When women first appeared on television, they were housewives. As time went on and feminism caught on, television audiences started seeing more women come to the front and have a voice and an opinion on television. With the emergence of talk shows and reality television, we started seeing more women on television as more than just housewives and mothers. Television is an important agent of socialization and as more shows are portraying women in a strong, positive light, television audiences are also seeing them in that way as well. It is important to realize how television impacts the views of the viewers. Studies have shown that when shown repeated images of a portrayal of a type of person, such as an ethnicity or of one gender, one is much more likely to believe and even to take on an unrealistic view or stereotype of a gender or ethnicity (Rubie-Davies, Liu, and Lee 2013).
According to Harper (1998)“…Women are shown almost exclusively as housewives or sex objects” (cited in Dines, 1995, Ch 16). There are very limited roles that women typically play on television, and although women outnumber men in society, men outnumber women on television (Harper,1998). It is the role of television to disprove this theory and slowly and surely, it is.