S2E9: TV Moms that Shaped Us: Clair Huxtable, Rosanne, Marge Simpson

Sonja and Vanessa consider TV moms who inspired American women in the 80’s and 90’s. Given the warm response to our pop culture episode in our first season (S1E10: “Madonna, Maggie, Diana, Cyndi & Sinead–Gen X Heroines”), we were excited to review some fictional moms from our youth.

Clair Huxtable of the Cosby Show, demonstrated how to raise five children, while looking fashionable and gorgeous, exuding educated elegance, wit, and feminist passion. Rosanne Conner, tutored us in unapologetic snark for Reagan era policies that left her working-class family forgotten in the dust. Rosanne raises 3 kids on part time jobs with intelligence, savvy, and resilience that lets laughter ring out defiantly in her home–every single day. Finally, the most long-lasting TV mom, Marge Simpson, in a nutshell, probably deserves sainthood. Marge is both a satire and a loving salute to pearl-wearing housewives of yesteryear. Let’s just say that June Cleaver never faced the challenges Marge does. What other TV mom can hold a candle to Marge’s 36-season (and counting) optimism, ingenuity, and long-suffering patience?

We look at all three characters as mothers whose stories partly shaped what we hoped we’d be as mothers. Why did they make an impression on us? What did their stories leave us expecting when we were expecting? And were these stories on the mark? Were any parts of the stories ultimately misleading or unhelpful? As we pursue these queries, Sonja shares a secret about bra burning, and Vanessa (tries) to sing the Enjoli commercial song.

REFERENCES:

NPR's Fresh Air Interview about the documentary We Need to Talk about Cosby

Article from Slate in 2014 about Clair Huxtable: The Other Huxtable Effect

2018 Article about Rosanne in Meanjin Online: When Capitalism Saves Us from Ourselves

In our second half of Shirley Jackson’s biography, we pick up in 1939 when Shirley is about to marry Stanley, and for a full portrait of Stanley, you’ll absolutely want to check out S2E7 “The Very Haunted Life of Shirley Jackson.” Again, as we highlight in the show notes for the previous episode, this episode is only made possible by the scholarship of Jackson biographer, Ruth Franklin. We have drawn primarily on Franklin’s 2016 biography of Shirley Jackson, A Very Haunted Life, and we highly recommend it as thorough, thoughtful, and engaging. If you love Jackson or if you are interested in what 1950’s life was like for women and female artists, get your hands on Franklin’s marvelous book!

In this episode, for Jackson, children and books start coming along at about equal intervals in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, and then we really get to see a woman writing full time, while also being an attentive mother, a loyal wife + maid, cook, and laundress. Hear about how Jackson manages this challenge admirably, in a time when neither her husband, nor her parents, nor her society offered her any physical or emotional support.

As they review Shirley Jackson’s adult life with a focus on motherhood, Sonja and Vanessa pause to give special attention to Jackson’s 1953 family memoir, Life Among the Savages, about raising her 4 children. It’s brilliant. Add to that, it’s hard not to marvel at a writer who masters nonfiction humor writing AND also writes fictional horror at a level that makes her one of Stephen King’s greatest influences. Jackson’s Life Among the Savages takes us on a jolly journey through 1950’s America, where parenting requires ashtrays and no child car seats.

Shirley Jackson’s life was short, and packed into it are all the forces arrayed against mid-century American women–the constraints of maintaining a home, the unquestioned deference to husbands, the constant pressure to be feminine and slim, all alongside a very human desire to pursue what your mind and spirit need… and if that need happens to be writing, in the 1950’s, you probably have to wait for your husband to allow you a turn at the typewriter.

REFERENCES:

Ruth Franklin's biography: A Very Haunted Life

Goodreads Review of Life Among the Savages

S2E7: The Very Haunted Life of Shirley Jackson, Part 1

Shirley Jackson, one of America’s greatest writers, was also a mother of 4 children in the 1950’s, and she worked from home writing, cooking, writing, nursing sick kids, writing, doing laundry, writing, shopping, writing, going to parent-teacher conferences, and also taking care of her husband Stanley, who was a legendary college professor but who was so incapable of adulting that his two daughters had to come take care of him after Shirley died because he didn’t even know how to make himself a cup of coffee.

We bring you this episode in large part thanks to the careful, thorough, and passionate scholarship of biographer Ruth Franklin and her brilliantly-written 2016 biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. We knew we had to include Shirley Jackson in our season on motherhood because of how much Shirley’s own mother impacted her life and what a heroic feat of organization, love, hard work, and humor she brought to the act of birthing and raising 4 children while birthing and seeing to publication over 200 short stories, 2 best-selling memoirs, and 6 novels. Within those works lie some of the most probing studies of female characters trying to literally maintain their sanity–with varying degrees of success–in a society that wants them to be college-educated housewives who work like unpaid servants but who do it all cheerfully in high heels and wearing pearls.

Part 1 covers Jackson’s life from her birth in 1916 to the late 1930’s, in her college years when she meets Stanley Hyman who will be both her greatest champion and the source of her deep sense of abandonment. Along the way, Sonja and Vanessa brush up against Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the happily-very-rarely used term, “transcendental groin.”

REFERENCES:

Ruth Franklin's Shirley Jackson: A Very Haunted Life

A brief overview of Betty Friedan's life & main argument of The Feminine Mystique (1963)

Ruth Franklin’s biography of Jackson contains several of Jackson’s cartoons, but this Washington Post article also includes a couple showing Jackson’s satirization of her lounging husband, in the midst of her non-stop work as a full-time homemaker & writer who, eventually, made more money than he did.

Ruth Franklin’s scholarship goes far beyond her 2016 biography of Jackson: check out Ruth Franklin's Website!