In David Shumway's "Watching Elvis" article, he effectively places an overemphasis on the change of gender roles in the 1950s. It's true that women entered the labor force, and in that sense the typical dynamic of a housewife, two and a half kids, and a bread-winner father did change slightly in a few families, but he makes it out to be a complete social upheaval like the bra-burning feminists in the 1960s.
Pre-WWII, approximately 15% of women ages 25-44 were active participants in the work force, and post-WWII this number increased to around 25%. A significant increase, certainly, but nothing like the 67% of married women working in the mid-1980s. Instead it was due to the necessity in a war economy to have laborers, and many of the male laborers being sent overseas to fight in the war. It was only natural women would start working, but it certainly didn't mean that there was a huge social upheaval or a complete change in gender roles just because 10% more women were contributing to what was a bustling economy. In the 1950s, of the women who had children who were 6 years old or younger, only 10% were actively seeking or already in possession of jobs. The role of women as housewives was still greatly widespread.
After about 3 hours of putting off writing this blog post by staring at 1950s advertisement, I came to strongly disagree with Shumway's comment, "...especially advertising, in which women's bodies are displayed to sell everything from women's clothing to motor oil" (128) and then states how Elvis moved into this feminine role of sexual display. Instead, I found women's bodies being used to sell Jantzen swimsuits, women not dressed provocatively at all but looking ecstatic advertising silverware that men should buy for their wives or the wonders of a washer and dryer, or how exciting an SOS pad is. Instead of women largely being sexualized or as the author suggests men being feminized through their own sexualization, images of family are strongly enforced for almost everything. Women clean and cook, men do the yardwork and cut the turkey, and the kids look cute and encourage parents to buy them things. Even car advertisements seemed to restrict their interest to how sturdy the car was, and only a few mentioned people whatsoever, with slogans like "take him fishing in style" with a little kid holding a pale and a fishing pole with his dad opening the car door for him. Most images of men involved them being with their sons, such as the car example above, or almost every food advertisment involved the family at the park together with the father barbecuing with his son. I certainly hope that doesn't count as the sexualization of men, but I know it doesn't make me go hubba-hubba.
Oh, and of course scantly clad women fawn over guys who are drinking whatever brand of booze is being advertised, but priorities while drunk haven't changed much since the middle ages.
If gender roles were changing and men were being sexualized, I'd think the advertisements would have changed to capitalize on this in a time where consumer studies were so wide spread and consumerism was on the rise. Even movies ranging from musicals like “Guys and Dolls” and the large output by Disney in the 1950s such as “Cinderella”, “Alice in Wonderland”, “Sleeping Beauty” and so on all show women in their typical feminine role while men are hyper masculine, knights in shining armor, gangsters (who in the case of “Guys and Dolls” dance and twirl in the most masculine of fashions) and what have you. “The Seven Year Itch” with Marilyn Monroe has her being the breathy voluptuous blond bimbo like always, and even Doris Day, as much of a tomboy as she’s accused of being, eventually agrees with her fiancé in “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” to be a housewife while she repaired the broken engine of their car on her own.
Maybe Elvis did get popular because he was a sex object, but he became one through overemphasis of his masculinity. Hell, the relation between Elvis being referred to as a sexual object with emphasis on his masculinity and then being characterized as androgynous or a eunuch seems like a huge conflict in terminology to me, but fortunately in the context of the article it more or less makes sense. It’s just greatly troublesome to read an article when its premise is severely flawed. Gender roles in the 1950s were as strongly enforced as ever, and a few more women working as secretaries and stewardesses definitely didn’t spark any sort of drastic change in attitudes towards women, let alone women’s attitudes towards men.
I think Shumway's point is that Elvis was the first white, straight male to be cast as a vulnerable sexualized object, not that it was common but that the clear male/female foundation was cracking, as it was throughout a variety of arenas in the US post-WWII.
ReplyDeleteI think what's interesting about your reaction is that you're looking at two different things that hopefully we'll discuss throughout the class as we move more into media: real life (work statistics) and fantasy (advertising). The jump from 15% of working age women working to 25% of the same group working is rather remarkable. This isn't an addition of 10%, this is an addition of almost 67%. The female workforce almost DOUBLED after the war.
The depiction of women as homemakers in media makes sense, since most women were homemakers. But there's a normalizing component. WWII media showed women as laborers in order to convince women it was okay to be a laborer, post-WWII media showed women as housewives to remind them to get out of the office and back in the kitchen. Disney, while having stunning animation, has always been a medium of socially conservative propaganda. That 10% of the working age female population said 'no' is a remarkable change of the dominant order of the country.
Something interesting to consider also is our retrospective view. As Shumway notes, The Beatles, like Elvis, were sexualized. Were they sexualized in the skimpy attire of women hawking beer? No, but what is now seen as men's bodies sexualized in media (David Beckham for Armani) only began in rebellious advertising of the 1980s. I don't think of Elvis as all that sexual, just as a performer having fun, but I'm not a teen girl in the 1950s, so it's hard to know. It's also hard to know if media is a reflection of society or an idealized version of society if that's the only thing we're considering.