"Smart and devilishly funny, Wherg the

Girls Are is as much fun as driving around

town in a top-down convertible. We see

where we've been, but the road ahead is

even more fascinating."

— Chicago Sun- Times

wing Up Female with tlie Mass Media

nnUmlu
 Praise for

ere ih Girls Ire:

6R0WIN6 UP FEMALE WITH THE MASS MEDIA

"Wonderfully witty . . . sometimes acerbic, often amusing, and

always eloquent." — Chattanooga Free Press

"A pleasure to read ... an engagmg book . . . displays a wisdom and

tolerance that bespeak an understanding of complexity and ambi-
guity." — The Boston Globe

"A penetrating flotilla of wit, nostalgia and revenge . . . Douglas

delights as she dresses down the media to its sexist bone." — Vogue

"An intriguing baby-boomer Baedeker to the conflicting portrayals

of women in postwar pop culture. . . . There's sure to be something

in Girls that will bring a groan of recognition." — People

"In this thoughtful, cheeky tour of television and the rest of Ameri-
can pop culture, Douglas is tough yet anything but a scold as she

deciphers the markedly mixed messages fed to women and girls . . .

written with insight and good humor." —Associated Press

 ——

"Highly recommended . . . Like machine gun fire, the history of

women through this century explodes from her pen . . . She knows
her topic thoroughly and presents it as a rapid-fire lecture without
drawing a breath . . . highly hterate." — West Coast Review of Books

''Terrific . . . amazing . . . Where the Girls Are may be the funniest,

most original, most brilliant piece of academic writing I've ever

read." — The Washington Post

"A bright, mouthy, accept-no-bullshit treatment of the media's con-

tradictory images of women since World War II ... a brave and
funny book ... a welcome, intelligent cultural history." — Elle

"A book so sincere, witty and pragmatic that it's positively subver-
sive . . . more like a smart self-help book than an academic trea-
tise . . . Where the Girls Are may auger a new popuHsm in media
studies, an era when everyone will think of mass culture as some-
thing to be analyzed as well as absorbed." Women's Review of Books

" Where the Girls Are is so good — so real, so true, so funny — that no
review can do it justice." — The Pilot

"A wickedly funny examination of media images of women over the

last 50 years." — Entertainment Weekly

"Susan Douglas writes with wit and research all the things women
say when we talk back to our TV sets —and more. Where the Girls
Are should be read by anyone with a sense of humor, justice, and a
TV set. —Gloria Steinem
"In this smart and hilarious tour of the mass media, Susan
J. Douglas
charts the love-hate relationship of baby boom feminism and popu-
lar culture, from the Shirelles and — yes! Charlie's Angels to Fatal
Attraction and Roseanne. Sure to be controversial. Where the Girls Are
is must reading for every woman who talks back to her television
and knows that it's okay for a feminist to shave her legs —which,
Douglas suggests, means just about all of us."
—Katha Pollitt, columnist for The Nation

"The temptation is to go on quoting Douglas because she is so

quotable. Here is a rare human being v/ho not only knows how to

write well and write humorously but who brings her talents to the

writing of history . . . Read it, if for no other reason than the enter-
taining style." —Editor & Publisher

"A witty, insightful romp through the last four decades."

— Kirkus Reviews

"A fun and scholarly look back . . . Douglas is an excellent writer."

— The Michael Jackson Show, KABC

" Where the Girls Are is as original and refreshing a popular culture cri-

tique as anybody is producing these days." —Ann Arbor News

"Some books are just fun to read, no matter how much seriousness

lurks beneath the surface . . . filled with pungent criticism ... a

well-argued piece of work." — Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph

"The wisecracks are choice ... a bracingly acidic review of the way
women have been portrayed." — The Milwaukee Journal

"Douglas has written a dehghtful chronicle of mass media portrayal

of women from the 1950s to the present . . . Douglas successfully
shows the complex role the media play in our lives."
— The Trenton Times

"Includes loads of uproariously funny, barbed asides . . . Must read-

ing for baby boomers of either sex who would Hke some insight into
why women of that generation are the way they are, and for
younger generations."
— Wichita Eagle
 "Susan Douglas has perfectly captured the
ever-present internal bat-
tles between femininity and
feminism ... her tone is playful but her
message is serious."
__j^^ j^^^^ ^.^^^

"She writes wonderfuUy ... a sophisticated

look at the media
funny and thought-provoking book."
—The Hampshire Gazette

"Douglas zings just about everyone in Wlwre

the Girls Are, a percep-
tive, irreverent and thoroughly
enjoyable tour of the mass media and
how It has shaped the female psyche in America."
— The Seattle Times

"An mteresting, witty analysis ... the

book's contribution Hes m
bringing the reader to new recognitions
of famiHar events suc- . . .

ceeds admirably in rescuing much of

female culture from the dust-
bm of history ... the formative media influences of
our past and
present will take on new meanings for those who read this inteUi-
gent and dehghtful book."
-The San Francisco Chronicle

"Personal and funny and more than just a htde mouthy."

—Amherst Bulletin

"An angry amusing pop-culture chronicle . . . Douglas produces

vibrant notes . . . energetic and accurate." —New York Magazine

"Chosen one of the top ten books of the year

"
that 'helps make sense
of our times.'
_The McLaughhn Group

"A major achievement . . . Douglas breezily mixes personal narrative

with historical events and afemimst critique of popular culture from
the 1950s to the present. It's sometimes humorous, often msightful
and always entertaining."
-The City Paper
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2010

http://www.archive.org/details/wheregirlsaregroOOdoug.
Also by Susan J. Douglas

Inventing American Broadcasting:

1S99-1922

\
fftere
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iris

Are
SUSAN J. DOUGLAS

Growing Up Female
with the Mass Media

TIMES m BOOKS
RANDOM HOUSE
 Copyright © 1994, 1995 by Susan J.
Douglas

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Published in the United States by Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,

New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,

Toronto.

This work was originally pubhshed in hardcover and in slightly different form by
Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1994.

Grateflil acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously

published material:

EMI Music Publishing: Excerpt from "Sweet Talkin' Guy" by Douglas Morris, Elliot

Greenberg, Barbara Baer and Robert Schwartz. Copyright © 1966 and renewed 1994
by Screen Gems-EMI Music, Inc. and Ronzique Music, Inc. All rights controlled and
administered by Screen Gems-EMI Music, Inc. (BMI). Excerpt from "Chains" by
Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Copyright © 1962 and renewed 1990 by Screen
Gems-EMI Music, Inc. (BMI). AH rights reserved. International Copyright Secured.
Reprinted by permission.

Stone Agate Music: Excerpt from "Nowhere to Run" by Holland/Dozier/HoUand.

Copyright © 1965 by Stone Agate Music. Excerpt from "Too Many Fish in the Sea"
by Norman Whitfield and Edward Holland, Jr. Copyright © 1964 by Stone Agate
Music. Reprinted by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PubHcation Data

Douglas, Susan J.
Where the girls are : growing up female with the mass media /

Susan J. Douglas.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8129-2530-0
1. Mass media and women —United States. 2. United States — Popular
culture. I. Title.

P94.5.W652U634 1994
302.3'082— dc20 94-490

Manufactured in the United States of America

4 6 8 9 7 5 3

Book Design by Naomi Osnos and M. Kristen Bearse

 For my incandescent colleagues,

Joan Braderman, Meredith Michaels, and Mary Russo,

and for T. JR.. Durham, the Leader of the Pack
 oitents
c
Here
e

ins
Are
 —

ntroduction
J
1am a woman of the baby boom, which means my history is filled

with embarrassment, Httered with images I'd just as soon forget.

Old photos of my friends and me in platform shoes or, worse, hot

pants, our hair freshly ironed, arm-in-arm with some neanderthal yet
highly self-satisfied boyfriend in a surplus army jacket, serve as unfor-

giving reprimands of how naive and pHable we seemed in our youth.

Reading the diary I kept as a teenager is now excruciating, so morti-

fying that, if anyone else were to find it, I think I would bhnd myself
with hot coals or simply commit hara-kiri. I look back at my former
self, her hair motded Hke tortoise shell after an unfortunate en-
counter with a box of Summer Blonde in the upstairs bathroom, the

words she wrote in her spiral notebooks obsessed with two topics
boys and sex —and I wonder: Who are you? How could you have
been so insipid? Are you related to me? How did you become me?
I don't know where you were m, say, 1964, but I divided my time
between screaming wildly for the Beades, wearing a cheerleading

uniform, scrubbing my face ten times a day with Noxzema, and

putting my hair up in rollers the size of Foster's lager cans. (This was
when I and all my friends learned how to sleep on our faces.) I mem-
orized the lyrics to every Shirelles hit and rarely missed watching
Shindig or Hootenanny. My friends and I were slaves to fashion, and
slaves of the mass media, getting weak-kneed over the Hkes of Edd
"Kookie" Byrnes and Troy Donahue, flagellating ourselves because-

we didn't look Hke NataKe Wood or Sandra Dee or Jean Shrimpton.

 Where the Girls Are

Only a fe"w years later, I my bras, and certainly all

had thro\vn out
my hair rollers, had friends who refused to shave their legs (I wasn't
that brave), talked back to men in power, learned how to curse,

hurled my slippers, or whatever else was handy, at the TV set during

Nixon press conferences, Kojak, or The Brady Bunch, and subscribed
to Ms. Yet, behind closed doors, I still applied blush-on and read
Glamour magazine. I regarded that girl I had been in 1964 as some
preconscious pupa, whose shell I had adamantly left behind and
whose "I Will Follow Him" mind-set I had repudiated. An eruption
had occurred, the Red Sea had parted, and there was no connection
whatsoever — except, perhaps, the blush-on —between the young girl

who chased boys and the young woman who embraced feminism.
Never look back — that was my motto — or I might have to remem-
ber my earlier false consciousness,when I had sung along passion-
ately with Little Peggy March and when one of my highest ambitions
was to be just Hke Gidget, popular, cute, and perky.
But today, with the proliferation of oldies stations, cable TV with
its Dream of Jeannie and Get Smart, blockbuster
endless reruns of /
movie remakes of sixties TV shows, and the election of the first pres-
ident to have had a favorite Beatle (Paul, I regret to report), it has
become impossible not to look back. Baby boom culture is every-
where, in all of its naive and preposterous excesses. Often it crowds
out the cultural memories and icons of other generations, so that
kids not even born when Bewitched premiered in 1964 nonetheless
grew up with Darrin and Sam, just like I did, although they viewed
them under very different circumstances. Nostalgic and often embar-
rassing images wash over us as pundits, newscasters, and pop psy-
chologists pontificate about what Elvis, Route 66, and teach-ins
signify about the huge generation of 76 million people born between
1946 and 1964.
As a grown-up baby boomer with a family, a job, eye bags the

size of George Shultz's, thighs the fashion magazines suggest belong

in a burnoose, and what used to be called in junior high school an
attitude problem, I've been watching all this with an increasingly
 Introduction

curious —and jaundiced— eye. For what gets looked back on and
celebrated as pathbreaking—-James Dean, Elvis, the Beades — are the

boys. Don't get me wrong, I like looking back at these boys too, but

doing so requires a great deal of self-abnegation. Because what film

and TV recorded girls doing during these years — teasing our hair,

chasing the Beatles, and doing the watusi in bikinis —was silly, mind-
less, and irrelevant to history. No wonder looking back produces for

women an overwhekning reaction: the urge to disown these past

images, these past associations, as having nothing to do with who we

are today.

We wince at women's cultural history and seek to amputate our-

selves from this pop culture past, to place as much distance as possi-

ble between our present selves and Gidget, and for good reason. Girls

and women come across as the kitsch of the 1960s — flying nuns,

witches, genies, twig-thin models, and go-go-boot-clad dancers in

cages. None of our teen girl culture, none of what we did, apparently

had any redeeming value at all. According to the prevaiHng cultural

history of our times, the impact of the boys was serious, lasting, and
authentic. They were the thoughtful, dedicated rebels, the counter-

culture leaders, the ones who made history. The impact of the girls

was fleeting, superficial, trivial. The supposedly serious cultural doc-

uments of teenage rebellion, Hke Rebel Without a Cause, The Wild
One, or Blackboard Jungle, emphasized male aHenation and malaise.
Histories of the sixties still focus on the boys, their music and their

pdHtics, while we appear as nothing more than mindless, hysterical,

out-of-control bimbos who shrieked and fainted while watching the
Beades or jiggled our bare breasts at Woodstock. Idiots, hysterics,

dumbos — empty vessels.

Just think about it. Male rock 'n' rollers, no matter how lewd,
drug-besotted, paunchy, or short-lived, have become canonized.
Elvis is a saint, a legend, immortaHzed now on a stamp, while Jerry

Lee Lewis, who had a habit of marrying his thirteen-year-old cousins

and having wives who died mysteriously, was portrayed by box office
star Dennis Quaid in Great Balls of Fire! There have been movie bios
 Where the Girls Are

of Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, and forty-seven made-for-TV

movies about the King. Pledge drives for PBS are built around doc-
umentaries celebrating the genius of Paul Simon, Elton John, and
James Taylor. I'm a fan of all these guys, but I can't help noticing that

no comparable celebratory tributes have been made to Laura Nyro,

Joni Mitchell, or Aretha Franklin. Must a female singer have the crap
beat out of her — as Tina Turner did — to merit a film? Where's the
movie about the Shirelles, or Grace SHck? Apparently, they didn't
matter, and had no impact on social change in America. We hear lit-

tle about the beehived, satin-sheathed girl groups whose music we

danced to and sang along with as we tried to figure out whether to

"Tell Him" or not.

What we do get to see plenty of from our collective past is blank-
eyed blondes in shirtwaist dresses and crinolines and, later, miniskirts

and hip buggers, who served others, who wore high heels and smiles
while they vacuumed, who had breasts the size of medicine balls and
thighs the size of Tweety Pie's, and who never knew as much as Dad,
or even Mr. Ed. Unlike popular culture featuring boys, the major
impact of kitsch for girls was supposedly reactionary, not subversive:
it urged us to be as domestic as June Cleaver, as buxom and dumb as

Elly May Clampett, and as removed from politics as Lily Munster.

There is a crucial contradiction here: baby boom culture for girls

didn't matter at all, yet it mattered very much. It was laughable and
historically insignificant, but at the same time, it was a dangerous and
aU too powerful enforcer of suffocating sex-role stereotypes.
What's more, neither of these premises helps explain the rise, and
persistence, of one of the most important social revolutions since

World War II: the women's liberation movement. The common wis-
dom about the unremitting sexism of popular culture, and our lem-
minglike acquiescence to it, can't be quite right. For somehow,
millions of girls went from singing "I Want to Be Bobby's Girl" to
chanting "I Am Woman (Hear Me Roar)." Girls like me, who
gorged ourselves on all these pop culture pastries, evolved from
cheerleaders, experts at the Bristol stomp, and Seventeen magazine
 Introduction

junkies to women impatient with our continued second-class status,

committed to equality- and change, and determined to hold our own

in a man's world. MiUions of us —even women who today claim not
to be feminists —-jumped across that great divide between prefemi-
nism and feminism, and once we did, there was no going back. But
in our haste to deny our own history, to repudiate what we now
regard as our preconscious selves, we've lost sight of the fact that

these selves weren't quite so preconscious, frivolous, or passive, and

is an important connection betwen them and us.
that there

The truth is that growing up female with the mass media helped
make me a feminist, and it helped make miUions of other women
feminists too, whether they take on that label or not. I'm not sup-
posed to admit I'm a feminist, and neither are you, for this portion of
our history evokes as much derision as what preceded it. The
moment the women's movement emerged in 1970, teminism once
again became a dirty word, with considerable help from the main-
stream news media. News reports and opinion columnists created a

new stereotype, of fanatics, "braless bubbleheads," Amazons, "the

angries," and "a band of wild lesbians." The result is that we all know
what feminists are. They are shrill, overly aggressive, man-hating,

ball-bustmg, selfish, hairy, extremist, deliberately unattractive women

with absolutely no sense of humor who see sexism at every turn.

They make men's testicles shrivel up to the size of peas, they detest
the family and think all children should be deported or drowned.
Feminists are relentless, unforgiving, and unwilling to bend or com-
promise; they are singlehandedly responsible for the high divorce
rate, the shortage of decent men, and the unfortunate proliferation of

Birkenstocks in America.
."
Given all this baggage, it's best to say, "I'm not a feminist, but . .

before putting forward a feminist position. As recently as 1989, Time

announced haunt the feminist movement" and con-
that "hairy legs

cluded that the women's movement was "hopelessly dated." We aU ^

saw what happened to Hillar^^ Chnton in the 1992 campaign, a fliU

ten years after she changed her name to Bill's so voters wouldn't think
 Where the Girls Are

she was too independent or anything. Excoriated by the RepubHcans

as a "feminazi" because she has only one child and has argued (in

print, no less) that children have a right to be protected against abu-

sive parents, Hillary was forced to prove she could operate a hand
mixer and impersonate a deaf-mute. When, as first lady, she testified

before Congress about health care, congressmen and pundits aHke

expressed dumbfounded shock that a woman Hke this — ^you know,
assertive, independent, brainy — could be witty and charming. (Once
the mikes were off, you could see them saying to each other, "Sheeit,

Bob, I didn't know them fem-nist bitches knew how to laugh!") This

is what happens to you in America if you dare to identify yourself

with the F word.

Yet in a culture saturated by representations of happy brides
and contented moms, and then by representations of feminists as

deranged, karate-chopping, man-repeUing witches, a women's move-

ment did burst on the scene and continues, against great odds, to
who were anything but feminists in their youth have
flourish. Girls

grown up to become women who (whether they embrace the F word

or not) endorse many feminist goals and values, and this despite Mar-
ilyn Monroe, Beach Blanket Bingo, and the Paul Anka hit "You're Hav-

ing My Baby"^
Although many of us have undergone this transformation in con-
sciousness, we'd still rather have a root canal than appear in pubHc in

a bathing suit. As we consider the metamorphosis that millions of

women, and men, for that matter, experienced over the past three
decades, we immediately confront the well-known female yin and
yang of soHd confidence and abject insecurity. In a variety of ways the
mass media helped make us the cultural schizophrenics we are today,

women who rebel agamst yet submit to prevaiHng images about what

a desirable, worthwhile woman should be. Our collective history of

interactmg with and being shaped by the mass media has engendered
in many women a kind of cultural identity crisis. We are ambivalent

toward femininity on the one hand and feminism on the other.

Pulled in opposite directions —
told we were equal, yet told we were
 In trod net ion

subordinate; told we could change histon', yet told we were trapped

by histors' —we got the bends at an early age, and we've never gotten
nd of them.
When I open logue, for example, I am simultaneously infuriated
and seduced, grateful to escape temporarily into a narcissistic paradise
where I'm the center of the universe, outraged that completely
unattamable standards of wealth and beaurs' exclude me and most
women I know from the promised land. I adore the materiahsm; I

despise the materiahsm. I yearn for the self-indulgence; I think the

self-mdulgence is repellent. I want to look beautiful; I think wanting
to look beautiful is about the most dumb-ass goal you could have.
The magazine stokes my desire; the magazine triggers my bile. And
this doesn't only happen when I'm reading Vogue; it happens all the
time. The TV griUing of Anita Hill made many of us shake our fists

m rage; Special K ads make m.ost of us hide our thighs m shame. On

the one hand, on the other hand — that's not just me — that's what it

means to be a woman in America."

To explain this schizophrenia, we must reject the notion that

popular culture for girls and women didn't matter, or that it consisted
only of retrograde images. American women today are a bundle of
contradictions because much of the media imagery- we grew up with
was itself filled with mixed messages about what women should and
should not do, what women could and could not be. This was true
in the 1960s, and it is true today. The media, of course, urged us to
be phant, cute, sexually available, thin, blond, poreless, wrinkle-free,

and deferential to men. But it is easy to forget that the media also

suggested we could be rebeUious. tough, enterprising, and shrewd.

And much of what we watched was porous, allowing us to accept and
rebel against what we saw and how it was presented."^ The jigsaw
pieces of our inner selves have moved around m relation to the jigsaw
imagers' of the media, and it is the ongoing rearrangement of these
shards on the pubhc screens of America, and the private screens of
our minds, that is the forgotten stors- of American culture over the
past thirty— five years. The mass consumption of that culture, the ways
10 Where the Girls Are

in which the many of us

shards got reassembled, actually encouraged

to embrace feminism in some form. For throughout we this process,

have found ourselves pinioned betv^^een two voices, one insisting we

were equal, the other insisting we were subordinate. After a while,

the tension became unbearable, and millions of women found they

were no longer willing to tolerate the gap between the promises of
equaHty and the reaUty of inequaHty."
At first blush it might seem that "He's So Fine" or A Summer
Place had absolutely nothing to do with femimsm, except that they

contributed to an ideolog\' many of us would eventually react against.

Those who much of 1960s pop culture as sexist trash, and who
regard
remember all too well how the network news dismissively covered
the women's movement in the 1970s, may be loath to regard the mass
media as agents of feminism. But here's the contradiction we con-
front: the news media, TV shows, magazines, and fikns of the past
four decades may have turned feminism into a dirty word, but they

also made feminism inevitable.

To appreciate the mass media's often inadvertent role in this

transformation, we must head down a memory lane that has been
blockaded for far too long. We must rewatch and reHsten, but with a

new mission: to go where the girls are. And, as we consider the rise

of feminism, we must move beyond the standard poHtical histories of

a handfijl of feminist leaders and explore the cultural history of the

millions who became their followers. It's time to reclaim a past too

fi-equently ignored, hooted at, and dismissed, because it is in these

images of women that we find the roots of who we are now. This is

a different sort of archeology of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s than we're

used to, because it excavates and holds to the Hght remnants of a col-

lective female past not usually thought of as making serious history.

What are my credentials for writing such a book? Allow me to

introduce myself I am one of those people The Wall Street Journal,

CBS News, and Spy magazine love to make fim of I am a professor

of media studies. You know what that means. I probably teach entire
courses on the films of Connie Francis, go to academic conferences
 Intro due tioti 11

where the main intellectual exchange is trading comic books, never

make my students read books, and insist that Gar\^ Lewis and the
Playboys were more important than Hegel John Dos Passos. or
Frances Perkins. All I do now, of course, is study Madonna. The

reason I chose the media over, say, the Renaissance or quantum

mechanics is that I don't Uke to read, don't know much about histors;

and needed desperately to find a way to watch television for a living.

This, anyway, is the caricature of people Hke me. See, if enough

people think studying the media is a waste o£ time, then the media
themselves can seem less influential than they really are. Then they

get off the hook for doing what they do best: promoting a white,

upper-middle-class, male view of the world that urges the rest of us

to sit passively on our sofas and fantasize about consumer goods while
they handle the important stuff, hke the economy, the environment,
or child care.^ If it was important enough to them to spend hundreds
of thousands of dollars to bring us Mr. Ed, Enjoh perfume ("I can
bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan, and never, ever let you
forget you're a man"), and Dallas, then it's important enough for us
to figure out why.
Now, there has been ample documentation in the past few^ years

that the mass media are hardly a girl's best friend. It seems as if every

time we turn on the TV or open a magazine advertisers trs' to make

those of us born before 1970 feel like over-the-hill lumps of hideous
cellulite in desperate need of a scalpel and a hfetime supply of Retin-

A. Women Hke me are not too happy with the seeming insistence of
those selhng hair dye or skin cream that unless we all look like

Christie Brinkley, act like Krysde Carrmgton. and shut up already

about equal rights, we're worthless. Women are angry at the media,

because a full twenty years after the women's movement, diet soda

companies, women's magazines, and the Sports Illustrated "swimsuit

issue" bombard us with smiling, air-brushed, anorexic, and com-

still

pHant women whose message seems to be "Shut up, get a face-lift,

and stop eating." One of the things we are angriest about, because

the strategy has been so successful, is the way we have become ahen-
12 Where the Girls Are

ated from our own bodies. We have learned to despise the curves,
bulges, stretch marks, and wrinkles that mean w^e've probably worked
hard in and out of our homes, produced some fabulous children,
enjoyed a good meal or two, tossed back a few^ drinks, laughed, cried,
gotten sunburned more than once, endured countless indignities,
and, in general, led pretty full and varied lives. The mass media often
triviaHze our lives and our achievements, narrowing the htmus test of
female worth to one question: Does she have dimpled thighs or
crow's-feet? If so, onto the trash heap of history. No wonder we want
to throw our TV sets out the window whenever an ad for Oil of Olay
or Ultra Slim-Fast comes on.
But our relationship to the mass media isn't quite this simple. If
we are honest, we have to admit that we have loved the media as
—
much as we have hated them and often at exactly the same time.
After all, the mass media did give us The Four Tops, Bette Midler,
The Avengers, Aretha Franklin, Saturday Night Johnny Carson,
Live,

and Cagney & Lacey. And even though I spend an inordinate amount
of time yelling back at my television set and muttering expletives as I

survey the ads in Glamour or the covers of Vanity Fair, I don't always
hate the media, or think the media are — or have been — always bad.
We all have our guilty media pleasures, the ones that comfort us at

the end of a rotten day or allow us to escape into a fantasy world

where we really do get to soak in a bubble bath whenever we want.
No, the point here is that we love and hate the media, at exactly the
same time, in no small part because the media, simultaneously, love
and hate women. (Here I depart from the argument in Backlash,
Susan Faludi's important polemic on how the media have mounted a

major war against women since the mid-1980s. While Faludi is

extremely convincing about the breadth and depth of the backlash

against feminism, she casts the media as all bad, and she suggests that
this kind of backlash is relatively recent. Neither point is true. The
war that has been raging in the media is not a simplistic war against
women but a complex struggle between feminism and antifeminism
 Introduction 13

that has reflected, reinforced, and exaggerated our culture's ambiva-

lence about women's roles for over thirty-five years.)

Since the 1950s, v/omen growing up m America have been

indelibly imprinted by movies, television, ads, magazines, and popu-

lar music. Now it's true that, when we're born, we come with this

twisted coil of DNA inside us that determines whether we'll be shy

or gregarious, athletic or klutzy, cautious or daring. And we have our

parents, who, for better or worse, twist that coil around m certain

ways so that some kinks we can never get out, no matter how much
we spend on psychotherapy or channeling —and some kinks we
wouldn't want to. But we're hardly born complete, and our parents,

as they will quickly attest, rarely got the last word, or even the first.

Litde kids have all these cracks and crevices in their puttyHke psycho-

logical edifices, and one relendess dispenser of psychic Spackle is the

mass media. They help fill in those holes marked "What does it mean
to be a girl?" or "What is an American?" or "What is happiness?"

Along with our parents, the mass media raised us, sociahzed us,

entertained us, comforted us, deceived us, disciphned us. told us

what we could do and told us what we And they played a
couldn't.

key role in turning each of us into not one woman but many
women — a pastiche of all the good women and bad women that

came to us through the printing presses, projectors, and airwaves of

America. This has been one of the mass media's most important lega-
cies for female consciousness: the erosion of anything resembhng a
unified self Presented with an array of media archetypes, and given
morahty tales in which we identify first with one type, then another,
confronted by quizzes in women's magazines so we can gauge
whether we're romantic, assertive, in need of changing our perfume,
or ready to marry, women have grown accustomed to compartmen-
talizing ourselves into a whole host of personas. which we occupy
simultaneously.
For kids born after World War II, the media's influence was

unprecedented. The Hving rooms, dens, and bedrooms ot America

14 Where the Girls Are

became places where people's primary activity was consuming the

mass media in some form or other, and much of this media was
geared to the fastest-growing market segment, baby boomers. Media
executives knew if they were going to succeed with this group,
already known for its rising rebellion against fifties conformity, they
would have to produce songs or movies or TV shows that spoke to

that rebellion. They would have to create products specifically for

teens and definitely not for adults. And they would have to heighten
the sense of distance between "cool," alienated teenagers and fuddy-
duddy, stick-in-the-mud parents who yelled at us to turn the lights

out when we weren't using them and often counseled fiscal restraint.

Spending without guilt, and with abandon, in defiance of our par-

ents, was "with it" and "hip." "Hey you — yeah, you/' yelled the
advertisers, record producers, magazine pubHshers, and TV networks
of America, "we've got something special just for you girls."

We were the first generation of preteen and teenage girls to be so

relentlessly isolated as a distinct market segment.^ Advertisers and
their clients wanted to convey a sense of entitlement, and a sense of
generational power, because those attitudes on our part meant prof-
its for them. So at the same time that the makers of Pixie Bands,
Maybelline eyeliner, Breck shampoo, and Beach Blanket Bingo rein-
forced our roles as cute, airheaded girls, the mass media produced a
teen girl popular culture of songs, movies, TV shows, and magazines
that cultivated in us a highly self-conscious sense of importance, dif-

ference, and even rebellion. Because young women became critically

important economically, as a market, the suspicion began to percolate

among them, over time, that they might be important culturally, and
then politically, as a generation.^ Instead of co-opting rebellion, the
media actually helped promote it.

Historians will argue, and rightly so, that American women have
been surrounded by contradictory expectations since at least the
nineteenth century.^ My point is that this situation intensified with
the particular array of media technology and outlets that interlocked
in people's homes after World War II. It wasn't simply the sheer size
 Introduction 15

and ubiquity of the media, although these, of course, were impor-

tant. It was also the fact that the media themselves were going
through a major transformation in how they regarded and marketed
to their audiences that heightened, dramatically the contradictions in

the images and messages they produced. Radio, TV, magazines, pop-
ular music, film — these were the mass media, predicated on the
notion of a national, unified market, and their raison d'etre was to
reach as many people as possible. To appeal to the "lowest common
denominator," TV and advertisers offered homogenized, romanti-
cized images of America, which, especially under the influence of
the cold war and McCarthyism, eschewed controversy and reinforced
middle-class, sexually repressed, white-bread norms and values.

Even in the 1950s, however, there was rebellion against these

sappy representations of American Hfe, as indicated by the rising pop-
ularity of rock 'n' roll, FM radio, "beat" poetry and hterature, and
foreign films. These cultural insurgencies drove home the fact that

the media market was not national and unified but divided — espe-
cially but not solely by age. Even so, media executives tried to please

simultaneously the "lowest common denominator" and the more

rebellious sectors of the audience, often in the same song, TV show,
or film. By the 1960s, the contradictions grew wider and more
obvious, and the images and messages of this period were obsessed
with shifting gender codes, riven with generational antagonisms,
schizophrenic about female sexuality, relentless in their assaults on the
imperfections of the female face and body, and determined to strad-
dle the widening gap between traditional womanhood and the

young, hip, modern "chick."

These contradictions still exist, and the mass media continue to
provide us with stories, images, and whopping rationalizations that

shape how we make sense of the roles we assume in our families, our
workplaces, our society. These stories and images don't come from
Pluto: our deepest aspirations and anxieties are carefully relentlessly

researched. Then they're repackaged and sold back to us as something

we can get simply by watching or buying. Despite what TV execu-
16 Where the Girls Are

tives like to say, the mass media are not simple mirrors, reflecting
"reality" to us. The news, sitcoms, or ads are not reflections of the

world; they are very careflil, deUberate constructions. To borrow

Todd GitHn's metaphor, they are more like flan-house mirrors that

distort and warp "reaHty" by exaggerating and magnifying some fea-

tures of American life and values while collapsing, ignoring, and

demonizing others. ^^ Certainly there is a symbiotic relationship

between the media executives, who think we're morons, and the

audience, many of whom think media executives are cognitively

challenged. But let's remember that they have the cameras, the pro-

duction faciHties, and the money, and we don't.

This doesn't mean that the media are all-powerflal, or that audi-

ences are just helpless masses of inarticulate protoplasm, lying there

ready to beheve whatever they see or hear. Hardly anyone with any
sense beHeves that six rich, jowly, white guys in pin-striped suits sit

together in some skyscraper and gleeflilly conspire to inundate all of

us with the message that scrubbing the mildew ofl" bathroom tiles is,

for women, akin to a rehgious epiphany. Viewers do resist the

homogenizing pull of TV, by ignoring it when it's on, yeUing "Bull-

shit!" at the commercials, channel cHcking, or deconstructing the

news." We might not buy into Dan Rather's newscast, Folgers ads
that pretend that having an infant is romantic, or a Rambo movie's

proposals for international diplomacy. We also live real lives apart

firom the media, and our everyday experiences all too frequently con-
tradict the version of reality put out by Lorimar Productions, Joan
Lunden, or AT&T.
But some images and messages are harder to resist than others,

Hke the one that insists that a forty-year-old woman should have
thighs hke a twelve-year-old boy's, and that no self-respecting

woman should ever have wrinkles. This is because women, much

more than men, have learned from ads, movies, and TV shows that

. they must constantly put themselves under surveillance. In standard

Hollywood movies, men act —they solve crimes, engage in sword
fights, right social injustice, and swing from vines — while women are
 ItiTroduction 17

on screen to be looked at. Constantly positioned on staircases, stages,

rugs, beds, beaches, even tables, their bodies exposed while men are

covered hv sheets, robes, boxer shorts, or jungle gear, women are pri-

marily physical specimens to be sur\^eyed intently by the camera, the

male characters in the film. and. of course, the audience.^" Print ad^
in particular reinforce this, with their endless images of pout)' -Hpped,
beautiful women looking at themselves in the mirror, being gazed at
adoringly by men and by other women consumed \M:h en\y
Women learn to turn themselves into objects to be scrutinized; they
learn they must continually watch themselves being watched by oth-
ers, whether thevVe walking on the beach, drinking a beer, entering
a restaurant, or rocking a baby.'"'

In part because they got us when we were so young, and m part

because the mass media have been obsessed with defining —and
exaggerating— codes ot mascuKmrs- and femininity-, they have
ensnared us in an endless struggle for gender self-definition. With the
recent heaw promotion of baldness remedies, bodies by Soloflex,
and macho cosmetics lines, men. too. may learn the pleasures of such

relentless self-consciousness. But certainly advertising, movies, and

TV shows have also taught men how to look at, assess, and treat

women, so this media imager^' comes back at us in our own inter-

personal relationships, and rarely in ways we find helpful.

Throughout our Hves we have been getting profoundly contra-

dictors* messages about what it means to be an American woman.
Our national mythology- teaches us that Americans are supposed to
be independent, rugged individuals who are achievement-oriented,
competitive, active, shrewd, and assertive go-getters, like Benjamin
Franklin. Thomas Edison, or Ross Perot. Women, how^ever. are sup-

posed to be dependent, passive, nurturing t^-pes. uninterested in

competition, achievement, or success, who should conform to the
wishes of the men in their Hves.^^ It doesn't take a rocket scientist to

see that these two Hsts of behavioral traits are mutually exclusive, and
that women are stuck right m the middle. What a woman has to do,

on her own. is cobble together some compromise bersveen these

18 Where the Girls Are

traits that is appropriate to her class, race, and interpersonal relations

with her family, friends, co-workers, and lovers.

Women also stand at the intersection of another major cultural

contradiction: the war between what academics call the "producer"

ethos and the "consumer" ethos. ^^ The work ethic, with its emphasis

on industriousness, thrift, deferred gratification, and self-denial, was

crucial to estabhshing the United States as an economic giant by the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But then this problem
arose.Someone had to buy all the stuff the country's factories were
producing. And much of what was getting produced wasn't necessi-
was conveniences and Htde luxuries. People who had had the
ties, it

virtues of the work ethic beaten into them by hickory branches and
McGuffey's readers weren't going to buy all these things, especially
on credit. So advertisers had to start convincing people to reverse
their value systems completely, to spend, to be self-indulgent, to grat-

ify themselves immediately, and to feel entided to plenty of leisure

time. Since this consumer ethos is extremely seductive, but the pro-
ducer ethos still holds us in its unforgiving and guilt-inducing grip,
we oscillate uneasily between the two. This has been especially true

for women, traditionally the primary consumers in America, who

were also expected to be models of productivity and efficiency, not to

mention self-sacrifice, when running their households. The Ameri-
can woman has thus emerged as a bundle of contradictions, seeking

to be simultaneously passive and active, outspoken and quiet, selfish

and selfless, thrifty and profligate, daring and scared, and who had
better know which persona to assume when.
My generation grew up internahzing an endless film loop of
beach bunnies, witches, flying nuns, bionic
fairy-tale princesses,

women, and beauty, queens, a series of flickering images that urged

us, since childhood, to be all these things all the time. We grew up in

different places, with different parents, and with wildly varying class

and ethnic backgrounds. There is much that women my age don't

have in common. Yet we do have a shared history of Hstening to the

Chiffons, watching Bewitched, wearing miniskirts, idoUzing Diana
 Introduction 19

Ross, singing "I Am Woman," watching Charlie's Angels, being con-

verted by Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, and Betty Friedan, hoot-
ing over Dallas and Dynasty (but not missing a single week), and, as a

result, becoming women with a profound love-hate relationship with

the mass media, and with the cultural values the mass media convey.
Like all histories, my account of our relationship with this popu-
lar culture is neither objective nor exhaustive; rather, it is idiosyn-

cratic, and replete with the sorts of biases that come from my having

been raised in a particular place and time. I am a white, middle-class

woman —now a wife and mother —who grew up in a place that was
something between a small town and a suburb, who went to college

and then to graduate school, who has always lived in the Northeast,

and who has a proven track record of consuming vast amounts of

media imagery. I write this book not from the perspective of some-
one who was ever a feminist leader or a poHtical activist but rather

from the perspective of someone who, like most women, watched

from the sidehnes, yet who found being a spectator an increasingly
pohtical and politicizing act.
Because of who I am, this history cannot speak for everyone.
Every woman has her own story. Some of us were smiling baton

twirlers, or Homemakers of
domesticated members of the Junior
America, or gum-popping, leather-clad who hung out hair hoppers

at the Laundromat. Some of us were quiet and shy, members of none

of these stereotypically female groups. But because we were all cul-
turally united, in an often sick and twisted way, by Walt Disney, the
nightly news, Mark Eden Bust Developers, Tlie Mary Tyler Moore
Show, Cyndi Lauper, and ads for skin creams with "advanced deliv-
ery systems," we recognize this history as a shared history. Although

I can hardly speak for women of color, working-class women, or les-

bians, we often experienced the same very narrow, parochial kind of

imagery that made white, upper-middle-class lives the norm and
everything else deviant.
In my tour through the images of the past four decades, my goal

is to expose, review, and, at times, make fiin of the media-induced

 —
20 Where the Girls Are

schizophrenia so many of us feel, while showing how it has produced

tension, anger, and uncertainty in everyday women. Most women
take for granted their own conflicted relationships to the mass media.

They assume they are the only ones who love and hate Vogue at the
same time, the only ones riddled with internal contradictions about
whether to be assertive or diplomatic, gentle or tough. And too many
assume that such contradictory feeHngs are unusual, abnormal. They
aren't. Most women feel this because they've been socialized by the
mass media, and women should know that feeHng these contradic-
tions on a daily basis is what it means to be an American woman.
And, contrary to media stereotypes, such contradictions and ambiva-
lence are also at the heart of what it means to be a feminist.

Our pop culture past isn't all embarrassing, and it's not irrelevant
to how we feel or what we face today. Some of it was pretty goofy

I mean, identical cousins, get real —

but much of it requires a second
look. History, including this history, matters. It may help to explain
why American women are both mad as hell and yet resigned, at times
even happy, to leave things the way they are. This history also helps
to explain why so many women are ambivalent about feminism,
shunning the label but embracing so many of the precepts. And in
the end it reveals why the mass media are both our best allies and our
most lethal enemies.
y ntkni Fairj Tales

the of 1957, the kids of America were castigated by political

fall

In leaders, newspaper columnists, their teachers, and, worst of all,

their Weekly Readers. It turned out that while we were running

around in our coonskin caps (yes, girls did too wear them), learning
to twirl hula hoops, and rotting our brains on Twinkies and the
Mickey Mouse Club, the Soviets were taking education seriously
The proof: On October 4, they sent the first rocket-powered satellite
into orbit before the United States did, terrifying the country that we
were no longer number one in advanced technology. Only a month
later, the Ruskies sent a female husky named Kudryavka
(Curly in

Enghsh) into orbit. On November 10, one week after "Muttnik," as

the press called her, went up, the U.S. OfEce of Education published
a study confirming cold warriors' worst fears. The Soviet Union out-
ranked the United States in every aspect of scientific and technical
education. Their kids weren't making Pilgrim hats out of construc-
tion paper; they were learning calculus, chemistry, and quantum
mechanics.
As Walter Lippmann wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, Sput-
nik didn't result from "some kind of lucky guess in inventing a gad-

get." This cosmic humihation occurred because the Soviets were

systematically and rigorously educating their students in science and

technology and training them to become relendessly competitive

engineers. And had happened. We were "falling behind

so the worst

in the progress of science and technology," warned Lippmann, and if

22 Where the Girls Are

we continued to lose momentum, added Newsweek, "Russia will be

ahead of the West in almost all fields in a few years. Unless the West
steps up its scientific development, it will become technologically
inferior to Russia within ten years." ^ The only hope was to reinvig-

orate American education, to add more discipline, to place more

emphasis on science, and to use Sputnik, and the threat of thermonu-
clear war, to get American kids to switch their priorities from spitball

hurling to titration analysis.

Between 1946 and 1951, a record 22 million kids had been born
in the United States, forming the first bulge of that demographic
goiter in the population known as the baby boom. In 1957, those
children, between the ages of six and eleven, glutted the over-
crowded, antiquated classrooms of America. Nothing less than the
survival of the free world rested on our puny, puff-sleeved shoulders.
As we earnestly studied our Weekly Readers and heard how if we
didn't shape up fast we'd all be living on borscht, sharing an apart-
ment the size of a refrigerator carton with all our relatives, and gen-
uflecting to Nikita Khrushchev, one thing was clear: no one said,

"Just boys — -just you boys study hard." This was on everyone's heads,
girls too, and we were not let off the hook, especially in grammar
school —we had to get A's as well, to fend off the red peril and save
our country and ourselves.
Now, on the other hand, no one painted seductive pictures of us
girls growing up to become engineers. The Russians had lots of
women engineers, doctors too, and we all knew what they looked
like: Broderick Crawford in drag. It was because all their women
were dead ringers for Mr. Potato Head that we knew their society

was, at its heart, joyless, regimented, and bankrupt. No one was

going to let that happen here. But it might if they took over. Our
girls were going to stay feminine, but they were also going to roll up
their sleeves and make America number one again. So when we were
kids, and many of our elders were fighting for an improved educa-
tional system, including greater access to a college education, the

understanding was that they were pushing these reforms not just for
 Fractured Fairy Tales 23

boys but for all kids — well, white kids, an\^vay. This activism, stoked

by the Sputnik scare, led to the construction of hundreds of new

schools, and Congress passed the National Defense Education Act of

1958, which authorized low-interest, long-term tuition loans to col-

lege and graduate students. Again, not just boy students — girls too.

Just three years later, this very young, handsome, and eloquent
man became president, and he breathed energy into our aspirations.

In January 1961 he delivered an inaugural address that still has the

capacity to choke up even the most hardened cynics w^ho were young
and ideaHstic back then. (Remember, this was before we knew that

his dad had bought him the election or that it was impossible for him
to keep his fly zipped within a fifty-mile radius of rusthng pettipants.)

In addition to the "ask not what you can do for your country" part,
there was the stirring sentence "Let the word go forth that the . . .

torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans." Less than

two months he estabhshed the Peace Corps to encourage young

later,

Americans to work on behalf of those less fortunate than they Now

Kennedy didn't say "a new generation of men," even if that was what
he was thinking. Nor was the Peace Corps restricted to males: on the
contrary,young women flocked to serve, often as a direct result of

Kennedy's inspiration. Never for one minute did I think JFK was

talking only to boys. He was talking to me as well. The spirit of the

times invited, even urged, girls to try to change the world too.

Thus did the poHtical cHmate of the late 1950s and early 1960s

begin disrupting, if ever so imperceptibly, comfortable assumptions

about girls' aspirations. Economic circumstances, most notably the

postwar boom and the triumphal enthronement of American con-

sumer culture, also began to dislodge assumptions about who was

important and who wasn't. And the ones who were becoming more
important every day were us — the kids.

Many of our parents, of course, survivors of the Great Depression

and of World War II, were determined that their kids have a more
secure and carefree youth. Because there were so damn many of us
don't forget that the birthrate m 1950s America exceeded that in
24 Where the Girls Are

India —we created special pressures on the society, and we saw new
buildings, from ranch houses to libraries to schools, going up just for
us. But precisely because there were so many of us, we, as kids,

became one of the most important things any group can become in
America: a market. Once you're a market, you're really, truly special.

Once you're a market — especially a really big market —you can

change history.

Advertisers magnified the national gestalt, insisting we were a

new and different generation, blessed as no other had been, riding a
seemingly never-ending crest of prosperity and progress. We would
be better educated, healthier, more affluent, and certainly more
sophisticated than any generation before us, especially if we bought
the right products. There we were, surrounded as never before by a
bhnding and deafening array of images from television, magazines,
and newspapers, increasing amounts of it promoting consumer goods
from Kool-Aid to Revlon dolls, trying to imagine our futures. As we
did so, many of us, boys and girls aHke, got this almost transcendent
sense of historical destiny. We got this idea that we really were the
chosen ones.
Coonskin caps may have been the
first important clue. Their suc-

cessproved that eight-year-olds had such economic clout that they

could make the manufacturer of a rather ratty hunk of fur a miUion-
aire — a lesson not lost on enterprising types. Imagine sitting at your
kitchen table, trying to figure out how tomake a fast fortune, com-
ing up with Silly Putty, and being rightl Whoever invented Barbie, a
toy that today makes a feminist mom
apoplectic, must have become
a So did the manufacturers of Colorforms, Magic
gazillionaire.

Markers, Clue, and Trix (with the telling slogan "Trix are for kids").
Just as we became isolated as a market, the television industry parti-
tioned the broadcast schedule into slots just for us — early morning,
late afternoon, and at least half the day on Saturday. All of this
because we were important —meaning the fastest-growing market
segment in the country. When we turned the corner from kid to
 Fractured Fairy Tales 25

teenager, the marketing blitz was even more intense. By 1960 there

were approxmiately 11.7 million girls betw^een the ages of twelve and
eighteen m the United States, and their average allowance ot four
dollars a week was spent on Hpstick, Phisohex, size 30AA stretch bras,
'Teen magazine, Ben Casey shirts, and forty-fives like
"Big Bad John."

By pitching so many things to us all the time that were only and

specifically for us, the mass media insisted that we mattered. They told
us that we were a force to be reckoned with. And we
girls came to

beHeve that we were freer fi-om constraints than our mothers; that we
were modern, riding a wave of progress, less old-fashioned; that, for

us, anything w^as possible.

So this, maybe, is where my confusion began. While exhorta-

tions to study hard, make something of myself, and extend democ-

racy throughout the world were going m one ear, resonating with

sales pitches that reaffirmed that, as a girl, I had indeed been born
into the very best of times, retrograde messages about
traditional

femininity were going in the other. Saturday morning, after aU, dom-
inated as it was by opera-singing supermice and other male
heroes

constantly rescuing female victims tied to railroad tracks and con-

veyor belts in sawmills, intermixed with ads for the Barbie game
("You Are Not Ready When He Calls Miss One Turn" and "He —
Criticizes Your Hairdo— Go to the Beauty Shop") was a bastion of

sexist assumptions.

Like nullions of girls of my generation, I was told I was a mem-

ber of a new, privileged generation whose destiny was more open
and exciting than that of my parents. But, at the exact same time, I

was told that I couldn't really expect much more than to end up like

my mother. Was I supposed to be an American — individuaHstic,

competitive, aggressive, achievement-oriented, tough, independent?

This was the kind of person who would help us triumph over Sput-
nik. Or was I supposed to be a girl — nurturing, self-abnegatmg, pas-

sive,dependent, primarily concerned with the well-being of others,

and completely indifferent to personal success? By the late 1950s and
26 Where the Girls Are

early 1960s, the answer was starting to become less clear. All too
often it seemed that being a real American and a real girl at the same
time required the skills of a top-notch contortionist.
These warring messages — "be
an American"; "no, no, be a
girl" —one and occasional, one louder and insistent, were
softer

ampHfied, repeated, and dramatized in the electronic hothouse we

grew up in. We were the first television generation, and being raised
with the box gave us psychological mutations all our own. The
black-and-white images emanating from our sets began to illuminate
our vision of who we were and what we might become. But even as
television gave shape to our most precious and private dreams, our
hopes and our fears, cracks and fissures appeared, for the medium's
messages were so often at odds with one another.
The major spht we began to see on TV in the late 1950s and early
1960s, and to experience in our own
as kids, was the gap
lives, even
between current events and entertainment programming. Although
before 1963 TV news was still only fifteen minutes long, television
brought poHtics into our Hving rooms through its coverage of
the civil rights movement, the Kennedy-NLxon debates. President
Kennedys live press conferences, and the televised rocket launches

from Cape Canaveral. What we saw revealed a larger world of con-

flict, inequahty, and insecurity. At the same time, entertainment pro-
gramming got more removed from reahty. The so-called golden age
of television, with its hard-hitting, socially conscious teleplays,
was
over, replaced by Sing Along with Mitch and Wagon Train. The gritti-
ness of shows like The Honey mooners, The Goldbergs, and I Love Lucy —
with their emphasis on domestic friction, particularly the war
between the sexes, and
their reUance on female characters who
looked Hke someone you might see in real hfe gave way by the late
fifties and early sixties to the pabulum of Leave It to
—
Beaver, Thejetsons,
and My Favorite Martian. Now we saw harmonious nuclear famiUes
and wasp-waisted, perfectly coiffed moms who never lost their tem-
pers, and we were subjected to the most nauseating innovation
to hit
the airwaves, the laugh track. News cameras showed us sit-ins pro-
 Fractured Fairy Tales 27

testing segregation; the networks gave us Dennis the Menace, The

and Mr. Ed, inhabitants of a bizarre cartoon world
FUntstones, Fiazel,

hermetically sealed off from poHtics and history. These were the poles
that we, as kids, oscillated between.
While John Kennedy and My Weekly Reader suggested that even
we girls had a larger historical destiny, I was still coming home after

school and rotting my brain with TV. Most of the shows I watched
then were not telling me that I, some dumb girl, could change the
world. No, these shows had a different message. I would not change
the world; I'd watch my boyfriend or husband do that. did not have I

my own destiny; my fate, my life, would be dependent on my man's.

Since I would be nothing without a man — especially a cute, strong,

successful one — I'd better learn how to be cute and popular, how to

stand out from the herd, and how to get my hair to go into the most

preposterous style yet invented, the flip. And here came the rub,

one of the earliest contortion acts. For embedded in the rather unfor-

giving gender ideology of the late 1950s was the following contra-
diction: I was supposed to be, simultaneously, a narcissist and a

masochist. To be a success as a girl and then as a woman, I learned

early that I was supposed to be obsessively self-centered, scrutinizing

every pore, every gesture, every stray eyebrow hair, eradicating every

flaw, enhancing every asset, yet never, ever letting anybody see me
doing this. No matter what girls did behind closed doors, in front of
their mirrors, they were never supposed to act self-absorbed in pub-

He. We were supposed to be as self-abnegating, and as cheerful about

it, as Cinderella or Snow White. The message to women and girls in

the 1 950s wasn't just "Be passive, be dumb, keep your mouth shut,
and learn how to ma]<^S]2an2^^a nd-Ve]veeta croquettes." It was_worse.
It was "To re aUy have it all, be a martyr."

Klo""oriemore powerfully or more regularly reaffirmed the

importance of the doormat as a role model for Utde girls than Walt
Disney. When I was a kid, Disney was a demigod, the personification
of America's generosity of spirit, its trusting innocence, its sense of

good-natured, harmless fun. When I got older, however, I saw the

28 Where the Girls Are

dark side of Disney, the right-wing reactionary who supported Barrv'

Goldwater for president in 1964 and denied entrv' to Disneyland to
over 500 teenagers in the summer of 1966 because they had beards or
their hair was too long." The fantasy worlds he created were as ster-

ilized and white as an operating room in Switzerland, populated by

boys instructed to look and dress hke Pat Boone and girls forced to
look and dress Hke Tricia Nixon. As we look back on this much-
revered national icon, we see that Disney was obsessed with order
and tradition, and there were few traditions he spent more time but-
tressing than suffocating sex-role stereotypes for boys and girls. For
girls, Disney's fairy tales were not harmless.
Let's take another look at these stories, some of which we first

saw in the movies or on the longest-running prime-time series in

network television, the Walt Disney show, variously titled Disneyland,

Walt Disney Presents, and Jlie Wonderful World of Disney. Today, as a

mother with the single most important —and insidious — aid to child
rearing, the VCR, I have gotten to see with my daughter these
female morality plays hundreds of times. (I know; some of you are
thinking, "What kind of a mother is she?" Answer: One who needs
to cook dinner, take a shower, and read a newspaper headKne once in
a while.) I remember their effect on me, and I see, with regret, their
effect on her.

Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, and Snow
Wlnte got us baby boomers during the Paleozoic era of psyche for-
mation, when the most basic features of our psychological landscape
were oozing into place. And what down? Primal images
got laid
about good girls and bad girls, and about which kind of boys were
the most irresistible.

First, there were the good and wonderful girls, the true prin-
cesses, the we were supposed to emulate. They were beautiful,
ones
of course, usually much more beautiful than anyone else, but com-
pletely unself-conscious about it —
^you never saw Snow White or
Cinderella preening in front of some mirror. They were so virtuous,
so warm and welcoming, so in tune with nature, that bluebirds
 e

Fractured Fairy T.:l{s 29

couldn't resist on their heads or shoulders and surrounduig

alighting

them \\-ith birdsong. (I remember placing m the woods as a kid and

feeling completely rejected when birds would oiilv run away from

me/^ These girls were exrremelv hardworking, always scrubbing

cement floors and ser\-ing food to others, and. despite the fact that

thev never heard one word of thanks, and uisteadjust got more unfair

abuse, thev smiled happily sang throughout their chores, and never,
ever. ever, complained.
B cause thevjvyer e so beauntlil and kind and vo ung^ thev wer e
detested by olde n \indicnve. murderous stepmoxheri,jor_j^ueeiii
wearing too much eyeliner and eyeshadow, usuallv blue or purple.
These wome n had wav too much power for their own good.

embod\-ing the age-old truism that a nv power a t all completely cor-

rupted womenjnd_turned-lh£iTi inro mgnsters.. In their hands, power

was lethal: it was used onlv to bolster their own ovenveenmg vanit\;

and to destrov what was pure and good in the world. In the ensuing

batde bet\veen the mnocent. deserving, self-sacrificmg girl and the

vam. black-hearted, covetous woman, the girl won the end. res- m
cued iTom female power run amok bv some handsome prince she

had met onl\- once. She lay there, ma coma, or was locked m some
garret, waiting, powerlessly. for some cipher of a guy she barely knew
to ^ive her her hfe back through a kiss so powerful it could raise

Lazarus Irom the grave.

The onlv good women besides the princess were the chubbv.
posmienopausal fau^- godmothers, asexual grandmas well beyond the
ase of successflillv competing in the contest over "who's the tairest ot
them all." Except for them, all the females were competition, over m
who was who was most appeahng to men. who the birds
pretnest.

and dogs Uked best, or who had the smallest feet. \\'ith the advantage
of hindsight, and the \'CR. it becomes clear that Disnev Studim. in
hhns trom Vic Parcni Trap to Mary Pcppitis. was obsessed \\-ith female

compennon and seemed deternuned to oiler us onlv two choices :

the powerless but beloved m asochist or the powerful but detested

narcissist.
30 Where the Girls Are

Take Peter Pan, for example. I loved it as a kid because I thought

flying would be real neat. As a mother with a more jaundiced eye, I

have a somewhat less charitable take. In the Disney version, one of

the central themes is female competition over the attentions of a boy.
Tinker Bell is a scheming, overly possessive, vain little chorus girl-

constantly admiring her reflection in mirrors or any available body of

water. These scenes tell us right away she's a no-good little bitch.
Wendy is a kind-hearted, servile, masochistic wimp who only wants
to wait on boys. She is in awe of Peter from the moment she meets
him, silently accepting the dismissive remarks he makes to her in the
nursery about girls talking too much and so forth. When Wendy gets
to Neverland, the vain and catty mermaids splash her with water and
try to drive her away so they can have the happily self-absorbed Peter
all to themselves.

In James Barrie's original version. Tinker Bell is indeed jealous of

Wendy and does whatever she can to have her eHminated with
extreme prejudice. But since she's mainly a flash of light, and de-
scribed by Barrie as "sHghtly incHned to embonpoint" —plump-
ness —we don't get beat over the head with the relentless Disney
equation: vanity means a girl is probably evil and deserves to die. And
Barrie's Wendy has a mouth on her. From the moment she meets
Peter she's pretty patronizing, telling him he's ignorant and con-
ceited. The mermaids in this version splash everyone, male and
female aHke, because they don't Hke people, not because they consti-
tute some harem competing with Wendy for Peter.
These differences may seem minor, but with the special license
that animation allows, Disney was able to emphasize that girls do pri-
marily two things — stare at themselves in the mirror and fight over
boys —while the boys are more outward-looking and doing more
important things. And what about Peter, this boy so irresistible to
every female he meets? He is cocky, self-absorbed, egocentric, aloof,
and indifferent to the feeHngs of the females around him. (The Tramp
in Lady and the Tramp, also held up as a real charmer, has the same
MO.) Peter Hkes playing the girls off one another and takes special
 —
Fractured Fairy Tales 31

delight in the Wendy-mermaid catfight. He refuses to grow up and

thus IS supposed to be especially charming. Sound hke any boytriends
or husbands you ever had?
Now the argument can be made that Disney, just hke the other
purveyors of pop culture to kids m the late 1950s and early 1960s,

was simply reflecting the times, including all the taken-for-granted

"truths" about jealousy vanit\^, passivit\; and a terror of mice being
biologically mapped onto the genetic structure of girls. But Disney
wasn't passively or innocently reflecting anything; he was actively
emphasizing and exaggerating certain assumptions about women and
girls while clearly ignoring others. All we have to do is
compare his
Peter Pan with the one starring Mary Martin (which ran on Broad-
way during the same decade) to see that the stor>' worked fine, if not

better, without Wendy being a helpless, fawning t\vit and Tinker Bell
a narcissistic bimbo. But to too many men, or at least male cartoon-

ists, the ongoing catfight between girls, especially beautiful girls, over

some boy, any boy, was irresistible; they had to play it over and over

Bett\' versus Veromca, Lois Lane versus Lana Lang, and so on.
These cartoon dramas put that Htde voice in our heads, the one
always warning us to beware of other girls, especially pretty ones or
ones with too much makeup, and installed the Htde surveillance cam-

era in there too, the one incessantly scanning others —and our-

5elves — to scrutinize who was the fairest of them all. ' For, in truth,

we were damned if we were vain and damned if wt weren't. We

learned, through these fairv^ tales, and certainly later through adver-

tising, that we had to scrutinize ourselves aU the time, identif\' our

many imperfections, and learn to eliminate or disguise them, other-
wise no one would ever love us. But we also learned that we had to

be highly secretive about doing this: we couldn't appear to be

obsessed with our appearance, for then no one would love us either.

No discussion of Walt Disney's influence on our tender psyches

is complete without mentioning TJie Mickey Mouse Club, which ran
from 1955 to 1959, featuring Karen and Cubby and, of course,

Annette.^ Annette stood out because she was clearly favored by Dis-
??.... ^''"^ the Girts Are

ney as the prettiest, and because she

was getting "them." You could
see them, just a suggestion at
first, then getting bigger each season
shaming the more flat-chested,
fireckle-faced girls, making
Annette
more enviable but also more of a joke.
Annettes emerging breasts
made many of the boys I knew lust after
her, but they also aUowed
these boys to smcker at her. So
here was an uneasy early lesson Girls
were defined by their bodies, by
whether their were too big
breasts
or too smaU, by whether they
came in too fast or too slow, by the fact
that these breasts simultaneously
attracted and terrified boys
Girls
were damned if they had big ones and
damned if they had little ones
and were vulnerable, open, and
exposed because they had them at
aU. This IS what Annette,
through no fault of her own, taught
us
Shows like ne Mickey Mouse Club
influenced more than just my
own self-image and my notions of how I
should look and behave
They also shaped how real boys I knew
sized up and treated me and
my girlfriends.

Disney's notions about the ennobhng

effects of female masochism
were echoed by adult programming.
Queen for a Day, which aired
from 1956 to 1964 and was the
number one daytime show in Amer-
ica, also became emblazoned on my plastic Uttle psyche. Thirteen
million of us were completely
hooked on thisgame show-cum-
psychodrama, a monument to the glories of female martyrdom and
victimization.' Here was the
premise. Four contestants were
inter-
viewed, one after the other, by
Jack Bailey one of the most conde-
scending, smarmiest game show hosts ever. Each woman sheepishly
recounted a reaUy heart-tuggmg
sob story and made a request for a
prize she felt would Ughten
her load, or, more hkely, someone else's
Maybe she had six children, aU under
the age of seven, and had just
been told she had to go to the
hospital for a lifesaving operation.
She
would be laid up for several weeks.
Her request: someone to take care
of the lads vvhile she was recuperating.
Or maybe her husband and
child sufi-eredfrom severe asthma and could barely
breathe without a
vaporizer, but they couldn't
afibrd one unless Queen
for a Day helped
They were always stories Hke these,
about financial deprivation and
 '

Fractured Fairy Tales 33

physical and emotional loss, about the isolation and sense of helpless-
ness of many bereft housewives. One purpose of the show was to
dramatize that there was no problem, no catastrophe that couldn't be
fixed by a new dishwasher or some costume jewelry
Of the four women chosen for any show, there was always one
who was much more pathetic. After all four had spilled their guts on
national television, they sat side by side at a table, an applause
meter

superimposed on the screen under each one, their eyes darting Hke
caged rabbits, waiting to be judged. Who was the most pathetic? As
Bailey called out "contestant number one, contestant number two,
contestant number three," the audience was meant to clap the loudest

and the longest for whichever woman was most pitiable, and she
became Queen for a Day She almost always burst into tears as she was
handed a dozen roses, draped with a fake ermine-trimmed robe, and,

of course, crowned. Then began the parade of consumer goods—the

washers, dryers, knit dresses, Jell-O molds, Naugahyde recHners,
year's

supply of Rice-a-Roni, matched luggage, cases of car wax,

wrist-

watches, swing sets, and gift certificates to the Spiegel catalog— that

would solve her problems. These fetish objects, the witch doctor-host
suggested, would obhterate any suspicion that the Queen for a
Day
and other women like her were trapped because economically poHti-
cally and socially they were, in America, second-class citizens.

The message in Queen for a Day was that nothing was more glo-

rious or elevating in a woman than masochism. The woman who

suffered in silence, who worked hked a dog and put everyone else's
needs before her own, who washed men's feet with her hair (Hke in
all those 1950s Bible movies) and, when given the chance, asked

nothing for herself— this was the deserving woman, the noble
woman, the saint. There was a hint of immortaHty about all this, that
these women would be remembered tearfully living forever in the

grateful hearts of those who knew, guiltily they could never be as

selfless or as noble.

If you've ever subjected yourself to the Douglas Sirk melodrama

Imitation of Life, the number four box office hit m 1959, you know
 34 Where the Girls Are
}

what I mean. Here we have Lana Turner as Laura, a selfish, blond

bitch who is always primping in fi-ont of a mirror and is obsessed with
her career. She is Marilyn Quayle's worst nightmare, the mother
who, once she gets a taste of professional success, callously relegates
her child to the care of others so she can claw her way to the top. The
word sacrifice means nothing to this bloodsucker. She "takes in" a
black woman, Annie (Juanita Moore), and her daughter, Sarah Jane
(Susan Kohner), and they all live together for the next fifteen years or
so. Annie, who is more beatific, good, and holy than the Virgin her-
self, raises Susie (Sandra Dee), Lauras daughter, while Laura becomes
a famous actress.

To make a really long story short, the fair-skinned Sarah Jane

keeps trying to pass for white, and since Annie, who's obviously
black, kinda makes this hard to do, the Judas Sarah Jane treats her
saintly mother Hke a leper, denying her in pubUc and running away
to dance half naked in strip joints. But no matter how spiteful and
hideous Sarah Jane is, Annie never gets fed up or even a bit peeved.
Annie just keeps loving her, and all she wants out of Hfe is to give
Sarah Jane money and get an occasional, begrudging hug. At the
same time, Annie selflessly waits on Laura, runs her house, and
becomes the real mother figure for Susie. The thanks she gets is that
Sarah Jane runs away from home for good and says she never wants
to see her mother again.

At the end of the movie, worn out from self-neglect and a bro-
ken heart, Annie dies, and, boy, is Sarah Jane sorry then. Everybody's
sorry. The death and funeral scenes are some of the most effective
tear-wrenching moments ever filmed. On her deathbed, with the
vioHns and chorus of angeHc soprano voices virtually pumping the
water out of our tear ducts, Annie sets a new standard of female self-

sacrifice. This is genuine "Forgive them, Lord, for they know not
what they do" material. As Laura kneels at her bedside, her chin
quivering and her eyes widened as if she's watching the Virgin speak
at Lourdes, Annie says, "I want everything that's left to go to Sarah
Jane ... tell her I know was I selfish and if I loved her too much I'm
 Fractured Fairy Tales 35

sorry." By now Sirk has us where he wants us: we in the audience are

slobbering indignantly to ourselves, "Selfish!? You?!?! Why, that Htde

ingrate ..."
Annie keeps laying it on: "My pearl necklace — I want you to

give it to Susie." She turns to the black minister who's come to the

house. "Reverend, I want your wife to have my fur scarf." Then she

Laura that every Christmas for the past fifteen years or so, she's
tells

been sending money to their old milkman from the first cold-water
flat they all lived in because he had been so tolerant about their being
late with their bills. And here's the kicker — she's selflessly sent the

money in Laura's name as well, even though the now filthy rich

Laura would have never, ever thought of such a gesture. Yet Annie
made sure her self-centered boss would be warmly remembered as an
altruist. Annie's final request is to send the former milkman a fifty-

dollar bill. As she begms to fade, with Laura, self-absorbed to the

end, screaming at her, "You can't leave me — I won't let you," Annie

mumbles, "Our wedding day . . . and the day we die are the great

events of life."
After we're all given time to bawl our eyes out over this death

scene, the camera cuts to a funeral service fit for a head of state,

where none other than Mahalia Jackson is belting out a spiritual

about redemption and reHef in the afterHfe. The church is packed

with mourners and bleachers of flowers, and Annie's casket is covered

with a blanket of hUes. Just after the casket is loaded into the hearse,
Sarah Jane appears, hurHng herself onto the casket and sobbing,
"Mama, I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it, can you hear me? I did love

you, I did love you." Now there's barely a dry eye in the house; even
some men are blubbering. As Laura pries Sarah Jane off the casket,

Sarah Jane my mother!" The funeral procession begins,

yells, "I killed

headed by mounted poHce, who are followed by a brass band and

dozens of friends marching, row upon row. Then comes the hearse.

