Lynn Spigel examines the forces that contributed to television's rapid adoption and purchase in the 1950’s. In Spigel’s very first line, she acknowledges that between 1948 and 1995, “more than half of American homes installed a television set” (Spigel, 3). Her piece covers a lot of ground, but I was most drawn to what Spigel calls the “ideological harmony” between television and 1950s suburban architecture (Spigel 7). Specifically, with the single-family home newly available as “young couples, for the first time in history, found it cheaper to own their own homes than to rent an apartment in the city,” the architecture itself found a balance between “public and private space” (7, 8). Spigel asserts these moves into the suburbs did not close people off, as some other scholars had suggested, but rather built a sense of community through their new found privacy. The stand-alone house created a sense of isolation and withdrawal from the world, but the identical architecture placed it within a unified suburban “whole.” And in that whole, Americans were privy to design developments that merged the interior and exterior through open-concept floor plans and large windows that invite us outside while we simultaneously do not have to leave the sofa. Television, it appeared, could take us places we otherwise could not go. This utopia was complicated, however, by a woman’s role in this new suburbia: with chores to tend to, the woman could not spend time watching television with her family. Modleski would argue that a woman’s “openness to the needs and desires of others” would be magnified by the openness of the 1950s family home (Modleski, 3). Easy-living? Not so much when the separation between a home’s physical spaces has been deconstructed and replaced by a layout that makes managing your family’s needs that much easier.
Spigel’s piece makes numerous references to advertisements - ads telling families how to decorate their home, ads selling television sets, and ads on television selling machines that give us more time for television. Wanting to get a clearer look at these ads, I discovered a Motorola television ad from 1950 titled “How TV Makes Home-Life Happier.” TV is described as a “blessing,” something that gives us more time for relaxation, and is supposedly the great family unifier. Yet even in the ad, it becomes clear that this newfound “relaxation” is not always available to women. The largest image shows a man enjoying a program from the comforts of his chair, his wife is still bringing him a beverage. While he has time to kick his feet up, this at-home entertainment creates a new form of work for women, namely serving her husband. The middle-right image depicts two children watching a cartoon, and the caption reads: “More free time for mother? Between the hours of 5 and 7, a TV set is a wonderful nurse for children.” Unspoken by the ad is what, exactly, a woman is to do with this newly found free time, but its language hints at the maternal labor involved with taking care of children. Although it attempts to describe the family-wide benefits of purchasing a television set, the ad instead reveals that the object liberates all members of the family from their tasks except for the woman of the house. It is a fascinating artifact of the time period, and one that speaks to Spigel and Modleski’s concerns about a woman’s function in the home during the rise of television.
 |
| Source: https://twitter.com/tedgioia/status/1128721171183284225 |
The full caption of the left image reads: “Relax…and enjoy yourself! Television’s great gift to the American home is–complete relaxation. Here is entertainment that does not mean late hours, dressing up, baby sitters, expensive checks or hectic excitement… entertainment that ranges from operate and symphony concerts to World Series baseball and Bowl Games…entertainment is the place where you can be yourself – your home. In thousand of families, TV has helped apply the brakes on the feverish pace of 1950s living. It’s good for America’s nerves!”
No comments:
Post a Comment