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Work, family, and social class in television images of women

Work, family, and social class in television images of women: prime-time television and the construction of postfeminism.

by Andrea Press , Terry Strathman

Fictional television's presentation of women has changed considerably over the course of its history, particularly in the relationship of television women to family and work. The shape of the American family has also changed and as more women have entered the paid labor force, television's depiction of the workplace and the family, and of women's relationship to each, has altered significantly as well.

Alterations in television images have not always paralleled actual shifts in society. Particularly with regard to depictions of women, we can see how social ideologies mediate changes in the real world, the images which become available on television, and viewers' choices of television images to watch. Many assume that viewers' choices reflect their desire for more "realistic" portrayals of a real world, but this is not always the case as shown by discrepancies between real-world changes and television images at corresponding moments in history.

Like other forms both of art and mass culture, popular television images systematically position social groups, issues and institutions within an hierarchical social structure. In the case of women, popular television narratives minimize the problems of contemporary American women as they attempt to carve out new identities for themselves during rapidly changing social realities and expectations. The National Commission on Working Women reported that current television portrayals of women fail to represent the pressures of balancing work with family, finding child care, and stretching family budgets. The study notes that on television, all single mothers are middle-class (or wealthier) and almost half of all families are at least upper middle-class; there are no poor families. In reality, 69% of all homes headed by women are poor, and the annual median income for a family with two working parents in 1990 was just over $30,000. Also, more than half of all television children live with their fathers, who normally experience fewer financial difficulties in single parenthood. Realistically, 90% of all children in single-parent families live with their mothers, whose average annual income is under $9,000.

Popular television reflects a desire to simplify terrains of ideological confusion and contradiction within our society. Some argue (Taylor 1989) that television provides us with fantasy level solutions to pressing social problems, particularly those relating to the disintegration of families and instability of private lives. Other commentators stress the ways in which television misrepresents common social and personal problems, proliferating representations of lives systematically distorted to reflect cultural ideologies (Gitlin 1980; 1983).

In this paper, we discuss some of the changes in television images representing women, work, family, and their interrelationships, placing the discussion in the context of actual changes women's lives have undergone in the television age. Though necessarily abbreviated, this discussion illuminates television's articulation with issues raised in our culture by the feminist movement.

Prefeminist Family Television

Prefeminist fiction television had no shortage of women who were active, insightful and personally courageous; indeed it frequently suggested that women's lives were colored by sex role injustices. At this time, unlike later television narratives, women's social roles as women were dichotomous with the very divergent path they would have to traverse to escape stereotypical destinies as women. Rarely (if ever) were early television women shown to be mature, independent individuals. Extremes, particularly of women, were closely bound up with, and by, others in their family group, mainly their male partners. Family women on early television were pictured almost exclusively in the domestic, or private, realm; rarely did they legitimately venture into the male, public, world of work. Unlike the men in these shows, early television women were often depicted in inextricable solidarity with one another.

The popular middle-class situation comedy show I Love Lucy well illustrates typical qualities of women on early television. Yet I Love Lucy, like other shows on early television, featured a subtext of resistance to many of these conventions. Many plots revolved around Lucy's struggle to escape her circumscribed housewife role to enter the glamorous would of show business. In a typical plot, Lucy manipulates and "schemes" to get a part in a production involving her husband Ricky. Through trickery and deceit, Lucy again and again almost achieves her aim--showbiz fame and glory is almost hers. Yet inevitably Lucy is humbled, and "domesticated." Her schemes fail, usually in a comic denouement. As the show's overt value structure asserts itself, Lucy ends up where she belongs--right back in the bosom of her nuclear family, usually crying in relief at being welcomed back by Ricky and spared the fully disastrous consequences of her mischief.

Most I Love Lucy plots would be inconceivable without Lucy's best friend and sidekick, Ethel Mertz. With Ethel, the conflict moves into the realm of gender vs. gender, instead of being simply a matter of husband vs. wife. The two are constantly together, plotting and executing Lucy's schemes. The usual theme of these plots concerns the women's rebellion against either the expectations or rules laid down by their husbands, Ricky and Fred.

