Copyright American Culture Association Spring 1997The Walt Disney corporation has been a major purveyor of popular history throughout the twentieth century. From cartoons to television shows, feature films to amusement parks, Disney has shaped and reshaped the presentation of the past for an audience of millions. With the creation of enormously successful amusement parks in California and Florida, Disney history became part of tourist itineraries throughout the world. Disney's interpretations of history, however, are not static. A look at one attraction in particular, the Carousel of Progress, suggests how Disney has transformed the presentation of the history of women and the family over the past thirty years. Disney's "collective memory" of family life reflects a persistent nostalgia for a pleasant, highly controlled past and an equally well ordered future, in the context of an ever-changing present.
The Carousel of Progress is a Walt Disney stage attraction that uses "audio-animatronic" robots to portray the evolution of technology in the American home. The Disney corporation claims that this show has entertained more viewers than any other theatrical presentation in world history (Bierman 223). Since its introduction as a 
General Electric-sponsored attraction at the 1964 New York World's Fair, the show moved to Disneyland in California, and then in 1975, to Disney World in Florida. An examination of four versions of the Carousel from 1967 to 1995 indicates how history has been interpreted and reinterpreted by Disney to tens of millions of people.' A comparison of each act of the play, looking particularly at the depiction of gender roles, should demonstrate not so much how gender roles have actually changed, but rather how those changes have been constructed as a kind of collective memory of the history of women and the family during the twentieth century.
The Carousel is a combination play, advertisement, and amusement park ride. The audience sits in seats that rotate around a stage to view an affluent white robot family in four different eras: the pre-electric turn of the century, the 1920s, the 1940s, and the most up-to-the-minute "present." The setting is the kitchen and its ever-improving wonders, with side glances at other parts of the house. At the end of each act, a catchy musical refrain ("There's a great big beautiful tomorrow...") builds while the seats rotate to the next scene and the next historical era.
Family life has of course transformed dramatically during the course of the last century. Perhaps most significantly, women have entered the paid labor force in droves; at the same time, the rise in divorce and single-parent households has made the two-parent family, with a full-time mother at home, anomalous, representing at best a tiny proportion of current American families.2 Equally buffeted by change has been the nature of historiography since 1964, particularly as the disciplines of women's history and family history have developed. These conceptual approaches barely existed when the Carousel first turned. For example, a topic like the evolution of domestic technology has been subject to increasingly sophisticated analysis, much of it suggesting that "labor saving" devices don't always save labor (Cowan, Strasser). Hence, a comparison of different versions of the play might suggest the degree to which social change, or at least its historiography, has influenced Disney's construction of the past.3
The Walt Disney corporation has enormous influence on the historical consciousness of popular culture in the United States (Watts). As Michael Wallace has suggested, "Walt Disney has taught people more history, in a more memorable way, than they ever learned in school..." (158). The Carousel of Progress is a case in point. During the show's first two decades, an estimated 100 million people sat in the revolving chairs to view the products of General Electric and the shifting depictions of the evolution of family life.4 The current venue for the show-Disney World in Orlando, Florida-is the world's top tourist destination, hosting over 33 million people a year (Jackson, 99). Disney's claim for a theatrical record, then, is not surprising.
The Carousel of Progress opened at the New York World's Fair in 1964. Like earlier expositions, the fair showcased technology, consumerism and industry.5 At this fair Walt Disney's "imagineers" received corporate funding to create four audio-animatronic displays, following the success a year earlier of the "Enchanted Tiki Room" replete with chattering "birds" at Disneyland. Audio-animatronics was to Disney a form of "animation through electronics"-a kind of three-dimensional cartoon (Jackson 103, 249). Audio-animatronic productions could play forever but the script could change; unlike a conventional play, television drama, or cartoon, these shows do not stay fixed, but are continually revised (or perhaps more accurately, "reprogrammed"). Audio-animatronics therefore represent a unique genre of popular culture.6
It has been suggested that Thornton Wilder's play, Our Town, provided the original model for the structure of this theater piece (Bierman 223, Wilder). In both Our Town and the Carousel, a stage manager, or narrator, directly addresses the audience to describe the characters and their daily lives. In both plays, there is a sense of nostalgia for the past and anticipation of the future. There is only one version, or script, of Grover's Corners, however, although we do see Our Town over the passage of time. While the Carousel of Progress has been described as a "robot drama," at the same time it can be seen as a domestic comedy of household technology, with a long-suffering male narrator getting audience laughs as his female partner goofs up.7
In all four versions of Carousel, the narrator is John, also known as "Father." Pipe in hand, he affably presides over a family including Sarah ("Mother"), their son James, daughter Jane (who is sometimes known as Patricia), and a dog who transforms from Rover to Sport to Queenie back to Rover. A house guest, variously Cousin or Uncle Orville, is occasionally present, as are Grandma and Grandpa. These characters people the cast, along with a rapidly modernizing collection of kitchen appliances (which sometimes steal the show as they busily whir, clang open and shut, and light on and off).
