Earners and spenders, husbands and wives: the affective restraints on women’s labor in high Cold War American sitcoms

Abstract

ABSTRACT The affective dimensions of labor and the ways in which gendered representations of affect can be deployed as a justification for limiting women’s participation in the workforce constitute a foundational, yet often overlooked, aspect of midcentury American situational comedies. Two American sitcoms—I Love Lucy and The Donna Reed Show—exemplify the connections between women’s participation in the labor force and gendered representations of affect, providing new perspectives on how the imaginary ‘1950s housewife’ foregoes participation in the wage-earning workforce and voluntarily confines herself within the domestic sphere as a result of her actual or perceived affective obligations to her family and community. By positioning Lucy and Donna within an economy of women’s affective responsibilities and the purportedly emotionless mechanization of the incipient post-industrial economy, these sitcoms align labor and affect along an axis of gender that portrays women as obligated to provide free emotional labor for their families, while thereby representing the ‘housewife’ as emotionally unfit for productive waged labor.