Underneath its comic structure, I Love Lucy can be read as a chronicle of the deep friendship and joint struggle of two women oppressed by the structures of patriarchy. Lucy and Ethel live out Friedan's "feminine mystique" (1963). Their overriding dissatisfaction--and the unifying target of their struggles--is their lack of power in society and in their own families vis-a vis their husbands. Ricky and Fred seek to confine their wives to the domestic, or private realm, and to the reproduction of the realm, so they have "a home to come to" after work. Should Lucy live out her fantasy of working in the public world, or developing her own public life, Ricky suspects that the family's private life would be deeply threatened. This is the primary source of the struggles between the men and the women on the show.

While the men try to protect their private lives by confining their wives, Lucy and Ethel resist. Together they live, create, and recreate a subculture of resistance against the dominant patriarchy as they attempt (usually in vain) to subvert the norms characterizing the dominant culture, represented by their husbands' desires and beliefs. They confide in each other, and generally help each other subvert the desires of the men in their lives, whose interests differ from and conflict with their own. Together Lucy and Ethel engage in a very active sort of resistance against men, a resistance which ironically, in its continual failure, reproduces both their femininity and domesticity.

We might also see this duo serving a vicarious wish fulfillment function for the women watching the show, who might want a partner in crime, or the opportunity to engage in more active forms of resistance themselves, or even for their husbands to rescue them, and return them to the home. Feminist film and media theorists (Arbuthnot and Seneca 1982; Lesage 1982; Press 1986) propose that female film viewers can derive pleasure by reading apparently hegemonic films with a feminist sub-text (or "pre-text") chronicling feminist resistance to the patriarchal hegemony of the main text. Such sub-texts of resistance can be inscribed within narrative structures themselves, through characters that embody purposefully contradictory qualities, or through the use of cinematic techniques, characters' uses of space and nonverbals, all operate alongside the overt narrative of the film (Arbuthnot and Seneca, 1982). Women may identify with these underlying subtexts, thus enjoying films which on the surface seem unlikely to appeal to women. Thus, in I Love Lucy, viewers may consciously or unconsciously discern and identify with a subtext of female bonding and resistance to patriarchal values in the show.

In many respects, Lucy and Ethel resemble Alice and Trixie of The Honeymooners, a successful working-class situation comedy of early television. Although a working-class housewife, Alice shares many predicaments with the middle-class Lucy. Like Lucy, Alice does not usually work outside the home, making her survival depend on her husband's paycheck. She also must put the needs of her husband Ralph before her own. Alice and her best friend Trixie (who also live in the same building) resemble Lucy and Ethel in their very vocal opposition to their husbands Ralph and Norton.

Unlike the middle-class Lucy, however, Alice's horizons are limited in ways presumably typical of the American working-class family. With a bus driver husband, she truly does "go without" in ways television's middle-class characters do not. Alice lives in a bare, stark, two-room apartment with few modern appliances. Money is tight, and Alice watches every penny. Plotlines center on Ralph's desire to spend money on some personal item, and the havoc this causes in the household budget. It is Alice's duty to restrain him from these impulses, becoming the nagging voice of authority, sense, and reason.

Honeymooners episodes typically close when Ralph, after struggling throughout with Alice, recognizes that she has been right all along. His closing line "Baby, you're the greatest!" restores her to the morally superior position in the couple, as belated recognition of her accurate judgement. The phrase is particularly restorative since Ralph's other trademark line, "To the moon, Alice!" is also offered weekly as an attempt to suppress her resistance and to dismiss her advice. The Honeymooners pictures, in early television's most blatant form, the struggle between the sexes, and the myth of female power, Alice and Trixie share many activities and pleasures, but rarely conspire or scheme as do Lucy and Ethel. They don't have to; Alice is so powerful a character that she is able to stand up to Ralph on her own. Ironically, on this show it is Ralph and Norton who conspire--not infrequently against Alice--and in a strange reversal it is Ralph who needs allies in his attempt to subvert the voice of reason which Alice represents.

