Wesleyan University The Honors College Women on the Move: Representation and Gender Change in the Sitcom by Regen Routman Class of 2016 A thesis (or essay) submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in American Studies Middletown, Connecticut April, 2016 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 2 Introduction 3 1. Containment & Contradiction in the Domestic Sitcom 9 I Love Lucy (1951-1957), The Donna Reed Show (1958-1966), Bewitched (1964-1972), Roseanne (1988-1997), and The Mindy Project (2012—) 2. Liberation & Lifestyle Feminism in the Workplace Sitcom 44 The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), 30 Rock (2006-2013), and Parks and Recreation (2009-2015) 3. Single Women & Sisterhood in the Friendship Sitcom 74 Sex and the City (1998-2004), Girls (2012—), and Broad City (2014—) Conclusion 108 Bibliography 111 1 Acknowledgments I have a small army of people to thank for their part in helping me finish this thesis. I truly never believed that I would make it all the way to the acknowledgments stage of this writing process, and I probably wouldn’t have if not for the patient, unending support of the people listed below. My thesis is dedicated all of you. To my parents, who have done so much for me I don’t even know where to begin. Thank you for bearing with me through my various stress-related breakdowns and emotional outbursts, for all of your encouragement and help, and for raising me on only “quality television” and good movies—I quite literally never would have written this thesis without the love of culture you’ve instilled in me, from Seinfeld to I Love Lucy and beyond. To my thesis advisors, Professor Clawson and Professor Traube - Professor Clawson, thank you for all your help in forming the structure of this thesis, and for guiding my thinking and my research during the first part of this process. Betsy, I am so endlessly grateful for everything you’ve done for me, from your endless patience with me to your incredible edits (at the last minute! I can’t thank you enough). This thesis would not have come together without your invaluable guidance. To the beautiful (thesiscrazed) ladies of 105 Cross, Mara, Becca, and Helen, for their advice, emotional support, venting sessions, and everything else. We’ve worked so hard this semester and I’m so proud of us I could literally burst—we did it! Thank you for everything, from helping me with my laptop troubles to letting me ramble to McDonalds runs and dinner cooking and generally being amazing. I’m so happy to live in the best house with the best women around. To the alum Trolls of 60 Home, Michael, Ariane, and Siri (and friend of the house Eliza), for giving me thesis-writing inspiration and showing me that it could be done, among many other things. To my Hocka-girlies (now Hocka-women?), for supporting me via group text message and generally dealing with my sleep-deprived mind— you’ve been my girl gang from day one, and I’m so proud to call you my friends. To Nick, for putting up with my ramblings and stressed-out nonsense and generally being the Best. To the many amazing teachers I’ve had in my life, at Hockaday and here at Wesleyan, for helping me grow as a writer and thinker, for challenging me, and for shaping me as a person. And to everyone else: the Wesleyan ITS department for fixing my computer and broken spirit in the midst of this thesis process, the friends that sent me encouraging texts and Snapchats and let me ramble on at them in the Weswings line, the many people I have no doubt forgotten (my apologies). 2 Introduction Television’s representations of women are related to women’s lives in a number of complex ways. As Julie D’Acci has written, “The tight interweaving of institutional constrains and women’s ‘lived experience,’ of [television’s] construction of femininity and women’s understanding of themselves as women, are impossible to pick apart.”1 Many have noted television’s ability to reinforce and reconfigure social norms, helping shape our ideas about who we are, how we should behave, and how we should conceive of each other and of ourselves, especially when it comes to gender. But television is not machine for reproducing dominant ideology; as a popular cultural medium its products are charged with contradictions and complications, and involves a multilevel process of continual negotiation. D’Acci has advocated for an “integrated approach” to analyzing television and gender, one that considers (or at least acknowledges) the medium’s four interrelated spheres: production (the making, marketing, and distribution of TV), reception (viewers’ practices and identities), content (the narrative and stylistic strategies of television programs), and social/historical context.2 Television is constantly changing as it responds to changing social and cultural as well as industrial conditions; to examine only one sphere, without acknowledging any others, would provide a highly lopsided view of a complex phenomenon. TV’s ongoing negotiations are particularly visible when it comes to how women and femininity have been represented over the course of television history. The industry’s early days and the installation of television in 1 Julie D’Acci, Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney & Lacey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 204. 