Leslie Regan Shade

Graduate Program in Communications
McGill University
shade@Ice.CC.McGill.CA

 

Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1992.

 

Spigel, Lynn, and Denise Mann, eds. Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1992.

 

In the past few years there has been a flurry of published work on women and television. Some of the books include: Gender Politics and MTV by Lisa A. Lewis; Women Watching Television by Andrea L. Press; the BFI collection Women Viewing Violence; Ann Gray’s Video Playtime; Enterprising Women by Camille Bacon-Smith; Elayne Rapping’s The Movie of the Week; and No End to Her: Soap Opera and the Female Subject by Martha Nochimson.

 

What most of these books have in common is a preoccupation with analyzing the multifaceted role of women as audiences in various televisual experiences, with many utilizing an ethnographic approach to contemporary situations. This tendency within cultural studies to concentrate on media audiences, and particularly non-elite audiences, has often led to overarching generalizations as to the shaping of subjectivity, audience interpretations, and subcultural resistance to the hegemonic order. Nonetheless, this purview has captured the attention of historians eager to examine working-class life, including the audiences of diverse cultural fare. As Susan Douglas has noted, though, very often we have too much theory without history, and too much history without theory. How then, can we get past this absence in the historical record and “admit that, short of seances, there are simply some questions about the colonization of consciousness that we can never answer. We are, for the most part, restricted to data generated by the producers, not the consumers, of popular culture” (Douglas 135).

 

What is a good strategy for conducting historical research on the impact and effect of media on audiences? What types of evidence are needed? Where can such artifactual evidence be mined? Carlo Ginzburg suggests that the historian’s knowledge is akin to that of the doctor’s in its reliance on indirect knowledge, “based on signs and scraps of evidence, conjectural” (24). Such a conjectural paradigm, Ginzburg believes, can be used to reconstruct cultural shifts and transformations. There is also the potential for understanding society, not by invoking claims to total systematic knowledge, but by paying attention to the seemingly insignificant, idiosyncratic and often illogical forms of disclosure. “Reality is opaque; but there are certain points–clues, signs–which allow us to decipher it” (29-30).

 

Lynn Spigel, for one, has made avowed use of Ginzburg’s tactic for following the seemingly inconsequential trace in order to render a significant pattern of past experiences. In her cultural history of the early integration of the television in the American home, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, Spigel finds tell-tale evidence of the history of home spectators in discourses that “spoke of the placement of a chair, or the design of a television set in the room” (187). What she dubs a “patchwork history” consists in amassing evidence from popular media accounts that mostly catered to a white middle-class audience, such as representations in magazines, advertisements, newspapers, radio, film, and television. In particular, her insistence on treating women’s home magazines as valuable historical evidence allowed her to supplement traditional broadcast history (with its reliance on questions of industry, regulation, and technological invention), by highlighting the important role women assumed in the domestic, familial sphere as consumers, producers, and technological negotiators.

 

Spigel employs a diverse range of historical material to examine how television was represented in the context of the wider social and cultural milieu of the postwar period, such as the entrenchment of women within the domestic arena, the proliferation of the nuclear family sensibility amidst cold-war rhetoric, and the burgeoning spread of single-family homes in the new Levittowns. Some of the material she examines was culled from women’s magazines, industry trade journals, popular magazines, social scientific studies, the corporate records of the National Broadcasting Company, advertisements, and television programs.

 

In the first chapter, Spigel briefly examines past ideals for family entertainment and leisure, from the Victorian era to Post World War II. She argues that preexisting models of gender and generational hierarchy among family members, such as the distinction between the sexes and that of adults and children, and the separate spheres of public versus private, set the tone for television’s arrival into the home. As well, the introduction of entertainment machines into the household, including gramophones and the radio, also influenced television’s initial reception.

 

“Television in the Family Circle” is perhaps Spigel’s most successful chapter. Here she describes women’s home magazines of the time, including “Better Homes and Gardens,” “American Home,” “House Beautiful,” and “Ladies’ Home Journal,” which were the primary venue for debates on television and the family. They addressed their female audience, not just as passive consumers of television, but also as producers within the household. On the practical side, these magazines advised women on the proper architectural placement for the television set in the domestic space. The television set came to be seen as a valuable household object, becoming an electronic hearth that replaced the fireplace and the piano as the center of family attention.

 

Television was either greeted as the penultimate in technological advancement and as a “kind of household cement that promised to reassemble the splintered lives of families who had been separated during the war”(39); or as a kind of monster that threatened to dominate and wreak havoc on family togetherness. These diverse sentiments were echoed in the advertisements and discourses of the popular magazines of the day. A typical ad by RCA featured the family circle around the television console, while “Ladies’ Home Journal” dubbed a new disease, “telebugeye,” which afflicted the young couch potato.