In one Honeymooners episode, for example, Ralph is laid off from his job as a bus driver. Over Ralph's objections, Alice decides to go to work and lands a job as a typist. Embarrassed that she is working, Ralph becomes jealous as she talks about the other people in her office, all men. When Alice's boss wants her to work one weekend, Ralph insists that they work at home. Upon meeting her boss and watching them work together, Ralph becomes jealous. During their work session, Ralph discovers he will be rehired, and at that moment he violently throws Alice's boss out of the house. Alice is both angry and flattered at Ralph's violent jealousy. Like him, she is glad to return to their customary roles, and seems compensated for her lack of autonomy and worldly power by her power in the family. This episode illustrates the necessity of maintaining a traditional division of labor in the family in early situation comedy shows.

Honeymooners episodes typically focus on conflicts between Ralph and Alice, or between the "girls" and the "guys," usually resolved at the show's conclusion by Ralph's domestication: his admission that he has been childish, and that Alice's advice or desires have been reasonable.

Lucy and Alice differ as characters in important respects. Alice, the real boss in her family, is a powerful figure. In fact, much of the show's humor turns on Ralph's incompetent, arrogant, and bumbling personality. The Kramden family appears as a working-class matriarchy. Husband and wife do not make family decisions collectively; nor is the family truly governed by Ralph, much as he considers himself the family head. Lucy is more childlike than Alice; she is similar to Ralph in this respect, with her resistance trivial in the end. The Honeymooners also illustrates the tendency, continued in modern television, to romanticize working-class women by exaggerating their power and the respect they are given, especially in the family. Alice is the morally superior and powerful one, and in the end Ralph's childlike resistance is always domesticated.

The images of women in I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners converge in the representation of the leading women's friendships and solidarity with one another. Women's solidarity in their conflict with men is shown as the natural order of affairs. Neither show casts any doubt upon women's implicit understanding and unity with one another. At the same time, neither show questions the heterosexual nuclear family even though fraught with internal contradictions. The situation comedy genre depends on maintaining the viewer's beliefs in the indestructibility of the family, which must stay together for the show's continuity. No matter how hostile intergender relations become, the viewer knows that in the end the family will never break apart: All will be successfully resolved, the unity of the family restored (and the show's perpetuity assured) by the show's end.

The Honeymooners presents important contrasts to television's early middle-class family shows. In middle-class shows, family authority lay either with the husband (especially in the case of shows featuring "dingbat" women such as I Love Lucy, Burns and Allen, December Bride, and I Married Joan), or was achieved through a somewhat egalitarian negotiation between both members of the couple (in the suburban family shows such as The Danny Thomas Show, The Dick van Dyke Show, The Donna Reed Show, and Father Knows Best). Working-class families, in contrast, are shown to be governed by strong, decisive females. While both middle-class and working-class family portrayals show tension and struggle between the sexes, these are generally resolved according to the lines of the dominant authority characterizing each class representation.

The contrast between images of the working-class and middle class family raises interesting questions regarding the ideological dimensions of television's interpretations of class, women, and the relationship between the two. Consistently to date, the working class has been underrepresented in family shows. More interesting, a stereotyped working-class family structure displays specific prejudices about sex roles. The working-class family is seen as "matriarchal" as opposed to "patriarchal" or "egalitarian" portrayals of middle class families. In reality however, working-class women have even less power than middle-class women--in their marriages, in society--because they have fewer alternatives to their domestic role. Popular television glorifies working-class life, and the working-class woman's experience in particular.

Television "Feminism"

The second-wave feminist movement of the late sixties/early seventies coincided with a marked change in televised images of women. For one thing, television began to include families broken through death, and later, divorce. Single women also began appearing, or starred in their own shows. Overall, women's portrayals began to include participation in the paid labor force. Often, family and outside work combined in some manner. Family roles still dominated, but television had made some inroads in exposing feminist concerns.

