Gender and Television

In a two-part article written for TV Guide in 1964, best-selling author of The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan claimed that television has represented the American woman as a "stupid, unattractive, insecure little household drudge who spends her martyred, mindless, boring days dreaming of love--and plotting nasty revenge against her husband." Almost thirty years later, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Susan Faludi suggested that the practices and programming of network television in the 1980s were an attempt to get back to those earlier stereotypes of women, thereby countering the effects of the women's movement that Friedan's messages had inspired in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Although the analyses of Friedan and Faludi are undeniable on many levels, it is important to remember that television provides less than realistic stereotypes of men as well (although these stereotypes embody qualities--courage, stoicism, rationality--that society values) and the images of femininity justifiably disturbing to Friedan and Faludi are not necessarily read by female viewers in the ways intended by program producers and advertisers. Recent scholarship has studied not only female fan groups that rework television texts in their own writings, but has also suggested that narratives and images are polyvalent and dependent on contextual situations for meaning. For example, television scholar Andrea Press studied women's responses to I Love Lucy, finding that middle-class women drew strength from Lucy Ricardo's subversion of her husband's dominance and Lucille Ball's performing talents, while working-class women tended to find Ball as Lucy Ricardo funny, but thought the character was silly, unrealistic, and manipulative.

While scholarship such as Press's, motivated by an agenda of understanding cultural products and practices, attempts to understand how audiences negotiate the meanings of gender and class in their encounters with television, commercial broadcasting also has a history of research into audience composition and desires. Of course its agenda is mainly focused on understanding the audience as consumers, since the economic basis of commercial broadcasting is selling consumers to advertisers. As early as the late 1920s, market research suggested to advertisers the importance of the middle-class female consumer in terms of her primary role in making decisions regarding family purchases. Early radio programs included some targeted to the female listener. Advertisers found success with how-to and self-help programs that could highlight the use of a food, cosmetic, or cleaning product in their generous doses of advice patter. By the early 1930s, household product advertisers successfully underwrote serialized dramas ("soap operas") in the daytime hours, and their assumptions that women were the primary listeners during those hours meant that narratives often revolved around central female characters and that segmentation of story and commercial must conform to the working woman's activities as she listened.

Several of the popular radio soap operas made the transition to television, with many new ones created for the medium which would eventually eclipse radio in audience numbers. As with their radio predecessors, these shows were programmed for the daytime hours and featured commercials aimed at the housewife, that "drudge" Friedan described as the stereotype of the post-war American culture. Daytime hours on television also included game and talk/advice shows, whose rhetorical strategies assumed women's capacity as caretaker of the family's economic and emotional resources. The make-up of daytime programming on the broadcast networks has stayed remarkably the same over the years, although soap opera plots seem to take into account the presence of male viewers (not only making male characters more important, but mixing action genre ingredients into the narratives). Perhaps even more significantly as programming strategy, game shows have given way on the schedule to talk shows.

This latter trend began with the tremendous success of Donahue, which started in 1967 as a local, Dayton call-in talk show aimed at women. Host Phil Donahue was interested in serving the needs of the woman at home who was intelligent and politically sophisticated, but unrecognized by other media. Appearing at a time of considerable political and gender unrest and change, by 1980 it was carried on 218 stations around the country, delivering the "right numbers" to advertisers--women aged 18 to 49. Oprah Winfrey also started locally (in Chicago) and two years later, in 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show went national, not only beating Donahue in the ratings, but also becoming the third-highest rated show in syndication.