Stephanie Coontz's What We Really Miss About The 1950s

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Modern Sitcoms Compared To 1950s Sitcoms Today people watch sitcoms on TV for entertainment and sometimes we can relate to them because it is realistic to people’s lives today. In the 1950s people watched sitcoms to compare or imitate values with their families. In Stephanie Coontz’s “What We Really Miss about the 1950s”, it talks about a poll that was taken in 1996 by Knight Rider news agency that more Americans preferred the 1950s over any other decade for children to grow up in. Coontz suggest our nostalgia for the 1950s could be miss leading. Coontz believes it is not a good decade for people to remember there was change in values that caused racism, sexism, and discrimination against women. Viewers today would not turn to sitcoms to compare their lives to the sitcoms. For example, the viewers do not want to be a teenage single father living at home with parents with no education as in the show “Raising Hope.” People watch sitcoms now for entertainment. In the 1950s sitcoms the mother stayed at home to look after the children and the father was the one off to work to financially support the family. As shown in sitcoms, “gender roles became much more predictable, orderly and settled in the 1950s” (Coontz 31). However, with society changing…show more content…
These sitcoms were like manuals for the viewers to get marriage and child raising advice. There were never any drinking or drug problems as well as no emotional problems shown on these sitcoms. Women were known as loving caring mothers that stayed at home looking after the children. When women watched theses sitcoms they imitated this belief. In “Raising Hope” Maw Maw and Burt always drink at dinner and Virginia is always sneaking around to smoke so her family will not see her. Maw Maw has mental health problems and forgets who she is most of the

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