"Feminist" representations on television include shows such as Charlie's Angels, Cagney and Lacey, Hill Street Blues, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and feature strong working women in nontraditional positions. Yet the "feminism" that television elected to portray was narrow and impoverished, a version focusing on situations created by women's new roles in the work force, but giving little hint of the challenges feminism posed to patriarchy. Like other media representations, television fiction focused on stories of individual achievement and success, ignoring the logic and structural demands of feminism. It reversed the feminist maxim that the personal is the political by reducing the political to the personal; women's oppression in the workplace was the result of individual, idiotic bosses, not the expression of a patriarchal system.

Charlie's Angels is a good example of television's ambivalent exploitation of feminist concerns. No doubt, as Brooks and Marsh (1985:156) put it, "sex, pure and simple, seemed to be the principal ingredient in the considerable success of this detective show" as three sexy detectives--the "angels"--appealed to the prurient tastes of male viewers. That their unseen boss controlled and directed the Angels surely added men to the show's audience. "In the male viewer's fantasy, he could be Charlie, ever supervising, ever needed, ever returned-to monopolist of Angels," (Gitlen 1983, 72). Still, women made up the majority of the program's audience. Charlie's Angels had something for everyone: for men, a controlling voyeurism; for women, the opportunity to identify with independent, adventurous, attractive women who had exciting work. "Producer Aaron Spelling appealed at once to elements of the new feminism and its conservative opposition. The Angels were skilled working women and sex objects at the same time" (Gitlin 1983:72--73). In a sense, they promised women it was possible to enjoy the fruits of feminist labors in the workplace, without refuting a patriarchal network of power and desire.

The Mary Tyle Moore Show also focused on situations created by women's new roles in the workforce. While it was less "sexy" than Charlie's Angels, it carried the same dichotomous message. In many ways, the show was a landmark. Mary Richards, an ambitious, attractive single woman in her early thirties has moved to Minneapolis after breaking up with a man she had dated for four years. Mary wants to find a man and raise a family, but the search does not dominate her actions. Her character is serious, warm, and worthy of respect. Mary's independence and level-headedness is appealing; it particularly shines through when compared with the self-deprecating, comic and husband-hungry Rhoda, and the dingbat Phyllis. At work, Mary is extremely competent, working particularly well with her sometimes blustery boss Lou Grant. Along with Charlie's Angles, The Mary Tyler Moore Show is a noteworthy example of what one commentator identified as the spate of "work family" shows that proliferated in late-1970's television (Taylor 1989:110--149). Most Mary Tyler Moore plots revolve around the colleagues at work, who form a sort of "pseudo-family," serving metaphorically as a sort of antidote to the coldness and impersonality of increasingly bureaucratized workplaces, and to the growing instability of associations in our private lives (Taylor). Though single and searching for a husband, Mary is not lonely, because her workplace associates fill in as an effective substitute family. Mary has the problems of many single women, but the most serious, loneliness, financial hardship, unequal treatment at work, and single parent responsibilities, are minimized.

Other popular work-family shows in the late 1970s featured strong women. One, Hill Street Blues, broke new ground with the character of Joyce Davenport, the hard-nosed, no-nonsense public defender. Relentlessly professional, Joyce is intelligent, competent, ambitious, and exceptionally beautiful. Joyce is a "superwoman" of sorts, competent in love as well as work, but her identity is unambiguously focused around work in the public, not the domestic terrain. Alice stars an aspiring singer, the widowed mother of a twelve-year-old boy, who waits tables in a diner while she waits for her big break. The loud and crusty Flo, the naive and quiet Vera, and their grumpy but lovable boss Mel provide a family of sorts for Alice and her son. The female characters here are strong, and many interesting issues about women and work are raised, but few of tension between work and home occur because work is home. The plight of the single woman--in this case, the working class single mother--is minimized.