Covered with gilt ornamentation and drawn by four white horses,

the carriage is right out of a fairy tale, and not unlike the hearses
favored by the royal families of Europe.
36 Where the Girls Are

As the choral music swells, and hundreds of bystanders mourn

Annie's passing, we see that, in death, she has finally gotten the atten-
tion, the praise, the credit, and the glory she deserves. Through her
martyrdom, she has become larger than life, eternal, a legend. All are

desperately sorry that they didn't appreciate her more when she was
alive. Everyone, especially her wretched daughter, is sorry she's gone;
no one will forget her now, for she has achieved immortality. No
wonder my mother used to say with some regularity, "You'll be sorry
when I'm dead and gone." If you want never to be forgotten as a
woman, if you want to live on in the hearts and minds of legions, be
a doormat your entire life. Sure, there's some deferred gratification

involved, but the payoff in the end is really big. When you're feeling
down and as if no one appreciates all you do for others, just imagine
yourown death and how much they'll all cry, and you'll feel better.
What's especially interesting here is the reversal Sirk does: the fair,

blond woman is self-centered and bad, the darker woman is Christ-

like and good. Usually in popular culture it was the other way
around, although black women, when they got movie or TV roles at

all, could only be selfless earth mothers who spoke in malapropisms

and loved white children more than their own. We see here how
black women and white women were used against each other in
American popular culture, the woman embodying standards of
white
beauty impossible for the black woman to achieve, but the black
woman serving as a powerful moral rebuke to the self-indulgent nar-
cissism of the white woman who dares to think of herself. Imitation of

Life was simply one of the more over-the-top parables, resonating

with the sacrificial rituals of Queen for a Day, about women learning
the importance of behaving like flagellants.
At night on TV in the age of Sputnik there were the infamous
family sitcoms, like Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, The Adven-
tures of Ozzie and Harriet, and The Donna Reed Show, with their smil-
ing, benevolent, self-effacing, pearl-clad moms who loved to vacuum
in high heels. Their messages about a woman's proper place were
sometimes surprisingly bald. In a 1959 episode o^ Father Knows Best,
 Fractured Fairy Tales 37

entitled "Kathy Becomes a Girl," Kathy, a.k.a. Kitten, has entered

junior high, but because she's a tomboy, she's having trouble making
friends. She still Hkes to cHmb trees and wrestle with boys, while the
other girls Uke to wear frilly dresses and wash their hands a lot. Even
though Kathy protests, "Who wants to be Hke those silly girls?" her

mom and older sister, Betty, know she needs and wants to become a

real girl. Mom says she was

tomboy once too, but she knew when
a

to "put down the baseball bat and pick up the Hpstick." Betty shoves

her mto a bubble bath and then puts makeup on her, advising,
"Nothing will make a boy sit up and take notice Hke a Htde glamour."
But, of course, it's the talk with Dad that cHnches her transformation.

"You can become a queen to some man," advises Dad, who then
describes the "cute tricks" Mom uses. "Being dependent — a Httle

helpless now and then" is an excellent strategy, because men Hke to

be gallant, "the big protectors." This is a revelation to Kathy. "We

girls have got it made — all we do is sit back!" she exclaims. Then she

gets her final piece of advice from Dad: "The worst thing you can do
is to try to beat a man at his own game. You just beat the women at

theirs."

A year later, we witnessed "Betty's Career Problem." Betty finds

herself in constant competition for scholastic honors and class offices

with a young man named CHff Bowman. Then a job opens up at a

local department store for an assistant merchandise buyer, and Betty

and CHff find themselves in the personnel office both applying for it.

CHff teUs Betty not to waste her time, since no firm wiH hire pretty

girls for career jobs. "They know from experience that pretty girls

usuaUy get married and chuck the job." The interviewer, who hires

CHff right away, reaffirms this position. Even though Betty insists that

she's "dead serious about this job," he repHes, "I don't know what to

say to you. Miss Anderson. We find that training pretty girls for

career jobs doesn't pay off." He does offer her a modeHng job in an

upcoming fashion show but advises, "Miss Anderson, take inventory

—
of yourself are you after a job or a man? You can't have both." It

turns out that Betty has to model a wedding gown, and Cliff has been
38 Where the Girls Are

hired to model the groom's suit. As they stand there in their cos-

tumes, Betty announces she won't pursue a career with the depart-
ment store after all. "I've found somethmg that you could never do
better than I can —be a bride," she says, and the sound track bursts
into applause. So much for Betty's delusions about working outside
the home.
Television shows were filled with such predictable swill. But they
kept butting up against real Hfe. In the world of poHtics and culture,
a new kind of woman emerged on the scene in 1961. Our new,
thirty-one-year-old first lady, JacqueUne Kennedy, was a one-woman
revolution, and an extremely important symbol for baby boom girls

just entering adolescence. Only one first lady had been younger than

Jackie, but that was back in 1886, much too long ago to count. Jackie
personified a generation of women, who, in a variety oi quiet but
significant ways, represented a departure from 1950s stuffiness, con-
formity, and confinement. No Mamie Eisenhower sausage-Hnk
bangs or crinoUned skirts for her. Jackie's smooth, glamorous bouf-
fant hairdo seemed to symbohze a new, relaxed stvde, an uncoiHng of
the constraints that had hemmed in other, older first ladies. Jackie was

traditionand modernity, the old femininity and new^ womanhood,

seemingly sustained in a perfect suspension. She was a wdfe and
mother, but she had also worked outside the home. She deferred to
her husband, but at times outshone him. The week of JFK's inaugu-
ration, it was Jackie's picture, not Jack's, that appeared on the cover of
Time. She was young, beautiful, sHm, styhsh, and rich — a true

princess, it seemed —who, it turned out, read voraciously loved

sports, and had feet the size of pontoons. Jackie Kennedy, in the early
1960s, was the most charismatic woman in America, possibly in the
world, and she was critically important to baby boom culture because
of the way she fractured the old fairy tales.

The press couldn't get enough of Jackie. And it wasn't just Time
or Newsweek. She found herself on the covers of aU those trashy
movie magazines I used to gorge on, Hke Motion Picture, Modern
Screen, Movie Stars, and TV Radio Mirror, that ran stories hke "Is Bur-
 Fractured Fairy Tales 39

ton Jealous of Liz's Children?" or "I Was Vince Edwards' First Wife."
By December 1962, a picture of Jackie or some screaming headline
about her had appeared on the cover of Photoplay in ten of the previ-
ous seventeen issues. She couldn't be on all of them because there had
to be room for that cuckolding home wrecker Liz Taylor. They did
share the Photoplay cover once, with a headHne that pronounced
them "America's 2 Queens!" The other Jackie headlines were great,
like "Jackie Turned Her Back on Hollywood" or "The Illness That's

Breaking Jackie's Heart." The entire magazine industry from Red- —

book to U. S. News and World Report to The New York Times Maga-
zine —was obsessed with her.

Certain images were ubiquitous, such as the shot of her working

as an "inquiring photographer" for the Washington Times-Herald in
the early 1950s. She made this look like a fun job for a young
woman. After aU, she got to interview politicians and socialites, and
she covered, under her own byHne, the coronation of Queen EHza-
beth.^ And we constantly saw her horseback riding, even falling off
her horse, as well as swimming and waterskiing, prompting U.S.
News and World Report to gush that she was "the most athletic wife of
a president in memory."^ She also dared to wear slacks in public, some
of them "shocking pink," aU of them "tapered," enraging old farts

who favored midcalf shirtwaist dresses and hats with veils as the only
appropriate first lady attire.

Much was made of the fact that she was smart — a "certifiable

egghead," said Newsweek^ —and painted; spoke French, Italian, and

Spanish; loved literature, art, classical music, and the opera; and had
attended Vassar, George Washington University, and the Sorbonne.
"Once," reported Time, "when Jack lost some notes from Tennyson's
Ulysses that he wanted to use in a speech, Jackie obligingly quoted
excerpts, from childhood recollection."'^ In another widely publi-
cized story, reporters seemed amazed that she knew the ancient
Greek origin of the word ostracize. I remember vividly the time she

went to France with the president and did something he couldn't do

at all: addressed the crowds who flocked to see them in French. The
40 Where the Girls Are

adulation she received —hordes who yelled "Vive Jackie! Vive

Jackie!" —^prompted one of her husband's famous quips, "I am the

man who accompanied Jacquehne Kennedy to Paris." The same

thing happened when they went to Latin America in 1961. U.S.
News and World Report headhned its story about the trip this way:
"First Lady Gives a Lesson in Diplomacy" "Breaking the language

barrier for the President" by addressing the crowds in Spanish, Jackie

stole the spotHght as "a new kind of ambassador of good will for the
US."^*^ When she went to India a few months later, she was hailed as

the Amriki Rani, Queen of America. After a visit to England, one

Fleet Street reporter summed up her influence this way: "JacqueHne
Kennedy has given the American people from this day on one thing
they had always lacked — majesty.""

Jackie even added the egghead's touch to decorating in her highly

pubHcized restoration of the White House. She was appalled, when
she first toured the White House, that it reflected so Httle of the his-

torv' of the presidency. "It looks like a house where nothing has ever
taken place," she observed. "There is no trace of the past."^^ She
made it clear that she was not assuming the simply female role of
redecorating. She was directing a historically informed and accurate
restoration. This required (the press was quick to note) knowledge,
brains, and organizational skill. She took on the role of curator, per-
suading Congress to designate the White House a national museum
and insisting that its furnishings should represent the full sweep of
American history. Yet after watching her assume such a commanding
role as first lady, after hearing about what a weU-educated intellect

she was, it was a shock to watch her conduct that TV tour of the

White House in February 1962. She had such a whispery, soft, little

girl's voice, a voice Hke, well, Marilyn Monroe's. (Only later would
we appreciate the fuU irony of this.) The Htde girl voice just didn't

seem match the eggheaded, accompHshed woman. In an October

to

1962 Gallup poll, people said one of the things they Hked least about
^^
Jackie was her voice.
 Fractured Fairy Tales 41

But the big ston; aside from her fabulous wardrobe, was her feet.

This was a media obsession —were they only size 9AA, as had been
speculated, or were they really 10. or 10'::. or even, as some had whis-
pered. 1 1? When she was on her tour of India, Jackie had to take off

her shoes and put on violet velvet sHppers to \isit the memorial to

Mahatma Gandhi. When she did. Keyes Beech, an enterprising cor-

respondent for the Chicaoo Daily Xews, looked m her shoes and
immediately cabled home with this scoop ot the year: "I can state

with absolute authorit\- that she wears lOA and not lOAA."^^ Why
did anyone care, and what did it mean? The fact that Jackie

Kennedy's foot would never have fit into Cinderella's size V^ glass

sUpper seemed highly symboHc at this moment m history. For me. it

was a personal vindication and a rehef. since my feet were edging

toward size 9 and I desperately needed to beheve you could still be
thought ot as a girl it your feet were as big as your brothers.
But that was exactly the point. Jackie had these traditionally
"mascuHne" quahties — she was smart and loved intellectual pursuits,
she was knowledgeable about histors' and the arts, she wore pants,

and she had big feet — yet she was still completely feminine, a

princess, a queen. She kne\\ how to take charge, and she also knew^
how to be gracious and ornamental. For those of us raised on Cin-
derella and Snow White, she suggested new possibilities for the

princess role. Being educated, having some knowledge your husband

didn't have, was glamorous, even enviable. This was important
because women's magazines were still way to land
telhng girls that the
a man was to pretend you were dumber than he was. Jackie Kennedy
told us all kinds ot subterfriges and compromises were possible (as

long as you looked hke Jackie Kennedy, of course).

Poised on the brink of the 1960s, facing the abyss of the teen and
preteen years, the girls of America already had their heads jammed
with images and fantasies about how their lives might proceed. We
had learned how to put ourselves under surveillance, and learned
about the importance of female masochism. Then, in August 1962,
42 Where the Girls Are

we heard that the greatest Hving sex symbol in America, Marilyn

Monroe, had died of an overdose of pills. Is this, we wondered, what
too much beauty, too much sex appeal, and what appeared at the time
like too Httle brains got you —an early, tawdry death? Too much has
been written about Marilyn Monroe, and I won't add to the output.
But her suicide did represent the death of a certain kind of feminin-
ity, and a certain kind of female victimization. When she died, it

seemed to me, even back then, that an era had passed, and that the
seemingly dumb-blond, busty bombshell would no longer exert the
cultural or sexual pull that she once did. For w^hile all these twisted
lessons about being nice no matter what, never complaining, and
being a doormat were well threaded into my psyche, Marilyn Mon-
roe, Sleeping Beauty, and all those pathetic women on Queen for a

Day made me reaUze I wanted something else too. I wanted more

control than they had. And, one way or another, I was going to get it.
As I watched all these martyrs on the large and small screens, I
also watched a woman in real Hfe: my mother. She didn't seem to

have much more control over her life than they did, and, as a result,

she was what you might call testy much of the time. So it wasn't just
that I wanted to avoid ending up as Queen for a Day. I especially
wanted to avoid ending up hke Mom.
 m

w am Saii J

I he most popular prime-time shows in the late 1950s and early

I 1960s were westerns, and those of us glued to the tube back then
A can still identify upon hearing the first five notes, the themes to

Sugarfoot, TJie Rifleman, Rawhide, Maverick, or Have Gim 117// Travel.

Of the top twenrs'-five prime-time shows in the 1959-60 season.

eleven were about cowboys with shiny metal oblongs of various sizes
strapped to their thighs, and their oblongs were bigger and taster than
anvone else's. Or they had long. sine\\y powerful ropes that they
r^virled masterflilly to render someone else helpless. They were otten

astride muscular, thrusting, panting steeds, the horses themselves

equipped with guns and lassos, all the various phalluses between, on,

and around the cowboy's legs rushing, galloping, stiffening toward a

showdown. Because females didn't have any of these cyUndrical

accessories, they had to stay to home and take care of the youngins,

bake corn bread, and darn the cowboys' smelly socks. I watched all

these shows that extolled male adventurism and naturalized female

drudgery with someone who was extremely pissed off on pretty-

much a daily basis, my mother.

Unlike June Cleaver. Donna Reed, or Harriet Nelson, my
—
mother worked outside the home as weU as mside it once — my
brother and I were estabhshed m school. She was not alone —
1960, one out of five women with children age six and younger was
m the labor force, and nearly 38 percent of women over the age ot
sixteen had a job. Their median income was only 60 percent ot what
44 Where the Girls Are

men made, in part because they were restricted to low-paying jobs

like schoolteacher, beautician, waitress, nurse, and secretary, and were
paid less than men for doing exactly the same work. Then they came
home and had to be totally responsible for the children and do every-
thing around the house, and I mean everything, with the possible
exception of taking out the garbage once in a while or mowing the
lawn. (Some things, of course, haven't changed much.) And this was
at a time when the standards for household cleanliness, not to men-
tion for the laundry, had been raised to a psychotically obsessive level
by advertisers who had read "The Whiteness of the Whale" in Moby-
Dick one too many times.
Plus, unlike Ozzie or Dr. Stone or Ward, who were always hang-
ing around the house in their cardigans, eager to help Mom reason
with the kids, my father, and most fathers I knew, were not around
the house much, and when they were, they stayed far away from the
metal cyHnders Mom did get to deploy. Pledge cans and vacuum
cleaner hoses. No wonder so many of our mothers were pissed. They
worked all the time with Httle or no acknowledgment, while their
ingrate kids watched TV shows that insisted that good mothers, Hke
true princesses, never complained, smiled a real lot, were constantly
good-natured, and never expected anything from anyone. When our
mothers sat back to relax in front of the TV after a twelve- to fifteen-
hour day, they were surrounded by allegories about mascuhne hero-
ism and the sanctity of male gonads. Rarely, if ever, did they see any
suggestion that the incessant, mundane, and often painful contortions
of a woman's daily life might, in fact, be heroic too. They didn't even
see any representations of working mothers on a regular basis, and,

when they did, all they saw and heard was that working mothers
were, by definition, bad mothers. Plus they were harangued by white
tornadoes and white knights with long lances to get up off their butts
and make their already spotless houses even cleaner.
But there were
other, historically rooted reasons why many of
our mothers had an attitude problem, reasons few of us understood
when we were kids. All too many of us witnessed the tensions and
 Mama Said 45

the resentments in our mothers, and these shaped, quite powerfully,

how we negotiated our way through the media dreams before us. We
saw major contradictions about women and work: TV moms didn't
work, many real moms we knew did. These moms worked because
they had to or wanted to, or both, and they seemed, simultaneously,
proud of the work they did and completely stressed out by it. My
confusion about what I would be when I grew up stemmed from the
disparity between glowing media images of happy, fulfilled moms and
my mother's daily indications that her life was one no sane girl would
ever want to aspire to. We got it, even as kids, that there was a big dif-

ference between June Cleaver's attitude toward life and Mom's. June
was never harried, and my mother was always harried. At first, of
course, I blamed Mom—what was the matter with her, anyhow? Lit-
tle did know what she and her generation had already been through.
I

All I knew was that there was a resistance there powerful, mdignant, —
and defiant —and you don't live with that resistance without internal-
izing it. my memory serves me correctly, didn't learn to
If I yell back
at the TV set on my own; learned it, in part, from Mom.
I

We must remind ourselves of the ideological roller-coaster ride

our mothers took to understand how their tensions and struggles in

relation to the mass media eventually became our own. Born in the

1920s and '30s, our mothers had been whipsawed first by the Depres-
sion, then by World War II, and finally by the postwar recovery, each
of which was accompanied by dramatically different cultural mes-
sages about proper female behavior, messages with all the subtlety of

a sledgehammer.^ My mother was twenty years old and single when

the United States entered World War II, and she was a prime target

for the Rosie the Riveter sell job, the most concerted propaganda
campaign up to that time aimed specifically at women. In the 1930s,

the message to women had been "Don't steal a job from a man," and
twenty-six states had laws prohibiting the employment of married
women. ^ Single, white women could find work as salesgirls, beauti-

cians, schoolteachers, secretaries, and nurses; women of color were

much more restricted, consigned to jobs like maid, cook, or laun-
46 Where the Girls Are

dress. Although over three-fourths of the women who worked did so

because they had to, the common wisdom was that most women
worked for a more frivolous reason —because they v/anted something
called "pin money."
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they also blew apart all
this accepted wisdom about American women and work. With
thousands of men leaving their jobs every week to go fight in the

war, there was no one to manufacture the planes, ships, and ammo
they would need — well, no one except women. The campaign
orchestrated by the Office of War Information, in collaboration with
ad agencies, women's magazines, radio producers, and filmmakers,
tried, overnight, to make wearing overalls and wielding a welding
torch glamorous. Here's a sampling of what the OWI-sponsored
newsreels, ads, and radio shows told our mothers.^ The newsreel
"Glamour Girls of 1943," with its bevy of female riveters and assem-
bly-line \vorkers, ^vas narrated by a stentorian male baritone who
bellowed about "women on an equal footing with men, earning the
same pay" and proclaimed, "With industrial advances, there's practi-

cally no limit to the types of jobs women can do." The radio show
Womanpower, with a similar male baritone, explained its title at the
beginning of each broadcast: "the power to create and sustain life; the
power to construct in the midst of destruction; an unlimited source
of moral and physical energy working to win the war." Magazine ads
were filled with images of determined women workers and had
headlines like "Women Teach Industry Recipe for Protection" or
showed a smiling riveter captioned "Miss America, 1943." The cam-
paign worked —over 6 miUion women joined the workforce during
the war, 2 million of them in heavy industry. One-third of the home-
firont jobs were held by women. Others, Hke my mother, joined the
WACs and the WAVES.
By the end of the war, most of these women had discovered that
they liked working outside the home —they liked the money, the
sense of purpose, the autonomy. Polls showed that 80 percent wanted
to continue working after the war. Women also wanted to be
 Mama Said 47

reunited with their husbands or sweethearts, and they wanted to start

families. This was a very real desire, but they didn't want to give up
everything for it. Poor, deluded souls —they wanted it all, and they
didn't quite get it. The war was over, and they were supposed to

sashay back to the kitchen and learn how to make green beans baked
with Campbell's cream of mushroom soup.
The backlash against our mothers, which began nine seconds
after Japan surrendered, makes the backlash of the 1980s look flaccid.

Fueled by the fear that there wouldn't be enough jobs for returning
servicemen and that depression conditions might return, the cam-
paign to get women out of the workforce began immediately: in

1946, 4 million women were fired from their jobs. ^ But there was an
ideological component as well, stemming from the postwar hysteria

over Communism. If the United States was going to fight off con-
tamination from this scourge —and the disease/infestation metaphor
was rampant —then our women had to be very different from their

women. Their women worked in masculme jobs and had their kids

raised outside the home in state-run child-care centers that brain-

washed kids to become good little comrades. Therefore, our kids had
to be raised at home by their moms if we were going to remain

democratic and free. There actually were poHticians and newspapers

that proclaimed day care a "Communist plot."

As if fears of a new depression and subversion by the reds weren't

enough to convince Mom to stay home, pop psychologists added
another reason —women who wanted to continue working outside
the home were nuts. In 1947, Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand
Lundberg, a shrink and a sociologist, published the best-seller Mod-
ern Woman: Tlie Lost Sex. The hypocrisy of Farnham, herself a career
woman, having the chutzpah to order other women to stay home
didn't seem to compromise the book's influence. In fact, it was even
better that this drivel came from woman.
a Feminists —meaning any
women who thought there might be more to Hfe than baking cook-
ies and administering rectal thermometers —were "neurotically dis-

turbed women" afflicted with the much-dreaded "penis envy."

48 Where the Girls Are

Feminism was "at its core a deep illness." Lundberg and Farnham
asserted that the only healthy woman was one who followed her bio-
logical destiny and procreated on a regular basis, learned to crochet,
avoided higher education at all costs because it would make her
frigid, and, in general, embraced a "feminine way of Hfe." Women
who wanted to step out of the confines of the kitchen and the bed-
room were sick, sick, sick, and if this kind of woman had children,
she turned them into "delinquents," "criminals," and "confirmed
alcohoHcs."
A classic example of such a woman was Mildred Pierce, the char-
acter Joan Crawford portrayed in her 1945 comeback film, for which
she won an Oscar. Mildred, a working mom, turns her daughter,

Veda, into a monster. Mildred works hard to build up a restaurant

business, and, as a result, she is able to give Veda everything she
wants — everything except time and mother love, that is. Mildred's
financial power and independence ruin Veda, who ends up, in

sequence, a spoiled brat, a tramp, and a murderer. The story in Mil-

dred Pierce is a simple one: to save themselves, their children, and,

indeed, the very social fabric of America, women needed to return

the workplace to its rightfial inhabitants, men.^

The desire to work outside the home, so healthy and welcome in

1944, was, just three years later, prima facie evidence that you were a

neurotic, castrating hysteric. Resonating with this message were the

women of film noir, the black widow spiders, seductresses, and gun-
crazy bitches whose appetites for money and sex drove men to ruin

in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Double Indemnity (on the
cutting edge in 1944), Tliey Live by Night (1949), Gun Crazy/ Deadly
Is the Female, (1949), and, later, Kiss Me Deadly (1955).^ In "crime"
comics, quite popular in the postwar years, the breasts of women
were as large as the Enola Gay; as a result, the genre became known
as "headlight comics," and the women were villains, victims, or both.
Gone were the ads teUing women they could do anything a man
could do. Instead, ads like one for the Penn Mutual Life Insurance

Company showed a bride under the headHne "Lady, Do You Have a

 —
Mjtna Sjid 49

Job!*" reciting. "I promise to love, honor, obey, cook meals, make
beds, sort laundn; rake care of babies, euc. ..." Even more horrm-mg
and repressive was rhe now infamous Johnson &: Johnson campaign.
which, through trick photography, featured gargantuan babies

imprisoning their Tinker Bell-sized moms in cribs. pla\-pens. high

chairs, and toddler leashes and castigating. "\^'hoa. Mom! Can't you
take it? Shame, Mom! You said you'd like to have a baby's easy life

but now that we've changed places, you fuss." After listening to
eventhing she's done wrong. \lom concedes. "I haven't been a care-

ful mother, have I? \^atch me refcrmV Moms, m other words, were

always wrong, never doing things quite right, and in constant need oi
improvement that could come only hrom hstening to expert ad\'ice.

But backlash of this intensity- is a sign of struggle, of men's sense

of being under siege, a sign that women have made important gains

they \\ill not rehnquish easily, or ever. Because the contrast between
the Rosie the Riveter campaign and the \-irulent antifeminism that
followed it was so stark, it is easy to paint a black-and-white, before-
and-after portrait of this period. It is common to think ot the post-

war backlash beginmng with a vengeance m 1946 and reigning in

as

a monoHthic and uncontested form until the late 1960s. But this was
not the case.

The ideolog\- that Bett\- Friedan would label in 1963 "the femi-
mne mystique" had not really consohdated until sometime bet\veen
1952 and 1955. The years before this were more turbulent than we
think, the messages about motherhood and working outside the
home more ambiguous. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the period
when our mothers were getnng their adult Hves and their households
started, America went back into the trenches, this tune over women's
proper roles, a batde played out in movies. T\ shows, and ads. The
antifeminism was so vehement, even vicious, at nines, that the temi-

nism of the period has been too trequendy echpsed. But it was there,

in movies Hke Adam's Rib and Pai and Mike, in Ashley Montagu's
1953 best-seller T7k^ Wnurjl Superiority of\Vct?uti [which maintained
that men had "womb and breast en^•^"\ in numerous masrazine arn-
50 Where the Girls Are

cles, and, of course, in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, also

published in 1952. And it was there on the new invention in the

home, television.

On television in the late 1940s and early 1950s, various female

characters often defied the compliant, womb-centered, housewife

stereotype. The most famous, of course, was Lucy, but there were
others, including Alice Kramden of The Honeymooners, Imogene
Coca of Your Show of Shows, Gracie Allen of 77ze Burns and Allen
Show, Mama and Katrin in Mama, and Molly Goldberg of The Gold-
bergs. Either physically or verbally, or both, these women refused to
stay in their place, and broke the stays of corseted demureness. These
were women, trespassers who delighted in violating the
transgressive

boundaries of femininity. Some of them, like Lucille Ball and Imo-

gene Coca, were physically mutinous, brilliantly using their faces and
bodies in slapstick enactments of the battle of the sexes. These
women and their bodies refused to be contained in the home or lim-
ited by the prevailing orthodoxy about appropriate female comport-
ment. Their voices mattered too; often they were loud, they weren't
afraid to yell, and they didn't back away from verbal combat.
Gracie Allen was the master of linguistic slapstick, using puns,
malapropisms, and a willful misunderstanding of language to turn
male logic on its head. She refused to be contained by the conven-
tions of male language that seemed to leave women no position from
which to speak honestly about their lives. Gracie the character was
supposed to be addled and ditzy, but viewers knew that Gracie the

comedienne knew exactly what she was doing and why. Alice Kram-
den gave as good as she got, never backed down, and emerged as the
repository of reason and sensibility in each episode of The Honey-
mooners, despite her husband's size and temper, and his weekly threats

to sock her so hard she'd go right to the moon. And Molly Gold-
berg
— "Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Bloom" —was anything but contained and
demure. There were also single working women in Private Secretary,

Our Miss Brooks, How to Marry a Millionaire, and Oh! Susanna, and
 Mama Said 51

while they labored in stereotypical jobs and were often obsessed with
men, at least there was an acknowledgment of women's participation

in the workforce with women holding the leading roles m such

shows. This, too, would soon change.

Through one kind of slapstick or another, these shows gave

expression to the deep anxieties over who would wear the pants in

postwar America. And while it is true that the shows' narratives

tended to manage and resolve these anxieties so that the woman was
happily tamed at the end of each episode, our mothers could
nonetheless see, on television, women resisting and making fun of
the credo that "real" women found fulfillment in diaper pails and
macaroni recipes, or that they thought obeying their husbands made
much sense. By the late 1950s, when these shows were replaced by
Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, and Leave It to Beaver, with
their cookie-cutter moms, television's physical and hnguistic con-

tainment of women was complete. Gags and slapstick were replaced

by laugh track-buttressed comedies about the process of raising chil-
dren, in which fathers came into their own as authorities. June
Cleaver, for example, often came to Ward in a befuddled state for

advice, asking, "Ward, did boys do this when you were their age?"^

The ironic thing was, however, that this media containment was
achieved at the very moment that more and more real-Hfe moms
were leaving the domestic sphere and going back to work.
Nowhere was the postwar schizophrenia about women's proper

roles more evident than in the Ladies' Home Journal. In between ads
for Pond's cleansing cream ("She's Engaged! She's Lovely! She Uses

Pond's!") and Ivory Flakes ("How to Bring Out the Wolf in a Man")
were earnest articles about why women ought to get involved in
national and international poHtics, and the need for a feminist revo-
lution. In her highly popular monthly advice column, "If You Ask

Me," Eleanor Roosevelt routinely wrote things like "I think girls

should have exactly the same opportunities as boys" and advocated

establishing nurseries for the children of working mothers.'^ Profiles
 '

52 Where the Girls Are

of successful career women emphasized that such women did not

regard their jobs as "a mere stopgap to marriage" and that they often

had to be "twice as good" as the men around them to succeed."* Ads

such as those for Ipana toothpaste featured models who were also

mothers with text like "Can a MODEL mother be a model

MOTHER? Judging by little Jojo's bursting health, cover-girl
Natalie Reid does n/vjobs well." A poll commissioned by the maga-
zme in 1946 reported that 75 percent of men and 80 percent of
women supported equal pay for equal work.
'

In the immediate postwar era, our mothers were told that they
were inferior to men and, at the same time, that they were vastly supe-
rior. Equality rarely entered into the equation. In the luidies' Home
Journal article "Queens Did Better Than Kings," the author argued
that "queens love peace because women love peace . . . the male
instinct for fighting and killing contrasts at its very root with the
female instinct for giving, raising and protecting Hfe," thus women
needed to take over poHtical leadership.'" But such assertions often

played into the hands of those seeking to keep women in their

"proper" place, as did the postwar insistence that men were weaker
and had much harder lives than women. '"^
Article after article, with
titles Is the Stronger Sex" and "Women May
Hke "Proof That She
women w^ere healthier and Hved longer than
Control U.S.," noted that
men. "The American woman does less and less, lives longer and
longer, while her husband, a drone, 'a social eunuch,' his insurance

paid up, dies of a heart attack before he's 50," wrote George Lawton
in Tlie New York Times in 1948. What should women do? "The next
time you meet a man be kind to him."'"^ Compared with women, men
were fragile and self-destructive, and needed coddling and protection.
At the same time, the tone in the Luidies' Home Journal steadily

became less enlightened. Ipana, for example, revised its message, with
its model mother now announcing, "It's more fun being a Mother
than a Model." The change was especially notable in columns Hke
"Making Marriage Work" by Clifford R. Adams, Ph.D. (predecessor
to "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" which should have been titled.
 Mama Said 53

"Will This Wife Eat Shit?"). Here my mother's generation learned

that women should not "argue about poHtics and reUgion," or be

"good at cracking wise and making pointed remarks." Every column,
month in and month out, drilled into its readers that "the happiness

of the marriage and the home depends primarily on her'" — the wife.

Women should not even consider the thought that men '"subdy

evade their responsibilities" or that husbands are "mclmed to over-

look the rights of wives." Nor should wives "overreact to a husband

who answers sharply," the number one complaint men had against

their spouses.'" In "What Sends People to Reno," Dr. James E Bend-

er advised that "bad housekeeping" and "poor cooking" are each a
"direct cause of divorce" and that "underweight women make poor
marital risks" because they are "usually jittery."''^ Some readers
caught on to the trend; one irate woman wrote, ''Ladies' Home Jour-
nal blames women bad mxarriages and makes them solely respon-
for

sible for marital success ... all marriages hmge on whether we keep

beautiful, are good cooks, understanding helpmates, etc. ... On the

other hand, mascuhne magazines inflate the male ego and also blame

the weaker sex for everv^ known marriage failure. Really this is going

too far."'" Hers, however, was an unheeded voice.

The antifeminist onslaught intensified m other mass circulation

magazines. In "What's Wrong with American Women?" first pub-

hshed m Esquire and reprinted in Reader's Digest m 1949, the author

unburdened himself of the opinion that the American woman is "the

most spoiled and self-centered woman m the world" and he com-

plained about America's loathsome "near-matriarchy"^ In a subse-
quent issue, the magazine summed up the "chief charges commonly
leveled against women": "They reach their decisions emotionally

instead of logically; they are unpredictable; they usually don't Hke

each other much; they have a genuine fondness for trouble and it

there isn't any real trouble they will cook up some out of boredom.
Finally, they must have the last word and a disproportionate percent-

age of the other words.'"^' In "Women Aren't Men," also in Reader's

Digest, our mothers could read that the "egotistic desires of

54 Where the Girls Are

women ... for equal rights" were responsible for the high divorce
rate and escalating juvenile deHnquency in America. Especially vile
were working mothers. But they paid a price. "The neglected child"
realizes right away that his mother works because she loves her job
more than she loves him, thus he "often hates her with a passionate
intensity."""

By the early 1950s, the batde Hues hardened, and, within a few
years, it appeared that the antifeminists had won. In the ten-year
period from 1940 to 1950, our mothers had been told, first, that they
shouldn't work outside the home, especially once they were married,
then that there was no job they couldn't do and that it was exciting
and patriotic to work outside the home, and, finally, that their real

job was to wash diapers, make meat loaf, and obey their husbands no
matter how brutish, dumb, or unreasonable they were. While endless
movies in the 1950s and '60s glorified male heroism during World
War II, our mothers' roles in helping win the war were repressed, and

they appeared primarily as the sweethearts left behind, not as the

welders and riveters who built the ships and planes. It was as if their

experiences —including the nascent feminism of the time —had

never really happened. But repressing pubHc memories doesn't mean
that private ones are forgotten.

We watched our mothers react in a variety of ways. Between

cleaning, making Jell-O molds, being den mothers, chauffeuring,
running the nation's PTAs, and ironing Dad's boxers, housewives in
this period averaged a ninety-nine-hour workweek.^^ Yet ads for

household appliances, Uke Maytag's, which showed an ecstatic

woman gushing, "Look ... no work!" or the one for an electric
mixer that instructed, "You Dial It! —
Dormeyer Does It!" suggested
that women led a life of leisure. Our mothers saw themselves simul-
taneously revered and loathed. They were childlike nincompoops
who would never learn how to drive a car or balance a checkbook,
but they were domineering, unreasonable Amazons who controlled
the nation's wealth and from whom men needed to escape as often as
possible. But it wasn't just our mothers who took in these messages.
 Mama Said 55

We daughters absorbed them as well, and they encouraged us to

respect Dad and and ridicule Mom.
to resist

To cope with the misogyny of American culture, many of our

mothers smoked, or drank, or took Miltowns, or saw a shrink, or
yelled a lot at us. And an increasing number of them did one other
thing: despite all the propaganda casting working women as neurotic

freaks, they got jobs. By 1955, there were more women with jobs
than at any point in the nation's previous history." At the very time
when the feminine mystique imagery was most ironclad, women
began flocking to the job market. Women whose husbands made too
much money to justify their having jobs of their own did volunteer

work with charities or, significantly, with political campaigns. Other

mothers I knew, in the midst of raising several kids, went back to col-

lege. Whether they were beauticians, nurses, B.A. candidates, or en-

velope stuffers for the Democratic party, our mothers accentuated the
inconsistencies of American womanhood even more. Just because
the feminine mystique had become the official ideology by the late

1950s doesn't mean that all women bought into it. But it divided

many of our mothers against themselves, pulled between ideaHzed

images and the more gritty reahty of their own lives, pulled betu^een

defiance and self-abnegation.

So while we kids were beginning to reverberate between the
lessons of Sputnik and the lessons of Snow White, our mothers, too,

were ensnared in the historical contradictions of the moment. Eco-

nomic and opportunities pulled them one way, cultural ideol-
forces

ogy pulled them another. My mother had worked since she was a
teenager, and she looked back fondly on the fun and sense of purpose
she had had during World War II. By the mid-1950s, with a national

need for more teachers, nurses, and secretaries, there was an impHcit
call to women Hke my mother to reenter the workforce. And my
mother wanted the extra money, to help buy the vast array oi con-

sumer goods and services that defined the good Hfe for her and her

children. So she went back to work, and here's where she and mil-
lions like her got nailed.
56 Where the Girls Are

A burgeoning consumer culture needs one big thing —con-

sumers. Consumers, of course, need money. But America's consumer
culture was predicated on the notion that women were the major
consumers of most goods — that was their job, after all —and that, to

sell to them, you had to emphasize their roles as wives and mothers,
because it was in these capacities, not in their capacities as secretaries

or nurses, that women bought. So, to buy more things, many of our
mothers had to work. To sell to them, advertisers erased and dimin-
ished this fact, and stressed how many more products they needed,
and how many more tasks they had to undertake with those products,
to be genuinely good wives and moms. No wonder Mom was often
a bit testy. Here she was, part of a system that insisted it needed her
to consume inside the home but adamantly refused to admit it also
needed her to produce outside the home. She was supposed to deny
a central fact of her life, and she was damned for doing the very
things that were keeping not just the family but the entire U.S. econ-
omy financially healthy.

The delusion, or the insistence, that all women identified them-

selves primarily as wives and mothers seems to have gripped the con-
sciousness of pretty much everyone in advertising. A 1958 how-to
text. What Makes Women Buy, offers the perfectly preserved, fossilized
remains o£ the stereotypes aboutwomen that triumphed between
1953 and 1963. Advertisers had some pretty fixed ideas about our
mothers and which immutable female traits had to be taken into
account when selling to them. Having the intelligence, common
sense, and strength to manage a household, let alone a household and
a job, wasn't among those traits. Women, the book intoned, "have a
strong tendency toward irrational behefs" and are "highly intuitive."
The conviction that a woman "Uves in two worlds —her real world
and an imaginary world she creates" led advertisers to invent guys
like the shiny-headed, bullet-shaped, cartoon genie Mr. Clean to
really reach our childhke, daydream-behevin' moms.
Slaves to their reproductive systems, "at least half of all women
are turned into 'witches' of varying degrees once a month."
 Mama Said 57

"Woman's bone and bodily proportions overwhelmingly

structure

lead her toward more passive interests and an inward Hfe," which I
guess explains why American moms always sat on their asses, drink-

mg beer and watching ball games, while our naturally more active
dads chased the kids around the house and drove them to scout meet-

ings and Little League. "The instability of woman's bodily functions

and nervous system makes her a more emotional customer than a
man," which is why my miother systematically hunted for bargains

while my dad would come home with ten of something if it had a

great new package. Women "tire more easily than men," and "the

average woman would be more interested in reading about sewing

than about swimming." (Who'd want to read about either?) Instead,
"home decorating is a high natural interest," wired, presumably, into
one (or both) of the X chromosomes. "Women's verbal aptitude
accounts for the fact that they hke to gossip and have the last word."

Women "like to see pictures of food" and have a "relatively low

interest in travel." They are "not incHned to be interested in automo-
biles and business," and their "interest in sports and mechanical
objects is extremely low." All these notions, most of them snide, con-

descending, and stupid, constituted the commonsense, taken-for-

granted assumptions about my mother, and week in, week out, I

watched her chafe under them.

mother despised doing housework, and she was extremely
My
unpleasant to be around when, on her weekends "off," she vacu-
umed, stripped the beds, cleaned the oven, ironed, and so forth. Yet
she was determined to have the house neat and clean at all times,

because house was the primary way you were assessed as a

a clean

wife and mother. June Cleaver made having a spodess house look so
effordess; for Mom, it was so hard. I resolved early on to become a

slob when I grew up, since housework seemed to produce nothing

but misery. (I succeeded spectacularly, by the way.)
By 1963, women like my mother were in an untenable position.

They worked all the time, yet their work inside and outside the home
was taken for granted and poorly valued. To even approach the level
 —
58 Where the Girls Are

of material comforts that Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best sug-
gested everyone had, millions of families needed Mom in the work-
force. And to have their houses approach the standards of tidiness and
cleanliness also set by these shows, Mom had to come home from
work and mop till she dropped. The ideological yo-yo they had been
spun on since 1941 —
hey, be a feminist, you're equal to men; hey,
wait a minute, no you're not; hey, maybe you are constituted one —
series of contradictions in our mothers' Hves. Being a woman at the
height of the feminine mystique meant incorporating a mosaic of
traits, most of them negative, and most of them at odds with one
another. What persona, which subject position, should our mothers
assume, and when? My mother tried out nearly aU of them as she
navigated her way through her memories, her disappointments, her
desire to conform, and her absolute disdain for conformity. I watched
her buy into some of the media norms about ideal womanhood, and
I watched her defy and lash out at others, for she was pulled in one
direction by imagery and in another by economics, and pulled in
both by desire and longing. We saw in our mothers acceptance and
rebellion, conformity and iconoclasm, especially when it came to
work in and outside of the home. By the early 1960s, the tension
between my mother's having had her identity — or, more accurately,
identities — constituted by the mass media and her increasing resis-
tance to media images that triviaUzed her worth was becoming
unbearable, for her and for me.
But the lessons about women and work that I got from my
mother, and from the mass media, were more ambiguous. June
Cleaver's life — tossing salad and installing new rolls of paper towels
looked boring, and I knew my mother liked having a job, skills,

accomplishments, and friends who were just hers. But my mother,

Hke millions of mothers across the country, made it clear that my
work would be different, because, unlike her, I was going to go to
coUege. She wanted me to set my sights higher. And so did I.

There were, however, still cautionary tales about women and

work, about setting your sights too high, about actually taking your
 Mama Said 59

work seriously. For there was one narrative about women and work
that tied my mother and me together in unspoken ways, and ties me
to millions of other — —
women and men in a twisted, destructive
spell we seem unable to exorcise. This is the story of A Star Is Born,

one of my mother's favorite movies and a real whopper of a melo-

drama with the teUing hit song "The Man That Got Away." This sick

story has somehow been so compelling that it's been made into a film

three times and spawned lots of imitators, from Valley of the Dolls

to Mahogany to Funny Girl. Here's the basic premise. A young,

extremely talented but unknown actress meets an older, extremely
successful actor-mentor, who helps launch her career, and, in short

order, she becomes a star. But there is a finite amount of success allot-
ted to any one male-female couple: the more she gets, the more he

loses, as if her success can only be parasitic on his. According to this

immutable law of physics, as her star rises, his must fall in direct pro-

portion. Her fame and fortune emasculate him and turn him into a
suicidal drunk. The moral is clear: you can work, but if you have a

career and are really good at it, if you become "a star," you will
diminish your man and suck the very Hfeblood out of his manhood
and sense of self- worth. It doesn't matter how much you love him,

you simply can't defy the following law of nature: become a success,

you castrate your man.

Neither my mother nor I could anticipate that thirty years later

we would still be trying to exorcise the two central cultural messages

of her era, which continue to cling to the deepest recesses of our psy-
ches: first, the suggestion that working mothers are somehow dehn-
quent mothers; and second, the notion that working moms are

primarily responsible for cleaning the house, cooking dinner, and

playing Uncle Wiggily with the kids. Study after study shows that
while working dads have time to read the paper, watch guys with
arms the of Smithfield hams run into each other, go out with the
size

boys for a frosty one, or simply take a nap, working moms barely have
the time —
or the opportunity —
to pee with the bathroom door fully

closed.^^ Like a toxic spill from 1950s ideology that we can't seem to
60 Where the Girls Are

clean up or bury, the notions that working mothers are, ipso facto,
depriving someone, usually a loved one, of something, that they
shouldn't be too ambitious, and that they should be constantly guilty,
contaminate our lives. They don't stop women from working any
more today than they did in the 1950s, because most of us haven't
much choice. But this tension between old images and new reaHties,

the kind of media lag our mothers lived with, still corrodes women's
sense of self-worth, of what we're entitled to, and what we can
rightly ask of our men. We see that even though we and our moth-
ers resisted media messages about women and work, the insidious
cultural norms have been nearly impossible to expunge.
Watching my mother and watching what was said to and about
her, there was one big lesson I got. Whatever this category "woman"
was, I didn't want a big part of it, since it meant you'd be torn in a
million directions and be ridiculed as dumb yet overbearing, incom-
petent yet scheming, and frivolous yet dangerous. Of course, there
were always exceptions to every rule, and that's what I wanted to be,
an exception. It turned out that millions of other girls my age wanted
the same. But then puberty hit — irreversible, inexorable, and excru-
ciating — forcing us to recognize that, hke it or not, womanhood was
where we were destined. And it started to seem as if we had only two

choices: sink or organize a mutiny

 a
s aid tie Siifle Teeiafer

the early 1960s, millions of baby boomers were confronting

that hideous abyss, puberty. The growth rate of the teenage

By population took off at four times the average of all other age-

groups: a staggering 46 miUion Americans entered their teens in this

decade. One thing you become obsessed with during puberty is, of

course, sex. And, not coincidentally, magazines and movies became

obsessed with sex as well, for the early 1960s marked the beginmng
of what came to be called the Sexual Revolution. There had already
been a few harbingers, Uke the introduction of the bikini in 1959 and
the appearance on the best-seller list of the unexpurgated version of
Lady Chatterley's Lover. And then, in 1960, the FDA approved distri-

bution of the birth control pill. According to a nervous Reader's

Digest, "one vast, all-pervading sexological spree" was about to

begin. ^
Teenagers were in the middle of a hyped-up Sexual Revolu-
tion we were supposed to ignore or reject at the very moment that
massive amounts of sex hormones were being pumped through our
bloodstreams. Fat chance.
In the same way that we girls had gotten mixed messages about
our role in changing the world, and about women and work, we
mixed messages about sex. The legacy of the 1950s was
started to get

that no "nice" girl ever, ever, went all the way before marriage, and

no nice woman ever really Hked sex. But by the early 1960s, there
were indications to the contrary, in best-selling books, in suggestive

ads ("Does She — Or Doesn't She?"), m pop music, and in James

62 Where the Girls Are

Bond movies. And as we grew from preteens to teens, these media

became even more daring, pushing the boundaries of what you could
show and what you could say. And we became a lot less sure about
what was right and wrong when it came to sex."

I was just about to hit puberty myself when this revolution began,
and I remember the secrecy, shock, and horror that accompanied its

early tremors. Being raised Catholic, as I was, meant going to church

and hearing the priest all of a sudden start screaming about birth con-
trol, which I quickly learned was a really, really big sin. (We're talk-
ing a beehne to hell unless you said 500 rosaries and put a big
contribution in next Sunday's collection.) Now, I had no idea what
birth control meant, and I quickly discovered that no one, especially
my parents, was going to tell me. But then I learned from some-
place — I think it was Life magazine — that there was this new pill, and
if women took it they wouldn't get pregnant. Why was the priest so
flipped out over this, I wondered, since I knew even at this tender age
that getting pregnant when you didn't want to was the number one
terror for females? This pill idea sounded pretty good to me, so I

started getting confused some more. Didn't this represent progress,

and wasn't progress, especially medical progress, what made America

America?
Then (and I'll never forget this), Liz Taylor made this scan-
dalously immoral movie, Cleopatra, while cheating on the husband
she'd "stolen" from Debbie Reynolds by steahng yet another
woman's man, and we all had to stand up in church and take an oath
together out loud that we would never go see it. If we did, well, now
we're talking serious church time, including novenas, and helping
add a wing to the rectory. Naturally, I wanted to go see it right away,

and when I did, I was extremely disappointed in how tame it was

(and how bad it was). Meanwhile, Ann Landers began stepping up
her "Just Say No" campaign against girls doing anything except
holding hands before marriage, and, well, it started to seem like

maybe something was up. As it turned out, something was. That

 Sex and the Single Teenager 63

rigid code meant to keep niiddle-class girls' pants on until after they

got married — the double standard —was starting to crumble.

You could see it in magazine articles everywhere, with titles that

used to be reserved for the Hkes of True Confessions: "If Only They
Had Waited," "My Daughter Is in Trouble," "Today It Could Be Your
Daughter," or "How to Tell Your Daughter Why She Must Keep
Her Self-Respect." Landers, in addition to her endless newspaper
columns on the differences between necking and petting, and the
perilous dangers of both, wrote pieces like "Straight Talk on Sex and
Growing Up" for Life magazine and pubHshed more advice in her
book Since You Ask Me in 1961.^ The message in these articles was
always the same. Girls, who didn't have much, if any, sexual desire,

had to protect themselves from boys, who were, from the age of four-

teen on, completely governed by their crotches. Females never really

—
Hked sex they only did it with their husbands so they could have
what they really found satisfying, babies. If a girl did it before she was

married, she risked getting pregnant, but, even worse, no boy, not

even her steady boyfriend, would ever respect her again, and no
decent man would marry her, because she wasn't a virgin.

This was pretty scary stuff, ruining your entire life over some-

thing you wouldn't Hke very much anyway. And if you got pregnant,

your whole family would be humiHated and you'd have to either get
married immediately or be shipped off to one of those homes where
bad girls in angel blouses were hidden until the offending abdominal
bulge disappeared. But a few things happened that started making
these warnings seem a tad hysterical. First, the Kinsey Reports t hat

came out after World War II suggested that some women actually

Uked sex and that premarital intercourse wasn't as rare as everyone

thought. But not too many kids read this cHnical, jargon-filled stuff.

No, for the most part we hid in garages or basements, hungrily

devouring some purloined copy of Lady O mtterle-fs Lover, or we
snuck Tropic of Can cer_out of our parents' bookshelves and furtively
flipped to the "good parts," which, as I recall, weren't too hard to
64 Where the Girls Are

find. Two major surprises awaited girl readers: the women in these

books liked sex, sometimes a lot, and the young girls themselves felt

a pleasant tingUng between their legs as they turned the pages. Holy
cow — sex might be fiin, exciting, fabulous, exhilarating, and not just
for boys.

The real coup de grace came in 1960, with the introduction of

the birth control pill. Boy, did this create an uproar, and not just in

my church. Popular magazines from Life to Reader's Digest were

crammed with articles about the birth control controversy. Ameri-
cans were beginning to realize that there were other countries on the
planet besides the United States and the Soviet Union, and that there

was something called a population explosion going on in many of

them. They were also learning that there were miUions of poor peo-
ple right here in America who couldn't afford the kids they had and
certainly didn't want any more. Plus there were tens of millions of
middle-class women, many of whom weren't yet thirty, or even
twenty-five, who'd already had all the kids they wanted and didn't
want any more either. So you might say there was a big demand for

birth control information and devices, and several transcendently

obvious, commonsense arguments for making all these available as
soon as possible.

But there were also these ceHbate, overfed, busybody bishops and
priests who'd never administered a 2:00 A.M. feeding or cleaned up a
projectile vomit puddle of mashed bananas, cottage cheese, and
spaghetti who kept issuing bulls and encycHcals insisting that birth
control be banned, or at least made very hard to get. Guys like this
lobbied to get people fired who
tried to make birth control available

to poor people.^ And in some states, like Connecticut, the use of

birth control devices, let alone the sale or prescription of them, was
forbidden by law. There, in 1961, Estelle Griswold, head of the state's

Planned Parenthood League, was arrested for giving out information

on things Hke contraceptive foam. To a lot of people —including
many Catholics like me — this all seemed extremely silly, especially

since Mrs. Griswold was a w^oman in her sixties who looked

 Sex and the Single Teenager 65

respectable enough to be the head of the DAR. Finally, in 1965, the

Supreme Court overturned Griswold's conviction and ruled that the

Connecticut ban against contraceptives was unconstitutional. By this
time, miUions of women were already on the pill, with millions
more, Hke me, age fifteen, waiting in the wings.

By the early and mid-1960s, the Sexual Revolution was one of

the biggest stories in the print media. Pubhshers and editors discov-
ered that sex helped sell magazines —
even newsmagazines. They
greatly exaggerated the speed and scope of the Sexual Revolution,

suggesting that young people, especially young women, aU over the

country were shedding their virginit>^ en masse. The truth was that
while some college women, especially those pinned or engaged,
were violating the taboos against premarital sex, most young women
in and out of college in the early and mid-1960s stiU kept their undies

on until they were married. While Time and other pubHcations

panted over the "cult of pop hedonism" and an "orgy of openmind-
edness," several researchers in the mid-1960s documented that sexual

permissiveness had not yet overtaken the youth of America. The

magazines sensationahzed the Sexual Revolution with their sugges-
tions that sex-crazed coeds were watching La Dolce Vita and then

sleeping with whomever was available. That behavior didn't really

start on a large scale until 1968.

Yet no comment, no prediction, no assessment of the contempo-
rary scene was too hyperboHc to print. Margaret Mead, who was

always quoted about pretty much everything, complained that "we

have jumped from puritanism to lust," while Pearl Buck, another
magazine regular and trusted sage, opined, "The change is so abrupt,
so far-reaching, that we are all dazed by "The Puritan ethic,"
it."^

announced Time, "so long the dominant force in the U.S., is widely
considered to be dying, if not dead, and there are few mourners."
Popular magazines expressed a blend of panic and puerile excite-
ment over the prospect of young, white, middle-class women
thumbing their noses at the double standard. As one writer put it, it

was "not girls from lower income levels [but] girls from our so-called
66 Where the Girls Are

'best' families" who were shocking adults by their sexual behavior.^

Previously, in pop culture iconography, the "bad" girl —meaning the
one who did have sex before marriage —was easily identified by class

and ethnicity. She came from the "wrong side of the tracks," had dark
hair and was not fair-skinned, wore spit curls and skirts with sHts, and
was the kind of girl boys were urged to sow their "wild oats" with
before marrying the girl with the pageboy and the circle pin. In other
words, her willingness or desire to be sexually active could be dis-
missed as the allegedly hypersexuaHzed, unrestrained behavior of
the lower classes. But when fair-skinned, well-bred, middle-class girls
started claiming and expressing their own sexuaHty, this was news, for
it suggested that the cherished class boundaries were being violated,
that girls of the "better" classes were being contaminated by what-
ever corrupted the values and behavior of their inferiors.
Magazines Hke Life, Reader's Digest, Esquire, and the Ladies' Home
Journal all looked for deeper explanations for the Sexual Revolution.
With the availabihty of contraceptives and penicillin, the three age-
old deterrents to premarital sex —conception, infection, and detec-
tion —began to lose their power to terrorize middle-class girls. But
the magazines saw deeper causes, from the postatomic dread of
Armageddon to the spreadof existentiaHsm. In one of the most air-
headed references Simone de Beauvoir ever uttered, one boy
to
reportedly told Newsweek that "Hving together makes me feel Hke an
intelligent person —Hke Sartre and his mistress.""^ But the magazines
did get one cause right, and that was the rise of relativism in the
1960s. Imposing one's own sexual standards on others was now as

anachronistic as a Jonathan Edwards sermon; sophisticated tolerance

was in. As one girl told Esquire, "I used to think it was terrible if peo-
ple had intercourse before marriage. Now I think each person should
find his own values."^*^ A boy told Time that the only test of sexual
conduct should be "Do I want to do it? Does it hurt anyone else?"^'
There were two other explanations for the imagined "sexological
spree," and you will not be surprised that one of the people especially
 Sex and the Single Teenager 67

deserving of blame was Mom. It was Mom, with her pathetic need
to live through us and her ambitious desire to shove us prematurely
onto the social stage, who pushed "champagne parties for teen-agers,

padded brassieres for twelve-year-olds, and 'going steady' at ever

younger ages." Saturday Review attacked "the mother who fosters

sexual precocity in her daughters and who herself has a very shaky

concept of values, responsibiHty, and true affection." The article had

special contempt for "the girls who, sometimes with the connivance

of their ambitious mothers, deliberately trap desirable young men by

getting pregnant."'" I, unfortunately, never met any of these pimping
moms so popular with male commentators; the moms I knew
thought we should all have our legs glued together for about a
decade.
The other culprit in promoting the Sexual Revolution was,
according to the magazines, the "mass media," which emphasized
the "gratification of sexual drives as natural and glamorous."^ What's
so rich about this is that publishers and editors were hardly above
using sex whenever possible to sell their magazines, yet they acted as

if they were above and apart from the media system they decried. In
a cover story called "The Second Sexual Revolution" and clearly

designed to lure in extra readers, Time cited the "innumerable

screens and stages, posters and pages" that flashed "larger-than-life-

sized images of sex."^'^ Esquire, the magazine noted for its portraits of

barely clad women, complained about "the stridently phallic movie

heroes of today" and the "sleazy paperbacks [that] compete with
each other in a gaudy Olympiad of sex and sadism." ^^ Articles like

"How to Stop the Movies' Sickening Exploitation of Sex," "Speak-

ing Out: Movies Are Too Dirty," and "Must Our Movies Be
Obscene?" singled out films as the worst culprits. ^^ It was true, books

and movies were getting much more expHcit than they had been, but

so were magazines. And while the magazines gave voice to concerns

about the new moraUty, they also accelerated its acceptance by mak-

ing it seem reasonable and inevitable. The magazines often structured

68 Where the Girls Are

their articles in the classically "objective" on-the-one-hand, on-the-

other-hand format as they sought to lure in some readers without
alienating others.
In the midst of this sea change in American morality, a book
appeared that must have made the priests of America long for the
reintroduction of the chastity belt. Sex and the Single Girl, by Helen
Gurley Brown, became an instant best-seller in July 1962 and stayed
on the hst for nearly seven months. The book created a sensation

because it put the words sex and single girl in bed together in the very
same phrase, in direct violation of 1950s Legion of Decency moral-
ity. I mean, even married people on TV had to have twin beds so
there was no suggestion that any body parts below their clavicles ever

made contact, and here was this brazen hussy blithely announcing in
her book and in countless television interviews that America should
get over it, already, about premarital sex for women. Within a few
years of the book's publication, the previously unknown Brown

became the darling on the TV talk show circuit, was named editor of
the languishing Cosmopolitan magazine, and received the highest
amount ever paid, up to that time, for the movie rights to a nonfic-
tion book.
Now, I don't want to hold Helen Gurley Brown up as some
paragon of feminism, since the bottom line of her message has always
been the absolute importance of pleasing men. But looking at her
book, thirty years later, with aU its fatuous advice about buying wigs,
bleaching your leg hair, and making "chloroform cocktails" (coffee,

ice cream, and a fifth of vodka), we see some startling stirrings of

female liberation. And, for her, liberation came through sex, by
throwing the double standard out the window. ^^
For many young women. Brown was a welcome iconoclast. She
made being single and having a job sound glamorous and exciting,
while she equated marriage — especially marriage at too young an
age —with drudgery and boredom. "You may marry or you may not.
In today's world that is no longer the big question for women. Those
who glom on to men so that they can collapse with relief, spend the
 Sex and the Single Teenager 69

rest of their days shining up their status symbol and figure they never
have to reach, stretch, learn, grow, face dragons or make a living

again are the ones to be pitied. They, in my opinion, are the unful-

filled ones." The fulfilled ones were out in the world and had jobs.
"A job," gushed Brown, "can be your love, your happy pill, your
means of finding out who you are and what you can do . . . and your
means of participating, instead of having your nose pressed up to the

glass."^^ This did sound better than scrubbing diaper pails.

Most important, the single girl had great sex. "Theoretically a

'nice' single woman has no sex Hfe. What nonsense! She has a better
sex life than most of her married friends. She need never be bored
with one man per Hfetime. Her choice of partners is endless and they
seek /zer."^*^ Challenging the stuffy women's magazines. Brown
insisted that you didn't have to marry early just to have children, since

"you can have babies until you're forty or over.""^ Here Brown was
clearly ten to twenty years ahead of her time. Despite the fact that

Brown's ideal single woman was a frivolous ditz who took voice
lessons so she could sound sexier and had "a memorable beach hat or
two," she was also an active agent in the world, in control of her sex
new kind of role model, and while she
Hfe and her future. This was a
was highly convenient to men (and to advertisers), she also opened
up new possibilities for women. For once women started thinking
that they could be equal in the bedroom, after a while they started
thmking they should be equal in other venues as well.

With Brown's book perched at the top of the best-seller charts,

another soon-to-be-famous woman pubHshed "The Moral Disarma-

ment of Betty Coed" in the September 1962 issue of Esquire. Gloria
Steinem was just beginning her writing career and made a splash
with this piece, which announced that on college campuses the dou-

ble standard was going the way of the poodle skirt. Increasing num-
bers of college girls didn't think premarital sex was any big deal; they
did it when and many of them were quite eager to get
it felt right,

hold of the pill. These girls thought their sex practices were "none of
society's business," and they didn't "feel forced to choose between a
70 Where the Girls Are

career and marriage." We see the prefeminist stirrings in Steinem as

she writes, "The development of the 'autonomous' girl is important

and, in large numbers, quite new . . . she expects to find her identity

neither totally without men nor totally through them." She con-
"
cluded the article with an especially prescient comment: The real

danger of the contraceptive revolution may be the,a £££kration of

woman 's role-change without any corresponding change of man's
attitude toward her^role.""^ Say amen somebody.
How accurate was this portrait of college girls giving the double
standard a giant raspberry? Gael Greene decided to find out. Hoping
to capitahze on Brown's success, she titled her 1964 book Sex and the

College Girl. Greene interviewed hundreds of students, mostly

female, from colleges and universities throughout the country, and
while she found no statistical evidence she felt she could trust, she

affirmed people's suspicions: premarital mtercourse in college dorm

rooms, dugouts, arboretums, and Chevy station wagons was increas-
ing. Most of the girls she talked to were preoccupied with sex, and
they refused to impose their judgments on other people's sexual
behavior.
At the same time, Greene found that college girls were deeply
"
conflicted between the old message that sex is sin" and the new

message that "sex [is] the ultimate expression of romantic love."

These girls told Greene that they had been terrorized by the double
standard warnings, only to get to college and discover it was all a

whopping He. A student from RadcHffe said, "I mean we all get sort

of the same 'nice girls don't' routine at home. Well, I for one really

beheved it. There just wasn't any doubt in my mind that I would be
a virgin when I got married. But then I came up here and there they

were — all those nice girls, much nicer than I if you talk about family
and background —and they were doing it. I felt betrayed. . . . My vir-
ginity lasted exactly four months. . . . The truth is, nice girls do."

Greene reported a "fury" among college girls "at being so unfairly

misled" and a sense that their intelligence had been insulted. Their
confusion and ambivalence about what was right led them to rico-
 Sex and the Single Teenager 71

chet on a daily basis between "two contradictory values" and to cob-

ble together some compromise they could live with.

Greene reported that movies, magazines, and books often played
a key role in convincing some college girls to shed their virginity. A
graduate of Hunter College cited Marjorie Morningstar as one such
text. "I suspectHerman Wouk would be somewhat upset if he real-
ized how many nice middle-class Jewish girls lost their virginity
because of him. Silly as it sounds, I know for sure at least three
. . .

girls who gave up the good fight just to prove they weren't Mar-
jories." Other girls singled out Wliere the Boys Are, a successful book
and movie, whose heroine Merritt asserted, "It's ridiculous and picky
of society to turn it [virginity] into an institution.''-^ Greene herself
cited the on- and off-screen affairs between glamorous costars Hke
Taylor and Burton or NataHe Wood and Warren Beatty as a double
whammy slap in the face to American puritanism.
The puritan ethic was indeed taking a thrashing in the movies,
fanning the sexual confusion many young women felt. Despite the
unfortunate plethora of Doris Day films {Pillow Talk, That Touch of
Mink) in which a thirty-five-year-old maidenhead was as sacred and
well-guarded as the Pieta, there was a new sexual frankness in films,
which had started in the 1950s with movies like Peyton Place and Baby
Doll and was accelerating with the arrival of foreign films. With the
great decline in movie attendance in the late 1940s and early 1950s,

Hollywood had begun to exploit more sexually risque themes to lure

adults back into the theaters. But the success of Rebel Without a Cause

(1955), April Love (1957), Love Me Tender (1956), and / Was a Teenage

Werewolf (1957) — the last of which cost $150,000 to make and quickly
grossed $2.5 million — established the importance of the teenage audi-

ence. At the end of the 1950s, three-quarters of the movie audience

was teenagers. ^^ And what was foremost in these viewers' minds were
their ongoing romantic and sexual dilemmas. By 1965, one Holly-
wood executive complained to Tire New York Times, "Teenage tastes
are exerting a tyranny over our industry. It's getting so show business
is one big puberty rite."'^'^
72 Where the Girls Are

But because of the importance of this audience, the film indus-

try did play a leading role in breaking down sexual taboos long

before television would touch them. In the first James Bond movie,
the wildly successful Dr. No (1962), Sean Connery and a luscious

Ursula Andress made it clear that unmarried men and women did

have sex simply because they were attracted to each other, and the
rest of the series featured a string of sex objects who, despite their
objectification, made sex for single women glamorous and satisfying.

And when the virginal Maria in West Side Story (1961) admitted
Tony into her bed, the audience was urged to be sympathetic, even
approving. In 1965, the Motion Picture Association of America, the

industry's office of self-censorship that enforced what was known

simply as "the code," approved a scene in The Pawnbroker that
showed a woman naked to the waist, and the T & A floodgates were
opened. The following year. Variety proclaimed, "The Code Is

Dead."^^
Movies have always been an especially powerful medium, partic-

ularly for the young. There you are, in the dark, small, almost face-

less, lost and anonymous in the audience, your eyes upturned to the
huge, perfect, ideaHzed face of the movie star. Various writers, draw-

ing on psychoanalytic theory, have Hkened movie viewing to infancy,

when the baby, not yet knowing the difference between Mom and
herself, idealizes the huge, all-nurturing mom, and identifies with
her, thinking she and Mom are the same. The size of the movie
screen, the darkened, blurry irrelevance of everything around it, the

perfections of its heroes and heroines, re-create this deHcious

moment in infancy, compeUing us to identify with the idealized

characters before us in an especially thoroughgoing fashion. It is this

intensity of identification that has prompted do-gooders of various

stripes since the early 1900s to try to censor movies, especially those
that seem to promote sexual Hcense. And it is also this intensity of
identification that makes films from this era about young girls and sex
so important to remember."^
 Sex and the Single Teenager 73

It was during the beginning of the Sexual Revolution that a new

kind of film emerged, the pregnancy melodrama. A cross between the
women's film and the youth film, the pregnancy melodrama placed
premarital sex between young people at the center of its often pre-
posterous narrative. At the heart of these films was the battle between
American puritanism — often personified in frigid, shriveled-up
moms and brutish, spiritually dead dads —and the new morahty,
which truly allowed for a m^ore healthy marriage between love and
sex. Since films of this era rarely showed people doing it — or even in
bed together, for that matter — the pounding of the ocean surf, or of
waterfalls, w^as called upon again and again to serve as the metaphor
for you-know-what.
Having said this, it is important to emphasize that I'm not talking
about those fake, sanitized beach movies Hke Beach Blanket Bingo or
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. Annette and Frankie generated about as

much sexual heat as two snails in a cistern, and we were actually sup-
posed to beheve that a bunch of guys and gals slept together in the
same beach house without any hanky-panky going on. We knew
these movies were phony. Pregnancy melodramas, m contrast,

acknowledged that young people were fed up with bourgeois

hypocrisy about everything from status seeking to sex, and that they
were struggHng with often irresistible sexual urges. Cast adrift in an
amoral world, the protagonists in these films struggled in a sea of rel-
ativism as they rejected the unyielding and, to them, heartless dictates
of sexually constipated adult America.
Several themes and features were common to pregnancy melo-
dramas. The desirable boys were often feminized in some way, by
being overly sensitive and brooding, by rejecting the corporate ethos
and monetary standards of male success, and by having wavy hair that

dipped suggestively over their foreheads. They also equated sex with
love. Father figures (often obvious metaphorical symbols of patri-
archy and capitalism) were frequently crippled — lame, drunk,
sickly — to make clear how their obsession with material goods had
74 Where the Girls Are

paralyzed them emotionally and spiritually. While attacking the

steriHty of American materiaUsm and patriarchy, these films offered a

prescription: that society had to be rehabiHtated through an embrace

of more traditionally female traits.

