Disparate Housewives: A Round of Retro Imagery Adds Another Layer to the Expectations that Confront the Modern Wife
by Felix Carroll, Staff Writer
October 10, 2004
Just when it seemed safe for women to roar, they're spitting at each other like alley cats. Just when it seemed safe for women to break the glass ceiling, they're cleaning windows again. And just when it seemed safe for women to have it all, they're on bended knees buckling beneath their burdens.
That is, of course, if you take at face value the image of women as portrayed in television shows of late.
While long gone are the ironic-free days of June Cleaver, in whose burnished banister happy housewives of the 1950s sought their own reflections, so, too, are the days of Murphy Brown on the opposite end of the spectrum, the self-assured 1980s icon of the independent woman.
Women are housewives again. They are sexual predators. They are desperate and bitchy. But in a society that views its television fare as a reflection of itself, the mirror seems to have misplaced its many faces.
"I think now what we're seeing on television is a return to an even more retro picture, where women are consumed with things that go against the grain of what I think were the most progressive impacts of feminism," says Elayne Rapping, professor of American studies at the State University at Buffalo, whose specialty is media and popular culture.
Changing realities
All this at a time when the term housewife seemed, if not lost in the junk drawer of history, then at least ground down beyond recognition by the changing realities of the American family.
For instance, in two new reality shows, "Trading Spouses" on Fox and "Wife Swap" on ABC, women are evaluated solely on the basis of their housekeeping talents. And while the four heroines in the new ABC series "Desperate Housewives" hardly find self-fulfillment in a luminously cleaned toilet bowl, they still harken back to a different age perhaps the nighttime soaps of the 1980s where women played bored adulteresses, reluctant mothers, fragile perfectionists or men-hungry divorcees.
So what's to account for all this devolving womanhood?
Rapping and others point to the conservative turn society has taken since the 1960s and '70s one, she says, that longs to place women back into more clearly labeled boxes.
But even so, with women now a key component of the work force and with marriages now far more power-sharing than a generation ago, society could hardly function today if it suddenly denied women the advancements made by the feminist movement.
Overshooting trends
If anything, the decidedly anti-feminist direction of much of today's television may say less about the roles expected of modern women than of the fuzzy math employed by pop culture as a whole, which has a tendency to spy trends, then overshoot them.
Women, after all, have come a long way since Betty Friedan, author of the catalytic 1963 book, "The Feminine Mystique," declared the American wife was bored to death.
Today, American women are more educated than ever before. In 1971, women earned just 9 percent of the medical degrees, 7 percent of the law degrees and 4 percent of the MBAs in the United States. But now women comprise half the enrollment at Ivy League colleges and get nearly half of the graduate school degrees.
And more of those well-educated women are deciding that, instead of turning headlong into corporate America, they'd rather stay at home and raise children. The U.S. Census Bureau found that 22 percent of women with graduate degrees stay home, at least for the time being.
Indeed, a study released in June by Reach Advisors, a Boston- based research firm that tracks generational changes, says that Generation X moms are more likely than their baby boom counterparts to stay home.
But unlike their counterparts of 40 years ago, these Generation X moms "expect to weave in and out of the work force over time," the study says.
"Instead of trying to fit family into their work life," the study says, "Generation X parents are more likely to try to fit work into their family life."
Making choices
All this feminism-as-roadkill television aside, many women say what is emerging in the culture is a golden mean of womanhood that's inclusive of both the conservative ideal and the feminist ideal and everything in between. Today's television scripts may merely be the growing pains.
There's room for a Hillary Clinton, the reluctant cookie baker, as well as Laura Bush, the pleasant, silent partner. And there's also room to be a composite of the two.
"One thing that really does bother me is when people try to paint stay-at-home moms versus moms who decide to have careers," says Susan Pedo of Albany, who has a career and two children. "I don't think that there is divisiveness between those two groups. I have many friends who have made both choices, and we all get along and we all respect each others' decision. And that's what it's really about, to be able to have the choice whenever possible to pursue either option."
Shannon Cherry of Albany notes that technology has allowed many women to bypass the tough choices between work and family. With the Internet and computers, doing both isn't as difficult as it once was, she says.
"That's an option that women years ago didn't have," says Cherry, who runs her own public relations firm from her home and who plans to continue to work if she has a baby.
The golden mean? Perhaps.
Housework
But that doesn't mean all that glitters is golden.
"Today's wives are under a great deal of stress," says Mary Ellen Balchunis-Harris, a professor of political science at La Salle University in Philadelphia who teaches a course on women in politics and is a working mom. "They now have their high-power jobs, but they still carry the responsibilities of the house, children and elder care. All of this while they are expected to look and act like a sex kitten."
Working women still spend on average seven hours more time on housework a week than working men and have less leisure time on an average day than men, according to a U.S. Labor Department survey released last month.
But many men are coming around, says Cherry. She recently had a good laugh after she grabbed a book from a free-book bin while on vacation in Martha's Vineyard. The book is titled "A Marriage Manual: A Practical Guide-Book to Sex and Marriage" (Simon and Schuster), first published in 1935.
Sitting in her living room in Albany, she opens its dog-eared pages and reads aloud one of her favorite passages: "Economic ability, especially on the part of the man, has generally been regarded as one of the most important social standards of fitness for marriage."
"It's absolutely hilarious," says Cherry.
"I'm grateful that both men and women have realized that people are individuals," she says. "That a partnership, no matter what form it is, is a partnership.
"What is a wife today?" she wonders. "My role as a wife is I'm a sounding board, I'm a lover. I'm someone who supports my husband in what he does.
"And I pretty much expect the same thing in return," she says.
Copyright (C) Albany Times Union, 2004.
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