 

“Women’s Work,” recounts how the television industry addressed women as consumers and workers within the domestic economy through advertisements and specialized programming. These discourses, addressed to “Mrs. Daytime Home Consumer,” included trying to hook the housewife on habitual daytime viewing through genres such as soaps and the segmented variety show featuring cooking and cleaning tips. Women’s magazines tried to mediate the dilemma housewives faced between television viewing as a leisure activity and their requisite domestic chores. One absurd solution to this predicament was epitomized by the Western-Holly Company’s 1952 design for a combined TV-stove, turning cooking into what Spigel calls a “spectator sport” (74).

 

The last two chapters deal with the emergence of television as the home entertainment center. In the new suburban landscape, television came to be seen as the “window onto the world,” and spectatorship became privatized and domesticated. Interior architecture reflected this relationship between the inside and the outside by promoting design elements such as landscape paintings, decorative wallpaper that featured nature or city-scapes, and the picture window or sliding glass door. Family sit-coms mimicked this fixation by depicting domestic spaces in which public exteriors could be glimpsed. As well, through various self-reflexive strategies, such as depicting television characters as real families “who just happened to live their lives on television” (158), and through farcical observations on the nature of the medium itself, viewers could be reassured about their relationship with this new electronic medium.

 

Spigel concludes by musing about current discourses on the contemporary home theater and the utopian possibilities raised by smart-TV’s, HDTV, the 500-channel universe of cable television, new video technology, digital sound systems, and virtual reality. She comments that the discursive strategies used to debate these new technologies are surprisingly the same as those used to discuss the introduction of television into the post-war economy.

 

Make Room for TV is interspersed throughout with reproductions from ads, cartoons, and television stills. Spigel’s work is an inspiration for those seeking to integrate diverse and unconventional source material into a coherent and plausible exploration of past audiences and the effects of new communications technologies.

 

Private Screenings, edited by Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann, is an expanded version of a special issue of camera obscura that appeared in 1988, and it is also part of a camera obscura series brought out by the University of Minnesota Press. Other books in the series include the 1990 Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction and the recently released Male Trouble.

 

I, for one, was slightly disappointed to realize that except for the addition of three new essays, Private Screenings was a reprint of the camera obscura issue. Although the ability to easily purchase such revised editions is preferable to hunting down obscure copies of the journal in specialty bookstores and libraries, the question can still be raised as to the politics of publishing mostly reissued material. Lorraine Gamman commented on the prevalence of the feminist scholarly reprint, urging that publishers be pressured to reduce the prices of books that consist of mostly reissued material:

 

It seems likely that the live feminist scholarly reprint developed as a phenomenon not only because feminist thinkers are at last becoming recognized, but because it constitutes low-investment publishing. Obviously authors have their own reasons for authorizing the reissue of their work, and so it would be inappropriate to say that reprints constitute exploitation or simply another publishing scam. Yet in the rush to reprint the past, both publishers and authors should take care to ensure that feminism doesn't look like it has run out of new ideas or fresh ways to express them.(Gamman 124)

 

However, publishers also want to capture part of the relatively large photocopy audience. Important journal articles or special issues circulate through academe mainly in photocopied form, outside the publishers’ revenue loop, contravening copyright law.

 

The nine essays in Private Screenings provide several interesting cases of historical methodology, focusing on the relationship between women, television, and consumer culture, and are intended to be part of a larger feminist project of “close analysis and historical contextualization” (xiii) which Spigel and Mann believe is the panacea to prevalent theoretical generalizations about television. By paying close attention to the analysis of television texts and their historical frameworks, the editors hope that cultural differences in how heterogeneous groups in particular historical situations perceive various mass media will be more practically delineated.

 

Three recurrent themes are interwoven in the essays. The first is television’s appeal to women as consumers, either through its display of various lifestyles and commodities; or through the viewing of television programs. The second theme is memory: how did audiences understand television programs, and what kind of nostalgic function did television programs serve? The negotiation between Hollywood and the television industry is the third theme, whether in early programming where the recycling of Hollywood glitz was common, or through contemporary soap operas which imitate cinematic ploys.

 

What is most interesting is the diversity of historical material that the authors have gleaned, including archival footage of television shows and films, popular magazines, fanzines, market and demographic research, and viewer response mail. A variety of approaches for analyzing the material are employed by the authors, including historical and audience interpretations. The first four essays by Spigel, Mann, Lipsitz, and Haralovich, concerned with historical interpretations of television’s social and cultural function in the 1950s, are by far the most successful and convincing in the book.

 

Lynn Spigel’s essay, “Installing the Television Set” is an earlier and shorter version of Make Room for TV. In this condensation, the introduction of television into the social and domestic sphere is examined through investigation of a variety of popular discourses on television and domestic space, including the theatricalization of the home front.

 

A fitting follow-up is Denise Mann’s “The Spectacularization of Everyday Life” concerned with variety shows that featured Hollywood guest stars. For Mann, these formats epitomized the nostalgic return to both earlier entertainment forms such as burlesque and vaudeville, and to strategies utilized by the Hollywood publicity machine to engage women as ardent fans. Using “The Martha Raye Show” as an example, Mann argues that this transfer of Hollywood stars to the home through television eased the negotiation of Hollywood’s participation in television and its placement into the everyday mundane life of the housewife. Women were encouraged to enter into the fantasy world of television while being constantly reminded that the images were corporate-produced and commercially-sponsored.