Television Postfeminism

In the 1980s television images changed once more, in some alarming directions. Women are shown back in the home, and many shows espouse what may be termed postfeminist values, resembling those of the fifties, about women's work and family roles. Television postfeminism retains some aspects characterizing feminist era television, but re-packages them. Women have some version of a work identity, however superficial, alongside their family role. The 'family role' is privileged; or if it is not, that very fact commands narrative attention. Concomitantly, the theme of women's collective resistance is less prominent than in many prefeminist family shows. Perhaps now that the patriarchal family can no longer be taken for granted, television cannot afford to be so cavalier in offering multiple, comic depictions of women's dissatisfactions and rebellions.

To discuss the construction of postfeminism in American television seems strange, as television's "moment of feminism" was brief and equivocal. If we mean by feminism the fairly explicit representation of women's interests as collective interests, rather than the articulation of the rights or abilities of particular women as individuals, then feminism has been virtually nonexistent in all television programming. In the tradition of dominant liberal ideology even the most "feminist" shows emphasize women's success as individuals, not as members of a collective group (Blum 1982 and Press 1986). Our use of the term postfeminism denotes television reassuming its more traditional depiction of family after only the briefest flirtation with feminist representations.

The term "postfeminism" like its fellow, "postmodernism," is an ideological term. Like postmodernism, it attempts to foreclose on the promise of the earlier concept. The term postmodernism implicitly criticizes the universalizing tendency in modernism, and its unbridled faith in progress. Some feminists (Elshtain 1981; Friedan 1981) have used the term postfeminism to signal the recognition that the women's liberation movement of the late '60's and early '70's no longer presents a unified front; that the particular circumstances of race and class are not merely "add-ons" to the central circumstance of being a woman; and that we are in a period where the "fact" of power is felt everywhere, but where the oversimplified attributions of power, whether to men, "the big bosses," or the superpowers no longer offer such immediate and intelligible hope for redress.

Postfeminism is often taken to mean something else as well, something felt quite bitterly by some women of the women's movement. To them it describes the mindset of women who came of age after the heyday of the women's movement and benefitted from the painfully gained social reforms and changed attitudes, but who categorically refuse to call themselves feminists and cling to symbols of women's traditionally "special" status.

The currency of "postfeminism" in this latter sense cannot be understood without reference to the "television feminism" of the late '60s and early '70s. Feminism, as depicted in mainstream media, differed radically from the meaning of feminism within the women's movement. In its most benign form, television feminism promoted an ethic of achievement and success for women who were "making it in a man's world." It avoided the challenges of feminism to private life, to sexuality and to the family. In these realms it usually resorted to traditionalist formulations. The "feminist" that survived was a kind of "woman in a grey flannel suit"--dressed for success but with nothing to go home to. It was to this representation of feminism that Friedan's "postfeminist generation" of young women responded. The mass media first promoted this impoverished version of feminism, then gleefully reported the discontent with that version as "postfeminism."

The mass media have been a leading source for anti-feminist ideas among women, and their attack on feminism has been three pronged. For the most part, the media ignored the women's movement. In Tuchman's terms, this was symbolic annihilation of the women's movement. When collective action was represented, it was largely through pejorative images of "strident" or "wacko" feminists (Tuchman et al. 1978; Baehr 1980; Van Zoonen 1988).

Many of the critical issues raised by feminism made good fodder for the fiction mills. In the second prong of its attack on feminism, the media usurped themes raised by the movement, but represented personalized or individualized solutions as being the most "honest" resolution of a woman's problems. This tendency furthers media annihilation of the women's movement, discouraging as it does any group identity for women. In television, a woman might experience a problem because she was a woman, but she would solve the problem because she was a competent or even superior individual. The solution might occur to her in interaction with others, but in the end, private insight and personal courage offer her a way out.

That television would come to this solution in the representation of women's issues is not surprising given the trajectories of its narrative form, and the histories of its major genres. Fiction and non-fiction television alike represent politics as a function of personality. Yet it is ironic that such "collective" productions as television shows take such an individualist bent.

