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I Love Lucy was an American television series running from October 15, 1951 to May 6, 1957 on CBS, and was rated one of Time magazine's "100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME" and captivates an American audience of 40 million each year. The program was so popular it won five Emmy Awards and was the first show to end at the top of the Nielsen ratings, which was followed only by the Andy Griffith Show and Seinfeld. While I Love Lucy was extremely successful as a show and distracted many Americans away from their problems in the Fifties, it did not depict an exact representation of middle-class American society during the 1950s, but major parts of the series were true to life.
America in the 1950s was a generally uneventful era in foreign affairs, but was full of internal improvements with the development of the interstate system, the Department of Health, Labor, Welfare, and the founding of NASA alongside a steady increase in the standard of living that left many Americans with a desire for the "good life." I Love Lucy had a strong emphasis on being well off, with Lucy and Ricky Ricardo having no problem with money at any time. For instance, when Lucy wants to prove to Ricky that she can go on a television commercial, she destroys their T.V. and goes inside to act out a scene. T.V.s were expensive in the 1950s, but it wasn't a big deal. The sense of a strong economy can be seen in other aspects of I Love Lucy as well such as the show of Ricky's successful career as a singer and band leader for the Tropicana Club, which showed that the American people had no problem with spending their money on entertainment.
Married women in the fifties were ideally efficient, patient, and charming housewives with only 30 percent of all married women wor...

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...ailed, only solidifying Ricky's trust in accurate society at the time. At one point, Lucy attempted to get a job (which was quite controversial in itself as only 40% of all women worked) when Ricky and Fred were criticizing women's roles as housewives and how simple it was. Ethyl and she went into the job seekers office but had issues getting jobs, as they had no formal skills, but they did end up working in a candy factory where they failed miserably and learned the lesson that breadwinning was a "man's job", alongside Fred and Ricky nearly destroying their apartment in an attempt to cook dinner.

Works Cited

• I Love Lucy S01E30
• I Love Lucy S02E01-S02E04
• Out of Many: A History of the American People 6th Edition [Chapter 27]
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Lucy
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043208/
• http://elcoushistory.tripod.com/economics1950.html

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