 

George Lipsitz examines early subgenres of ethnic, working-class sitcoms in “The Meaning of Memory,” contending that this genre served important social and cultural functions beyond the economic imperatives of network television. Shows such as The Honeymooners and The Life of Riley portrayed an idyllic version of urban working-class life which tugged at the chords of nostalgia for the neo-suburbanites, as well as legitimating a change in the socioeconomic and cultural sphere occasioned by the shift from the depression-era to the post-war consumer consciousness of material goods.

 

In “Sit-coms and Suburbs,” Mary Beth Haralovich provides a fascinating analysis of the emergence of suburban housing, the consumer product industry, and market research, which operated as defining institutions for the new social and economic role of post-war women as homemakers. By considering the work of architectural historians Dolores Hayden and Gwendolyn Wright, she details the many ways that post-war housing development and design, spurred on by the priorities of the Federal Housing Administration, created homogeneous and socially stable communities which effectively excluded any group that wasn’t white and middle-class. Haralovich explores the ways that the consumer product industry tried to define the homemaker through intensive market research, such as employing “depth research” which would probe into the psychic motivations of consumers and allow for “new and improved” product design and packaging. Using the examples of the television shows Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, Haralovich shows how these representations of middle-class nuclear domesticity mediated the burgeoning suburban sensibility by inserting the preeminent homemakers June Cleaver and Margaret Anderson into the domestic architecture itself.

 

The next three articles in Private Screenings utilize archival material, such as viewer response mail sent to the producers of prime-time television shows, to look at how network television was dealing with the changing social roles fomenting in the 1960s, including feminism and civil rights.

 

Aniko Bodroghkozy in “Is This What You Mean by Color TV?” analyses public reaction to Julia, the first sitcom since the early 1950s to feature an African-American, Diahann Carroll, in its starring role. By concentrating on its reception, Bodroghkozy argues that “Julia functioned as a symptomatic text–symptomatic of the racial tensions and reconfigurations of its time” (144). Her tactics included analyzing viewer response mail, leading her to conclude that viewers were attempting to come to grips with racial difference; and by reading producer script files, she surmised that the production team constantly struggled to produce relevant images of African-Americans in the context of the civil rights movement.

 

The “new woman audience” that the networks were courting in the 1980s is the subject of D’Acci and Deming’s articles. D’Acci’s study of the police women genre show Cagney and Lacey led her to examine production files and interview the producers and writers to analyze the elaborate bargaining that ensued between the television producers, the network, the audience, critics, and public interest groups, relating this to the ongoing concerns of the women’s movement. She details how Cagney and Lacey struggled with the terms of femininity as it was played out on prime-time television–for instance, charges of lesbianism against the actors, problems with sexual harassment and the pain of the biological clock. Robert H. Deming is good when he argues that our interpretation of the “new women,” as exemplified by Kate and Allie, is contingent on our memories of sitcom women of the past, from ditzy gals like Lucy to goody- two-shoes like Mary Tyler Moore; but he is irritating when he tries to make a case for the program constructing and defining forms of female subjectivity.

 

The last two articles are concerned with contemporary television melodrama and the insertion of this “feminine” genre into a broad spectrum of programming. Sandy Flittermann-Lewis adopts a rather obtuse psychoanalytic- semiotic model to analysize how weddings are used in soap operas to contribute to the flow of narrative actions, concluding that they function as a return to the cinematic past. Lynne Joyrich examines the prevalence of the melodrama into diverse forms and textures of contemporary television, such as daytime soap operas, prime-time soaps, made-for-TV movies, crime dramatizations, and the growth of the therapeutic ethos. She maintains that “melodrama is thus an ideal form for postmodern culture and for television” (246), but I am not at all persuaded that such genres can, as she believes, “steel women for resistance” (247). Rather than reading melodramas against the grain and providing my own ironic commentaries, I would instead prefer to turn the set off.

 

On the practical side, the last chapter in Private Screenings is a “Source Guide to TV Family Comedy, Drama, and Serial Drama, 1946-1970” contained at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, the Museum of Broadcasting, and the Museum of Broadcast Communications at River City. As well, William Lafferty has compiled a guide to alternative sources of television programming for research, including video dealers and the collectors market.

 

Works Cited

 

• Douglas, Susan J. “Notes Toward a History of Media Audiences.” Radical History Review 54 (1992): 127-38.
• Gamman, Lorraine. “Feminism and Youth Culture: from Jackie to Just Seventeen and Schoolgirl Fiction” [book review]. Feminist Review 41 (Summer 1992): 121.
• Ginzburg, Carlo. “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method.” History Workshop 9 (1990): 24.