'I Love Lois'

[williamtheday]

Re-reading the Lois Lane comics in The Superman Family trade paperback, it hit me that Lois how much Lois was written as Lucy Ricardo back then! Ah, the chauvinistic 1950s...

[Steven Caldwell]

Ah, the chauvinistic 1950s...

Oh, jeez. "chauvinistic". Only in the "chauvinistic" 50's could a woman "Lucille Ball" have her own show.

[Adekis]

Totally tangential topic, but there's an episode of Lois & Clark where Clark, having anxiety about his upcoming wedding to Lois, starts dreaming that they're in a Super-I-Love-Lucy, where Lois is trying to be Super-Wife. Meanwhile, Lois I believe dreams that Clark is Super-James-Bond ("The name's Man. Super Man.").

It was pretty funny, really meta, and honestly I don't think any other version of Superman but that show specifically could have done that plot. I loved it.

[Jon Clark]

Re-reading the Lois Lane comics in The Superman Family trade paperback, it hit me that Lois how much Lois was written as Lucy Ricardo back then! Ah, the chauvinistic 1950s...

I think I read somewhere that either Weisinger or Ellsworth had actually requested the writers to make Superman stories more like the comedic Lucy adventures. So Lois as Lucy Ricardo to Superman's Desi is deliberate.

It worked, but for my money I wish we had never gotten that zany Silver-age bit Lois and Superman's antics revolving around his secret ID or Lois trying to make Superman jealous.

[Jim Kelly]

I don't really think so. I think I know my Lucy and my Lois well enough to see a distinct difference. Lucy isn't trying to get Ricky to marry her, she's usually trying to get a job of some kind. Lois has a job and has no difficulty finding other jobs when she wants a change, but she's not married.

Lucy sometimes made mistakes as a homemaker--for the sake of comedy--but generally we're supposed to believe she's okay at taking care of the home and taking care of Little Ricky (it would be too shocking if Lucy was a horrible mother to her little child). Whenever there was a story about Lois getting married, she seemed to always be poorly suited to the task. It was the one job she wasn't good at--the subtext seems to be that even if Lois got her wish, it would turn out badly for her--she's better off single and employed as a reporter.

Now if we were talking about THE LUCY SHOW as opposed to I LOVE LUCY--then I could see some similarity. Lucy Carmichael has a job and a blow-hard boss. She has work friends. She's single and always on the prowl for a man.

I don't see that the Lois Lane stories (which were mostly published in the 1960s, not the 1950s) really fit into any kind of ideology. You can't say they support the patriarchy anymore than they advocate feminism. They're mainly meant to entertain and thus nimble in their use of character. Whatever a plot demands, that's what a character must do.

Given that most of the writers were male, I think their approach to writing a female character was to switch gender. Where a male would be obsessed with the object of his desire, Lois was obsessed with the object of her desire. Superman and Clark didn't usually play a big role in her stories, but she looked at them the way a man looks at a woman from afar. In the case of Superman, she thinks he's the most perfect being in the world and is obsessed with having him. And in the case of Clark, she despises him but will use him if she can get something out of him. This is exactly how men behave toward women (or certainly did when I was a youth).