Shopkeeper, Newswoman

I spent Sunday afternoon with B., my 96-year-old cousin who lives in rural Tennessee.

Despite her age, B. is intelligent, articulate, opinionated—as she has always been.

It wouldn’t seem like a visit to an elderly relative would have a place in a blog about women, work, and media, but I think it does.

Engaged to be married when she was young, B. lost her fiancé in World War II. She kept his Purple Heart and his photo, and went on with her life, running a small but well-stocked grocery on the typically Southern town square. There, she provided not only food items (bologna was a specialty) and glass knick-knacks (which she liked) but information. She knew everyone in the surrounding towns, all about most people in the county, and all of their stories.

When people came to the county courthouse for information, they were sometimes told to go across the street to the store before bothering to look up the papers. B. probably had the information they needed. The store was often our first stop when we arrived on our annual August trek from Oklahoma to Tennessee when I was a child. For one thing, I was the world’s pickiest eater and bologna was one of the few things I’d eat. Mostly, I think, it was a way to catch up on news before making the round of relatives.

The tie between news and trade is an old one. In media history class, I always ask students to think about where they’d get news (and how they’d define “news”) if they lacked formal sources. They realize, then, that they’d go to places people congregate—coffee houses, student unions or libraries on campus, and, particularly, marketplaces, where “news” has long been a by-product of the exchange of goods.

B. ran her store until well into her 80s—until age and nearby “big box” stores pushed her out. Every day for 40 years, she wore a suit to work. In her own way, she was a newswoman.

Good Wife, Old Story

Would somebody please explain to me the appeal of The Good Wife?

I just started watching it, and admittedly have seen only a few reruns. People kept telling me it’s good, despite the cliché initial promos when it appeared in 2009. So I thought, okay, I’ll watch it. Now I’m not sure why.

Of course, I get the obvious. The show is a fictionalized take on the recurring news stories in which a male politician is discovered in an extramarital affair. Dutifully shoring up her husband’s public image, the “good wife” in such stories stands stoically beside him, doing her best to feign a Nancy Reagan-style loving gaze in a scene that is clearly PR-orchestrated damage control. The show is an attempt to look behind that two-dimensional construction at the real life of such a woman. In this case, she’s an attorney named Alicia who has been forced (can’t have her do it by choice) to return to work. She spends her days fighting crime and her nights worrying about her teenage kids—Superwoman with a double meaning.

It’s good, of course, to see a show in which the main character is a hard-working, capable woman who does her job well. Alicia is smart, sensible, sincere. It’s also good to see a show that builds, to some extent, on people’s awareness of media manipulation. So far, so good.

But as someone interested in media portrayals of women’s working lives, I don’t see anything so new here. Instead of any kind of in-depth exploration of character, we get another version of two-dimensional stick figures—in this case, more so than usual. Alicia and Peter are media stereotypes of media stereotypes. There’s no hint of love, or even sexual chemistry, between them. (Was there ever?) We are directed to root for Alicia as if we’re watching a prize-fight instead of a romance. But why?

The answer is by no means a new one. As in almost all media portrayals of women’s employment on some level, the theme here is home vs. work and the spectacle of female suffering. It’s “Stand By Your Man” with a twist—updated with a business suit and a question mark. (“Stand By Your Man?”) No matter what case Alicia’s law firm is pursuing, audience attention is directed to her role as Wronged Wife and the question of whether she’ll Take the Bastard Back. We accept her power as an attorney only because she has been sacrificed on the altar of female victimhood, which reinforces the femininity that might be in question if she were simply a capable female attorney.

Even the symbolism is heavy-handed. In one episode, she spends the day doing legal work on the king-sized bed she no longer shares with her husband. Of course, we’re all for her helping the innocent prisoner escape execution, scheduled for that night, but it’s clear she’s gotten a bum deal—forced to replace sex with legal papers. The real story is what she’s not doing on that bed.

Ho-hum.