Most important, the young female characters had sexual desires

that they acted on without being killed or otherwise banished by the

end of the story. Now these were girls we could identify with. In A
Summer Place (1959), Sandra Dee wilHngly goes "all the way" with
Troy Donahue, and when she gets pregnant, he doesn't jilt her but

says instead that the prospect of having a baby makes him feel "warm
all over." In Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), NataHe Wood gets

knocked up by Steve McQueen during a one-night stand he barely

remembers, but by the end of the film he is head over heels in love
and proposes.
The young women in these films acknowledged the contradic-
tions puUing them in different directions. Pregnancy melodramas
provided female viewers with multiple personas to try on: there were
stark differences between the female characters in each film, but there

were also contradictions within the same character. It was this latter

type of character, deeply conflicted and unsure whether to act on her

sexual impulses or obey the double standard, a girl incHned to rebel
yet still every bit a "good girl," who was held up as the new role

model. The various female characters in pregnancy melodramas

offered points on the continuum of female sexuaUty, from prudish to

promiscuous. The big-breasted, out-of-control sluts on one end of

the continuum and the tight-Hpped ice maidens on the other served
as monoHths to be rejected, while the ones in the middle, caught in
the crosscurrents of discourses about "good" and "bad" girls, were
the ones meant to be recognized as authentic by teenage girls. In

other words, young girls were sociaHzed as viewers to identify with

ambivalence itself.^^

One of my favorites of this genre is Susan Slade (1961), which I

wasn't allowed to see when it came out because it was too risque.
Connie Stevens is Susan, a naive, sheltered virgin who has a ship-
 Sex and the Single Teenager 75

board romance with a dashing mountain climber. Con White (?!),

who wastes Httle time mounting her as well. From the soft-focus

close-ups of Susan with her eyes barely opened and lips sHghtly

parted, the audience sees that this girl knows sexual desire and hkes

It. By the time they dock, the young lovers are secretly engaged, but

they won't make it official until after Con completes his next climb
m Alaska. While Susan waits in vam to hear from him. she discovers,
vou guessed it. that she's pregnant. Then she learns the worst Con —
has been killed m a chmbmg accident. Now what? She has to tell her
parents, and to save face, her father takes a job in Guatemala, where
thev move for two years. \^'Tien they return to Cahforma. Susan's
mother, played by Dorothy McGuire. pretends the baby is hers.

Meanwhile, Susan is being courted by two boys. Hoyt Brecker (Troy

Donahue), the sensitive, brooding local stable hand and poor, aspir-

ing noveHst, and Wells Corbett (Bert Conw), the rich, cocky son of

her parents' wealthy friends.

Then comes the best scene in the film. One night while Susan is

home watching her "baby brother," the kid gets hold of a cigarette
lighter while Susan is chatting with Hoyt, and before you know it,

there's a rubber toddler mannequin on screen engulfed m a small

bonfire. Susan and Hoyt rush the baby to the hospital (the kid sur-

vives), and It IS there that Susan reafizes she can't live this he anymore.
Surrounded by Wells and his parents. Hoyt. and her own mother.
Susan confesses that the baby is hers and that she doesn't care who
knows It. Wells, the status-obsessed hypocrite, withdraws his previous
commitments of love and marriage, while Hoyt skulks oS. But he has
simply gone back to Susan's to wait for her and. when she arrives,

declares his undying love for her. no matter what she did before.

Now, despite the double helLx contortions of the plot, several

themes emerge that dominated in other pregnancy melodramas.

Most important, of course, is that the girl is not punished tor her pre-
marital exploits but emerges as a morally principled girl who also gets

Troy Donahue, who, even though he couldn't act, was extremely

cute. Upper-class values and pretensions, like Wells Corbett 's, are
76 Where the Girls Are

seen as buttressing a thoroughly retrograde and hypocritical form of

sexual sterility and deceit. And the truly attractive, decent, and lov-
able boy is the one who sees a girl for v^hat she is and doesn't judge
her by some outmoded, barbaric double standard.
Time and again, the double standard was attacked as a source of
unnecessary misery, and as an unnatural code left over from some less

enlightened era. By the end of these films, viewers wanted to cudgel

it back to the Stone Age. In A Summer Place, American puritanism
was given its most perverse and demonic personification in the form
of a frigid and tyrannical mother, Helen Jorgensen (grimly played by
Constance Ford). She and her husband, Ken (Richard Egan), are

trapped in a loveless marriage marked by separate bedrooms and

Helen's abhorrence of sex. We know Helen's an evil bitch from the
get-go because she's frequently shot in harsh light and from an unflat-
tering low angle, she rarely smiles, and we always see her spying on
other people, especially her daughter, Molly (Sandra Dee), and
Molly's boyfriend, Johnny (Troy Donahue). Everyone knows that
women in films are to be looked at; if they do much looking them-
selves — for information, for sex, for clues —they usually pay the con-
sequences and are hated by all the other film characters and the entire
audience.^^ By contrast, we learn right away that Johnny's mom,
Sylvia (Dorothy McGuire), is the good mom, because she's always
lovingly framed in warm, rosy, soft-focus shots. Molly, too, is caressed
by the camera, so girls knew they could —and should— identify with
her, even though she loses her virginity.
In a fight with Helen, Ken castigates her for the monstrous,
twisted levels of her prudery, and we, the audience, are right there
with him. "Are you antipeople and antilife? Must you suffocate
every natural instinct in our daughter too? Must you label young
lovemaking as cheap and wanton and indecent? Must you persist in
making sex itself a filthy word?" After this heated exchange, Molly
goes to her father's room to say good night. As she snuggles against
him in his bed, Molly complains of her mother, "She's antisex. She
says all a boy wants out of a girl is that, and when a girl marries it's
 Sex and the Single Teenager 77

something she has to endure. I don't want to think hke that. Poppa,
she makes me feel ashamed of even having a body." But apparently
not for long.
Later in the film, whatever fleeting shame Molly may have felt

has clearly given way to lust for Johnny, and the two of them go off
to a deserted building along the beach that Molly, not Johnny, has
found for the specific purpose of doing the wild thing. Molly is any-
thing but passive here — she struggles with whether or not to go all

the way with Johnny, and when he ventures that maybe they should
tr\' to be good, she runs her finger suggestively over his lips and whis-
pers, "You dont really want that." Fade to black; next stop, the g)'ne-

cologists office for the bad news.

While Ken and Sylvia wait up nervously for the kids to return

from the beach, Ken deHvers yet another indictment of 1950s moral-
it\-: "Just what honest advice can I give her? To be a half-virgin? To

allow herself to be fondled, to go half.vay m the backseats of parked

cars but always draw back in time? ... I can't tell her to be half-

good — I feel hke a hypocrite. ... Is the only answer that youth must
be a time of suspended animation?" Throughout the picture it is

Ken, the new. humanized kind of dad, who attacks sexual repression

as deademng. He represents a recuperated patriarchy, in which the

fathers gain even greater authonn.- by taking on the female traits of
empathy, nurturance. and compassion. And it is in Johnny, the ten-

der, loyal boy with his blond hair waving softly, even girhshly, over his

forehead, that the young girl sees her fantasy of more humane and
cl

feminized patriarchy reafized.""^

In the end, when Molly and Johnny (whom w^e are to befieve are

somewhere around seventeen and eighteen) marr)^, the moral of the

story isn't that premarital sex is bad or that getting married that
young is really dumb. The moral is that denying your sexual instincts

is stultifying, and acting on them hberatmg. Molly gets sexual fiilfill-

ment, respectabiht)-, and her man. The movie ends happily, well
before the baby arrives, which is good, because after that sex tor

lohnnv and Mollv will be onlv a fond memorv.

78 Where the Girls Are

For many baby boomers, Splendor in the Grass (1961) was the

most powerful of the pregnancy melodramas, in part because it was a

"serious" film —
WiUiam Inge won an Oscar for the screenplay and —
because Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty were so convincing as

young lovers trapped between their sexual desires and their repres-

sive parents. One minute Deanie (Wood) has to listen to her frigid,

moneygrubbing mother hiss, "Boys don't respect a girl they can go

aU the way with. Boys want a nice girl for a wife," and the next she
has to decide whether to go aU the way with Bud (Beatty), who is

irresistible and truly in love with her. As we watch Bud and Deanie
struggling with their desires, usually against the backdrop of a pound-
ing waterfall, we see that this isn't the usual Ann Landers portrait of
the predatory, only-one-thing-on-his-mind guy trying to seduce
some unwilling, sexually disinterested girl. Deanie is often as over-
come by her passion as Bud, and for them both, love and passion are

inseparable. In this film, not going aU the way completely ruins the
young couple's lives. Deanie goes crazy as a result of her abstinence
and has to be institutionalized, and Bud, after collapsing on a basket-

ball court from sexual frustration, ends up pathetic and defeated, a

barefoot dirt farmer in overalls with snot-nosed kids and an ever-
pregnant, slatternly wife.
Like most of the girls in the audience in 1961, Deanie has no
place to stand. Torn between her overwhelming physical desires and a

moral code that pretends they don't —and shouldn't — exist, Deanie is

divided against herself, her mind and body pitted against each other,

wanting to succumb to her passion and not daring to do so. Because

she feels the costs of restraint and the costs of passion in the same
moment, Deanie provides a powerful point of identification for the
girl in the audience reacting against the moral strictures of the 1950s.
In contrast. Where the Boys Are (1960) sought to resolve the pre-
vailing questions about premarital sex through a melodramatic end-
ing that showed the horrible costs for girls of going aU the way. Four
girls go to Florida for spring break; three remain virgins and end up
with steady boyfriends. The fourth (Yvette Mimieux), mistaking sex
 Sex and the Single Teenager 79

for love, goes all the way with the first guy she meets, then takes up
with his best firiend, whom she shamelessly chases, and by the end of
the film is a victim of date rape who wanders aimlessly through traf-

fic until she is hit by a car. (She lives.) But throughout this film,

which is also supposed to be a comedy and a musical, there are so

many contradictions about girls and sex that the final message is

"Every girl must decide for herself." Even the openmg sequence,
seemingly sexist and stupid at first, actually reveals that for girls, atti-

tudes and behaviors are changing.

Opening with an aerial shot of Ft. Lauderdale, a slightly sarcastic

male voice intones that during spring break droves of students 20,000
strong swarm to these shores. "The boys come to soak up the sun and
a few carloads of beer. The girls come, very simply, because this is

where the boys are." Already the major tension of the film is estab-

lished. According to this narration, it is boys who venture forth into

the world, autonomous, self-motivated, and considerably more indif-

ferent to girls than they are to malted beverages. Here girls are cast as

the sexual aggressors, the ones who take the initiative in courtship
rituals and pursue the boys. Throughout the film, however, we see

that this initiative is restricted to positioning themselves in the right

place at the right time so as to be spotted by the right boy. Was this

passivity or was this taking action? Just how much a girl should do,
how assertive she should be, how far she should go, drove the narra-
tive of the entire movie.
A film like Wliere the Boys Are offered viewers the opportunity to

try on a range of attitudes toward premarital sex by presenting a vari-

ety of stock female archetypes, from the confirmed virgin to the

fallen angel to the tomboy type who didn't have such worries
because no man found her sexually attractive (the role Connie Fran-
cis got stuck with). Tuggle (Paula Prentiss), the virgin, gets to utter
lines like "I promised myself I'd try for a man the chaste way, and so
help me I'll keep it if I have to drop into the local blacksmith and buy
a belt." She adds, "Girls like me weren't meant to be educated. We
were made to have children. That's my ambition — to be a walking,
80 Where the Girls Are

talking baby factory, legal of course." The character no one was sup-
posed to want to emulate was Lola, the balloon-breasted, squeaky-
voiced, low-class, dumb-blond party girl who earned a living by
swimming in a giant fish tank under the billing "Sea Nymph of the
Tropical Isles."

Meanwhile, the mam heroine, Merritt (Dolores Hart), the one

we're really supposed to identify with, is a bundle of contradictions.

In the opening of the film, we see her challenging the post-
menopausal female professor who is trying to teach them about
"Courtship and Marriage." "Why don't we get down to the giant
jackpot issue," Merritt demands, "Uke should a girl or should she not,

under any circumstances, play house before marriage?" She then

asserts, "My opinion is yes," which gets her thrown out of class and
into the dean's office. Later m the film, however, when she's in

Florida being wooed by Ivy Leaguer Rider Smith (George Hamil-

ton —and where did they get these names, anyhow?), she talks like an
experienced woman but rebuffs all his advances. When the moment
of truth comes and she can't resist Rider anymore (the waves are just
too powerful and he wears an ascot), she admits she's a virgin and that
she's confused about what to do. Just as she's about to give in, she

hears that her friend Melanie (Mimieux) is m trouble and dashes off
to tend to her. Everyone is horrified by the date rape, and Melanie,

of course, wants to kill herself. The subtext is that Melanie brought

this on herself because she slept with a boy before being sure he really

loved her.
At the end of the film, with spring break over, Merritt and Rider
meet on the beach. Merritt says no girl is strong "when it comes to

love —what she thinks is love. How do you know the difierence?"
Rider invites her to come up to Brown to visit him, and she accepts.

When she does go, will Merritt sleep with Rider? We aren't sure. If

she does, will it be wrong, or destroy her, or cost her his love? We
doubt it. So despite what happened to Melanie, it's simply not clear

that premarital sex in all cases is bad, especially if you're smart and

sensible, Hke Merritt.

 Sex and the Single Teenager 81

In the early 1960s, the voices of the schoolmarm, the priest, the
advice columnist, and Mom insisted, "Nice girls don't." But another
voice began to whisper, "Oh yes they do —and they Hke it, too."

Audiences saw the desirable boys in these movies look at the girls

who said yes not with contempt but with love. We saw these girls

lovingly lit and shot from camera angles that made them look like

morally decent beauty queens, not like tramps. In the temporary fan-
tasy world of the darkened movie theater, we could try on different
roles, from starlets who said yes to starlets who said no to those who
said, "Maybe, but I'm just not sure yet." And as we saw on the big
screen that it was sometimes possible not to get punished for having
sex with your boyfriend, some of us began to wonder.
Even so, the double standard exerted a powerful hold over most
teens in the early and mid-1960s. For one thing, the majority of us

were still too young to say yes anyway, and it was no small feat to

shake the warnings from one's parents or Ann Landers — especially for

girls who lived in small towns, where gossip traveled quickly and
imposed rigid codes of behavior. ^^^ Nonetheless, the seeds of doubt
and eventual rebellion were planted, and they grew rather quickly.
Like the other mixed messages we were getting, the ones about sex
were at war with each other, some telling us we should never, ever
behave hke boys, the others teUing us we had every right to as much
sexual freedom and license as they did, especially now that we could
avoid getting pregnant.
But we didn't get these contradictory messages just in the movies
or in magazines. We got them every time we turned on the radio, or
our record players, or threw a quarter in the jukebox. We sang these
mixed messages to ourselves day in and day out for years, branding
ambivalence, defiance, and fear onto the innermost reaches of our
psyches.
 / /hy th e Sbirclles Mattcfd

»K— here's a test. Get a bunch of women in their thirties and for-
ties and put them in a room with a stereo. Turn up the volume
to the "incurs temporary deafness" level and play "Will You
Love Me Tomorrow" and see how many know the words — all the

words —by heart. If the answer is 100 percent, these are bona fide

American baby boomers. Any less, and the group has been infiltrated

by impostors, pod people, Venusians. But even more interestmg is

the fact that non-baby boomers, women both older and younger
than my generation, adore this music too, and chng to the lyrics hke
a life raft.

Why is it that, over thirty years after this song was number one in
the country, it still evokes in us such passion, such longing, such
euphoria, and such an irresistible desire to sing very loudly off key

and not care who hears us? And it's not just this song, it's girl group
music in general, firom "He's So Fine" to "Nowhere to Run" to
"Sweet Talkin' Guy" Today the "oldies" station is one of the most
successful FM formats going, in no small part because when these

songs come on the radio, baby boomers get that faraway knowing,

contented look on their faces that prompts them to scream along

with the lyrics while running red Hghts on the way home from work.
None of this is silly — there's a good reason why, even on our
deathbeds, we'll still know the words to "Leader of the Pack."
First of all, girl group music was really about us — girls. When
rock 'n' roll swiveled onto the national scene in the mid-1950s and
84 Where the Girls Are

united a generation in opposition to their parents, it was music per-

formed by rebellious and sexually provocative young men. Elvis Pres-
ley was, of course, rock 'n' roll's most famous and insistently

masculine star — in 1956, five of the nine top singles of the year were
by Elvis. At the same time, there would be weeks, even months,
when no woman or female group had a hit among the top fifteen
records.' When women in the fifties did have hits, they were about
the moon, weddings, some harmless dreamboat, like Annette's "Tall
Paul," or maybe about kissing. But they were never, ever about doing

the wild thing.

Then, December 1960, the Shirelles hit number one with
in

"Will You Love Me Tomorrow"; it was the first time a girl group,
and one composed of four black teenagers, had cracked the number
one slot.^ And these girls were not singing about doggies in windows
or old Cape Cod. No, the subject matter here was a litde different.
They were singing about whether or not to go all the way and won-
dering whether the boyfriend, so seemingly full of heartfelt, earnest
love in the night, would prove to be an opportunistic, manipulative,
lying cad after he got his way, or whether he would, indeed, still be
filled with love in the morning. Should the girl believe everything
she'd heard about going all the way and boys losing respect for girls
who did? Or should she believe the boy in her arms who was hug-
ging and kissing her (and doing who knows what else) and generally
making her feel real good?
Even though this song was about sex, it didn't rely on the musi-
cal instrument so frequendy used to connote sex m male rockers'
songs, the saxophone. Saxes were banished, as were electric guitars;
instead, an entire string section of an orchestra provided the counter-
point to Shirley Owens's haunting, earthy, and provocative lead
vocals. The producer, Luther Dixon, who had previously worked
with Perry Como and Pat Boone, even overlaid the drumbeats with
violins, so it sounded as if the strings gave the song its insistent, puls-

ing rhythm. While Owens's alto voice vibrated with teen girl angst
and desire, grounding the song in fleshly reality, violin arpeggios flut-
 Why the Shirelles Mattered 85

tered through Hke birds, and it was on their \\-mgs that our erotic

desires took flight and gained a more acceptable spiritual dimension.

It was this briUiant juxtaposition of the sentimentaHt\- of the violins

and the sensuality^ of the voice that made the song so perfect, because

it was sunultaneously lush and spare, conformist and daring,

euphemistic yet dead-on honest. The tens of milhons of girls singmg
along could be starr\'-e\'ed and innocent, but they could also be
sophisticated and kno\\-mg. They could be safe and sing about
love,

or dangerous and sing about sex. "^'ill You Love Me Tomorrow"

was about a tradinonal female topic, love, but it was also about female

longmg and desire, including sexual desire. And. most important, it

was about havmg a choice. For these girls, the decision to have sex
was now a choice, and this was new. This was. in fact, revolutionary.

Girl group music gave ex-pression to our struggles with the possibih-
ties and dangers of the Sexual Revolunon.
What were you to do if you were a teenage girl in the early and
mid-1960s, your hormones catapulting you beuveen desire and para-
noia, elation and despair, hormness and terror? You didn't
know
which instmcts to act on and which ones to suppress. You also

\^ eren't sure whom to listen to since, by the age of fourteen, you'd

decided that neither your mother nor your father knew amthing
except ho\^- to say no and perhaps the KtIcs to a few Andy Williams
songs. For answers —
real answers —
many of us turned to the record
players, radios,and jukeboxes of America. And what we heard were
the voices of teenage girls singing about —
and dignit\-mg our most —
basic concern: how to act around boys when so much seemed up
tor

grabs. What were you to do to sur\-ive all those ragmg

hormones?
\^Tiv. dance, of course.
There s been a lot of talk, acadermc analysis, and the hke about
how Elvis Presley and rock 'n' roll made rebelhousness acceptable for

boys. But what about the girls" group music help us become
Did girl

rebels? Before you say "no way" and cite "I WlU Follow Flim/
^'Chapel of Love," and "I Wanna Be Bobby's Girl" to substantiate

your point, hear me out. Girl group music has been demed its right-
 —
86 Where the Girls Are

ful place in history by a host of male music critics who've either

ignored it or trashed it. Typical is this pronouncement, by one of the
contributors to Tlie Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll: "The female
group of the early 1960s served to drive the concept of art com-
pletely away from rock 'n' roll. ... I feel this genre represents the low
point in the history of rock 'n' roll." ' Nothing could be more wrong-
headed, or more ignorant of the role this music played in girls' Hves.
It would be ideal if this section of the book were accompanied by a
customized CD replaying all these fabulous songs for you. Since that's
not possible, I do urge you to Hsten to this music again, and to hear
all the warring impulses, desires, and voices it contained.^
By the late 1950s, Tin Pan Alley reaHzed that Perry Como, Doris
Day, and Mantovani and his orchestra weren't cutting it with the
fastest-growing market segment in America, teenagers. Even Pat
Boone was hopelessly square, having foisted on us the insufferable
"April Love" and his goody-two-shoes advice book to teens, 'Twixt
Twelve and Twenty, which said kissing "for fun" was dangerous. Music
pubHshers and producers grasped two key trends: rock 'n' roll was
here to stay, and there w^as this flourishing market out there, not just
boys, but girls, millions of them, ready and eager to buy. And they
were not buying the Lennon Sisters or Patti Page. At the same time,
the proHferation of transistor radios meant that this music could be
taken and heard almost ever^^vhere, becoming the background music
for our desires, hopes, and fears, the background music to our indi-
vidual and collective autobiographies.
Teenage songwriters Hke Carole King and Ellie Greenwich got
jobs in the Brill Building in New York, the center of pop music pro-
duction m America, and in the aftermath of the Shirelles hit, all kinds
of girl groups and girl singers appeared, from the pouf-skirted Angels
("My Boyfriend's Back") to the cute and innocent DLxie Cups to the
eat-my-dirt, in-your-face, badass Shangri-Las. There was an explo-
sion in what has come to be called "girl talk" music, the lyrics and
beat ot which still occupy an inordinately large portion of the right
or is It the left? — side of mv brain.
 —
Why the Shirelles Mattered 87

The most important thmg about this music, the reason it spoke to

us so powerfully, was that it gave voice to all the warring selves mside
to forge
us struggling, blindly and with a crushing sense of insecurity,
something resembhng a coherent identity. Even though the girl

groups were produced and managed by men, it was their music m

that the contradictory messages about female sexuaHt\'
and rebel-

housness were most poignantly and authentically expressed. In the

early 1960s, pop music became the one area of popular
culture m
which adolescent female voices could be clearly heard. They sang
about the pull between the need to conform and the often over-
whelming desire to rebel, about the tension between restraint and
freedom, and about the rewards— and costs— of prevaiHng gender
roles. They sang, m
other words, about getting mixed messages and

about being ambivalent m the face of the upheaval m sex roles. That

loss of self, the fusing of yourself with another, larger-than-hfe per-

sona that girls felt as they sang along was at least as powerful as what

they felt in a darkened movie theater. And smgmg along with one

another, we shared common emotions and physical reactions to the

music.
This music was, simultaneously, deeply personal and highly pub-
he, fusing our neurotic, quivering inner selves with
the neurotic,

quivering inner selves of others m an effort to find strength and con-

fidencem numbers. We Hstened to this music in the darkness of our
bedrooms, driving around m our parents' cars, on the beach, making
out with some boy, and we danced to it — usually with other girls

in the soda shops, basements, and gymnasiums of America. This

music burrowed into the everyday psychodramas of our adolescence,
forever mteruvined with our most private, exhilarating, and embar-
rassing memories. This music exerted such a powerful influence on

one we may barely have recognized,

that because of this process
us,

of identification. By superimposing our own dramas, from our own

lives,onto each song, each of us could assume an active role m shap-
ing the song's meaning. Songs that were hits around the country had
very particular associations and meanings for each Ustener. and
 ^

88 Where the Girls Are

although they were mass-produced they were individually inter-

preted. —
The songs were ours but they were also everyone else's. We
were all alone, but we weren't really alone at all. In this music, we
found solidarity as girls.

Some girl group songs, Hke "I Will Follow Him," allowed us to
assume the familiar persona Cinderella had trained us for, the selfless
masochist whose identity came only from being some appendage to a
man. As we sang along with Dionne Warwick's "Walk On By," we
were indeed abject martyrs to love, luxuriating in our own self-pity.
But other songs addressed our more feisty and impatient side, the side
unwilHng to sit around and wait for the boy to make the first move. In
"tell him" songs Hke "Easier Said Than Done," "Wishm' and
Hopm'," and, of course, "Tell Him," girls were advised to abandon
the time-wasting and possibly boy-losing stance of passively waiting
for him to make the first move. We
were warned that passivity might
cost us our man, and we were urged to act immediately and unequiv-
ocally, before some more daring girl got there first. Girls were urged
to take up a previously male prerogative — to be active agents of their
own love lives and to go out and court the boy Regardless of how
girls actually behaved —and I know fi-om personal experience that
what was derisively called "boy chasing" was on the rise —now there
• were lyrics in girls' heads that said, "Don't be passive, it will cost you."
Was being cautious too safe? Was being daring too risky? Girl
group music acknowledged —even celebrated —our confusion and
ambivalence. Some of us wanted to be good girls, and some of us
wanted be bad. But most of us wanted to get away with being
to
both, and girl group music let us try on and act out a host of identi-
ties, from traditional, obedient girlfi-iend to brassy independent
rebel, and lots in between. We could even do this in the same song,
for often the lead singer represented one point of view and the
backup singers another, so the very wars raging in our. own heads
about how to behave, what pose to strike, were enacted in one two-
minute hit single.
 Why the Shirelles Mattered 89

Few songs capture this more perfectly than one of the true girl
group greats, "Sweet Talkin' Guy" by the Chiffons. Here we have a
tune about a deceitful and heardess charmer who acts like he loves

you one day and moves on to another girl the next. Nonetheless,
"kisses Hke wine (oh
since he's "sweeter than sugar" (ooh-ooh) with
he's so fine)," this heel is irresistible. The lead
singer warns other girls

to stay away from such a boy since he'll only break their hearts, but

she also confesses he is "my kmda guy" The female chorus backs her

up, acknowledging that it is indeed understandable to be swept up by

such a cad.

On the face of it, we have lyrics about the unrequited love of a

young woman with, no doubt, a few masochistic tendencies. But the

and
song achieves much more. With the layering of voices over
against one another, some of them alto and some of them soprano, we
have a war between resisting such boys and succumbing to them.
The
music, with Its driving beat and a tambourine serving as metronome,

IS dance music. At the end of the

song the layered vocal harmonies
run ecstatically up the octaves, like girls running jubilantly across
a

field, ending witheuphoric chord that suggests, simultaneously that

a

young female love will win m

the end and that it will transcend male

brutishness. Singing along to a song Hke this, girls could

change voice,

becoming singing ventriloquists for different stances toward the same

boy the same situation. As altos, sopranos, or both, back and forth,

we could love and denounce such boys, we could warn against our
own victimization, yet fall prey to its sick comforts. We could feel
—
how desire irresistible, irrational, timeless was shaping our des-—
feel even more
times. The euphoric musical arrangement made us

strongly that the power to love and dream would enable us some-
to

how to burst through the traps of history. In "Sweet Talkin' Guy,"

being divided against yourself is normal, natural, true: the song
cele-

brates the fact not just that girls do have conflicting

subjective stances

but that, to get by they must. Yes, we can't help loving them, even

when they're bastards, but we have to be able to name how they hurt
90 Where the Girls Are

us, and we must share those warnings with other girls. And if we're
dancing while we do it,moving our bodies autonomously, or in uni-
son with others girls, well, maybe we'll escape after all.

Girl group songs were, by turns, boastful, rebellious, and self-

abnegating, and through them girls could assume different personas,

some of them strong and empowering and others masochistic and
defeating. As girls hstened to their radios and record players, they
could be martyrs to love ("Please Mr. Postman"), sexual aggressors
("Beechwood 4-5789"), fearsome Amazons protecting their men
("Don't Mess with Bill" and "Don't Say Nothin' Bad About My
Baby"), devoted, selfless girlfriends ("My Guy," "I Will Follow
Him"), taunting, competitive brats ("Judy's Turn to Cry," "My
Boyfriend's Back"), sexual sophisticates ("It's in His Kiss"), and,
occasionally, prefeminists ("Don't Make Me Over" and "You Don't
Own Me"). The Shirelles themselves, in hit after hit, assumed differ-
ent stances, from the faithful romantic ("Soldier Boy," "Dedicated to
the One I Love") to knowing adviser ("Mama Said," "Foolish Little
Girl") to sexual slave ("Baby, It's You"). The songs were about escap-
ing from yet acquiescing to the demands of a male-dominated soci-
ety, in which men called the shots but girls could still try to give them
a run for their money. Girls in these songs enjoyed being looked at
with desire, but they also enjoyed looking with desire themselves.
The singers were totally confident; they were abjectly insecure. Some
songs said do and others said don't. Sometimes the voice was of an
assertive, no-nonsense girl out to get the guy or showing off her
boyfriend to her friends. At other times, the voice was that o{ the
passive object, yearning patiently to be discovered and loved. Often
the girl tried to get into the boy's head and imagined the boy regard-
ing her as the object of his desire. Our pathetic struggles and anxieties
about popularity were glamorized and dignified in these songs.
In girl group music, girls talked to each other confidentially, pri-
marily about boys and sex. The songs took our angst-filled conversa-
tions, put them to music, and gave them a good beat. Some songs,
like "He's So Fine" (doo lang, doo lang, doo lang), picked out a cute
 —
Why the Shirelles Mattered 91

bov from the crowd and plotted how he would be hooked. In this

song the choice was clearly hers, not his. Songs also re-created images

of a of girls standing around in their mohair sweaters assessing the

clot

male talent and, well, looking over boys the way boys had always
looked over girls. Other songs. Hke "Playboy" or "Too Many Fish in

the Sea," warned girls about two-timing Romeo U'pes who didn't

deserve the time of day. and the sassy, defiant singers advised girls to

boys who didn't treat them right to take a hike. Opening with a
tell

direct address to their sisters

—"Look here, girls, take this advice"
on what sounded hke age-old female wisdom:
the Marvelettes passed
''Mv mother once told me something/ And every word is true/Don't
waste your time on a fella/Who doesn't love you." Urging the Hs-
tener to "stand tall," the lead singer asserted, "I don't want nobody
that don't want me/7\in't gonna love nobody that don't love me."

The absolute necessity of female collusion in the face of thought-

less or mystihing behavior by boys bound these songs together, and
bound the hsteners to the singers in a knowing sorority. They knew

things about boys and love that they shared with each other, and this

shared knowledge — smarter, more deeply intuitive, more worldly

wise than any male locker room talk —provided a powerful bonding
between girls, a kind of bonding boys didn't have. And while boys

were often identified as the love object, they were also identified as

the enemy. So while some of the identities we assumed as we sang

along were those of the traditional, passive, obedient, lovesick girl,

each of us could also be a sassy, assertive, defiant girl who intended to

have more control over her Hfe — or at least her love hfe. In numer-
ous advice songs, fiom "Mama Said" to "You Can't Hurr\- Love," the
message that girls knew a thing or two, and that they would share that
knowledge with one another to beat the odds in a man's world, cir-

culated confidently.
Other songs fantasized about beating a different set of odds — the

seeming inevitabiht^; for white, middle-class girls, of being married

ofi" some boring, respectable guy with no sense of danger or
to

adventure, someone Hke David Nelson or one ot Fred MacMurray's

92 Where the Girls Are

three sons. Here we come to the rebel category

— "Leader of the
Pack," "Uptown," "He's a Rebel," "Give Him a Great Big Kiss," and
"He's Sure the Boy I Love." Academic zeros, on unemployment, clad
in leather jackets, sporting dirty fingernails, and blasting around on
motorcycles, the boy heroes in these songs were every suburban par-
ent's nightmare, the boys they loved to hate. By allying herself
romantically and morally with the rebel hero, the girl singer and lis-

tener proclaimed her independence from society's predictable expec-

tations about her inevitable domestication. There is a role reversal

here, too — the girls are gathered in a group, sharing information

about their boyfriends, virtually eyeing them up and down, while the
rebel heroes simply remain the passive objects of their gaze and their
talk. And the girls who sang these songs, like the Shangri-Las, dressed
the part of the defiant bad girl who stuck her tongue out at parental
and middle-class authority. The Ronettes, whose beehives scraped
the ceihng and whose eyeHner was thicker than King Tut's, wore
spiked heels and skintight dresses with sHts up the side as they begged
some boy to "Be My Baby." They combined fashion rebellion with
in-your-face sexual insurrection.
In "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," Shirley Owens asked herself,

Should she or shouldn't she? Of course, the question quickly became

Should I or shouldn't I? The answer wasn't clear, and we heard plenty
of songs in which girls found themselves smack in the grip of sexual
desire. SexuaHty emerged as an eternal ache, a kind of irresistible,

unquenchable tension. But in the early 1960s, sex and sexual desire
were still scary for many girls. The way many of these songs were
produced — orchestrated with violins instead of with electric guitars
or saxophones —
muted the sexual expHcitness and made it more
romantic, more spiritual, more safe. "And Then He Kissed Me"
alluded to some kind of new kiss tried on the singer by her

boyfriend, one she really Hked and wanted to have a lot more of In
"Heat Wave," Martha Reeves sang at the top of her lungs about being
swept up in a sexual fever that just wouldn't break, and the whisper-
ing, bedroom-voiced lead in "I'm Ready" confessed that she didn't
 Why the Shirelles Mattered 93

really know quite what she was supposed to do but that she was sure

ready to learn — right now. Claudine Clark desperately begged her

mother go ofF to the source of the "Party Lights," where

to let her

one helluva party was happening, and she sounded like someone
who had been in Alcatraz for twenty years and would simply explode
if she didn't get out.
The contradictions of being a teenage girl in the early and mid-

1960s also percolated from the conflict between the lyrics of the song
and the beat of the music. Girl group music had emerged at the same
time as all these new dance crazes that redefined how boys and girls

jij — or, more accurately did not —dance with each other. Chubby
Checker's 1960 hit "The Twist" revolutionized teenage dancing,

because it meant that boys and girls didn't have to hold hands any-

more, boys didn't have to lead and girls didn't have to follow, so girls

had a lot more autonomy and control as they danced. Plus, dancing

was one of the things girls usually did much better than boys. As the
twist gave way to the locomotion, the Bristol stomp, the
mashed
potatoes, the pony the monkey the slop, the jerk, and the frug, the

dances urged us to loosen up our chests and our butts, and learn how
to shimmy, grind, and thrust. This was something my friends and I

did with gleeful abandon.

Many of us felt most free and exhilarated while we were dancing,
so bouncing around to a song like "Chains" or "Nowhere to Run"
put us smack-dab between feehngs of Hberation and enslavement,
between a faith in free will and a surrender to destiny Both songs
describe prisoners of love, and if you simply saw the lyrics without

hearing the music, you'd think they were a psychotherapist's notes

from a session with a deeply paranoid young woman trapped in a

sadomasochistic relationship. Yet with "Chains," sung by the Cook-

ies, girls were primed for dancing from the very
beginning by the

hand clapping, snare drums, and saxophones, so that the music

worked in stark contrast to the lyrics, which claimed that the girl

couldn't break free from her chains of love. Then, in a break from the
chorus, the lead singer acknowledged, "I wanna tell you pretty
94 Where the Girls Are

baby/Your lips look sweet/I'd like to kiss them/But I can't break

away from all of these chains." At least two personas emerge here,
coexisting in the same teenager. One is the girl who loves the bitter-
sweet condition of being hopelessly consumed by love. The other is

the girl who, despite her chains, has a roving and appreciative eye for
other boys. The conflict between the sense of entrapment in the
lyrics and the utter liberation of the beat is inescapable. The tension
is too delicious for words.
It was the same for one of the greatest songs ever recorded,
"Nowhere to Run." The opening layers of drums, horns, and tam-
bourines propelled us out onto the dance floor I mean, you couldn't —
not dance to this song. While we were gyrating and bouncing around
to a single about a no-good boy who promised nothing but heartache
yet had us in his sadistic grip, we were as happy as we could be. The
best part was the double entendre lyrics in the middle, which we
belted out with aknost primal intensity. "How can I fight a love that
shouldn't be?/When it's so deep — so deep — ^it's deep inside of me/My
love reaches so high I can't get over it/So wide, I can't get around it,

no." In the face of our entrapment, Martha Reeves made us sweat, and
celebrated the capacity of girls to love like women. She also articu-
lated a sophisticated knowingness about how sexual desire overtakes
common sense every time, even in girls. In a very diflerent kind of
song, the efiervescent "I Can't Stay Mad at You," Skeeter Davis told
her boyfriend that he could treat her like dirt, make her cry, virtually
grind her heart under the heel of his boot, and she'd still love him any-
way, and all this between a string of foot-tapping, butt-bouncing
shoobie doobie do bops. So even in songs seemingly about female
victimization and helplessness, the beat and euphoria of the music put
the lie to the lyrics by getting the girl out on the dance floor, moving
on her own, doing what she liked, displaying herself sexually, and
generally getting ready for bigger and better things. Dancing to this
music together created a powerful sense of unity, o£ commonality of
spirit, since we were all feehng, with our minds and our bodies, the
same enhanced emotions at the same moment.
 Why the Shi relies Mattered 95

While a few girl groups and individual singers were white — the

Angels, the Shangn-Las. Dust>- Springfield —most successfial girl

groups were black. Unlike the voices of Patti Page or Dons Day,
which

seemed as innocent of sexual or emotional angst as a Chaov' Cathy doll,

the vibrating voices of black teenagers, often trained m the gospel tra-
ditions ot their churches, suggested a perfect fiision of naivete and

knowingness. And with the rise of the ci\il rights movement, which by
1962 and 1963 dominated the national news, black voices conveyed
both a moral authorm^ and a spirited hope for the future. These were
the voices of exclusion, of hope for something better, of longing.
They
were not, like Annette or the Lennon Sisters, the voices of sexual

repression, of social complacency, or of homogemzed

commercialism.

From the Jazz Age to rap music. Afi-ican American culture has

always kicked white culture upside the head for being so pathologi-

cally repressed; one consequence, for black women, is that too often

they have been stereot\^ped as more sexually acti\^e and responsive than
their white-bread sisters. Because of these stereot\^pes, it was easier,

more acceptable, to the music industr>^ and no doubt to w^hite culture

at large that black girls, instead of white ones, be the first teens to give

voice to girls' changing attitudes toward sex. But since the sexualit\^ of

black people has always been deeply threatening to white folks, black
characters m
popular culture also have been desexuaHzed, the earth-
mother mammy being a classic example. The black teens in girl

groups, then, while they sounded orgiastic at times, had to look tem-

inine, innocent, and as white as possible. Berrs' Gordy the head of

Motown, knew this instinctively, and made his girl groups take charm

school lessons and learn how to get into and out of cars, carr>^ their

handbags, and match their shoes to their dresses.^ They were trapped,

and in the glare of the spothght, no less, between the old and new det-
initions of femininit>^. But under their crmoUned skirts and satin cock-

tail dresses, they were also smuggHng into middle-class America a taste

of sexual Hberation. So white girls like me owe a cultural debt to these

black girls for straddHng these contradictions, and for helping create a

teen girl culture that said, "Let loose, break fi-ee. don't take no shit."
96 Where the Girls Are

The Shirelles paved the way for the decade's most successful girl

group, the Supremes, who had sixteen records in the national top ten

between 1964 and 1969. But of utmost importance was the role

Diana Ross played in making African American beauty enviable to

white girls. As slim as a rail with those cavernous armpits, gorgeous
smile, and enormous, perfectly made-up eyes, Diana Ross is the first

black woman I remember desperately wanting to look Hke, even if

some of her gowns were a bit too Vegas. 1 couldn't identify with her
completely, not because she was black, but because when I was four-
teen, she seemed so glamorous and sophisticated. Ross has taken a lot

of heat in recent years as the selfish bitch who wanted all the fame
and glory for herself, so it's easy to forget her importance as a cultural
icon in the 1960s. But the Supremes —who seemed to be both girls

and women, sexy yet respectable, and a blend of black and white cul-
ture —made it perfectly normal for white girls to idolize and want to
emulate their black sisters.

Another striking trend that grew out of the girl group revolution
was the proliferation of the male falsetto. From Maurice Williams in
"Stay" to Lou Christie in "Two Faces Have I" to Roy Orbison in
"Crying" and Randy and the Rainbows in "Denise" (ooo-be-ooo),
and most notably with The Four Seasons and The Beach Boys, boys
sang in high-pitched soprano ranges more suited for female than for
male sing-along. What this meant was that girls belting out lyrics in

the kitchen, in the car, or while watching American Bandstand had the
opportunity to assume male roles, male subjective stances as they sang,
even though they were singing in a female register.

This was nothing less than musical cross-dressing. While the

male falsettos sang of their earnest love for their girls, about how
those girls got them through the trials and tribulations of parental
disputes, loneliness, drag-car racing ("Don't Worry Baby"), or being
from the wrong side of the tracks, girls could fantasize about boys
being humanized, made more nurturing, compassionate, and sensi-
tive through their relationships with girls. This is an enduring fan-
tasy, and one responsible for the staggeringly high sales of romance
 Why the Shirelles Mattered 97

novels in America. It was a narcissistic fantasy that the girl was at the

center of someone's universe, that she did make a difference in that

universe, and that that difference was positive. This practice of

assuming male voices later enabled girls to shp m and out of male
points of view, sometimes giving girls a temporary taste of power.
much mahgned by feminists, "Under
Several years later, in a song
My Thumb," girls could and did sing not as the one under the

thumb but as the one holding the thumb down.

While girl group music celebrated love, marriage, female

masochism, and passivity, it also urged girls to make the first move, to

rebel against their parents and middle-class conventions, and to dump

boys who didn't treat them right. Most of all, girl group music—pre-
cisely because these were groups, not just individual singers — insisted

thatit was critically important for girls to

band together, talking

about men, singing about men, trying to figure them out.

What we have here is a pop culture harbinger which m girl

groups, however innocent and commercial, anticipate women's

groups, and girl talk anticipates a future kind of women's talk.^ The
consciousness-raising groups of the late sixties and early seventies

came naturally to many young women because we'd had a lot of

practice. We'd been talking about boys, about loving them and hat-

ing them, about how good they often made us feel and how bad they
often treated us, for ten years. The Shirelles mattered because they

captured so well our confusion in the face of changing sexual mores.

And as the confusion of real life intersected with the contradictions

in popular culture, girls were prepared to start wondering, sooner or

later, why sexual freedoms didn't lead to other freedoms as well.

Girl group music gave us an unprecedented opportunity to try

on different, often confUcting, personas. For it wasn't just that we

could be, as we sang along first with the Dixie Cups and then the
Shangri-Las, traditional passive girls one minute and more active,

rebellious, even somewhat prefeminist girls the next. Contradiction

was embedded in almost all the stances a girl tried on, and some ver-

sion, no matter how thwarted, of prefemimsm, constituted many of

98 Where the Girls Are

them. We couldn't sustain this tension forever, especially when one

voice said, "Hey, hon, you're equal" and the other voice said, "Oh
no, you're not."
The Shirelles and the other girl groups mattered because they
helped cultivate inside us The main purpose of pop
a desire to rebel.

music is to make us feel a kind of euphoria that convinces us that we

can transcend the shackles of conventional Hfe and rise above the
hordes of others who do get trapped. It is the euphoria of commer-
cialism, designed to get us to buy. But this music did more than that;
it generated another kind of euphoria as well. For when tens of mil-
Hons of young girls started feeHng, at the same time, that they, as a
generation, would not be trapped, there was planted the tiniest seed
of a social movement.
Few symbols more dramatically capture the way young women in
the early 1960s were pinioned between entrapment and freedom
than one of the most bizarre icons of the period, the go-go girl danc-
ing in a cage. While African American performers Hke the Dixie
Cups or Mary Wells sang on Shindig or Hullabaloo, white girls in
white go-go boots pranced and shimmied in their cages in the back-
ground. Autonomous yet objectified, free to dance by herself on her
own terms yet highly choreographed in her Htde prison, seemingly
indifferent to others yet trapped in a voyeuristic gaze, the go-go girl

seems, in retrospect, one of the sicker, yet more apt, metaphors for
the teen female condition during this era. It's not surprising that
when four irreverent, androgynous, and irresistible young men came
over from England and incited a collective jailbreak, millions of these
teens took them up on it. For we had begun to see some new kinds
of girls in the mass media —some perky, some bohemian, some
androgynous —who convinced us that a Htde anarchy was exactly
what we, and American gender roles, needed.
 —

s \n dot tk Devil in Ber Heart

Which Type Are You?" demanded the cover

our Party-Givers:

1 of Glamour magazine. You could only fall into one of four

categories: planner, traditionaUst, romantic,

"How Good Is Your Swim Suit Figure? Special Pinch

and extemporizer.
Test," offered

another issue. Don't miss the "Know Yourself Quiz: What Does
Your Color Choice Tell About You?" Month after month, we sharp-
ened our pencils and took yet another quiz, and we could also pmch,
measure, and poke ourselves as per the carefully illustrated instruc-
tions in the magazine. were desperate to know which type we
We
were, to know ourselves, and we looked to the mass media for
answers. No doubt the magazines kept offering quizzes, often as

many as four or five in one issue, because they were quite popular
with us, their abject, quivering, insecure readers.

As we struggled through our teens, we were bombarded with

questions such as these, which w^ere stand-ins for the big ones. Who
were we? Who should we be? How could you fit in with everybody
else yet still be a distinctive individual with traits all your own? Now
there's Htde doubt that a pathological level of self-consciousness is

what being an adolescent is all about, at least in America. But for

girls, self-scrutiny —of our thighs, our pores, our eyebrows, our
breasts, our hair folhcles, our cuticles, and our "true" inner selves

was drummed
in by magazines Hke Seventeen, Glamour, 'Teen, and

Mademoiselle,with their increasingly skinny models, their advice

columns, and those endless, moronic quizzes. Boys simply didn't have
 —
100 Where the Girls Are

such magazines Boys' Life was about fishing and tying knots and
they were too young for Esquire — ^but there were plenty geared for
us, especially if you also count True Confessions and Photoplay.
There is no doubt that as these magazines demanded increased
self-scrutmy — so important to selling cosmetics, clothes, and Relaxa-
cizors —they also exaggerated our psychic schizophrenia, our sense of
bemg a mosaic of traits that didn't quite fit together. The magazmes
were themselves schizophrenic about whether to approach usas if we

were coherent, unified individuals or a bundle of contradictory,

inchoate multiple personaHties. The major literary devices here were
the ceaseless, countless, repetitious, judgmental, and certainly asinine
quizzes we were invited to take each month. These quizzes were
especially insidious. They always addressed us directly and intimately
as "you," as if they were personally designed for each and every
one of us. They asked us a lot of personal questions and invited us to
confess — in private, of course, and to an understanding hstener
who would never tell anyone. And they promised enhanced self-

knowledge if you'd only pick up a pencil and check off a few answers.
Through their multiple choice or true and false formats, these
quizzes reaffirmed that we were indeed different people at different

times, and should he different people at different times.

What fragrance type are you, floral or spicy? Take a quiz and find
out; your perfume will tell you who you really are. Are you attractive
to boys? How feminine are you? Are you shy or stuck up, too loud or
too quiet? Are you too easy or too hard to get? Take another quiz. Is

your skin your face heart-shaped or square? Don't forget

oily or dry,

to check your "Happiness Index." The monthly "It's All Jake" col-

—
umn in which a chatty, omniscient, sophisticated guy, we were
supposed to beheve, writing under the ever-so-cool pseudonym
Jake —gave girls the real lowdown about men and themselves. Jake
plotted, one month, "to find the real you" by giving a word associa-
tion quiz.As Jake acknowledged, "Any paperback treatise in psy-
chology will tell you that the real you is very hard to locate."^ The
 She's Got the Devil in Her Heart 101

most maddening quizzes and advice columns told us, over and over,
that, in order to be popular, we simply had to be ourselves. But how

could you be yourself if you didn't know what "yourself" was? And
what if the "yourself" you thought you might be didnt correspond
to any of the categories at the end of the quiz?

The insistence that you absolutely had to be able to pigeonhole

yourself quickly was an obsession m these magazines, but the pigeon-
hoHng w^as tied to particular situations. One quiz told you that you
were a romantic; another, that you were decisive; yet another, that
you were afraid ot commitment and that each trait, under different
circumstances, could be good or bad. So these quizzes reinforced the
notion that you had to assume different roles for different occa-
sions —
that there was not a "real" you, just an actress performing a

of parts. Certain roles, traits, and impulses were, of course,

variet\-

completelv unacceptable, and they were either condemned in these

quizzes or simply never mentioned, as if their existence was unimag-
inable. I remember all too well looking at the possible answers and

thinking that either all ot them or none ot them captured my

response. But there were your possible choices. A, B, or C, and you
had one and only one.
to pick

As we surveyed our compartmentahzed selves, we sought role

models to emulate, women who seemed to embody a way to feel

more whole and less fragmented. And, by the mid-1960s, there was
no shortage ot pop culture teen girls to latch on to. I may not have
been sure who I was, but one thing was clear to me early on — I did

not want to end up Hke my mother, pissed off, overworked, under-

paid, and trapped in New^ Jersey. In fact, my main mission m hfe was
to be as different from her as possible. My mother, I thought simply
back then, had been stupid and hadn't planned things ver\' well. She
had allowed herself to be trapped. She had willingly fallen into that
despised categor>^ Woman and now^ acted Hke one and was paying for
it. Not me: I was determined to be different and to escape the prison
of traditional womanhood. Plus, I wanted to have fun when I grew
102 Where the Girls Are

up. No, I want to be like my mother, and I didn't

definitely did not
want to be June Cleaver or Margaret Anderson either. No thank
like

you. I wanted to be Holly GoHghtly and stay up all night. I wanted

to be Cricket Blake from Hawaiian Eye and ride around in a con-
vertible with Edd "Kookie" Byrnes. I wanted to be
Gidget, the
perky tomboy type who still had plenty of dates and got to spend
most of her time on the beach. And I especially wanted to go on
tour with the Beades. By 1964, they had recorded a song that
tapped
into these feehngs: "Devil in Her Heart." Even though
it was a call

and response song about whether the girl in question would

be
faithful or fickle, I saw a higher meaning: just how
long were we
going to behave ourselves, anyway especially when behaving
your-
self as a girl meant not having any fun? Wasn't it
about time we had
the devil in our hearts?
There were so many boundaries I wanted to cross, especially
those marked "teenage girls don't belong here." And during this crit-
ical transition period in the mid-1960s, as the forces of various revo-
lutions were coalescing, I had a host of young role models
some of —
them serious —
and some of them frivolous to try on for size. But no
matter how dumb some of them seem now, together they pushed me
closer to a wholesale break with Mom's lot in hfe. All of them were
about masquerade, about looking the part of the teenage girl
while,
underneath, sneaking in less "feminine" behaviors and traits. There
were all sorts of disguised, furtive insurgencies going on that embold-
ened me and girls hke me m
surprising ways, and legitimized our
pushing against the already crumbling boundaries of
1950s-style
femininity.

At the same time that rebellion was erupting in tens of millions

of teenagers, the advertisers, moviemakers, and TV producers of
America reahzed that we weren't just a big market: we were humon-
gous. In a 1963 article tided "Teens Grow Top Target
as for Many
Products," Printer's Ink estimated that already "some
20-million
teenagers personally spend an average of $550-miUion
plus annually"
and that "smart marketing men" would be well-advised to concen-
 She's Got the Devil in Her Heart 103

trate on the kids.- We were a tricky market to pitch things to, how-
ever, because we wanted to rebel against grown-ups and the estab-

lishment while feehng grown-up ourselves. We also wanted

conform with one another, or at least with those of us
desperately to
who were cool. A successful ad campaign or TV show or musical
group spoke simultaneously to these conflicting desires and made us
feel Hke distinctive mdividuals with traits all our own who defied
mindless, knee-jerk conformism yet still fit in. What this led to by
the mid-1960s was a plethora of images of teenage girls and young
women, some of them cynically manufactured, some of them much
more genuine, who personified the blending, or management, of
both defiance and conformity.
As something resembhng my teen identity began to coagulate,
there was a cavalcade of female archetypes to consider, and each, in
her own way, embodied a reaction against the identity with which
our mothers had been saddled. They also represented a compromise
between obeying gender norms and subverting them. Even so, the
absolute importance of having flawless skin, thick, shiny hair, a slen-
der figure, and great clothes remained indisputable. This hadn't
changed, and maybe even had intensified as more products, from

Stri-Dex to Summer Blonde to poor boy sweaters and miniskirts,

were marketed exclusively to us. We were still terrified of being ugly,

unpopular, smelly, fat, and dorky, and as lemmingHke in our desire to
imitate what we saw in Seventeen and Glamour. (Models Hke Twiggy
would shortly raise the stakes considerably on how much weight we
all had to lose and how much eyeHner we had to apply to be truly
fashionable.) Yet these new female icons, as strikingly different as

they all were — the bohemian, the career girl, the folk singer, the Bea-

tles fan, the perky TV teen —were about repudiating certain pre-
scribed female traits, Hke being docile, obedient, apoHtical, and
sexuaUy passive. Even Glamour, by the early 1960s, assumed its read-

ers would either work or go to coUege after high school, and there
were many more articles like "From Campus to Career" and quizzes
asking, "Are You in the Right Job?" than there were pieces about
104 Where the Girls Are

marriage, let alone babies, which were rarely mentioned. The 1963
"Happiness Index" asserted that "happiness is ... an eight dollar

raise; the boss's compHment; not having to shave your legs." Yes, this

was chatty and cute; it was also prefeminist.

Through these new archetypes we could imagine and emulate a

new kind of agency for ourselves and for our generation of girls. And
the celebrity girls and boys we identified with were blurring one of
the most important boundaries of all, the one demarcating what it

meant to be a boy and what it meant to be a girl. As longer hair and

dandified clothes for boys became cool, many of us began doing what
boys did, acting hke them, and even looking Hke them. Mia Farrow
and Twiggy had shorter hair than John Lennon. We wore pants,

instead of skirts, whenever we could, man-sized watchbands, and, if

we were preppy, the same Bass Weejuns the boys wore. We stopped
wearing Heaven Sent and bought Canoe from the men's counter.
Sure, these were just cosmetic gestures of style, but they mattered.
No one called it gender bending at the time, but that's what was hap-
pening. And it gave us just that little bit of latitude we craved as we
collectively cast ourselves against Mom. Referring to the unisex fad,

Glamour cautioned, "Try On His Shoe in '66, But Don't Try to Fill

It.''^ But once you tried it on and felt how comfortable it was, well,
as men found out, they didn't always get those shoes back.

The first irresistible, androgynous, and nonconformist female

character many of us remember is Holly Golightly from Breakfast at

Tiffany's (1961). She partied aU night and slept aU day, usually in the

nude, watered the plants with scotch, kept her slippers in the refrig-
erator and her phone in a suitcase, refused to decorate her apartment,
used a two-foot-long cigarette holder, and earned her living as a

quasi-caU girl, quasi-escort. She lived glamorous life in New York

a

City, hosting wild cocktail parties, dining at the "21" Club, and get-
ting drunk whenever she felt Hke it. She could whistle for a cab as

loudly and effectively as any burly doorman. She was definitely not
a virgin, and she was completely charming. She was totally cynical

about marriage, setting her sights only on millionaires. She shop-

 She's Got the Devil in Her Heart 105

lifted for fun, played the guitar on her fire escape, and called every-

one darhng.
Here was a young woman on her own, flouting all sorts of old-
biddy conventions about how single women should conduct them-
selves, having a ball. But it was the fact that Audrey Hepburn played
this character that made so many of us fantasize about becoming
Hollys ourselves when we grew up. It wasn't just that Audrey Hep-
burn was stunningly gorgeous, or that she was sUmmer than most
models, or that whatever she wore automatically looked so incredibly
styHsh. Wide-eyed and small-breasted, Hepburn was still girhsh, and
while it was quite clear that Holly GoHghtly was sexually active,

Hepburn seemed, well, not quite presexual or asexual but Hke a fairy

or a storybook princess, above it all. She made sexual maturity for

girls less scary, as if on the other side of puberty you could be child-
like and androgynous and still be attractive to men. Beautiful women
with boyish bodies and upper-crust accents, women Hke Hepburn
and Jackie Kennedy, were critical icons during this period, for they
made being boyish "classy" and very "in." After the mammary mania
of the 1950s, flat-chestedness was fashionable and soon came to sig-

nify intelligence and breeding, as if flat-chested women were ipso

facto the special exceptions to all those negative stereotypes about
female irrationahty, incompetence, and stupidity. Audrey Hepburn
made me feel a lot better about not looking remotely like the "after"

picture in ads for Mark Eden Bust Developers, and this explains, in

why she was one

part, of the most popular actresses in America
among young women.
The narrative o£ Breakfast at Tiffany's was so compeUing because it

is about a young woman's struggle with her own identity and her pas-
sage to womanhood, a passage she and many of us in the audience
regarded with dread. After meeting this sophisticated New York City
glamour girl, we learn that in a previous life she was Lulamae Barnes,
a tomboy, child-bride hillbilly from the sticks. Holly's complete

opposite. When her former husband comes looking for her, she
refuses to go back with him, explaining simply, "I'm not Lulamae
106 Where the Girls Are

anymore." Later in the film, when Paul Varjack (George Peppard)

pressures her for a commitment, she announces that she is neither
Lulamae nor Holly, she isn't sure who she is.

This never-ending invention of selves, of masks, of poses was all

too famiHar to us, and when Paul asks her to give up certain aspects

of being Holly to be his wife instead, we were as torn as Holly. Paul

insists, "I love you —you belong to me," but Holly snaps back,
"No —people don't belong to people. I'm not going to let anyone put
me in a cage." Loving someone, she asserts, is tantamount to impris-
oning him or her. (Even as a preteen viewer, I saw the way marriage
had entrapped a lot of adults I knew, so I tended to agree with Holly.)
Holly validated my own emerging antagonism to the institution of
marriage. Nevertheless, there was George Peppard, handsome, car-
ing, and smart, who loved her despite all her previous dalliances and
who seemed to be offering something different. I wanted Holly to be
able to stay Holly and keep Peppard. The final scene, in which Holly
finds her cat (named Cat, of course) and kisses Paul in a teeming
downpour, is ambiguous. Do I cry every time because she's found
Cat and Paul, or because she's lost Holly? And it's not clear how
important the film's resolution was anyway, since what we all remem-
bered and found thrilling wasn't that Holly got George Peppard in
the end but that she got away with all sorts of nonconformity with-
out paying any price —on the contrary, she got one reward after the
next. She made female eccentricity, and deliberately not fitting in,

glamorous.
It's not embarrassing, after all these years, to admit that Holly
Golightly/ Audrey Hepburn had a strong impact on you when you
were young, making you long for bigger and better things. Cricket

Blake, however, is another matter. It takes a certain amount of guts to

admit that you bonded on some primal, coursing level with Cricket
Blake. Played by Connie Stevens, whom I idolized in the early 1960s,
Cricket was the sidekick of Tom Lopaka (Bob Conrad) and Tracy
Steele (Anthony Eisley), the two chisel-faced, freewheeling bachelor
detectives with a posh poolside office in the ABC show Hawaiian
 She's Got the Devil in Her Heart 107

Eye, which ran from 1959 to 1963. But I shouldn't be that embar-

rassed — Cricket, Hke Holly, offered an inviting alternative to Mom in

New Jersey. She also showed me a way out of the identity- problem by
being perky: energetic, an individuaHst, if only in speech, manner,
and style, puckish and attractive in a childlike way. A single career girl
with a long, blond, bouncy ponytail, Cricket worked as a photogra-
pher by day and a nightclub singer by night. She referred to Tom as

"lover," flirted with whomever she felt Hke, and sometimes helped

solve cases. She was very much an individual, often cast as eccentric

and — that most favorite of TV qualities

— "zany." Living in a glam-

orous place, surrounded by these hunky guys, and never, ever seen
vacuuming or cleaning up baby sputum. Cricket had it made, as far
as I was concerned. This was the life — single in Hawaii with lots of
adventure and no responsibihties, behaving exactly as you wanted
and being your own person.
The show was produced by Warner Bros., which speciaHzed in
detective shows such as Bourbon Street Beat, Surfside Six, and, its most

famous, 77 Sunset Strip. They all featured two or three debonair,

handsome private eyes, with dark, steel oblongs of their own, and
one beautiful young woman, who was their secretary, switchboard
operator, or simple sidekick. Two young guys with their hair waved
suggestively over their foreheads, Edd Byrnes of 77 Sunset Strip and

the ubiquitous —and robotic —Troy Donahue of Surfside Six, were

used by ABC to capture the teen and preteen audience, and the ploy

worked. I know I was there every week. Both were teen idols for a

few years, and Byrnes had a gold record hit with his novelty song
"Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb," a duet with my girl, Con-
nie Stevens.
Now, looking back on these shows, it's obvious that starlets like
Stevens, Diane McBain (Daphne on Surfside Six), Jacqueline Beer
(Suzanne on Sunset Strip), and Dorothy Provine (Pinky Pinkham [!]
on The Roaring Twenties) served primarily as decorative sex objects
and as occasional helpmates to those involved in the real action, the
men. But they also offered young girls a fantasy about life outside
108 Where the Girls Are

domesticity, away from some respectable, dull thud of a crew-cut

husband and whiny, needy children. They offered a fantasy of an
escape from masochism, of a hfe freer, more fun, and much less angry
than Mom's. They suggested, if only in a whisper, Hberation.
Eight days after Hawaiian Eye went off the air, on September 18,

1963, The Patty Duke Show premiered. The teenage girl was now so
important to advertisers and producers that entire shows were built
around her and her zany antics. The network with the lowest ratings,
ABC, was trying to improve its pathetic showings in the Nielsens,

and clearly targeted the teen audience, and girls in particular, as the
path to success. Hence Patty Duke, Shindig, The Farmer's Daughter,
and the show that really hit pay dirt, Bewitched. By 1965, The Patty
Duke Show and Gidget aired back to back on Wednesday nights. Here
we had teenage girls possessed by an almost virulent strain of perki-
ness. And while perkiness seems so nauseating now, it was then an

absolutely critical mask for girls who wanted to take an active role in

the world yet still be thought of as appealing.

In both shows, a perky, cute, and shghtly tomboyish teenage girl
was the central character and, thus, the center of attention. Her par-
ents doted on her, she was popular, she had a steady boyfriend, but
she also got to date other boys. The struggle for a comfortable, "nat-
ural," yet socially successful female identity was what animated these
shows, so they resonated well with all those quizzes in Glamour,
Mademoiselle, and Seventeen. Patty and Gidget liked to take charge, set

up new situations, and control events, but they also wanted to be

appealing to boys, who were sometimes put off by girls who were too
spunky and aggressive.

It was usually "perkiness" — assertiveness masquerading as cute-

ness — that provided the middle ground they needed to get their way
and get male approval, two goals that were often mutually exclusive.

By donning this disguise, Gidget and Patty got to be thought of as

girls while assuming some of the prerogatives of boys. They disdained

the passivity and helplessness of overly feminized girls. Lady was a

category they actively rebelled against, reinforcing a negative defini-

 She's Got the Devil in Her Heart 109

tion of womanhood while anghng to be the dehghtful exception.

The appeal here was watching these girls move between more ''mas-

cuhne" and "feminine" positions and having fun doing so. For many
teenage girls strugghng with all their warring selves, perkmess was a
satisfying compromise, a veneer over the fragmented mosaic. For
it

you were perky you were, by definition, unpredictable and highly

individuahstic, and could get away with behaviors no one quite
expected. Perkiness repressed and channeled teen girl sexuaHt>^ into

antics and plots, while giving girls some sense of control. Perkiness

was fabulous camouflage.

The Patty Duke Show sought to capitaHze on Patt\^ Duke's consid-

erable success portraying the young Helen Keller in Vie Miracle

Worker. Rarely has such a talented young actress been more poorly
ser\^ed (except when Sally Field got stuck with Jlie Flying Nun). The
show featured identical cousins (have you ever heard of identical

cousins?), Patty and Cathy Lane (both played by Patty Duke), the for-

mer an all-American, outspoken, slang-speaking, rock 'n' roll-loving

girl with the dorkiest boyfriend m TV history; and the latter a more
ladylike, refined, soft-spoken young woman from England with
high-culture tastes. Both characters were prett>^ insufferable because

they were so patently unreahstic, and you could never imagine any-
one having the hots for the dork-boyfriend, Richard. This show
actually pretended that normal boys and girls would rather sip a milk

shake at the local soda shop than French kiss at the local drive-in.

Although Patt\' was clearly the more "normal" and hip of the two,

there were times when Cathy's poHsh and quiet demeanor were
shown as attractive and desirable.

Having two Patt>^s was qumtessentially mid-1960s, when TV

shows, with the help of special effects, 'sought to hail as many types of
teenagers as possible. The purpose of the show seemed to be to pro-
vide girl viewers with two points of identification, Patty and Cathy,
both of them deliberately asexual and providing two outlying points
on the spectrum of teen girl femininity. Oscillating between these
two personas, the narrative rewarded perkiness sometimes and reti-
no Where the Girls Are

cence at others. The Patty Duke Show reinforced the notion that a girl

was a grab bag of traits and masks, some more feminine and some
more mascuHne, that could be deployed in different situations. Patty

and Cathy often traded places, providing a fantasy of being able to

change one's identity while showing all the pitfalls that accompany
such impersonations.
Gidget was more appealing. Not only were Sally Field's hairdos
and clothes cuter, but also the show featured the great Electra fantasy:

Mom gone and a kind, handsome, well-to-do, and indulgent Dad all

to yourself. The show also sought to appear more authentic to girl

viewers by opening and closing each segment with voice-over narra-

tion by Gidget herself, allowing us to be privy to her innermost
thoughts. In an episode demonstrating how the show navigated the
shoals of femininity, Gidget and her college professor father host a

Swedish exchange student, Inge, until the college dorms open.

