Title: Masculinity, Gender Roles, and T.V. Shows from the 1950s | The Artifice
Headings: Masculinity, Gender Roles, and T.V. Shows from the 1950s
Masculinity, Gender Roles, and T.V. Shows from the 1950s
Strict Gender Roles
Gender Role Conflict
Women as Subordinate
Men of the 1950s
How This Leads to Violence (Potentially)
Works Cited
Posted on Oct 18, 2014 by
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Content: Masculinity, Gender Roles, and T.V. Shows from the 1950s | The Artifice
Masculinity, Gender Roles, and T.V. Shows from the 1950s
The 1950s nuclear family emerged in the post WWII era, as Americans faced the imminent threat of destruction from their Cold War enemies. The ideal nuclear family turned inward, hoping to make their home front safe, even if the world was not. The image that we recall, largely as a result of the American television shows of the time period, is the picture perfect family consisting of the bread-winning, rule-making middle-class father, the doting housewife who was thrilled to wake up every single day and clean the house and cook all of the meals, and their children who never seemed to get into any sort of trouble that could not be fixed. For those Americans who sought reassurance of the role of the family in the Cold War era, television showed them exactly that.“… Television projected a vision of American life into the home that could easily be emulated, in part at least, in those places in society that already resembled the ideal…” (Gilbert 141). Though millions of Americans did not have the lifestyle depicted on the small screen, television show families from the 1950s reflected idealized gender roles of the time period, which set an aspirational norm, even if it did not reflect reality. Past scholarship has been generally uncritical of the psychological impact of these idealized images. This paper considers recent scholarship in gender and psychology, to theorize about the ways that highly masculinized norms perpetuated by television during the 1950s may have contributed to violent development in boys and young men. Strict Gender Roles
A working man from the 1950s, dressed in a suit to go to work. During the 1950s, television gender roles were stricter and more rigid than they ever had been.