Who's the Boss? She's the Boss.
a look at the reversal of stereotypical gender roles in "Who's the Boss?"
Oh, how I love “Who’s the Boss?”And for something that aired in the 80s, I’d say it was fairly unconventional. A successful, suburban, recently divorced, single mother and advertising exec hires a single widower/father/former pro baseball player to be her housekeeper -- it’s unlike any show from that era that I’m familiar with, mainly because of its reversal of stereotypical gender roles.
Often in mainstream culture, we see, or have seen in older media, the working husband and happy housewife trope. But in “Who’s the Boss?,” it was Judith Light’s Angela Bower (one of my favorite characters on television, by the way) who would come home from work expecting a clean house and dinner on the table. And it was Tony Micelli who would have it all ready for her, eager to hear about her day at the office. Of course, he was the housekeeper, so meal prep and house cleaning were parts of his job description. Still, the fact that it was Tony, a “man’s man,” doing domestic tasks, and Angela who was the breadwinner, was something new. Instead of even having shared cleaning duties and a two income household, which is what we would consider to be a modern and progressive home setup, the traditional working spouse-homemaker spouse setup was revisited in the show. Except the working spouse was a woman (and not a spouse, but rather the boss) and the homemaker spouse was a man (and not a spouse, but rather an employee).
This went beyond equality and instead put Angela above Tony. She paid his salary, she told him how to spend his days, she was paying for the house he was living in and the food he was cooking. Tony depended on Angela. Angela was the character in the most superior position. And she was not villainized for it or made out to be less womanly or motherly. She was a smart, witty, kind, and successful character whom audiences were meant to adore. There were no attempts to make her seem more masculine or neglectful of her child just because she couldn’t cook and prioritized her work. The relationship between her and her son was not strained. She cared for him and it was apparent. And in the later seasons, when her son was older and Tony adopted another child, she acted as that child’s mother, doing all of the necessary things like taking him to swim lessons and reading him bedtime stories.
And more than just being motherly, Angela was a feminine woman who was in touch with her desire for romance. She would wear heels, hair ribbons, and suits and dresses that were very fun and flowery and colorful (which are all things traditionally associated with women, although we are stepping away from these associations in today’s society). While this may seem like a trivial thing to point out, implicitly connecting femininity and professionalism feels like a big deal to me. When women in TV and movies are meant to be depicted as successful businesspeople, they are sometimes dressed in less feminine ways and given more neutral colors to wear, making the fact that they have a career their most defining feature and attempting to strip them of part of their womanhood. More than this, these women are also described as people without time for a romantic life, which would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that most of the movies that do this end up being romance films, forcing the women to choose between the career that made them uptight and the nice man who doesn’t take them as seriously (aka almost every Hallmark movie ever made).
Angela wasn’t like this. She dated. All the time. There wasn’t a stigma around her dating and she didn’t have to change herself in order to find a date. She had the career and the dating scene and the nurturing nature and the femininity. Her commitment to her job, disastrous nature in the kitchen, and inability to do domestic duties did not take away from her womanhood or ability to be a great mother, even though these things were often thought to be interconnected — maybe not so much in the 80s, but certainly in the preceding decades.
Angela just needed help around the house (as do many single parents) and that help happened to be in the form of a man who wanted to move his daughter to a better neighborhood. Angela was not less of a woman or mother because she didn’t cook or clean. And Tony was not less of a man because he did cook and clean. He took pride in his work; there was nothing “emasculating” about cooking dinner and doing the laundry. There was complete acceptance among them that the manner in which they lived their lives, while traditionally being considered “abnormal,” was perfectly normal. According to Tony and Angela, there was nothing odd about Tony being a housekeeper and Angela being a successful businesswoman. In contemporary society, we of course expect this kind of dissolution of gender norms, but the unconventionality seen in “Who’s the Boss?” was new for TV, and not just because of the reversal of gender roles.
Angela and Tony also had an unconventional relationship. The two of them lived in the same house for 8 years. They shared their lives and parented their respective children together like one big family, Angela being a mother to Tony’s daughter and Tony being a father to Angela’s son. They loved each other, first as friends and then eventually romantically. But their relationship was, as one character called it, “weird.” The writers introduced the possibility of a romantic relationship between the two of them in the first season, and yet only in the 6th season of this 8 season series was that relationship beginning to be seriously and more intensely explored. Of course, it was acknowledged beforehand. They went on dates, kissed a few times, flirted, and even talked about the possibility of a relationship. But only in season 6 did it feel like a more immediate possibility. Maybe my knowledge of older TV shows is not comprehensive enough, but this kind of slow burn romance between two people living in the same house, raising their children together, completing each other’s sentences, but dating other people on their journey towards each other doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that was heavily reproduced in various forms the way other sitcom situations were (for example, sitcoms that revolve around a group of single friends like “Girlfriends,” “Friends,” “Living Single,” “Golden Girls”).
There were, of course, other shows with a two parent household and some kids, like “Family Matters,” or shows with the will they/won’t they romance, like “Cheers.” But what “Who’s the Boss?” did was different. Tony and Angela were unmarried but living their lives together, a non-couple that acted like a couple, and a complete reversal of gender roles. Even watching it now, the family situation feels progressive, like these people are so evolved they can live together very harmoniously and act like they’re married without actually being married or having sex, because it could potentially change their relationship (in more than the obvious ways). They were in love with each other and they knew it, but they just continued with the relationship they had.
I don’t really know what to say about this other than the fact that it is different from anything I’ve seen before and while different doesn’t necessarily mean progressive and I could just think they’re “evolved” because their situation is unusual, I do think the show as a whole is fairly progressive because of its unconventionality (even if some of the episodes explored regressive or stereotypical themes).
While there is more that I could say on this show, like the powerfulness of Katherine Helmond’s character, Mona, or the show’s insistence on alluding to sex in every episode (which also feels progressive but maybe I just think 80s culture was more conservative than it actually was), I think over-examination is a thing that exists and very briefly discussing the wonderfulness of Angela Bower and the unconventionality of the Tony-Angela relationship allowed me to write about a show that I love without doing so exhaustively.
All this is to say that “Who’s the Boss?” did something that felt very different from what had been done, and even is being done today, on television. And it is a good kind of different. An empowering kind of different. Because when trying to answer the question of “Who’s the Boss?,” I lean more towards the women characters, and that in itself feels like a win.