Reaction Essay
Find the I Love Lucy episode called “Job Switching.”
1. Briefly explain how suburban middle-class women related to work in the 1950s.
2. How did Lucy and Ricky and Ethel and Frank portray each others’ jobs in the home and outside the home?
3. How the Job-Placement agent act toward Lucy and Ethel?
4. How was the manage at the candy factory portrayed, as masculine or as feminine?
5. How did Lucy and Ethel and Ricky and Frank fail at their respective switched jobs? Use the video as a Primary Source: connect it to what you read in your textbook and how it illuminates wider trends about gender roles in the late 1940s through the mid-1960s.
6. Finally, when people refer to “the good old days” or to when America was “great,” they mean the 1950s. Why do you think some people think it was “great?” Do you think it was? Why or why not? (Consider also the video you watched on Jackie Robinson when you answer this question, as well. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqizYxTxnj)