Desperate Housewives at 20 and the Reimagining of Suburbia

Words: Eleanor Brady

Make it stand out

Twenty years ago a fictional cul-des-sac appeared on the small screen in living rooms across America and changed the face of television forever. That street was Wisteria Lane in the fictional American suburban town of Fairview, the set of a new ABC Studios show created by Marc Cherry called Desperate Housewives. A pop culture moment was born; one which redefined what it meant to be an all-American housewife, by holding a mirror up to apparently idyllic suburban living and challenging the parameters of the domestic space. 

In the two decades since, following a post COVID-19 society redefining what it meant to stay at home and online content of the momospheregaining significant traction, the role of the female homemaker is once again a source of division within political and feminist rhetoric. Termed by experts as radicalised domesticity, the rise of new online domestic personas is a hark back to more traditional notions of the domestic sphere, which shows such as Desperate Housewives sought to satirise.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2004, Cherry revealed that Desperate Housewives was inspired by the case of housewife Andrea Yates, who, in 2001, was convicted of drowning her five children. Cherry watched the coverage of the trial with his mother and while horrified by the trial’s details, was shocked when his mother said she had thoughts of doing the same thing. Cherry added: “I realised if my mother had moments like this, every woman who is in the suburban jungle has.”
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Twenty years on, the rise of new personas like Hannah Neeleman and Nara Smith have brought the domestic space to the foreground of social media and online content. Influencers focussed on parenting, relationship, cooking, and crafting have seen exponential growth. Out of this online content spawned the term “tradwife”, with searches peaking in the midst of the pandemic. Simply put, a tradwife is a woman who believes in traditional gender roles and family dynamics, with a woman’s role and place being firmly in the home. 

Prior to Desperate Housewives, popular television idealised suburban living as utopian. Post World War 2, in order to boost housing development in a stagnating economy, advertised homeownership as a symbol of status, wealth and financial freedom: The American Dream. Making ‘the move’ to leave cities has since become the norm for more than 50% of Americans and is still regarded as the poster of middle-class success - a transition which is perfectly encapsulated by the cultural geography of Wisteria Lane. Sources have rightfully refuted this overly romanticised understanding of the housewife identity, not only pointing to the real work involved in homemaking but also its potential risks: isolation, domestic abuse and total financial dependence.

“When we consider the “suburban jungle” of the domestic space today, it is crucial that we adopt a critical lens when analysing tradwive content and consider what narratives can lie beneath the surface of perfect domesticity, just like the women of Wisteria Lane.” 

Each subplot involving the women is entertaining if ridiculous, from Gabrielle (Eva Longoria) being caught having an affair with the gardener and then getting run over by Bree (Marcia Cross)’s intoxicated son, to Lynette(Felicity Huffman)’s inability to control her children resulting in her becoming addicted to her sons’ medication pills. The housewives tested our threshold for what seems like every character flaw imaginable including adultery, bribery, marital breakdowns, murder and even nanny-rivalry. Perhaps most crucial to its rewriting of suburbia, despite at times being far-fetched, is that these acts showed female character development outside of the domestic space. 

Many of the women simultaneously took on roles outside of the domestic sphere, typically associated with their male counterparts. Whilst not always making good nor right decisions, the women of Wisteria Lane provided a necessary critical lens on the pressures of maintaining the image of a perfect home, which had rarely been deep-dived on screen or deemed ‘binge-worthy’. Clocking eight seasons and 120 million viewers worldwide, Desperate Housewives remains the longest-running female-led television show. 

Within tradwive rhetoric, the domestic remains essential to promoting traditional gender roles, with social media branding the space with a sharable aesthetic. Online content from creators such as Ballerina Farm and Gwenthemilkmaid have a reappropriated 1950s style aesthetic - not dissimilar to that of Wisteria Lane, with ‘day in the life content’ including supercuts of them happily scrubbing various kitchen surfaces, folding laundry, or preparing meals from scratch in sunny, spacious kitchens and wearing beautiful clothes gaining millions of views. The tradwive movement has been built around performances of domestic bliss which in turn, reflect an aesthetic of a simple, almost rural life of suburban perfection, which for many is not the reality. With research showing motherhood is the equivalent of having 2.5 jobs and domestic work continuing to be unrecognised as a form of labour, such content reduces the difficulties and pressures associated with domestic work, suggesting women must publicly carry out such work with a smile and few complaints. 

However, the crucial point is that this stylised and heavily-edited content - similar to the idealised life of the stay at home mom previously shown on TV - is not real life for many women. Which is exactly what Desperate Housewives aimed to highlight in its campy output. It’s no coincidence that most tradwife creators are almost exclusively upper or “leisure” class with access to paid help, huge homes and disposable income, key themes which Desperate Housewives aimed to satirise through the excessive glamour and wealth displayed on Wisteria Lane, but is entirely left out of such online content. 

To combat the obvious critiques of misogyny, many self-identified tradwives use feminist rhetoric to frame the movement as a choice, with a “good for her” sentiment echoed by other women to such content online. But the problematic nature of tradwife identity can go beyond issues of gender roles; Some tradwife accounts promote conservative views, particularly when it comes to sexuality and financial freedom, using alt-right phrases such as there being a “the natural order”, which places men on top. Others promote homeschooling to avoid exposing their children to sex education and gender identity. Views are packaged, juxtapositionally, as the domestic space providing more freedom for women, with blogs suggesting there is “more freedom” for women under the “headship of their husbands” rather than in the workplace.

Season one of Desperate Housewives opened with the death of model housewife Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong) who, despite her “perfect life”, felt compelled to shoot herself in her own living room. As Young goes on to narrate all eight seasons, she tells the audience that “suburbia is a battleground, an arena for all forms of domestic combat”. Whilst giving us hours of binge-worthy, glamorous entertainment, the show is a Trojan horse that offers a complex and important exploration of what can lie beneath the surface of suburban perfection, a theme which must be remembered when consuming tradwife content too.