"Butterflies" 1978 Sitcom? 10 POINTS!?

Question

I'm doing a general essay for my homework, and I wanted to know how you think the gender roles in "Butterflies" were presented?

Are they typical of that era in time?

What's different about them?

What differences are their in their genders?

Answer 1

From what i can remember, yes they are typical of that era.. She's a bit of a downtrodden housewife who needs to spread her wings and find herself. She's hopeless at cooking, her husband takes her for granted and she finds love elsewear. Her husband is the archetypal "career" man who isn't exactly sensitive to her needs. Oh and I seem to recall that she has two boistrous sons who don't really give her any support.



Hope this helps. I've probably got completely the wrong programme!!!

Answer 2

Partly as a result of feminism and partly because it had become harder for families to get by on the father's wages alone, more and more wives and mothers started going out to work in the 70s. However, Ben appears to have made enough money for there to be no financial incentive for Ria to work - and as she was such a dizzy character it does make you wonder how she would have got on in a job. The whole set-up does seem quite old fashioned by today's standards.



You might also want to check out the play Abigail's Party, which is another product of the late 70s. The gender roles in that are quite interesting - for instance, one husband is henpecked while the other is quite domineering.

Answer 3

British sitcom Butterflies starred Wendy Craig as Ria Parkinson, an outwardly normal housewife undergoing a rather profound middle-aged crisis. Married to a dentist named Ben (Geoffrey Palmer) who spent his off-hours collecting butterflies, and the mother of two indolent teenaged boys, Russell (Andrew Hall) and Adam (Nicholas Parkhurst), Ria could not help but feel that something was lacking in her life. Thus it was almost inevitable that Ria entertained thoughts of straying from her marital vows in the company of Leonard Dutton (Bruce Montague), a wealthy businessman whom she had met by accident during one of her rare forays outside her home. For his part, Leonard was enchanted by Ria, but he was reluctant to give his own wife a divorce. For four years, Ria and Leonard periodically ducked away to enjoy an entirely chaste relationship, with Ria forever torn between kicking over the traces and dashing off to a life of thrills and chance, and remaining the dutiful wife and mother she'd been all her life.

Answer 4

As far as I remember it was Wendy Craig discovering that she had missed her childhood as a middle aged woman and was bored with her sensible but responsible husband.



In that respect it was most definitely typical of that time since it was pretty much the beginning of an era of women discovering they wanted more than to be married and have kids and it was no longer frowned upon for a woman to have affairs, leave their husband etc.

At the same time husbands were no longer regarded as the breadwinners who had a wife to do the cooking, washing and bringing up babies.



Strangely, one of Wendy Craig's sons went to my school and was a totally uncontrollable, stuck up little snot, so maybe real life wasn't so far away from her acting roll.......

Answer 5

I think the gender roles were presented as Wendy Craig's ditsy housewife and Geoffrey Palmer's hen-pecked husband.

Sorry can't answer the rest of the questions as I only saw repeats when I was younger as I wasn't yet born in 1978.