Since 1990, the Simpsons have taken their place among the many other television families that have both shaped and reflected our ideas about American family life. As with Ozzie and Harriet, I Love Lucy, Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, Make Room for Daddy, The Jetsons, The Flintstones and the prototypic Leave It To Beaver, the Simpsons live in a world where the father goes out to work, the mother stays home and the children are often precocious. There are differences, of course. The mother, Marge, has improbably tall blue hair; the father, Homer, works in a nuclear power plant; the son, Bart, has a bit more edge than other TV sons. The Simpsons, however, debuted at a time when many TV families had taken on many alternative forms (e.g., two divorced women, two single brothers, a single parent, two-career families, blended families), making it actually one of the more traditional television family structures on television over the past fifteen years (excluding reruns). Within this traditional framework, however, do the Simpsons present traditional gender stereotypes, or does the show use the traditional framework to challenge or poke fun at traditional gender roles and stereotypes?

Definitions

To understand the Simpsons’ place in the gender world, we must first define a few terms. Although the usage has evolved over the past several decades, currently sex (as in “what is your sex?” as opposed to “let’s have sex”) refers only to biological factors, such as chromosomes, hormones, genitalia and body fat distribution. This includes  …