Media have traditionally reworked representations of women’s wage-earning jobs and careers into dramas about domestic life, reinforcing old clichés. This show is no different. How nice it would be, once in a while, to have a show about a successful woman in which her femininity wasn’t reinforced through suffering.

At least, could she do the legal work at the kitchen table?

No More Working Women

“Working women.” Now there’s a redundant, out-of-date phrase. Last year I was at a conference where someone suggested we retire it. I agree. Let’s do it yesterday.

The phrase suggests, of course, that some women don’t work—a put-down that those who do unwaged work caring for homes and families have long, understandably, objected to. And, obviously, the modifier suggests that those who do work—meaning at paid jobs—are outside the norm, the marked language functioning like, say, “lady doctor” vs. just a regular (male) one.

Beyond that, it sends us down a rabbit hole of oppositional thinking: “work” vs. tasks that aren’t considered “work,” being “at work” vs. “at home.” Such thinking implies a framework of clearly delineated boundaries privileging men and money. Men go “to work” to earn money; women “stay home” and don’t. “Work” is wage work. Everything else is—well, whatever, but it’s not “work.” The terms are deeply gendered. To “go to work” is active (and implicitly masculine); to “stay home” is passive (and implicitly feminine).

All of this sounds pretty old hat, so you would think we’d have let go of it by now. It’s not just that most women now hold paid jobs, but the boundaries between “work” and “home” are eliding, too. Work is where the laptop is, for a lot of people of whatever sex. Writers and college professors, who have long done a lot of their work at their kitchen tables, are used to such blurred boundaries—and the attendant implication that because they work “at home,” whatever they’re doing can’t possibly be “work.” But it’s becoming more common in other areas, too. A few years ago, a student of mine wrote her master’s thesis on workers in high tech industries who literally have no office. They’re issued a computer, and they do their work in a place of their choosing. The kitchen. Starbucks. Bed.

And yet, just when you think we’re past such outdated thinking, there it is again, belching up from the deep cavern of Stuff We Take for Granted. Managers at Wal-Mart, one of the nation’s largest employers and a ubiquitous part of American suburbia, have allegedly called female workers “Janie Qs,” arguing that while men seek careers, women do not. Once upon a time, the demeaning term for this was “pin money worker,” meaning a woman who worked to buy frivolous little extras, rather than, say, food. That kind of thinking was long used to justify women’s low wages. It hurt a lot of people, such as the women who supposedly took “pin money” jobs to feed and clothe their families during the Great Depression because it was legal to pay women less. Since they were cheap labor, women could get jobs like waitressing that many men wouldn’t do, yet they were blamed for causing the Depression by supposedly taking all the jobs. (Nothing like a vicious reversal.)

It seems to me that part of the reason such workplace practices aren’t catching up with people’s lives is because we don’t have current language to fully describe the relationship between work and space, place, locale—whatever you want to call it. Wal-Mart is a product and a staple of suburbia. Suburbia was built around gender boundaries—around a world in which Dad got in the car to go “to work” and Mom’s job was to stay “at home,” except, of course, to go shopping (like at Wal-Mart) to buy stuff. Again, this sounds so June Cleaver—so Been-There-Done-That. Yet it’s no surprise that it’s in corporate America’s best economic interest to (still!) reinforce those clichés. Maybe the rest of us have moved on, but big companies haven’t, a majority on the Supreme Court hasn’t, and the language hasn’t.

Before World War II, the common phrase for a married woman who was responsible for all of the housework and held a paid job was “two-job wife.” She was responsible for duties in two places—“in the home” and “at work.” In popular magazines, there was the predictable turmoil over whether the “two-job wife” was slighting her family. Later, the term was “Superwoman.” Either way, the implication was that women should only “work in the home.”

But that doesn’t describe reality now (if it ever did). We need a new term to describe women whose labor pays the bills and, hopefully, makes use of their talents and satisfies their ambitions.

How about deleting the modifiers and simply calling them “women”?