Sexism and Sitcoms

The traditions of media coverage of sexism issues change in the late 1980s and in 1990s. One final sign of the ascendance of post-feminism in 1990s television was the decline of the primary form for representing feminism in 1980s television: the single working-woman sitcom. The longest and the most typical running shows of this type in the 1980s were holdovers from the 1980s, were King of Queens and Still Standing.

To claim, as its producers and various critics have, that Leave It to Beaver was about lifestyle, whereas All in the Family was about politics, does not necessarily detract from the sitcom’s feminist resonance for viewers. At least in media interpretations, feminism increasingly was equated with lifestyle, especially the kind of lifestyle exemplified by media star Gloria Steinem. Maude first emerged as a character on All in the Family, from which Maude was a spin-off. As Edith Bunker’s outspoken, politically liberal cousin, she was a sparring partner for the equally outspoken, stubborn, but politically conservative Archie. Maude was not an evolving feminist, feeling her way in a man’s world; rather, she appeared on the television screen as a fully formed, self-confident ideologue. Both these sitcoms had the element that was missing in post-feminist sitcoms: the so-called “female bonding” or sisterhood. Both King of Queens and Designing Women appeared to be the examples of post-family television (Shugart, Waggoner & O’Brien Hallstein, 2001).

King of Queens, Still Standing and One Day at a Time, sitcoms of 1990s, were designed strictly for white, heterosexual, middle-class women (Cancian & Ross, 2001). The sitcoms of 1990s were glorifying to female bonding and alternative family forms.  That is why their radical view were combined with the analysis of the obstacles that modern women face in the world, these obstacles, by the way, were rather traditional (Shugart, Waggoner & O’Brien Hallstein, 2001). That is why such shows are post-feminist. In King of Queens, for example, the gender-related matters were analyzed like being dramatic for individual women instead of discussing them as problems of women at all.