Finally, mass media's commercial packagings sandwich whatever thin slices of feminism might survive in the finished product between thicker slices of commercial femininity. "Stridently" feminist women such as Maude--rare even in "feminist" television--have all but disappeared, replaced by more "balanced" images. These include highly "feminine" professional women characters, such as Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show, L.A. Law's professionals, and the lead characters of Designing Women. Femininity traditionally conceived, as both glamorous and/or maternal, has returned in network portrayals (was it ever really gone?) and determinedly refutes potentially unconventional, feminist images.

Network controversy over Cagney and Lacey illustrates the network's commitment to commercial femininity even in a show with explicitly feminist themes and values. Cagney and Lacey centers around the adventures of two women police officers, Christine Cagney and Mary Beth Lacey. In a cop show conventional except for the leads, the women combat problems not normally raised in male police shows: sexism; relationships with their fellow officers; reactions of others to their unorthodox work; problems with unemployed husbands, of working mothers; and other issues related to women's lives. Still these crises are usually posed as the problems of the individual rather than women as a group (Taylor 1989:159).

From the beginning, CBS found the series' leading characters lacking in requisite feminine attributes. When ratings were poor, the network blamed the show's feminism: "'[The] Cagney and Lacey characters were too harshly women's lib,' said an unnamed CBS executive in TV Guide, 'too tough, too hard, and not feminine. The American public doesn't respond to the bra burners, the fighters, the women who insist on calling manhole covers peoplehole covers,' he continued. 'I perceived them as dykes'" (quoted in Brooks and Marsh 1985:136). The network forced recasting of Cagney, then played by Meg Foster, by a more "feminine" actress.

Murphy Brown is another interesting case. Here is an autonomous professional woman who in many ways is quite feminist. The attention paid, and fun poked, at precisely these qualities makes this representation more postfeminist than feminist. The show exaggerates Murphy's competence, suggesting such characteristics are funny in a woman, or at the least, threaten those in her company. Murphy Brown presents a series of interesting postfeminist themes. In one episode, for example, Murphy's investigative reporting frees a falsely condemned criminal. Murphy subsequently hires him as her new office manager, but he wreaks havoc throughout the whole office. Murphy expresses her annoyance to him but the rest go out of their way to undermine her behavior and ridicule her harsh words. Even jokes about it being the "wrong time of the month," ensue. All agree he should be fired, but no one wants to do it. They look to Murphy as the only one hard enough to dismiss the nice employee. As it turns out, even she cannot go through with it, although she succeeds indirectly and he reluctantly leaves the office.

Particularly interesting about this episode is the focus of so much of the show's humor on Murphy's "gender-inappropriate" hardness. Were a man in her role, the humor would have to be focused quite differently. Murphy Brown highlights our culture's continuing and perhaps growing discomfort with women of stereotypically "feminist" personalities and roles.

The Cagney and Lacey incident, as well as Murphy Brown's plotline and character, illustrate the complicated interplay between public views about feminism and feminist representation, public expression of those views, and network perceptions of public opinion and responses to those perceptions. The creators of network television images straddle a wobbly fence as they assess how best to appeal to the largest segment of the public while offending as few as possible, especially when treating issues as controversial as feminism in American society (Gitlin 1983; Tuchman et al. 1978).

Postfeminist Family Television

Turning to postfeminist family television, one finds that, while class differences in the representation of family women remain, the theme of women's unity with other women has dropped out of the situation comedy arena, or is at least de-emphasized when compared with prefeminist family programming. For example, neither the working-class Roseanne or the middle-class Clair Huxtable bonds with other women in opposition to their families or husbands.

On the networks, only working-class shows seem capable of escaping the conventions of femininity. Roseanne is exceptional in breaking with television's tendency to emphasize traditionally feminine qualities in portraying women. Overweight, sloppy, unkempt, uncouth, Roseanne fights with her husband, yells at her kids, complains to her boss, bonds noticeably with other working women, and generally thwarts our expectations of proper female behavior.