The character of Mother is especially illustrative of the theme of gender in the Carousel story. Mother appears differently in each version and in each act of the play. She is always a consumer. She is variously a household drudge, flighty housewife, or social activist. While newly developed labor saving devices are applauded for providing mother with new "freedoms," these never include the provision of more time so that she can enter the world of waged labor. Mother is alternately clever, incompetent, very competent, long-suffering, annoying, sarcastic, bitter, comically overly talkative, and completely dehumanized. The order in which these characterizations are presented is surprising.
In the first act of the 1960s version, vaguely set "just before the turn of the century," Father boasts of the family's new acquisitions-an ice box, water pump, gas lamps, telephone, stove, "talking machines," and vacuum cleaner. Father lauds these things for saving so much time for Mother:
Mother: ...with my new washday marvel it takes only five hours to do the wash - imagine!
Father: That's right, folks.... Now, mother has time for recreations like...
Mother (interrupts, sarcastic): Like canning and polishing the stove!
Father (chuckles): Okay mother, you just iron the wrinkles out of my skirts.
Mother (tolerantly): Yes, dear.
(GE Carousel 4)
The labor-saving function of the appliances is noted with an ironic twist regarding the continued drudgery of mother's labor-presumably an irony shared by the audience.
In Act 2, set in the 1920s, the updated kitchen now houses a coffee percolator, waffle iron, refrigerator, and toaster. There are so many appliances, Father notes, that blowing a fuse is a constant danger. Mother has also been given an electric iron and therefore, Father says, even more leisure time:
Father: Mother has something to do to fill in her evenings.... Now, it's no problem at all to get my collars smooth-right mother?
Mother (hot and tired):
Yes, Dear.
(9)
Act 3 takes place in the "electronic era" of the 1940s. In this version, as in all the others, there is no evidence of the war. There are, however, many more new appliances: an electric washing machine, electric range, refrigerator, and dishwasher. But there is something else: clever Mother has figured out how to use her electric food mixer to stir paint as she remode the basement:
Father: ...Mother's remodeling my basement workshop...into something called a `rumpus room'...be careful now, Mother.
Mother: Don't worry about me, dear(resumes humming)
Father: Mother's pretty ingenious...like using her food-mixer for stirring paint??... Well, that's my wife, Sarah.
(16-17)
Just like Rosie the Riveter, Mother adapts her domestic sensibility to the business of production (Milkman 341). Then Mother, not to be too competent, falls off the ladder.
The final act in the first version is set in the General Electric "Medallion Home" of the 1960s. It's Christmas. Mother now has the annoying habit of interrupting Dad in an almost maniacal manner, because she's so excited she can't wait to tell us about her electric range with the self-cleaning oven and her huge choice of appliance colors. Mother has lots of free time now. She is active in the garden club, the literary society, and the ladies' bowling league. "Colormatic" lighting matches the mood of the music emanating from the hi-fi. Grandma and Grandpa, busy sidekicks in the first three acts, have disappeared to their own home in the nearby "Community for Senior Citizens." The play ends in this version with the audience shuttled towards a "Kitchen of Tomorrow" display of General Electric appliances (20-27).
