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!

S2E6: Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice: Is Mrs. Bennet a Bad Mom?

Mother knows best, the old saying goes. But what if your mother is constantly trying to ship you with strange, rich men? Believe it or not, if you’re in England, circa 1800, having such a mum might have its upsides.

Sonja and Vanessa offer a lively run-through of Pride and Prejudice with an eye on the character who, in terms of dialogue, speaks second-only to Miss Elizabeth Bennet herself. (No, it’s not Mr. Darcy.) It’s Elizabeth’s mother, Mrs. Bennet, who talks her way into second place with gossip, scheming, and fashion advice. And yet, we pose the question of whether this mother–universally acknowledged as silly–may also be wise. In this classic novel’s playfully astute look at patriarchy’s true ridiculousness, we spotlight Mrs. Bennet, wondering if, perhaps, she may be the marriage game’s MVP.

Along the way, Sonja indulges in a bit of Lady Catherine worship, and Vanessa mixes up her balls, and together they offer at least a couple of fresh insights into the world’s ongoing obsession with Pride and Prejudice, a novel merely attributed to the nameless “Author of Sense and Sensibility” when published that has, nonetheless, cast the shadow of a giant across the landscape of the literary world, over two hundred years later.

REFERENCES:

Jo Baker's novel, Longbourne

Live from Pemberley, Season 4 Hot & Bothered Podcast

Ben Fensom, lip synch PP miniseries from the 90's

@somebenfen (on Instagram)

S2E3: Motherhood in Lorca’s Yerma & The House of Bernarda Alba

Sonja and Vanessa are thrilled to welcome Dr. Jonathan Mayhew, an international scholar on Federico Garcia Lorca, to explore the theme of motherhood in Lorca’s 1934 play, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba, the masterpiece Lorca finished writing just two months before he was assassinated by Spanish fascists in August 1936. Disappeared by Franco's Falange forces at age 38, Lorca never saw Bernarda performed. Both plays question the expectations and limits traditional society puts on women in terms of sexuality, marriage, and motherhood. Yerma lyrically portrays a wife who cannot conceive, trying to figure out what purpose she serves without motherhood...she asks if she is even a woman. In Bernarda Alba, Lorca forges a crucible within the walls of a locked house, in a Spanish village, at the height of a sizzling Andalusian summer, in which five young women live, caged by religious mores, fears of gossip, patriarchal traditions, and the demands of their own sexual desires. Bernarda–their own mother–appoints herself their jailer, and with cruel words and a walking-cane-cum-blunt-weapon, Bernarda dominates her daughters, her servants--even her own octogenarian mother. Dr. Jonathan Mayhew explains and offers insights on crucial textual elements, plus he fills in key information about Lorca’s biography and the complicated political landscape of 1930’s Spain, in the lead up to the Spanish Civil War. This episode showcases all the elements we value on In Walks a Woman: scholarship, history, enduring literature, and women’s stories. Treat yourself to an episode that examines a Spanish male writer who showcases passionate, powerful women in stories that refract larger social, religious, and political issues….many of which we are still negotiating in 2025.

LINKS:

Jonathan Mayhew's 2020 book, Lorca's Legacies

Johnathan Mayhew's 2009 book, Apocryphal Lorca

2015 Presentation: Conversations in the Observatorio: Jonathan Mayhew. Lorca's Modernist Self-fashioning in collaboration with Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Translation of Lorca's 3 Major Plays: Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba (Dr. Mayhew recommends this translation)

Spanish Text of Lorca's Bodas de Sangre, Yerma, La Casa de Bernarda Alba

There are absolutely online translations of Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba that are free, but the quality of the translation might vary.

Sonja mentions the BBC version of The House of Bernarda Alba with Glenda Jackson as Bernarda and Joan Plowright as la Poncia, but sadly it does not appear to be available via streaming online. You might have more luck at your local library or finding a used copy for sale. It’s a brilliant production with two of the greatest British actresses ever. Jackson passed away in 2023, and we just lost Plowright this January of 2025. If you can find this performance with these two legends, it is SO worth watching!

#lorca #garcialorca #federicogarcialorca #spanishcivilwar #womenintheater #bernardaalba #inwalksawoman

Vanessa and Sonja examine Julie Otuska’s completely original narrative style in her novel, The Buddha in the Attic (2011). Vanessa grabs the historical student-driver wheel along with Sonja’s steady historical expertise to give you the story of Japanese immigration to the United States, the fascinating phenomenon of “Japanese Picture Brides” (OG catfishing?), the journey of women who leave their mothers and families in Japan to a country where they can only snag a foothold when they, the novel’s narrators, become the mothers of American citizens. And then comes the bombing of Pearl Harbor…and all footholds are lost. Buddha is like no other novel that has been written. Why? Because it tries to capture the “kaleidoscopic” (Sonja’s perfect adjective!) of women experiencing sweeping cultural events, women who traditionally have no voices and remain forgotten by history. What if all those women from the past could speak? What if they could all reach out to us from history and share a moment of their life experience? If they could, Julie Otsuka would be their medium, and the themes of motherhood and the cadence of poetry in Buddha would be their book.

Julie Otsuka's Website

THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC for purchase from the publisher, Penguin Random House

WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE for purchase from publisher, Penguin Random House

Also Referenced in this Episode:

An novel that exemplifies the use of multiple first-person narrators:

WONDER by RJ Palacio, for purchase from the publisher, Penguin Random House

More Info on Japanese art that may be influences:

Kakemono History

Sumi / Japanese Ink Paintings