Yet in some respects Roseanne's image is yet another form of media's romanticized, working-class matriarch. Roseanne controls her family. While her relationship to her husband Dan is much less discordant than was Alice's with Ralph, when conflicts do emerge Roseanne is usually correct. In fact, one of the most interesting features of Roseanne is the image of her husband Dan, a breakthrough--though idealized--for working-class males. According to the strictures of the postfeminist working woman family, Dan is much nicer, more sensitive, and more communicative than were Ralph Kramden, Archie Bunker, and television's other earlier working-class males. Dan contributes to a marked idealization of marriage in this family, which proves how superfluous and unnecessary Roseanne's bonding with other women would be.

Roseanne marks a new era in television's representation of work. The ill-paid, dull, repetitive, demeaning aspects of working-class labor are well presented on this show. Roseanne is often shown at work, where she has fairly close relationships with her fellow workers--almost all women. The gritty depiction of the workplace, however, is balanced by the idealized family life. While her forced overtime and long working hours are shown, their impact is diminished: these conditions are not too much of a problem because husband and kids all pitch in. When Roseanne comes home from work, she sometimes just collapses, leaving husband and kids to fend for themselves.

As feminists have recently noted (Hochschild 1989), most working-class women do not experience similar utopian family situations. The majority of working-class women work a "double-shift" of duties, with relatively little help from their husbands.

Roseanne offers an interesting split in the representations of family and work, corresponding to earlier themes in television's portrayals of the working-class. The show's idealized portrayal of family life contrasts with a more critical depiction of the workplace. This pattern is consistent with postfeminist ideology. Postfeminist thought retains from the feminist movement its ability to confront some of the important issues for women in the workplace; but postfeminism differs from feminism in that it retreats from criticism of the family. In the postfeminist world, traditional family life appears to coexist easily with stereotypically feminist women.

These characteristics are illustrated in an episode where Roseanne and her co-workers are told that there will be mandatory overtime again that evening. Repeated overtime has tired the women who all feel pressured by the demands the overtime has made on their families. The women struggle with their supervisor, but lose and are forced to work late. Roseanne comes home exhausted, unable deal with her noisy household, and asks her husband for permission to get out for a few hours, which he cheerfully gives. She ends up in a late night coffee shop, comparing notes on her life with the waitress, a widowed, older woman, who discusses how much she misses her husband and hates her job. Refreshed by this moment of comraderie, and thankful for what she's got, Roseanne returns home to fall asleep, exhausted, next to her husband.

Here, as in other episodes, Roseanne does connect with other women. At work, she and her co-workers unite in resistance to their unreasonable, unrelenting supervisor. But at home, all is harmony and happiness with her husband, reinforced by the waitress, who misses a husband who made her life of toil worthwhile. Roseanne has a feminist critique of work, and an impressive one for prime-time television; but places the critique alongside a vision of the family that depicts the conflicting interests of men and women in the home as resolved, undercutting many feminist criticisms of the family.

The successful Cosby Show offers yet another example of television postfeminism, this time focused on the middle-class family. An attempt to reclaim the black family in the wake of publicity about its demise, Cosby depicts a peaceful, congenial, happy, and prototypically upper-middle-class "normal" family. Wife Clair Huxtable is wife, mother, and successful lawyer, well illustrating the hegemonic view that families need not change to accommodate working wives and mothers. On this show conflicts between home and family for the working woman barely existed, avoided in part by showing attorney Clair primarily at home, occupied with family tasks, in the postures of stay-at home wives and mothers idealized in the fifties. The husband-wife relationship is consequently shown free from the pull of Clair's professional obligations.

Clair's husband Cliff Huxtable is also an idealized family man. Critics have noted that both wife and husband seem to have a great deal of leisure time to spend on small family problems, even though both occupy prestigious professional positions. An affluent doctor, Cliff still is intimately involved in his family's home life, with time to teach children the day-to-day lessons of growing up. In this respect Cliff Huxtable continues television's tradition of middle-class patriarchy. While he and Clair have a fairly egalitarian relationship, Cliff is at home more than she is; dad's word goes, perhaps because he is home more. This eighties version of patriarchy justifies male rule with an ironic twist of traditional gender roles.