2 D’Acci, “Television, Representation, and Gender,” in The Television Studies Reader, eds. Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill (London: Routledge, 2004), 376. 3 American homes over the late 1940s and early 1950s, coincided with a reversal of long-term socio-historical trends. In what became known as the postwar “domestic revival,” women (especially white, middle-class women) withdrew from or never joined the paid workforce and were confined to the home and to narrow gender roles; although for many postwar women the new family life was fraught with uncertainty and ambivalence, not until the next decade would these discontents be articulated in the second-wave feminist movement. As we will see, however, they also found covert expression in television representations that celebrated fulltime female domesticity. Out of TV’s many genres, the situation comedy is uniquely positioned to engage with gender relations and woman’s roles in public and private life. At least since the nineteenth-century ideology of the True Woman, women and femininity have been culturally associated with (and constrained by) ideas of domesticity, family, and the home, of relationships and the private sphere; sitcoms have similar associations, as a genre initially designed for family viewing. Joanne Morreale has written that, by structuring their narratives around relationships in the home, workplace, and/or community, sitcoms “express the ideological tensions that mark particular social and historical moments.”3 Serafina Bathrick makes a similar point: “It is woman who provides situation comedy with its capacity to mediate historical change through its representation of both the family and the familial.”4 We can gain an understanding of the relationship between the sitcom and gender and social changes by examining the shifting portrayals of women in woman-driven sitcoms, 3 Joanne Morreale, ed. Critiquing The Sitcom: A Reader (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), xi. 4 Serafina Bathrick, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Women at Home and at Work,” in Critiquing The Sitcom, ed. Morreale, 156. 4 which I define here as a half-hour length program that centers on a woman or group of women, one that intends to elicit laughter (or similar emotional responses) from its viewers. Woman-driven sitcoms can be found in a number of the form’s subgenres and often blend multiple generic traditions or stylistic strategies. In thinking about changes in female representation, I will explore this category as it has been materialized in three subgenres that have been shaped by changes in women’s lives, as well as by changes in formal and industrial practices, and in industrial constructions of television audiences: the domestic or family-centered sitcom, the workplace comedy, and the “friendship” (or “gang”) comedy. Though the idea that “television mirrors society” is a commonly held truism, D’Acci asserts that this platitude is inaccurate because “TV itself… is utterly selective about what it chooses to represent and how.”5 The body of woman-driven sitcoms throughout television history provides a clear illustration of TV’s selectivity in representation. Though there are naturally several significant exceptions, the vast majority of woman-driven sitcom narratives feature female protagonists who are young (generally in their thirties), white, educated, middle-class, and heterosexual. And, of course, most of these characters are conventionally attractive. Despite new industrial emphasis on “diversity” in recent years (mostly regarding race, sexuality, and body types), sitcom characters remain persistently homogenous. Consequently, my discussion of female representation will be mostly restricted to white, middle- class women, except where noted otherwise. The sitcom’s representation of feminism and feminist ideas has been similarly selective, as Bonnie Dow explains: 5D’Acci, “TV, Representation, and Gender” (2004), 380-385. 