The role of women on television has changed over the history of the medium, reflecting changes in the society over the same period. Social roles for women have changed since World War II. Media portrayals of women have been criticized for some time, and television in particular is seen as distorting many facets of American life in pursuit of commercial interests. Movies are accused of ignoring women more and more in our mass culture, and advertising in magazines and newspapers is seen as presenting a distorted view of women in particular, using them as sex objects to sell products. Television is perhaps our most immediate mass medium, entering our homes 24 hours a day, and the image of women on television has a particular power. By the 1970s, women's roles were changing form the more traditional to a somewhat different emphasis on self-empowerment and personal freedom, though certainly not to the degree that we have seen since that time. The beginning of this change was reflected in dramas, comedies, and news programs from that decade.
Television does not sell gender roles the way it sells viewers to advertisers or soap to viewers. Gender is inherent in the way men and women are portrayed on television, and these roles have changed over the course of television history. In a broad sense, they have changed to reflect shifts in gender roles in society at large, but at the same time, it is believed that television's portrayals have helped to shape those roles and continue to do so. In the 1950s, the nuclear family was widely represented in situation comedy, while in contemporary television programming, divided families, single-parent families, and non-traditional families vie with the nuclear family for television time. Gender is also represented in the advertising, which can be more problematic. Commercials have as their object selling products, and they generally treat all viewers as malleable clay to be shaped into the ...