[On October 15, 1951, I Love Lucy premiered on CBS. The show was many things, but at its heart it was a cultural depiction of a housewife—a common & complex category across our history to be sure. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such fictional figures, leading up to a weekend post featuring my own wife’s phenomenal work on the subject!]
On how the groundbreaking show differs from its peers, and how it can help us reframe them.
Back in October 2021, as part of another series inspired by I Love Lucy’s premiere (what can I say, if you AmericanStudy for 16 years you’re gonna cover some of the same territory in multiple ways!), I shared this post on some of the ways in which both the show and its titular star broke important new cultural and social ground. I’ll be building on those ideas in today’s post, so check that out one if you would and then come on back for those additional thoughts.
Welcome back! If Lucy would become and remain one of the decade’s most famous TV housewives (and characters period), I’d argue that another close contender for that title is Barbara Billingsley’s June Cleaver from Leave It to Beaver. When folks talk about the cultural stereotype of the 1950 housewife “vacuuming in high heels and pearls,” it’s almost certainly June Cleaver whom they have in mind; the character did indeed tend to perform household chores all dolled up, although it’s worth noting that there were also production factors involved beyond the cultural stereotype. In any case, it’s difficult to imagine two more contrasting images of a 1950s housewife than that one of June Cleaver and the equally famous one of Lucy (from the Season Two episode “Sales Resistance”) desperately trying to return or otherwise get rid of the vacuum cleaner that a forceful saleswoman had talked her into buying. And the latter image nicely symbolizes just how much Lucy—as a character and as a performer, as well as a creator and producer as I argued in that prior post—seemingly differed from contemporary characters like June Cleaver.
But the two weren’t exactly contemporaries: I Love Lucy debuted in 1951, as this series reflects; while Leave it to Beaver ran from 1957 to 1963. Indeed, Lucy was one of the earliest TV sitcoms, and certainly one of the earliest depictions of a housewife and a marriage in this new and evolving medium. It would thus be possible, and perhaps accurate, to argue that the subsequent, more stereotypical characters and shows like June Cleaver and Beaver comprised overt attempts to emphasize and reify “traditional” images (I use the scare quotes because such traditions are always constructed) in response to more radical ones like Lucy’s. But it would also be possible to argue in the opposite direction: to suggest that I Love Lucy’s more radical elements might also be present in, indeed might have directly influenced, the characters and shows that followed it. Lucy reminded audiences that behind the stereotypical, idealized, put-together housewives were real women and people, full of all the complexities and contradictions that we all possess. Just because we don’t see those as often with a character like June Cleaver—the show is more focused on the kids and thus on overall family dynamics, for example—doesn’t mean that they’re not part of her identity and story as well.
Next HousewifeStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Cultural housewives you’d highlight?
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