LUCILLE BALL, THE 1950'S
AND THE CULT OF DOMESTICITY

III. CONCLUSIONS

The initial question we wanted to investigate through this work was on how we could use biography, looking closely at the life of one individual, to help students understand a specific period in American history. But as we worked through the unit this question was transformed into an examination of how students worked with historical evidence. In this case the evidence included a series of videos that focused on Lucy the television character, rather than evidence about the life of Lucille Ball, the historical figure. We might have kept the focus on the actress and her career, but we found it difficult to find a biographical piece of appropriate length to address the historical question. So we focused more of our attention on the historical questions raised by the 1950s. Our emphasis became the portrayal of women in the 1950s media, with the Lucy character as an important case study.

We learned that students were able to successfully use television as a primary source. With the use of the organizer that places evidence in one of two columns: “cult of domesticity” or “proto-feminist” - students had a clear purpose to view two Lucy episodes as primary sources. Using this and other evidence they were able to articulate and use phrases like “proto-feminism” and “cult of domesticity.” Moving beyond just summarizing the episode, they were able to develop interesting and well-reasoned arguments, incorporating evidence to support a thesis in a formal essay (see Students A, B, C, and D). Additionally, many students successfully combined and analyzed the various primary sources to support their arguments (see Students E, F, and G).. We also saw that many students were challenged by this assignment, but that the prompt elicited, especially for some reluctant writers, some of their best work to date. For example, Carmel and Karla (Students K and L) used the evidence to develop thoughtful arguments, approaching the assignment with a high degree of engagement and enthusiasm. Indeed, throughout the teaching of this lesson, and through our observation, we noticed that Carmel’s and Karla’s enthusiasm and engagement was shared by many other students.

However, some students had difficulty using the documents to support the thesis (see Student H).. Additionally, a few students fell short of the assignment by failing to incorporate a sufficient number of sources in their essays; they tended to cite evidence only from the television episodes and not information from the written sources and advertisements (see Students I and J). We begin to address these address these issues in our comments on possible revisions that follow.

Possible Revisions

After having taught the lesson we realized we needed to rewrite the question to better facilitate the students in using the other primary sources. One possible question would be “Did the media in the 1950s crack or reinforce the cult of domesticity?” In order to help the students analyze the primary sources more deeply we would add sourcing information such as “who is the audience?” and “what is the purpose?” to the primary sources chart. Another possibility we considered was analyzing the visual advertisements as a class to model the source analysis and so that each group was analyzing written sources only.

Some teachers suggested dropping Source F (“What’s Wrong With Ambition” because it seemed inaccessible to some of the students. In order to support the essay question the three handouts need to have a uniformity of vocabulary (does a “crack in the cult of domesticity” clearly mean the same as being “a proto-feminist”?) Some teachers also thought that it would be beneficial to point that Episode 30 “Lucy Does a TV Commercial” can be interpreted as subversive in how it makes fun of advertising.