Raised by a very strict, old-fashioned father and engaged to an overly
serious and overbearing boor named Gunnar, Inge is a drudge who
carries her own luggage, constantly volunteers to cook and clean,

and spends the rest of her time studying. Quoting her father, she says,

"To be a woman is to be useful." Anticipating the Cyndi Lauper hit

of twenty years later, Gidget asks incredulously, "Don't you want to

have fun?" When Inge tells her that her life and behavior have
already been decided for her, Gidget urges, "Well, fight back." Gid-
get repeatedly describes Inge as a slave to her father and boyfriend, as

a second-class citizen deprived of the special privileges of being a

girl, and tells her that in America she can behave differently because
here everybody's equal. From Gidget's point of view, and thus the
audience's, Inge needs to be liberated. Let's see just what liberation
means here.

Gidget takes it upon herself to sociaHze Inge in the ways of fem-

ininity so that Inge can begin to enjoy her rights. She teaches Inge
how to act helpless and seductive to get boys to carry her books, buy
her food, and take her out on dates. The problem is, Inge is too good
a student and becomes a Swedish femme fatale in no time flat. (Given
 She's Got the Devil in Her Heart 111

the stereotypes about Swedish girls, we saw this one coming Hke a

Mack truck.) Soon all the boys in Gidget's crowd, including Gidget's

current boyfriend, Mark, are calling on Inge, and in one scene Inge
uses a combination of flattery and sexual display to try to seduce Gid-
get's father.Clearly Inge has gone too far on the femininity spectrum,
not knowing how to modulate, inflect, and strategically deploy these
traits the way Gidget does. She hasn't gotten it that an out-and-out

display of sexuaHty, inadequately disguised by perkiness or anything

else, is too dangerous and too threatening for a girl of her age. By the

time Gurinar returns, Inge is a petulant, self-indulgent, narcissistic

brat who sashays around the house expecting to be catered to hand

and foot. Gidget has created a monster.
Gidget decides to show Gunnar and Mark how far Inge has fallen

by hosting a quiet dinner at home for the four of them, during which
the usually effervescent, assertive Gidget displays all the self-effacing,

domestic, ladylike knows Gunnar admires. While Gidget

traits she
cooks, serves dinner, and asks Gunnar solicitously about his work,
Inge insists that she's not having fun, demands to be taken out, and
refuses to help Gidget with the dishes. While Gidget and Mark

retreat to the kitchen, Gunnar tells Inge he is ashamed of her. She

tells him he is just Hke Pappa, "Study, verk, learn. Well, I vanna haf a
htde fun." "Of course," answers Gunnar. "But is that all? I vant a

voman for a vife, not a child who only vants to haf fun. Look at Gid-
get. She's quiet, pleasant, thoughtful." As the argument escalates, he
accuses Inge of being "a spoiled child," takes her over his knee, and
spanks her. This restores Inge to her formerly docile self, although we
sense that Gunnar may compromise too. Please note that the spank-

ing falls happily into the "Thanks, I needed that" category of abuse:
upon overhearing it, even Gidget smiles with approval that this is the
best way to restore Inge to the proper mode of female behavior. Gid-
get, meanwhile, is the model of teen femininity, not so much because

she is a lady but because she knows how to impersonate one at the
right time. There is a recognition here that femininity is a masquer-
ade, and one that is essential for female survival.
112 Where the Girls Are

The next day Mark says to Gidget, "The other night

at the beach,

I sorta saw you differently You were quieter,

you know, more femi-
nine, and I Hked that. I mean, you used to come on full of plans, a
take-charge girl, but no more. I mean, a guy Hkes to feel Hke he's out

with a girl, not a platoon sergeant." As Gidget responds, "Whatever

you say, Mark," we see her loading him up with all the beach supphes

from the back of the car, her actions contradicting her words and the
laugh track underscoring the futihty of his words. "A man has to be

boss," asserts Mark. "You're right, you're the boss," says Gidget as she

smiles knowingly to herself Then her voice-over cuts in. "And that's

when I reahzed I'd set back women's rights a hundred years — exactly

where they belong," at which point Mark collapses under the load
Gidget has piled on him.
What constitutes "equahty" for girls remains confused through-

out the episode, and indeed throughout the series itself. The show
insists that girls not be slavish doormats for fathers or boyfriends. But,

to get their way girls need to flatter boys into thinking they're supe-

rior so boys will, instead, wait on girls. Without such manipulations,

girls would have no privileges, so "women's rights" jeopardizes these

prerogatives. Yet to be too feminine, meaning too self-centered,

helpless, and sexualized, can also isolate a girl. The message here was

about balance, and about a position of equaUty that required subor-

dination, and a position of subordination that required equality. Perk-

iness allowed for such machinations, deceptions, and contortions.

During these years, we also acted out the flip side of perkiness:
hysteria. The most prominent image of the teenage girl in the mid-

1960s was the victim of Beatlemania. Everything that perkiness dis-

guised and repressed — sexual energy, impudence, rebellion against

adult authority, a defiance of traditional gender codes, and a howhng

sense of outrage — all these hysteria unleashed. And it was our over-
powering identification not with celebrity girls but with four young
men from Britain that showed what could happen when contain-
ment and repression fail.
 —
She's Got the Devil in Her Heart 113

Only two months after The Patty Duke Show premiered, John F.
Kennedy was killed. The sense of possibiHty, of optimism, of
inevitable progress had been so buoying in the first three years of the

1960s that the youth of America took Kennedy's death especially

hard. I was too young to know about all the hidden corruptions and
hypocrisies of the Kennedy administration. I didn't know then that
behind the images of John-John and CaroHne frohcking in the Oval
Office, behind the nationally televised speeches asserting that segre-
gation was immoral and would not be tolerated, behind the ghtter-
ing White House parties for artists and intellectuals, it was old-style
poHtics as usual. So when I saw that vulgar turkey neck, Lyndon
Johnson, being sworn into office, I felt that youth had been robbed
and betrayed. I felt that the forces of reaction and cynicism had tri-

umphed over ideahsm. I was disillusioned and very, very sad. It was
as if optimism itself had been gunned down in Dealey Plaza.

It was to fill this emotional and spiritual void, this deep grieving
over a beloved, charismatic, and witty young man, that we would
react to a group of four different young men, also attractive, witty,

and a clear departure from the past. Just as Frank Sinatra served as a

pop young women when millions of young

culture surrogate for
men went off to war Beades became a mass phe-
in the 1940s, the

nomenon at a time of profound loss. And the resonance between

Kennedy and the Beades —young, spirited, funny, energetic

allowed for a powerful and collective transference of hope.

The Beades had cut their first record, "Love Me Do," in 1962
and, by 1963, had become a huge success in England. Capitol

Records, however, did litde at first to promote them in the United

States. Then, in December 1963, no doubt sick of listening to

"Dominique" by the Singing Nun for the 800th time, several DJs
began playing imported copies of "I Want to Hold Your Hand." It

went to the top of the charts in January 1964, sales having soared to
1 .5 million. Quickly other songs were released, and by April the Bea-
des held the top five slots on Billboard's charts, the only time in his-
 —
114 Where the Girls Are

tory this occurred. (The songs were "Can't Buy Me Love," "Twist

and Shout," "She Loves You," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and
"Please Please Me") Beatlemania had arrived, mutating the previ-
ously "normal" American girl into the hair-tugging, screaming,

tranced-out Beatles fan.

It was their February 9 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show —the
highest-rated show in TV history up to that time'^ — that signaled to

the adult world that a new hysteria was gripping the teenagers, and
especially the girls, of America. Just as I will never forget where I was
when I heard that Kennedy had been shot, I will always remember
the Beatles on Ed Sullivan like it was yesterday. I sat six inches away
from the TV, hugging an orange Naugahyde hassock to keep me
grounded. While I didn't scream (because I was recording them on
my dad's reel-to-reel tape recorder), I sure felt like it. I was elated
actually filled with joy. I couldn't stop smiling while they performed.
They made me so happy, the kind oi happy that overflows all the

breakers in your neural system and makes you feel free. This was a

happiness I could barely contain, the kind that made me want to

shake my best friend and jump for joy. I adored them. I understood
completely why 73 them on Ed Sullivan,
million Americans watched
and why 10,000 screaming fans had greeted them when they had
landed at Kennedy Airport two days earlier. Throughout their brief
visit to New York City and Washington, DC, the Beatles were
chased, run after, and swarmed over by teenage girls who kept
breaching the barriers set up between them and their heroes.

I remember when they were scheduled to perform at Shea Sta-

dium in August 1965. One of the New York radio stations had a

contest to win tickets to the concert. Fans were to draw pictures of

the Beatles and send them in to be judged. The category my best

friend and I entered was "biggest" picture of the Beatles. My father

was an artist and had rolls and rolls of drawing paper, which we
painstakingly taped together and spread out over my backyard. In our

white eyeshadow^ and black eyeliner, we painted the faces of all four
Beatles on what we thought was a huge expanse of paper —probably
 She's Got the Devil in Her Heart 115

about thirty feet by three feet. It cost a fortune to mail in —evidence

enough to us that we had a great chance of winning. But we had
been thinking too small — the winner m this category was, I recall, as

big as an acre or two.

Adults didn't know what to make of this behavior, and soon there
were two major cottage industries in America. The first produced

Beades wigs, bubble-gum cards, magazines (with pictures of each

Beade's lips blown up to life size so you could kiss each one), and so

forth. The second produced scores of articles by educators, sociolo-

gists,and Dr. Joyce Brothers with titles Hke "Why the Girls Scream,
Weep, Flip," "What the Beades Prove About Teenagers," and "Brace
Yourself, They're Back." It's hard to beheve some of the assessments

that so-called grown-ups came up with, Hke "Musically they are a

near-disaster [and] their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of yeah,

yeah, yeah!') are a catastrophe,"' and "Beatle music is high-pitched,

loud beyond reason, and stupefyingly repetitive."^

Much of this drivel was sarcastic and condescending, suggesting

that we were "possessed" and that, if parents were patient, it would
all pass. The visual images of girls fainting, screaming, biting their

knuckles, and pulling their hair out simply reinforced this notion of
possession. David Dempsey, writing for the Sunday New York Times

Magazine, observed, "The Beades, who provoke the most violent

response among teenagers, resemble in manner the witch doctors
who put their spell on hundreds of shuffling and stamping natives."
He described Beatlemama as a "seizure" that put teens in a "Zen-Hke
"The female members of this cult," he added, "go berserk."
trance."

But Dempsey also got the point: "Whether dancing, or merely Hs-
tening and jumping, those taking part are working off the inner ten-
sions that bedevil a mixed up psyche."^
Were we just mindless twits, empty-headed bimbos swept up in

some inexpHcable mass hysteria, witches in a twentieth-century elec-

tronic Salem? What wasabout the Beades that spoke to girls so
it

powerfully, that made thousands of otherwise obedient, law-abiding

teens willing to cross poHce barricades, to risk seizure and even arrest.
116 Where the Girls Are

to get near their idols? Beatlemania, always made to look foolish then
and now, in fact marked a critical point in the evolution of girl cul-
ture that wasn't fooHsh at all, and was particularly dangerous to the
status quo.^

First of all, the Beatles were good — really good —and they took
their female audience seriously. It wasn't just that they wrote their
own music and lyrics, which was itself a major departure from most
other performers and a sign to us of a new authenticity in rock. For

girls, it was that they so perfectly fused the "masculine" and "femi-
nine" strains of rock 'n' roll in their music, their appearance, and their

style of performing. It wasn't just their long hair, or Paul's eyelashes,

the heels on their boots, or the puckish way they clowned for the

camera. Without ever saying so explicitly, the Beatles acknowledged

that there was masculinity and femininity in all of us, and that blur-
ring the artificial boundaries between the two might be a big relief.^

A common sign displayed by Beatles fans was "Elvis Is Dead. We

Love the Beatles." It wasn't that the Beatles weren't sexy —they were.
But they weren't as threateningly masculine as Elvis. They didn't

sneer, they didn't direct attention to the pelvic area, they eschewed
anything resembling Brylcreem, and, as David Reisman put it, they
didn't remind one of "a hoodlum."^'^ Elvis shoved the wrong side of
the tracks into middle-class America's faces: he looked Hke a working-
class tough, and he sounded Hke a black man. The Beatles, in contrast,

even though they had come firom Liverpool, one of the most be-
nighted and roughest working-class enclaves in England, had traded in
their T-shirts and leather jackets for pseudo-Edwardian suits and ties.

Yet unlike all those fake, obviously packaged, and eminently safe boy
idols —Tommy Sands, Frankie Avalon, Paul Anka — the Beatles
exuded a kind of sexual energy that was perceived as completely
genuine yet nonaggressive. They personified sexual sublimation, in
which primal instincts and threats to the existing order weren't
denied —they were up Nehru
just dressed in suits and, as a result, bet-
ter disguised. Even though was shockingly long by 1964
their hair

standards
— pudding bowls of
"great Newsweek put —they hair" as it''
 She's Got the Devil in Her Heart 117

Without being able to put it into

Still seemed convincingly clean cut.

words, but quite able to put it into screams, girls instinctively recog-

Trojan horse, smuggHng androg>^ny, a contempt

nized the Beades as a

and sexual release into their pro-

for middle-class conventionaHsm,
The Beades insisted that aU kinds of
tected, middle-class worlds.

barriers could be finessed.

Their miusic bridged safety and danger as well. Drawing from
the
as weU as
"hard" rock 'n' roU of Chuck Berry and Litde Richard,
"soft" call-and-response layered harmony styles of the girl
from the
groups, the Beades pushed the conventional musical
codes of mas-

culinity and femininity up against each other a way that evoked m

love with your clothes on. In England they often
toured with
making
the Ronettes or Mary Wells, whose music they admired and bor-
rowed from. Electric guitar riffs, driving bass and drums, and John's

gravelly voice led into falsetto cries of "ooh" and "yeah," suggesting

male sexuahty wasn't so threatening, female sexuality was

per-
that
harmoniously. After
fectly normal, and the two could exist together

all,they only wanted to hold our hands, or dance with us, and love

us, and aU this said with a winning and suggestive wink. When they

recorded their own versions of giri group songs like "Please Mr. Post-

. man" and "Chains," they showed that boys could find themselves in
exactly the same spot as girls and feel just as trapped
and helpless.
about
Onstage, they were irresistible. The most striking thing
them was their sheer joy of performing. No languid, sleepy-eyed
Pdcky Nelson here, or some overly solemn Andy Williams or moon-
ing Johnny Mathis. They had the spirit, the openness, and
the fresh-

ness of cheerleaders; they didn't stand still, and their

moves weren't
choreographed. And these were white boys who definitely did not

have poles up their sphincters. They channeled sexual energy away

from where Elvis had located it, m the male crotch, and moved it

through safer, nonsexual parts of the body— their feet, their legs,

their heads, their hair. Like electricity, it arced to the audience, where

it surged safely through female Hmbs and faces. Sexual energy was

simultaneously activated and repressed. These boys were having fun.

118 Where the Girls Are

stomping their feet and smiling broadly while they sang, smiling, in
part, at themselves and at the performance they were giving. Their
self-mockery was Hke a magnet, and their enthusiasm infectious. The
way Ringo bounced his hair while drumming embodied carefree-
ness, and suggested that no one should take him or herself too seri-
ously, especially if young. Their own barely controlled ecstasy
and
abandon while performing captured the state teenage girls found
themselves in, racked by overpowering feehngs but constantly
warned to contain themselves. The Beades showed how you could
mock conventions while obeying them, how you could have fun
within the confines of estaWished expectations, how you could push
the boundaries of pubhc performance and get away with it. The Bea-
des affirmed that youthful optimism was a force to be reckoned with
yet again, and that, for all its naivete, it was hip. For this, girls
screamed in gratitude.
The Beades made it clear that they were quick-witted and smart
and that they would tweak pretension every chance they got. Their
particular form of rebellion, masquerading at first as clowning for
reporters, was palatably packaged in witty remarks, mugging, and
pranks. Social conventions about money, about taking fame seriously,
about deferring to authority figures, and about how to behave in
pubhc were all treated with irreverence. Already John Lennon's
remark before the British royals
— "People
in the cheaper seats, please
clap. The of you just ratde your jewelry"—was infamous. When
rest

they arrived in New York, they were asked when they were going to
get haircuts. George quipped, "I had one yesterday." When asked
which Beade he was, John rephed, "Eric." They made fun of them-
selves and of the supposed seriousness of the entire press .conference
ritual. No one had had this much fun with the press since, well, JFK.
Since I am not a shrink (although I play one in my job), I can't
provide the definitive, clinically vahdated reasons why millions of
girls, in 1964, were cast under the spell of Beademama. But I don't
think Beademania was at all silly In fact, in Beademania the seeds of
female yearning and female revolt germinated with the speed of
 She's Got the Devil in Her Heart 119

those exploding flowers in time-lapse photography.

Given the timing

of their arrival America, a mere eleven weeks after Kennedy's

m
evoked hardly surprising.
assassination, the coUective catharsis they
is

singularly unattractive, shifty-eyed, and with

Lyndon Johnson— old,
all the charisma of raw poultry—personified, for me, the deliberate
exuberance. His installation as president
thwarting of youthful
seemed a direct repudiation of Kennedy's call for a "new generation,"

new generation of young women, to try to change the

including a
world. And then the Beades arrived, making fun of the estaWishment
and getting away with it, and reaffirming that the spirit
and vitaHty of

this new generation was indeed alive

and well and would not be
daunted, stunted, or denied. Through the Beades, some of us began

to beheve again that things were going to be all right.

Because they sang so directly to and about young women,
and

did so without pandering to them, this reaffirmation

was especiaUy

compelling for girls. Folded m

with this was the Beades' challenge to

"the Marlboro Man" version of mascuHmty. So

when we watched
just a newly fem-
these joyful, androgynous young men, we saw not
inized, distinctly fi-iendher form of manhood. We also saw our own

reflection. In these boys were ghmpses not only of a new masculinity

an eagerness
but also of the best part of 1960s adolescent femininity—
to reach out to others, a faith in love, a behef m progress, and a deter-

mination to leave behind hoary conventions about staying

one's m
place. Most girls had a favorite Beade, the one
they claimed as

"theirs,"the one they loved above the others. If you think about it,

often chose the Beade that they themselves most

resembled,
girls

either physically or as a personality type, or the one they

most wanted

to be like. (OK, with this mouth, how could I have been anything

This imaginary bonding brought a brief but satisfy-

but a John girl?)

ing feehng of completion. For it wasn't just that by loving one or all

of the Beades you could indulge in a safe, pretend reladonship with

some ideahzed love Through this powerful identification with
object.
semiconscious
John, Paul, George, or Ringo, you could, on some
male, part female, out m the
level, become a Beade yourself, part
120 Where the Girls Are

world having fun. As one girl recalled, "I didn't want to grow up and
be a wife and it seemed to me that the Beades had the kind of free-
dom I wanted. ... I wanted to be Hke them, something larger than
life.">2

With the arrival of the Beades, girls congregated in pubHc in

packs, in swarms, waiting for tickets, waiting for concerts, waiting for
the Beades themselves, united in a determined, shared cause. Girls
wantonly jettisoned social conventions about female decorum by

screaming, jumping up and down, even fainting in pubhc. They

yelled "I love you" at the top of their lungs. They actively chased
these boys out in the streets, for all to see. The established authority
of the state was totally irrelevant to dedicated Beades fans: they
crawled under, cHmbed over, and simply burst through poHce barri-
cades, demonstrating that arbitrary boundaries, and the laws of old
men, meant nothing to them. Perplexed and horrified adults trying
to make sense of this seeming anarchy knew on some level what they
were witnessing: a very pubhc unleashing of subUmated female sex-
ual energy. But they were also seeing something more: what Barbara
Ehrenreich and her coauthors have identified as "the first mass out-
burst of the sixdes to feature women — in this case, girls."^^ This was
terrifying —and it was a premonidon.
Girls looking and acdng more hke boys, boys looking and acting
more hke girls, all of them trying to figure out what constituted indi-

viduahsm and what constituted conformity this was the turbulence —

of the mid-1960s, and it was embodied in a variety of teen girl
archetypes. Beademania was a manifestadon of our sense, our fear
even, that we knew nothing more about ourselves than that each of
us was a mass of unchanneled longing and desire who didn't want to
end up hke Mom.
But much of the pop culture of this period lay- —
outs on unisex fashions, Gidget's and Patty's constant orchestration of
events, whopping success of the Beatles showed
the — that girls
wanted some gender boundaries blurred. When taking all those
quizzes and wondering whether we, hke Holly Gohghtly, could ever
be individuals who stand out from the herd, we began to think of
 She's Got the Devil in Her Heart 121^

individualism itself as a pose, a collection of jaunty, saucy, irreverent

gestures that might hide the contradictory mess inside. The mass
and confor-
media reinforced the importance of both mdividuaHsm
mity, of being more like boys yet stiU
very much a girl, and offered
cracks were beginning to
perkiness as a temporary compromise. But

appear in the waUs restraining female energy

and sexuahty. These

compromises weren't calming us down; they were making us worse.

 mn aii ffitctes

hilemy friends and were upstairs blasting Beatles records and

I

planning how many times we would go see A Hard Day's

mothers were downstairs in the kitchen or the
Night, our

laundry room fuming, and fantasizing about a jailbreak of their own.

They soon discovered they weren't alone. PoHtical rumbhngs about
women's second-class status, and their desire for more opportunities
and choices, now on America's media seismographs. Some
registered

of our mothers, it turned out, wanted to break down some barricades

themselves. The prevaiHng Hne in the print media of the early
1960s

was that American women, as the Ladies' Home Journal put it, "never

had it so good": they controlled the family's purse strings

and the
had an array of household technologies that made
nation's wealth,

housework effordess, had plenty of free time to play bridge or do

volunteer work, and enjoyed unprecedented equahty. The Journal
continued, "They have rights and opportunities today the Hkes of
which the Western world has never seen. . . . Indeed, women today

arem many respects much better off than men." In its special supple-

ment of October 1962 entided "The American Female," Harper's

maintained that American women were "repelled by the slogans of
old-fashioned feminism."^
But Harper's also thought it saw a trend in 1962 and named it

"crypto-feminism." Women were reexamining their roles as "wives,

mothers, and members of the human race" because motherhood was

short-lived as a full-time job, more women wanted or needed to
124 Where the Girls Are

work outside the home, yet many women found that "the institu-
tions that are supposed to serve women are not very helpful."
Women, in fact, faced a "void." Articles kept appearing in the early

and mid-1960s with titles Hke "Our Greatest Waste of Talent Is

Women," "Women —Neglected Assets," and —

"Women ^Emancipa-
tion Is Still to Come," articles at odds with the "women have it
made" new turbulence was emerging.
line. Clearly, a

Professional women, in particular, were fed up with their second-

class salaries and their image as freaks of nature, and they lobbied the
Kennedy administration to do something. In one of the more famous
scenes from John Kennedy's press conferences, the indefatigable jour-
naHst May Craig stood up and asked the president what he was doing
for women. Kennedy quipped that he was sure that, whatever it was,
it wasn't enough, implying that women were never satisfied, and
shared a big laugh with the predominantly male press corps.
Nonetheless, in 1961, Kennedy estabhshed a Presidential Commis-
sion on the Status of Women, with Eleanor Roosevelt as its head, to
ascertain how to eradicate the "prejudices and outmoded customs
[that] act as barriers to the fuU reahzation of women's basic rights."
The Kennedy administration also outlawed discrimination in the fed-
eral civil service and in 1963 pushed through Congress the Equal Pay
Act, which prohibited paying men and women different salaries for
the same jobs. The Kennedy Commission's report, American Women,
pubhshed just six weeks before the president's death, recommended
the estabhshment of child-care services, advocated equal opportuni-
ties for women in employment and education, urged women to seek
public office, and argued that the government's mission should be to
secure "equahty of rights for women." The front-page story in The
New York Times headlined the report with "U.S. Panel Urges Women
to Sue for Equal Rights."^
The real tip-off that many of our mothers hated their assigned
positions, weren't sure whether to hate themselves or the men around
them, and were tired of straddhng the untenable contradictions in
their Hves was the eagerness with which thousands of them ran out to
 Genies and Witches 125

buy Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which they put on the
best-seUer Hst from April through July 1963. In 1964,
while teenagers

discovering the Beades, older women made The Feminine

Mys-
were
tique the number one best-seUing paperback in the country.^ Trashing

"biology as desdny," Freud, and penis envy, castigating the phony

enumerat-
happy housewife heroine of the women's magazines, and
ing the empdness, resentments, and self-doubt of many
housewives'

lives, Friedan reminded women of the unfinished work of the

women's movement and urged her sisters to stop being doormats and

to fight for equahty.

Portions of Friedan's book were condensed in women's maga-
and the book inspired other investigations into the status of
zines,

women. In "Whatever Happened to Women's Paghts?" pubHshed in

the Atlantic Monthly m March 1964, Paul Foley stacked up a tower of

statistics to emphasize women's second-class status. Only two U.S.

senators and 11 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives

were women. Only 3 of the 422 federal judges were female. Women
were confined to low-paying, dead-end jobs, they married too
young, and they were not encouraged to pursue advanced degrees.
was condensed and reprinted in Reader's Digest.^ U.S.
Foley's article

News and World Report in 1966 also itemized the various ways in
which women were discriminated against and underrepresented in
American business and poHtical institutions, and it noted that sociol-

ogists "warn that the U.S. may be building up a new generation of

'unhappy women.' The article also focused on a significant trend:

"

women were "going to work in droves," often combining a job, mar-

concluded that " 'full equal-
riage, and motherhood. But the article

ity' for women appears far off."^ Foley however, claimed that "for
pubHc scrutiny on the American woman, 1963 was a banner year,"

and he was right: this was to be a turning point.

It was withincontext of prefeminist agitation, combined

this

with the unsettHng phenomenon of wild packs of girls chasing the

with
four mop-tops across America, that there appeared on TV, and
a vengeance, a new female mutant, a hybrid of old and new, of neg-
126 Where the Cirls Are

ative and positive stereotypes. We saw the ghoulish Morticia in The

Addams Family as a femme fatale; a genie who was not a rotund, bald-
ing man but a shapely and beautiful young woman; a witch who was

not a murderous old hag but an attractive young housewife; a cute,

perky nun who could fly.

All of a sudden, female characters in TV sitcoms were capable of

magic. They had fantastic supernatural powers. Yet this was more than
just the ultimate in kitsch or the triumph of special effects. If we put
these TV shows and the impulses behind them on the shrinks couch
for a minute, we see that a significant proportion of the pop culture
moguls were trying to acknowledge the impending release of female
sexual and poUtical energy, while keeping it aU safely in a straitjacket.

Sure, it would be great if women, young women, were

especially
more sexually Hberated. But prefeminist rumbUngs about economic
and poHtical Hberation were another matter. You could almost see
these guys holding their nuts for dear Kfe. Sensing they were playing
with fire, they tried to contain it technologically, through images of
levitation, twitching noses, and poofs of fake smoke.
In these shows, the potentially monstrous and grotesque was
beautified and tamed; what we saw, in other words, was the contain-
ment of the threat posed by unleashed female sexuaHty, especially in
the wake of Beatlemania and Helen Gurley Brown. Since viewers
had been socialized to regard female sexuaHty as monstrous, TV pro-
ducers addressed the anxieties about letting it loose by domesticating
the monster, by making her pretty and sometimes slavish, by shrink-
ing her and keeping her locked up in a botde, and by playing the sit-

uation for laughs.^

In shows Hke Bewitched, I Dream ofjeannie, and The Flying Nun, a
new version of Pandora's box was acted out. Seemingly normal-
looking female characters possessed magical powers, which men
begged them not to use; if women did use them, their powers had to
be confined to the private sphere. Whenever women used these pow-
ers outside the home, in the pubHc sphere, the male world was turned
completely upside down. Business simply could not be conducted as
 Genies and Witches 127

usual, and logic and were often overthrown and rendered

rationality

useless. Men were made impotent by these

powers, and the husbands

(or husband figures) of such women were

stripped of their male
incompetent in front of their
authority and made to look fooHsh and
male superiors. After all, how men turned into dogs,
can you explain

or co-workers sent to Antarctica? Although the men insisted (usually

unsuccessfully) that their women not use these powers, there were

three exceptions that the shows' narrative systems

permitted: to com-

plete domestic chores, to compete over men, and to

help the men out

embarrassing situations, which usually had been created by the

of
woman's unauthorized use of her magic powers in the first place.
The two most successful examples of this genre were Bewitched
and / Dream ofjeannie. Bewitched was extremely popular; it was
the

biggest hit series produced by ABC up to that time,

running from

1964 to 1972. For its first five seasons it was among the top twenty
highest rated shows; the year of its debut, it soared to number two,

topped only by Bonanza J It is easy to dismiss Bewitched as one of the

dumbest and kitschiest shows ever produced, but it would be a mis-

take to do so. Bewitched was such a success in part because of its nov-

elty and its skillful use of special effects, which played to some fairly

basic fantasies about magic and control. But it was also successful
because it was one of the few shows with an appeahng female lead
character who offered female viewers a respite from, as well as a cri-

tique of, male domination. In Bewitched we have a woman's dream

and a man's nightmare. Damn was surrounded by an endearing yet
constantly troublesome matriarchy, a domestic situation m which his
wife, mother-in-law, daughter, and other relatives were all witches,

endowed with magical powers, which constantly threatened his pro-

fessional status and his authority as head of the household.

trickier ver-
A show like Bewitched was an updated, blander, yet
sion of / Love Lucy. Lucy didn't have magical powers, and she cer-

tainly didn't need them to get into trouble. Always strugghng to

break out of the confines of the domestic sphere and enter Ricky's
glamorous world in the pubhc HmeHght, Lucy was set up by the
128 Where the Girls Are

physical slapstick of the show as a clown, as a woman constantly using

her face and body to fight the strictures of femininity. Samantha,
however, was not a clown: she always remained a lady. This was one
of the show's many concessions to traditional femininity and conven-
tional gender roles. EUzabeth Montgomery didn't have to use her
face or body the way Lucy did: she had technically mastered special

effects to be disruptive for her. Aside from twitching her nose, nod-
ding her head, or raising her hands, she did not become physically
grotesque when disrupting Darrin's world. Young, sHm, blond, and
beautiful, with practical, intelUgent ideas about what needed to be
done in her community, yet a witch, Samantha stood at the intersec-

tion between middle-class definitions of the ideal young wife and

rebelliousness against those definitions.
Samantha embodied important contradictions, for she was a

happy, respectable suburban housewife who exerted power beyond

the kitchen or the Hving room. She was at once traditional and mod-
ern.The show often suggested that women, especially younger
women, were smarter, more creative, and more versatile than men.
Samantha had magical powers, but she also excelled at the more
mundane female duties of ensuring that social interactions ran
smoothly. Often it was up to her to come up with an explanation to
Darrin's boss or other outsiders for the bizarre goings-on. Invariably,
her explanation placated the irate or confused father figure, and often
she succeeded in using the explanation to make Darrin or some other
hapless man look good in the eyes of the older male authority figure.

Samantha engineered the outcome so that Darrin got the credit for
coming up with a great idea or doing a great job, but the audience
knew who was the real power behind the throne. And it was key to
the show that Darrin have all the sex appeal of egg albumen. Had he
really been handsome, sexy, or magnetic, her magic and power would
have been too threatening, both to the man and to the viewer.

The question of whether Samantha could use her powers, and

under what circumstances, defined the entire series. In the first show,
on their wedding night, just before they are supposed to go to bed.
 Genies and Witches 129

Samantha reveals to Damn that she is a witch. Dressed m her

peignoir, Samantha shows a skeptical Damn just ^^hat she can do by

broken cigarette Hghter he's tr\'ing to use suddenly ejacu-

making a

late a flame and by moving an ashtray

around the co&c table so he

can't successfuUy flick his ash. (And you

thought all that subhmmal
stufFonly went on m Hquor ads.) When he nearly faints
realizing she

really is a witch, Samantha kisses him seductively and he says they'll

next. The
discuss the problem tomorrow. We know what
happens

mere suggestion that these two are going to have sex was revolution-

arv' for television at that time. The next day. Damn makes Samantha
him, "Dar-
promise never to use her powers again. Samantha assures

ling, I'll be the best wife a man ever had." He gets specific. "You're

going to have to learn how to be a suburban housewife. . . .

And
you'll have to learn to cook and clean and keep
house and go to my

mother's house even,' Friday night." Samantha says it sounds

wonder-

ful. We don't beheve her for a mmute. There wasn't a woman in the

audience who would have given up that kind of power.

We know she won't be able to keep her prormse, and her restraint

is tested right away. A former girlfriend of Damn's, dark-haired,

rich, seductive, and patronizingly sophisticated —m other words, a

bitch— invites and Samantha over for dinner. During

Damn the

course of the evening, she openly fUrts with Damn while

making

insufferably catt>^ remarks to Samantha about her hair and clothes;

she's clearly the real demon here. Under an assault Hke this, when
another challenging her for her man, Samantha can't pos-
woman is

sibly keep her promise to Damn. Using her

magical powers, she

makes the rival's hair fall into her eyes, places a large
hunk of spinach
front teeth, has her dinner sHde into her lap, her
dress
on one of her
nearly and her wig blow otTher head. The rival is humiUated
fall off,

and Samantha's use of witchcraft completely justified. At the

end ot

the show, in what became a classic scene m Bewitched, Damn is urg-

ing Samantha to come up to bed, and we know exactly what he's got

on his mind. But the kitchen is a mess. Samantha says she'll be right
and zaps the kitchen clean. She says with a
up, then raises her arms
130 Where the Girls Are

self-satisfied smile, "Maybe I'll taper off," a joke rife with ambiguity.
Taper off, my ass.

It is also important to note that Samantha's mother —indeed, all

her relatives — is strongly opposed to Samantha not using her powers

just because of Darrin. Endora constantly casts him as a mere mortal

to whom Samantha is superior, and as someone who is constraining

Samantha, trying to make her hfe too confined, boring, and pre-
dictable. For Endora, Samantha has another, more exciting destiny, a

destiny that spans history and geography. And while Samantha insists

that marriage to Darrin is what she wants, she gets to have it both
ways, to have the reassurances of being a suburban wife and the
adventures of being a more unconventional woman.
What is especially interesting about the show, premiering as it did
in 1964, not long after Betty Friedans Jlie Feminine Mystique was a
best-seller, is the way it offered, yet sought to diminish, a criticism of
female confinement in the home. It is hard to imagine a woman
watching who did not identify with the fantasy of cleaning the
kitchen or preparing dinner just by twitching her nose. But there
were other teUing fantasies, repeated week in and week out, about
having some real influence in the outside world, and how the world
might be better if men just listened to women once in a while. In an
episode from the first season, Samantha and Endora eat at Mario's
Pizza and decide the food is so good that Mario deserves some pub-
Hcity. Samantha, by twitching her nose, stops the presses at the local
paper and inserts a full-page ad that reads "Eat at Mario's." When the
ad comes out, Mario's competitor, the head of Perfect Pizza, is out-
raged and drops Darrin's ad agency for letting Mario's get the upper
hand. When Samantha learns that her husband's account is in jeop-
ardy, she works to repair the damage. She and Endora, using their
magic, fill the town's billboards with ads, cover the sky with skywrit-
ing, and place "Eat Perfect Pizza" placards on all the pedestrians in
town. The delight they take in orchestrating this ad campaign is clear
as each tackles a new medium, giggling and saying, "It's your turn,"
and "Now yours." At the end of the show, with the account saved.
 —
Genies and Witches 131

Damn complains, "I'd appreciate your letting me handle my

accounts by myself," to which Endora responds sarcastically, "Do you
think you can?" Samantha insists with a smile, "Of course he can

except under special circumstances."

In other episodes, Samantha uses her magic to get the
mayor to
fix the town's traffic Hghts, to persuade a
French fashion designer to

design clothes that look good on "the average American woman"

and not just on fashion models, and to expose poHtical corruption
and help get reform candidate elected to the city council. In this last
a

episode. Damn wrongly accuses a corrupt councilman of

fraudulent

deahngs in a city construction contract. Samantha and Endora trans-

port themselves to the councilman's oBce and use their witchcraft to

open his locked file cabinet and study his records. It takes Samantha

just a few seconds to confirm that all his deahngs, with the sole

exception of the one that pea-brained Darrin had tried to expose,

had been crooked, another Darrin blunder that causes Endora great
mirth. Yet Endora casts various spells to vindicate Darrin and indict

the councihnan. At the end of the show, we see Darrin, completely

befuddled, mumbhng to himself as he walks upstairs, while Samantha

and Endora stand shoulder to shoulder, leaning sHghtly into each
other with their arms crossed over their chests, smiHng knowingly
and patronizingly at poor, dumbo Darrin.

repeated combination of magic, diplomacy (her forte), and

The
good common sense made Samantha's solutions to problems the ones
that were clearly the most viable and sensible. Here was a housewife

with logical and creative ideas about how to make the world better,
and with an abihty to act on those ideas and get them a fair hearing,
even if she had to do so through her bumbhng surrogate, Darrin.

(The character was such a zero that Dick York, Darrin number one,
was easily replaced in 1969 by another Dick, last name Sargent, as
Darrin number two.) Samantha's interventions in advertising, poh-
tics, and marketing were a mixed blessing, but
often they expedited

the solution to a particular problem. And despite his anger and frus-

tration over the personal humiHations, Darrin always loved and

132 Where the Girls Are

admired Samantha. This was one of the first post- 1950s sitcoms to

show a husband and wife sharing a double bed, and we often saw
Darrin looking at Sam with desire.

Samantha stood in contrast to the older women in the show, who

were grotesque by comparison and conformed more closely to the
age-old archetype of the witch as a wrinkled and disorderly crone.^
Grotesque women — the battle-axes, villainesses, shrews, and over-
the-hill whores of popular culture —with their aging faces and sag-
ging, protruding bodies, were ostracized, pitied, and often destroyed
in movies and TV shows because they had moved outside the norms
of feminimtv^. But such women also rebelled against and often dis-

rupted the rigid gender codes of society, and the female grotesque
par excellence of Bewitched —Endora—was no exception. With her
overly bouffant, bright red hairdos, t\vo-inch-long false eyelashes,
and thick eyeHner that shot up at a forty-five-degree angle to her

eyes, Endora made gestures to femininity that were exaggerated, Hke

a Mardi Gras mask. But it was this defiance that gave her power, and
made her such a liberatory character. Darrin hated her interventions,
and often Samantha did too. She was blunt, honest, catty, and self-

indulgent, and she did not waste her time trying to soothe others'
feelings or placate men the way Samantha did. She was a caricature

of the meddhng, hard-edged mother-in-lav/ girls were supposed to

cast themselves against. But as played by Agnes Moorehead, Endora
also had an arch sophistication and a biting tongue that enabled her
to get away with —and enjoy—her assaults on arbitrary male author-
ity, especially when it was imposed on her daughter. Female viewers
agreed with her dismissive assessment of Darrin as an impotent doo-
fus and took great deUght in her outrageous transgressions, and in her

unmovable loyalty to Samantha. Endora got to say what many

women wished they could say, and her complete indifference to the
approval of men was a joy and relief to watch, even as we knew we
did not want to be like her.
The other grotesque female, the baggy-faced, chinless, relent-
lessly nosy neighbor Mrs. Kravitz, was given none of Endora 's pro-
 Genies and Witches 133

tective coloration. There was no masquerade of feinimnity here. Mrs.

Kravitz was a warning, the darker side of female aging. She kept spy-
ing on the Stevens house, looking where she wasn't supposed to.
Thus, even though she saw "the truth," her reports made her appear
crazy. Ugly, unadorned, shrill, she never succeeded in getting anyone

else to see what she She was the parody of the old housewife
saw.

with too much time on her hands and nothing to do except Hve
through others. Old women who become voyeurs, who neglect their

appearance and their husbands, are pathetic. This, girls, is who you
could become you pay too much
if attention to the outside world

and not enough your face, body, and home. Mrs. Kravitz embod-
to

ied the costs of not adhering to traditional feminimty: her

husband

held her in contempt, and everyone else laughed at and pitied her.

Unlike Samantha, who knew how to juggle her domestic duties and

her forays into the outside world, Mrs. Kravitz had lost her balance.
She spent too much time looking out her window and not enough
looking in her mirror, too much surveillance in the wrong direction.

The character we identified with, Samantha —most firequently

referred to by her mascuHne nickname, Sam —was passive and active,

flouted her husband's authority yet compHed with the role of subur-

ban housewife, was both conforming and rebeUious: she gave expres-
sion to traditional norms and prefemimst aspirations. The show
hailed young female viewers by providing, and seeking to reconcile,

images of female equahty — and, often, even images of female superi-

ority —with images of female subordination. Samantha's talent and

success as a wife lay in knowing when to intervene and when to hold

back. She often made mistakes, but because she had the traditional

female traits of empathy, tact, flattery; and the abihty to craft a com-
promise, all coupled with her magic, she was able repeatedly to res-

cue her husband, herself, and her marriage.

The show acknowledged that young women wanted more than
confinement in the home, that housework was drudgery, and that
husbands were often mept clods. Samantha skillfiilly managed the
contradictions of being a superior being (a witch with power) and a
134 Where the Girls Are

subordinate being (a wife with a husband). She made these contra-

dictions work for her, and she also smoothed them over, demonstrat-
ing the jugghng act young girls were meant to do when they got
married. While the show reaffirmed the primacy of traditional

female roles and behaviors, it also provided powerful visual represen-

tations of what many young women would like to do if they just had
a little power: zap that housework and a few men as well.
I Dream of Jeannie ran from 1965 to 1970 and also featured a
woman with magical powers, but this show was predicated on a more
flagrant sexual display of Jeannie's body and her desires, even if the

network censors made sure Barbara Eden's belly button was discreetly

hidden. The premise rested on a male fantasy of a regular guy dis-

covering a beautiful, naive, unworldly woman who wiU do anything

for him and calls him "master," or, more formally, by his miHtary title.

(That the "regular guy" was an astronaut played into another male
fantasy for good measure.) But the impHed power and availability of
Jeannie's sexuaUty were always a threat to her master. Captain (later,

Major) Tony Nelson, and sometimes he was most relieved and hap-
piest when she was "in her bottle." Jeannie was always more amorous
and sexualized than her master, and this, of course, is what got them
into so much trouble. Captain Nelson tried in vain to contain Jean-

nie both physically and sexually, and in those episodes where Jean-
nie's bottle was lost, there was considerable tension until it was found
and Jeannie could get back inside it again.

/ Dream of Jeannie differed from Bewitched in crucial ways that

already suggested a backlash against the earlier show's discourse of
empowerment. Jeannie did not intervene in community affairs the
way Samantha did; in fact, she cared Httle for the pubHc sphere. She
was not the ideal 1960s wife who happened to have magical powers.

In her pink chiffon harem pants, red bra, pom-pom-trimmed bolero

jacket, and chiffon-draped headpiece, Jeannie was from another place
and time, an anachronism in 1960s suburban America. She was the
dumb, shapely, ditzy blonde with too much power, which she often
used impetuously. Hyperfeminized, Jeannie was unreasonably jealous
 Genies and Witches 135

and possessive, giggled a lot, and was overly enthusiastic about what-
ever her master did: in fact, she often behaved and was treated like a
child. Although she got her master into embarrassing situations,

unhke Samantha she left him to explain his own way out. She was
not seen as shrewder or more creative than Captain Nelson; after all,
he was an astronaut, embedded in a world of science, technolog>^, and
the miHtary^-industrial complex women allegedly couldn't master.

Jeannie's main goal was to serve Captain Nelson obsequiously, get

him to pay more attention to her, and, she hoped, get him to marry
her. Although Captain Nelson kept insisting he was the master of
the house, Jeanme's magic constantly undermined that assertion. Yet
the balance of power always tilted toward him, because Jeanme was
more devoted to him and more emotionally dependent on him than
he was on her.
The fact that Jeanme didn't know how to behave like a "normal"
woman was the basis for a number of the plots m the show In one
teUing episode, we see how this show, despite its reHance on many of
the same visual gags and tricks as Bewitched, differed ideologically

from Its predecessor. In a 1965 episode, "The Americamzation of

Jeannie," Jeanme comes to feel that Captain Nelson devotes too
much time and attention to his work and not enough to her. She
reads a women's magazine and finds an article tided "The Emancipa-
tion of Modern Women." She asks, "What does emancipation
mean?" and he answers, "You don't have to worry^ about anything
Hke that." "Oh, yes I do," she insists. "I want to understand your way
of Hfe so I can please you." She continues reading the article. "Are
you a loser m the batde between the sexes? Is the man in your Hfe

aloof, indifferent, difficult to please? Does he fail to appreciate what

you have to offer as a female? Answer: Challenge his mascuHne arro-

gance. Be independent, self-reHant, unpredictable. You must learn to

cope with him on his own grounds. In short, you must become a
modern, American woman."
The next day. Nelson comes home to find the house a mess and no
dinner on the table. Jeannie walks into the Hvmg room in a bathrobe
136 Where the Girls Are

and curlers and says, "Hiya, old boy," instead of her usual, more fawn-
ing greeting. Nelson accuses her of not doing any housework, but
Jeannie responds by citing part of her magazine article, "How Not to

Be a Drudge." " 'Share the work with him,' " reads Jeannie as she

reaches for a box of chocolates. "I'm an astronaut, not a housekeeper,"

explodes Nelson. "You must broaden your horizons," retorts Jeannie as

she hands him a broom.

Needless to say. Nelson tells Jeannie that a real woman doesn't

behave this way, and his reactions, as well as the narrative, repudiate

the role reversal she proposes. At the end of the episode, their origi-

nal relationship is restored, and Nelson advises her, "You need an

outlet for your affection. You need a pet." Advice from a magazine
about female emancipation turns out to be very bad advice because
itundermines the woman's femininity, makes her appear ridiculous,
and aHenates the man's affections. The advice, of course, is a parody
of feminism, for it urges women to be deliberately unattractive and
completely self-indulgent, and to make men do the housework while
the women do nothing at all.

Bewitched never took such a head-on approach to role reversal,

thus it didn't draw such stark boundaries between male and female
spheres. Bewitched blurred gender roles; I Dream ofJeannie accentuated
them. Yet both shows anticipated feminism and hailed the prefemi-
nist viewer. Samantha was clearly a role model, while Jeannie was an
extreme version of femininity that girls ought not to model them-
selves after. When women Hke that got power, look out. Thus, I
Dream ofJeannie was more of a warning. In Bewitched, Darrin's work
in an advertising agency was repeatedly compromised by the inap-

propriate exercise of female power. In I Dream ofJeannie, the ante was

upped: now, magic inspired by female desire, jealousy, and posses-
siveness threatened to disrupt one of the crowning achievements of
1960s male technocracy, the U.S. space program. Even NASA was no
match for female power and sexuaHty run amok. In Bewitched, female

power could be accommodated; in Jeannie, it could not. Because of

these differences, the central mixed message remains: female power.
 —
Genies and Witches 137

when let loose in the pubHc sphere, is often disruptive to male

authority, but sometimes it also bolsters that authority. These colhd-

ing messages made Bewitched and / Dream ofjeannie simultaneously
cautionary and liberatory. The schizophrenic female persona such
shows helped constitute saw female obsequiousness amply rewarded.
But she also had empowering images of physically zapping thmgs
and men — into their proper place.
In 1964 and 1965, images of female possession were everywhere.
In two sitcoms, The Munsters and The Addams Family, the mothers
were black-clad female vampires with often macabre idiosyncrasies.
The antithesis of Donna Reed, these moms did not bake chocolate
chip cookies or take the PTA seriously. They were more Hkely mak-
ing frog-eyebaU stew or teaching the kids how to tie hangman's knots
and build toy guillotines. Again, it was only through such quasi-
monsters — totally unreaHstic yet unthreatening women from the
realms of the supernatural — that females' rebellion against their tradi-

tional roles got expressed on TV. And as with Bewitched and / Dream
of Jeannie, the sexual tension between regular guys and newly
empowered women was a prominent subtext. A running joke on The
Addams Family had Gomez unable to restrain himself from planting
passionate kisses all along Morticia's irresistible arm. Here we saw the

clearest connection between female sexuahty and ghouUshness: her

monstrous power turned him into a helpless, slavering fool.

Then, in the 1 967-68 season, we had a fusion of Bewitched and

Gidget, in the form of the poor, benighted SaUy Field as Sister

BertriUe. In The Flying Nun, perkiness took to the air. It took SaUy
Field ten years and the abihty to portray dozens of personahties in
Sybil to Hve down this role. Now we had a female character who
could fly, but lest anyone do a Freudian reading, she was, by voca-
tional choice, chaste and asexual. Her flying wasn't always in her con-

trol, but when you walk around with headgear shaped like a paper
airplane on steroids, the updrafts sometimes just take you away She
often ended up in places where females, especially those from nun-
neries, weren't supposed to be; she was once nearly shot down as an
138 Where the Girls Are

enemy plane and, on another occasion, pursued by a lovestruck pel-

ican.^ Here we see the progression from Samantha to Sister Bertrille,

from the woman having control of her magical powers and using
them, at times, in ways that embarrassed men to the woman's magi-
cal powers having control of and embarrassing her. This was, of

course, wishful thinking on the part of TV producers, for out in

the viewing audience young women were feeHng more, not less,

empowered.
It is no surprise that, at the moment girls took to the streets in an
outpouring of female resistance against the status quo, and in pursuit

of new, supposedly false gods, while their mothers flocked to buy

a book demanding equal rights for women, the witch and other
women with supernatural powers would reappear on the cultural
landscape of America. Television shows tried to suggest that if girls

and women were feeHng a bit resdess, a tad mischievous, a mite defi-

ant, these unruly impulses could be managed. But in an effort to co-

opt this rebeUion, and to translate it into Nielsen ratings, this media
strategy backfired. For as we watched Darrin Stevens turned into a

Yorkshire terrier, or Major Tony Nelson transported to seventh-

century Persia, we saw that male authority wasn't so impregnable or

impressive at all.

In real Hfe, teenage girls bhthely ignored or pushed through

poHce barricades, with few negative consequences. What many of us
experienced and saw, although we barely knew it at the time, was the
beginning of a war. It was a battle between sexual rebellion and sex-
ual containment, between the old mascuHnity and the new androg-
yny, a fight over how much more masquerading had to go on
between men and women. After trying on the personas of the rebel,
the sexual sophisticate, the knowing girlwho was bonded to other
girls in a group, the pursuer, and the witch, some girls decided they
didn't want to imagine, fantasize, or pretend anymore. Girls were
stepping over old boundaries, and there was no going back. We were
on the verge of revolt.
 lirowing Out Our Bras
7-

September 7, Robin Morgan, who had played Dagmar

1968,
Onon the TV show Mama, organized several busloads of women to
attend the annual Miss America pageant in Adantic City. What
these women did there was, by the standards of the day completely
shocking. They were not there to attend the pageant and choose who
was prettier or had a better butt; they were there to put down the

pageant, and put it down they did. They swung brassieres in the air

Hke lassos. They crowned a live sheep "Miss America" to dramatize

that the contestants, and women, are "oppressed and judged like
all

animals at a county fair."^ They carried signs that read, "Welcome to

the MissAmerica Cattle Auction" and "Miss America Sells It," and
held up a poster of a naked woman with her body parts labeled
"rump" and "loin," as if she were nothing more than a side of beef.
They chanted, "Adantic City is a town with class. They raise your

morals and they judge your ass." And they set up a "Freedom Trash

Can," into which they tossed stenographer's pads, hair rollers, high

heels, copies of Playboy, and, the most titillating symbol of female

containment, all those brassieres. These women weren't perky, they

were pissed; yet, at the same time, they seemed to take a cheerful

dehght in trashing one of the country's most sacred and closely fol-
lowed rituals, the only TV show, claimed Richard Nixon, that he let
Tricia and JuHe stay up late to watch. No
one had ever seen anything
quite hke it. This was a completely outrageous event and marked a
140 Where the Girls Are

watershed in American history, a watershed virtually ignored in ret-

rospectives on the 1960s in general and 1968 in particular.

The Miss America demonstration defined my earliest days in col-

lege. One of the first photographs taken of me and my roommate
freshman year featured us braless, wearing men's undershirts instead,
holding a sign that read, simply, "Ban the Bra." We also saw fit to

paint the following epigram in huge letters on our window facing

out to the street: "The more I see of men, the more I like dogs." As
I recall, the letters were in fluorescent paint, which was set off nicely

by the black Hght we Ut each night. This created such a stir it was
photographed and featured in the local paper amid much head shak-
ing. The seniors down the haU in their Villager dresses, fraternity pins
jutting out from their chests like the Croix de Guerre, thought we
were barbarians who were wrecking the college; we informed them
that they were, in the parlance of the times, douche bags.
I wasn't a feminist yet, not by a long shot; I was not in the mood,
politically or hormonaUy, to see American society as a patriarchy. At
first, many of us regarded the Miss America demonstration as noth-
ing more than the latest in guerrilla theater, not the opening salvo in
a revolutionary social movement that would change our lives forever.

But as a result of the Sexual Revolution, which by 1968 was quite

real, and all the other cultural trends that had shaped me throughout
the 1960s, my chutzpah level was at record heights and in 1968
would soar to new levels, precisely because of what I saw on televi-

sion, heard on my stereo and the radio, and read in newsmagazines.

For me, Robin Morgan and her compatriots linked the cultural with
the poHtical, compelling me to take another fateful step away from
the girl I used to be. They emboldened me and got me thinking,
revealing the chasm not just between me and those older girls in their
Peter Pan collars but also between me and men. They suggested that
the sense of cultural and social collectivity many young women felt

when they sang along together with the ShireUes or the Beatles was
about to be extended into a political movement that would change
 Throwing Out Our Bras 141

America. They put us on notice that the poHtically innocent word

girl was about to give way to the politically
conscious word woman.

That same year, Valerie Solanas circulated the SCUM Manifesto,

which she sold at first on the streets of Greenwich Village." The
acronym SCUM stood for Society for Cutting Up Men, and I still

can't read the manifesto without laughing out loud at its over-the-

top, in-your-face bravura. As you would imagine, the SCUM Mani-

festo was a far cry from "I Will Follow Him." "Life in this society

being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all rel-
evant to women," began Solanas, "there remains to civic-minded,
responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the govern-

ment, eHminate the money system, institute complete automation,

and destroy the male sex." Asserting that "the male is a biological

accident" because the Y chromosome is really an incomplete X

chromosome, Solanas continued that the male "has made of the
—
world a shitpile" and therefore should be killed unless he joins the
Male Auxiliary of SCUM. In her final coda, Solanas really let it rip:

"The sick, irrational men, those who attempt to defend themselves

against their disgustingness, when they see SCUM barrehng down

on them, will cHng Mama with her Big Bouncy Boo-
in terror to Big
bies, but Boobies won't protect them against SCUM; Big
Mama will
be chnging to Big Daddy, who
will be in the corner shitting in his

forceful, dynamic June of '68, Solanas acted on her words

pants."^ In

and shot— and nearly killed—Andy Warhol. In a few short years, we

had gone from Gidget to this, in part because of what we saw and
heard in the mass media.
There was, in fact, a level of rebellion in the 1960s that the media
could neither manage nor contain, despite Bewitched and / Dream of
Jeannie. Two media in particular —
television news and rock and folk

music, and the interaction between them — stoked the flames of this

rebellion. While the most prominent female icons early in the decade

were Jackie Kennedy, hysterical Beatles fans, perky TV teens, and go-
go dancers in cages, behind the scenes, out of the spotHght, there
142 Where the Girls Are

were real girls getting real political. And what led them to this awak-
ening was that they now had the opportunity to go to college. Mag-
azines like Glamour added regular columns and articles about getting
into and attending college, and while their back-to-school issue each

August featured the ten "best dressed" college girls (as opposed to the

smartest, most accompHshed, or most Hkely to succeed), the maga-

zines nonetheless imparted a taken-for-granted quaHty to college

attendance for girls. In 1965, the number of degrees awarded to

women was double what it had been in 1955; by 1969 the number
had tripled, and it kept zooming up.^ At the vanguard of this social

change were our older sisters, women born in the early 1940s, many
of whom thought of themselves as baby boomers even though the
boom didn't "officially" start until 1946.
Many of these girls, in addition to discovering sex, drugs, and
rock 'n' roU, also discovered they had real problems with the status

quo, so they discovered pohtics. Some joined the Peace Corps. Oth-
ers were more radical and jomed Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS), which in the early 1960s was committed to community orga-
nizing and working for a more egaUtarian society grounded in par-
ticipatory democracy. Still others joined the Student Non- Violent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and spent their summers in the

South working in the civil rights movement. There was, on many

campuses, a new ethos of achievement for girls, an understanding
that they would use their education for more than deciphering the

rules of "Careers" and reading Tlie Joy of Cooking. And it was these
girls, who were in college in the early and mid-1960s, who became
the early leaders of the women's liberation movement. Before the
Miss America demonstration, few outside the New Left knew^ of

such women. As a result, they seemed to come from nowhere — or, as

the press seemed to suggest, from outer space or under a rock.

There are many possible explanations for young, middle-class

women to have been challenging the status quo in these years. Maybe
it was because, at the same time that we Hstened to the Shirelles and
the Beatles, or watched Samantha turn Darrin's boss into a poodle,
 Throwing Out Our Bras 143

we also read books like Tlie Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, Silent

Spring, Growing Up Absurd, and Black Like Me. Maybe it was hearing
Bob Dylan, Joan Baez. and Peter, Paul, and Man,' smg social protest
songs. Certainly it was seeing the nightly news start showing us a very

different picture of the world than the one we saw on Vie Patty Duke
Show. In fact, after we'd watched the perfect, secure, harmonious
families on Vie Donna Reed Show or My TJnee Sons, we watched our
parents fight with each other, yell at us and hit us, and plot their
divorces. We also saw, on the same TV that brought us fictional,

conflict-fi-ee towns Hke Mayfield and Springfield, all-too-real places

Hke Selma and Birmingham, where real Americans couldn't vote or

send their kids to college, where real parents lost their children to

bombs planted in churches, and where real teenagers were clubbed

mercilessly by poHce for sitting at a Woolworth's counter.
We were starting to gag, in fact, on the widening disjunctures

between our hves, what we saw on the news, and the increasingly
infantile and surreal offerings of network television: Mr. Ed, My
Favorite Martian, Gilligan's Island, F Troop, and, worst of all, Hogan's

Heroes, which transformed the grotesque horrors of a Nazi POW

camp into a half hour sitcom with a laugh track. This gap between
our experiences of current events and a realm populated by Mun-
sters, talking cars, fiymg nuns, and the overly fertile and supposedly

musical King family defined our adolescence. For girls m particular,

old assumptions were silted over by a whole host of new questions,

new rebellions, new ways of looking at the world and our place in it.

The change in oudook was gradual, a progression that took longer

for some than for others and was less overtly poHtical for some than
for others. The first step was girls thinking they had a duty to cham-

pion the rights of others. The next step was reahzing they had a duty
to champion rights for themselves.

As the 1960s progressed, television became increasingly divided

against itself, a schizophrenic medium that during certain portions oi

the broadcast day pretended there were no such things as social prob-

lems but at others shoved these problems right in our faces through
 ^

144 Where the Girls Are

news reports and exposes like Harvest of Shame. We knew that we

were choking on artifice and Hes, and we wanted the cloying taste

out of our mouths. In time, our desires would crystallize as the great

quest for the authentic, the genuine, the spontaneous, and the true,
fueled by raging teenage hormones itching to rebel against grown-up
society.

Nothing drove home the gap between TV land and reality more
than the civil rights movement, which by 1963 dominated the
national news. The movement provided network news executives

with what they wanted most: powerful, dramatic, and spontaneous

images.From the early days of television, news shows like John
Cameron Swayze's Camel News Caravan on NBC were only fifteen
minutes long and consisted primarily of stories read by the anchor-
man or newsreel footage of staged events hke ribbon cuttings, press
conferences, dam dedications, and beauty contests. The sponsor.

Camel cigarettes, made sure that Swayze puffed away while present-
ing the news and forbade NBC from showing anyone, no matter
how newsworthy, smoking a cigar, making only one exception, for

Winston Churchill. Any news footage containing a "no smoking"

sign could not be aired.
The civil rights movement blew apart this artifice and in the pro-
cess transformed the political outlook and political participation of
hundreds of thousands of young people. And the civil rights move-
ment and then the antiwar movement, the first major social move-
ments to be brought to people by television, transformed television
news and baby boomers' relationship to the news and TV in general.
Many complacent Americans were shocked by the murder of
Medgar Evers in June 1963, and the slayings of Andrew Goodman,
Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney a year later. When viewers
turned on the nightly news in May 1963 and saw the snout-nosed,
porcine Birmingham police attack slender, helpless schoolchildren
with fire hoses and German shepherds, many were ashamed, horri-
fied, and disgusted. To those of us who loved the Shirelles, the Mar-
velettes, and Sam Cooke, and who were just becoming familiar with
 Throwing Out Our Bras 145

Martin Luther King's eloquence, all of this seemed outrageous, and

George Wallaces 1963 inaugural chant, "Segregation now! Segrega-
tion tomorrow! Segregation forever!" which we also saw on the
news, confirmed that there were some authorirs^ figures who needed
serious defy^ing.
It IS hard to beUeve that with all this going on, the nightly news
was only fifteen minutes long. But it was precisely such dramatic,
visually arresting stories that prompted CBS, in September 1963, to

extend its nightly newscast, anchored by Walter Cronkite, to a half

hour. A week later, NBC did the same, with The Hmitley-Brinkley

Report. Both networks increased the number of their nev/s bureaus so

they could have film footage of events instead of relying primarily on

still photos or the anchor's story teUing abilities. Adolescents whose

newspaper reading consisted only of "Mary Worth" and Ann Lan-

ders now could see current events in their homes every day without

having to read at aU.

One of the things they saw were more women and more young
people engaged in dangerous and disruptive oppositional politics.

Young black women were as much a presence as black men, in the

vanguard of the struggle for integration, and the dignity and resolve
they conveyed on the nightly news as they tried to enroU m coUege
or participated m sit-ins
showed how powerful young women could
be. Behind the media spothght, young women, black and white,
learned invaluable lessons about pohtical organizing. In firont of the
camera, women from Rosa Parks to Coretta Scott King made pohti-
cal protest by women seem not just natural but necessary. The Viet-
nam War also brought increasing numbers of women to the streets, to

participate in highly pubhcized moratoriums and demonstrations.

The notion that poHtics and social protest were things women should

Ignore and avoid was, quite simply, eroding.

That young women could be poHtical, even radical —and be
admired for it —was becoming accepted on the fringes of American
popular culture and powerfully reinforced through the huge folk
music revival of the 1960s. The revival was started by the older broth-
146 Where the Girls Are

ers and sisters of kids like me, but through radio, record albums, and
TV, quickly trickled down to us. These older kids had outgrown
it

the fare of AM radio

— "Johnny Angel," "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow,"
and "Ahab the Arab" —but were about switch over
hardly what to to

passed for adult fare. Dean Martin, Steve and Eydie, and the sound-
track to The Sound of Music. What these kids wanted in their music,

as elsewhere, was authenticity, relevance, and, last but hardly least,

iconoclasm. And they got it in songs about persecuted labor organiz-

ers, the ordeal of African Americans, and the utter folly of war.
Listening to and playing folk music was one way that kids who
didn't ride down south on freedom buses or go to sit-ins could par-
ticipate, if only vicariously, in the civil rights movement. Folk music
legitimized the sense of urgency many young people felt about
extending social justice throughout America. There was a critically

important resonance between this music and what we saw in the news
from Selma and Birmingham. And this music also reinforced, quite

powerfully, the notion that not just young men, but young women
too, needed to speak out and to take to the streets if they had to.

Certainly the pioneer here was Joan Baez. Her debut at the New-
port Folk Festival in 1959 signaled a new kind of female performer,
one who eschewed makeup, satin dresses, and sexual come-ons, and
instead played her own guitar, dressed simply, sang social protest
songs, and talked oppositional poHtics between numbers. By the
summer of 1962, Baez had sold more records than any female folk
singer in history, and two of her albums had gone gold, without the
usual promotional hype on AM radio. ^ Baez became so big that she

made it onto the cover of Time in November 1962. In a Httle

hatchet-job piece called "Sibyl with Guitar," Time described Baez as an

"otherworldly beatnik" with a "remote manner, long hair, bare feet
and burlap wardrobe" who was often contemptuous of her audience
and had only one friend, an "aimless . . . sulky, moody, pouting fel-

low whose hair hangs down in golden ringlets."^

What Time couldn't get over the most was the fact that Baez,
who was young and beautiful, absolutely refused to buy into existing
 .

^ >) Uir:SH?imi>. mnm; You |,r.>t<-<-i my *\hi Mt .<\ t-r w ll !t tntrt-

/i"\ p, !..-,ia v<mVl !i!«- to t!nv<. ,.,.„,),. .),.!,«««•« n.^l.y (>. I, Ami
^j y aKil>y'»'<'-i''vlif.'. but .l<.n't (orcct t.. ««.• !!

|T'Vr„t «tK,t
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^ ;> pl;.r..^. y..,i /«»*.' tJmt"f ,an."urin<- irrilnlHrnr*
Designed to give every
K8>«; Pymi l.l;im« rtir. Ijimh? Th<-?^ Oflir/ ni1Ii'n>k vr-o .'r.rw.ft.
lin>.».,

mother nightmares: one (.tr-.t«' Tin* w-ricclins around! If ,,n<nhins spfinkl.-. of .t<.!it>..-.n-»
/> un. ,.»nf..f!.-<l>!.-. !...«• <J.h-. y-fir JUby r.iw.lrr, tr, hr!p >,. op .twf*-^
of Johnson & Johnson's tcntl. r «Kin ^tind it? .in<) t»ri<kl.-* nway'
Bilt: S!;.ivi .1" Mc.nmy. I'm mi^-z- KSK: moUx-r.
"Giant Baby" ads, as it ,1!.!.-: Ai»! n-iw \-<. Vr»'«v. t..<., why
I !i-<v>-n"t t«-^-n

l,!»vr. 1 ? W.-itc!. m.-

.t <-,-.r.-f<il

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appeared in Life in Kih..-^ m-<l .!..l,nw..-n Hnhy O.l

HIT: W„tch 'r-- r. fr.rn,

anrt .l..h«-.>n-» 15.<l-y IVnv.kr! C^V „^, ^y,,,, .,,,,,„„,„« ,„

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/^^\ir/\. tnko ciu.. <.f my >Vtr..

