| Leave it to Beaver has received substantial | | | | take care to note the ways in which Brady Bunch |
| attention from television scholars. These | | | | offered a very qualified feminist vision that |
| discourses include popular understandings of | | | | blended discourses of the 'new woman' - working |
| second-wave feminism encouraged by media | | | | and living on her own outside of the confines of |
| coverage of feminist activity, the generic | | | | past domestic sitcoms - with traditional messages |
| parameters and functions of situation comedy, | | | | about the need for women to continue fulfilling |
| and the history of television representations of | | | | traditional female roles as caretakers and |
| women. Leave it to Beaver is a fitting | | | | nurturers in the cobbled together 'family' of the |
| «baseline» example because of its | | | | workplace. The combination in these sitcoms of |
| popularity, longevity, and resonance in American | | | | girl-next-door sweetness and old-fashioned |
| cultural memory. Leave it to Beaver created | | | | attachment to honesty and integrity, on the one |
| important parameters for future television | | | | hand, and spunky New Woman, on the other, |
| discourse representing feminism, parameters that | | | | allows such sitcoms as Leave it to Beaver and All |
| include a focus on working women (and a | | | | in the Family to ride the currents of social change, |
| concomitant avoidance of a critique of the | | | | endorsing modernity at the same time as it |
| traditional patriarchal family), the depiction of | | | | hallows tradition.' Through her functions as mother, |
| women's lives without male romantic partners, the | | | | daughter, and sister within her work-family, a |
| enactment of a 'feminist lifestyle' by young, | | | | journalist becomes the career "True Woman" as |
| attractive, white, heterosexual, female characters, | | | | a television producer who nonetheless retains the |
| and a reliance on the tenets of second-wave | | | | equable charm and mediating skills of the |
| liberal or equity feminism (Janet, 1992). | | | | well-brought-up girl (Fraiman, 1999). The appeal of |
| However, at the same time that they note the | | | | such a character might lie in the fact that this is a |
| popularity and importance of Brady Bunch as the | | | | difficult reconciliation to pull off in life, and |
| generator of a new representational space for | | | | therefore it is very satisfying - for men as well as |
| female audiences, television critics and historians | | | | women - to see on the small screen. |