loyalty and consumer desire endemic to mo
ist society. The show begins with Mama teaching Katrin to make Nor
tato balls, the kind she used long ago to “catch” Papa. Unimpressed
complishment, Katrin changes the subject and asks Mama what she wa
upcoming birthday. In an answer that locates Mama within the gender r
1950s she replies, “Well, I think a fine new job for your Papa. You
to marry nice young men and have a lot of wonderful children-just
And Nels, well, Nels to become president of the United States” (Mee
Ropes 1954). In one sentence Mama has summed up the dominant cu
sion of legitimate female expectations: success at work for her husban
and childrearing for her daughters, the presidency for her son-and
herself.
But we lear that Mama does have some needs, although we do no
from her lips. Her sister, Jenny, asks Mama to attend a fashion show
cannot leave the house because she has to cook a roast for a guest wh
invited to dinner. Jenny comments that Mama never seems to get
kitchen, adding that “it’s a disgrace when a woman can’t call her soul
and “it’s a shame that a married woman can’t have some time to herself.” The
complaint is a valid one, and we can imagine how it might have resonated for
women in the 1950s. The increased availability of household appliances and the
use of synthetic fibers and commercially processed food should have decreased
the amount of time women spent in housework, but surveys showed that homemakers spent the same number of hours per week (51 to 56) doing housework as
they had done in the 1920s. Advertising and marketing strategies undermined the
potential of technological changes by upgrading standards fo cleanliness in the
home and expanding desires for more varied wardrobes and menus for the average
family (Hartmann 1982: 168). In that context, Aunt Jenny would have been justified in launching into a tirade about the division of labor within the Hansen
household or about the possibilities for cooperative housework, but network television specializes in a less social and more commodified dialogue about problems
like housework: Aunt Jenny suggests that her sister’s family buy her a “fireless
cooker”-a cast iron stove-for her birthday. “They’re wonderful,” she tells
them in language borrowed from the rhetoric of advertising. “You just put your
dinner inside them, close ’em up, and go where you please. When you come back
your dinner is all cooked” (Meehan and Ropes 1954). Papa protests that Mama
likes to cook on her woodburning stove, but Jenny dismisses that objection with
an insinuation about his motive, when she replies, “Well, I suppose it would cost
a little more than you could afford, Hansen” (Meehan and Ropes 1954).
By identifying a commodity as the solution to Mama’s problem, Aunt Jenny
unites the inner voice of Mama with the outer voice of the sponsors of television
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THE MEANING OF MEMORY 365
programs. Mama’s utility as an icon of maternal selflessness would
mised if she asked for the stove herself, but Aunt Jenny’s role in su
gift removes that taint of selfishness while adding the authority of an
pert. Aunt Jenny’s suggestion of hypocrisy in Papa’s reluctance to bu
encourages the audience to resent him for not making enough money
see his poverty as a form of selfishness-denying his wife the comfo
In reality, we know that Aunt Jenny’s advice probably contains the
tions of advertising claims, that even if the fireless cooker enabled
where she pleased while dinner cooked, it would bring with it differ
tasks and escalating demands. But in the fantasy world of televisio
siderations do not intervene. Prodded by their aunt, the Hansen child
ping and purchase the fireless cooker from a storekeeper who calls t
“the new Emancipation Proclamation-setting housewives free from
kitchen range” (Meehan and Ropes 1954). Our exposure to advertising
should not lead us to miss the analogy here: housework is compared
and the commercial product takes on the aura of Abraham Lincoln. Th
er’s appeal convinces the children to pool their resources and buy th
Mama. But we soon learn that Papa plans to make a fireless cooker for
his tools. When Mama discovers Papa’s intentions she persuades the
buy her another gift. Even Papa admits that his stove will not be as eff
one made in a factory, but Mama nobly affirms that she will like his b
he made it himself. The children use their money to buy dishes for
Katrin remembers the episode as Mama’s happiest birthday ever (M
Ropes 1954).
The stated resolution of “Mama’s Birthday” favors traditional values.
Mama prefers to protect Papa’s feelings rather than having a better stove, and the
product built by a family member has more value than one sold as a commodity.
Yet the entire development of the plot leads in the opposite direction. The “fireless cooker” is the star of the episode, setting in motion all the other characters,
and it has unquestioned value even in the face of Jenny’s meddlesome brashness,
Papa’s insensitivity, and Mama’s old-fashioned ideals. Buying a product is unchallenged as the true means of changing the unpleasant realities or low status of
women’s work in the home.
This resolution of the conflict between consumer desires and family roles
reflected television’s social role as mediator between the family and the economy.
Surveys of set ownership showed no pronounced stratification by class, but a clear
correlation between family size and television purchases: households with three
to five people were most likely to own television sets, while those with only one
person were least likely to own them. (Swanson and Jones 1951). The television
industry recognized and promoted its privileged place within families in advertisements like the one in the New York Times in 1950 that proclaimed, “Youngsters today need television for their morale as much as they need fresh air and
sunshine for their health” (Wolfenstein 1951). Like previous communications
media, television sets occupied honored places in family living rooms, and helped
structure family time; unlike other previous communications media, they dis-
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366 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
played available commodities in a way that transformed all their ent
into a glorified shopping catalogue.
Publicity about television programs stressed the interconnections
family and economy as well. Viewers took the portrayals of motherh
shows so seriously that when Peggy Wood of Mama appeared on the G
Show and asked for questions from the audience, women asked for a
raising their families, as if she were actually Mama, rather than an actr
that role (TV Guide 1954:11). The Ladies Home Journal printed an a
taining “Mama’s Recipes,” featuring photographs of Peggy Wood, w
trude Berg wrote an article as Molly Goldberg for TV Guide that con
recipes for borscht and blintzes. “Your meal should suit the mood of
band,” Berg explained. “If he’s nervous give him a heavy meal. If he
salad will do” (Ladies Home Journal 1956:130-131; TV Guide 1953A:7
on the shows also ignored the contradictions between their on-stage a
roles. Actress Marjorie Reynolds told TV Guide that she enjoyed pla
Chester A. Riley, because “I’ve done just about everything in films fro
to no-voice musicals, and now with the Riley show, I’m back in the
Where every wife belongs” (TV Guide 1953B:17).
The focus on the family in early network television situation com
volved a special emphasis on mothers. Images of long-suffering but lo
ers pervaded these programs and publicity about them. Ostensibly rep
of “tradition,” these images actually spoke to a radical rupture with t
establishment of the isolated nuclear family of the 1950s with its a
changes in family gender roles. The wartime economic mobilization
the depression stimulated an extraordinary period of family formation
sharp contrast to the experience of preceding decades. Americans ma
frequently, formed families at a younger age, and had more children
than they had in the 1920s and 1930s (Hartmann 1982:164-165). The
tion of permissive recommendations for childrearing and social chang
to increases in consumer spending isolated mothers as never before.
viously shared with extended kinship and neighbor networks now had
by machines, at home in isolation. Childrearing took up more time a
sibility, but inflation and expanded consumer desires encouraged wom
outside the home for pay. When the conflicting demands of permissiv
guilt and feelings of inadequacy, outside authorities-from child psyc
television programs-stood ready to provide “therapeutic” images
maternal behavior.
While placing special burdens on women, changes in family identity in the
postwar era transformed the roles of all family members. As psychoanalyst Joel
Kovel demonstrates, the decomposition of extended kinship networks made the
nuclear family the center of the personal world, “a location of desire and intimacy
not previously conceptualized” (Kovel 1978:13-14). Kovel argues that participation in civil society can keep…
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