Gender Roles in 90's Television

According to the works of Nancy Signorielli and Susan Kahlenberg, television seems to portray a never-ending dilemma for women. "Either have a respectable job or have a family, you can't have both" appears to be the theme for the women in many of the shows during the 1990s, as indicated by a "content analyses of programming in the 1970s and 1980s" (5). These studies showed that women who were married were less likely to work outside of the domestic realms and single, divorced, and widowed women were the ones more likely to be employed outside the home(5).
Sure, shows like Ally McBeal, Chicago Hope, and Veronica's Closet show successful and independent businesswomen that would suggest feminist ideals, but according to this article, these women also seem to struggle for fulfillment for their personal lives (5). By "personal lives", I do not know if the authors mean starting a family or if they mean personal goals such as going to Europe before they die or trying rock-climbing by the age of thirty. Whatever the authors were trying to suggest in this sentence, they emphasize the point that, on television, working women are less likely to have families. They also point out that men with families are the ones that are working while the single men made up a small percentage of the working men(5).
The television shows are more feminist in the sense that between the years of 1966 and 1990, more and more women in shows were beginning to occupy professional careers and managerial positions and less were taking on the traditional jobs of secretary, nurse, or teacher (6). However, the statistics are still there concerning the correlation between martial status and having a career. Just looking at the charts constructed from the studies done, many of the working women were single, divorced, or widowed. Many of the married women were not working. But the men who were married were working while not so many single men were working.
I believe these television shows go along with the traditional gender role ideal of women staying at home with the family while the father goes to work, even though the feminist ideals are starting to break through. It makes perfect sense that these shows would have the married men work, because they have to provide a financial base for their family. The married women fulfill the traditional housewife roles by staying home instead of working. The single women are breaking from the old norms of society and working instead of staying home. And the women who are divorced or widowed would be forced to work anyway in order to support themselves, especially if they have children to take care of, too. So, the two extremes in these television shows would be the tradional role women (the married ones) and the independent feminists (the working ones). The widows and the divorcees would be in the middle ground.

Signorielli, Nancy and Susan Kahlenberg. "Television's World of Work in the Nineties." p. 4-21.