This 1960s version of the family over the 20th century, like all the later productions, seems to occur outside time and place. There are a few references to innovations beyond the little, contained world of this family (like electric street lights, or retirement homes) but none at all to the cataclysms of war, assassination, depression, urban riots, racial struggle, or social change. Time is confused and foggy, with cheerful cliches ("the frantic forties") substituting for disturbing fact. The role of Mother is generally one of beneficiary of labor saving devices, within the context of her subordination to Father. Her free time is oriented toward the needs of the family. Still, during the 1940s segment she shows some spunk and ingenuity of her own.
The second version examined here is that of the play as it was redesigned for the move from California to Florida's Disney World in 1975. It apparently existed in a similar form as late as the mid 1980s. Mother in these versions has to some degree achieved more autonomy. While she still irons Dad's shirts in the first act, by the second, 1920s scene, instead of ironing Dad's collars Mother spends her free time at a new hobby for her own pleasure: embroidery. Daughter Jane, obviously a kind of roaring 20s "new woman," also wants to enlarge her activities-she argues with Father about finding a job:
Daughter: I don't see any harm in looking for ajob, daddy.
Father: It's a man's world out there, Jane.
Daughter: Well, it won't always be, father.
Queenie: Arf, Arf!
Father: Now cut that out, Queenie. You're supposed to be man's best friend.
(Fjellman 82)
This 1920s is remembered here differently than it was a decade earlier; the imagineers are aware not only of the changed status of women in the post suffrage 1920s, but perhaps of a new sensibility about women in general, reflective of the 1970s.
By the "frantic Forties" Mother is still remodeling the basement, and still using her food mixer to stir the paint. But this time, certainly reflecting the feminist debates of the 1970s, she argues that perhaps she should be compensated for her labors:
Mother: If you hired a man to do this, wouldn't you pay him?
Father: Of course, dear.
Mother: Then I should get equal pay.
Father: Heh! Heh! Heh! We might negotiate something later on.
Mother: When?
A cuckoo clock goes off. The bird sings, "Now is the best time."
Father: You stay out of this.
(Fjellman 82-83)
The last act is also changed. Mother's volunteer activities have taken on a more activist slant; she works in her free time on the "Clean Waters Committee" and has been "commended by the mayor for getting a bond issue passed." Luckily, she had time to do this, thanks to her convenient GE dishwasher and dryer. Father, picking up some of the responsibility at home, bumbles through meal preparation (Bierman 234-35). If woman's role is expanding, men obviously still are not comfortable in the kitchen.
This version of the mid 1970s through 1980s reflects the impact of feminism and the widening role of women, on both the presentations of the past and the present. Mother spends more time on her own affairs and less on those of her family. If she's not yet working for wages (as most of her non-mechanical contemporaries are) still she is engaged in activities of civic importance. The products of General Electric free her to follow these various pursuits.
In the most recent version of the Carousel of Progress, viewed in 1995, General Electric is no longer the sponsor, and Mother has been transformed yet again. Surprisingly, this transformation does not reflect the legal and economic gains for women of the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, for the Mother of the 1990s these gains seem to have been erased. At the "turn of the century" now, Mother has still been given time by the new labor saving devices to clean the oven and get the laundry off the line. Somewhat anachronistically, there's a radio playing in the background.
By the 1920s, Mom, provided yet even more free time by her new "electric servants," no longer chooses to spend her leisure hours at her hobby of embroidering. Instead, she is making costumes for the rest of the family so they can take part in her ladies' club holiday parade. Mother, by the way, comically "interrupts" even more than she did in the earlier versions. And the daughter, now called Patricia, is no longer interested in finding a job. She is only interested in boys. The somewhat ironic banter between daughter and Father about a man's world has completely disappeared.
The 1940s in this latest version is no longer "frantic" but "fabulous," and time is conflated in an even stranger way than before. Such 1950s phenomena as commuting, the "rat race" and television have already become part of family life. Significantly, the notion that Mother be reimbursed for her work on the rumpus room, evident in the Carousel versions from the 1970s and 1980s, has vanished. Instead, Father chastises Mother for her appeal for help with the basement remodeling project. There is a decidedly chilly undertone to the interaction between husband and wife in this 1990's version of the 1940s:
Mother: John, this papering is getting out of hand. I could use a little help.
