Make Room for TV by Lynn Spigel
In Make Room for TV, Lynn Spigel aims to track the cultural history of American television as the primary site of exhibition, the movie theater, moves from the public sphere into the domestic space. For this, she looks at the utopian and dystopian discourses that would shape both mass reception to t.v. and its actuality over the course of its development. Her understanding of that dialogue, however, focuses primarily on the contradiction between white women’s representations on t.v. that did not seem to reflect their steadily increasing population within the post-war labor force. To shift our dominant understanding of the cultural history of American television towards a relatively marginalized, feminine demographic, Spigel compares discourses on television and the family to other sources in the postwar world-- particularly women’s magazines-- that suggest multiple layers to hierarchies of power that have rarely been examined. While broadcast historians typically focused on economic and political frames for television’s reception, they often failed to account for the familial context and social factors that impacted its cultural form. She argues lower cultural layers must be examined (in this case, white women’s perspective) in relation to dominant discourse to shape a more accurate understanding of television’s content and motivations. In the first chapter, Spigel takes a historiographic approach to domestic ideals and leisure from the Victorian to the Broadcast age. She meticulously goes through various cycles of dystopian discourses on technology that eventually evolve into more naturalized views that are “appropriate” to fit with conceptions of womanhood and the domestic space. The movie theater, the train, and the pleasures of the urban space in general were all initially associated with moral corruption and masculinity until women began to move into these spaces. The same cycle continues on into the broadcast era, beginning with the supposed dangers and “masculine” technical prowess of radio. Radio was said to captivate its audiences with mass culture and isolate them from the moral grounding of the family. This was, of course, until it could fit within the furnishings of the home and speak to the entire family at once. The same dystopian cycle continues on with television and could be considered onward with the internet and its new technologies to this day. Ultimately, Spigel finds:
“postwar domesticity wasn’t simply a return to Victorian notions of True Womanhood, and nor was it, as some historians argue, merely an attempt to obliterate the Depression by returning to the family consumerism of the 1920′s suburb. Instead, it was an updated version of the family ideal,capable of negotiating traditional ideas about domesticity with the realities of postwar experience.” (33-34)
In other words, while much of our views on domesticity and womanhood had changed on the surface, discourses on television and new technology remained centered around gendered divisions lingering since the Victorian era.