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apparently, was too
I
~*~7"'
IJLtT: .3««t llii% .\rr»m. Aff'-r my hntU mnny h>i«li toisttnt:!
bizarre when it came to
terrorizing our mothers
into concentrating
m f^^c^^-
Johnson's Baby Oil

all their energies on Johnson's Baby Powder

baby sputum and talcum
powder. {Collection ohmcn ¥^uwvn
of the author.)
Jacqueline Kennedy redefined femininity for baby boom
girls coming of age in

the early 1960s. She was a fashion plate who knew Greek origin of the word
the
ostracize, a wife who knew more languages than her husband, and an American
princess with feet twice the size of Cinderella's. {AP/Wide World Photos.)
 which
A Summer Place and Susan Slade were classic pregnancy melodramas in
and Troy
"good" girls gave the double standard a giant raspberry. Sandra Dee
Williams
Donahue {above, in A Summer Place) and Connie Stevens and Grant
stage of family planning.
{below, in Susan Slade) embark here on an unwitting first
{Courtesy of Movie Still Archives.)
 Don't let these innocent poses
fool you. With their number
one hit "Will You Love Me
Tomorrow," the Shirelles were
the group to give voice
first girl

to teen-girl sexual desire and

spoke to a whole generation of
adolescents who were wondering,
"Should I? Or shouldn't I?"
(Courtesy of Movie Still Archives.)

a>t. '& V m
While some girl groups
tried to look like good girls,

other groups looked bad.

With their ratted-up hairdos
and don't-mess-with-me
black eyeHner, the Ronettes
expressed teen-girl rebellion
against middle-class
suburban mores. {Courtesy
of Movie Still Archives.)
 screamed, we pulled our hair out, and we breached poUce
barricades
We
mass hysteria;
throughout the land. But Beatlemania was not some empty-headed
m
for girls the mid-sixties, it was a coUective jailbreak. {AP/Wide
World Photos.)
 As Holly Golightly in Breakfast
at Tiffany's, Audrey Hepburn

made female bohemianism,

a disdain for marriage, and
flat-chestedness the height of
glamour in the early 1960s.
(Courtesy of Movie Still Archives.)

As Cricket Blade in Hawaiian Eye, Connie Stevens didn't dust furniture or pack
lunches Hke Donna Reed. She got to ride in convertibles with hunky detectives
and sing duets with Edd "Kookie" Byrnes, which seemed Hke a lot more fun
than vacuuming. Pictured here with Connie are (left to right) Anthony Eisley,
Robert Conrad, and Poncie Ponce. (Courtesy of Movie Still Archives.)
 After her success in The Miracle
Worker, Patty Duke got stuck
with this TV turkey classic,
The Patty Duke Show, in which
she had to convince us that it
was genetically and emotionally
possible to have an identical
cousin. Cathy, the drip, not
pictured, though Momand
Dad (Jean Byron and William
Schallert) make the cut.
{Courtesy of Movie Still Archives.)

Sally Field, in hercunning

bolero and flanked by
outfit,

her teddy bear, surfboard, and

jaunty musket, as TV's termi-
nally perky Gidget. Perkiness,
while at times nauseating, also
allowed girls to take control,
initiate action, and have some
fiin — even, at times, at the
expense of boys. (Courtesy of

Movie Still Archives.)

 It doesn't take a shrink to decipher why
Jeannie's bottle was shaped the way it

was, or why Major Nelson was happiest

when she was safely contained in it.

This woman's power was so formidable

that it disrupted the entire manned
space program in America. And in this
unretouched photograph, Barbara Eden's
belly button is visible just above her
waistband. {Courtesy of Movie Still Archives.)

¥"

Beginning with the smash hit Bewitched in 1964, women on TV suddenly had magical
powers, which men begged them not to use. Despite her dorky husband Darrin,
Samantha did get to zap her house clean and turn troublesome men into French
poodles, often with the help of her mutinous mother, Endora. (From left, Elizabeth
Montgomery, Agnes Moorehead, and Dick York.) {Courtesy of Movie Still Archives.)
Dismissed by the media bubbleheads," "ridiculous exhibitiomsts, and
as "bra-less
demonstration for women s
"man-haters," feminists orgamzed the first major
Hberation at the 1968 Miss Amenca Pageant,
when they charged that each con-
than a piece of meat. Women responded m
testant was reduced to nothmg more
increasing the ranks of women's organizations around the country
droves,
four-hundred-fold by 1974. {AP/Wide World Photos.)
 FIFTY CENT5 1
AUGUST 31, 1970

As the feminist the media loved to hate, Kate MiUett found

herself on the cover
of Time, artisticaUy rendered as a grim, baU-busting
ninja from heU. The article
mside noted that Millett didn't wash her hair enough.
{Copyright © 1970 Time Inc.
Reprinted by permission.)
 with
By contrast, Gloria Steinem was adulated by a news media more obsessed
What stupefied the press was why a woman
her hair and legs than with her ideas.

men slavered over would ever become a feminist. {Copyright © 1971 Newsweek, Inc.

All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.)

 The flouncy hair and string
bikinis prompted charges
of sexism. But in Charlie's
Angels, with its unhkely trio

of feminist heroines {from

left, Jaclyn Smith, Farrah

Fawcett-Majors, and Kate

Jackson), women worked
together, for the first time
on television, to get the bad
guys, not a few of whom
were identified in the dia-
logue as "male chauvinist
pigs." {Courtesy of Movie
Still Archives.)

The mid-seventies brought us countless superwomen who could lift tanks, stop
buUets with their bracelets, and run 35 miles per hour. In case you missed the
message that women had to be more like men, there was always a thick, knotted
Tarzan swing to remind you, here modeled by the Bionic Woman (Lindsay
Wagner). {Courtesy of Movie Still Archives.)
The wealthy attorney and right-wing
activist who portrayed herself as "just
a housewife," Phyllis Schlafly helped
defeat the ERA by charging that its
main purpose was to force women
into unisex urinals and infantry units
instead of letring them be wives and
moms. (AP/Wide World Photos.)

Tusshng wresthng m the mud, and hurhng cold cream at each

in reflecring pools,
other, Krysrie (Linda Evans)and Alexis (Joan Collins) in their legendary catfights on
that raged
Dynasty enacted the pitched battle between feminism and anrifeminism
throughout the mass media in the 1970s and '80s. {Courtesy of Movie Still
Archives.)
 With their reHance on fake
Sji*^-.
French names, accents and
circumflexes run amok, and
references to "collagen fibers"
and "molecular structures," the ^^ «) #i*.
cosmetics industry in the 1980s
marshaled science and snobbery
to declare war on the new Zj'
woman's most lethal enemy,
wrinkles. {Collection of the author.)

Sermaine Monteil introduces

lift Extreme
e^lift makes vou feel youjitier.l

CAPTURE
n-g V'CTORY OF SCSNC£ O^P. T!ME-

'OrV DO» f'^T£fJTED** llfOSOMtS p-PO/lOC A PEV01UT!C\

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 —

The cosmetics industry

invented "cellulite" in the
1970s to describe that portion
of the female body between the
knee and the waist. To achieve
the "buns of steel" that the
upscale female workahoHc was
supposed to have, you could
either spend half your Hfe in a
health club or slop some
Biotherm on your thighs.
{Collection of the author.)

The media superwoman of

the 1980s had a much bigger
drill than any —
man than any
mastodon, for that matter
and used it to obHterate
the gaping contradictions
surrounding the real women
of America, who didn't
want to hve up to some
superhuman standard and,
instead, just wanted a break.
(Collection of the author.)
They packed a piece and wore
mascara, and if you messed
with them you were dead
meat. The perfect antidote to
Monday Night Football, Cagney
and Lacey (Sharon Gless, left,
and Tyne Daly) attracted
millions of devoted viewers
who knew that women could
wear makeup and still be
tough and successful. {Courtesy
of Movie Still Archives.)

No longer forced to keep her lips zipped and bake cookies, Hillary Rodham
Clinton has galvanized millions of women by blending femininity and feminism.
When this on behalf of
brainy and attractive First Lady testified before Congress
universal health care inSeptember 1993, senators were stupefied to discover that
a feminist could wear nice clothes and could even have a sense of humor.
{AP/Wide World Photos.)
 Throwing Out Our Bras 147

and was
gender norms about proper female behavior and appearance,
The magazme kept marveHng that she and
hugely successful anyway.
her contemporaries, like Judy Collins, didn't wear makeup— not
a curler in years. The
even lipstick— and that their hair hadn't seen
burlap clothes really nuts. Baez seemed to defy feminine
made them
conventions at every turn her house —
was "squahd," and while Time
insistedon pointing out that she was "palpably nubile," they were
singing. Worst of
surprised to note that there was "htde sex" in her
taking part in "peace marches and
aU, she was "earnestly poHtical,"

ban-the-bomb campaigns" and also championing civil rights for

even while
black people. But the magazine had to acknowledge,
Baez "speaks to her generation" and was
being stupefied by it, that
enormously popular with young people, especiaUy coUege students.
The folk music revival became so popular that ABC tried to cash

in on It in 1963 and 1964 with the TV show Hootenanny, which fea-

tured hve performances taped at college campuses

around the coun-

try And here we saw another female folk singer,

more of a crossover
Her hair was Hke a sheet of
artist than Baez, more of a compromise.
platinum, straight, blunt cut, unteased. She dressed simply the way I

imagined the really cool girls m Greenwich Village did, m solid color

sweaters and skirts: no spike heels, no sequins, no crinohnes, no

aquamarine eyeshadow. We began to hear her voice, perfectly

blended with her partners', singing about war, peace, and social jus-

tice. Her name was Mary Travers, and the

group she was part of,

Peter,Paul, and Mary helped popularize the folk music revival of the

1960s well beyond the ivied walls of colleges and universities.

They
became the most popular pop acoustic group of the 1960s. The
"new" form of music they sang, the protest song, was, of course, not
new at all, but after "Duke of Earl" or Paul Petersen's "She Can't
Find Her Keys," it seemed revolutionary. The music that had
been

suppressed aU too hystericaUy by blacklisting in the 1950s was

now a
commercial gusher. Within a year of their debut, Peter, Paul, and

Mary had had three major hits, aU of them politicaUy oppositional:

"Lemon Tree," "If I Had a Hammer" (which hit number two on the
148 Where the Girls Are

singles charts), and "Blowin' in the Wind." Their debut album —one
of the top ten sellers in 1 962 —went platinum, having sold over a

million copies. Also in the top ten was the Kingston Trio's College
Concert, which featured their antiwar hit "Where Have All the Flow-
ers Gone."
Mary, with her striking good looks and strong, arresting voice,
had more to say to us girls than some allegorical stuff about magic
dragons. She told us that we had a right —even a duty — to express

and act on our sense of political outrage. Most important for the

times, she sang harmoniously with men, and did not threaten exist-

ing conventions about the importance of female gentleness when

engaging in political commentary. Nonetheless, she sang with obvi-
ous commitment, force, and carefully modulated indignation. She
was a highly energetic and passionate performer, who broke the rules
for girl singers by stomping her foot and whipping her platinum hair
from side to side as she sang.^ Mary, more than the more outspoken
and defiant Baez, embodied the contradictory position of the young
woman committed to fight for social justice. She could be a pacifist,

an advocate for desegregation, an opponent of government miH-

tarism and mindless materialism; these aspects of American society
she could publicly reject, as long as she looked the part.
What she could not reject completely, if she wanted acceptance
for herself and her message, were equally well-established norms
about female behavior and appearance. But she could undermine
them, making them seem frivolous and unnecessary, and that's

exactly what young female folk singers with their plain clothes,
strong voices, and indifference to lipstick did. They made it clear that

you could ignore the fashion industry, regard cosmetics as ridiculous,

and still be cool. They showed that being female and being political

were not mutually exclusive; in fact, they were complementary. And

they made this critically important, if subtle, link: that challenging
norms about femininity itself was, in fact, political.

Mary Travers stood out in the early 1960s; she Avas one of the few
women in a field dominated by men. After all, unlike girl group
 m

Throwing Out Our Bras 149

music, the folk revival movement wore its seriousness and self-
importance like a black armband. You didn't dance to this music; you
read Bertrand Russell to it, or discussed the existence of God, or

tried toimplement the principles of the Port Huron statement —

other words, did men's work. Joan Baez (who often toured with Bob
Dylan), Mary Travers, and their colleagues put another female icon
—
on the pop culture landscape the pohtically conscious young
woman unwavering in her determination to rectify social ills. So at

the same time that young women could try on sexual rebellion as

they sang along with the girl groups, they could try^ on pohtical

rebellion as they sang along with these women, and men, ot the folk

revival.

Singing along with the Beades also made us, their devoted female
followers, more comfortable with challenging authority in a more
pohtically informed fashion than breaching pohce barricades to try

to touch Pango's hair. In 1967, we listened in amazement to 5^f.

Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, bursting with references to mari-

juana, LSD, and sexual ecstasy, and filled with critiques of the spiri-
tual emptiness and stupidity of adult, middle-class society. By 1968,

we weren't chasing after the Beades in the streets, them as regarding

love objects; we were taking their poHtics to heart, regarding them as

pohtical role models and cukural gurus as we sang along with "Rev-
olution." Inside our heads now, embedded in lyrics envisioning the

overthrow of the existing society and the birth of a new one, was a

new persona, a pohtically defiant girl.

Although 1968, I hesitate to remind you, saw the rise of one of
the most loathsome genres of pop music ever, bubble gum ("Yummy,
Yummy, Yummy, Got Love
I've in My Tummy"), for the most part

rock and pop music was more pohtical than ever, attacking mih-
tarism, materiahsm, and sexual repression. It made girls hke me
receptive to the kind of rebellion we would see in Adantic City in

1968. Yet even as rock was radicalizing its female hsteners, the music
was becoming remascuhnized. Girl groups, except for the
itself

Supremes (who had gone Vegas anyhow), were a thing of the past.
 — —
150 Where the Girls Are

The emphasis on the electric guitar and drums, and male virtuosity
in playing them, which included smashing them and playing them
with your teeth, excluded women, and elevated Jimi Hendrix, the
Doors, Cream, and the Who to stardom. A few women broke
through, most notably Janisjoplin, who, when I saw her, drank about
three quarts of bourbon onstage, cursed at the security guards, and
sang her guts out. From "Eve of Destruction" to "White Rabbit" to
"For What It's Worth" to "Handsome Johnny" to "Alice's Restau-
rant," rock music, dominated as it was by young men who seemed to
have Bigfoot's sweat socks stuffed in their crotches, nonetheless rein-
forced young women's anger at the way the world was being run.
Music was so central to our lives because it seemed to tell "the
truth." We hungered for "the truth" not only because of the sludge
that dominated the prime-time television schedule Gentle Ben, The
Lawrence Welk Show, Gomer Pyle, and The Newlyived Game. We hun-
gered for the truth because the other person we saw all too much of
on TV, our weasel-faced president, was turning out to be a colossal,

intransigent har, and what he was lying to us about was Vietnam.

This didn't just matter to young men; it mattered to all of us with
brothers, boyfriends, and friends. In July 1965, Johnson doubled the
monthly draft calls, so now my friends' older brothers were getting
sent over there. When one came back in a casket, his face swollen
from malaria, I knew that I didn't know enough about the war yet,

except that I hated it. And as I watched the news, which I did now
with increased attention, I saw that thousands of young people
around the country, including young women, hated the war too, and
were taking to the streets to try to stop it. The reverberations
between the news and our music accelerated, so that the real com-
mentary to the images we saw wasn't what the newsman said, it was
the lyrics to "For What It's Worth."
What I didn't know then, from either the news or rock music
in fact, what most people didn't know until the Miss America

demonstration —was that there were young women in the country

furious not just about the war and racism but also about the way they,
 Throwing Out Our Bras 151

as women, were treated. And behind the scenes, out of the camera's

eye, they began organizmg.*^ These were young women who had
busted their asses — indeed, risked their Hves — for organizations Hke

SNCC, only to be told by Stokely Carmichael that "the only posi-

women in SNCC is prone."
tion for Similar directives were given to

young women active m SDS and the movement w^ho wanted

antiwar

to do more than run mimeograph machines and make coffee. Their

enlightened, New Left m.ale comrades told these young women that
what they needed was a good screw. These were sentiments right out
of a crotch novel or Rolling Stones song. The fault Hne between
coming of age during an era of rising expectations — for young peo-
ple, for blacks, for the society as a whole —and being told that your

expectations couldn't rise simply because you didn't have a penis, this

fault line burst apart for these women.

Being treated like a cross between Pussy Galore and Hazel made
these young, radical women snap: media stereotypes were stranghng
their goalsand ambitions. So they singled out the dominant media
imagery of women for attack. Through the underground newspa-
pers and newsletters, as well as the conferences of the New Left,
these women developed their own communications networks that
conveyed information about the status of women deeply antagonis-
tic to what Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and the Miss America pageant pre-
sented.^" These networks were crucial to feminist organizing, and to
spreading the word that there were w^omen around the country sick

of being told they should be a combination of Brigitte Bardot,

Donna Reed, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Taking the offensive against
the virgin/whore and good mom/evil mom oppositions that women
were supposed to navigate, these radical young women started to

think that they might not have to gloss over these contradictions (as

they had been sociahzed to do) but that they could, instead, ride full
tilt against them.

While feminist activism was going on out of the camera's eye, the

media spotHght, especially that of the news media and the rock music
scene, offered daily evidence that young women were getting as
152 Where the Girls Are

physically unruly, as politically rebellious, as sexually unconstrained,

and as high as young men. The discrepancies between the images of
young women we saw in magazines and ads and the images we saw
of them on the nightly news had never been more stark. Advertisers
defined the emancipated woman as one who wore miniskirts, paper
dresses, and Rudi Gernreich bathing suits, a sort of James Bond girl
who was sexually hberated, meaning she was willing and available, if
not downright promiscuous. Even worse was their version of the
"natural look." Joan Baez's version was simple: you stopped wearing
makeup and trying to make your hair defy the laws of physics. But
you can't keep a cosmetics and hair-care industry going this way.
Madison Avenue's "natural look," promoted through pouty, air-
brushed models, urged women to look Hke htde girls in short skirts,

Mary Jane shoes, white tights, long, straight (often ironed) hair, and
big, wide eyes. Products such as Love's Baby Soft, with its model
sucking provocatively on something cyUndrical, expHcitly promoted
the pHant, innocent baby-doll image designed, it seems, on the pre-
sumption men are really pedophiles at heart. This imagery infan-
that

tihzed women and exhorted us to embrace, more than ever, the

desire to be attractive and gazed upon favorably by men. ImpHed in
this definition was that women in the streets, whether protesting or
just walking, were to be seen but not heard; our purpose was to
provide erotic stimuli for "girl watchers" and to quietly, privately,
consume products such as feminine hygiene sprays and champagne-
flavored douches that would prepare us for intercourse with men. As
an ad for one such product put it, "Woman's new freedom — Pristeen
is part of it."
Colliding with this LoHta image, of woman as an innocent
preschooler who loved sex, were the all too real and wrenching
events of 1968 that made innocence a thing of the past, and that fea-
tured thousands of rebellious, defiant, pohtically infuriated young
women who talked back, got arrested, and went to jail. No year, in
my Hfetime, was more tumultuous. Exhilarating, infuriating, full of
hope, full of despair, 1968 had me on a constant psychic yo-yo.
 Throwing Out Our Bras 153

When the string was up, it left me feehng that my generation could

change the world permanently for the better, ending the regimenta-

tion, hypocrisy and ahenation that seemed to trap all too many peo-
ple. I know this sounds naive now, but we really believed this back

then, and I'm glad we did. Then the string would snap down, and I

was convinced that our destiny was utterly out of our control and in
the hands of Satan himself, working through LBJ, the Chicago
poHce, and General Westmoreland. I felt this range of intense feehngs

not out in the streets but m my living room, watching history trans-
mitted to me over the television. I was not yet in college in the spring
and summer of 1968; I wasn't a member of any of the various oppo-

sitional pohtical groups that organized against and did batde with
government authorities. I was, Hke the vast majority of young peo-

ple, still only a spectator. Yet spectatorship m 1968 —even in the con-

fines of your own home —was a poHticizing activity.

Dr.
Just think about what we saw in this one year. In January,
Spock, who had helped our mothers raise us, was indicted for "aid-

ing and abetting" draft evasion. In February we watched the Tet

Offensive on TV, which suggested that maybe Vietnam wasn't going

to be the Sunday football game rout the president and the Pentagon

had assured us it would. On March 12, Eugene McCarthy won the

New Hampshire primary, and four days later, Bobby Kennedy
declared his candidacy for president. Just two weeks after this, in what
Ithought would be yet another he-filled address to the nation, Lyn-
don Johnson stunned us all by announcing that he was stepping down
from the presidency when his term expired. The elation I felt over

this blockbuster development lasted exactly four days until, at 6:00

P.M. on April 4 — just in time for the nightly news —Martin Luther
King was assassinated.

Less than three weeks after this disaster, on April 23, somewhere
between 800 and 1,000 students at Columbia barricaded themselves
inside campus buildings to protest the university's ties to the Pen-

tagon and itsongoing appropriation of poor, residential neighbor-

hoods in upper Manhattan. The takeover ended the next week when
154 Where the Girls Are

1,000 cops stormed the buildings, arresting 700 college kids and
injuring at least 150 of them. And it was only five weeks later that we
watched those sickening images of Bobby Kennedy lying on the floor
of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, his wife cradHng his bloody
head in her lap.

What did we
get mstead of Martin Luther King, Gene McCarthy,
and Bobby Kennedy? Well, we got a full-blown, televised poHce riot
at the Democratic convention in Chicago, where we watched cops

bashing in the heads of college kids, journahsts, and bystanders. I

remember so vividly hearing the demonstrators chanting to the
cops, "The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching!"
and thinking surely make a difference, to have such state-
this will

sanctioned violence exposed. It made no difference at all, of course,

except to make people Hke me more cynical and resigned than we
already were, and certainly less willing to trust or obey white male
authority figures. The year that had started with such hope ended
with Tricky Dick, his sad, robotic wife, and prissy insufferable
daughters, as well as the most repulsive man ever to achieve high
office, Spiro Agnew, all in the White House. As a result of viewing all

this, I adopted two basic precepts. The first was that America was not
a democracy at all, and that some people and interests were much
more equal than others. The other was that the status quo was inhu-
mane and monstrous. As I say I wasn't a feminist yet, but, in retro-
spect, it is clear where
and millions of others were heading.
I

The pubHc activism of young people was one of the biggest

ongoing stories of 1968. After all, between January and June of that
year alone, there were 221 major demonstrations at 101 colleges and
universities involving some 39,000 students. ^^ PubHc demonstrations
were automatically newsworthy because they provided news organi-
zations with provocative pictures, they represented conflict, and they
sometimes produced and violence, two of the news media's
arrests

yardsticks for determining whether an event merited coverage. But

precisely because of such criteria, and the news media's ingrained
 —
Throwing Out Our Bras 155

preference for covering events rather than explaining underlying

causes or processes, their desire to identify leaders and spokesmen
even in groups that refuse to have them, and their insistence that
there are two sides —no more, no less — to every news story, such
coverage was a mixed blessing for the young people of the New Left.
It would prove to be a mixed blessing for feminists as well.

When feminists staged their own demonstrations, they encoun-

tered not just deeply entrenched journaUstic conventions but also the
more recently established routines and biases shaping the coverage of
social movements and demonstrations. By the time of the Miss

America demonstration, certain precedents in the press coverage of

dissent were well-established. The news media cast the protests of

young people as simultaneously dangerous and ineffectual, deeply

subversive yet of Httle consequence. Solemn references to "Commu-

nist elements" and constant reliance on two incendiary images
burning draft cards and Vietcong flags —were intermixed with
dismissive comments Hke this wrap-up from CBS's Bruce Morton:
"Most people have doubts be changed on
that U.S. foreign policy can

the streets."^- The New York Times and CBS, by turns, emphasized the
extremism of antiwar demonstrators yet ridiculed their beards and
blue jeans as signs that they were nothing more than naive, style-

over-substance poseurs. The "other side" the media gave time to

were often ultraright-wing types, as if there was some equivalence
between their poHtics and those of kids trying to stop the war.^^
News organizations habitually minimized the movement's num-
bers, its effectiveness, and its motivations, and acted as if it was as far
from mainstream America as Joseph Stalin. Reporters were used to
deahng with leaders and spokesmen — that's what the government
trotted out —and when deeply nonhierarchical organizations Hke
SDS refused to name someone as "head," the media anointed leaders
on their own, which was deeply divisive to the internal operations of
SDS. The important precedent was that the news media routinely
divided the antiwar movement into what Todd GitHn termed "legit-
156 Where the Girls Are

imate main acts and illegitimate sideshows," meaning the moderate,

conciliatory positions worth Hstening to and all the rest that the news
media indicated were not.^"^ Yet despite all this, or maybe even
because of —
it I know for a fact that some young people watching
this coverage were throwing tie-dyed T-shirts at their TV sets—thou-
sands of new converts joined SDS and other groups, or organized
demonstrations of their own.
The treatment of the Miss America protest made it clear that the
media coverage of the women's movement would be strikingly simi-
lar to that of the antiwar movement. But where women were

involved, there were some extra, important touches. How feminists

used, or failed to use, their faces and their bodies, and the extent to
which their faces and bodies conformed to those in a Max Factor ad,
were central features of the coverage. If these girls were out on the
streets and swinging bras around, why, they must be closet exhibi-
tionists, narcissists, or simply hysterical, and language that suggested
witchcraft or secret cults resonated darkly with the magical powers o^
sitcom characters. The media also paid inordinate attention to the

way feminists violated physical and social boundaries, and suggested

that, by doing so, they were making spectacles of themselves, just as

Beatles fans had done a few years earher. Feminists were cast as

unfeminine, unappeaHng women who were denouncing the impor-

tance of the male gaze, yet who secretly coveted that gaze for them-
selves by protesting in pubhc. These poor girls, it was suggested,
sought to get through poKtical flamboyance what they were unable to
get through physical attractiveness.
It was not just what was said to or about women in the media that
was important; news stories and TV shows were structured so that
feminism was positioned as deviant. The standards by which some-
thing was judged newsworthy were, in fact, deeply mascuHne. The

emphases on conflict in the pubUc sphere, on crime, on dramatic

pubhc events rather than behind-the-scenes processes, on the indi-
vidual rather than the group, and on competition rather than coop-
eration all biased the news toward mascuHne pubhc enterprise. The
 Throwing Out Our Bras 157

public sphere was defined, visually and rhetorically, as the place

where men make history. The news also exploited the highly emo-
tional as spectacle w^hile denigrating overly emotional commentars'

about events as not objective and therefore invalid. Because of these

journaHstic conventions, the only places any female had in the news
were as victim, hysteric, sex object, or wife of a prominent man. In
other words, the desire to make news, and the act oi doing so, two
impulses considered perfectly natural in men, rendered feminists as

deviant, no longer feminine but not quite mascuHne either. The

overwhelmingly dismissive coverage of the \\omen's movement that

followed was in many ways inevitable.

These biases, of course, were reinforced by the structures of the

news organizations themselves, which were rigidly hierarchical and
male-dominated. In the late 1960s, women jour naHsts were confined
to wTiting about spring hats and thirts'-one new ways to cook squash,
or they were researchers for male reporters, and they were rarely seen
on television except as weather girls. Women trying to break out of

these confines faced enormous pressures to conform to how the boys

did things, and they also faced editors and pubHshers deeply hostile to
the women's movement.
Perhaps one reason that the Miss America demonstration is not

remembered as frequently as it should be is that it happened amidst

the swirl of so many shocking events in 1968. Yet retrospectives today

on the late 1960s seem all too eager to show young girls smoking pot
and dancing partially clad at love-ins while they completely ignore
Atlantic Cit>^ in September. But anyone who cares about the sick
proHferation of the anorexic body as the ideal for all women, or who
is tired of the constant equation between crow's-feet and female
worthlessness, should keep the memors^ of this protest aHve and well,

for us and for future generations. Robin Morgan and her organiza-

tion, the New York Radical Women, took direct aim at w^hat they

called "the degrading mindless-boob-girHe symbol" so prevalent in

the media and decried the "ludicrous 'beaurv'' standards we ourselves

are conditioned to take seriously." They also attacked "the unbeatable

158 Where the Girls Are

madonna-whore combination" and the mixed messages women had

been sociaHzed to internaHze. "To win approval, we must be both
sexy and wholesome, deHcate but able to cope, demure yet titillat-

ingly bitchy . . . Miss America and Playboys centerfolds are sisters

over the skin."^^
Yet the New York Radical Women were in a tricky position — as
femimsts have been ever since — because they needed the same media
oudets that they were attacking. If the movement was to grow, its

existence and goals would have to be

pubHcized through the news.
Radical feminists were extremely wary about the kind of coverage
they would get; one fear was that it would drive women away. Robin
Morgan successfully used the extensive media contacts she still had
from her child-actress days to give the press advance notice of the
protest, but once reporters got to Atlantic City, the version of femi-
nism viewers and readers got would be theirs, not hers.
New York Timess coverage of the protest in Adantic City
77?^

indicated how the women's movement would be framed by the news

media over the next five years, and some female journaHsts were just
as disiTQssive as their male counterparts. Times reporter Charlotte
Curtis, emphasizing what she saw as thesewomen's desperate need
for attention, observed, "Television and news photographers were
allowed and even encouraged to photograph the pickets, and the
women escalated their activities when the cameramen arrived."
. . .

The women refused to talk to men, including male reporters. "Miss

Kathy Amatnick [sic], one of the younger women, caught her 65-
year-old grandmother, Mrs. Martha BerHn, talking with a male
observer and shouted at her to stop. 'You mustn't do that,' Miss
Amatnick may have been on to something; her last
cried." ^^ (She
name, Amatniek, was misspelled by the newspaper of record.) What
Curtis failed to report was that one of the main poHtical goals of the
action was to force the media to hire more women to cover hard
news stories, and to get men to see what it felt Hke to be second-class
citizens. Curtis did make a point of describing the protesters' clothes
and emphasized that the demonstration was observed by "about 650
 Throwing Out Our Bras 159

generally unsympathetic spectators." She also devoted a paragraph to

a counterdemonstration staged by only three women. Curtis also felt
obHged to pomt out that the sixty-five pickets who came from New
York arrived m buses driven "by male drivers." This fact, completely

irrelevant to the story, impHed that the women were more than
happy to be dependent on men when it was convenient, and that

their convictions were not particularly deep or strong.

Throughout the article, the demonstrators were made to appear

ridiculous, frivolous, and hypocritical. All the women's charges about

sexism in the United States were placed in quotation marks, suggesting
that these were merely the deluded hallucinations of a few ugly angry

women rather than a fact of Hfe. The demonstrators' rhetoric was cast

as highly inflated and thus absurd, and their complaints about female
oppression seen as representing a wacky, self-seeking, publicity-hungry

fringe of distinctly unrepresentative women. So the women who were

protesting the public exhibition of women's bodies were themselves
cast as nothing more than needy exhibitiomsts. The contrast was stark:

Miss America contestants, beautiful, docile, and compliant, who

eagerly sought out and competed for the male gaze, deserved their day

in the pubKc spotlight; the demonstrators, unruly rebellious, excessive,

who attacked the institutionalization of male voyeurism, did not.
In this way the protesters played into —
as some of them feared

they would — the media's love of conflict, especially among women,

and the image of feminists as hostfle to other women began to crys-

tallize. Yet even as these early feminist activists despaired over their

new image as storm troopers jealous of pretty women, they quickly

saw another immediate result of this dismissive coverage: it promoted
female soHdarity. In the aftermath of the Adantic City protest. New
York Radical Women was flooded with new members, and other
'

feminist organizations were founded around the country.

One year later, Newsweek would describe the Miss America
demonstration as one in which 150 women "gathered in front of

Convention Hall and burned their brassieres," even though no bra

burning had occurred in Adantic City.^^ But bra burning had
160 Where the Girls Are

become the news peg for media coverage of the women's movement,
a metaphor that triviahzed feminists and titillated the audience at the
same time. For the press, burning bras was
segue from burn-
a natural
ing draft cards. It fit dominant media frame about women's
into the
liberation and equated the women's movement with exhibitionism
and narcissism, as if women who unstrapped their breasts were
unleashing their sexuahty in a way that was unseemly, laughable, and
poHtically inconsequential, yet dangerous. Women who threw their
bras away may have said they were challenging sexism, but the media,
with a wink, hinted that these women's motives were not at all poHt-
ical but rather personal: to be trendy and to attract men.
Even for those of us who didn't recognize it at the time, 1968 was
a turning point. All the prefeminist glimmerings in girl group music,
Beademania, perky teens, and women with magical powers, the
exhortations to make something of ourselves and change the world,
and the image of the poHtical woman we first saw in Joan Baez and
Mary Travers —
these shards started coming together and magnified
one another during 1968. The acceptance by miUions of us of some
version of femimst ideology was a fitful process during which we

began questioning, rethinking, and revising our sense of what it

— —
meant or ought to mean to be an American woman. Baby
boomers' sense of being part of something bigger would begin to
shape not just a social identity but a poHtical identity, and one with
poHtical consequences. The
process began accelerating in 1968 as
many of us developed deep antipathy and contempt for the status
a
quo and an inflated sense of our mission to reject it. And then, for a
brief moment on the TV screen, there were these women, charging
that what completely undergirded that hideous status quo was the
subordination and objectification of women.
The standard histories of the women's movement cite the expe-
riences of women in the civil rights movement and the New Left, as
weU as the women of the National Organization for Women, as the
essential —and often the only — histories of feminism that matter. No
one disputes that the pathbreaking work of these women was critical
 —
Throwing Out Our Bras 161

to launching a women's liberation movement in the United States.

But those of us in the audience mattered too, even we rebounded

as

between Mary Travers and Lyndon Johnson, Robm Morgan and

Miss America, John Lennon and Tricia Nixon. Without us, there

would have been no movement. And our struggling prefeminist per-

sona, the one who wanted to "Tell Him," the one who coveted

Samantha's power, and the one who belted out "If I Had a Hammer,"
was gaining strength and chutzpah. With those two voices in our

heads, and in the mass media, getting louder and more insistent

"You're equal," "No, you're subordinate" —we were finding the ten-

sion unbearable. But in 1968, the voice for equality was starting to

get the upper hand.

 7 i fl

Am Hear h Eoai
J ffoBiaii,

August 26, 1970, Howard K. Smith, the anchorman at ABC

On News, smirked sHghtly and read the following lead-in to one of
the day's major stories: "Quote. Three things have been difficult
to tame. The ocean, fools, and women. We may soon be able to tame
the ocean, but fools and women will take a little longer. Unquote."

In case viewers missed the gist of the quip, the text of the quotation
was projected to the right of Smith on the screen. He continued.
"The man who made that statement is Spiro Agnew. He is now tour-
ing Asia, wisely, because today all over this nation, the women's lib-

eration movement is marking the fiftieth anniversary of women

gaining the vote by demonstrations and strikes." This was the lead-in
to ABC's coverage of the Women's Strike for EquaUty, the largest

demonstration in American history up to that time for women's

rights. Opening with such a dismissive Httle epigram from the official

verbal hit man and all-around sleazeball — oh, pardon me, vice presi-

dent —of the Nixon administration. Smith was able to frame ABC's
coverage of the strike with considerable condescension while absolv-
ing himself and the network of responsibihty for such an obviously
neanderthal remark. After airing the reports of several correspon-
dents from around the country. Smith ended the segment by quoting
West Virginia Senator Jennings Randolph, who characterized the

women's movement as "a small band of bra-less bubbleheads." The

last thing the viewer saw was the phrase "bra-less bubbleheads" pro-
164 Where the Girls Are

jected on the right portion of the screen. Kinda made you wanna
join right up.
Over on CBS, also spurred by the strike, Eric Sevareid, the TV
commentator I screamed at most in the early 1970s, dedicated his
evening's commentary to the women's movement. He opened by
noting that "no husband ever won an argument with a wife, and the
secret of a happy marriage is for the man to repeat those three Htde
words, was wrong.' " Dismissing the movement
'I as led by "aroused
minorities . . . who are already well off by any comparative measure-
ment," Sevareid asserted that "the plain truth is, most American men
are startled by the idea that American women generally are
oppressed, and they read with reHef the Gallup poll that two-thirds of
women don't think they're oppressed either." Reflecting again on the
evolution of social movements, he observed, "Many movements
grow by simple contagion, thousands discovering they are in pain,
though they hadn't noticed it until they were told." After some fur-
ther commentary about how difficult it was to think of women sim-
ply as people, he concluded by lecturing, "As for the organized
movement itself, it remains to be seen whether it will
unify and
remain effective, or will fragment into quarreHng, doctrinal groups
Hke the far left student movement and the black movement. It now
has the unavoidable opportunity to prove that the mascuhne notion
that women can't get along with other women is another item from
the ancient shelf of male mythology." The camera then switched to
Walter Cronkite, who added with his usual finahty, "And that's the
way it is."

These
are just two excerpts from the extensive coverage the

women's Hberation movement received in 1970, but they are typical

of how the news media framed what was and continues to be, by
almost any measure, one of the most consequential social movements
of the twentieth century Aside from the big yucks the gents shared
over "bra-less bubbleheads" and the Agnew quotation, words such as
contagion likened feminism to a social disease, and there was incessant
emphasis on the divisions, real or imagined, within the movement.
 I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar 165

The news media's stereotypes about feminism —which flattened this

complex, rich, multipronged, and often contradictory movement

into a cardboard caricature —were of urgent concern to feminist
organizers, since most womenlearned about the movement
first

through the media. "Rage would not be too strong a word to

^

describe the emotion felt by large numbers of feminists about the

media's coverage of the women's movement," noted the first chroni-

clers of the movement, Judith Hole and Ellen Levine, in 1971." And
though rage was exactly the correct response, it should not have been
the only response. For what is provocative here is that despite this

coverage — perhaps even because of it— increasing numbers of

women, and men, came to support varying versions of feminist ide-

ology, and to change their aspirations and their Hves accordingly.

Membership in NOW, to pick only one example and the most main-
stream of the feminist organizations, skyrocketed from 1,200 in 1967
to 48,000 in 1974, with 700 chapters in the United States and nine
other countries. By 1972, the movement had an anthem Helen —
Reddy's "I Am Woman" — which went gold, hit number one on the
charts, and won Reddy a Grammy
There is no doubt that the news media of the early 1970s played

an absolutely central role in turning feminism into a dirty word, and

stereotyping the feminist as a hairy-legged, karate-chopping com-
mando with a chip on her shoulder the size of China, really bad
clothes, and a complete inability to smile — let alone laugh. But
at the same time, by treating the women's Hberation movement as a

big story, the news media also brought millions of converts to femi-
nism, even if the version many women came to embrace was a shriv-

eled compromise of what others had hoped was possible. And while
some stories were shockingly derisive, others were sympathetic.
Many reports were ambivalent and confused, taking feminism seri-

ously one minute, mocking it the next. In this way, the news media
exacerbated quite keenly the profound cultural schizophrenia about
women's place in society that had been building since the 1940s
and 1950s.
166 Where the Girls Are

In 1970, the women's liberation movement burst onto the

national agenda. It would not be an exaggeration to say, even with
everything else going on then, that this was the story of the year. And
in the capable hands of our nation's highly objective journalists, the
women's liberation movement seemed to come out of nowhere — or,

more frequently, from Pluto. The movement fit the criteria of news-
worthiness perfectly. People were demonstrating in the streets, they
were charging that America was not the democratic, egalitarian oasis
its mythology said it was, they were saying and doing outrageous
things, and they were women. The protesters clashed starkly with
the women elsewhere on TV: young, perfectly groomed, always
smiHng, never complaining, demure, eager to please, eager to con-
sume. Unlike Katy Winters, who urged us to be cool, calm, and col-
lected in all those revolting Secret commercials, these women were
angry; they yelled, argued, and accused; they raised their fists and
shook them; and they mounted a full-scale attack against Madison
Avenue and the prevailing media stereotypes of women. They vio-
lated the nation's most sacred conceits about love, marriage, the fam-
ily, and femininity. They denounced illegal, back-alley abortions, a
previously taboo subject, as a form of butchery that had to stop. They
talked back to men, invaded their bars and clubs, and even challenged
the very fabric of American language, coining terms such as sexism
and male chauvinism while exposing the gender biases in the words
mankind, chairman, and chick, to name just a few. They insisted that
"the personal is poHtical," that motherhood, marriage, sexual behav-
ior, and dress codes all had to be considered symptoms of a broader
political and social system that kept women down.^ This was news.
After 1970, there was simply
no going back.
Consider what happened in this one year.^ Women charged
Newsweek magazine with sex discrimination in hiring and promo-
tion, and their sisters over at the competition filed a similar suit with
the New York State Division of Human Rights against Time Inc. In
March alone, over one hundred feminists staged an eleven-hour sit-

in at the Ladies' Home Journal, NBC and CBS each ran a multipart
 / Am Woman, Hear Me Roar 167

series on the women's movement on their nightly newscasts, Time

printed a special report called "The War on 'Sexism' " (they still felt
compelled to put the offending word in quotation marks), and Tlte
New York Times Magazine ran a major article by Susan Brownmiller
titled "Sisterhood Is The Times magazine also ran articles
Powerful."
that vear on the Equal Paghts Amendment, on Bettv^ Friedan, and on
whether there were biologically determined sex differences between
men and women. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics became the most
talked about best-seller of the year, and Millett herself appeared on
the cover of Time.
August was another landmark month. On the third, the U.S. Jus-

tice Department, prodded by outraged female workers, filed suit

against the Libbey-Owens-Ford Company of Toledo, Ohio — the

department's first suit against sex discrimination in the workplace. A

week later, on August 10, the House of Representatives, prompted

by the briUiant tactical work o( Representative Martha Griffiths (D-

Michigan), passed the ERA. Two weeks after that, on August 26, the
Women's Strike for Equality^ took place in cities around the country.
And the Ladies' Home Journal included in its August issue an eight-
page supplement titled "The New Feminism," written by some of
the women who had occupied the Journal's offices five months ear-

Her. Stickers reading "This Ad Insults Women" appeared on bill-

boards, subway posters, and the sides of buses. Bella Abzug was
elected to Congress; Shirley Chisholm was reelected. Hawaii and
New York State liberaHzed their abortion laws. Feminists began
appearing on talk shows, Gloria Steinem or Germaine Greer debat-
ing the hkes of Hugh Hefner or William F Buckley, Jr. And Tlie Mary
Tyler Moore Show premiered in September, noteworthy because,
despite its overly accommodating and comphant heroine who said

"oh geez, oh golly" too much (not to mention "Oh, Mr. Grant"), it

actually featured a single woman on her own without a steady

boyfriend and with a steady job.
The watershed year of 1970 actually began in November 1969,
when Time became the first mass magazine to feature a major article
 —
168 Where the Girls Are

on the movement.^ It was written by Ruth Brine, one of the few

female contributing editors at the magazine, who was also (the pub-
lisher's note hastened to emphasize) a mother of three, as if this

ensured her objectivity and immunized her against contamination

from this latest ideological plague. Headhned "The New Feminists:

Revolt Against 'Sexism' " and placed in the "Behavior" section of

the magazine, the article oscillated wildly between dismissive ridicule
and legitimation of certain feminist grievances. Thus it was typical of
the schizoid coverage of feminism. Brine suggested that the move-
ment was highly derivative, its activities and its charges of oppression
"all borrowed, of course, from the fiery rhetoric of today's mihtant
black and student movements." The implication, often repeated else-
where, was that this was a copycat movement, a frivolous imitation,

with no genuine basis in true oppression, true hardship.

Labehng feminists as, simply, "the angries," Brine observed,

"Many of the new feminists are surprisingly violent in mood, and
seem to be trying, in fact, to repel other women rather than attract

them." It went without saying —and so, of course, it had to be said

that feminists "burn brassieres." The most prominent image of femi-

nism, a seemingly required illustration for any article on the topic,
and one brandished here, was a photograph of women learning
karate, to signify the movement's deadly seriousness and its hostiHty
toward men and femininity. This was a famiHar, and deliberate, jour-
naHstic strategy. As the journalist Susan Brownmiller described it,

male editors would insist, succinctly, "Get the bra burning and the
karate up front."^ "Soon," Brine predicted, "we may expect legions
of female firemen, airHne pilots, sanitation men and front-line sol-
diers (although anthopologist Margaret Mead thinks that they would
be too fierce.)" Yet despite this alleged fierceness, the article empha-
sized that "women themselves do not, in truth, have a record of soar-
ing achievement." The message was clear: women were, by nature, a
bunch of incompetents who, if you gave them just a Httle power,

would turn into megalomaniacs and become as lethal as Snow

White's wicked stepmother.
 I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar 169

The story also suggested that women had to be brainwashed m

order to become part of the movement. This, too, was a common
theme, that feminists, Hke the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers,

cannibalized perfectly happy women and turned them into inhuman

aliens. Young w^omen were especially "fertile ground for the seeds of
discontent" that were sown in consciousness-raising groups. Accord-
ing to Time, these were "rap sessions" in which women "drum their
second-class status mto each other by testifying to various indigni-
ties." Radical feminists "soon attracted a number of women who

otherwise had no radical leanings at all. The latest recruits include

factory workers, high school girls, a number of discontented house-
wives, and even a coven [!] or two of grandmothers." The discourse
of invasion recurred over and over again, resonating with the still

powerful anti-Communist rhetoric of the cold war. Brine described

the "radical wing of Women's Liberation" as consisting of "groups,

or cells, which constantly split and multiply in a sort of mitosis." One

could readily imagine a sci-fi horror film, "Invasion of the Mutant
Feminist Bitches" against whom conventional male weaponry was
helpless.

At the same time, and in less suggestive language, the article

acknowledged that feminists "have also drawn attention to some real

problems," such as the wage gap between men and women, the lack
of decent day care, and the fact that two-thirds of the women who
worked did so because they needed the money. In a small sidebar,

highlighted in pink, Time listed a series of statistics documenting

women's low salaries and their underrepresentation in business, the

professions, and poHtics. Like virtually every other mainstream news

organization. Time legitimated Hberal feminism's charges about eco-
nomic discrimination. For one thing, the statistics were irrefutable.

But, also, the news media embraced the conceit that the United
States was a society of equal opportunity, and where it wasn't it had
to change, especially after prodding firom a sanctimonious, and often
hypocritical, press. "Equal pay for equal work" was a slogan quickly
accepted by many journaHsts as a reasonable and moderate goal; it
170 Where the Girls Are

was a concrete, measurable reform, it built on the rhetoric of democ-

racy, and it suggested that women could be integrated into male jobs
without insisting that they would. "Equal pay for equal work" was
also handy for journaHsts: they could affirm show they weren't
it to

sexists, then use that support to marginalize other, more sweeping

feminist critiques as deviant and extreme.
Four months March 1970, Newsweek featured its own
later, in

"Special Report" story, "Women in Revolt." The cover illustration

featured a silhouette of a naked woman, her arm raised and fist
clenched, breaking through the circle and cross symbol for woman,
cracking the circle in half. The article, "Women's Lib: The War on
'Sexism,' " was initially assigned to Lynn Young, an assistant editor at

the magazine, who claimed that her male colleagues attacked it for
not being objective enough. One editor asserted, "Only a man could
portray 'the ludicrous soul of this story,' " and had a man rewrite her
article. The piece was reportedly rewritten every week for two
months before her editors decided not to run it. Then Newsweek
hired Helen Dudar, the wife of one of its senior editors and a writer
for the New York Post, to write the piece.^
Dudar's article was surprisingly sympathetic, although she rein-
forced existing metaphors, Hke the one that cast feininism as a science
project gone berserk. She wrote that "women's lib groups have mul-
tiplied like freaked-out amebas," and she found the feminists' hostility
"gravely infectious." But she also provided one of the least sensation-

alized accounts of radical feminism and wrote about women's second-

class status with passion. As a newcomer to feminism, she recorded
her own reactions to her topic. "As I sat with many of the women I

have discussed here, I was struck by how distorting the printed word
can be. On paper, most of them have sounded cold, remote, surly,
tough, and sometimes a bit daft. On encounter, they usually turned
out to be friendly, helpful, and attractive. Meeting the more eccentric
theoreticians, I found myself remembering that today's fanatics are
sometimes tomorrow's prophets." At the end of the article she admit-
ted that she had gotten a real education, that she'd had to question
 I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar 171

some very basic assumptions about her own position in life, and that

the process was deeply unsettling. Nonetheless, "the ambivalence is

gone; the distance is gone. What is left is a sense of pride and kinship
with all those women who have been asking all the hard questions. I

thank them and so, I think, will a lot of other women."

To balance this out, Xewsweek featured a one-page insert titled.

"Other Voices: How Social Scientists See Women's Lib."' This piece

was filled with the t\'pically pompous comments of primarily male

"experts'" who endorsed equal pay for equal work, but cited a range
of studies to show that, in a host of areas, femimsts were simply igno-
rant, wrongheaded, and misguided women prone to hyperbole.
(Marilyn Goldstein of Xewsday revealed to a fellow jour nahst in 1970
that whenever her paper covered the movement, one of her editors

instructed reporters to "get out there and find an authority' who'll say
this is all a crock of shit.")^ Newsweek's assortment ot dispassionate
blowholes asserted that men and women really were biologically dif-

ferent, that girls were by nature more nurturing and passive, boys
more active and aggressive. Each expert was introduced as someone
"famous," "eminent," "distinguished," and "the most knowledge-
able" in his field about sex roles. Dr. Abram Kardmer of Columbia
maintained, "From w^hat I've seen of the Hberationists, their most
conspicuous feature is self-hatred. I see tremendous vituperativeness

and lack of feehng." Dr. Man,' Calderone, "distinguished for her

work on sex education," denounced the movement "because the
women in it are mihtant, unpleasant and unfeminine."
This same mixture, grudging acknowledgment of a few feminist
critiques mfiised by a disdain for feminists themselves, characterized

TV's equally schizophrenic coverage. The CBS network began its

three-part evening news series on "the blossoming of the femimst

movement" on March 3, choosing David Culhane to cover the story.
The first installment focused on economic discrimination against
w^omen, pointing out that their median salary- was $4,000 a year,

about half that for men. Culhane noted that women were confined
to "women's jobs," such as teacher, secretary; or nurse, and discour-
172 Where the Girls Are

aged from entering the professions. He added that there were fewer
women holding Ph.D.'s in 1970 than there were in 1940. Although
women made up 51 percent of the population, they were an
"oppressed majority," a position backed up by an interview with
Betty Friedan. Then the story cut to a women's meeting in
Northridge, California, in which moderate middle-class women,
young and middle-aged, calmly discussed the dilemmas they faced.
"Most women are going to have to work as head of households to
support an entire household and taxed the same as a man," explained
one woman, "and yet paid one-third as much for identical work.
How do we make the puWic understand that this woman can't com-
pete . . . she can't compete in the labor market enough to feed her
children?" In this story we learned that women had a legitimate
point about their second-class economic status.

But when women, especially young women, showed their anger,

this was less acceptable. The story cut to Senate hearings on the safety
of the birth control which younger, more "miUtant" women had
pill,

"disrupted" by standing up and yelling at committee members.

"Women are not going to sit quietly any longer —you are murdering
us for your profit and convenience," yeUed one young woman.
Added another, "I'd like to know why is it that scientists and drug
companies are perfectly willing to use women as guinea pigs, but as

soon woman gets pregnant in one of these experiments she's

as a

treated hke a common criminal." When the chairman asked the

young women to sit down, one shot back, "No, we aren't going to sit
—
down why don't you give us some soHd answers to our questions?"
Whatever the intended effect of this footage, young women Hke
me, watching this on TV, were yelling, "Right on!" because it was so
thriUing to see women my age taking on these bloated, self-righteous
senators who thought girls should be quiet, smile, and serve tea. The
story moved on to other disorderly women demonstrating against
sex-segregated bars, and as they angrily confronted a bar's owner,
they equated having a "men only" bar with having "whites only"
facilities. After one woman was attacked by a male patron of the bar,
 I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar 173

the women discussed their need to learn how to defend themselves

physically. The last scene showed what reporters repeatedly referred

to as "militant feminists" learning judo and karate. The final image of
the story was of a woman huriing a man to the floor and pinning him
there. No one could miss the point. "MiBtant feminists," meaning
anyone more outspoken than Pat Nixon, favored brass knuckles and
Molotov cocktails as the only way to achieve women's Hberation.
The second installment opened with Walter Cronkite sitting in

front of a picture of Sigmund Freud. Those of us already sick of being

told that we suffered from "penis envy" and that our biology was our

destiny, braced ourselves for the worst whenever we saw Freud

invoked, and we were not to be disappointed here, as Cronkite
intoned, "Sigmund Freud, an expert on women if there ever was

one, said that despite his thirty years of research, he was unable to
answer one great question: What does a woman want?" (Well, Wal-
ter, he might have found out if he'd actually listened to them.) Freud
might be even more confused today, opined Cronkite, if he saw the
current "militant demonstrations" staged by women. Culhane then
opened his story with footage of the Miss America demonstration, a

protest that was anything but "militant." While he cited Playboy

Clubs as a special target of feminists, the camera zoomed in on the
jigghng cleavage of a particularly well-endowed bunny, and Culhane
described these watering holes as places "where men come to

observe remarkable displays of female pulchritude," thereby embrac-

ing the objectification of women that feminists deplored and suggest-
ing that it was, in fact, harmless. He hastened to add, however, that it

wasn't just "sour grapes" that led feminists to protest the objectifica-
tion of women's bodies. "They can and indeed have won beauty
contests," he reported, as if it was newsworthy —
and shocking to —
think that would be anything but hideously ugly, then cut
a feminist

to an interview with Alice Denham, a former model and playmate of

the month who had become a feminist.

Just when you wanted to punch Culhane in the snout, he
changed tone, reporting quite movingly on Jean Temple, a college-
174 Where the Girls Are

educated divorced mother of four in her forties who was agitating for
child-care centers because she was "unable to work and take care of
her children at the same time." Speaking of her constant worry about
her children while she was at work, and about how her family was
always on the verge of poverty, Temple said simply "My children
now have to bring themselves up." Here Culhane demonstrated how
male journalists got it about the oppression of economic discrimina-
tion and didn't get it at all about the bondage of sexual objectifica-
tion. He closed the story by delineatmg the differences between
liberal and radical feminism. The moderates wanted "equal job
opportunities, equal pay with men for the same jobs, child-care cen-
ters, and more or less unrestricted abortion." The more mihtant fem-
inist groups, however, "say even these goals are not enough." He
promised that the next report would look at the "revolutionary views
of these radical women," the word radical receiving especially heavy
emphasis.
The final segment pulled out all the stops. Several radical femi-
nists, including Ti-Grace Atkinson, Shulamith Firestone, and
Anselma dell'Oho, were interviewed by a female reporter, Conchita
Pierce. The sections of the interviews the network chose to air

focused on these women's critiques of marriage and the family as

women. As Atkinson asserted,
institutions that can't help but oppress

"If you had equahty between men and women, you couldn't have
marriage." "What would you substitute for marriage?" asked Pierce.
"What would you substitute for cancer?" Atkinson rephed. Firestone
argued that "pregnancy is barbaric" and that women should not have

to bear the burden of reproduction alone. Scientific research should

be directed toward what Culhane paraphrased as "the so-called bot-
tled baby. . . . That, of course, is one of the most radical visions of
feminism."
Here we see how vexed the relationship was between radical
feminism and the mainstream media. What radical feminists pre-
sented as revolutionary and Utopian, the mainstream media saw as a
bad acid trip. Some radical feminists refused to cooperate at all with
 I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar 175

anyone in the media, alienating women journalists who wanted to

give their views a wider hearing. Yet radical feminists were right to
be wary of media that delighted in the superficial and the shocking
because this approach endorsed reformism rather than a complete
break with the past. Ti-Grace Atkinson became a media darling
because she gave great sound bites like "Marriage means rape" or
"Love has to be destroyed." But the coverage she received used such
disembodied quotations to make radical feminists seem like crazed
freaks. Now it's true, most radical feminists were over the top in their

condemnation of patriarchy, and their pronouncements were outside

mainstream thought. But rarely did any reporter acknowledge the
thoughtful analysis, or the painful reahties for many women, that led

to such conclusions.

Culhane concluded the series in a typical way, pitting women

against women and acting as if male sexism was a completely insignif-
icant barrier to change: "So far, the women's rights movement has

had one fundamental problem; not so much to persuade men, but to

convince the majority of American women that there is something

basically wrong with their position in life." After some final footage
of women singing a feminist version of the "Battle Hymn of the
RepubHc," the camera cut to a smirking Walter Cronkite, eyebrows

raised in amusement, as he softly chuckled, "And that's the way it is."

Two weeks after the CBS series ended, NBC weighed in with its

own, which turned out to be one of the most sympathetic pieces

done on the movement. This point of view was due in no small part

to the firmness and persuasiveness of NBC's female reporters — Liz

Trotta, Norma Quarles, and Aline Saarinen —who covered the story.

In Saarinen's first report, a rapid-sequence montage of Barbie dolls,

fashion models, women in print ads, and footage from a Virginia

Slims commercial drove home how women are victimized by

"degrading stereotypes." And Saarinen was one of the few to high-
light feminists' emphasis on personal choice, by reporting their insis-

tence that "domesticity and motherhood should be one option

among many options." In just a few minutes, Saarinen had acknowl-
176 Where the Girls Are

edged the legitimacy of the major points underlying the 1968 Miss
America protest and broadcast them to miUions.
Liz Trotta followed up this report with a review of society's sex-
ist attitudes toward girls. "Discrimination begins early in a girl's Hfe,"

noted Trotta, as she interviewed expectant fathers in a hospital wait-

ing room, all of whom hoped they would be getting boys. Over
footage of children playing, she pointed out that the girl "learns that

her place is in the home. The boy learns his place is not in the home."
Trotta then went to Austin, Minnesota, and asserted that "by the
time she's in high school, a girl has been brainwashed." She then dred
a classroom debate among high school students over women's rights,
in which the boys claimed that girls only go to college to find a hus-
band and that girls are inferior and simply want an easy Hfe. As one
young man summed it up, "Like, my mother, she went to college,
you know, she got some dietary deal, and she doesn't know any-
thing." (I wonder what kind of a reception he got from his know-
nothing mom that night.) Trotta let these retrograde comments speak
for themselves. She concluded, "There are young girls here who are
bright, enthusiastic, and full of hopes, but, like most women, they'll

go out in the world knowmg their place, and that place is secondary
to men." This was powerful and persuasive stuff.

Norma Quarles covered economic discrimination against women,

offering such statistics as "only 1 percent of the 31 million working
women earn $10,000 or more." Some "exceptional" w^omen can
make it, but they will "be fighting man's prejudice all the way." In an
especially savvy and effective ploy, Quarles edited together, on the
audio track, a series of quotations by men about how women can't
concentrate like men, aren't levelheaded, can't be aggressive at work,
and are basically domestic. These she played over footage of women
working with computers, in banks, in heavy industry, and in offices,

images that directly contradicted the men's dismissive comments and

dramatized the ignorance and stupidity of sexism.
In the final report, Saarinen conveyed the richness and diversity
of feminism, describing movement members as ranging from
 I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar \77

"reformers to revolutionaries." She showed women in demonstra-

tions getting arrested and being dragged to pohce vans. Cutting to

footage of a demonstration by the Women's International Terrorist

Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH), Saarinen described the "flashier,

more original" WITCH as "uniquely satirical and witr\' m a move-
ment that, Hke all crusades, is rather humorless." This was one oi

the few moments when a journahst laughed with, not at, radical

feminists and understood what they were poking fun at, and why.
Saarinen concluded. "There's a group for evers' taste, from militant
man-haters and lesbians to happily mated." While acknowledging
that there were disagreements among these groups, she emphasized
that "the strength of the movement Hcs in what the groups hold in
common," their determined tight against discrimination. She closed
with a powerful plea from sufrragist Ahce Paul, then m her eighties,
who asked, "Mr. President, how long must women wait for hberty?"
Viewers of the NBC series saw an extremely convincing and sympa-
thetic account of the pressing need for women's liberation, an
account that would soon be pooh-poohed elsewhere.
The biggest story of the year, and the one that received the most
coverage, was the Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, to
commemorate the fiftieth anniversary^ of the ratification of the Nine-
teenth Amendment. Women were urged to drop their stenographer's
pads, their laundry baskets, and their compHant, nurmnng demeanor,

to strike for a day in protest of sexism in the United States. Organiz-

ers of the strike agreed on the following demands, which you can
read with a wistful sigh, since none of them has been achieved: equal
opportunity for women in employment and education, twent\'-four-

hour child-care centers, and abortion on demand. To drive home the

role played by the media in reinforcing women's oppression, organiz-

ers also urged women to boycott four products whose advertising

was ofiensive and degrading to women: Cosmopolitan magazine, Silva

Thins cigarettes, Ivory^ Liquid, and Pristeen, the infamous "feminine
hygiene" spray. The strike was probably the most important pubHc
action of the movement, and given the number of women who par-
178 Where the Girls Are

ticipated, and the even larger number who were converted to femi-
nism, it was a huge success. But you would never have guessed that

from the news.

Newsweek described the movement as a "shaky coalition of dis-

parate groups" and asserted that "there is plenty of reason to doubt

that [it] will ever be able to unite women as a mass force. Certainly it

has not done so yet."^*^ What Ahne Saarinen of NBC had character-
ized as a strength — the fact that the movement sustained a wide spec-
trum of groups with different ideological positions —was cast by
Newsweek as an insurmountable weakness. Time opened its story with
the world-weary, oh-what-we -boys-must-endure quip "These are

the times that try men's souls, and they are likely to get much worse
before they get better." ^^ Women had better button their lips and
keep their anger to themselves. Time warned, quoting no less an
authority than Margaret Mead: " 'Women's Liberation has to be ter-
ribly conscious about the danger of provoking men to kill women.

You have quite literally driven them mad.' " Noting that the move-
ment "has not produced much humor," the article cited Sexual Poli-
tics as the new bible for feminists and described Kate Millett as "the
Mao Tse-Tung of women's liberation," "a brilliant misfit in a man's
world" who lived in a dashiki and work pants and didn't wash her
hair enough. Reading Sexual Politics, warned Millett 's doctoral-thesis
adviser, "is like sitting with your testicles in a nutcracker."

Commentary on television before the strike mingled amused

condescension with outright contempt, and no network was more
notorious than ABC and its virulently sexist anchormen Harry Rea-
soner, Howard K. Smith, and Frank Reynolds. On August 11, in his
commentary, Reynolds observed that now there were "lady" jock-
eys, "lady" generals, and a female president of the U.N. General
Assembly, and that "even the House of Representatives has finally
decided that women are entitled to the same rights as men." The first

major implication of the ERA Reynolds chose to highlight was that

women might be required to pay alimony, which, he noted sarcasti-

cally, "would restore the ancient and honorable profession of gigolo

 I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar 179

to its rightful glory." The second implication of the EPJ\ was that
women would be subject to the draft, which would decidedly end
"Americas role of world pohceman." He explained why with a

chuckle. "Female draftees would presumably retain at least some of

their civihan prerogatives, so it would be obviously impossible to fly

a regiment halfway around the world at a moment's notice when

at least one-half the regiment could simply never be ready on time. It

is not that there is anything inherently unequal about women in

such matters, it is just that they are, well, different." Oh, Frankie, such

a wit.

August 25, Reynolds's colleague Howard K. Smith weighed

On
in with his thoughts on women's liberation. "Like the majority of

Americans," Smith said, he was "weary of the abrasive type of group

protest." While sympathetic to "Indians and Negroes," who had been
"genuinely mistreated," Smith confessed to a "modified wnsympathy
with women's Hberation." He found "a few of their demands," such
as equal pay, equal access to "some jobs," and child-care centers, to be

"good." He suggested women were already more than equal, since

they constituted 53 percent of the population and "they get the most
money, inherited from worn-out husbands." He derided what he saw
as a demand for "sameness," which he denounced as "abhorrent."

Then, in a bizarre non sequitur, Smith observed that European cities

traditionally have had more charm than those m America. "But

when American women adopted the miniskirt, displaying much
more woman, it was the biggest advance in urban beautification since
Central Park was created in Manhattan." Winding down from such
lyrical heights, Smith said, "To me, women's lib has that in common
with the midi, which is now threatening us — that it is a kind of
defeminization." Praising the differences between men and women,
Smith concluded, "Vive la difference!" This, I remind you, passed for

journaHstic analysis in 1970.

When August 26 arrived, there were marches and ralhes in most
major cities, and in New York the day's events culminated in a march
down Fifth Avenue, followed by speeches and a rally behind the New
180 Where the Girls Are

York Public Library. The police had cordoned off one lane for the
parade, but the barricades got pushed aside as somewhere between
20,000 and 50,000 marchers filled all the lanes of Fifth Avenue.
Although few women actually went on strike during the day, thou-
sands participated in lunchtime and after-work demonstrations.
Not
every female reporter was as sympathetic as the women at
NBC. Linda Charlton reported for The New York Times, "In New
York, as elsewhere in the country, the impact of the day of demon-
strations beyond those already involved or interested in the women's
liberation movement appeared to be minimal."^' I hasten to empha-
size that there were no featured interviews — —with any of
zero the
thousands of women who participated in the march, and whose Hves
may indeed have been changed by the experience. A small sidebar
piece next to the article was headlined "Leading Feminist Puts
Hairdo Before Strike."^^ Girls will be girls, of course, and it was emi-
nently newsworthy that Betty Friedan was no exception: she
was
twenty minutes late for her first scheduled appearance because of
a
"lastminute emergency appointment with her hairdresser." A larger
story on the same page, by Grace Lichtenstein, was tided "For
Most
Women, 'Strike' Day Was Just a Topic of Conversation."''^ The story
began, "For the vast majority of women, yesterday was a day simply
to go about one's business —whether that meant going to a job,
attending a Broadway matinee, having one's hair done or washing
the
baby's diapers." A
female employee of Doyle, Dane and Bernbach
was described as spending the day in "the most Hberated way possi-
ble. golf." A spokesman for the Equitable Life
She took off to play
Assurance Society told Lichtenstein, "The movement is regarded
with some ridicule here." A typist for the company added, "I'm
against the whole equahty thing I'm afraid of being drafted."
Lichtenstein also interviewed suburban women. As one folded dia-
pers, she said, "Women's liberation? Never thought much about it,
really." But those who had thought about it apparently eluded the
reportorial staff of the nation's newspaper of record.
 / Am Woman, Hear Me Roar 181

One of my favorite pieces on the strike was another story in The

Times titled "Traditional Women's Lib."^^
Groups Prefer to Ignore

The Daughters of the American Revolution, the Women's Christian

Temperance Union, and the Junior League, which were described as
"traditional groups" that had "for decades championed women's

rights," were cast as "facing a challenge from a movement that many

consider bizarre, ahen, and totally unacceptable." The traditionahsts,

according to the article, considered women of the movement

"ridiculous exhibitionists, a 'band of wild lesbians,'
" or "commu-
nists." Mrs. Saul Schary, incoming president of the National Council
of Women, asserted, "There's no discrimination against women like

they say there is . . . women themselves are just self-hmiting. It's in

their nature and they shouldn't blame it on society or men." After

describing the women in the movement as self-seeking exhibition-

ists, she added, "And so many of them are just so unattractive. ... I
wonder if they're completely well."
This was a consistent media device: to have "refined" women
denounce "grotesque" women. In its leading editorial on August 27,
The Times echoed Mrs. Schary 's remarks, condemning the demon-
strations as "pubhcity seeking exhibitionism" and "attention getting
The newsmagazines were no better. Time snickered that the
antics."^^

Fifth Avenue march provided "some of the best sidewalk oghng in

years" but seemed disappointed that there were no "charred bras."
Newsweek emphasized that "lib supporters came up short" in getting

women out in the streets, except for "small detachments" who

formed "unstructured battahons" of presumably warHke, fearsome
commandos ready to nuke sexist men and housewives to kingdom
come.^^
On television, the three networks used varying approaches in
their coverage. But they had one thing in common: they all show-
cased the Jennings Randolph "bra-less bubblehead quip," giving this
bonehead more coverage than any woman involved in the strike. On
NBC, the advances of the Saarinen-Quarles-Trotta series were for-
182 Where the Girls Are

gotten, as not-so-subtle editing strategies delivered a new message:

that the movement was filled with preposterous exaggerations and
thus was naturally off-putting to more sensible gals. In the network's
footage on strike activities in Washington, DC, viewers saw and
heard a black woman in a park singing, "And before I'll be a slave, I'll

be buried in my grave. . . . Yes, goodbye slavery, hello freedom." As

the woman sang these powerful lyrics about the oppression of slavery,
the camera cut to white women in dresses and pearls lounging lazily
on the lawn and languorously eating ice cream in the sun while they
hstened. The striking juxtaposition of the song's lyrics and the images
of extremely comfortable women enjoying a leisurely picnic put the
he to claims that women were "oppressed" in any way like other
groups had been. In its report on Los Angeles, NBC showed
marchers chanting repeatedly "Sisterhood is powerful, join us now,"
as they punched the air with clenched fists. On the words "join us
now," the camera zoomed in on two waitresses watching the march
who scurried back to safety behind the doors of the restaurant.
Again, in pictures alone, without any commentary NBC conveyed
the gap between feminists and "real" women. In his commentary at
the end of the program, Frank McGee derided the "nonsense being
mouthed today by some of the more extreme members of the cur-
rent women's hberation movement" and scolded them for trying
to
make wives and mothers feel inferior. But it was usually McGee and
other male commentators, not feminists, who pushed this equation
between being a housewife and being inferior.
The coverage on CBS was, not surprisingly, in Hne with that net-
work's earher news reports. Right after an ad for Playtex bras, Walter
Cronkite introduced the protest by calling its participants a "militant
minority of women's liberationists." Of the four stories about the
strikefrom around the country, three were by male reporters, and
they discounted the strike and thus the movement as ridiculous,
inconsequential, and having htde bearing on most women's lives.
Bob Schakne in New York opened his story over footage of a small
group of women carrying placards with this introduction: "It turned
 I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar 183

out there weren't a lot of would-be liberated women willing to stop

their work for the day in New York. Early demonstrations tended to

be small, and the onlookers were by no means always sympathetic."

