ABSTRACT

When I ask my ten year old daughter what she wants to be when she grows up she is uncertain. What she does state with determination is that she doesn’t want to be married; being a housewife, even a mother, has little space in her dreams. I suspect this has more to do with the popular culture she consumes, the sitcoms such as Roseanne that she watches, than having a feminist mother. What I intend to explore in this chapter is the way in which women could use sitcoms to challenge dominant versions of femininity, specifically around the construction of the housewife. This can be done because of the polysemic nature of popular culture texts, which ensures that they may have as many readings as readers, positioned as they are by their class, gender, sexuality and other cultural specificities. Even with many traditional comedy texts, such as On the Buses, there have been spaces for women to negotiate meanings and to contemplate possibilities of change in the role of the housewife. Furthermore, an important shift occurs in sitcoms in the late 1970s from texts within which women were portrayed as the objects of humour, or as merely in a supportive role, to what I call ‘housewives comedy’ (such as Butterflies) where women have a significant voice; indeed at times theirs is the dominant voice within the text. This voice expresses many of the same concerns and criticisms in relation to domesticity, housewifery and finally child care as 1970s and 1980s feminism.