BEWITCHED, BOTHERED, AND BEWILDERED: As I noted in my last post, Susan Douglas's Where the Girls Are argues that baby-boomer girls grew up amid a popular culture that often pulled them in contradictory directions, between the narcissist and the masochist, the confident "new woman" and the traditional girlfriend/wife/mother. The rise of "prefeminist agitation" in the mid-1960s -- particularly the release of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) -- set the stage for a new round of pop-culture figures: the magical stars of Bewitched (1964-72) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965-70), whom Douglas sees as representing a cultural anxiety about modern women's unpredictable "powers." (This chapter, by the way, draws the most eye-rolling from students who think Douglas reads waaaaaay too much into "silly" pop culture.)
By 1970, though, the genie of "women's lib" was out of the bottle and onto the streets, attracting an often vicious media backlash; Time provided an especially blatant example with its August 1970 cover of author Kate Millett as a "grim, ball-busting ninja from hell," as Douglas puts it. Not surprisingly, then, pop-culture heroines in the early 1970s often navigated and embodied the tensions between feminism and antifeminism. On The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77), Mary Richards constantly vacillated between assertiveness and meekness, independence and humility. Bea Arthur's Maude (1972-78) offered a more consistently self-assured, even daring central character, but she was also a "strident, loud, unfeminine bruiser." With the 1976 trifecta of Charlie's Angels, Wonder Woman, and The Bionic Woman, viewers certainly got "women with power," Douglas notes, "but only in comic book settings that could never be mistaken for reality."
As the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment took center stage in the late '70s and early '80s, the political clashes between the Schlaflys and the Steinems of the world were mirrored in pop-culture "catfights," most infamously "between the traditional wife and mom [Krystle] and the feminist bitch from hell [Alexis]" on Dynasty. Reaching the end of her narrative in the early 1990s (the book came out in 1994), Douglas does see some signs of hope in more confident, creative performers like Roseanne and Madonna. Yet she's also troubled by the familiar refrain of late-20th-century American women: "I'm not a feminist, but..."
So how (if at all) has pop culture's image of women changed over the past decade or so, since Douglas's study first appeared? If Douglas were to publish an updated version of Where the Girls Are, which examples of feminine/feminist pop culture, circa 1994-2007, would she absolutely have to discuss?
By 1970, though, the genie of "women's lib" was out of the bottle and onto the streets, attracting an often vicious media backlash; Time provided an especially blatant example with its August 1970 cover of author Kate Millett as a "grim, ball-busting ninja from hell," as Douglas puts it. Not surprisingly, then, pop-culture heroines in the early 1970s often navigated and embodied the tensions between feminism and antifeminism. On The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77), Mary Richards constantly vacillated between assertiveness and meekness, independence and humility. Bea Arthur's Maude (1972-78) offered a more consistently self-assured, even daring central character, but she was also a "strident, loud, unfeminine bruiser." With the 1976 trifecta of Charlie's Angels, Wonder Woman, and The Bionic Woman, viewers certainly got "women with power," Douglas notes, "but only in comic book settings that could never be mistaken for reality."
As the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment took center stage in the late '70s and early '80s, the political clashes between the Schlaflys and the Steinems of the world were mirrored in pop-culture "catfights," most infamously "between the traditional wife and mom [Krystle] and the feminist bitch from hell [Alexis]" on Dynasty. Reaching the end of her narrative in the early 1990s (the book came out in 1994), Douglas does see some signs of hope in more confident, creative performers like Roseanne and Madonna. Yet she's also troubled by the familiar refrain of late-20th-century American women: "I'm not a feminist, but..."
So how (if at all) has pop culture's image of women changed over the past decade or so, since Douglas's study first appeared? If Douglas were to publish an updated version of Where the Girls Are, which examples of feminine/feminist pop culture, circa 1994-2007, would she absolutely have to discuss?
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