Clair has few woman friends. And an interesting difference between Roseanne and Cosby is that the working-class Roseanne is often shown at work, while Clair's professional workplace remains invisible. Although Roseanne bonds with women at work, neither she nor Clair conspire with other women against their husbands as did prefeminist television characters. Given the vulnerability of modern patriarchal families, is it too threatening for media to continue to picture this fragile entity under constant, gender-related onslaught?

The postfeminist images we've described hint at a cease-fire in yesteryear's battle between the sexes. Alternative family forms increasingly find a forum in the situation comedy television show. Interestingly, old-style female bonding continues to some extent. Images of female solidarity, scarce in postfeminist era family television, seem more permissible in "post-family" television, shows depicting women living (as do increasing numbers) in alternative family forms. Kate and Allie, Golden Girls, and Designing Women along with Murphy Brown are three of the more successful entrants in this genre. In the first three, single women live together to pool the expenses and responsibilities of running a household. Child-rearing and dating may be elements of the formula, but even when marriage factors in, it is usually a minor complication that does not seriously disrupt this female "post-family" form (weekend husbands are one solution).

As with the idealized men in more conventional families of this television era, these female-centered alternative families can be read on one level as an idealized solution to the problems faced by single women. Taylor neatly sums up some major problems of such representations.

Their potential for creating alternative visions...is

undercut or diluted by the level of generality, the

cheery politics of social adjustment, with which fami-

ly change is endorsed even in shows that experiment

self consciously with gender and family roles. With

few exceptions the family comedies of the 1980s are

less genuinely adversarial than those of the early

1970s.... With the sting of divorce, family poverty,

and other problems removed, single parenthood and

stepparenting turn into a romp, a permanent pajama

party. (Taylor 1989:158).

Their continued trivialization of the obstacles real women face undermined the potentially radical depiction of female centered families

Conclusion

Images of women and family in early, prefeminist situation comedy programs differ importantly from those shown in more recent television episodes. New images indicate the influence of postfeminist ideology in the mass media, as in our culture. Postfeminist images show women working for wages in middle-class professions and occasionally in working-class jobs, but highlight women's traditional nurturing roles in the nuclear family. At times, women unite in feminist-type struggles against authorities in the workplace. Yet television's progressive images of work are counterbalanced by its postfeminist images of the family, which idealize the traditional, nuclear form. While television's family women once bonded with other women in common resistance to male authority within their families, this type of female bonding has all but disappeared from current family images. "The battle of the sexes"--a plot standard of prefeminist television--is largely absent from postfeminist programming.

The growing pervasiveness of postfeminist ideology in our culture, as in the mass media, demands attention. Postfeminist thought largely sanctions current treatment of women in the workplace, and holds forth the traditional nuclear family as a societal ideal. Professional and non-professional women, working-class and middle-class, still experience a variety of forms of discrimination in their respective workplaces that television's current representations not only fail to confront, but render invisible. Television does not show female professionals dealing with discrimination that women in professions continue to face, nor facing the "second shift" of housework (Hochschild 1989). If these problems are raised (as in Cagney and Lacey or Thirtysomething) the dilemma becomes a criticism of women's decisions (or needs) to work, rather than critique of a system that demands that women choose work or family exclusively when, realistically, the choice is a myth. Non-professional working women, while also experiencing pressures, face even more crippling discrimination in a workplace which, even in the wake of feminist political efforts, continues to deny them not only equal pay and opportunities for promotion, but equivalent pay for jobs of comparable worth (Kessler-Harris 1989; Blum 1991). By ignoring issues centrally important in structuring the real lives of working women, television glorifies and supports a status quo oppressive for women. Television's stories both comment upon and help to shape our experiences and ideas about the forms our private lives should take. Televisual domesticity merges with our own; if not always accepted, its ideas must be confronted, as we seek to make meaningful our increasingly fragmented domestic experience in this postfeminist age.

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