ABSTRACT
Over thepast fewyears, severalwidely discussedBritish andAmericanperiod television
dramas have testified to public fascination with the history of working women. These
series respond to the ways in which work increasingly dominates women’s lives,
exploring how paid employment might have shaped femininity in the past and, by
extension, the present. In exploring work’s impact on feminine identities, shows
likeMad Men (AMC, 2007-15), Call the Midwife (BBC1, 2012-), The Bletchley Circle
(ITV, 2012-14),Mr Selfridge (ITV, 2013-), The Paradise (BBC1, 2012-13), The Hour
(BBC2, 2011-12) and Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010-15) directly address concerns held
by women audiences. Seen collectively, these programmes articulate postfeminism’s
emphasis on achieved gender equality even as they use the recent past to uncovermore
complex and potentially progressive histories that variously ground, rationalise, inspire
and justify contemporary women’s professional lives. Going beyond simple narratives
of female progress, these texts seek to puncture widespread illusions about the limited
nature of female participation in the pre-1970s Anglo-American workplace. Rather
than presenting their characters as surprising pioneers, they demonstrate working
women’s relative ubiquity, encouraging viewers to revise their understandings of
feminine labour. Bridging past and present, they link work to female emancipation,
agency, self-fulfilment and even glamour, all characteristics that conventionally attract
women audiences. Avowedly feminine skills are shown as central for even the most
markedly patriarchal and traditional workplaces, with these programmes consistently
presenting women as the more visually literate sex and thus more perceptive to the
visual cues key to a variety of tasks, including solving crimes, assessing medical
emergencies and running successful modern businesses. Female audiences are conse-
quently invited to see their spectatorship in similar terms as these programmes
encourage identification with their protagonists’ visual labour, something mirrored in
the very act of viewing. The discourse on women’s work mounted in these series
reflects upon and extends to the labour performed by their female spectators.
