Content area
Full Text
Watching the "Working Gals": Fifties Sitcoms and the Repositioning of Women in Postwar American Culture
If you were to drive through the intersection of Hollywood and Vine in 1956, you could glance out your car window and glimpse a billboard that declared, "HERE'S WHAT YOUR SECRETARY THINKS OF YOU!" Next to these words you would have discovered a cryptic message. If you stopped at the light long enough--and could decipher shorthand--you could figure out that the message read, "If you are anything like my boss on TV's Private Secretary, your secretary probably thinks: You are smart and efficient in so many ways. But you sometimes forget the value of praise. Ann Sothern." 1 This billboard not only promoted CBS's popular new sitcom Private Secretary; it publicly chided bosses for failing to recognize their secretaries' skills. Although Sothern's message addressed employers, most likely it was decoded by smirking secretaries. The billboard symbolized the secretary's precarious new position in the window of public display. She could speak in public, but not out loud; she could criticize her working conditions, but only in code; she could find new employment opportunities, but remained subject to the whims of her boss. In short, the billboard captured social anxieties surrounding women's mobility in the workplace during the 1950s and the increasing significance of clerical labor.
This article examines Private Secretary along with two other "working girl sitcoms" that aired on CBS between 1952 and 1957. 2 My Friend Irma (1/52-6/54), Meet Millie (10/52-3/56), and Private Secretary (2/53-9/57) all featured single, white secretaries who worked in New York City. But rather than present a normative model of the secretary, each of these shows constructed a different version of the "working-gal," with divergent modes of behavior and dress, varying degrees of ambition and professionalism, and different relations to home and family structures.
CBS's working girl sitcoms appeared on television during a period of postwar containment that largely limited women to the domestic sphere. Both Mary Beth Haralovich and Lynn Spigel have shown compellingly how the television industry valorized women's domestic role during the 1950s and created the "ideal homemaker." 3 But at the same time that dominant social trends encouraged women to become homemakers, business and industry were rapidly expanding and in need...