Sexism in Sitcoms

This article discuses, analyzes and compares the feminism-related TV sitcoms of 1950-70s with current sitcoms. Both groups of sitcoms are focused on the life of thirtieth, unmarried, working women and their network of friends and co-workers in USA. Their authors were described by reviewers and critics as an example of original programming both during and after its seven seasons on TV. The claim to originality was based, among other things, on production factors, such as its status as the first of a series of highly successful programs that would be created by its parent companies, on its contribution to the situation comedy format as an exemplar of the move from domestic or home-based situations to situations based in the workplace, and on its social sensitivity and timeliness as a program focused on the life of a career-oriented, single woman.

One of the most popular journalist-author of sexism-related sitcoms is Mary Tyler Moore. Mary Tyler Moore is generally acknowledged as the first popular and long-running television series clearly to feature the influence of feminism. Although the show’s creators consistently claimed that Mary Tyler Moore was about character, not politics (an implied contrast to All in the Family), writer-producer James Brooks observed that «we sought to show someone from Mary Richards’ background being in a world where women’s rights were being talked about and it was having an impact». Mary Tyler Moore was not the first working-woman sitcom (Fraiman, 1999). Yet it is generally acknowledged as the first to assert that work was not just a prelude to marriage, or a substitute for it, but could form the center of a satisfying life for a woman in the way that it presumably did for men. This was, perhaps, the most consistent and explicit pro-feminist statement made by the sitcom.

Another such sitcom is Brady Bunch. Other «single woman on her own» programs that followed Brady Bunch would take this basic theme in different, more progressive directions, but the shadow of Brady Bunch hangs over them. Brady Bunch was not just innovative, it was also tremendously successful. It launched three spin-offs and is still popular in syndication almost twenty years after it left prime-time. The television producers recognized the power of its formula is evident in the numerous attempts to duplicate its premise throughout the 1960s and 1970s and in the fact that Brady Bunch still serves as a standard, or starting point, against which progressive television representations of women are judged, at least in popular media (Butler, 1993).