Father: Now, Sarah, didn't I set up that clever automatic paint stirring machine for you? (whirring noise)
Mother: Yes, John, you're a genius. Of course, this will ruin my food mixer. What do you care?
Father: Oh, good old Sarah. Always the last laugh. (loud noise; dog barks)
Mother: Oh, you and your progress! That paint mixer of yours just sloshed paint across my room-my rumpus room!
Father: How do you like that? I always say, if you're going to be married, marry a girl with a sense of humor!
("Performance Notes" 11-12)
Something has happened since 1967. Then, Mother was dubbed "ingenious" for figuring out how to stir paint with the food-mixer. During the next productions in the 1970s and 1980s, she additionally argued for the need for equal pay for her labor in rehabbing the rumpus room. Now, in the 1990s, it is instead Father who has performed the clever task of inventing a paint stirrer, while Mother rather ineptly does the labor. No Rosie the Riveter, she. The discourse over the worth of female labor for both mother and daughter seems to have completely faded from Disney's collective memory.
The last act, too, is different. Mother, we recall, in the 1960's script kept busy with the garden club and bowling league. The versions from the 1970s and 1980s involved her more centrally in civic life, in the "Clean Waters Committee" and bond issue drive. But by the 1990s there is deafening silence on any work or community commitments. Mother sits in a corner of the kitchen toying with a "new voice activation system" for the oven while Dad, as ever a stooge with a stove, happily burns a turkey. The earlier acknowledgment of social change, and of the historiography of change, is gone. Labor saving devices at this point don't seem to produce much in the way of leisure, self-improvement, or satisfaction for Mother at all. By the 1990s, her activities have been more subordinated to those of her family than at any time in the long history of this drama.
Twenty years ago, the Carousel was criticized for its portrayal of women. A newspaper writer suggested that, "The G.E. Carousel was a sexist hymn to allelectric progress in the 20th century. Through the years, dumb old Mom would fall off ladders replacing light bulbs.... Dad, of course, would be long-suffering."8 James Bierman, who analyzed the play as a "robot drama," disagreed with this analysis, arguing that the women of the Carousel had nowhere to go outside the kitchen, not because there was nowhere to go, but because "Disney's women are good for nothing else." Furthermore, he stated, if the play was sexist, it was not. from malice but from the deeply rooted male chauvinism in American culture. The play, he argued "reflects; it does not invent" (229). If the women's liberation movement of the 1970s altered the historical perspective of the audience and imagineers, as Bierman argues, what happened in the 1990s?
It is difficult to get through the Disney or General Electric organizations to speak with the creators themselves, and to understand the process through which the scripts have been revised.9 General Electric, of course, had since the 1920s worked hard at creating a "positive electrical consciousness" that would build a desire in families throughout the country to "make their homes into electrified dwelling places."'o This was the task given the Disney imagineers, who strove to create a new kind of realism that left the audience feeling good about the sponsor. "What we create," one Imagineer has said, "is a `Disney realism,' sort of Utopian in nature, where we carefully program out all the negative, unwanted elements and program in the positive elements."" But like Thornton Wilder's Grover's Corners, Disney's idealized family has dystopian as well as utopian features. It appears that a feminist perspective, acknowledged during the 1970s and 1980s when feminism was part of the national discourse, has been scripted out of the Carousel's world in the more conservative 1990s.
Disney history may be, as the historian Michael Kammen suggests, "shallow entertainment" of a bland and nostalgic past, but it also reflects a powerful collective memory of women and the family (639). For millions of people, it has been an entertaining and memorable, if not always accurate, account of American social history with a whiggish perspective on progress and consumerism. Kammen has written that "Americans will historicize the present in a somewhat facile, somewhat inadvertent way, and they will continue to depoliticize the past as a means of minimizing conflict" (704). Perhaps it is this process that accounts for the popularity of the Carousel's theater. Feminist gains, part of the national experience a decade ago, are erased during a time of political and social backlash. The play presents a history that forgets its own past.