When the film cut to the march on Fifth Avenue, which Schakne
severely underrepresented it drew "several thousand peo-
by saying
ple," viewers nonetheless saw an enormous crowd of marchers jam-
ming the street, arm in arm, some with raised fists, some with signs.
Schakne noted that "the tone of the protest stayed moderate and
orderly. The radical feminists of the movement attempted no con-

frontation," as if viewers should have expected women in fatigues,

firing bazookas.

Bill Kurtis, reporting from Los Angeles that "several hundred"

women's liberationists "shared the spotlight with an opposing group,"
focused on the confrontation between the two groups. As men hold-
ing signs reading "Viva la Difference" heckled the feminists, the

women turned on them, chanting, "Go do the dishes! Go do the

dishes!" Then several women grabbed the signs from the men, tore
them in pieces, and threw them back in the men's faces. The strike

was thus cast as nothing more elevated than a playground spat. The
story then cut to Richard Threlkeld in San Francisco, who
announced, "Women's liberation day went largely unnoticed in San

Francisco's middle-class neighborhoods, where housewives were too

busy just being housewives to pay it all much mind." He interviewed
a woman in a supermarket parking lot, who said, "I think it's ridicu-
lous," which evoked a loud and approving chuckle from Threlkeld.
She continued, "I think it's stupid. I don't think women should just

stay home all the time, but I don't think they belong out either." (Say

what?) Another woman, carrying her shopping bags out of the store,

said she was a happy housewife and a happy mother, and a third

woman echoed this sentiment.

This juxtaposition — in which women with complaints were
shown only in highly charged, dramatic, public demonstrations,
yelling loudly and tussling with men, while women without com-
plaints were in more tranquil, everyday settings —made women
184 Where the Girls Are

shoppers opposed to the movement appear more thoughtful, ratio-

nal, and persuasive than their feminist counterparts. The visual posi-
tioning of them, in places such as supermarket parking lots, suggested
these women were much more connected to the fabric of daily Hfe.
The juxtaposition also suggested that women had only two choices
of how to be and where to be: compHant, calm, and sexually
rewarded in private; or aggressive, strident, and sexually mocked
in pubhc. The network's pattern of framing the story, especially
Threlkeld's segment, suggested that most women were quite con-
tented with their lot, were well treated financially and emotionally,
and simply could not comprehend a series of complaints that seemed
exaggerated and irrelevant to their lives.

After a commercial break, Eric Sevareid offered his commentary

on the day's events. He dismissed the notion that women were
oppressed, cast women's liberation as a minority movement, and
echoed the feminism-as-disease metaphor by suggesting that it spread
by "contagion" as women's hbbers indoctrinated previously happy

women. Yet Sevareid endorsed "three practical aims with which a

great many men also agree: equal opportunities in employment and

education, abortion on demand, and child-care centers. Nor does

this end the list of realistic inequities." So even in the midst of his
pompous dismissal of female oppression, Sevareid put his seal of
approval on three revolutionary feminist goals. How could viewers
not feel torn about feminism when commentators hke this kept try-
ing to have it both ways?
Not surprisingly, some of the most smirking coverage came from
ABC, those wonderful folks who gave us Spiro Agnew as the latest
authority on women. Bill Brannigan, reporting from the New York
Stock Exchange, assumed the pose of a man trying very hard to keep
a straight face and strugghng, for the sake of "objectivity," to restrain
his sarcasm. "Trading, inside, was not affected by women's Uberation.
But outside, there was a bemused sort of traffic congestion. The two
dozen pickets appeared a Htde unsure of themselves. It was only
when poHcemen, who outnumbered the pickets, stepped in to sepa-
 / Am Woman, Hear Me Roar 185

ratedemonstrators from pedestrians, that the picket Hne actually took

shape. The chantmg was restramed." Over footage of one of these
male onlookers helping one of the demonstrators pick up some
papers she had dropped, Branmgan observed, "Even though male
chauvinism is under attack, chivalry, it appears, is not dead." Not one
of the women demonstrators was interviewed.
Then the stors^ switched to Bill Wordham m Los Angeles, who
also did not talk with any women involved in the strike but instead

gave airtime to a counterdemonstration organized by Jacque Davison,

a young, busty bleached blonde in a tight sweater, her hair
teased,

curled, and varmshed. identified on the screen as "anti-women's lib."

Here was a story made m heaven for the boys at ABC —a rootm',

tootm' catfight. Wordham asked Davison, a housewife with seven

children and "proud of it," why she was demonstrating against

women's Hberation. She responded, "I like being a girl. It's fun. We
are free .we're freer than you men. I'm sorrs' to tell you, fellas, but
. .

we're freer than you are." Wordham ended, "A few hard-core Hbera-
tionists [Qu'est-ce que c'est. "hard-core"?] joined the march and

there was some pushing and shoving and shouting." The final image

from Los Angeles was the catfight between Davison and a feminist

demonstrator.
One of the most striking, though hardly surprising, aspects ot
the media coverage of the women's movement is the way that news
organizations repeatedly —almost desperately, one is tempted to
note — Ignored, erased, and dismissed male opposition to women's
Hberation. Male commentators and reporters, positioning themselves

as the wise, dispassionate onlookers, used their alleged endorsement

of equal pay for equal work, or their appreciation of women's thighs,
to demonstrate that they weren't male chauvinist pigs and to suggest

that their other attackson feminism stemmed not from sexism but
from simple common sense. Male observers of the movement w^eren't
hostile: they were "amused." Opposition to the women's movement,

reporters insisted, came from women, not men, and they included
plent\' of interviews with unsympathetic women to prove their
186 Where the Girls Are

point. Rarely, however, were there interviews with male attorneys,

college professors, doctors, or corporate executives, let alone
with
shop foremen, union stewards, or construction workers, about why
they had so few women co-workers and how they would regard the
entrance of women mto their ranks. Men were simply not put on the
spot, nor were their attitudes flushed out.
Instead, women with no economic or poHtical power were used
as stand-ins for men who opposed feminism. Through this tactic,
male journahsts could ask why men should support changes even
most women didn't want, and they could smirk over one of their
favorite events, the catfight, while
smiUng knowingly and maintain-
ing that women from men, and weren't the differences
were different
cute and delightful. Thus was misogyny naturaUzed, transformed
into
a kind of world-weary tolerance of what everyone
understood to be
women's inherent foibles.

Even if most women want a Uberation movement, its success'

did
was doomed, according news accounts, because women were con-
to
stitutionally incapable of cooperating with one another. Certainly
there were real within what was broadly termed the
divisions
women's movement. Yet by playing up such divisions, the news
media reinforced the stereotype that women were completely
incompetent as poHticians, tacticians, and organizers and had proved,
once again, that they didn't deserve to be active anywhere but in the
kitchen, the bedroom, and the nursery.
Possibly the most important legacy of such media coverage was its
carving up of the women's movement into legitimate feminism and
illegitimate feminism. Mainstream journahsts, most of whom were
men, endorsed a narrow, white, upper-middle-class shce of hberal
feminism and cast the rest off as irresponsible, misguided, and
deviant. Nearly every story and editorial about the women's move-
ment acknowledged women really did suffer from economic dis-
that
crimination and approved of "equal pay for equal work." Many also
endorsed child-care centers and the legahzation of abortion. They
supported, m
other words, going through the courts and legislatures
 I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar 187

for redress and establishing one or two new institutions to help work-
ing mothers. Feminism, in this view, should only redraw the work-

place, and this only sHghtly. Other regions of society, Hke a man's
home, his marriage, his family, should be cordoned off from feminist
surveyors. Yet for young women Hke me, these issues were exactly

the locus of the movement: we got it that the personal was indeed
poHtical. Whileinequities in employment were carefully docu-

mented, neither the print media nor television devoted news time to
inequities in marriage, divorce, and child rearing. Critiques of mar-

riage and the family were much too explosive, and hit too close to

home, for male journalists to be comfortable analyzing them. But

since such criticisms were, in 1970, articulated primarily by radical

feminists, they were easy to dismiss as loony and bizarre. This rein-
forced the media's insistence that the personal was still the personal

and should never be poHticized. The overall message was that women
had no business trying to imagine wholesale social change; that was
man's work.
Perhaps the biggest difficulty for feminists was that the most basic
and pernicious forms of female oppression did not lend themselves to

visual documentation. Women's real grievances — the burdens, frus-

trations, and inequities m their lives—occurred behind closed doors.

Unlike the civil rights movement, there were no protesters being

hosed down or attacked by dogs. There was no war footage, or pho-

tographs of napalm burning people's skin. There were just these
women, most of whom looked OK on the outside but who were, on
the inside, being torn apart. Feminists had to make the private pub-

he, the invisible visible, and the personal pohtical. This was an
extremely difficult assignment, especially with a media increasingly
hooked on dramatic, violent pictures.
Time and again the media emphasized that members of the

women's Hberation movement were completely out of touch with,

hostile to, and rejected by most American women, when, in fact,

many women's attitudes toward feminism were much more compH-

cated and were constantly moving toward support.And the move-
188 Where the Girls Are

ment was much broader-based than the images revealed. No black

feminists, with the exception of Shirley Chisholm, appeared m these
news stories, even though Florynce Kennedy, Frances Beal, and
Eleanor Holmes Norton, to name just a few, were already active in
the movement.
The new^s media's ambivalent representation of feminism was
simultaneously empowering and crippling, for it legitimated middle-
class, liberal feminism and applauded legaHstic reform at the same
time that it dramatized the severe psychological and emotional costs
to women who challenged patriarchal versions of female sexuaHty
and who pubHcly violated the boundary between the pubHc (male)
and private (female) spheres. The word militant was tossed around all

too loosely to marginahze any woman who wanted more than a few
legislative reforms and served to demonize female behavior that
refused to remain friendly, accommodating, compHant, docile, and
obsequious. Women, in other words, might get pay raises and child-
care centers if they just asked nicely and kept smiHng at men. Karate
images, which overflowed with anxieties about female anger, male
castration, and the possible dissolution of amicable heterosexual rela-
tions, marked "militant feminism" as a potentially deadly trend. And
the repeated use o£ militant as an adjective imparted to many feminists
attitudes from female separatism to a love of violence that they did
not, in fact, embrace.

But let's consider what else we did see and hear, and why such
coverage may have been empowering to some women viewers. The
media did enable us to hear speakers on television attack the sexual
objectification of women and the impossible beauty standards im-
posed by advertisers. They provided a platform for women furious
over their inability to control their own bodies and their reproductive
lives.They showed us women challenging men in the streets, chant-
ing at them to "go do the dishes." I remember being initially intrigued
and repelled by what I saw. At the age of Uventy, I had just discovered
how much fun boys could really be, and now this? At first I bought
into the media dismissal that comfy young women like me couldn't
 I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar 189

possibly be oppressed. And the reduction of sophisticated feminist cri-

tiques into "man-hating" made me wary. But, like millions, I stayed

tuned; I read Tlte Female Eunuch and The Golden Notebook; and I woke
up. The messages from feminists I saw and heard in the news res-

onated with my own experiences, while the representation of women

in ads and TV shows undermined my aspirations and ambitions. So

when Harry Reasoner trashed the women's movement from his priv-
ileged podium on ABC, it made me even more angry, more commit-
ted to feminism, and more determined than ever to hurl a series of

expletives — or whatever else was handy — at the next paunchy,

middle-aged man I met (and met too many of them) who

I treated me
as if I couldn't possibly be serious about having a career of my own.
While the coverage repudiated feminists as ugly, humorless, dis-
orderly man-haters in desperate need of some Nair, it also endorsed
selected feminist principles, particularly those premised on equaUty
of opportunity. It showed that while women who got together in the

pubHc sphere were subject to male derision, they could also change
society. And at the same time that radical feminists and their often
shocking pronouncements were marginaHzed, portions of their
vision were folded into the mainstream, thus reconfiguring what
constituted the middle ground.
The news coverage pinioned women between the same messages
we had grown up with, only now the stakes were higher. On the one
hand, by endorsing a few Hberal reforms Hke equal pay, the media
reinforced the message that women had every right to expect to be
treated as equal citizens, with the same rights, responsibihties, and
opportunities as men. On the other hand, by mocking and dismiss-

ing the way feminist activists looked and behaved, and by marginal-
izing many of their critiques of society, the media also endorsed the
notion that in some cases female subordination and sexual objectifi-
cation were not only fine but desirable. In one moment, the media
exhorted women to be equal and active; in the next, they urged them
to be subordinate and passive. Sound famihar? We had been hearing
it all our Hves.
190 Where the Girls Are

What was different nov^ Avas that many women, especially young
women, were aware of these contradictions and pointed to them in
their demonstrations, newsletters, and speeches, holding them up as

untenable. Understanding that the internal conflicts we faced weren't

our own lonely struggle but resulted from being raised female in
America was, in the language of the times, mind-blowing, and, as

such, a colossal rehef Finally, the demonstrators and the female

reporters said, out loud, on television, that women were in an abso-
lutely impossible situation because they couldn't ever live up to the
mutually exclusive traits society demanded. Women like me started

to seek some kind of satisfactory resolution to these contradictions,

not in ourselves but in society. We had become conscious not only of
our inequaUty but also of how our identities had been fragmented.
The warring pieces, we saw, were virtually impossible to hold
together without constant posing, dissembHng, and the abandonment
of our own needs and desires.

There were other blind spots in the media coverage that worked
to women's advantage. The media failed to convey the exhilaration of
participating in the women's movement. Yes, there were divisions,

battles, and internecine strife. But there was also a compeUing

Utopian vision, a great unity of purpose, and a respect for diversity.

Once a woman experienced the sheer joy of uniting with her sisters

to effect personal and societal change, only to see on television and

in the press an image of grimness and humorlessness, it was hard to
trust the media again. The antidote to this was the consciousness-
raising group, which spread rapidly throughout the country, forming
an alternative, behind-the-spotlight communications center for
women to discuss what the news ignored or belittled. These under-
ground networks were quite consciously independent of and often at

odds with the dominant media. Here, working through their

ambivalent positions, women came to appreciate how they had been
sociaHzed — especially by the media — to be all things to all people.
Now, when we went back and forth between the girl talk of our
groups and the mostly boy talk of the news, we understood more
 / Am Woman, Hear Me Roar 191

clearly why much of what we had grown up with on TV, and what
we still saw, made us uncomfortable, insecure, and furious. We
learned^and loved — the power of rejecting media pronouncements
and of giving guys Hke Howard K. Smith a big Bronx cheer. We also

learned that feminism itself, unlike the one-dimensional caricature

we saw m the media, was many things to different women. It was

becoming apparent that there many ways to adopt a feminist

were as

perspective as there were ways to be woman. Most important, we

a

reaHzed that it was within our power to accept or resist the new
stereotypes, picking up some shards, kicking away others. Feminism,

Hke womanhood itself, became a pastiche.

While the media helped spread the word about femimsm, pro-
ducing converts and enemies, they had one particularly pernicious,
lasting effect. By demomzing prominent feminists Hke Kate MiHett,
the media effectively gutted one of femimsm's most basic chaUenges
to gender roles: that women should be taken seriously and treated
with respect regardless of whether they were conventionaUy "attrac-

tive." The media countermanded this heresy, not only in the news
but through entertainment shows in the 1970s that offered up Char-
He's Angels and the Bionic Woman as the new exemplars of the Hb-

erated woman. The media representation of feminism reinforced the

division between the acceptable and the deviant, bet\veen the refined

and the grotesque, bet\veen deserving ladies and disorderly dogs.

This false dichotomy helped to reaffirm, more than ever, the impor-

tance of female attractiveness to female success, and the utter toUy oi

taking to the streets. Even as the media attention accelerated the
spread of the women's movement throughout the countrv; it stunted

the movement's most Hberatorv' potential, a handicap that cripples aU

of us, women and men aHke, to this day.
 7 h Uu of tie Imn Biitio

you want to talk backlash, let's talk backlash. Not to take any-

nK, thing away from the 1980s, which brought us Fatal Attraction and
news stories about women over thirty-five being more likely to

receive a terrorist's bullet than a marriage proposal, but the backlash

that accompamed the women's liberation movement suggests that

testosterone poisoning reached epidemic proportions m the early

1970s. Backlash didn't need time to build up; backlash didn't wait
for feminism to setde in. Backlash was there from the moment
women took to the streets, barking and nipping at their heels. The
war between feminism and antifeminism in the early 1970s raged

throughout the media in an exphcit, no-holds-barred action. For at

the same time that the news media were bringing feminism includ- —
mg radical femimsm — into people's living rooms and thus helping,
despite the negative coverage, produce more converts to the cause,

the entertainment media were trying to figure out how to capitaHze

on feminism while containing it.

This ideological warfare about woman's proper place was the pre-
vaiHng subtext of American popular culture in the 1970s, and the
backlash against feminism showed spectators like me how ver\' right

feminists were about the persistence and immobility of sexism. This

backlash made me more committed to feminism than ever, and eager
to — —
shed many but not all of the holdover trappings of 1960s fem-
ininit\^ At the same time, however, the backlash was filled with cau-
tionary tales about what happens to women who are too angry^, are
 —
194 Where the Girls Are

too outspoken, and get too much freedom. These new media tales
recycled the famihar female caricatures, updating the age-old drama
about how assertive a woman could be and still be approved by men.
The pop culture versions of the liberated woman were meant, it

seems in retrospect, to be a compromise between the demands of

feminists and the resistance of antifeminists. But they were also a
powerful tool for managing an extremely threatening, even revolu-
tionary, social movement. Now, as I've said before, it wasn't that six
white guys with cigars and white loafers conspired together to
repackage feminism so it would help sell Lestoil or Oil of Olay. But
media moguls work in a highly insulated environment, trusting their
"guts" as much as, or often more than, the market research they get.^
Given their insularity and the rampant sexism of the industry in the
1970s, it's not surprising that they came up with similar responses
a mix of concessions Hberally larded with dire warnings.
What was different, however, about the 1970s was that now mil-
Uons of women had a sense that it was their right and responsibility
to deconstruct these images even as they felt their pull. Nearly every

pseudofeminist gambit on television, from Tlte Mary Tyler Moore

Show to Charlie's Angels, produced a host of pubHc analyses and
attacks by women who agreed that imagery and symboHsm mattered
to our everyday lives and our poHtical futures.
To taste just a few samples of backlash 1970s style, let's begin with
my favorite newscasters, those highly objective, dispassionate types
over at ABC News. Harry Reasoner, who had already made his
views about the women's movement perfectly clear, became rabid
over the pubUcation of that pioneering feminist magazine many of us
eagerly awaited, Ms. The magazine was first pubHshed as a forty-page
insert in the December 20, 1971, issue of New York, then as a maga-
zine all its own a month later.
I still recall the visceral fury I felt when watching Reasoner's
commentary on December 21. He opened by describing the maga-
zine as "pretty sad" because "it is so clearly just another in the great

but irrelevant tradition of American shock magazines" that do things

 The Rise of the Bionic Bimbo 195

like"expose the chemical composition of Coca-Cola" or pubHsh

nude photos of Marilyn Monroe. Such magazines "usually last about
three issues," the fate he confidently predicted for Ms. To succeed,
magazines need someone of H. L. Mencken's caHber, "but there is
—
no sign in Ms. or indeed in the whole women's movement of an —
H. L. Mencken," since how could any woman be as smart or sardonic

as the Bard of Baltimore? Reasoner acknowledged that "the girls

who are putting together Ms. are prettier and probably brighter than

Ralph Ginsberg, who seems to pubHsh most of the shock magazines.

But the only thing they are more than H. L. Mencken is prettier."
After equating Ms. with pornography and tabloid jour naUsm, he
went on to an assessment of the first issue itself. "There isn't an arti-

cle in Ms. that wouldn't look perfectly all right in one of the standard
women's magazines, and has probably already been there, only some-
what better written," he sniped cattily. But the main problem for the

editors and writers of Ms. was that "they've said it all in the first litde

issue. I can imagine some stark, antisexist editorial meeting trying to

decide what to do next." He and several of his friends had discussed
betting on the magazine's longevity, but none of them would put
money on its lasting more than five issues. Pronouncing the magazine
DOA, Reasoner ended his commentary with "I'm sorry I'm —
sorry," the tone indicating the girls were dreaming if they hoped for

the magazine actually to last.

But ABC couldn't let even this level of fulmination He. Harr>^
apparently got his colleague Howard K. Smith so exercised that the

next night he, too, had to weigh in on the women's movement.

"Among the multitude of causes in this cause-ridden age, one that
has not, to me at least, made its case is women's Hb," he began, echo-
ing his Hne at the time of the Women's Strike for EquaHty. He admit-

ted that there was prejudice against women in some fields, including
journaHsm, but, he hastened to note, "there are prejudices against
every class of human," including TV reporters, "but they aren't about
to make a federal case out of it," as if there was any correspondence

between people's irritation with guys like him and the legal and social
196 Where the Girls Are

discrimination women faced every day. The real truth, according to

Smith, was that we hved in a matriarchy that w^as getting stronger and
more fearsome every minute. "Women dominate our elections; they
probably own most of the nation's capital wealth; any man who
thinks he, and not his wife, runs his family is dreaming," he asserted
falsely then described Bella Abzug as "the pohtician I would least
dare to make an enemy of, excepting, perhaps, Shirley Chisholm."
To prove that there was no such thing as inequaHty and discrimina-
tion against women, women were already plenty Hberated, he
that
cited Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, known for their "toughness."
"So I'm not persuaded by women's lib — indeed, there may be a case
for man's lib."

Smith apparently was ignorant of the following facts, which his

commentary erased but which help explain why Ms. did not meet
the fate Harry Reasoner so ghbly predicted for it. In 1970, women
earned 58 percent of what men did, and forty-three states Hmited the
number of hours women could work, generally to eight a day, mean-
ing overtime and other job opportunities were forbidden to them by
law. Some states restricted the amount of weight a woman could
carry on the job —anywhere from ten to thirty-five pounds, in other
words, the weight oi a child from infancy to kindergarten. Most
women in 1970 found it impossible to get a mortgage or a credit card
in their own names, and in many states a woman's income and prop-

erty were legally under her husband's control.- So much for the
matriarchy theory On January 25, 1972, the first full issue of M^.
appeared, and I remember running to the newsstand to get my copy
Apparently so did thousands of others —250,000 issues were sold out
m eight days, and 35,000 women sent in subscription cards. ^ Blow
that up your shorts, Harry.

But backlash was hardly restricted to the news media. The

women's liberation movement also provided fodder for TV shows
from The Beverly Hillbillies to All in the Family, and you will hardly be
surprised to learn that the portrait of feminism m these quarters was
less than charitable. Ridicule often took the form of placing feminist
 The Rise of the Bionic Bimbo 197

rhetoric in the mouths of ridiculous sitcom characters. I mean, how

can you take complaints about oppression seriously when they're

uttered by Ellie May, let alone Granny, the roUing pin-wielding,

karate-chopping matriarch who terrorized men? In a scene from one

Beverly Hillbillies episode tided, simply enough, "Women's Lib,"

Granny and EUie May are parading around the kitchen with placards.
When Jethro comes in and sees the one reading "Free Women," he
yelps, "I'm gonna git me one of them!" to the deHght of the laugh
track. Archie Bunker's daughter, Gloria, the Kewpie doll on All in the

Family, yells to Archie after having scanned a book on feminism,

"We're tired of being exploited by men — tired of you holding us

down and keeping us back. And if you continue to exploit us, we're

gonna rise up against you someday like our black sisters and our Chi-
cano sisters and I don't even know what I'm saying anymore." So
much for feminism being anchored in lived experience and genuine
conviction.
Not to be outdone. Green Acres, with Eva Gabor and Eddie
Albert, featured "The Liberation Movement." Lisa (Gabor) attends

her women's club meeting to hear a guest speaker from the Women's
Liberation League, which OHver (Albert) refers to as "one of those
bra-burning groups." When she returns from the meeting, she has

been transformed into an enraged, jargon-spouting feminazi who

yells at OHver, "All men treat women as second-class citizens because

they're afraid to give them equal status. You make me look Uke a fool
in front of my friends. Men are afraid of women, that they'll take over
the world because they are smarter." She continues, "From now on,
I am not going to walk four paces behind you in bare feet with a

laundry bag on my head." Now, since Lisa spent much of her time
flouncing around in chifrbn, ostrich feathers, and gemstones the size
of Fig Newtons, completely unable to cook or manage the house-
hold, the viewer saw immediately that feminist generaHzations about
domestic Ufe certainly didn't apply here, and therefore, they might
not apply elsewhere. OHver insists, "Lisa, you already have equal
rights." She is unmoved. "You should do the housework one day, and
198 Where the Girls Are

I the next, and we will live happily ever after." By now, Oliver is

pissed. "Is that what that nut woman told you? Don't you women
reahze what a nice, soft touch you've got the way it is? All you have
to do is vacuum a rug, make a bed, do a few dishes." Lisa shoots back,
"You're leaving out the hard part." Here Lisa itemizes the true nature
of women's oppression. "Have you ever waited for an hour and a half
for your nails to dry? Have you ever tried to make an appointment at
a beauty parlor before a hoHday? Have you ever put on a red dress and
found that you don't have shoes to match?"
Lisa decides she wants to reverse sex roles and be called Max. She
insists that any woman can do the "man's work" around the house as
easily as any man. She appears for this work in skintight blue satin
overalls. She quickly discovers, however, that fixing the shed and
other chores are quite beyond her, so she secretly hires handymen to
do the tasks for her but leads Oliver to beheve that she has done
them herself She also discovers that Oliver doesn't really want to
sleep with her now that she's liberated. Finally she admits, "I'm not
too happy about this Hberation thing. Tomorrow why don't I go
back to being the woman and you the man?" She immediately
regains her desirabihty. "Why do we have to wait until tomorrow?"
Oliver asks slyly.

The episode's message is transparent. Feminism comes from out-

side the home, from but shallow propaganda that
initially persuasive

infects women and turns them into something they're not. There is
no basis for feminism in women's everyday, lived experiences,
because women aren't truly oppressed. To be equal to men, and to
be able to do what men
women have to pretend and he, since
do,
equality is impossible. Plus, if men and women really were equal,
men could never get it up again since women would no longer be
attractive.

Even teen romance comics, the ones filled with busty, red-lipped
girls who cry their eyes out in one panel and kiss some guy named
Chad or Dusty in the next, got into the act. As with the notorious
"headhght" comics of the late 1940s, comics in the early 1970s were
 The Rise of the Bionic Bimbo 199

a key repository of antifeminism. Comics like "Our Love Story,"

"Girls' Love," "Young Romance," and "Falling in Love" featured

story lines in v^hich young women think that what they want is a
career, only to discover that this ambition makes them repulsive to

men and no hin to be with. In one story, a misguided girl named Pam
learns that she won't get the promotion she wants, in part because her

clothes are frumpy. "You're probably a pretty girl when you're not

wearing those business suits or that sack you've got on!" her boss tells

her at a party. (This was before women had a name for such power-
tripping drivel, sexual harassment.) Pam ducks into the ladies' room
and strips down to the foxy httle hot pants number she couldn't resist

wearing under her dowdy feminist costume, and now the reception is

quite different. Her boss exclaims, "Pamela! Like WOW!" while the
male co-worker she had been competing with for the promotion
looks at her in quite a different Hght. In the final frame, as the two of
them comic book kiss, the baUoon over Pam's closed eyes
kiss that

reads,"The moment our Ups met ... I knew! My preoccupation

with women's lib had ended. ... I was surrendering!'"^
This backlash, however, began to mingle with deep confusion in
the entertainment industry. Just what were they going to do about
women, anyhow, especially if some of them followed Gloria Steinem
while others were hning up behind PhyUis Schlafly, who emerged in

1973 as the George Patton of antifeminism? More to the point,

feminists in academia had begun cranking out hundreds of studies of

how women were depicted in ads, soap operas, comic books,
women's magazines, movies, and sitcoms, and the results of many of

these studies were pubHshed in popular magazines. CaroHne Bird cri-

tiqued the portrayal of women in "What's Television Doing for 50.9

Percent of Americans?" in a 1971 issue o£ TV Guide, charging,

"Television . . . does not provide human models for a bright thirteen-

year-old girl who would Hke to grow up to be something other than

an ecstatic floor waxer." Leonard Gross, also in TV Guide, charged

the networks with bias against women. Other

"*
articles, like "TV's
Women Are Dingbats," "Women Get the Short End of the Shtick,"
200 Where the Girls Are

and "Same Time, Same Station, Same Sexism," documented that

despite the superficial appearance of change on TV with shows like

The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Police Woman, the medium was as sex-
ist as, possibly even more sexist, than in the days of Our Miss Brooks,
Oh, Susanna, and / Love Lucy.^
Study after study showed that women were severely underrepre-
sented on television, and that the ones we saw were exceptionally
attractive, sHm, sociable, accommodating, dependent, helpless,

incompetent, and under thirty-five. They almost always smiled. Sev-

enty percent of all TV characters in the early 1970s were male; 40
percent of these boys were over forty, but only 15 percent of the girls

were. Women continued to be typecast as homemakers, secretaries,

nurses, and, with increasing frequency, crime victims. Single and

working women were especially Ukely to take it in the chops, while
married women who didn't work received the most favorable treat-
ment in TV land.'' Three-quarters of those television commercials
that featured women were for products to make you, your bathroom,
women were rarely used in ads for
or your clothes stop smelling bad;
cars or gasohne, which most women used with more fi-equency than

they did Lysol. But whether an ad featured women or not, the sales
pitch had to be cHnched by the male voice of authority: men
accounted for nearly 90 percent of all voice-overs in TV ads.^ In

print ads, female models were firequently posed to look Uke children:
wide-eyed, often in a puckish, clowning pose, being carried piggy-
back by some guy or kicking their legs in the air, and, in general,
doing things you would never see a male model doing. Gazing up at

men, physically leaning on men, and regularly pictured lying on

floors, rugs, beds, and sofas, the display of women's bodies in ads was
defined by submission, passivity, incompetence, and deference to
male authority.*^ It wasn't just radical feminists who read about and
believed these studies. As early as 1972, 75 percent of the 120,000
respondents to a questionnaire in Redbook agreed that "the media
degrades women by portraying them as mindless dolls."^-
 The Rise of the Bionic Bimbo 201

The women's liberation movement, and the studies Hke this that

it generated, threw TV producers, news orgamzations. and film-

makers into a complete tizz\: Women were the major consumers of
much of this media, yet there, on the news and m the pages of Ms.,
Redbook, Jlie Xew York Times, and even Tl ' Guide, feminists were

attacking media imager^' of women with a vengeance —and an accu-

racv — that hit home for millions of us. ''What to do, what to do?"

you could hear media executives asking themselves, not wanting to

ahenate "traditional women" yet desperate not to lose the young
upscale women receptive to feminism (an enormous chunk ot the

market). They knew they had to react —but had yet to figure out

how. Plus, there was schizophrenia among producers themselves.

Some were hard-core male chauvinists who thought acting, for
women, consisted of wearing a G-string and a smile, but others were
persuaded by some versions of women's Hberation and knew their

audience was too. All this marketing uncertainty^ and ambivalence

added to the contradictory media reaction to and co-optation ot
feminism in the 1970s.
Holl-s^^ood s solution was simple: Hey, let's just pretend women
don't exist for a few years while all this blows over. Good parts for

women in films became scarcer than circle pms. Instead, we got road
movies, buddy pictures, or some combination of both: Easy Rider,
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy, A/M*5*H,
DeUverance, Tlie Sting, and Tlie Last Detail. The prize roles for women
were Jane Fonda as a prostitute in Khite and Diana Ross as a victim-
ized drug addict in the biopic about Billie HoUiday, Lady Sings the
Bhies. Females, especially pushy ones, got to be deranged slashers, as

in Play Misty for Me, screeching, hysterical victims trapped in a sink-

ing ocean finer in TJie Poseidon Adventure, or possessed Antichrists

who spewed spHt pea soup at Mom and a few priests. Or, as in Last

Tango in Paris, they got to take all their clothes off and be sodomized
with the help of some Land O'Lakes while the bloated male lead was
protected from the certain embarrassment of having to strip down.
202 Where the Girls Are

And, of course, in films like the blockbuster Billy Jack, they got to be
tied up spread-eagle to stakes and raped. But mostly, in the early and
mid-1970s, women were invisible in the movies. The medium that

had responded most rapidly to changing sexual mores in the late

1950s and early 1960s was one of the slowest to respond to the
changing status of women in the early 1970s. Women having sex
they could deal with; women having aspirations, hey, that was some-
thing else.

By contrast, television, which in the late 1950s and early '60s pre-

tended there was no such thing as sex, responded almost immediately

to feminism and sought to manage and contain the threat it posed
while seeming to accommodate it. After the initial backlash of 1970
and 1971, television became a highly contested terrain in the strug-
gle not just between feminism and antifeminism but over what type
of feminism was going to become accepted into the mainstream. The
first sitcom with an avowedly feminist character came in a spin-off

from All in the Family. Maude, which debuted in September 1972 and
was an instant hit, became the fourth highest rated show of the
1972-73 season. Most men I knew hated the show; nearly every
woman I knew loved it. Maude, played with rehsh by Bea Arthur,
was not young, or skinny, or conventionally which was,
"pretty," in
many ways safe, because it would have been much too threatening to
have a sweet young thing say —and do—what Maude did. At five feet

eleven inches, she was as tall as, or taller than, most men, and Time
described her as having "the voice of a diesel truck in second gear."^^

Outspoken, sharp-tongued, and sarcastic, eager to take on any

man in a debate about poHtics and especially about the status of
women, Maude said all the things you wished you had said when, at

2:00 A.M., you reviewed how badly you'd handled your day, and how
you had failed to stand up, verbally, to men you wanted to kill. The
deep pitch of her voice and her wiUingness to yell and to engage in
verbal fisticuffs were central to the show's big joke: women who had
not severed the cords between their opinions, needs, and desires and
their voice boxes were so unusual that they were, well, funny When
 The Rise of the Bionic Bimbo 203

visiting Edith Bunker, her cousin, Maude refuses to cater to Archie's

expectation that he will be waited on hand and foot, and even has the
effrontery to sit in his chair. After he fails to respond to her call that

breakfast is ready, she goes upstairs, pulls the pillow out from under

him, and announces, "Are you waiting for a special invitation? I said
breakfast is on the table. You can either come to the table and eat
. . .

or he there and feed off your own fat." In another episode, as she

waits next to an examining table for her gynecologist, she places

her hands dehberately on the stirrups and sighs, "Just once, I'd love to

get a doctor in these." When her mother describes her love for her

husband as "biting my tongue and standing behind him right or

wrong," Maude counters, "If you think that's love, then you're a

horse's patootie."

Maude was a thrilling catharsis — a woman with a mouth on

—
her and probably what was most thriUing about her was her refusal
to compromise or to take on any of the conventional guises of femi-
ninity. The most heated controversy of the 1972-73 television season

was the two-part show "Maude's Dilemma," when Maude, discover-

ing herself pregnant at age forty-seven, decides to get an abortion.

No sitcom woman had ever done this before.

But Maude was also fearsome, an often unyielding batde-ax, a

caricature herself of the older, privileged American woman who
constantly castrates her htde worm of a husband. At the same time
that Maude ridiculed sexism and male privilege, she reinforced the

stereotype of the feminist as a strident, loud, unfeminine bruiser who

could afford to be a feminist because she was older, less needy of male
approval, and financially comfortable. She was contrasted to her
neighbor Vivian (Rue McClanahan), an overly accommodating,
hyperfeminized ditz. Were these our choices, the ball-busting harri-

dan or the doormat? Hey, hadn't we seen these choices before? We

wanted to speak our minds, to reconnect our voices to all of our
inner selves, not just the poHte ones. But Maude, liberal poUtics and
all, suggested that if we did — if we really did —we'd be as feared and

as laughed at as Maude. Younger viewers like me felt that compro-

204 Where the Girls Are

raise was still away of life. And we wanted to see these compromises
on TV and in the movies, but in a way that preserved female dignity.
With a few isolated exceptions, we were to be sorely disappointed.
Black women fared no better, and it's certainly easy to argue that
they fared worse. After decades of invisibiHty on television, punctu-
ated by the overly ssippy Julia, in which Diahann Carroll broke the
color barrier by getting a lead m a sitcom, black women began to get
roles, but most often as oversized, forbidding matriarchs whose dia-
logue consisted primarily of yelling at men and ridiculing their hus-
The black female voice on TV was even more forbidding than
bands.
Maude s. The most terrifying was Aunt Esther (LaWanda Page) of
Sanford and Son, who threatened Fred Sanford with warnings Hke
"I'm gonna jump down your throat and stomp on your liver" while
she chased after him brandishing an umbrella or other weapon, ready
to strike. In return, he constantly insulted her appearance, driving
home how hideous women become once they are older and have
some opmions. In Good Times (itself a spm-off from Maude), Esther
Rolle was infinitely more sympathetic as a strong and caring wife and
mother, but many of the same stereotypes clung to her, as they did to
Louise Jefferson in The Jeffersons. Black female characters in the early
1970s fell into either the stereotype of the hefty, asexual, loud-
mouthed, castrating, domineering woman who wasn't really a
woman at all — like Flip Wilson's drag character Geraldine —or the
exotic tigress much more sexuahzed than her white
Even as sisters.

black women on TV were given louder and more demanding voices,

the media further negated and silenced them.
Other sitcoms in the early 1970s participated in the drama of the
struggle for the female voice, how it should be used and what it

should and should not say The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-
offs Rhoda and Phyllis showed women of varying marital status work-
ing outside the home, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show was held up
both as a sign of progress and as an example of recalcitrant sexism in
the representation of women's lives. Because it was, when it first aired
in 1970, the only major TV show with a single woman in the tide
 The Rise of the Bionic Bimbo 205

role, It became a lightning rod for feminist criticisms and aspirations.

And few shows embodied more perfectly the intertwining of tradi-

tional femininity with new feminist ambitions. In a masterfiil balanc-

ing act, the show spoke powerfully to women yet domesticated

feminism at the same time.^" Sure, Mary Richards was out on her

own working in a good job and, in contrast to her man-chasing

friend Rhoda with the New York accent, not slavering to give up
that job to get married. She called up men for dates, and she fended
off men she didn't hke. She made it clear that sohtude was vastly
preferable to spending time with some oaf, just because he was a
man. But why, asked feminists, did a TV producer call her male boss

Mr. Grant when every^one else in the entire office building called him
Lou and he, Hke everyone else, took the Hbert\' of calling her Mary?
Why, if she really was a producer, was she most frequently seen t>^p-
ing, serving as Ann Landers to other staffers, and replacing the flower
in the vase on her desk? Why, demanded feminists, must the media
always take away with one hand what they had just given us with the
other?
These criticisms point to the major conflict for women, particu-

larly middle-class women, that Vie Mary Tyler Moore Show addressed:
just how assertive could, or should, the "new woman" be? The logo

for the show's production company said it all: the familiar MGM
wreath, but instead of a roaring Hon in the middle, there was a mew-
ing kitten, finally at center stage, but never, ever, able to roar. Much
of the commentary on MTM at the time misread the show, I think,

taking one snapshot of it at a particular moment and making pro-

nouncements about its cultural significance. Either it was retrograde

(no TV producer did the menial jobs Mary did) or it was progressive
(she was independent, lived alone, and had a career). These wildly
var^dng responses simply illustrate how open this shov.; and Moore's
performance in it, were to various readings by different women.
Mary's struggle to blend assertiveness with submission and diplo-
macy was best exemplified by her gestures, her facial expressions,

and, especially, her language. Simultaneously feisty and meek, Mary

206 Where the Girls Are

often took one step forward and two steps back as she sought to find
the middle ground for herself between traditional femininity and the
new womanhood. The part of her body most engaged in this strug-
gle was her larynx. At times, in fact, it seemed as if Moore was car-
icaturing the way women repeatedly use words and phrases hke
"maybe," "perhaps," "have you considered," and "I don't know how
to say this, but . .
." to cushion the impact of a request, demand, or
refusal. She also stuttered, paused, and let her voice trail off when
she was being pressed to tell some boor what she really thought of
him or to assert a position at work. Mary used her voice to drama-
tize the ongoing struggle for women to speak their minds, even after
the women's movement. As soon as she raised her voice, she muted
it. It was as if her vocal cords alternated between femininity and
feminism.
In the first episode, when Lou Grant interviews Mary for a job,
he starts asking her what reUgion she is and whether she's married.
She responds, "I don't know how to say this, but you're not allowed
to ask that when someone's applying for a job." She then blurts out
the answers to the personal questions. As Grant persists, she stands up
as if to leave, raising her voice sHghtly and saying, with a quaver,
"You've been asking a lot of personal questions that don't have a
thing to do with my qualifications for the job." It's clear this was not
easy for Mary Richards to say but she did say it. Yet right after this
defiance, as soon as she is hired for the job, she almost cants her head
and, eyes down, gives every indication she will be an obedient
employee. In the same episode, when Rhoda asserts that the apart-
ment Mary expects move into is really hers and that Mary should
to
get out, Mary protests, "You think I'm a pushover, don't you? Well,
if you push me, I might have to push back —and hard." Rhoda
doesn't buy this for a minute and scoffs, "You can't carry that off," to
which a deflated Mar>^ admits, as her voice sHdes down several
octaves and decibels, "I know." Yet Mary keeps the apartment. She
also insists that her breakup with her boyfriend of two years was "my
choice," and when he comes to town to try to rekindle their
 The Rise of the Biotiic Bimbo 207

romance, she appreciates, yet again, that he"s not committed enough
to her and tells him good-bye. When he tells her to take care of her-
self, she answers, "I think I just did."

At times Marv' Richards was completely comphant, a lady

putting herself through contortions to spare others' feehngs. At other

times she was absolutely definite, standing up for her rights as a

woman and a worker. Most frequently she asserted hersell with one
phrase or sentence but couched the assertion in such a stuttering,
roundabout manner that it hardly seemed like an assertion at all.

Mary's specialt\^ was this deployment of Hnguistic camouflage, using

verbal decoys of comphance to achieve what she wanted. Through
Mary, women's desires for independence, autonomy, and respect

were expressed and vaHdated, yet also choked off, swallowed, muted.
We identified powerflilly with this pas de deux, for few real-Hfe dra-
mas for women in the 1970s were more difficult than the tension

between speaking the truth and hedging it, or even, in the end, keep-

ing quiet.
As the show progressed into the mid- and late 1970s, the Mars-

Richards character evolved as well, becoming more assured, more

sarcastic, more authoritative. Without ever being expHcitly temi-
nist — the writers dehberately avoided women's rights issues'' — the

show subtly dramatized the ideological molting process that young

women were experiencing as the decade wore on. The Mary we first
met after the theme song asked "How will you make it on your

own?" Uved on her own and hked it. and was "gonna make it after
all." But she also smiled too much, was too eager to please, and usu-

ally couldn't say no to job demands or to needy friends. As the sea-

sons passed, however, she became less concerned about sparing

people's feehngs and more assertive about protecting her indepen-
dence — The show, then, validated the
aU diplomaticaUv-, of course.
struggle of many working women to make the workplace more
humane, shaped as much by traditional "female" values of nurtur-
ance, praise, and mutual support as by traditional "male" values ot
cutthroat competition, criticism, and mdividuaHsm.
208 Where the Girls Are

The men in the show offered caricatures of patriarchy. Ted Bax-

ter, the self-important, narcissistic anchorman, showed that behind
the distinguished silver hair and baritone voice of the news
announcer who told us the way it was there was a shallow, ignorant,
preening imbecile who understood nothing. The gruff and insensi-
tive Lou Grant couldn't express his feeHngs and had an impoverished
personal life. Murray Slaughter was a eunuch, forced to write copy

for Ted Baxter and disappointed in his own ambitions. Mary was the
most balanced, sensible, and happy of them all. But there was the
inevitable unspoken warning: don't aspire to too much success or
power —look what it does to men, think of what it would do to a
woman. More important, Mary was ideaHzed by
men, each all three
of whom had of a crush on her and who, in one episode, even
a bit

fantasized about marrying her. We were reminded, week in and week

out, that this adulation came fi-om Mary's traits as a caring, nurturing,
ever-supportive, smiHng woman who would never be too pushy or
demand too much, a woman who didn't raise her voice, a woman
who knew how to ask for things without seeming like she wanted
anything for herself Old contradictions never die; they just get new
outfits.

There was also another unfolding drama, this one about female
friendship and sisterhood. In the first four seasons, Mary Hved in an
apartment building that resembled a female dorm. Rhoda was
upstairs, Phyllis was downstairs, and the three often met in Mary's
apartment to talk about their work, their lives, and men. The

woman's world of Mary's apartment balanced the man's world of

work. But when Rhoda and Phyllis were "spun off" into series of
their own in 1974 and 1975, Mary no longer had her sisterly support
group. ^"^ Now the only women in her Hfe were Georgette, Ted Bax-
ter's ditzy wife, and Sue Ann Nivens, the female barracuda who ate
men —and litde girls like Mary—for breakfast. These women weren't
sisters, and Sue Ann made it quite clear that she could regard Mary
only as competition. When one of Mary's female relatives, her Aunt
Flo, a seasoned journaHst, appeared, we saw an older, high-powered.
 The Rise of the Biotiic Bimbo 209

insensitive, overly aggressive career v^oman who made Mary feel

inadequate. This move from the female camaraderie of the show to

Mary's isolation from w^omen and increased alUance with men mir-
rored other subde, and not so subde, negations of sisterhood else-
where in the mass media as the 1970s progressed.

In these years, television was wrestUng with what to do not only

with women's voices but with their bodies as well. The conflict over

women's new sexual freedom was staged, most frequently, on cop

shows. The 1974-75 season saw the debut of two new trends on tele-
vision, one the mirror image of the other. In Police Woman, starring

Angle Dickinson as Sgt. Pepper Anderson, and Get Christie Love,

with Teresa Graves, the barrier against women having the title role in

a cop show was broken. (Get Christie Love was meant to break the
color barrier as well, but the show only lasted one season, possibly
because viewers didn't quite buy a female cop who smirked sugges-
tively to criminals, "You're under arrest, sugah.") And so women
wouldn't get too cocky, another barrier, a long-held TV taboo, was

also broken in that season. It was now OK to discuss and portray the

crime of rape, and soon women were getting raped everywhere,

especially on shows Hke Police Woman. George Gerbner, then dean of
the Annenberg School of Communication and a leading authority

on television violence, decried the "counterattack on the women's

movement" that involved such "tactics of terror" as "the institution-
alization of rape."^^ But the counterattack escalated in The Streets of

San Francisco, Kojak, Mannix, and other detective/cop shows, where

we often got to see and/or overhear the woman gasp, cry, and whim-
per as she was violated for the viewing audiences' supposed pleasure.
Ironically, it was on shows Hke Police Woman — allegedly a sop to

women, but created, produced, and written by men — that we saw

the height of the backlash.
First, let's consider the character "Pepper," her name neither mas-

culine nor feminine, but one you might give to your cat. Angle
Dickinson proposed the name herself, saying, "Somehow I can't
"^^
imagine a woman poHce officer named 'Lisa.' The opening
210 Where the Girls Are

sequence of the show, which juxtaposes shots of her legs descending

a staircase, action shots of her with gun in hand, images of her face
frozen with fear as she's being attacked, and close-ups of her breasts,

established the centrality of her sexuality to her success on the job.

The gorgeous, blond, and husky-voiced Pepper's main job as a cop
was to go undercover as a prostitute, stripper, gangster's moU, or
aspiring porno queen to set the black widow's trap. But she wasn't
the predator, she was the prey. As the sexy, luscious bait, in her low-
cut, fringed sheath or jumpsuit, Pepper was invariably found out by
the bad guys and always had to be rescued by the white, male cavalry,
the real cops headed by Lt. Bill Crowley (Earl HoUiman). Often she
was rescued just as she was about to be raped or sexually violated in
some other way. So the audience got to fantasize briefly about a
woman who dared to do a "man's job" getting her just deserts. But
the threat of Pepper's unleashed sexuaHty also got contained just in
time. Episodes had titles hke "Warning to All Wives," "Anatomy of
Rapes," and "Bondage." Crowley and others urged Pepper to use her
sex appeal in all aspects of her work, like when trying to secure
authorization for a wiretap ifirom a lecherous judge. Often she would
receive this advice while getting her male compatriots a cup of cof-
fee. Her gun was always smaller than theirs, just a httle snub-nosed
thing with hardly any range or power at all compared with what the
boys had. But at least it fit into her purse.
The first episode of Police Woman, about a bank robbery, con-
tained a rape. Invariably, the rape victims in these episodes were
young and single, and their occupational choices usually meant that
they were "asking for it." They were nude models, or strippers, or
actresses wilHng to star in porno movies. For the purposes of viewer
titillation, these women were humiliated in some way, either forced
to do a striptease at gunpoint before being murdered or tied up with
leather straps and threatened with an iron poker. In another episode,
when a nude model is found raped and bludgeoned to death, one cop
dismisses the crime by noting that the victim is "not exactly the kind
of chick who'd have to have her arm twisted." Later, after examining
 The Rise of the Bionic Bimbo 211

the body, the coroner tells Pepper and Crowley, "There are indica-

tions that the lady had herself quite an evening," as if there were por-

tions of the assault she had welcomed.

The sexual Hberation of women, in other words, became an
excuse to terrorize them and to reinforce the most offensive stereo-

types about which kinds of women get raped and why. In this same
episode, an older, married white woman accuses a black man of rap-
ing her; in the end, she confesses she was lying. When women Hke
that claim they've been raped —women who not young, gor- are

geous, and scantily dressed —who can beheve them? At very time the

when feminists were beginning to attack rape laws and the way rape

victims were treated by pohce and the legal system, shows like this,

under the guise of feminism, reinforced every negative stereotype

about rape that perpetuated the system. Women kept seeing them-

selves as helpless victims, as being both responsible for male rage and
violence and unable to escape from it without the help of other, bet-
ter men. Some women at the time praised Police Woman because it

featured a strong female lead. But I remember this show well, a kind

of TV noir with sexually provocative and rapacious women needing

either extermination or rescuing by men, and I remember how litde
pleasure and how much anger it brought to me.
Then there was the drama about women and power. In 1976
came most ingenious resolution to the tension between
television's

feminism and antifemimsm. What we got was the bionic bimbo, the
superhuman woman with lots of power, maybe even a gun, flouncy

hair, a mellifluous voice, and erect nipples. She was the immediate

forerunner of the superwoman, the size-six CEO with a Ph.D., two

perfect children, a doting husband, not a Hne on her face, and the
ability to rebuild the car's engine on the weekend. She sang to us, as

the Enjoh woman did, "I can bring home the bacon, fi^ it up in the

pan, and never, ever let you forget you're a man." Later, she appeared

in ads as the no-nonsense businesswoman in stiletto pumps who

could best any man. In one example of subHminal seduction gone
awry, the new superwoman CEO was pictured holding a really really
212 Where the Girls Are

big which, presumably, she would use to drive any competition

drill

into the pavement.

In 1976, we saw the debut of The Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman,
and, of course, Charlie's Angels. Few shows drew more instantaneous
criticism from feminists than Charlie's Angels. Judith Coburn, a jour-

nahst, called it "one of the most misogynist shows the networks have
produced recently Supposedly about strong women, it perpetuates
the myth most damaging to women's struggle to gain professional
equahty: that women always use sex to get what they want, even on
the job." She cast the program as "a version of the pimp and his girls.
Charlie dispatches his streetwise girls to use their sexual wiles on the
world while he reaps the profits."'^ And femmists weren't alone. Vir-
tually everyone trashed the show as a piece of sexist soft-core porn
that drove television to new lows. Time described the show as
"mediocre" and "aesthetically ridiculous," adding, "Brightly lit and
crudely shot, the visual style indeed reminds one of comic art at its
^^
least sophisticated level."

Since I had been glued to ABC that summer, watching the

Olympics, I, Hke millions of others, knew was com- Charlie's Angels
ing: ABCtook advantage of the huge Olympic-viewing audience to
hype the show ad nauseam. By then, I was in graduate school study-
ing the media and teaching about it, and, well, I had an excuse;
watching Charlie's Angels was part of my "work." (Hey, it's a dirty job,
but somebody's got to do it.) And when I first saw the show, I was as
outraged as other feminists over its objectification of women and its

celebration of patriarchy through the use of invisible Charhe's

instructing voice. But you know what? I watched it regularly and not
just for work. At the same time that I hated it, I loved it. Unhke Police
Woman, show did something I certainly wasn't supposed to
this

admit, then or now: it gave me pleasure. And I had plenty of com-

pany On Wednesday nights at 10:00 P.M., a staggering 59 percent of
all TV sets in use were tuned to Farrah,
Jaclyn, and Kate, which
meant 23 million households watched Charlie's Angels every week.
And these viewers weren't just slavering fourteen-year-old boys or
 The Rise of the Bionic Bimbo 213

people with single-digit IQs: the show ranked seventh among coUege
graduates and those who earned over $20,000 a year. It was popular

with womenand with men, although often for different reasons.

There is no doubt that the show was escapist rot of the first order,
combining plots a three-year-old could foUow with plent\^ of cheese-
cake. But neither its sexual titillation nor itsSee-Spot-Run plotUnes
adequately explain why this show at this time, became the media and

cultural phenomenon Looking back on Charlie's Augeh

that it did.

after nearly twenty years, we find some interesting

and pleasant sur-

prises mixed in with the string bikinis and

those hideous bell-

bottoms, so try to hold your nose and bear with me.

exploited,
The reason Charlie's Angels was such a hit was that it

perfectly, the tensions bet\veen antifemimsm and feminism.

The
opening sequence estabhshed this tension immediately We hear the

voice of the great white patriarch, CharHe, announcing,

"Once upon
a time, there were three Htde girls who went
to the poHce academy."

But what we see aren't three Htde girls. We see three buxom women
grimly shooting guns, using judo to flip men over their heads and

onto the ground, and writing traffic tickets. Then Charhe says sarcas-

tically, "And they were each assigned very hazardous duties," as we

see them stuck m the kinds of dead-end jobs women usually get con-

fined to: doing clerical work and serving as crossing guards for

schoolchildren instead of working as real cops. Distancing himself

to take
from the retrograde and unenhghtened bureaucracies that fail

advantage of the talents of smart, accomphshed women,

CharHe

announces proudly, "But I took them away from aU that, and now
they work for me. My name is Charlie."

Then, as the lush theme song, a cross between the James Bond
theme and the music from South Pacific, fills the soundtrack, we see

the angels in their new job, driving race cars at a hundred miles an
hour, brandishing guns and commanding, "Freeze!," chasing and

being chased by villains, and flippmg their voluminous hair across

They now get

their faces. to do what men do, but they are still very

much women. CharHe, a sophisticated and enlightened man, is the

214 Where the Girls Are

agent of liberation for these women, suggesting that it is smart, mod-

ern men who will set women free. But CharHe is also instantly
recognizable as a traditional patriarch —commanding, unseen, per-
meating everything, issuing orders and mstructions the girls must
obey. He is also a complete lech, a trait we're meant to find endear-
ing. CharHe couldn't possibly supervise the angels face-to-face — he'd
be too busy chasing them around the office to get anythmg done.
Instead, he has a eunuch, Bosley, supervising the harem; Bosley is an
office manager who poses no sexual threat and who, as the butt of
coundess jokes and incessant teasing, affirms that some men are quite
make fools of and dominate.
easy to
The plots were pretty standard. At the beginning of each show,
CharHe mformed the angels about someone, usually a young woman,
who had been victimized in some way; often they then met the girl,
instantly bonded with her, and told her not to worry, they would
help. To do so, they had to go undercover to expose and thwart the
bad guys. And here's where things get interesting. In the first season
they went undercover as prison inmates, WACs in basic training, and
roUer derby queens. The girl they were helping was almost always
from what was called "a simple background," meaning less sophisti-

cated and of a lower socioeconomic class than they, although the

angels' class was somewhat indeterminate. So they didn't just go
undercover into an occupation not theirs, they also went undercover
into another class, coming to the aid of a less fortunate sister who
didn't have their resources, their training, or their chutzpah. The
angels were always extremely sympathetic and helpful to these girls,
suggesting a female bond across class barriers that many feminists
were trying to achieve in real Hfe. These absolutely preposterous sit-

uations spoke to a fantasy about women being able to help other

women against brutish, oppressive men, and they affirmed the
importance of sisterly love.

Once the angels were given the case and their undercover roles,
they usually acted independently of CharHe. What we saw, as the case
progressed, were three women working together, sharing informa-
 —
The Rise of the Biotiic Bimbo 215

tion, nps. and hunches, usnig inductive and deducnve reasoning to

piece together the solunon to the crime. They tested their percep-

tions and ideas against one another, and if one fell too easily for some

man's explanation of thmgs, the others razzed her for being too soft.
The term male chauuinist pig was a regular part of their vocabulary
They conspired together against bad men, one posing as bait while

one or both oi the others snuck up behind and nailed the bastard.
Unhke Pepper .\nderson. who was always gettmg bailed out by her
male compatriots, the angels saved themselves and one another, otten
with their guns, always with their wits. It was watching this women —
working together to solve a problem and capture, and sometmies kill,
reallv awtiil. sadisnc men. while ha\ing great hairdos and clothes

that engaged our desire.

Nor did the angels always have to use their sexuaht\- to get what
diey wanted. It's true, their looks never hurt, and the endless bikinis,
decolletage. and wet T-shirts, which prompted Hbidinous comments
tfom the appreciative male characters, reemphasized to women \-iew-
if you're really
ers the importance of looking hke a Playboy centertbld

eoing to get what you want. No doubt this made it more palatable
when they talked back to bad guys, which they did all the time and

with plent\- of conviction, looking some chunky, menacing beetalo

straight in the eye and saving, "I don't beheve you. You're a Har."

They also took on bad women, and here negative stereot\-pes ot

the lesbian as a menacing, bull dyke dominatrLx abounded, as it was

made clear that the angels, despite their guns and defiance ot men.

were still real girls. These bitch villainesses cared not a whit tor

human life or decency and they speciahzed m xictimizmg young

women. In one episode \\-ith the titillating S 6c M tide "Angels m

Chains." the girls have to go undercover into a women's prison, only

to run mto a warden named Max(ine). who instructs them to ""strip

to vour birthday suits" and eyes them appreciatively as she douses

them with disinfectant. Corrupt dvke roller derby queens are just as

bad, and Jill (Farrah) knees one in the stomach and pounds her on the

head as part of what she refers to as ""unfinished business." Women

 —
216 Where the Girls Are

like this got no empathy; they got cold-cocked —and not by men,
but by other women.
When they went undercover, the angels often cross-dressed, and
we saw them in army fatigues, prison work shirts and jeans, or race
car driver jumpsuits and helmets. Women in men's clothing look
smaller than men in men's clothes, reminding us that women aren't as
big and strong as men: there is a fantasy of easy domination and con-
quest here. But this cross-dressing also challenged conventional gen-
der roles, emphasizing that the angels could assume mascuhne roles
with a great degree of success. And when these women with their
perfect makeup, voluptuous bodies, and huge hairdos wore men's
clothes, they showed that masculinity, like femininity, was a put-on,
a masquerade, something these girls, with their wits and guns, could

indeed impersonate without becoming too manly or corrupted by

^'^
male desires for power and domination.
Charlie's Angels pulled off a neat trick: while it reinforced tradi-
tional male power through CharHe's faceless voice and agenda-setting
instructions, it also tried to pretend that there was no such thing as
patriarchy, at least the way feminists had characterized it. Instead,
there were just a few bad men, isolated deviants, and if only these
guys were exterminated or locked up, women would have nothing to
fear. There wasn't a system that oppressed women, only a few power-
hungry bad guys. And if women worked together to ferret them out,
all would be fine. But despite this repudiation of feminist analyses, I

must admit I enjoyed seeing women in nice clothes and great hair
brandishing guns to put certain boys in their place, and to kill them
if need be. Here feminism and antifeminism stood in perfect suspen-
sion. In seeking to have it both ways —
to espouse female Hberation
and to promote the objectification of women's bodies Charlie's
Angels offered a compromise with empowering and thwarting effects.
But I wasn't sure what to make of Wonder Woman and The Bionic
Woman. Having grown up with Bewitched and The Flying Nun, and
hoping stupidly that maybe, now, we'd get something a Htde more
reaUstic than a woman whose power Hes in her bracelets, we got.
 The Rise of the Bionic Bimbo 217

instead, more far-fetched, metaphorical cartoons m which women,

without special effects, were powerless. The campiest ot the bionic
bimbos was Wonder Woman, played by the statuesque, voluptuous
former beaut\' queen Lynda Carter. The shows theme song con-
tained the best lyrics ever wxitten: "In your satin tights, fightmg
for

your rights, and the old red. white, and blue." Wonder Woman was

an Amazon princess from an all-female island somewhere near the

Bermuda Triangle: she w^asn't supposed to like or need men, but then
she met one and kmda lost her resolve.
At first the show was set during World War II. when Wonder
Woman fought Nazis, but in 1977 the scene changed to contempo-
rar>' America. In both incarnations, Diana Prince put on glasses and
worked as a secretary- in low-cut dresses, and her boss, the dark-

haired. FM-voiced Steve Trevor, had no idea she was Wonder

Woman. Whenever Steve, or American national securit\-. was in dan-
ger, Diana dashed off to a private room and started
spinning. As she

spun, an orange explosion emanated from her navel, and. when

the

sparks had cleared, there she was her gold-braided, m

red satin

bustier, her star-studded blue satin short shorts, and her knee-high,
high-heeled, red satin boots, which must have been real easy to run
and m. Once she was
iump m
this outfit, there was nothing she

couldn't do. She stopped tanks with her bare hands, snapped assault
rifles in two as if they were toothpicks. Hfted up trucks, hurled bad
guys through the air. and leaped tall buildings in a single bound — all

m her red spikes. She could knock down a steel door with one kick,
and her golden bracelets deflected all bullets, all this to the sound ot

beating t\'mpames and screeching synthesizers. At the same time that

Ubnder Woman's breasts seemed constantly poised to burst torth

from their Playboy bunny-t\-pe container. Wonder Woman reasoned

calmly with Steve about the crime m him ideas,
question and gave

suggestions, and solutions for how to foil the bad guys. This girl used

her brains and her body. But as tough and powerful as she was. Won-
der Woman never used her powers to advance her own interests, and

she never spoke of her own goals and ambitions. She had power, all
218 Where the Girls Are

right, but It was always put to altruistic ends, to save the man she
secretly cared for (a desire she couldn't admit to) and to save her
country. With Steve she was as soft-spoken, pleasant, and diplomatic
asSamantha Stevens. As Diana Prince, her powers were hidden, kept
secret. As in 1964, female power was still a secret power, kept under

wraps, never discussed, used only in emergencies, never used for self-
advancement. Unlike in 1964, this power wasn't supposed to be con-
fined to the domestic sphere. It could, and should, be used in pubHc,
in the service of good and evil, and to preserve national security
itself

The same was true for Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner), the
Bionic Woman. She was the least kitschy of them
all. She didn't have

a costume, was not constantly seen in bikinis or wet T-shirts, and

didn't giggle all the time, although she did eventually get a bionic dog.
Max. When she was introduced to the viewing pubHc as the Six Mil-
Hon Dollar Man's fiancee, she was a tennis pro, one of the top-ranked
women players in the world. But when she got her own series, her
cover was the more femininely appropriate role of schoolteacher.
Jaime Sommers had bionic legs that allowed her to run thirty-five
miles per hour and jump fi-om rooftops, a bionic right arm that was
capable of ripping open steel doors and the Hke, and a biomc ear that
allowed her to crack safes, overhear dastardly plots, and anticipate the

arrival of UFOs. Like the angels, she often went undercover, assum-
ing, by turns, the role of nun, lady wresder, and the perennial favorite,
rollerderby queen. Like the angels, she took her orders from a man,
although this one was visible. Unlike the angels, she worked alone, her
best fi-iend not another woman but a dog.
Behind the bionic Hmbs and Old Glory short shorts, the flouncy
hair and snub-nosed guns, behind Maude's yeUing and Mary's partially

swallowed words, was a media compromise with fermnism. They

would show us women with power, but only in comic book settings
that could never be mistaken for reahty. This power had to be kept
secret, as the women who possessed it masqueraded as regular women,
as lower-class women, as women with absolutely no power at all.
 The Rise of the Bionic Bimbo 219

Given their power, it was critical that the women be hyperfeminized,

with large, gravity-defying breasts and perfectly souffleed hair.

The dramas we witnessed in the 1970s, about our being severed

from while trying to reclaim our voices, our sexuaKty, our agency in
the world, urged us to rewrite Helen Reddy's song and, instead, to

murmur, as we watched the cute-as-a-button MTM logo, "I am

woman, hear me purr." Women could have it all, but the levels of
accomplishment we were offered were impossible for mere mortals
to attain. As with Bewitched nearly ten years earUer, women's emerg-
ing power — their political power, their sexual independence, their

growing individual assertiveness —was either too scary or simply too

incomprehensible to portray with any reahsm. So, once again, we got

metaphors and kitsch: women with magical, superhuman powers

made possible, the viewer knew, not by the woman herself but

through the wizardry of special effects, designed and controlled by

men. We saw Jaime Sommers leap buildings in a single bound,
accompanied by great sound effects, and Wonder Woman zap bad

guys with her magic bracelets. But in the early 1970s, when approx-

imately 45 percent of women were working outside the home, many

of them married with children, we still didn't see women's real hero-

ism on TV: women jugghng it all with virtually no support from any
quarter and demands coming in from everywhere.
Pdcocheting between the various representations of feminism
and pseudofeminism we saw on TV m the 1970s, we reaHzed we
would have to reinvent ourselves yet again. Now- there were a few

women on TV with steel oblongs of their own, although they were

decidedly smaller than what dangled provocatively under the armpits
of their male counterparts. These stubby, truncated phalluses,

wielded by braless women with leomne hair, signified woman's new

power —her new, stubby, truncated power. It wasn't much, but it was
a start.
 T E R 10

7 h EEA as Catfigtit

and gentlemen! In this corner, we have Gloria Steinem, a

Iadies
beautiful, single, and childless career woman in a miniskirt, who
Hkens marriage to prostitution and insists that "if men could get

pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." In this corner, we have

PhyUis Schlafly, an attractive, successful wife and mother of six in a

shirtwaist, who women and calls

claims that feminism will enslave

feminists a women
"bunch of bitter seeking a constitutional cure for

their personal problems." OK, girls, the gong has sounded, have at it.

In the 1970s, while Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali were pound-
ing the crap out of each other around the globe, we had our own
feminist Thrilla in Manila right here in America. This was what the
debates about feminism got reduced to in the mass media: a catfight
between two women. Still unknown to most Americans in 1970,
when the media spothght was on Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and
Shirley Chisholm, by the mid-1970s Gloria Steinem and PhyUis
Schlafly personified the stark and supposedly mutually exclusive

choices before us. It willcome as no surprise that their elevation to

these positions says more about the media's response to feminism

than it does about either feminism or antifeminism.

The catfight is a staple of American pop culture, and by the 1970s
it had evolved into various forms of especially sloppy faux combat
between women, like female mud wrestHng or Jell-O wrestHng. In its

purest form, it features two women, one usually a traditional wife

(blond), the other a grasping, craven careerist (brunette), who slug it

222 Where the Girls Are

out on a veranda, in a lily pond, or during a mud slide. Usually they

fight over men or children. Sometimes, as in The Turning Point, they
just hit each other with their Httle purses. Other times, as in the
incessant catfights in Dynasty, Krystle got to slop a big, gushy glob of
cold cream in Alexis's face, or Alexis got to throw pond scum down
Krystle 's blouse.'
The catfight—which in the 1960s we only got to see in B movies
Hke Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! —made it into the main-
stream in the 1970s and '80s. We tend to think of the catfight as a sta-
ple of the nighttime soaps, and the daytime soaps as well. So it's

worth reminding ourselves that the catfight was first revived not in
prime time but through a more respectable venue, the news media.
We can trace those mud-wrestHng scenes on Dynasty back to the
hissing and clawing on the nightly news. For all too many baby
boomers, raised with Cinderella and Gidget, now coming of age
with Bella Abzug and Germaine Greer, the 1970s was a tough
decade, and not just because of polyester pantsuits or the fact that
every number one hit in the country seemed to be by John Denver.
Reehng between two very different visions of how women should
behave and what they should aspire to, we searched for a resolution
that gave us power but didn't cost us love. In this struggle, we got Ht-
tle help from the mass media, which seemed, when it came to
women, only able to provide caricatures of extremists on each side.
Yet we took what we got —
Steinem versus Schlafly, Alexis versus
Krystle —and drew pieces from each as we continued puzzHng
through what now seemed like the impossible task of forging a new
identity. The media gave us plenty of warnings about feminism while

acknowledging that there was no going back. The compromise we

would have to jerry-rig for ourselves.

Throughout the 1970s, I was struggling big time with which

feminism, or feminisms, I was going to assume. Going to graduate
school helped consolidate my transformation; work or marriage to
someone who thought women should be seen but not heard did it

for others. The academic department I was first in was so sexist I

 The ERA as Catfight 223

transferred out after a few weeks. It had never, to my knowledge,

graduated a woman Ph.D. and, of course, had no women on its fac-
ulty except one visiting professor. With a few key exceptions, the
rest of the department was larded with one self-satisfied, pompous
fathead after the next did things Hke wink at me during aca-
who
demic advising meetings and ask me what I was going to cook for

dinner that night. Other women I knew got comments on their

seminar papers teUing them how cute they were. Mostly, the profes-

sors treated women with complete contempt, waiting

for them to

drop out so they could type some man's seminar papers. This was the

first time I had run smack into so inhospitable a

male estabhshment,

and I decided one thing right away — if I made it out of there alive, I

was never going to be like them, callous, condescending, ehtist

swine. So one thing feminism came to mean for me, right away, was
a repudiation of how men hke this conducted
business. But how,

exactly, should women be instead? Many women who tried

to enter

male enclaves in the 1970s have stories hke this, and knew that what-

ever the news media was suggesting, the struggle wasn't between

women, it was between women and men. And just at this point, the
biggest catfight of them all began on the TV screens and the news- m
papers and magazines of America, the batde over the Equal Rights
Amendment.
As a metaphor for the struggle between feminism and antifemi-
msm, the catfight provided a symbohc catharsis of woman's internal

confhct between the desire for liberation and the longing for security.
It was also a spectacle: two women, often opposites,
locked in a death

grip that brought them both crashing down into the muck. Both
women were sullied; no one won. Meanwhile, the men, dry, clean,
and tidy, were off m some wood-paneled den relaxing, having a drink
and a smoke, and being reasonable.
The catfight served two critically important ideological func-

tions: It put the he to feminists' claims about sisterhood and

reasserted, in its place, competitive individuahsm in which women,

Hke other Americans, duked it out with each other. The notion that
224 Where the Girls Are

all women were "sisters," bound together across ethnic, class, gener-

ational, and regional lines by their common experiences as an

oppressed group, was the most powerful, Utopian, and, therefore,
threatening concept feminists advanced in the 1970s. The best-
selling book Sisterhood Is Powerful; the signs and banners that read
"Women of the World Unite"; the rapid spread of consciousness-
raising groups in which women found common cause; the articles
and editorials advancing sisterhood in Ms.; the sight, on the news, of
tens of thousands of women marching together arm-in-arm — all

these suggested that maybe enough women would form a poHtical

and cultural sisterhood. Of all the concepts and principles that femi-
nists advanced, none was more dangerous to the status quo than the
concept of sisterhood. Hence, the absolute importance of the catfight
to demonstrate as simply and vividly as possible that sisterhood was,
in fact, a crock of shit. Through the catfight, the threat that feminism
posed could be contained and turned back on itself

We had been raised to compete overmen and to scrutinize our-

selves and otherwomen to see who was thinner, younger, sexier,
nicer, prettier. And we had grown up with a notion of a female hier-

archy in which some women —

the Waspy, wealthy, young, and beau-
tiful —were at the top of the pyramid and other women the poor, —
the dark-skinned, the ugly, the old, the fat —were at the bottom.
Multimillion-dollar industries were built on this foundation of
female competition, and it was a notion wired into our sense of self.
The competitive spirit was what animated individualism, and it is

hard to think of an American value more enduring than rugged indi-

viduahsm. Each of us was special and unique; each of us had a shot
at being distinctive in some way; each of us was encouraged to imag-
ine herself as apart from the herd, as someone people somewhere,
someday, would notice stood out. So many women greeted the sis-

terhood concept with ambivalence, a combination of euphoria and

discomfiture.
In the 1970s, millions of women of aU ages struggled with the
tensions between embracing sisterhood and cHnging to that bulwark
 The ERA as Cat fight 225

of American ideolog\', democratic individualism. Iremember walk-

ing around New York or Boston m the early 1970s in my work shirt

and jeans, looking at fifty-year-old women dripping with gold jew-

elry; fur coats, and a few poodles and wondering

whether I really
could get behind the idea that these women were my sisters. At the
same time, I was a social worker for a while and felt enormous empa-
thy with and admiration for — sisterhood, if you will — the working-

class women I met who did things Hke handcuff the fathers of their

babies to their hospital gurneys so the fathers, in violation of hospital

poHcy, would be m the delivery room when their babies were born.
And here Hes the dirt\^ htde secret about sisterhood. It was easy to
feel sisterhood with those "beneath" you or lateral to you in class,

wealth, or appearance. But to feel it with those "above" you — hey,

that Htde insecure, catt\' voice kicked m, those weren't your sisters,

they were the competition, the ones getting more than you got, the
ones who had won, the ones you could never beat. The news media,
TV shows, and ads nurtured this worm burrowing through the apple

of sisterhood, and dramatizing female competition

personif\'ing

wherever possible, erasing or simply refusing to represent (with a few

exceptions) the power of female friendship, cooperation, and love. In
a decade suffocating under the weight o\^ male buddy movies and
male buddy cop shows, we got a total o( one major movie about
female friendship, Julia. Whereas many in the women's movement
sought to highhght sisterhood and dismiss differences among
women, the mainstream media became obsessed with those differ-
ences, emphasizing all the things that kept women divided and apart.
Even ffom the nightly news or TV
Ms., with a different agenda
shows, was riddled with the tensions between sisterhood and mdi-
viduahsm. Articles about how to start consciousness-raising groups

or jom feminist pressure groups coexisted with articles promoting

individual transformation and advancement and profiles of self-made
women.- Once again,we were at the crossroads of an irreconcilable
conflict. Ms. suggested we could have both communalism and mdi-
viduahsm, but the mainstream media were more definite. The major
226 Where the Girls Are

subtext of the 1970s was this: sisterhood, you fools, is both impossi-
ble and undesirable.
By the early 1970s, the catfight had become the dominant news
peg about the progress of the women's movement, and the campaign
to ratify the Equal Paghts Amendment was cast as the catfight par
excellence. The stakes were higher than who got the boy, but we
were back to the same old story we grew up with: Tinker BeU versus
Wendy, Betty versus Veronica, the impossibility of female coopera-
tion. And this is the primary reason we lost the EPu\: if women
themselves were so hopelessly divided over the amendment, why
should it pass? While it's true that some women were deeply threat-
ened by and anxious about the EP^ and lobbied strenuously to
defeat it, polls throughout the decade showed that they were the
minority.^ The main struggle was between EP^ proponents and
male legislators, and behind-the-scenes corporate lobbyists, but this

is not the struggle we saw on the nightiy news. What we saw was the
catfight.

"Women Versus Women" was how the debate over the ER^ was
headhned in news articles, TV shows, interviews, and documen-
taries. AH the news media's initial responses to the women's move-
ment- —the demonizing of feminists as out of the mainstream, the
exaggeration of the movement's internal divisions, the erasure of
male opposition to feminism —became even more pronounced dur-
ing the coverage of the EPJ\. And the media's addiction to "ofiicial"
spokespersons and leaders reinforced America's long-standing cult of
individuahsm.'^ Focusing on leaders impHed that not aU women
shared the same talents or the same pHght —some were more, or less,

equal than others. In the sifting process of identifying leaders, and

ultimately certifying the ones who would be legitimate and the ones
who would not, we saw, again, the caricature of the female
grotesque, of the older or unattractive woman who had "stepped into
the Hmehght out of turn" and was quickly rushed offstage in favor of
less physically and poHtically unruly women. While other social ""

movements went through this tango with the media, in which one or
 The ERA as Catfight 227

two people emerged as the leaders or spokesmen, it was only in the

women's movement that a spokesperson's reception in the press

depended on the degree to which she resembled a model m a Maid-

enform or a Duncan Hmes ad.
It is, of course, a commonplace to note how much more impor-
tant appearance is for women than for men. But there was more to it

than this. Of all the social movements of the 1960s and '70s, none
was more expHcitly anticonsumerist than the women's movement.
Feminists had attacked the ad campaigns for products like Pristeen
and Silva Thins, and by rejecting makeup, fashion, and the need for

spotless floors, repudiated the very need to buy certain products at all.

Now I'm sorry, but attacks Hke these simply cannot be tolerated ma
nation whose main cultural activity is shopping. Yes, there was sex-

ism in the relendess overemphasis on feminists' appearance, but more

than gender privilege was at stake. By ridicuHng how feminists
looked, the American media insisted that consumerism, especially by
women, had to remain both a central pastime and a reUgion. This,

too, the catfight would reinforce.

Competition between women —not over their ideas but over

their looks and behavior, and especially their sexuality —defined the

first stage of the catfight, the selection of the head feHnes. Conflict,

after all, requires combatants. When feminists refiised to single out a

spokeswoman, the media anointed their own.^ Their choice? The

glamorous, successfial, articulate journahst with her choice of male
escorts and a leonine mane of hair, Gloria Steinem.

A close-up of a smiling, sunny-faced Steinem appeared on the

cover of the August 16, 1971, issue o£ Newsweek under the headUne
"The New Woman." Since Steinem had done virtually no organiza-
tional work in the movement until 1971, her selection as feminist

poster girl was distressing to activists who had been in there pitching

The magazine made it

for nearly half a decade. thank clear that this,

God, was no Kate Millett. The entire first paragraph focused on her
appearance, "her long, blond-streaked hair falling just so above each
breast" and her "most incredibly perfect body." Steinem was some-
228 Where the Girls Are

thing most feminists allegedly weren't: sexy and extremely attractive

to men. As Newsweek put it, "one of the basic assumptions" about

feminists is that they "must be losers." Steinem, however, presumably

could get laid whenever she wanted to and was still a feminist. This
dumbfounded Newsweek. But because of her "emphatic sexuality,"
Newsweek emphasized, "Steinem is looked upon with suspicion and
envy by many of the sisters," especially, the article noted, women Hke
Friedan.^ Here was the catfight again. By 1972, Steinem's canoniza-
tion was complete: there she was, on the January cover of McCalVs
under a headline that might sound familiar, "Year of the Woman."
Steinem was used to displace all those other women male media
moguls apparently didn't want to look at or Hsten to, hke Kate Mil-
lett, Betty Friedan, and Bella Abzug. Millett had emerged, against
her will, as one of the first media-anointed feminist leaders in the
summer of 1970, especially when Sexual Politics became a runaway
best-seUer.^ She found herself on the August 31 cover of Time as an
unsmiling, thick-eyeb rowed sphinx with emerging eye bags and a
laser beam stare that could melt testicles from fifty yards away Four
months later, in December, the stereotyping of MiUett as the brawny,
repellent feminist had reached new lows. In fact, the artist Asian,
known for his loving drawings of peach-toned, inviting pinups in
Esquire, drew a caricature of "the feminist," clearly with MiUett in
mind, and Time duly reprinted the image with the caption "A sple-
netic frenzy of hatred." Saggy-breasted, beefy, and scowling, one fist

on her hip, the other holding up a bra in flames, wearing -sandals

favored by Roman centurions and a button reading "WITCH," this

woman clearly hated men, no doubt because she had been rejected
by them so many times. Time used the drawing to illustrate its article

"Women's Lib: A Second Look," in which Irving Howe quipped

about Sexual Politics, "There are times one feels the book was written
by a female impersonator." As it turned out, the worst strike against

Millett was her admission that she was bisexual, a disclosure, in Time's

words, that "is bound to discredit her as a spokeswoman for her

 The ERA as Catfight 229

cause, cast further doubt on her theories, and reinforce the views of
those skeptics who routinely dismiss all liberationists as lesbians."^

Within six months, Millett had been projected onto a leadership role

she didn't seek and banished to the fringes of legitimacy.

^'^
Women
Hke me took note of what happened to this successful intellectual:

she was chewed up and spit out, her private Hfe ripped apart, her fate
a morality tale for us all.

Steinem knocked Betty Friedan out of the spothght. The

also

founder of NOW and a woman more than happy to be regarded as

a feminist leader, Friedan found herself marginaUzed by the news

media, in no small part because of her age and appearance. In a New

York Times Magazine article titled "Mother SuperiorWomen's to

Lib," Paul Wilkes obsessed on her looks and described the young
Friedan on "a lonesome perch by the weed-filled, abandoned
sitting

cemetery," "her eyes gUstemng with tears" because "Betty wasn't an

attractive girl." She would "happily have traded 30 points on the IQ

scale for a modicum of good looks and popularity." She had grown

up to become "a vision of somebody's eccentric, middle-aged aunt,

her hair a swirl of cowhcks, her face deeply Hned, [and with a] dou-
ble chin," a woman with "her clothing in disarray" who carried "a

leather purse the size and shape of a horse's feedbag." Surely a

woman like this — sagging, wrinkled, disheveled, disappointed in

love — couldn't really show women the road to happiness. The arti-

cle then pitted Friedan against other feminist leaders, using cap-

tioned photos of "Women's Libbers" saying things hke "Betty's

greatest strength —her aggressiveness — is also her greatest weakness"
or that Betty championed women's liberation "so that her own
emotional needs can be fulfilled.'"' Meow. Then there was the fem-

inist billed by Time as "Bellacose Abzug," nicknamed in the press

"batthng Bella" and described, variously, as "a sumo Hberal," "a lady

wrestler," "an interoffice tyrant undreamt of since Cahgula," and "a

rhinoceros," whose voice Norman Mailer said "could boil the fat off

a taxi driver's neck."'"^

230 Where the Girls Are

Were these real women or oddities? With the women's move-

ment cast as a bizarre carnival, filled with disorderly, parading
women — freaks of nature — in forbidding, scary masks, bursting into
previously peaceful, harmonious male enclaves, it is not surprising
that questions of imposture would arise. By refusing or failing to con-
form to prevailing notions of prettiness and demureness, these
women sought to gain strength from such defiance. But this failure

was used against women deemed grotesque: if a woman wasn't attrac-

tive to men, then she could not be a leader of women.
Steinem, by contrast, became extremely effective as the exemplar
of the new, liberated young woman; she was the compromise the
news media had been looking for, a feminist who looked like a fash-

ion model. I remember my own ambivalence about Steinem in the

early 1970s and the hostiUty she evoked from other feminists. She
seemed an opportunist, someone who stepped in after other women
had done all the organizing and taken all the flak. And Steinem was
often used symboUcally as a rebuke to women less talented, less beau-
tiful, less autonomous, and less successful than she. Steinem was the
woman you competed against and lost to, the woman you hoped
wasn't working in your husband's office, the one you hoped your
boyfiriend never met, the one you never wanted to run into on the
beach with both of you in bathing suits. It wasn't easy to feel sister-
hood with a media star like this.

But Steinem was also one of the best things for the women's
movement, because she nullified many of the dismissive comments
about feminism and feminists, as did Germaine Greer, author of the
best-selling Tlie Female Eunuch. Precisely because they were tall, sHm,
and beautiful, they got away with saying things Friedan didn't dare
utter. So, while Friedan, who was much more accommodating to
men in her speeches and her politics, got cast as a man-hater,
Steinem, who constantly spoke out against the ruHng elite of white,
upper-middle-class males, did not.^^ The word strident, repeatedly
used to describe Friedan in news stories, was rarely used about
 The ERA as Catfight 231

Steinem, even though she was more radical. When she denounced
marriage because it "makes you half a person'' and turns women mto
"slaves," she wasn't ridiculed as an ahen or a lunatic. Because oi her
beauty, Steinem was able to smuggle radical critiques of the status of
women into mainstream discourse and gradually get them discussed
and even accepted. And she did this by appearing on dozens of talk
shows acting as if nothing could be more sensible or self-evident for
all w^omen than feminism.
But Steinem also found herself stereot\'ped as the exception, as

the woman who could speak only for the gorgeous, fiercely inde-
pendent, talented few. Despite her pleas for sisterhood, other women
eyed her suspiciously. Despite her efforts to showcase black feminists
by lecturing in tandem with either Dorothy Pitman Hughes or Flor-
vnce Kennedv, the sound bites, and the pictures, were oi her.'"^

Steinem was young, childless, and single by choice. Although she

criticized the inequities of marriage, she also defended housewives
and advocated repeatedly and passionately that they be paid what
they were worth. (But when she sought to calculate all the services
that a husband and father would have to buy if he didn't have a

wife — housecleaning, cooking, baby-sitting, chauffeuring — she also

included prostitution, which offended many wives, who hardly
thought of themselves as hookers.) Here was one personification oi
feminism, the beautiful career girl, indifferent to marriage and chil-

dren, so confident, successful, and fulfilled she didn't need a husband

or even a steady bo\^riend. She embodied a kind of voluntary' sepa-
ratism fi-om men that I wasn't able to accept or interested m embrac-
ing. Did that mean I was a weenie, a sellout, not a *'real" feminist?

The other personifications, Hke Abzug or Friedan, were variously

rs^pecast as combative, shrill, unattractive, and humorless, suggesting
that for women to get the opportunities they wanted, they had to

abandon their socialization as helpmates, nurturers, and sex objects

overnight. (And this even though Abzug and Friedan were wives and
mothers.) As the battle over the EPJ\ heated up in the 1970s, these
232 Where the Girls Are

were the media archetypes for us to embrace or reject. These were

your choices, female grotesque or femme fatale, the one unappeaHng,
the other unattainable.
As we oscillated between Germaine Greer and Kate Millett, Glo-
ria Steinem and Bella Abzug, the mind-set of feminism itself became

one of ambivalence. We had no choice but to read between the lines,

to take what strength we could from Friedan, Millett, and Abzug,

despite their stereotyping as has-been harridans. Many of us were
deeply emboldened by what these women said and wrote, even if we
were not completely ready, ourselves, to "boil the fat off a taxi

driver's neck." I took what I could from Steinem, too, the permission
she and Greer gave me to continue to shave my legs, wear mascara,
covet nice clothes, sleep with men, and still be a feminist. Steinem
and Greer made me feel that women could cobble together elements
of the codes of femininity they were unable to expunge with a fem-
inism they were eager to adopt.
And then another woman appeared on the national scene in
1973, a woman eager to serve the media's need for an opposing feHne
in the catfight to come. To women like me, who supported the Equal
FUghts Amendment, Phyllis Schlafly made the Wicked Witch of the
West look like Mary Poppins. There have been few women, if any,

more pubHcly cynical than Schlafly, who using the pretense of help-
ing women made it perfectly acceptable to keep them under the great
boot of patriarchy. But you had to hand it to PhyUis. She was an
incredibly shrewd activist and demagogue, and it is no exaggeration
to credit her and her Stop ERA campaign with singlehandedly
defeating the amendment.
Schlafly headed a highly effective grass-roots organizing project
that quickly developed enormous political clout. Congress had
finally passed the Equal Paghts Amendment in March 1972, and
within a year twenty-eight states had approved the new amendment:
ratification seemed a foregone conclusion. But then the tide turned,
and as early as 1973 the EP^ was in trouble. By 1975, thirty-four
states had ratified the EP^, but after that date only one more state
 The ERA as Catfight 233

voted yes (Indiana in 1977), and several states that had passed the
amendment voted to rescind approval. After a ten-year fight to the
finish, the EFLA died in July 1982, only three states shy of the num-
ber required for ratification.'^ Schlafly achieved this victory, in part,

because she was brilliant at exploiting media routines, biases, and

stereotypes to make the EP^ seem both dangerous and unnecessary.
She became a media celebrirv; and the media became her most pow-
erful weapon.
Schlafly understood that conflict, especially between women, was
automatically newsworthy, and that if one side consisted of everyday,
"normal" moms, that side would automatically receive more favor-

able coverage, especially if the "other side" was "women's Kbbers."

She understood that simple but incendiary statements — especially

those that conjured up a wholesale destruction of sex roles and the

family as we knew them —made great sound bites. She milked the
negative stereot\^pes oi the feminist for all they were worth. Given
that feminism had been cast repeatedly as a minority movement that

represented very few women, no one challenged Schlafly 's authority

to speak for the "typical" American woman. When she said things
Hke "The overwhelming majorm^ of women do not want EP^" and
"The women's Hb movement is not relevant to most women," she
was convincing. Drawing heavily from the cult of individuaHsm,
Schlafly suggested that the EP^ would force conformity on all

women. Most of aU, she appreciated that by organizing women to

oppose the EP^, she automatically gave men, who held the over-
whelming majorities in every state legislature in the country; permis-
sion to oppose women's Hberation without looking Hke sexist pigs.

Phyllis Schlafly knew she couldn't lose once she transformed the
EPvA fi-om a struggle bet\veen women and a male-dominated politi-

cal system into a catfight between the girls. And that's just what
Schlafly, queen tigress of them aU, did. More to the point, the media
bought it.

The text of the EP^ sounded innocent enough: "EquaHty of

rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United
234 Where the Girls Are

States or by any State on account of sex." Hold your horses, cried

Schlafly. This may sound simple, but you'd better read between the
lines. Assuming the role of schoolmarm, Schlafly urged her students
not to take things at face value, especially when deahng with the gov-
ernment. With sex roles, conventional marriage, the U.S. economy,
and the presidency itself under assault (it was, after all, the time of

Watergate), Schlafly had a cHmate of uncertainty to exploit, and she

did so with the persistence, and the subtlety, of a battering ram.
The EP^ didn't mean equaHty for women, she warned. On the .

contrary, it meant servitude and increased vulnerability. Sounding,

for just a second, Hke Abbie Hoffinan, she denounced the ERA as "a
big rip-off" for American homemakers. Mothers would no longer
be able to count on their husbands or ex-husbands for support of
their children. Why, the EPJV could force all women, whether they
wanted to or not, to get jobs, no matter how menial, and to consign
their children to day-care centers, just Hke in all those Commie
countries. Women would be drafted into the army just like men, and
have to be slaughtered in combat, just Hke men. Her favorite verb

was "wipe out," as in "The ERA will wipe out our right to have

single-sex schools and coUeges." Prisons would be coed, and

churches would be required to have female priests and ministers. The
ERA automatically legaHzed —why, it even encouraged —marriage
between homosexuals, who would now rush to become grammar
school teachers. Worst of aU, the ERA meant that when you had to

go to the bathroom in a restaurant or bus station, you'd be compeUed

to do it right next to some strange, lascivious man with his penis
hanging out peeing in a smeUy urinal while he watched you v/ipe

yourself. Is this what you want? demanded Schlafly.

While feminist leaders who debated Schlafly (like Eleanor Smeal

and Jill Ruckelshaus) often spoke m the conditional — the ERA
"might" or "may" or "could" do this or that depending on how the
courts interpreted the "legislative intent" of Congress, Schlafly
spoke m ironclad certainties, always using the verb will and speaking
confidently about "devastating effects." And she successfuUy changed
 The ERA as Catfight 235

the terms of the debate by acknowledging the feminist goals the

news media had endorsed —equal pay equal work and for increased

opportunities for women— and pointing out Equal Employ- that the

ment Opportunity Act of 1972 and the Equal Credit Opportunity

Act of 1974 had already taken care of these inequahties. The ERA
was no longer about discrimination in housing, education, or

employment. The EFLA was no longer about equal rights, a concept

most Americans favored. The EPJV was about unisex urinals and
coed penitentiaries. In a nutshell, Schlafly made the anti-EP^ cam-
paign more newsworthy, and, dare I say it, more sexy, than the cam-

paign for ratification.

She also repeated and amplified stereotypes about feminists,
which the press duly reprinted. Feminists were "petty . . . and vin-
dictive" and "think it is unequal that mothers have to take care of
their babies." ^^ Feminists "just don't want They want to be
to be nice.

ugly."^^ On a 1977 ABC special, hosted by none other than Howard

K. Smith and tided, predictably enough, "EP^: The War Between
the Women," Smith asked her about the feminist charge that she was
afhhated with the John Birch Society. (Schlafly attended Birch Soci-
ety rallies and proclaimed the atomic bomb to be "a marvelous gift

that was given to our country by a wise God," so you be the judge.)
Schlafly smiled patronizingly and said, "I think those attacks just

show the poverty of the arguments on the other side. I don't spend

my time going around teUing you all the lesbian organizations that

are pushing EPJ\, although I could. I hke to argue it on the merits of

the question." Schlafly repeatedly used the word reasonable to describe

her incessant ad hominem attacks on the ERA's supporters. The fact

that she always looked, as Time put it, "crisp and composed" in her
shirtwaist dresses and that her "upswept blond hair" was always "per-
fectly in place" signified orderHness, containment, and rationality.

One Time headhne read, "Feminine but forceful, Phyllis Schlafly is a

very liberated woman."^^ Now here was a certified leader.

In 1977, the catfight turned into a stand-off, and this was the year
that the women's movement began to decline as an ongoing news
236 Where the Girls Are

story. The movement's last gasp was the National Women's Confer-
ence, which took place that November in Houston with approxi-
mately 14,000 in attendance. The three-day conference produced a
National Plan of Action consisting of twenty-five separate recom-
mendations to be forwarded Jimmy Carter and
to President
Congress. Read them and weep. They advocated government-
funded battered women's shelters; national health insurance for all

Americans with provisions for women's special needs; government

funding for day-care centers; rape prevention programs and programs
for victims of child abuse; and extension of Social Security benefits to
housewives. Since as of this writing, over fifteen years later, America
has three times as many animal shelters as it does battered women's
shelters, no national health insurance plan, no federal funding for
day-care centers, and a rape rate that is terrifying, any one of these
provisions could be thought of as revolutionary.
But the news media focused on the three most controversial res-
olutions — calls for passage of the ERA, federal funding for abortions
for low-income women, and an end to discrimination against les-
bians — as if the others didn't exist. All three networks and the news-
magazines ignored the calls for national health insurance and
child-care centers and zeroed in on "lesbian rights," without report-
ing, for example, that a woman could lose custody of her children if

she was revealed to be a lesbian, a barbaric poHcy that still exists in

some parts of America. Lesbians' concerns —even their existence as a

group —were finally being recognized, but only in a way that used
their sexuality to demonize feminism and attack other women. The
other main dramas the news media hammered away at were the con-
flicts between feminists and antifeminists within the conference, and
between those women at the conference and the thousands of other
women who attended a counterrally across town headed by Schlafly.
Erik Engberg of CBS summed up Houston this way: "The batde
between feminists who control the convention and the antifeminists
yelling foul was in fiill swing." Here were the girls slogging it out in
the mud again.
 The ERA as Catfight 237

Even worse, in the long run, were the televised images of the
conference itself. Thousands of jostling women in a convention-

cum-circus atmosphere presented an indehble image of disarray. It's

not Hke there wasn't dissent and disagreement at the convention;

there was. But the overwhelming sense of sisterhood that many

women left with was deemed neither newsworthy nor photogenic.

When ERA supporters at the conference did a snake dance through

the convention hall to celebrate the passage of the EPJ^ resolution, it

looked, on the TV screen, contrived, childish, disorderly. No doubt

it felt quite a bit different. But television cameras make such sponta-
neous outbursts of camaraderie and joy look extremely silly. This is

not always by design; it's just that TV cameras are incapable of con-
veying the spirit behind public demonstrations and the infectious
sense of communal resolve that animates them. So these were the
final messages of Houston. Sisterhood was impossible, and when you
saw female unity, it meant it had been forced under duress. Worse,
sisterhood was moronic and made you sound naive and look hke a

jerk. Sisterhood had women making spectacles of themselves on

national television. Meanwhile, through Schlafly's efforts, and the
media's compHcity, male opposition to the ERA became invisible.

Hardly any attention was ever paid to the hundreds of male legisla-

tors or the male-dominated organizations that helped fund Schlafly's

Stop ERA, and they were the real ones to block the amendment, and
to benefit from its defeat.

But what the catfight inspired in most people, including feminist

women, was resignation and a desire to retreat fi-om poUtics. By 1977,

the EPJ\. looked doomed; in fact, pohtical activism looked doomed.

The Zeitgeist of the late 1970s emphasized self-improvement and per-
sonal fulfillment over poHtical reform and the betterment of the com-
munity. Best-seUing advice books Hke The Managerial Woman, Dress for
Success, and When I Say No I Feel Guilty stressed individual strategies

for individual women — usually more privileged women — to get

ahead. Women had to learn how to be assertive, but not too assertive,

to become team players at work, to dress in female versions of the pin-

238 Where the Girls Are

striped suit with blouses that had ties at the neck. Women had to make
their peace with patriarchy and learn how to fit in. They had to com-
pete with men and with other women if they were going to fulfill
their feminist aspirations.

This is the message that underscored two of the most popular TV

series of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dallas and its imitator,
Dynasty. It is no surprise that these shows appeared when they did,
when the ERA was ready for extreme unction. Here we saw women
competing with women in a variety of venues rarely staged on
prime-time TV, and women arguing with each other about what
kind of woman to be in the post-EPJV era. Just so women wouldn't
miss the point, the female characters couldn't even trust their own
biological sisters, let alone those not connected by blood. But these
shows also enacted feminist critiques of the status quo. Ostensibly
about power, wealth, and the intrigues of the oil industry, both shows
replayed, week in and week out, the simultaneous disintegration and
resilience of the American family, symbol, of course, of America
itself

In Dallas, patriarchal capitalism, personified by the stupendously

venal J. R. Ewing, was corrupt, inhumane, cynical, and destructive,
especially of women and weak men. This was fully acknowledged
and pushed, in fact, for all it was worth. But Dallas and Dynasty reaf-
firmed that patriarchal capitalism was the only game in town, the
only imaginable way to organize society, and that it was impossible
for women, whether they were traditional wives or ambitious vixens,
to put forward an alternative.
Both shows quickly developed enormous audiences, both in the
United States and abroad, and many of the series' most avid fans were
women, including feminists Hke me. It is customary to dismiss enter-
tainment popular with women as garbage, and soaps are probably the
prime example, although how these are inferior to, say, a broadcast of
men with skeleton masks and ice skates chasing a black disk and beat-
ing each other up with sticks is beyond me. Trashed for years as con-
taminated bilge ingested by passive and victimized women, especially
 The ERA as Catfight 239

homemakers, soaps have seemed, to some, like the ultimate in

antifeminist propaganda. This attitude certainly greeted the night-

time soaps. But hke Bewitched and Charlie's Angels, these shows spoke
volumes about our inner contradictions and gave us pleasure at the

same time.
First of all, the in-your-face, self-conscious kitschiness of both
shows allowed people like me — aspiring professionals — to feel supe-

rior to them and to make fun of their incredibly bald narrative strate-

gies at the same time that we were completely sucked in. In those

early years, missing Dallas on Friday nights or Dynasty on Wednesday

nights was simply out of the question. Imitators and spin-offs like
Knots Landing and Falcon Crest also addicted millions. Many people
watched these shows, especially Dallas, in groups, as a sort of end-of-
the-week party. It was almost as if you couldn't resist the powerful

undertow ot Dallas without a few friends around to act as lifeguards.

But together, people laughed, hooted, and screamed at the show,
gave the characters nicknames, and both imagined and predicted
plotlines. In this way, viewers were simultaneously engaged with yet
distanced from this highly feminized, and therefore despised, Venus's-
flytrap of pop culture. These viewing strategies, the laughter espe-

cially, allowed me to pretend I was impervious to the pull o£ Dallas

and gave me permission to indulge in this hedonistic, completely
unredeeming pastime seemingly designed for the brain dead and the
pohtically bankrupt. Being, in 1979, both a freshly minted Ph.D. and
a new wife, I had to use the show as a constant affirmation of my own
cultural superiority. Who was I kidding, besides myself?
The pleasure of immersing yourself in these absurd, antifeminist
melodramas, in which women were crushed, pitted against each
other, and objectified — yet resisted patriarchy in a variety of ways
while wearing lilac chiffon gowns and tons of jewelry —was total.

Feminists Hke me were supposed to know better, and at first I felt I

shouldn't have taken the dehght I did in the conflicts between Sue
Ellen and Pam or the catfights between Krysde and Alexis. But I did,

and so did other feminists. ^'^ As we came to understand, it was pre-

240 Where the Girls Are

cisely our contradictory stance as viewers, our disdain for the show
yet our absorption in it, that gave us so much satisfaction.

These shows affirmed what I knew about patriarchy: men con-

trolled everything, and some of them, like the caricature J.R., were
~
the worst sexist pigs you could imagine, cheating on their wives,

regarding them as baby machines and sex objects, squashing even

their most puny aspirations. But they also dramatized the tensions
between traditional womanhood and the "new" woman and did
something the male-dominated cop and detective shows didn't do:
they let us into the subjective worlds of the female characters. Sue
Ellen Ewing was a real favorite with viewers, especially female view-
ers, and there were good reasons for this. Through Sue Ellen's spats

and conversations with Pam, her monologues to her shrink, Dr.

Ellby, and her confessions to her series of lovers, we hear her analysis
of her situation. And her analysis is that women unfortunate enough
to be ensnared in the world of Southfork are trapped and doomed.
Despite the differences between herself and her sister-in-law
Pam, Sue Ellen, who's been around, insists that their situations are the
same — that they are united and similarly positioned whether they
like it or not —because they are both Ewing wives. Sue Ellen is a

who
fatalist thinks that the notions of individualism and free will for
women are a cruel hoax. Against Pam's repeated protestations (after

all, she has her own career and, at the beginning of the series, a happy
marriage, and Sue Ellen has neither). Sue Ellen reiterates in various
episodes that "all Ewing men are the same. . . . And for you to sur-

vive you have two choices. You can either get out, or you can play by
their rules." Pam refuses to see things in such totaHzing terms, assert-

ing, "I will never accept the fact that Bobby and J.R. are the same."

In another episode, Sue Ellen warns that it doesn't matter which

Ewing you're married to: "In a couple of years they'll look at you in

the same way: as property. And you'd better be wrapped up in a

pretty Httle package.""^ Wasn't this what the New York Radical
Women warned us about in Atlantic City in 1968?
 The ERA as Catfight 241

This was one of the central debates between these two —whether
men were all alike, meaning selfish, brutish, oppressive pigs, or not. It

was a debate about whether patriarchy could ever be "feminized,"

infused with some degree of tenderness, empathy, and egalitarianism

between the sexes. It was the same debate that had occurred in
"Sweet Talkin' Guy" twenty years earlier. And the show provided
different answers, sometimes suggesting the pigs were all alike, and
other times suggesting they weren't alike at all. By giving women
viewers several positions to inhabit, either exclusively or alternatively,
the show spoke to women's ambivalence about loving and needing
men yet feeling trapped in the seeming inevitabilitv' of patriarchy.
And it spoke to women who, in the morning at work, might indeed
feel that all men were alike pigs — —
and who, at night with their
boyfriends or husbands, made an exception.
Pam and Sue Ellen were in constant competition, over their sta-
tus in the household, over the approval of the great matriarch Miss
EUie (who suggested that strong women had it easier in earlier,

prefeminist times), over their clothes, and over whose choice — to

work or not to work —was wiser. They competed not outside the
home but squarely in the domestic sphere, and consumerism was
central to the contest. Whose clothes were nicer, an^^way, and who
bought too much and who bought too little? Few shows provided a

more powerful rebuke to the anticonsumerist stance of feminism

than Dallas, with its constant emphasis on the joys of shopping, driv-
ing fancy new cars, and going to spas.

Dynasty upped the ante even more. These women had great
clothes and a level of opulence unmatched since Versailles. And we
got real opposites and real catfights. On one side was blond, stay-at-

home Krystle Carrington (Linda Evans), the Mother Teresa of soaps,

endlessly empathetic and supportive, always willing to listen and care,

beloved by her servants, an incredibly irritating, goody-two-shoes

throwback I wanted to throw a pie at myself. In the other corner was
the most deHcious bitch ever seen on television, the dark-haired,
242 Where the Girls Are

scheming, duplicitous, supremely self-centered and self-assured

career vixen Alexis Carrington Colby whatever (Joan CoUins). Krys-

tle just wanted to make her husband happy; Alexis wanted to control

the world. How could you not love a catfight between these two?
This was the Battle of the Titans, the final duke out between the
traditional wife and mom and the feminist bitch from hell. Since each
woman was such a flagrant caricature, it wasn't easy to identify with

either, or, for that matter, with the white trash sex kitten Sammy Jo;
the nearly mute, whiny victim Kirby; or the mentally unstable Clau-

dia. But what we could identify with as Alexis and Krysde slugged it

out in some reflecting pool was what lay between these characters,

the compromised space we inhabited that seemed vastly superior to

the extremes they had chosen.

Watching the catfights, we could see, enacted before our eyes,
our own, never-ending struggles between that portion of our psy-
ches still tethered to prefeminism and the other portion firmly
hitched to feminism. What did it mean to be a woman, and, in the

wake of the women's movement, what kind of women should we be?

How assertive and ambitious should we be and how accommodating
to men? These and other questions bedeviled us constantly, so
watching Krysde and Alexis grapple with them, metaphorically, in
the mud provided a powerful catharsis for the terminally conflicted
American woman.
What many women identified with, then, was this conflict, this

tension, this ambivalence. We were starting to reahze, as we

approached our thirties and forties, that the one constant in our Hves
was, in fact, contradiction itself. Different women, of course,

watched and used these shows in very different ways, but it would be
a mistake to think we were all just passive viewers. Many women sat

in their living rooms egging the female characters on, urging Sue

Ellen or Krystle to do something, to act, to get a job or leave the bas-

tard or both. And many of us, watching Alexis, tried on the bitchy
personality for size, and found that sometimes we liked the fit.^^

Women viewers in their sweat suits, jeans, or flannel bathrobes could

 The ERA as Catfight 243

still feel superior to these women dripping with silk and emeralds
because they felt that their solutions, their compromises, their blend-
ing of feminism and traditional womanhood were vastly superior to

the monoHthic approaches taken by —or forced upon —Krysde, Sue

Ellen, and Alexis. To those viewers still trapped in dictatorial rela-

tionships or low-paying, traditionally female jobs, the shows allowed

fantasies about revolt, and rebellion, if only \'icariously. But vicarious
rebelhon sometimes leads to something else.

Although we don't see as many catfights on prime-time TV

today as we used to, the catfight remains an extremely popular way
for the news media to represent women's struggles for equaHty and
power. In 1987, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to Washington for

an arms control summit, the first lady mud wresthng between tradi-

tional wife and mom Nancy Reagan and careerist, intellectual bitch

Raisa Gorbachev blew the boys right off the front pages of America.
Lead-story coverage was given to the shoving match that occurred
when Nancy gave Raisa a tour of the White House and Raisa
sought, as TheNew York Times noted, to "upstage" her hostess by
talking too much to the press and hogging the HmeHght. Neither Tlie

Times nor USA Today would let Raisa get away with this: they

exposed her grotesque diplomatic faux pas of wearing a black cock-

tail dress and —how^ low can you go?—sagging black stockings with

rhmestones on them during the day. Raisa wasn't very ladyhke at all;

instead, revealed TJie Times, she was "just assertive enough to give

some hsteners the impression that she w^as sparring." She cattily dis-
missed the White House as a museum (what a dig!) and assumed a

"schoolteacher tone" as she "peppered Mrs. Reagan with questions

as if the First Lady were a graduate student facing an oral examina-

tion." This kind of coverage made us think (hope?) that what we'd
get next, instead of some boring old negotiations between a bunch of
men about world disarmament, would be a knockdow^n, drag-out,
hair-pulling, eye-scratching wrastHng match for world peace. A
defemmized, Marxist comrade-in-arms and a hyperfeminized capi-
tahst mannequin get along? Never!
 —
244 Where the Girls Are

In the 1992 campaign, the contests between Barbara Bush and

Marilyn Quayle in one corner, and Hillary Clinton in the other,
showed that when it comes to conveying the multilayered complexi-

ties women have faced as they have negotiated through work, mar-
riage, motherhood, and poHtics, the news media wiU opt for the

simplistic yet coercive metaphor of woman-on-woman violence

whenever possible. The reason Camille Paglia has become such a

media darUng, despite an ego the size of Australia and two books that
don't make a lick of sense, is that she loves to trash feminists — or, at

least, her particular caricature of feminists. Ditto for Katie Roiphe,

whose attacks on women twice her age who work in rape crisis cen-
ters or battered women's shelters have helped to make her famous. The
mainstream media's love of the catfight has made it hard for feminists
who value debate and disHke orthodoxy to welcome such debate.
(And despite what Paglia and Roiphe think, not all feminists are Stal-
inists.) All too many feminists feel they must maintain a united front,
like it or not, because disagreements among some feminists are simply
used to cast all women as face-clawing, eye-scratching hysterics.
Nonetheless, v/hether on the nightly news or in prime time, the
battles between the simpering, sheltered wife and mother on the one
side and the ambitious, independent, outspoken bitch on the other
pulled women in the audience to the middle, to the space between
the two archetypes. The space in the middle was not passive and
helpless, nor was it masculinity in drag. This space inside our heads
and our hearts was filled with elements of each side, with compro-
mises, with inner conflicts as well as possible resolutions. The media
referees insist on putting feminism in one corner and antifeminism in
the other, as if feminism could never be in the middle, but what they
fail to recognize is that feminism is this middle ground. It may be
filled with ambivalence and compromise, tradition and rebellion, but
the space between the two cats — the space where we, the girls, are
is what feminism is all about.
 ircissisffl y Likration
fl

'm worth it," insists Cybill Shepherd m her brattiest, na-na-na-

poo-poo voice as my Since I

she swirls her blond hair in face.

I have to be restrained, physically, from hatchetmg my television set

to death whenever this ad appears (and every woman I know
has the

same reaction), it is amazing to think it actually sells hair dye. But it

must, since this campaign has been harassing us for nearly a decade.

"I'm worth it" became the motto for the 1980s woman we saw m
television and magazines ads. Endless images of women lounging on
tiled verandas, or snuggling with their white angora cats
while wear-

ing white silk pajamas, exhorted us to be self-indulgent, self-centered,

private, hedonistic. In stark contrast to the selfless wife and mom of

Vie Feminine Mystique, not to mention those hideous, loudmouthed

feminists who thought sisterhood and poHtical activism mattered,

women of the 1980s were urged to take care of themselves, and to do

so for themselves. An ad for Charles of the Ritz, featuring a gorgeous
model dripping with pearls and staring off into space, summed up
women's recent history. "I'm not the girl I used to be. Now I want to

surround myself with beautifril things. And I want to look beautifril

too. I've discovered that it's easier to face the world when I hke what

I see in the mirror."

By the 1980s, advertising agencies had figured out how to make

feminism— and antifermnism—work for them. There had been a few
clumsy starts m the 1970s, Hke the Virginia SHms "You've Come a

Long Way, Baby" campaign, which equated Hberation with the free-
246 Where the Girls Are

dom to give yourself lung cancer. And feminine hygiene sprays like

Massengill's pictured the product with a poUtical button reading

"Freedom Now" and touted the crotch rot in the can as "The Free-
dom Spray." But the approaches got more subtle and certainly more
invidious as America's multibazillion-dollar cosmetics industry real-
ized that all those kids who once bought Clearasil and Stri-Dex were
now getting something even worse than acne — wrinkles. Here was
an enormous market — the women who grew up with, who in fact
made possible, a youth culture — now getting old. You could almost
hear the skin cream moguls in their boardrooms yellmg yippie-
kiyo-kiyay.
The appropriation of feminist desires and feminist rhetoric by
Revlon, Lancome, and other major corporations was nothing short
of spectacular. Women's liberation metamorphosed into female nar-
cissism unchained as poHtical concepts and goals Hke hberation and
equahty were collapsed into distinctly personal, private desires.

Women's became equated with women's ability to do

liberation
whatever they wanted for themselves, whenever they wanted, no
matter what the expense. These ads were geared to the woman who
had made it in a man's world, or who hoped she would, and the mes-
sage was Reward yourself, you deserve it. There was enormous
emphasis on luxury, and on separating oneself from the less enlight-
ened, less privileged herd. The abiUty to spend time and money on
one's appearance was a sign of personal success and of breaking away
from the old roles and rules that had held women down in the past.
Break free from those old conventions, the ads urged, and get truly

Hberated: put yourself first.

Narcissism was more in for women than ever, and the ability to
indulge oneself, pamper oneself, and focus at length on oneself with-
out having to Hsten to the needy voices of others was the mark of
upscale female achievement. These were the years when we were
supposed to put the naive, ideahstic, antimateriaHstic 1960s behind us
and, instead, go to polo matches and wash our hair with bottled
water from the Alps. Ralph Lauren, in his ads for sheets and oxford
 Narcissism as Liberation 247

cloth shirts, used manor houses, antique furniture, riding boots, and

safari gear to make when the sun never set on the

us long for the days

British Empire, when natives (and women) knew their place, and
robber barons ran America. Huge museum exhibits celebrated Eng-
land's "Treasure Houses" and the gowns favored by Marie Antoinette
and her pals, each ot which represented the work of 213 starving
peasant seamstresses.' Vic Bio Chill suggested that even radical baby
boomers had sold out to Wall Street, a move portrayed as inevitable

and perfectly understandable.

For women in the age of Reagan, ehtism and narcissism merged
m a perfect appeal to forget the pohtical already and get back to the
personal, which you might be do something about. But let's
able to

not forget the most ubiquitous and oppressive anatomical symbol

of

the new woman's achievement that came into its own in the
1980s:

the pertectly sculpted, dimple-free upper thigh and buttock. A tour

through the land of smooth faces and even smoother buttocks and
thighs makes one appreciate why the women of the 1980s who had
reason to feel pride in their accomphshments still felt Hke
worthless

losers when they looked in the mirror or, horror of horrors,

put on a

bathing suit. Of course, these feeUngs were hardly confined to baby

boomers. Nor are they confined to the past. Though I write about

what emerged in the 1980s m the past tense, I feel awkward about
because the ad strategies estabhshed then are still in high
doing so,

gear, and we watch their effects with sorrow, anger, and empathy
When go toI any number oi coUege or universiU' sw imming pools,
Isee women twent\^ years younger than I, at their physical peak,

healthy and trim, walk out to the pool with towels wrapped around
for the
their w^aists so their thighs will be exposed to the world only

few nanoseconds it takes to drop the towel and dive into the pool. I

have never seen a young man do this. Then they go back to the locker

room and slather their sweet, twenty -year-old faces with Oil of Olay

so they can fight getting old "every step of the way."

Advertisers in the 1980s, especially those targeting women,
apparently had a new bible: Christopher Lasch's 1979 best-seUer, Vie
248 Where the Girls Are

Culture of Narcissism. Lasch identified what he saw as a new trend, the

emergence of people who seemed self-centered and self-satisfied but
were really deeply anxious about what others thought of them.
Americans were becoming increasingly self-absorbed, he wrote, but
not because they were conceited. On the contrary, Americans were
desperately insecure, consumed by self-doubt and self-loathing, and
totally obsessed with competing with other people for approval and
acclaim. The "narcissistic personality," according to Lasch, was com-
pulsively "other-directed" and consumed by self-doubt, even self-

hatred. As a result, the narcissist craved approval and fantasized about

adulation. Any sense of self-esteem was fleeting, hinging on things
like whether someone looked at you funny or laughed at one of your
jokes. This obsessive need for admiration prompted the narcissist to

become skilled at managing impressions, at assuming different roles,

and at developing a magnetic personahty. Narcissists were always

measuring themselves against others; being envied, for example, had
become infinitely more important than being admired or respected.
Narcissists had a strong belief in their right to be gratified and were
constantly searching for heightened emotional experiences, for
instant gratification, to stave off the fear that Hfe is unreal, artificial,
and meaningless. Narcissists were especially terrified of aging and
death. Lasch particularly emphasized how the messages and ploys of
American advertising had cultivated such narcissistic personaHties.

When I read this book, I was struck by two things. First, Lasch
kept using the pronoun he to talk about the narcissist, and this helped
make the trend he was describing seem new. But for women, this

wasn't so new, this was the story of our Kves, of how we had been
sociaHzed since childhood. Second, it was in ads geared specifically to
women, especially ads for cosmetics and other personal care items,
that we saw advertisers applying, with a vengeance, the various

insights of Lasch's book. Under the guise of addressing our purported

new confidence and self-love, these ads really reinforced how we

failed to measure up to others. Hanes, for example, in a classic cam-
paign, skillflilly resolved the tensions surrounding new womanhood
 Xarcissism as Liberation 249

m its series of ads ritled "Reflections On . . Z" A woman was pictured

arms of a leather chair, or
sitting across the a wicker patio lounger, m
with her legs prominently displayed. She was usually dressed up in a

^Httery cocktail dress, exchanging smiles w^th a man in a tux. She

was always white. In one ad. the admiring male voice said. "She
messes up the punch Hne ot even.- joke; can tell a Burgundy from a
Bordeaux: and her legs ... Oh yes. Joanna's legs." In another version,

the copy read: "She does this flawless imitation of Groucho Marx:
recites the most astonishing passages from Hemingway; ahh, and her
legs . . . Emilys legs."

Joanna's and Emily's nonanatomical achievements were impres-

sive — thev knew things only ehte men used to know, hke how to

select a wine, and their favorite writer wasn't Edith Wharton or Ahce
Walker, it was Mr. Macho himself They didn't imitate Mae West
(too threatening), they imitated a constantly lecherous man. They
had cracked the male code. but. because of Hanes. they were still
ladies. These women were huge successes at managing the impres-

sions they gave to others, coming across as distinctive, noncontormist

women who nonetheless conform perfectly to dominant standards ot

beautv They were self-satisfied and self-assured, yet their value came
from male admiration and approval. The ads suggested that without

inner confidence, and a core self that is assured and discriminating

(made possible, one can infer, by feminism), these women would not

be the charmers they are today. But without male approval and admi-
ration, they would not have the acclaim on which narcissistic self-

esteem rests. It was in campaigns such as this that the appearance ot

female self-love and achievement was used to reinforce female

dependence on male approval. If you wore Hanes, m other words,

vou would feel the contradictions between feminism and pretemi-

nism thread together smoothly as you pulled them up over your legs
and hips and then strode confidently out into the world.
The cult of narcissism Lasch saw in the 1970s exploded m the

1980s, nurtured by Reagan's me-first-and-to-hell-\\-ith-everyone-

else political and moral philosophies. Under the guise ot telhng
250 Where the Girls Are

women, "You're worth it," advertisers suggested we weren't worth it

at all but could feel we were, for a moment, if we bought the right
product. Here we were again, same as it ever was, bombarded by the
message that approval from others, especially men, means everything,
and without it you are nothing, an outcast, unworthy and unloved.
We were right back to Tinker Bell and Cmderella, urged to be nar-
cissistic yet ridiculed if it was discovered that we were.
The narcissism as Hberation campaign found its happiest home in
certain television ads, such as those that sponsored shows Hke
Dynasty, and in women's magazines like Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Made-
moiselle, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and the aptly named Self. These mag-
azines, with their emphasis on clothes, makeup, and dieting, were
much more hospitable than Ladies' Home Journal or McCall's, which
acknowledged that women couldn't be completely self-indulgent
since they still were the ones responsible for pureeing bananas for the

baby and getting dinner on the table at night. Vogue et al. didn't con-
taminate their pages with such gritty reminders of reality, thank God.
Instead, they created a narcissistic paradise, a luxurious daydream, in

which women focused on themselves and their appearance, and in

which any change was possible, as long as it was personal.
Now, before I get on my high horse about cures for what the
fashion magazines call "orange peel skin" and subdermal rehydrating
systems, let me be perfectly honest about my own vulnerabiHty to
these really preposterous ploys. Like a lot of women, I look at ads for

things Hke EHzabeth Arden's Ceramide Time Complex Capsules, Ht-

tle gelatinous spheres that look like a cross between a diaphragm and
a UFO, which claim to get — this
— "boost [the] skin's hydration level
over 450% after one hour" because they are "supercharged with
HCA, a unique alpha-hydroxy complex," and I think —or sometimes
yell —would you puleeze get real here. I know that in 1987 the FDA
had cracked down on cosmetics ads then in print because they were,

to put it euphemistically, inflated in their claims. I know that putting

collagen on your skin does nothing. Nevertheless, there's this per-
fectly airbrushed model, young, beautiful, and carefree, her eyebrows
 Narcissisni as Liberation 251

the only lines on her face, and I sigh a longing sigh. Even when we
are fully able to deconstruct these pseudoscientific sales pitches,

which would make any self-respecting snake oil salesman blush, there
we are, a part of us still wantmg to beHeve that we can look younger
and that it's desirable to do so. I don't "read" Vogue or Glamour; if

you'll pardon the masculine metaphor, I enter them. I escape into

them, into a world where I have nothmg more stressful to do than

smooth on some skin cream, poHsh my toenails, and He on the beach.
But despite these soft spots, I'm here to say that deconstruction can
make us strong, so let's be on with it.

In ads for personal care products in the 1980s, especially skin

creams, makeup, and perfume, we confronted our ideal selves, eter-

nally young, flawless, confident, assured of the envy of others, yet

insulated fi-om the needs of others. The Lutece Bath, for example,

created "your private world of luxury." In these ads, the contradic-

tions that we'd Hved with all our Hves, the tensions between the need
to be passive and the need to be active, were subtly and brilliantly

resolved. Usually the women pictured were enjoying leisure

moments, or what Glamour called "private time." They w^re sitting

alone on their enormous porches, or rechning in beds of satin sheets,

or soaking in bubble baths, sometimes with their eyes closed, in a
state of relaxation and escape. In one of my favorites, an ad for some-
thing called Terme di Montecatini, we saw the profile of a woman at
a spa, covered fi:om forehead to rib cage with a kind of mud we
assumed would make her even more beautiful while she just rested.
Women Hke this are passive, inactive, supine. Yet make no mistake
about it, these women are in complete control: they are dependent
on no one, their time is their own, they are beyond the cares of the
world, they long for nothing they don't already have. Those symbols
of wealth — a huge veranda, the Riviera, art objects, unusual breeds
of dogs, the omnipresent glass of white wine —convey comfort, lux-
ury, insulation from the masses, and control.

It wasn't enough to put some Lubriderm on your face —my God,

that was Hke consigning your skin to the soup kitchens of moisturiz-
252 Where the Girls Are

ers. No, you had to spend money, and plenty of it, to be a discrimi-

nating, knowledgeable, accomplished woman. An ad for a product

called Oligo-Major lectured, "No woman can afford to be without

it." The cosmetics industry employed three main strategies to get
women to buy the high-priced spreads for their faces instead of using
the cheap shit, Pond's or Nivea — the building construction approach,
the haute cuisine approach, and the high-tech approach, all intended
to flatter the "new woman." They were designed to convey one basic
message: you get what you pay for, and if you scrimp on skin-care
products, you get what you deserve — crow's-feet, eye bags, turkey

neck, the worst. Fail to spend $42.50 on one-thirty-second of an

ounce of skin cream and the next time you look in the mirror, you'll

see Lyndon Johnson in drag.

The building construction" approach was best represented by a

fabulous new product. Line Fill, a kind of Silly Putty for the face.
Line Fill was also called skin Spackle —now we were supposed to

think of ourselves as a slab of drywall —and was used best to "fill

those character Hues we can all do without." In the same age when
"character," particularly for male politicians, became an obsession,
women didn't dare look like they had any character at all. Chanel's
Lift Serum Anti- Wrinkle Complex relied on Plastoderm, which,
despite its name, operated as a kind of hydraulic jack for sagging skin.
"Wrinkles," informed the ad, "are 'lifted' by gentle upward pressure."
The haute cuisine approach reached its apotheosis with "skin caviar,"
an "intensive concentration of vitamins, humectants, emollients and
plant naturals." The assumption here was that aging skin was merely
malnourished; so in a gesture reminiscent of our new heroine, Marie
Antoinette, the truly discriminating woman should say, "Let it eat

caviar."

But without doubt the most prevalent approach was the high-
tech approach, the one that introduced us to "deHvery systems,"
"collagen," and lots of words starting with micro- and lipo-. What
women's Hberation really meant was that now the labs of America
would turn to our real concerns: our crow's-feet. Science and tech-
 Narcissism as Liberation 253

nolog\', those onetime villains that had brought us napalm, the bomb,
Three Mile Island, Love Canal, and the Dalkon Shield, were them-
selves given a face-Hft for women. They were rehabiUtated as our

allies and our minions. Science and technolog}' were the most effec-
tive agents of luxurious narcissism, and the various forms of white
goop that we slopped on our faces had amazmg names that cloaked

the products in mystery while keeping supposedly technophobic and

techno-dumbo females engaged and credulous.
Here we see another clever twist on feminism. The women's
health movement of the 1970s, as embodied in Our Bodies, Ourselves,

insisted that doctors not treat women Hke morons but that they talk

to us as adults, provide us wdth information and choices, and give us

more control over our bodies. Advertisers said OK, you want techni-
cal, medical information, we'll give it to you. They got to have it

both ways —they flattered the "new woman" \\4th all this pseudosci-

entific jargon, suggesting that this was the kind of information she
v/anted, needed, and could easily understand, and they got to make
the goop they were selHng sound as if it had been developed at Cal

Tech.
In the 1980s, m nearly ever>^ cosmetic ad we saw, science and
technology were women's servants, and servants not just to expedite

domestic chores (as in the bad, selfless old days) but through which
women could remake themselves, conquer time, and conquer nature
bv overcoming their genetic heritage. Here women's desires for more
control over and more autonomy m their Hves were shrewdly co-
opted. Naomi Wolf argues that the high-tech approach sought to
speak to women whose work was increasingly dominated by com-
puters and the microchip." The words performance, precision, and con-

trol were used repeatedly, and products such as Swiss Performing

Extract or Niosome Systeme Anti-Age performed on you (you are

passive) while performing for you (you are in command). One prod-
uct's slogan was, simply, "The Victor^' of Science over Time." This

product, Hke so many, contained "patented Hposomes," which, in

case you needed an explanation, were "micro-capsules of select
254 Where the Girls Are

ingredients of natural origin which fuse with the membrane restor-

ing fluidity, promoting reactivation of cells in your skin." Niosome
" This was not sup-
produced "an exclusive action, 'Biomimitism.'
posed to make you think of conjugating spirogyra; it was supposed to
make you feel privy to the world of the scientist. It was very impor-
tant to feature microscopes, women in white lab jackets, and lots of
footnotes about patents pending to suggest the weight of a scientific
abstract.

As we read other ads for competing products (and there was no

shortage of them), a pattern started to emerge. Nearly all the cos-

metics companies referred to their products as "systems." These sys-

tems "penetrate" the "intercellular structure" of the skin, increasing

"microcirculation." Using only the most advanced "deHvery sys-

tems," presumably inspired by NASA, the Pentagon, and Star Wars,
these creams and lotions deployed "advanced microcarriers" or
"active anti-age agents," presumably trained by the CIA to terminate

wrinkles with extreme prejudice. So cosmetics actually became

weapons, and the word defense began to proHferate in ads at the same

time, interestingly, that the Pentagon's budget was going through

the roof.
In copy sounding as if it had been written by Alexander Haig, our
skin was put in a bunker or, better yet, behind Reagan's version of Star
Wars, as "protective barriers" and "invisible shields" deflected "exter-
nal aggressors." These muscular products relied on the same high-tech
weaponry we saw in The Empire Strikes Back and had straightforward
names like Defense Cream and Skin Defender. You could almost see
Luke Skywalker, backed up by the Green Berets, zapping those wrin-
kles back to kingdom come. Turning on its head the feminist argu-

ment that the emphasis on beauty undermines women's abiUty to be

taken seriously and to gain control over their lives, advertisers now
assured women that control comes from cosmetics. Cosmetics were
sold as newly engineered tools, precision instruments you could use
on yourself to gain more control than ever over the various masks and

identities you as a woman must present to the world.

 Narcissism as Liberation 255

But lest all this high-tech talk ahenate women, cosmetics firms

also made sure to give their products European-, and especially

French-sounding names. System was usually spelled systeme; concen-

trated became concentre. Accent signs became essential, as did the pro--

noun Le. Several product names simply went for broke, as in this Htde

gem, Creme Multi Modelante bio-suractivee, or Lift Extreme Nutri-

Collagene Concentre. What were briUiantly brought together were
the seemingly opposite worlds of advanced, ever-changing, Ameri-
can engineering technology and laboratory science (traditionally the
province of men) and the preindustriaHst, timeless, beauty-oriented
cultural authority of Europe (which caters to women). For new
beauty products to sell, it seems, the ads had to refer to and unite
recent scientific breakthroughs and the language of engineering with
references to France, Switzerland, or Italy. The words extract, serum,

and molecular suggested both the lab and elements found in nature.
Thus Niosome, from Lancome, is an antiaging "system" with a

French-sounding name that "recreates the structure of a young skin."

Cosmetics ads straddled the Adantic, Hnking American technology
with European culture, and the traditions of the old world with the
futurism of the new.
With the union of science and aesthetics, women now could

draw from the achievements of men in a world in which science and

technology did what we always wished they would do —slow the

passage of time, provide us with cost-free luxury and convenience,

and allow us to remake ourselves. It was through the female form,
and the idealized female face in particular, that science and technol-
ogy^ were made to seem altruistic, progressive, relevant to everyday

needs, and responsive to women's desires. They were made humane

and romantic, and with the reakns of art, nature, and tradition.
allied

At the same time, the pseudoscientific language not only legiti-

mated cosmetic companies' claims but also assured women that these

products were for discriminating, upscale consumers. The new

woman was now sophisticated enough and privileged enough to

benefit from a scientific enterprise designed specifically for eHte

256 Where the Girls Are

white women. The Hnking of American science and technology

with European cultural authority served to unite narcissism with
ehtism, to make eHtism seem natural, legitimate, and inevitable, and
to suggest that if you truly loved yourself, you had to aspire to the

privileged, idle, self-indulgent world of the rich, who were the right-

ful beneficiaries of technology, and the true arbiters of high art. Here
we had a new kind of magic. How could products that rehed on
herbal treatments, molecular biology, and chemistry fail to transform

us into newer, better selves?

