TV Family Values

Gender, Domestic Labor, and 1980s Sitcoms

By Alice Leppert

Rutgers University Press

During the 1980s, U.S. television experienced a reinvigoration of the family sitcom genre. In TV Family Values, Alice Leppert focuses on the impact the decade's television shows had on middle class family structure. These sitcoms sought to appeal to upwardly mobile “career women” and were often structured around non-nuclear families and the reorganization of housework. Drawing on Foucauldian and feminist theories, Leppert examines the nature of sitcoms such as Full House, Family Ties, Growing Pains, The Cosby Show, and Who's the Boss? against the backdrop of a time period generally remembered as socially conservative and obsessed with traditional family values.

The sharp and insightful analysis of 1980s family sitcoms we need! An engaging assessment of TV comedy in a changing culture of gender, work, and home during a transitional decade. Elana Levine, author of Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television

Insightful, well-argued and carefully researched, TV Family Values gives a rich and multifaceted picture of the social, cultural and political currents at play in 80s sitcoms. Joanne Morreale, author of Advertising and Promotional Culture: Case Histories

Recommended. Choice

Leppert provides an excellent analysis of the significant storylines and ‘fantasies’ that provided a lens with which to view the realities of the Reagan Era. H-Net

ALICE LEPPERT is an assistant professor of media and communication studies at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania.

Contents
Introduction
1          Selling Ms. Consumer
2          “I Can’t Help Feeling Maternal—I’m a Father!”: Domesticated Dads and Career Women
3          Solving the Day-Care Crisis, One Episode at a Time: Family Sitcoms and Privatized Child Care in the 1980s
4          “You Could Call Me the Maid—But I Wouldn’t”: Lessons in Masculine Domestic Labor
5          Disrupting the Fantasy: Reagan Era Realities and Feminist Pedagogies
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

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