Gender and TelevisionEssay title: Gender and TelevisionIn a two-part article written for TV Guide in 1964, best-selling author of The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan claimed that television has represented the American woman as a “stupid, unattractive, insecure little household drudge who spends her martyred, mindless, boring days dreaming of love–and plotting nasty revenge against her husband.” Almost thirty years later, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Susan Faludi suggested that the practices and programming of network television in the 1980s were an attempt to get back to those earlier stereotypes of women, thereby countering the effects of the womens movement that Friedans messages had inspired in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Although the analyses of Friedan and Faludi are undeniable on many levels, it is important to remember that television provides less than realistic stereotypes of men as well (although these stereotypes embody qualities–courage, stoicism, rationality–that society values) and the images of femininity justifiably disturbing to Friedan and Faludi are not necessarily read by female viewers in the ways intended by program producers and advertisers. Recent scholarship has studied not only female fan groups that rework television texts in their own writings, but has also suggested that narratives and images are polyvalent and dependent on contextual situations for meaning. For example, television scholar Andrea Press studied womens responses to I Love Lucy, finding that middle-class women drew strength from Lucy Ricardos subversion of her husbands dominance and Lucille Balls performing talents, while working-class women tended to find Ball as Lucy Ricardo funny, but thought the character was silly, unrealistic, and manipulative.
While scholarship such as Presss, motivated by an agenda of understanding cultural products and practices, attempts to understand how audiences negotiate the meanings of gender and class in their encounters with television, commercial broadcasting also has a history of research into audience composition and desires. Of course its agenda is mainly focused on understanding the audience as consumers, since the economic basis of commercial broadcasting is selling consumers to advertisers. As early as the late 1920s, market research suggested to advertisers the importance of the middle-class female consumer in terms of her primary role in making decisions regarding family purchases. Early radio programs included some targeted to the female listener. Advertisers found success with how-to and self-help programs that could highlight the use of a food, cosmetic, or cleaning product in their generous doses of advice patter. By the early 1930s, household product advertisers successfully underwrote serialized dramas (“soap operas”) in the daytime hours, and their assumptions that women were the primary listeners during those hours meant that narratives often revolved around central female characters and that segmentation of story and commercial must conform to the working womans activities as she listened.
Several of the popular radio soap operas made the transition to television, with many new ones created for the medium which would eventually eclipse radio in audience numbers. As with their radio predecessors, these shows were programmed for the daytime hours and featured commercials aimed at the housewife, that “drudge” Friedan described as the stereotype of the post-war American culture. Daytime hours on television also included game and talk/advice shows, whose rhetorical strategies assumed womens capacity as caretaker of the familys economic and emotional resources. The make-up of daytime programming on the broadcast networks has stayed remarkably the same over the years, although soap opera plots seem to take into account the presence of male viewers (not only making male characters more important, but mixing action genre ingredients into the narratives). Perhaps even more significantly as programming strategy, game shows have given way on the schedule to talk shows.
This latter trend began with the tremendous success of Donahue, which started in 1967 as a local, Dayton call-in talk show aimed at women. Host Phil Donahue was interested in serving the needs of the woman at home who was intelligent and politically sophisticated, but unrecognized by other media. Appearing at a time of considerable political and gender unrest and change, by 1980 it was carried on 218 stations around the country, delivering the “right numbers” to advertisers–women aged 18 to 49. Oprah Winfrey also started locally (in Chicago) and two years later, in 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show went national, not only beating Donahue in the ratings, but also becoming the third-highest rated show in syndication.
The Oprah Winfrey Show was a popular, high-concept, and often innovative TV show featuring great singers, performers, and actors. It is one of the few shows in history that was popularized from the time before the advent of the Great Depression and was later picked up for syndication at the highest level. Oprah started the program at a time that was far from ideal for women and for men who liked to talk about their own lives. Her show became something of a cult phenomenon with tens of millions and millions taking it on the national stage like the Beatles did at the 1964 Goliad Festival in attendance.
The Oprah Winfrey Show opened in New York City in 1974 and followed the life of Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and many others, beginning in 1970 and continuing to develop as the new trend of Oprah. Oprah received a wide share of the attention in the entertainment industry, which attracted some of the most well-regarded stars of the twenty years. Women and youth were the most enthusiastic viewers, with some of their stars even breaking through the 30% mark for the first time in her career. The women who watched her were drawn out of their families, the television networks, and the public with the idea that Oprah was all they had. Thereafter many women had sought out their entertainment. Among the women found in Oprah’s program was the late actress Jane Seymour, a former Hollywood actress, and the actress Lillian Liles, who made major career appearances along with the late Oprah and Betty Brant, among others.
Oprah was especially popular in the young adult world, where the show ran for four weeks or more, on Monday nights in many theaters. With Oprah Winfrey, the show brought in huge numbers of viewers with her many successful films, including the blockbuster “The Oprah Winfrey Show” (1997), “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show 2,” and “Oprah Winfrey” (1984). In the eight years from 1972 to 1985 alone, “Tales of the Oprah Winfrey Show” attracted over two million viewers. Oprah’s popularity continues to influence American entertainment today. Oprah earned the title of “TV Personality of the Year” in 1986 and has been in the Top 10 at the Best Television and Comedy shows and on the Top 100 in the most recent month of 1998. Her television career has also been successful financially, with almost 10 million dollars in sales last year, with an estimated $2 billion going to her and her co-stars.
As of February, 2002, Oprah Winfrey was the youngest person to become a household name in Hollywood, with 15 to 50 years remaining in the Top 10 or Top 100. She has also starred in many TV movies, including “Family Guy,” “Livinja,” “Tangled,” “Halloween,”