For help with this project, thanks to the Disney Archives, Ben Weiner, Stuart Weiner, Maria Treccapelli, Tom Moher, and Marilyn Perry. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1996 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women.
| [Footnote] |
| 1The primary sources for this essay are as follows: for the 1967 script: "GE Carousel"; for the 1975 script: Bierman; for the 1980s report of the show: Fjellman, and Wallace. For the February 1995 version of the show, see "Performance Notes." |
| 2There is of course a vast literature on this topic. For the rise in working mothers, see Weiner; on the effects of the feminist movement of the 1970s, see Evans. |
| 3For another interpretation of Disney see the discussion of changing representations of the American West in Disneyland's "Frontierland" in Wiener. |
| 4This estimate was made by Walt Disney Enterprises in 1975; millions more have seen the presentation by the late 1990s. See Bierman, 223. |
| [Footnote] |
| 5The attraction was at first entitled "Progress Land," and later renamed the "General Electric Carousel Theatre of Progress" and then the "Carousel of Progress." See Jackson, 65. On the cultural analysis of world's fairs and expositions, see Sorkin, Nye, Williams, Smith. |
| 6"Performance Notes," 1. That the Carousel has been edited in this way was acknowledged in the 1995 production; the narrator proclaimed, "Although our Carousel family has experienced a few changes over the years, our show still revolves around the same theme and that's progress." It is hard to get a grip on this "genre"; because of the revisions it is ephermeral, slippery, never fixed. Perhaps the Carousel is more like a museum exhibit, or even a puppet show, than a conventional play. |
| 7For the "robot drama" definition, see Beirman. Thanks to John Kasson for pointing out the domestic comedy aspect of the play. |
| 8Michael Seiler, Los Angeles Times, 3 July 1974, cited in Bierman, 229. |
| [Footnote] |
| 9See my correspondence with both General Electric and Walt Disney: Weiner to Archivist, General Electric Company, 11 Aug. 1995; E-mail correspondence between Weiner and Robert Tieman, Walt Disney Archives, Burbank, CA (15 June 1995, 19 June 1995, 19 June 199S, 22 June 1995 and 23 June 1995). Copies of correspondence in Weiner's possession. |
| 10In an earlier theatrical promotion, General Electric had, at the 1933 Century of Progress in Chicago, created a "Talking Kitchen" exhibit. See Nye, 265, 358. |
| 11Cited in Zukin, 222. |
| [Reference] |
| Bierman, James H. "The Walt Disney Robot Dramas." Yale Review LXVI (Dec. 1976): 223-36. Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic, 1983. Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in |
| America. New York: Free, 1989. |
| Fjellman, Stephen M. Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992. "GE Carousel of Progress." Typescript. Walt Disney Archives, Burbank, CA, 1967. |
| [Reference] |
| Jackson, Kathy Merlock. Walt Disney: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. |
| Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Vintage, 1991. |
| Milkman, Ruth. "Redefining `Women's Work."' Feminist |
| Studies 8 (Summer 1982): 342. |
| Nye, David E. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940. Cambridge: MIT P, 1990. |
| [Reference] |
| "Performance Notes of the February 1995 Carousel of Progress." Typescript in author's possession. Smith, Michael L. "Making Time: Representations of Technology at the 1964 World's Fair." The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History. Ed. |
| [Reference] |
| Richard W. Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. |
| Sorkin, Michael. "See You in Disneyland." Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. Ed. Michael Sorkin. New York: Noonday, 1992. 205-32. |
| Strasser, Susan. Never Done: A History of American |
| Housework. New York: Pantheon, 1982. Wallace, Michael. "Mickey Mouse History: Portraying the Past at Disney World." History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment. Ed. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989. Watts, Steven. "Walt Disney: Art and Politics in the American Century." Journal of American History (June 1995): 84-110. |
| [Reference] |
| Weiner, Lynn Y. From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 19201980. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985. Wiener, Jon. "Tall Tales and True." The Nation 31 Jan. 1994: 133-35. |
| Wilder, Thornton. Our Town. New York: Coward McCann, |
| 1938. |
| Zukin, Sharon. Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. |
| [Author Affiliation] |
| Lynn Weiner is Professor of History and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Roosevelt University, Chicago. |
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