5 Liberal feminism, and its focus on women’s equality with men within existing social structures, has always been the easiest form of feminism for media to understand and incorporate… Television’s visions of feminism thus become equated with the practice of individualism by women… ignoring the complexities of race, class, and sexuality… and disregarding the structural problems that impede women’s progress.6 Feminism is certainly not monolithic, but because the sitcom depicts and defines it selectively, my references to its ideas, its movements, and its impact will be similarly selective, focusing mostly on the liberal feminism Dow outlines above. To explore the sitcom and its relationship to gender and social change, I’ve selected a number of woman-driven sitcoms from the early 1950s to the present, grouping them in the three major subgenres outlined previously—domestic, workplace, and friend-group. I chose these programs based on a number of factors: their prevalence in preexisting literature, their ratings or critical acclaim, their impact on popular culture, audience response, and how they fit into shifts in social history and changes in sitcom formal and industrial practices. I’ve organized them chronologically within each chapter, moving from a subgenre’s beginnings to its more recent iterations. I begin with women and the domestic or family-centered sitcom: I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951-1957), The Donna Reed Show (ABC, 1958-1966), Bewitched (ABC, 1964-1972), Roseanne (ABC, 1988-1997), and The Mindy Project (Fox, 2012-2015; 6 Bonnie Dow, “‘How Will You Make it on Your Own?’: Television and Feminism Since 1970,” in A Companion to Television, ed. Janet Wasko (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005), 392. 6 Hulu, 2015--). I analyze how each program grapples with domesticity and “domestic containment,” a concept developed by Elaine May; I also explore how social context alters the meaning or significance of domesticity, particularly in shows that began after the rise of second-wave feminist movements.7 My second chapter moves on to woman-driven workplace sitcoms: The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970-1977), 30 Rock (NBC, 2006-2013) and Parks and Recreation (NBC, 2009-2015). I explore the rise of single women sitcoms, emphasizing Mary Tyler Moore’s impact on single woman narratives. I discuss the “work family” as a new iteration of the sitcom “family,” and I examine the shifts in how woman-driven sitcoms engage with feminism and feminist ideas, starting with Dow’s concept of “lifestyle feminism,” and then with the self-identified feminist protagonists of 30 Rock and Parks and Rec.8 My third chapter explores sitcoms that center on friendships among young, single women: Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004), Girls (HBO, 2012--), and Broad City (2014--). Here, I relate the different generational representations of these three single women shows—SATC’s turn-of-the-millennium thirtysomethings versus millennial young adults on Girls and Broad City—and discuss the varying ways they depict relationships between women, as well as female sexuality and pleasure, in the lives of young adults. Through these three subgenres, we can trace in broadest strokes the progress of (mostly white, mostly middle-class) women in American society and cultural imagination from the postwar period onward, as these sitcom women migrated from the private sphere into the public, from a prescribed life path of 7 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 16. 8Dow, “TV and Feminism since 1970,” 380. 7 marriage and motherhood to unruly independence. By examining the contradictions and complexities inherent in representations of women and in the situation comedy, we can track television’s relationship to social and gender change. 8 1. Containment and Contradiction in the Domestic Sitcom Television’s early years, the late 1940s and early 1950s, coincided with the idealization of home, family, and domesticity in postwar America. Unsurprisingly, most female sitcom stars of this era were depicted as wives or mothers, tethered to the home; until the women’s movement gained more mainstream acceptance over the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, television women were largely contained to the domestic sphere. The very earliest domestic comedies, aimed at audiences in East Coast urban areas, mostly depicted working-class ethnic families, but over the course of the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, the domestic sitcom shifted focus, abandoning the urban, ethnic working-class for the white, middle-class suburbs. Over the 1950s, family sitcoms split into two formal categories: purely comic, vaudeville-influenced sitcoms, such as I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951-57) and The Honeymooners (CBS, 1955- 56), or more realist, sentimental domestic sitcoms with melodramatic aspects, set in middle-class suburban homes like Father Knows Best (CBS, NBC 1954-1960), Leave it to Beaver (CBS, ABC 1957-1963) and The Donna Reed Show (ABC, 1958-1966). Purely comic family sitcoms drew on vaudevillian theatrical traditions, such as slapstick, while realist family sitcoms mostly sourced their comedy from smaller, more everyday domestic situations. Suburban realist domestic sitcoms featuring happy middle-class families have come to dominate popular recollections of the 1950s, especially when it comes to woman’s status in American society at the time. One of the best-known vaudeville-inflected comedies of this era is I Love Lucy, which originally aired on CBS from 1951 to 1957. The show centers on the exploits of Lucy Ricardo, a housewife with showbiz aspirations but little talent, as she 9