Humor and Gender Roles: The "Funny" Feminism of the Post-World War II Suburbs

Abstract

BY NOW IT IS GENERALLY ACCEPTED THAT THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT OF THE 1960s did not come into being overnight. The publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963 provides a convenient watershed event, but Betty Friedan's book documents the fact that women's discontent with their narrowly prescribed roles had been brewing for some time, and a variety of studies has provided evidence that all was far from bucolic in the postwar suburbs to which middle-class women were consigned by societal expectations.' Although many women did not participate in the back-to-the-kitchen movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the prevailing ethic stressed woman's fulfillment as wife and mother. Resistance to this ethic found some overt expression in magazine articles,2 but emerged more subtly in the popular art forms of the period, including film, fiction, and humorparticularly the humor created by popular women writers. One study of the popular arts of the period is Brandon French's On the Verge of Revolt (1978), an analysis of the films of the 1950s. French points out that while the films of the World War II period reflected women's increased participation in