Housework and Gender in American Television

Housework and Gender in American Television: Coming Clean examines representations of housework and gender in sixty of the most popular television shows of the 1950s through the 1980s. This book challenges the notion that housework functions primarily as a mechanism through which female characters are marginalized, devalued, invisible, or passive, instead proposing a reading that brings to the fore the strength, often ignored in standard feminist analyses, that is inherent in the loving, sacrificial, and active qualities of housework.