TV Moms

The 1950s

During the 1950s, even the government weighed in on such issues as television's impact on the whole-someness of the family, and in response, television networks offered programming reminiscent of popular radio shows from decades before. Domestic life was represented with nuclear families, such as that in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Donna Reed Show, Leave It To Beaver, and Father Knows Best, which presented idealized versions of white middle-class families in suburban communities, and mothers whose lives revolved around the home; these moms were relegated to serving the needs of their children, husbands, and households. Seemingly fulfilled in every way, women catered to the needs and whims of the other family members.

The 1960s

The 1960s gave us the civil rights movement and awakened the nation to women's rights issues, such as equal pay in the workplace and adequate child-care outside the home. The network lineup shifted with the times to mirror some of the social anxiety caused by a nation in flux. For example, the family dynamic was significantly impacted by rising divorce rates, yet network writers and executives were limited in their ability to illustrate the nation's rising divorce rates without actually portraying divorced families. Censorship codes at that time required that the single parent not be divorced, but rather widowed.

For the first time, American viewers were presented with the image of single mothers on such shows as Julia, Here's Lucy and The Big Valley. By 1967, classic domestic comedies featuring traditional families were hard to find, while “broken” families (mentioned above), as well as a new trend of “extraordinary” families in programs like Bewitched, The Munsters, and The Addams Family accounted for the mainstay of the family shows. In some way, these programs with “monstrous” mothers may have reflected social anxiety about the future of the American family without stay-at-home moms.

The 1970s

Additionally, the 1970s was a time of considerable change for the portrayal of women's lives within the American family, as the networks took on the burden of social criticism and attempted to reach new demographics, such as the burgeoning African American middle-class, young white-collar professionals, and the growing number of women working outside the home. Programs such as All in the Family, which presented Edith Bunker as the docile working-class mother caught up in political differences between generations in the household; her polar opposite cousin, Maude Findley in Maude was the first feminist/activist mother and was groundbreaking in that she debated the issue of abortion in prime-time. Other programs, such as Good Times, presented Esther Rolle as Florida, an African American mother who overcame the hardships of rearing her children in the projects, and her struggles as a single mother after the death of her husband.

In the mid-1970s, new family formations included programs featuring single moms, either divorced or never married women, such as in Alice, or One Day at a Time. Despite these modernizations, the 1970s and early 1980s still featured retrospective versions of motherhood, including traditionally-depicted soap moms, traditional mothers in family dramas such as Family and Eight is Enough, or the sentimentally reminiscent Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons, which took viewers back to the “good old days” of “traditional” families where women's main function in the family—and in life—was to be a mother.

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