I DREAM OF JEANIE

Barbara Eden was the most woman on TV in the 1960's. You could not find anyone not mesmerized by her character on the show ‘I Dream of Jeanie’. The nation watched TV as a collective whole, and everyone was party to the same stimuli feeling connections with strangers through the medium of television. The reporting of news had a different standard mostly because the generation that gave us the news came from a higher standard of primary education that stimulated more of the intellect. Math, Writing, English and Play were important primal elements to one's education.

The hippie movement was a rebellion against the rigid demand of White America to insist on playing a stoic role for men, and for women a dutiful housewife who was first a virgin, not given to sexual liaisons before marriage, and modest in appearance, and behavior. The disconnect for the young whites of the 1950’s & 1960’s spurred a rebellion from the Beatniks to the hippies, and America was never to be the same.

In those days people expected news reports to connect the dots, and took great personal stock in being able to see the relationships to things. A strong work ethic came from Eastern European immigrants, Negro field hands, and an assortment of people who saw themselves as part of a nation under a banner of superiority. The images of white people as the best of our lot was under attack among Black folks, but Barbara Eden had the knack for killing those notions for half of an hour, and everyone sat down enjoying the show imaging life with a Jeanie, or if you were a man, have a Jeanie who was Barbara Eden at your beck and call. – Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories