The Role of Sitcoms

Sitcoms worked to naturalize woman’s place in the home, and, as the Leonard review quoted above indicated, at the time of All in the Family‘s debut, sitcoms depicting women within familial settings were still a dominant form. The significance of the shift from this premise was underscored by the career trajectory of Brady Bunch that moved from playing an exemplary goodwife in The Dick Van Dyke Show for most of the 1960s to the consummate career woman of the 1970s, a fact noted in press coverage of All in the Family. All in the Family expanded the limited parameters of the single adult woman comedy, which, although existent since the beginning of television, was hardly a dominant form in the way that domestic sitcom was. At the very least, All in the Family liberated single-woman sitcoms from narratives dominated by husband hunting.

That media coverage ultimately functioned to divide the women’s movement into “legitimate feminism and illegitimate feminism” that, generally, followed the divide between liberal, reformist feminism and radical feminism calling for cultural transformation. The arguments purporting to demonstrate the existence of public discrimination against women received, by and large, more sympathetic treatment in the press. Wage disparity, discriminatory laws, and the low percentage of women in certain professions were easily documented with statistics, were understandable in terms of basic American values like equal opportunity, and were located in the public sphere, which reporters saw as the realm where legitimate news resided. The critique of sex roles, the patriarchal family, and the false consciousness created by the mythology of romance and heterosexuality were treated with much more scepticism and, often, outright ridicule. These issues were associated with the “angry” and “militant” radical feminists who were depicted as «ugly, humourless, disorderly man-haters desperately in need of some Nair” (Janet, 1992).

That Leave It to Beaver achieved solid popularity through its pairing with the most explicitly relevant sitcom of the 1970s, All in the Family, underscores the extent to which relevance became associated, both then and now, with situation comedy. It completes the pattern of the classic father and child problem-solving plot familiar from Leave It to Beaver. The child has a problem and goes to the father, who tells the child to do the right thing, which the child intuitively knows she should do anyway. With the advice and pressure of the parent, the child overcomes her reluctance, does what is required, and the situation is resolved happily, reaffirming the wisdom of the father.