Core Response #1: Julia

In this week’s reading of Lynn Spiegel’s “Installing the Television Set: Popular Discourses on Television and Domestic Space, 1948-1955,” I was completely taken in by the idea of women in the home having to create a kind of gendered choreography in relation to their television sets. Spiegel identifies multiple levels of tension that exist between the 1950’s housewife and the TV set that sits within her domestic space. Firstly, by programming content that put the domestic lives of other idealized women on display (p.19) television inherently forced women watchers into their own performance of domesticity under a “domestic gaze”. Secondly, by claiming to offer a look into various parts of the world (p.25), television eliminated any real need for the family to leave the home for leisure, thereby further confining housewives to their domestic spaces. Thirdly, Spiegel describes the TV set as a kind of “other woman” who is able to monopolize all male attention within the confines of the domestic space (p.31), thereby further othering and isolating the housewife. Ultimately, Spiegel seems to be implying that the appearance of TV sets across American households served as an oppressive reminder of women’s constrained roles within their domestic spaces.  

However, despite all this discourse surrounding women’s relationship to their television sets, housewives were not actually encouraged to watch television. Indeed, Spiegel explains that women watching television was deemed visually displeasurable, and quotes Sparton TV’s 1955 declaration that “the sight of women turning a TV set with dials near the floor was ‘most unattractive’” (p.30). Housewives were not meant to watch television, but instead to function the same way as television sets: bodies to be looked at, blending in discretely with the rest of the domestic space. 

 

It is then surprising to consider the incredible impact that female audiences had on the development of television in later years, especially through the establishment of soap operas and “women’s television”. I am currently reading Elana Levine’s book on Daytime Soap Opera & US Television History (2020) where she discusses the influence of women as the primary audience demographic that allowed television to prosper as a lucrative business in the first place. This pushed me to consider the way in which the domestic gaze also directly translates into currency for sponsors and networks of this early television era that Spiegel is describing. Therefore, in an odd dynamic shift, TV started out as an oppressive gendered component of the domestic space, yet female spectatorship in subsequent years may be one of the reasons television is so prominent in our lives today.