These social circumstances also inflect TV’s epistemological landscapes. Streeter and Wahl point out that the mutual constitution of gendered spheres and consumer economics is inseparable from the same sorts of analytic uncertainties about viewers that plague television studies: “The social fact and assumption of viewing in the domestic space... is one of the principle ways that the industry solves what Gitlin calls ‘the problem of knowing,’ that is, the difficulty of organizing centralized program production given an invisible and diverse broadcast audience” (248). As for the critics themselves, Joyrich notes that “disputes over the gendered subject — women’s place in the public and private spheres — have been complemented by similar disputes over the subject of reception — women’s place within the discourses of and about television” (RR 5). If, as Joyrich maintains, “television as it is currently organized gears its specific textuality and viewer/text engagement toward a goal quite consonant with capitalist patriarchy — the encouragement of consumption,” the figure of women as the “primary consumer[s] in our society” (RR 40) is necessarily refracted through all facets of the project of televisual representation and inquiry.
As Bathrick observes, “the new [post-war] economic reality that... middle-class women, wives and mothers were entering the labour force as never before” (100) was an especially fraught node in these gendered networks, and the professional woman became a privileged emblem of the anxieties stimulated around the shifting public/private border. According to Streeter and Wahl’s introduction to the topic:
The category of the ‘working woman’ gets its meaning, not straight from life, but by way of other categorizations and their contradictions... ‘working women’ are not women who work, but women who work in a way that takes them across a perceived social boundary that violates certain received social expectations... relating to certain felt tensions and struggles over the role of women within social life; if there is a connection between the political-economic and aesthetic dimensions of television, it is not because the former mechanically imprints itself on the latter, but in terms of those tensions and struggles. (243)
That is, as television is thoroughly entangled with the gendered contradictions and transgressions that crisscross public and private realms, the similarly laden figure of the working woman is necessarily interwoven with the televisual terrain. The professional woman, in literal terms, exploded onto the television scene with the hugely popular Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970 (after the actual transformation of women‚Äôs participation in the workforce had been underway for more than two decades, as Bathrick points out). This and other initial portrayals (Rabinovitz identifies ten ‚Äúfeminist sitcoms‚Äù before 1985 [146]) were predictably ambivalent, manifesting, as Bathrick puts it, ‚Äúthe historical and ideological mandate for keeping the familial intact‚Äù (105) via ‚Äúanother, albeit more ‚Äòresponsive‚Äô, commitment to family values‚Äù (103) displaced onto the ‚Äúworkplace family.‚Äù At the same time, representing the domestic (or, indeed, erotic) concerns proper to femininity within the public professional setting was often an insurmountably thorny proposition: a 1971 article ‚Äúasserts that working women portrayed on TV are never granted private lives and that mothers are denied any relationship to the workplace‚Äù (102). Lentz argues that, additionally, typical discourses around these programs translated feminist struggles against such double binds into ‚Äútelevision‚Äôs struggle for legitimation‚Äù (50), a move that ‚Äúrelies simultaneously upon freeing television from its femininity and conferring new value on that femininity‚Äù (51). This strategic maneuvering demonstrates, again, that the uncertainties posed by the changing status of women, and by the disruptive working woman in particular, are bound up with uneasiness around television itself that it must navigate and contain. Finally, Lauren Rabinovitz recognizes that ‚ÄúNetwork programming executives initially became interested in ‚Äòfeminist programming‚Äô in the early 1970s because it was good business,‚Äù given ‚Äúan important national shift in audience‚Äù (145) toward the young female professional as the new privileged consumer. In this metatextual sense, too, television‚Äôs position vis ?† vis women's roles is inextricable from the complicated relations of capitalism and working girls.
