Earners and spenders, husbands and wives: the affective restraints on women’s labor in high Cold War American sitcoms

ABSTRACT

The affective dimensions of labor and the ways in which gendered representations of affect can be deployed as a justification for limiting women’s participation in the workforce constitute a foundational, yet often overlooked, aspect of midcentury American situational comedies. Two American sitcoms—I Love Lucy and The Donna Reed Show—exemplify the connections between women’s participation in the labor force and gendered representations of affect, providing new perspectives on how the imaginary ‘1950s housewife’ foregoes participation in the wage-earning workforce and voluntarily confines herself within the domestic sphere as a result of her actual or perceived affective obligations to her family and community. By positioning Lucy and Donna within an economy of women’s affective responsibilities and the purportedly emotionless mechanization of the incipient post-industrial economy, these sitcoms align labor and affect along an axis of gender that portrays women as obligated to provide free emotional labor for their families, while thereby representing the ‘housewife’ as emotionally unfit for productive waged labor.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective labor
• separate spheres
• I love Lucy
• The Donna Reed Show
• American sitcoms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Elizabeth A. Patton’s Easy Living; The Rise of the Home Office (2020) and Eileen Boris’s Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (1994) historicize the boundaries between home and work by analyzing the material and discursive construction of the home office and the centrality of paid labor by working mothers within the domestic space to Cold War political discourse.

2. From monographs by Pugh (2018), Bianculli (2016), Dalton and Linder (2016), Austerlitz (2014), Morreale (2012), Fiske (1986, 1987), Adler (1981), and Elliott (1956), to scholarly articles by Korostenskiene and Lioponyte (2018) and White (2016), the extant scholarship on the centrality of the sitcom to American popular culture remains a vast and ever-expanding field. However, the affective dimensions of labor and the ways in which gendered representations of affect can be deployed as a justification for limiting women’s participation in the workforce constitute a foundational, yet often overlooked, aspect of midcentury American situational comedies. Kutulas (2016), Douglas and Olson (1995) and Cantor (1991) have considered representations of family dynamics in 1950s sitcoms. While Landay (2016, 1999), Floreani (2007), and Parks (1999) engage directly with labor and consumerism in midcentury sitcoms, none consider either the explicit labor demands made of female characters or intersections between labor and affect. Scholars such as Landay, Brinkema (2007), and Mellencamp (1986) specifically engage with questions of gender in Lucy and Donna Reed, but the intertwining of gender considerations with labor for these women remains unexplored.

3. Johanna Oksala (2016) contends that feminist attempts to address the nature of work alongside feminist politics pose significant shortcomings for the project of advancing feminist political objectives. She argues that feminist theorists must rely instead on theoretical distinctions within affective labor analysis that enable them to advance ‘a normative – political and ethical – problematization of our current forms of work’ (2016, 283). However, her critique of Hardt and Negri depends upon their application to contemporary capitalism and does not advocate a wholesale dismissal of their theories when applied to different historical contexts.

4. Rebecca Coleman’s article ‘Austerity Futures: Debt, Temporality, and (Hopeful) Pessimism as an Austerity Mood’ (2016) examines the relationship between affect and neoliberal capitalism, and Tero Karppi et al’s ‘Affective Capitalism: Investments and Investigations’ (2016) emphasizes the multiplicity of approaches to understanding how bodies, both individual and collective, affect and become affected in different encounters with capitalism. Gorman (2017) argues that processes of labor reproduction themselves produce affects in workers within psychiatric systems. However, these articles engage solely with questions of neoliberal macroeconomics and eschew any conversation of concrete materialities of labor practices.

5. Todd W. Reeser’s comprehensive work ‘Producing Awkwardness: Affective Labor and Masculinity in Popular Culture’ (2017) provides a fascinating counternarrative through which we can consider Ricky’s affective labor in the series. Reeser argues that awkward relations may be evoked within plots for the sole purpose of their containment and management. Gender particularly complicates this plot point through gendered expectations of who should provide comfort (women) versus who should receive it (men).

6. Banks (2013), Carini (2003), and Gardner (1988) consider the role of self-referentiality and the overlaps between the real-life Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and their fictional doppelgangers Lucy and Ricky Ricardo.

7. An intersectional approach can be found in works by Kirschen (2013), Firmat (2013, 2012), and Floreani (2013, 2007). In addition, Desjardins (1999) assesses the intersection of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity between Lucy and Desi, while Hinton (2007) and Pilato (2014) consider questions of femininity and masculinity in midcentury sitcoms more broadly.

8. Katheleen Rowe (1995) provides a counterargument to Mellencamp’s Freudian reading of the function of the comic and of humor in midcentury American sitcoms in The Unruly Women: Gender and Genres of Laughter, asserting that ‘unruly women’ in American film, following oft-replicated archetypes such as the ‘big lady’, the ‘unruly virgin’, and the ‘dumb blonde’, deploy humor and a carnivalesque form of excess to undermine patriarchal authority.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily Naser-Hall

Emily Naser-Hall is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of the Film Program at Western Carolina University. Her research focuses on post-1945 American literature, film and cultural narratives. Her work has been published in Arizona Quarterly, Confluence, ASAP/J, the collected anthology Screening #MeToo: Rape Culture in Hollywood, Studies in the American Short Story, Popular Culture Studies Journal, Tulane Journal of International Law, and DePaul Journal for Social Justice. She has forthcoming publications with Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Shirley Jackson Review, The Oxford Handbook on Shirley Jackson, and a scholarly monograph on American folk horror.