Housework and gender in American television : coming clean / Kristi Rowan Humphreys.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Humphreys, Kristi Rowan, 1977- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Families on television.

Women on television.

Housewives--United States.

Housewives.

Housekeeping.

United States.

Housekeeping--United States.

Television programs--United States.

Television programs.

Physical Description:

xi, 169 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., [2016]

Summary:

Housework and Gender in American Television: Coming Clean examines various representations of housework and their relationships with gender in sixty of the most popular television shows of the 1950s through the 1980s, searching for trends, similarities, inconsistencies, and meaning. Much of the critical scholarship addressing mid-century televised housework claims that domestic activities marginalize female characters, removing them from scenes involving important familial discussions and placing them in devalued positions. This book challenges the notion that housework functions primarily as a mechanism through which female characters are marginalized, devalued, invisible, or passive, and instead proposes a different reading of housework in television, one that brings to the fore the loving, sacrificial, and active qualities so crucial and foundational to housework activity in both representation and reality. These qualities, in turn, attach a strength to female characters, and male characters when applicable, that is often ignored in standard feminist analyses of television. This study reveals roughly twenty trends established in four decades of televised housework, from the housewives of the fifties, to the witches and genies of the sixties, to the elimination of male domestic labor in the seventies, to the dominance of male housekeepers in the 1980s. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction

Televised housework in the 1950s

Televised housework in the 1960s

Televised housework in the 1970s

Televised housework in the 1980s

Conclusions.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780739192528

0739192523

OCLC:

920453721