Of course, if you'd been dereHct in your moisturizing duties,

there were more heroic methods to combat the signs of aging. Arti-
cle after article touted plastic surgery, so that no woman would ever

have to go out in pubhc again looking Hke Eleanor Roosevelt,

Simone de Beau voir, or Margaret Mead did in their later years.
Experts from skin-care labs, their names trailed by twenty-eight ini-
tials signifying their degrees and affiliations, happily agreed to inter-
views for Harper's Bazaar and elsewhere, promoting the knife. They
always said these really informative and logical things, Hke that the
first part of the body people usually look at is the face, which is why

you shouldn't have any Hues on yours. So what if, after a few tucks,
you were laid up for six weeks and looked like you'd gone eighteen
rounds with George Foreman? It was true, some women did experi-
ence a Uttle facial paralysis after a Hft, and you might not look as

Occidental as you used to or have enough skin to smile in quite the

same way, but these concerns were all picky, picky, picky. Did you
want to look Hke Cher, or not?
The other intermediate step was promoted in full-page ads by the
CoUagen Corporation. Here we met Sunny Griffin, "mother, build-
ing contractor, and former TV correspondent and model." Already I

felt pretty inferior, but it quickly got worse. Sunny was ten years
older than I and easily looked ten years younger. Sunny, it turned
out, "didn't Hke those 'Httle commas' at the corners of her mouth,
her crow's feet, or the Hues on her forehead. So she did something
 Xarcissism as Liberation 257

about them." But. unlike me. she was a woman of action. She went
to a doctor who stuck needles in her face, filling in those hideous

Hues with "mjectable Zyderm- and Zyplast- Collagen." Now those

wrinkles were "mere memories." Here were prefeminism and femi-

nism beautifully reconciled m Sunny Griffin, Collagen poster girl. As
a feminist, this superwoman had tackled male jobs and female jobs

and combined them successfully with motherhood. This gave her

permission to indulge her prefemimst side, the one still obsessed with
Uttle commas and crow's-feet, especially if she took decisive medical
action to take control of her face and herself.
In the collagen ad, it was the beautiful, rich, and successful Sunny
Griffin versus the rest of us. And that was the other important thrust
of the narcissism as hberation campaign, the continuation ot the cat-
fight, war between women. In all these ads, sisterhood was out,
the
competitive individuaHsm was m. It got worse if you actually fell for
these ads (hey, 1 was m my thirties, what did I know?) and went out
to buy some skin defender. If you've ever bought anything at a CHn-
ique, Lancome, or other such counter, you know what I mean. The
saleswoman's face is made up hke a Kabuki mask to put you off bal-

ance right away. And. clearly, all these women were trained wherever
that awful secret place is that they train used car salesmen. Using a

combination of intimidation, pressure, and highly uncharitable

assessments of your existing skm-care regimen, these women sought

to shame you into buying everything they had, which could come to

the equivalent of a monthly car payment. The worst, and I mean the

worst, thing you could say to one of these, women was that you
mixed products — you know, used a cleanser from one company and
moisturizer from another. Then they'd nearly croak firom exaspera-

tion at your stupidirv^ and your self-destructive tendencies. Didn't you

know, these cosmetic Hnes were integrated systems; each component
worked with the other components as a unit. Mixing products was
akin to putting a Che\y carburetor inside a Porsche engine and
expecting the car to run. You'd wreck your face by mixing products;
258 Where the Girls Are

you had to buy into the entire system or risk waking up one morn-
ing to discover your face turning into melting wax.
The notion of sisterhood being powerful seemed a real joke
under this onslaught. Fisticuffs seemed more appropriate. It took

work to remember that the salesclerks needed these jobs, that many
of them were supporting kids with their salaries, and that while we
squared off against each other across the glass-cased counter, the big
boys upstairs who didn't need face cream were getting ready for their

three-martini lunches and their affairs with women twenty years

younger than they
Tensions between technology and nature, between feminism and
antifeminism, and between self-love and self-doubt were played out
not only on the terrain of the flawless female face. Everywhere we
looked, in the incessant "get-back-in-shape" TV ads and magazine
articles, on billboards, in the catalogs that jammed our mailboxes, and
in the endless diet soda and cereal ads on the airwaves, the perfectly

smooth, toned buttocks and thighs of models and actresses accosted

the women of America. They jutted out at us from the new, high-
cut, spHt-'em-in-two bathing suits and exercise outfits, challenging
us and humbling us, reminding all women that nothing in the world
is more repulsive and shameful than "orange peel skin," a.k.a. "cel-
luUte." They provided women, whether black or white, rich or poor,

with a universal standard of achievement and success. They insisted

that the rest of us should feel only one thing when we put on a

bathing suit: profound mortification.

It's true that we also started seeing more female biceps, and every
few months The New York Times asserted that breasts were back "in."

But, still, it was the slim, dimple-free buttock and thigh that became,
in the 1980s and the 1990s, the ultimate signifier of female fitness,

beauty, and character. To make sure you couldn't hide them, the fash-

ion industry gave us bathing suits with legs cut up to just below the
armpit. Trim, smug models were positioned with their knees bent or
their bodies curled so that their superhuman hindquarters were front

and center. And not just in Vogue or Cosmo, either: even in The Village
 Narcissism as Liberation 259

Voice,between the exposes on racism and government malfeasance,

ads appeared for products like the videotape Buns of Steel which
promised, "Now you can have the buns you've always wanted." Sad-
dlebag-busting products like Biotherm appeared, which actually sug-
gested that if you just rubbed some cream on your buttocks, the

dimples would go into remission.

Whv this part of the body? Why were we suddenly but constantly
confronted by these perfectly sculpted rumps? During the mammary'
mania of the 1950s and '60s, bust creams, exercisers, and padded bras

suggested that women could compensate for what nature forgot. Yet
while less-endowed women might buy such products, and bemoan
their lack of voluptuousness, there was also a basic understanding
that, short of surgery; there was Htde a woman could do to actually
change the size of her breasts. The thigh was different: this body part

could be yoked to another pathology of the 1980s, the yuppie work

ethic. Thin thighs and dimple-free buttocks became instant, auto-

matic evidence of disciphne, self-denial, and control. You, too, the

message went, can achieve perfect thighs through dieting and exer-
cise. As Jane Fonda put it, "Disciphne Is Liberation."^

Emphasis on the thigh, which still harasses us, stems from the fit-

ness craze of the past fifteen years, when increasing numbers of

women discovered the physical and psychic benefits of exercise. I

learned in graduate school, for example, that if swam sixty-seven

I

laps in the pool I was less Hkely to strangle the pompous white male
professors making my Life miserable, and I'd also sort out some prob-
lem with my own work as weU. Plus, for inspiration to get off your
butt, there were women Hke Bilhe Jean King, one of my heroes, a

fabulous athlete and a feminist, and the first woman athlete to earn

more than $100,000 a year. When she beat the H\ang crap out of

Bobby Paggs in the much touted "Battle of the Sexes" in 1973, as

women Hke me screamed with deHght in our Hving rooms, she not
only vindicated female athletes and feminism but also inspired many
of us to get in shape —not because it would make us beautifial but

because it would make us strong and healthy.

260 Where the Girls Are

What too many of us forget is that the fitness movement began as

a radical reaction against the degradation of food by huge conglom-

erates, and against the work routines and convenience technologies
that encouraged us to be passive and sedentary. The organic health
food movement was, initially, at its core, anticapitahst. The women's
fitness movement, too, was a site of resistance, as women sought to
break into sports previously restricted to men and women sim-
other

ply sought to get strong. But one of capitalism's great strengths — per-

haps its greatest — is its abiHty to co-opt and domesticate opposition,

to transubstantiate criticism into a host of new, marketable products.

And so it was with fitness.

Corporations saw immediately that there was gold in them thar

thighs. The key to huge profits was to emphasize beauty over health,
sexuaHty over fitness, and to equate thin thighs with wealth and sta-

tus. What had worked so well in the past was to set up standards of
perfection that were cast as unattainable yet somehow within reach if
only the right product were purchased. So we got a new, even nar-
rower ideal of beauty that continues to bombard us from every media
outlet and serves the needs of a host of corporations.
Yet there was much more going on here than just the media cap-
itaHzing on a trend or the standard let's-make-'em-feel-inferior-so-
they'11-buy-our-product routine. The flawless rump became the most
important female body part of the 1980s because its cultivation and
display fit in so well with the great myth of Reaganism: that super-

ficial appearances really can be equated with a person's deepest char-

acter strengths and weaknesses. The emphasis on streamlined rumps
allowed for a dramatic reshaping of feminist urgings that women take

control of their bodies and their health. All we had to do was Hsten
to Cher in those health spa ads, she'd tell us: thin thighs and dimple-

free buttocks meant you worked hard, took yourself seriously, and
were ready to compete with anyone. They were indicators of a
woman's potential for success. Any woman, so the message went,
could achieve perfect thighs through concentrated efibrt, self-denial,

and deferred gratification, the basic tenets of the work ethic. All she
 Narcissism as Liberation 261

had to do was apply herself and, of course, be a discriminating,

upscale consumer. "You don't get this far by accident," proclaimed

one sneaker ad displaying a tight, toned rump; "you've worked hard."
Another magazine ad, this one for a spa, also spotHghted a machine-
tooled hindquarter, intoning, "When you work at it, it shows."
Meaning, if you've been slacking off, that will show too. Only "new
women" had buns of steel; out-of-date women who had failed to

have their consciousnesses raised didn't.

It didn't matter if you were healthy, exercised regularly, and
weren't overweight. If wearing one of the new, ultrahigh-cut bathing
suits would reveal too much roundness, a Httle fat (what the cosmet-
ics industry christened "celluhte" in the 1970s), you would be dis-

missed as slothful and lacking moral fiber and self-respect, not to

mention lazy, self-indulgent, insufficiently vigorous, lacking control,
sedentary, and old. (The only acceptable sedentary indulgence was to
He on a chaise longue, slathered from head to toe in sludge, a la

Terme di Montecatini.) No matter that the female hip area is natu-

rally more fatty than the male (a function of reproduction), or that
most women's jobs require constant sitting, two factors that tend to

work against developing buns of steel. Over and again we were told

that a real woman, whatever her age, would get off her butt and, by
overcoming her sloth, not just get in shape but conquer genetics and
history. Her buns of steel would instantly identify her as someone
who subscribed to the new yuppie ethic that insisted that even in

leisure hours, the truly tough, the truly deserving, never stopped
working. The sleek, smooth, tight butt was —and — is a badge, a

medal asserting that anal compulsiveness is an unalloyed virtue.

Perfect thighs, in other words, were an achievement, a product,

and one to be admired and envied. They demonstrated that the

woman had made something of herself, that she had character and
class, that she was the master of her body and, thus, of her fate. If she

had conquered her own adipose tissue, she could conquer anything.
She was a new woman, Hberated and in control. She had made her
buttocks less fatty, more muscular, more, well . . . Hke a man's. So
262 Where the Girls Are

here we have one of the media's most popular —and pernicious— dis-

tortions of feminism: that ambitious women want, or should want, to

be just like men. The woman whose upper thigh best approximated
a fat-free male hindquarter was the woman most entitled to enjoy the
same privileges as men. Orange-peel skin should be a source of
shame, not only because it's "ugly," but also because it's inherently

female. It indicates that, as a woman, you aren't working hard

enough, aren't really taking responsibiHty for your own Hfe.You
aren't really Hberated because you haven't overcome being a woman.
A desirable woman doesn't look Hke a real woman looks; thus, one of
the basic physical markers of femaleness is cast as hideous.

Yet well-toned, machine-tooled thighs suggested that women

could compete with men while increasing their own desirabiHty.

Thighs, rather than breasts, became the focus m the 1980s because

presumably everyone, the flat-chested and the stacked, men as well as

women, could work toward buns of steel. Women could develop the
same anatomical zones that men did, giving their muscles new defi-
nition, a definition meant to serve simultaneously as a warning and as

an enticement to men. Buns of steel marked a woman as a desirable

piece of ass, and as someone who could kick ass when necessary.

What made these thighs desirable was that, while they were fat-

free, Hke men's, they also resembled the thighs of adolescent girls.

The ideal rump bore none of the marks of age, responsibihty, work,
or motherhood. And the crotch-sphtting, cut-up-to-the-waistUne,
impossible-to-swim-in bathing suits featured in such pubHcations as
the loathsome Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue could never reveal that
other marker of adulthood, pubic hair. So, under the guise of female
fitness and empowerment, of control over her own body, was an ide-
alized image that infantilized women, an image that kept women in

their place.

The upper thigh thus became freighted with meaning. The work
ethic, the ethos of production and achievement, self-denial and
deferred gratification was united there with egoism, vanity, self-

absorption, and other-directedness. With the work ethic moved from

 Narcissism as Liberation 263

the workplace to the private sphere, the greatest female achievement

became, ironically, her body, her self. The message was that women
were capable of remaking themselves and that this remaking required
not only intelligent consumption but also hard work. Thus could
women be, simultaneously, self-indulgent consumers, buying high-
priced exercise shoes and spa memberships, and self-denying produc-
ers who were working hard to remake something — their bodies.

They could be active subjects in control of their own images and pas-
sive objects judged by those images. They could be prefeminists and
new women at the same time.

By the middle of the 1980s, these buttocks and thighs were mak-
ing me and all the other women I knew really hostile and defensive.
Their sleek, seemingly healthy surfaces really demanded that we all

be pathological: compulsive, filled with self-hate, and schizophrenic,

and we were already schizophrenic enough, thank you very much.
Aside from the impossible standards of perfection they imposed, these
buns of steel urged women to never stop and to be all things to all

people: to be both competitive workaholics and sex objects, to be

active workers in control of their bodies and passive ornaments for
the pleasure of men, to be hard-as-nails superwomen and vulnerable,
unthreatening, teenage beach bunnies. StraddHng such contradic-
tions, even on toned, fat-free, muscular legs is, in real life, impossible.

And buns of steel were meant to separate the deserving truly classy,

women from the rest of the lumpy female proletariat. Buns of steel,
Hke a Pierre Cardin label, were a mark of well-earned exclusivity.

Lumpy thighs were K mart thighs, not the thighs of Rodeo Drive.
The 1980s are over, but buns of steel are very much with us, in

Diet Pepsi ads, Victoria's Secret catalogs, and women's magazines. A

1993 survey reported that while only 6 percent of women wished
their breasts were either bigger or smaller, a whopping 72 percent
wished they had "better thighs.""^ That same year, the cover of Glam-
our promised, in a two-inch headhne, "A Better Butt, Fast!" The
cover also promised to explain "Why 15 Million Women Own
Guns.'"' I figure it's to shoot everyone involved in the campaign to
264 Where the Girls Are

make us think we need buns of steel. The article inside, tided eupho-
niously enough "The World-Class Butt," accompanied by exercise
instructions and an enormous photo of a smooth, sixteen-year-old
butt in white eyelet short shorts, lectured, "A toned, firm bottom has

plenty to recommend it, as the photo on the right confirms." I also

learned that the "flat bottom featured in those beach-blanket

movies" was really out. "Now women want a defined, sculpted look
with higher, rounder cheeks." Yep, this has been an overarching goal
I've wanted to devote a lot of time to in the 1990s. But there's the

same old hitch: "You have to work hard to firm them up. So get
busy." No need to repeat which expletives I use when reading an
exhortation such as this.

So where do these buttocks and thighs leave the rest of us, the
real women of America who sit at desks or stand at sinks, who are

over sixteen, and who don't have the time, money, personal trainer,
or surgical team to help us forge our own buns of steel? Even
nonoverweight women, and women who do and should know bet-
ter, have been worked over so well that whenever we look at our-

selves in the mirror or, worse, have to be seen in pubUc in a bathing

suit, all we can feel is disgust and shame. But it isn't just shame of our
bodies. Buns of steel have taught us to be ashamed of the way we Hve
our day-to-day lives; of the fact that whatever we're doing, we aren't

working hard enough; that we don't have that badge of entitlement;

that we don't really have enough self-respect and dignity; that we

aren't enough Hke men; and, worst of all, that we're adult females in

a culture that still prefers, by and large, htde girls. All it takes is the

sHghtest roundness, the smallest dimple, to mark a woman as a lazy,

and therefore worthless, unattractive person whose thighs obHterate

whatever other admirable traits or impressive accomphshments she
might possess.

I'm tired of being told never to stop, and that some physical exer-

tion, Hke pumping a Nautilus machine, is more valuable than some

other exertion, such as chasing a two-year-old. I'm tired of Cher's
rump, Christie Brinkley's thighs, and coundess starved, airbrushed.
 Narcissism as Liberation 265

surgically enhanced hindquarters being shoved in my face. I'm tired

of being told that if I just exercise a lot more and eat a lot less, I, too,

can conquer biology, make my thighs less female, and thus not be
eyed with derision. I'm real tired of the marquis de Sade "bathing
suits" foisted on us by the fashion industry Most of all, I'm tired of
the endless self-flagellation we women subject ourselves to because of
the way this latest, unattainable, physical ideal has been combined
with the yuppie work ethic.

And I'm not alone. Backlash works two ways, and women, espe-
cially cranky women my age, are really getting the fed-up-skis with
advertisers' obsession with machine-tooled faces and thighs. I think
that catalogs like Lands' End must be making a fortune on this back-
lash agginst buns of steel. They sell bathing suits that fit and that you
can actually swim in. If you make the mistake of waiting until late

June to order one, they're out of stock because furious women all

over the country now refuse to try on a glorified G-string under flu-
orescent lights that make you look like a very fat dead person.
At the same time that we can't exorcise such long-standing infe-
riority complexes about our bodies, we see women trying to reclaim
the fitness movement from Kellogg's, Diet Pepsi, Biotherm, and
all the rest of the buttocks and thighs cartel. Women know, in
their heads if not their hearts, that buns of steel are not about fitness:

they are about pretending that some anorexic, unnatural, corporate-

constructed ideal is really a norm. Buns of steel are designed to
humiliate women, and to make us compHcit in our own degrada-
tion, and most women know this too. Silly as they may seem, buns
of steel are worth being angry about because of the eating disorders
they promote among young women and the general sexism
they reinforce in society. So the next time some curled-up rump is

forced mto your field of vision, view it not with envy but with con-
tempt. For it doesn't reflect hard work or entitlement so much as

mindless narcissism, unproductive self-absorption, and the media's

ongoing distortion of feminism to further their own misogynistic,
profit-maximizing ends. Buns of steel are just another media Trojan
266 Where the Girls Are

horse, pretending to advance feminism but harboring antifeminist

weaponry.
Narcissism as Hberation gutted many of the underlying principles

of the women's movement. Instead of group action, we got escapist

solitude. Instead of sohdarity, we got female competition over men.

And, most important, instead of seeing personal disappointments,

frustrations, and failures as symptoms of an inequitable and patriar-

chal society, we saw these, just as in the 1950s, as personal failures, for

which we should blame ourselves. Smooth, toned thighs and but-

tocks obstruct any vision of social change and tell us that, as women,
personal change, physical change, is our last, best, and most realistic

hope. Women are to take control of their bodies not for poHtical or

health reasons but to make them aesthetically pleasing. The "new

woman" of the 1980s, then, perpetuated and legitimated the most
crass, selfish aspects of consumer capitaHsm and thus served to distort

and deny the most and revolutionary principles of feminism.

basic

Narcissism as liberation is liberation repackaged, deferred, and

denied. Again women felt pinioned, trapped in a web of warring
messages. We
were supposed to work harder than ever; in fact, the
mark of success was having no time for your friends, your family, or
yourself. But we were also supposed to indulge ourselves, and to

know when and how to kick back, and to do so with style.

Let's take, for example, the poUtics of the face-Hft. Baby boomers
with sufficient discretionary income are starting to confront this one,

and with the explosion in celebrity journaUsm, stars' face-lifts and

other nips and tucks have become headUne news, serving as an
enticement and a warning. Cosmetic surgery is being presented as a

perfectly natural, affordable, routine procedure, and increasing num-

bers of women are heeding the call. Cosmetic surgery is growing at

a faster rate than any other medical specialty and grosses approxi-
mately $300 million a year.^ The decision to get a face-lift or not is,

inescapably a poHtical decision. Getting one means you're acquiesc-

ing to our country's sick norms about beauty, youth, and being
"worth it." Not getting one means you're gonna tough it out, be
 Narcissism as Liberation 267

baggy-faced, and take the heat. Actresses and models have no choice.
The rest of American women are pulled between these nodes.
But here's what doesn't come out m the war agamst wrinkles and
celluHte: women are as conflicted about agmg as they are about other

aspects of their lives. For example, when I was tv.^enty and had
streaked blond hair, walking down pretty much any street was a

nightmare. The incessant yells of "Hey, baby," and other more

anatomically graphic remarks, the whistles and other simianlike
sounds some men seem to spend an inordinate amount of time
perfecting, all these infuriated me and kept me constantly on the

defensive. Now that doesn't happen anymore— and I love it. I can
walk—no comments; can jog—no comments;
I I can walk along the
beach —no My eye bags and my
leers. "cellulite" are now my friends,
my protectors, my armor, and I love them for that. At the same time,
part of me will always want to sandpaper them off.

Then there's the love-hate relationship with the eye bags. No

woman wants to look like George Shultz after a bad night, but a

woman's facial Hnes are the story of her Hfe. I got mine from pulling
too many all-nighters in college, from smoking pot, from drinking
tequila with my brother and champagne with my husband, from bak-
ing way too long in the sun, from putting in sLxty-hour workweeks,
from having a child unfamihar with the concept of sleep, and, of
course, from growing older. They've tracked my joys and sorrows,

my failures and successes, and I'm supposed to want to chop them off
so I can look like an empty vessel, a bimbette? Besides, my husband,
who hates it when his favorite actresses get face-lifts and don't look
hke themselves anymore, Hkes them. They go with his; they're a

team.
So here's the question, girls. And it's one you guys should con-
sider too as Grecian Formula, CHnique, and Soloflex eye your sag-
ging faces and bodies greedily. What if every woman in America
woke up tomorrow and simply decided that she was happy with the
way she looked? She might exercise to keep herself healthy, and
get some Vaseline Intensive Care from CVS to soothe her dry skin,
268 Where the Girls Are

but, basically, that would be the extent of it. Think of the entire
multibillion-dollar industries that would crumble. This is one of the
reasons lesbians are so vilified —many of them have already made this

choice, thereby costing the beauty industry millions. If women

decided in the war between feminism and antifeminism being waged
in skin-care and diet soda ads that antifeminism had way too big an
advantage, women might decide to shift the odds a bit. For example,
they might decide to take the $42.50 for skin caviar or skin Spackle
and send it, instead, to the Fund for the Feminist Majority, the Inter-

national Red Cross, the Children's Defense Fund, or some other

organization that works for the benefit of women and children.
The reason this won't happen is that advertising, women's maga-
zines, movies, and TV shows have been especially effective in ahen-

ating women from their faces and bodies. Women of all ages, who are

perfectly capable of denouncing sexist news coverage, or making

their own empowering and subversive meanings out of TV shows
and films, find it extremely difficult to resist the basic tenet that a face

with lines or a thigh with dimples means you are worthless. The
media's relentlessly coercive deployment of perfect faces and bodies,
and the psychologically, politically, and economically punitive mea-
sures taken against women who fail to be young, thin, and beautiful,

have intersected seamlessly with age-old American ideals about the

work ethic, being productive, and being deserving of rewards. The
"I'm Worth It" campaign and all its allies and imitators co-opt the
feminist effort to promote female self-esteem to reassure women that,
deep down, they aren't worth it The same women who have
at all.

been able to find feminist ^empowerment in the most unlikely

places —from Harry Reasoner's editorials to Krysde and Alexis's cat-

fights — nothing but

find self-hatred and disempowerment here. Of
all the disfigurements of feminism, this, perhaps, has been the most
effective.
 T E R 1

M
J 'i lot I Feiiiist, • » •

here we are, kids. It's the 1990s, a decade I used to think of as

So science fiction. It's still too soon to tell what the nineties will be
remembered for, and whether this decade will produce a fashion
fad worse than white go-go boots, music even more odious than
heavy metal (or whatever that is that bands Hke Whitesnake and
MetaUica play), or TV shows more corrosive to the brain and our
nation's social fabric than Cops, Rescue 911, Inside Edition, and Hard
Copy. Certainly any future historian, going through the TV ads of

today, will assume there was an outbreak of yeast infections among

the young, white, upper-middle-class mothers of America that
reached epidemic proportions, and that their doctors happily dis-
cussed these infections with them for hours on the telephone.
But for baby boom women, now anywhere between thirty and
fifty, and just a tad testy, as well as for their mothers, sisters, and
daughters, the 1990s promise to deHver more of the same: a media
environment with so many spHt personahties about the roles and
place of women that Sybil seems pretty uncomplicated by compari-

son. Feminism is still an F word, but having women in the profes-

sions — well, a few of them, and in some professions — is OK. Women

with lines on their faces are still anathema, unless they're selling den-
ture cream or Pampers for seniors. Opinionated women with big
mouths are good for laughs in sitcoms, but keep them the hell out of
pohtics and Hollywood movies — unless they are villains, of course.

There's certainly no need for feminism anyway, since we just had

 —
270 Where the Girls Are

"The Year of the Woman" in 1992 and increased the number of

women m the Senate to five, which is plenty. Ads for toilet cleaners,

iTLildew blasters, furniture spray, and food enhancers still emphasize

woman's role as the only who can see

one in the house dirt or pre-

pare a meal. And the main motto of women today is, supposedly,
."^
"I'm not a feminist, but . .

As both the news and entertainment media have construed this

statement, they emphasize and reinforce what comes before the
comma: "I'm not a feminist." They pay much less attention to the
"but," and virtually ignore the comma itself. The comma, however,
is whole statement, which marks the divisions
the fulcrum of the
and, more important, the profound connections between the dis- —
avowal of feminism in the first part of the phrase and its embrace at
the end. The comma says that the speaker is ambivalent, that she is

torn between a philosophy that seeks to improve her lot in life and a

desire not to have to pay too dearly for endorsing that philosophy

Most important, the comma identifies the speaker as someone who

both acquiesces to and resists media representations of women and of
feminism. speaker has been cowed by stereotypes of the feminist
The
as a hateful, obnoxious, repellent shrew. But the speaker also knows

that these women have something to say to her, that some of the

feminists she has seen and heard she even likes, and she suspects they
might not be as hideous as they're made out to be.
but ."?
So where are we now, in the era of "I'm not a feminist, . .

We an overlay of imprints, bearing, in some way or another, the

are

fossiUzed remains of Queen for a Day, Sputnik, the Sexual Revolution,

the Chiffons, Beademania, perkiness, the women's movement, the
catfights, Charlie's Angels, and buns of steel. We have learned to be

masochistic and and comphant, eager to please and

narcissistic, feisty

eager to irritate and shock, independent and dependent, assertive and

concihatory. We have learned to wear a hundred masks, and to live
with the fact that our inner selves are fragmented, some of the pieces^

vaUdated by the mass media, o th'^Teferna ll y ignore d^ All our lives,

we have watched women from Beatles fans to Anita Hill and Hillary
 I'm Not a Feminist, But . . . 271

Rodham Clinton breaching barricades and crossing boundaries they

weren't supposed to: we have seen how stepping out of Hne has been
punished and how effective —and utterly futile —such punishments
have been. Certain women are demonized, but they, and others
emboldened by their actions, come back for more. We have grown
up with these ever discrepant representations of women, and related

tothem all our lives, and while we have shaped them, they have had
more power to shape us. We have grown up and continue to live with
media images not of our making, so, on some level, we will always
feel like outsiders looking in at a culture that regards us as unknow-
able, mysterious, laughable, other. But we are insiders too, having
been formed by this very same culture, our desires researched to the
hilt and then sold back to us in a warped, yet still recognizable fash-
ion. We stand on the border, looking out and looking in, feeling

simultaneously included and excluded, wooed as consumers yet

rejected as people.
One of the major traits womanhood in the 1990s is
that defines

our daily war with all those media which we love and hate and

which, after all these years, don't know what to do about us or for us,

although they seem to have a better grip on what to do to us. It is

easy for many of us to understand what an advertiser or a TV pro-

ducer wants us to take away from this ad or that show, but that
doesn't mean that women always, in fact, buy into and accept those

meanings. We are fed up with ads that tell us we're too old, too fat,

and too marked up in some way, but we feel, nonetheless, too old,

too fat, and too marked up. We are tired of blockbuster movies that
glorify beefy, rippled men who speak monosyllabically and carry
extremely well-endowed sticks, but we go to them anyway, nursing
our fury and enjoying our catharsis. We get the bends as we escape

mto the schizophrenic landscape of Glamour or Vogue, in which edi-

torials, advice columns, and articles urge us to be assertive, strong,

no-nonsense feminists while the fashion and beauty layouts insist that

we be passive, anorexic spectacles whose only function is to attract

men and who should spend our leisure time mastering the art of the
272 Where the Girls Are

pedicure. We throw half-eaten bagels at Saturday morning kids'

shows and commercials that tram our daughters to be giggling, air-

headed Valley Girls, but we go ahead and buy them GHtter Ken and
the Fisher-Price toy kitchen on the theory that we played with Bar-

bie and we came out OK—well, sort of. We think that news pro-

grams must be getting less sexist because there are now famous
women newscasters hke Connie Chung, Diane Sawyer, and Nina
Totenberg, but we also see how so-called women's issues are either

sensationalized (have one more drink and you'll die of breast cancer)

or triviahzed (so what if a woman has to drive 300 miles to get an

abortion, or a sixteen-year-old has to get permission to do so from a

father she never sees?), while women's voices about major areas of

national poHcy are ignored. Most of all, the constant erasure of the

contradictions that define our lives makes us crazy, since all the

media, completely confused and conflicted about what to do about

women, subtly acknowledge those contradictions while either pre-
tending they don't exist or insisting they can be resolved, especially
with a purchase or two.
." has become an
no wonder that "I'm not a feminist, but
It's . .

infamous and numbingly overused cHche. It is a statement attributed

less to baby boom women than to the "baby bust"

generation born

between 1965 and 1975, to the much stereotyped and condemned

"twentysomething" crowd. As I understand this conversational gam-
bit, it means that the speaker probably supports some combination of
equal pay for equal work; reproductive freedom for women; equal

access to the same educational, professional, and financial opportuni-

ties as men; expanded child-care facilities for working parents; more

humane maternity and paternity leave poHcies; marriages in which
husbands cook dinner and empty the diaper pail; and an end to or —
even a slowing of —our national epidemic of violence against women
of all ages. It also means that the speaker shaves her legs, bathes regu-

larly does not want to be thought of as a man-hater, a ball-buster, a

witch, or a shrew, and maybe even wears mascara, blush-on, and a

bra. Most of all, it means that the possibility of having, inside you,
 —
I'm Not a Feminist, But . . . 273

a unified, co here nt self that always believes the same things at the
same time is virtually zero.

This is what it has come to. On the one hand, few women want
to take on the baggage of the feminist stereotype. On the other hand,
they embrace much of w^hat feminism has made possible for them
which they also learned about, initially, from the media —and are
uninterested in returning to the days of woman as doormat. Since the
1960s, legitimation of femimsm in the mass media and backlash
against it have smacked against each other with the force and chaos of
biUiard balls colliding. Individual women, too often isolated by the
pressures of jugghng work, relationships, kids, and trying to see a

movie once a year, are left on their own to arrange the balls neatly in

some psychic rack that makes sense for them, if only momentarily.
What the mass media don't convey, and can't convey, is that fem-
inism is an ongoing project, a process, undertaken on a daily basis by
millions ot women ot all ages, classes, ethnic and racial backgrounds,
and sexual preferences. Feminism is constantly being reinvented, and
reinvented through determination and compromise, so that women
try. as best they can, to have love and support as well as power and
autonomy. As they do so. they have certainly taken note, with Susan
Faludfs help, ot a backlash filled with wishful thinking pronounce-
ments about the "death" of feminism and the heralding of a new
"postfeminist" age." But they have also taken heart m Roseanne, L.A.
Law, Murphy Brown, Nina Totenberg, and Katie Couric, in the vari-
ous defiant, flinny. smart, and strong women they see on TV.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, we continued to witness the war
between feminism and antifeminism in movies, TV shows, popular
music, the new^s, and, especially. Senate confirmation hearings. The
first fictional "new woman" we got on TV w^as Joyce Davenport of
Hill Street Blues, a no-nonsense, stone-faced, humorless woman in

public who was more fun in private but was (no doubt because she
was such a bitch) unable to have children. Remingtoti Steele, in which
a woman used a man as a front for her own detective agency, reaf-
firmed, as Charlie's Angels had. the inevitabiHn' ot patriarchy while
274 Where the Girls Are

insisting, like Bewitched, that women were the brains behind the
throne. L.A. Law showed us tough, smart, often expHcitly feminist
female attorneys who won in court yet often lost in real Hfe, and who
were in constant competition with each other, thirtysomething, one of
the best-produced and, hands down, most manipulative and annoy-
ing shows of the period, dramatized the struggle for women between
family and job, yet Hope, the main, beatific mom, couldn't juggle

work and baby so she stayed home and nearly had a psychic break-
down when she had to stop breast feeding. Cagney & Lacey was many
women's favorite. Here were women who wore guns ^n^ mascara,

who loved each other and fought with each other, who told sexist
men where to get off and sued their butts for sexual harassment, and
who consciously changed the masks they wore as they changed roles
throughout the day But did the unmarried, childless one really have

tobe an alcohohc, especially since the mother of three had a lot more
reason to drink? And in Moonlighting, our sympathies were meant to
be with the wisecracking David (Bruce Willis) and not with the fre-
quently unsmiHng, more serious-minded Maddie (Cybill Shepherd),
although I may have been biased by all those L'Oreal commercials.

Northern Exposure has finally given us, in Ruth Ann, a feisty, wonder-
ful older woman, but one ongoing joke is how O'Connell, the inde-
pendent young woman of the show, has a string of previous
boyfiriends who all died after getting involved with her. Through all

this, I see less of a concerted, unified backlash and more of a twisted,

constipated, contorted effort to hail women who now have some dis-
posable income and growing aspirations, while also dramatizing that
feminism can go a Utde further, but not too far.

The news media, for their part, are today a schizophrenic mess_
about feminism, and there is a powerful reverberation between their
schizophrenia and our own. They continue to cover feminism and
describe feminists as if the movement is monoHthic and feminists are
all alike. At the same time, in their stories and their hiring practices,

we see that in the news media (as elsewhere) feminism is many things

to many women; that there is not one feminism but many; and that
 I'm Not a Feminist , But . . . 275

there are beautiful, amiable women who claim feminism and shrill,

mean-spirited ones who condemn it.

Let's take Times cover story for December 4, 1989, "Women

Face the '90s." Beneath the headlme, the cover asked, "In the '80s

they tried to have it all. Now they've just plam had it. Is there a future

for feminism?" Inside, the article announced, "Hairy legs haunt the
feminist movement, as do images of being strident and lesbian."

Hmm, wonder where those specters came from? One college student

was quoted as saying, "I picture a feminist as someone who is mascu-

Hne and who doesn't shave her legs and is doing everything she can
to deny that she is feminine." Nothing, apparently, is more disgusting

and horrifying than female leg hair. Time stated confidently, "Ask a

woman under the age of 30 if she is a feminist, and chances are she

will shoot back a decisive, and perhaps even a derisive, no." The arti-

cle cast women my age as "resentful" because "things have not

worked out as expected," and whom did we blame? Employers with

no flextime plans? Communities with no decent child-care centers?

A White House that fought to dismande affirmative action

and thought women were best employed in the Oval Office as

astrologers? Husbands who snored peacefully on the couch while we

picked up all 708 Lego pieces? Nope, according to Time, we blamed
the women's movement.
Then, in an especially deft turn, and one the press has gotten

quite good at, the article blamed the women's movement for the sins
of the media. Women my age now castigated the movement "for not
knowing and for emphasizing the wrong issues. The ERA and les- ,^^^3
bian rights, while noble causes, seemed to have garnered more atten- }/y^ ^

tion than the pressingnegd- for chilHrix^and more flexible work J^"^
schedules." And who(spodighted lesbianisn^^djug^^^
divide women while ignoring temimsts' demands for child care,

national health insurance, and the Hke? Why quelle surprise, it was
Time magazine and the other increasingly sensationaHstic media out-
lets. Then feminism took some more of the usual hits, once again

running interference for the media. The women's movement had

276 Where the Girls Are

ignored women of color, poor women, and working-class women,

and it had denigrated motherhood and housewives. There was no
suggestion, of course, that the media's representation of feminism
played any role in these stereotypes.
But after how younger women couldn't identify with
itemizing
old bags like me, and how old bags like me felt betrayed by the Hkes
of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, the article reviewed how far
women had come since the 1950s and how much women credited
the women's movement with that progress. Quoting a Time/CNN
poll, the article reported that 77 percent of women thought the

women's movement had made Hfe better, 94 percent said it had

helped women become more independent, and 82 percent said it was
still improving the lives of women. So why did only 33 percent of

women identify themselves as feminists? Because the women's move-

ment had won, and was therefore obsolete. Does this sound like the

correct answer to you? Me neither, and apparently it didn't sit so well

with the folks at Time. Because then the article described how far

women still had to go to close the wage gap, to defeminize poverty,

and to eliminate women's second shift at home.^

As you can see, this article was all over the place. The women's
movement allegedly had made many women, especially my age, mis-

erable, yet it had made us happy, by opening up opportunities we trea-

sured and would never give up. Feminists were still caricatured as
hairy, humorless bruisers best kept quarantined on some reservation
for transsexuals, but it turned out a lot of women who wore panty
hose, and knew all too well who Big Bird is, embraced feminist posi-
tions and were, therefore, feminists. Equality was a burden; subordi-

nation was untenable. Feminism was a curse; feminism was a salvation.

Only a few grotesque crones were still feminists; nearly all women
were feminists. Feminism was for no one; feminism was for everyone.

No wonder young women, who were infants and toddlers at the

."
height of the women's movement, say, "I'm not a feminist, but . .

They inhabit the only place they can, the place all women know all

too well, the site of ambivalence, contradiction, and compromise.

 I'm Not a Feminist, But . . . 277

As more women have entered journalism, and so-called women's

storieshave become headhne news, this same schizophrenia perco-
latesthroughout the news media and into the representations of fem-
inism we see and hear. In 1970, there were no female
anchorwomen
on the national news, hardly any at the local level, and very few
female TV journaHsts. Today the norm is for local newscasts to
be

cohosted by a male-female team, and national newscasts, morning

talk shows, and newsmagazines have made stars out of Barbara Wal-

Diane Sa\wer, Jane Pauley Joan Lunden. and Katie Couric.

ters,

Connie Chung became Dan Rather's coanchor on the CBS Evemng

Xews, although not without gripes that her presence would
triviahze

the broadcast (as if Dan's efforts to boost his ratings by sporting, first,

red suspenders and then a sweater vest didn't). Some of the sharpest

and funniest colummsts m the country —Molly Ivins, Katha PoUitt.

Barbara Ehrenreich— are women, and in 1992 and 1993, the PuHtzer
Prize in commentary went, respectively, to Anna Qumdlen and Liz

Balmaseda. So it's easy to point to surface appearances and think the

revolution has been won.

On the other hand, women's voices are rarely heard on the news.
Femimsm is still kept m
ideological purdah. Female "experts" are

interviewed for the nightly news when the topic is abortion, child
care, or affirmative action; but when the topic is war, foreign poHcy
the environment, or national purpose, female voices, and
feminist

voices in particular, are ignored. A recent study revealed that m 1988

only 10.3 percent of the guests on Xightline were female, and of the
twentv^ most frequent guests, none were women. Another study
from

1990 found that the ten individuals who appeared most frequently as
analysts on the CBS, ABC, and NBC nightly news were
all men. and

some of them appeared as many as fifty-eight times in a single year.^

Bett\^ Friedan's Women, Men and Media Project found that the per-

centage of female correspondents was only 15 percent in 1989, and

were some nights when you could watch the news and see
that there

no women reporters at all. Of the one hundred most frequently seen

correspondents on TV, only eight were women. Diane Sawder and
278 Where the Girls Are

Connie Chung remain exceptions, and they represent a very small

and privileged class of women. More to the point, they are gorgeous.

No woman who looks Hke Andy Rooney, Charles Kuralt, or

Walter Cronkite would ever be allowed to report or comment on the

news.^ Ninety-seven percent of the TV anchors over forty are, you
guessed it, male. Christine Craft was canned from her anchor posi-
tion in Kansas City in 1983 at the wizened age of thirty-six for being

"too old, too unattractive and not deferential to men."^ This kind of
agism is really pissing off a lot of women. Why do CUnt Eastwood,
Robert Redford, Sean Connery, Richard Dreyfuss, and other men in
their fifties, sixties, and even seventies continue to work and get great

parts while terrific actresses over the age of forty, hke Sally Field, Jes-
sica Lange, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Kathleen Turner, Susan
Sarandon, and others search in vain for decent roles and have had to
set up their own production companies to ensure that they can still

work? Movies in which these same aging men kill about fifty-eight
people are praised as terrific thrillers while Thelma and Louise was
denounced as virulent feminism laden with dire social consequences.

The media's unresolved schizophrenia about woman's proper

place has taken perhaps its greatest toll on motherhood. It is as moth-
ers today that these contradictions really pull the rug out firom under
us. After a steady decHne in the birthrate that began in 1965,
women —and these were primarily baby boom women —began
reproducing in greater numbers in the 1980s, leading to a "baby
boomlet." I was no exception: m December 1988 I too became a

mother. Like many women of my generation, I had postponed hav-

ing a child until I was in my thirties and felt I had a handle on my
work and some sense of how a baby would fit into my husband's and
my hfe. Of course, I knew nothing. Despite some false sense of being
"setded" and "ready," I wasn't ready at all. How can you ever be
ready for endless crying, constant sleep deprivation, projectile vom-
iting, or 2:00 A.M. trips to the emergency room? I was in for a lot of

shocks, and one of the biggest was this: motherhood challenges every
feminist principle you've ever had and, possibly as a result, reinforces
 / '
m Xo r .: Ft m inisi , Bui . . .
279

need and
them and makes them stronger. At the same tmie. vour
abilit\' to make compronnses reach
new highs. Rarely do you oscil-
late so wildly between femimst ideology-
and the codes of teminimr\-.
While all I heard in the news media was that women,
especially

young women, were gomg around pretacmg even-thing thev

said

1 was s2Lymg, "^ait a mmute.

.'" I am
w^th "I'm not a femimst. but . . .

a femimst. but Few thmgs m hfe are harder than bemg a femimst
. .
."'

and a mother. Even the most egahtanan husband has trouble

bemg an
egahtarian parent. As a mother, especiallv of babies and toddlers, you
often find the world stacked agamst you. \Mth too
many responsibil-
ities and expectations falhng solely on
your shoulders. Yet even as I

felt, for the lirst time, some of the anger, frustration, and resenmient

my mother had felt thirt\- years earher. one thing reaQv was difrerent.

It was my consciousness.

Thanks women's movement, my consciousness as a woman

to the

and as a mother was ver\- different from my mother's. I was aware ot

our countr\-"s pathological schizophrema about mothers and chil-

dren: revere them m miager>-. re\-ile them m pubhc pohcy But this

wasn't mv own lonely obser\-ation: urdike my mother. I could read,

hear, and see other women, m a variety- of places, articulatmg these

had the language, as weU as the sense of obh-
same criticisms. I also

ganon. to dissect the media's role m sustaimng this h\-pocrisy

new consciousness, hke the old. is riddled \\4th

Although this

chasms, fault hues, and tensions about who 1 am as a

woman and who
I can and should be. it provides me
with the armor and a few lances

against a mass media that, after all these vears. still doesn't get it.

As sat m front of the TV m my

I
husband's sweatpants (the only

thing m the house that feedmg my baby fit), I had to confront, m a

more personal and immediate way than before, the soft-tocus,

honey-hued s>Tnbohsm surroundmg moms and babies. I sat there
by
and watched Joan Lunden chirp on cheerftillv at "AS. msisnng
her stellar example we can have it all. ^This was
that before the mla-

when we kept bemg remmded how perfect she and

mous divorce,

her entire family were.) 1 saw those Folgers decaf ads in which Dad.
280 Where the Girls Are

supposedly having stayed up all night with the baby sleeping on his

chest, puts the baby down and nuzzles happily with his smiHng,
rested wife while they wake up together and face another fourteen-

hour day without caffeine. In contrast to this lovely image, I was

finding that being forced to get up hours before the Today show even
started required the strongest shot of caffeine possible and never, to
my recollection, produced a smile. There was no tangerine-hued
sunrise making my kitchen look Hke a dream; hell, it was still pitch

black. Anyone attempting to nuzzle would have been shot on sight.

And sincenone of the fathers I knew had breasts (ah, if only they
did!), they were relatively worthless during those 1:00 A.M., 3:00
A.M., and 5:00 A.M. nursings the Folgers ad pretended Dad had taken
over from Mom. All I felt was that television and advertising had
absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with me or my life, except to
needle me about how ecstatic I'd be about motherhood if I'd just get

over not sleeping. Joan Lunden and Jane Pauley got up at 4:00 A.M.
What was the matter with me? Why didn't I have that inner serenity,
that sense of peace and fulfillment, that all those Johnson & Johnson
ads suggest are part of my maternal DNA?
Nowhere is the gap between image and reality wider than the one
separating the smiling, serene, financially comfortable, and perfectly
coiffed media mom from her frazzled, exhausted, sputum-covered,
real-life counterpart. Everywhere I turned, as I read child-care books,
watched TV, or went shopping for baby paraphernalia, I found
myself navigating the powerful crosscurrents of middle-class mother-
hood. Like all the other messages surrounding us —about sex, about
assertiveness, about women in poHtics, and about independence — the

messages about motherhood and babies crash into each other Hke
tidal waves. Shooting these ideological rapids on a daily basis, while
also taking care of a baby, can produce a certain astringency in the

new mom's worldview. And I found myself getting more astringent as

I took inventory of the completely unreaHstic images of motherhood

we imbibed. Here was my love-hate relationship with the mass media
writ large.
 I'm Not a Feminist, But . . .
281

In the early months of my daughter's life, I watched more TV

even my old standbys
than usual, but with a more jaundiced eye. Yet
let me down. On L.A. Law, Ann
Kelsey and Stuart Markowitz, who
an infant girl.
had been trying unsuccessfully to have a baby, adopted
make their lives was that
The only difference this baby seemed to in

they struggled to find the right mobiles and

nanny In one episode,
Ann had to bring the baby to work, and the baby lay m her bassinet
the scene was to
while Ann took a deposition. Although the pomt of
com-
show how the baby's crying ruined the deposition, I was stiU
pletely incredulous. Where were Ann's eye bags?
How could she have
mind do anything, let alone concentrate on legal
the presence of to

work, if she had an infant who'd disrupted her sleep several times the

night before? were there no unsightly milk splotches on the

Why
padded shoulders of her $700 outfit? When we saw Ann and
Stuart

with the baby, we didn't see them struggHng to complete a

at home
brief phone conversation or yeUmg at each other about whose turn it

screaming.
was to walk the baby around the house until it stopped
No, they were ecstatically rocking a quietly cooing baby who appar-

ently never cried, defecated, or threw up, and

who didn't have the
schedules, let alone their
poor taste to wreak havoc with her parents'

previously contented relationship.

Motherhood had virtuaUy no impact on this woman's Hfe or

work, while those of us sitting at home in our sputum-covered

bathrobes and ratty slippers were wondering how we

were going to
like most media
survive the next day at work on no sleep. This baby,
was a trouble-free, ecstasy-producing, attractive
htde acquisi-
babies,

tion; if you "get" one, it will make you feel real good, look great m
a rocking chair, and make you fall m love with your spouse aU over

Now,
again. while babies are, at times, an indescribable joy, caring for
them makes you feel like you've been tortured m an especially sadis-
tic sleep-deprivation experiment. The feel-good images are a com-
plete He, and you know it. But they burrow into you, forcing you to

castigate yourself for not being serene enough,

organized enough, or

spontaneous enough as a mother.

282 Where the Girls Are

At the same time that this Uttle fantasy world was beaming out
from dramatic television, the concept of the "mommy track" was

getting bandied about in the news media, promoted by huge cover

stories in the newsmagazines and major stories on TV. According to

this proposal, mothers should be on a separate —and unequal— career

track that gives them more flexible hours in exchange for no promo-
tions, no challenging assignments, less autonomy, and no raises.

Talk about getting the bends! On the one hand, we had the TV
supermoms, size-six women with perfectly apphed makeup who
could do anything and apparently didn't need any sleep. On the

other hand, we got a recognition that motherhood might be just a

tad demanding, but acknowledged only in the age-old blame-the-

victim solution of the mommy track. Between these two extremes

were millions of us, the real mothers of America, with no place to

stand. We were either supposed to act as if children don't hamper our

abihty to be overachieving workahoHcs and we can do everything we
did before plus raise a baby or two or acquiesce to second-class citi-

zenship, acknowledging that being a mother is so debilitating that

we're only capable of having dead-end, place-holding jobs while

men, including fathers, and women without kids step on our backs
to get the next promotion. Either way, the real-Hfe mother is humil-
iated, especially if she has a job, as opposed to a "career," in which
the whole notion of advancement or a "track" is patently absurd.

Meanwhile, there is no recognition that fatherhood might be

exhausting too, and that new fathers are also operating under a com-
pletely different set of circumstances. In the supermom fantasies of
TV and the mommy track proposals of corporate America, what
remains enshrined is our country's craven, hypercompetitive yuppie
work ethic. Babies and parents are supposed to work around these

increasingly preposterous norms of what constitutes adequate job

performance.
These contradictions surrounding motherhood and children dif-
fer from what our mothers confronted, but they have their roots
firmly and deeply in the 1950s. For even now, no matter what you
 I'm Not a Feminist, But . . .
283

do, you can't ever be good enough as a mother. If you don't work,

you're a bad mom, and you do work, you're a bad mom. Then
if

there's all the advice that comes at us from

Working Mother, Parents,

Newsweek, the nightly news, 20/20, and Oprah. Let your baby cry

herself to sleep; never let your baby cry. Don't be too rigid,
but don't

be too permissive. Don't ever spank your child; an occasional swat

on
good for a kid. Encourage your child to learn, but don't
the butt is

push her to learn. Be her friend; never be her friend. Rein her in; cut
her some slack. The tightrope walks are endless. Once again we find
workers,
ourselves under surveillance, not only as sex objects, or as
but as mothers. And on all sides of us are voices with megaphones,

yeUmg completely opposite things to us as we figure out whether we

have time to do a wash or will simply have to turn the kid's under-

wear inside out tomorrow.

And here, again, we feel the pull between sisterhood and com-
petitive individuaHsm. At 4:00 A.M., when it seemed hke everyone m
the world except my
daughter and I was asleep, I felt myself part of

that transhistoncal and transcultural group called mothers, the ones

who get up, no matter what, hstenmg to the soft snormgs of others,
while tending to the needs of a child. Now this may sound
overly

romantic and sentimental, but I didn't expect to feel such a powerful

bond with other women across space and time. And I still feel it,

whenever I see a mother strugghng to get the grocery shopping done

with a couple of kids squirming and crying the cart, or watch her m
trying to free herself from the frantic grip of a waiHng toddler
because Mom is late for work and, like it or not, has to leave the day-

care center. At any playground, mothers who are complete strangers

can enter effordessly into conversation about kids and child

rearing.

parks, fast-food
We smile knowingly at each other in shopping malls,
joints, and toy stores. We connect.

Yet we each other too. Motherhood, Hke

are divided against
over
everything else women do, has been turned into a competition
who's more patient, enterprising, inventive, decisive, hardworking,
firm, and loving. Working moms are supposed to overcompensate for
284 Where the Girls Are

their time away from home and the kids by baking cakes in the shape

of a triceratops and building marionettes for the weekend puppet

show. Out of the media archetype of the supermom came the most
revolting appHcation of bureaucratic, human potential double-speak
ever to accost mothers: quality time. Stay-at-home moms were
hardly exempt from this. The competition across the street with her
briefcase and high heels had to institute "quaUty time" segments in
her household, and if you didn't too, your child would lag behind
and grow up to hate you. This, at least, was how the news media
framed motherhood, with its endless stories about "moms vs.

moms."^ At the same time, we're all supposed to conspire together in

yet another grand masquerade that hides those moments when, out
of frustration, exhaustion, and desperation, we say truly hateful and
juvenile things to our children ("If you don't go to sleep, you'll never

get to watch Barney again"), refuse to give them what they want or
need, and fantasize, most of all, about sending them to Saturn.

This is why Roseanne Barr, now Arnold, became the top female
sitcom star in America in the early 1990s. Despite the incredibly hos-

tile treatment she has gotten in the press —because she's four things

TV women are not supposed to be, working-class, loudmouthed,

overweight, and a feminist —Roseanne became a success because her

mission was simple and welcome: to take the schmaltz and hypocrisy
out of media images of motherhood. Her famous hne from her
stand-up routine
— five, hey, I've done my
"If the kids are alive at

job" — spoke women who love their children more

to miUions of
than anything in the world but who also find motherhood wearing,
boring, and, at times, infuriating. She spoke to women who had seen
through June Cleaver and Donna Reed years ago, and were strug-
ghng to see through the supermom image now. Roseanne also took
aim at the class biases around media images of motherhood: that
good mothers looked like those svelte, smiling, beauty queen moms
in Gerber ads or the moms in white mushn on the beach pitching

Calvin Klein perfume. Most moms are not corporate attorneys.

 I'm Not a Feminist, But . . .
285

Roseanne insisted, nor do they fit into a size six, carry a briefcase, or

smile most of the time. They are waitresses, or work in factories, or

m tiny office cubicles, or m other dead-end jobs, and they don't have
$700 suits or nannies. But the other much more upscale but defiant

media mom, Murphy Brown, also gave all the traditional stereotypes
after the
about motherhood the raspberries and continued, even
birth of her child, to be as insensitive, narcissistic, and bossy as before.

In many ways, the media environment that surrounds us is very

similar to the one that surrounded our mothers. It is crammed with

impossible expectations and oozes with guilt that sticks to every nook
and cranny of our psyches. It is dominated by images of upper-
middle-class moms, both real and fictional, who "have it all" with Ht-
de sacrifice, counterposed by upper-middle-class women who have

fled the fast track for the comforts of domesticity. These either/or

images are our new impossible choices for the 1990s. And we also

have, as a holdover from The Rifleman, Bachelor Father, and My Three

Sons, the conceit that the best moms are really dads. This reversal got

new Hfe breathed into it by Kramer vs. Kramer, in which the selfish
bitch wife up and left the cutest, most lovable boy in America to

"find herself" while her previously neglectful husband turned into

the Albert Schweitzer of dads. The movie never let us see
how
devoted she had been as a mom—and virtually a single mom, at

that — for all those years Dad Hved at the office, nor did we see what
had provoked her to take the dramatic action she did. In the custody

hearing, women viewers were supposed to root for Dustin Hoffman

and repudiate Meryl Streep.'' The "best moms are dads" motif spread

through the prime-time schedule hke measles, giving us My Two

Dads and Full House, in which Mom is conveniently six feet under

and a couple of cool dads move in together to raise the kids.^

But Roseanne and Murphy Brown dramatize the most important

difference separating us from our mothers: our stance toward the var-
ious mass media. At the same time that media executives tamed the
high-spirited Madeline Hayes in Moonlighting, or gave us The Equal-
286 Where the Girls Are

izer, a former CIA agent who rescued terminally helpless and peren-
nially stalked female victims in distress, they also brought us China

Beach, Kate & Allie, Designing Women, Cagney & Lacey, Sisters, Sirens,

and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. They didn't do this out of altruism;
they did it because we're still a big market and, as they are learning,
an increasingly jaundiced, pissed-off market that wants to see women
on their own, women being brave, women having adventures, and
women with mouths on them. Yet this is not enough. Some of us
would Uke to see a lot more women with Hues on their faces and a

little mileage on them, too.

Women are hardly immune to the svelte images, guilt trips, and
all the other normative messages that come at us courtesy of Amer-
ica's media moguls. But we are not putty in their hands either. Our
interactions with sitcoms, the news, women's magazines, popular

music, and movies are dynamic, a contested push and pull, in which
they have most of the power but not we can't assume
all of it. While
that every woman who saw Fatal Attraction or Pretty Woman moaned
"oh, pleeze" and cursed a lot throughout, neither can we assume that
they just got down on their knees at the end and offered to Hck their
boyfriends' or husbands' boots. And don't think, for a minute, that
only upper-middle-class women with Ph.D.'s who study semiotics
and discourse analysis can debunk a misogynistic piece of crap like 9/6

Weeks. Some women, of course, are still slaves to the media, buying
into liposuction. Ultra Slim-Fast, and the notion that aU career

women are vipers. But many other women, of all ages, classes, and
ethnic backgrounds, have become, as a result of the last twenty years,

skeptical viewers who know a He when they see one.

This is why media women celebrities as — well as pubhc fig-

ures —who have deliberately gone against the grain, who have
attacked persistent stereotypes about women, have gained notoriety.

And the most famous women of our era have dramatized, in their
work, their hves, or both, that whatever we might think of as

"female identity" is constantly fluid, unstable, contingent. They

embody the fact that there is no such thing as a fe male identity for^
 .

I'm Not a Feminist, But . . . 287

any woman, only many identities and personas, which often resist

qu ick and easy definitio ns

Let's take the woman of them all, Madonna.^

most famous media
Madonna hasn't onlybecome one of the richest women in show
business, she's also spawned more academic analysis of her work than

any celebrity in recent years. Is Madonna a feminist or not a feminist?

Is the way she plays with sexist imagery good for women or bad for

them? Why were there so many Madonna wanna-bes? And so forth.

What has intrigued everyone, academic and nonacademic alike, is

whether, and for how long, she'U be able to get away with having it

both ways. One of the first signs of what she was up to was her Boy-
Toy belt buckle. As she slithered through her early videos and shim-
mied on stage. Madonna was posing both as a sex object and as

someone ridiculing the passivity that usually goes with being a sex

object. Drawing Mae West

firom several key predecessors, especially

and Bette Midler, Madonna aggressively took control of her own

sexuaUty and affirmed that it was healthy and liberating for a woman
to express her sexual desires, whether they were threatening to men
or not. "Boy-Toy" was a joke: this girl wasn't going to do one damn
thing to placate anyone's castration anxieties; on the contrary, she was

going to elevate them every chance she got. This made critics, espe-

cially male critics, insane.

In several of her videos, she pretended to be under masculine

control, only to reveal, at the end, that it was all a performance and
that shehad nothing but contempt for and was completely immune
from male sexual power. This was most successfully expressed in her
"Open Your Heart" video, designed to display her newly trimmed
body after she'd lost fifteen pounds through what the tabloids touted

as her popcorn diet. It opens with Madonna as a dancer in a peep

show who wears a black bustier and dances suggestively with a chair
while pig-faced, slavering men ogle her from their individual cubi-

cles. When the performance is over, she is seen in the kind of baggy
pants and jacket Charlie Chaplin used to favor, skipping away from
the grip of patriarchy happily, innocently, and androgynously with a
 —
288 Where the Girls Are

young boy. What made feminist critics nuts about Madonna perfor-
mances like thisone was that she got to critique the way women's

bodies are reduced to being erotic spectacles for men while still get-

ting the pleasures and rewards of being such a spectacle herself.

But by assuming so many identities — in her video "Express

Yourself," a rip-off of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, she appears in drag as a

corporate CEO and later as a Hteral sex kitten crawHng to a saucer of

milk —Madonna offered women viewers a host of masquerades to try

on. One of her favorite ploys was to portray a virgin one minute and
a whore the next, even suggesting that some virgins were whoreHke
and some whores virginal. Every performance acknowledged that

womanhood was a series of costumes and poses, and shoved in every-

one's face how mutually exclusive these roles for women were. In

what supposedly constitutes her "real life," she has reinvented herself

every year or two with different hairstyles and different acts. While
some of her incarnations have been more appeaUng than others (her

recent bare-breasted and highly self-satisfied walk down a fashion

runway, for example, crosses over the Hne she has been so careful to
straddle), her fascination comes from the changes themselves, and her

insistence that women consist of deeply conflicting identities and

personas. It is this kind of woman, unashamed, proud even, of her
sexual desires, a woman who steps out of line and won't be pinned
down, and who insists that women act out the mutually exclusive
roles they're supposed to inhabit, who can't help but inspire admira-
tion, desire, dread, and outrage.
The only other woman in recent years to inspire such extremes

of admiration and hatred is Hillary Rodham CHnton. In 1992

which you may recall ruefully was yet another "Year of the
—
Woman" she got more ink than even Madonna did, and that was
the year of Madonna's infamous Sex book. In 1993, Hillary was on
the cover of nearly every magazine in America, including the

"humor" magazine Spy, which featured her as a black-lingerie-clad

dominatrix. The reference to Madonna was obvious. Hillary became,

in the hands of the news media, the Hghtning rod for people's
 I'm \ot a Feminist, But . . . 289

deepest anxieties and most fervent hopes about the role that women
should plav m shaping the future ot the country. Women watched,

with a powerful sense of identification and recogmtion, whatever

their poHtics, as Hillan,- put her feminism, her competence, and,
most important, her mouth m the closet so her husband could
become president of the most conservative mdustriaUzed nation on
the globe. Once she —
became first lady er, excuse me, "copresi-
dent" —the male pundits of America clung to their nuts for dear Hte
as they lobbed one verbal projectile afiier the next at her. Even before
her husband's inauguration, the neocons on Tlie McLaughlin Group

acted as if she were Rasputin m drag, who would do things Hke hyp-
notize Bill into appointing ''a bunch of wacko lefi:ists to the Supreme
Court" instead oi "'decent people." But she was also "'one tough
mother." and there were constant references to her learning how to

plav '"hardball." These boys fialmmated that she had not been elected,
so how dare she stick her nose into pubUc pohcy issues. Ever\' time

she went to Capitol Hill it was a big story because she was doing

what no previous first lady had done: m the fijll Hght of day, she

stepped over the threshold of power, walked into the male sanctum
sanctorum: she breached sacred boundaries; she stepped out of Hne;
she went beyond the pale. To arm herself against all that's come her
wav, and maybe even to keep them all off guard, she's done what any
woman would do when she wants perceptions about her to change:
she's some new hairdos.
gotten
The woman we owe the most to. though, is Anita Hill, who
claimed her voice and her past with a dignity- many oi us found
remarkable and thrilling. For testifying against the dumbest and pos-
sibly most reactionary and mean-spirited man ever to sit on the

Supreme Court, she was labeled a Har, a hysteric, a scorned woman,

a hallucmator. For many of us, watching the RepubUcan men go after

her hke slavering pit bulls, while the Democratic men covered their
httle weenies and ducked for cover, exposed the hes embedded m
Charlie's Angels and elsewhere, that there was no such thing as patri-

archv. but if there was. it was beneficent and would protect women.
290 Where the Girls Are

Although the Thomas-Hill hearings were very real, they res-

onated powerfully with all the accrued media images of women as
victims, women needing to keep their mouths shut, women needing

to stay in their place, women needing to be deferential,

compHant,

ever smiling. The sight of this poised, accompHshed, well-spoken

woman sitting alone, across from the firing squad of complacent, self-

satisfied white men, who after all this time still didn't get it, hit a

nerve. While Thomas whined about a high-tech lynching, women

saw a we watched our
high-tech gang rape. Here daily, private, often

internal conflicts acted out before our eyes, in pubHc. The drama we
witnessed was the intersection between decades of media stereotypes
about women and one woman's shameful treatment by men because
of those stereotypes. We knew how she felt —on some level we had
been there and were still there —trapped by prejudices, expectations,

and norms not of our making. So we knew why she came forward,
why she fought, and why she wanted it all to go away For the same
media that had told her, as a woman, to shut up and smile had also
told her, as an American, to speak out against injustice and discrimi-
nation. Anita Hill dramatized exactly the conflicts each of us has

struggled with since we were Htde girls.

In the aftermath of the Thomas-Hill hearings, the notion of men

"not getting it," and especially of the mainstream media not getting
it, has coexisted with Vanity Fair covers of Sharon Stone half dressed,
busty bimbos advertising beer, the ongoing trashing of sisterhood in
movies like Single Wltite Female and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,
and enough douche commercials to choke Moby Dick. It may be the
effects of the lobotomy, but Pat Robertson feels he can still
declare

that feminism "encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their

children [and] practice witchcraft.'"^ It is still a man's world and a

man's media, but there are also cracks and veins for us to mine, as

there were thirty years ago. And here we are, same as it ever was, on
an ideological yo-yo not unlike the one that raised and lowered our
mothers and their hopes, now raising, now lowering, our own.
 I'm Not a Feminist, But . . . 291

So what's a girl to do? First, we should insist that there is nothing

inherently superior about Elvis or James Dean in relation to the

Shirelles or NataHe Wood. The ridicuHng and erasing of our cultural

history is nothing less than a ridicuHng of our past selves and of who
we are today, and while flying nuns and watusi-dancing beach bun-
nies were pretty revolting, they were also, simultaneously, metaphors

for our incipient jailbreak and for efforts to keep us behind bars. Sec-

ond, have seen how, over time, the most revolutionary precepts of
we
the women's movement, "Sisterhood Is Powerful" and "The Personal
Is Pohtical," have been redramatized and repackaged to convey the
opposite: that when you get a bunch of women together all they do

is fight, and that the personal is still, m the end, personal. g^LX^-V^
The American cult of individualism, which urged us to make_^ j"
something of ourselves, and which also helped us become feminists, ^^^;<'^
was retooled in TV shows, women's magazines, and cosmetics ads in --fH*^

the 1970s and '80s to emphasize o ur isolation from^nd competition PfXA^jr

wi th other women. The poHtical has been collapsed into the personal - mA
so" that you, the lone individual, are all that matters. When a show
Hke Charlie's Angels still stands out as the Utopian moment of sister-

hood m the mass media, it's obvious that images of female friendship,
cooperation, mutuaHty, and love —you know, like in real life —have
been as rare as a day without a male sporting event on TV. No won-
der female collective action is so difficult to imagine, while boys

operating as a team, patting each other's butts and supporting each

other's efforts, is a taken-for-granted image in the media. And the
media quarantining of feminists as repulsive, "single-issue" mono-
maniacs simply reinforces the notion that we couldn't possibly have

anything in common with environmentahsts, peace activists, or other

groups trying to make the world a better place.

We also have come to reaHze that, as we have aged, we have not

found ourselves hailed the same way by the mass media. We are no
longer a generation with clout and with promise, a generation that
matters. Some of the collapse m attention is the result of the seg-
292 Where the Girls Are

mentation of the mass media and the targeting of audiences by age,

gender, race, class, income, and locale. One way we do know that we
still matter is that advertisers have ripped off all our music, from
"Shout" to "Natural Woman" to "My Girl" to "Rescue Me," to sell

everything from kitty Utter to tampons. But the sense of generational

cohesion that the media cultivated in us in the 1960s has dissipated.
Instead, what is reinforced is the privatization of American Hfe, the

severing of community and atrophying of the pubhc sphere as we

shop, attend poHtical rallies, Usten to concerts, and hear people talk
about current events and cultural trends from the insulated privacy of
our sofas. Once this sense of generational collectivity as a market
evaporates, so does the sense of political collectivity.
Some right-wing critics condemn the so-called liberal media for

shoving godlessness, sexual license, and liberal politics down our

throats. Some left-wing critics condemn the media for imposing a

narrow, selectively constructed image of the world that benefits eHtes

and keeps the rest of us in our place, stupefied, misled, and deluded.
While I beheve there is more truth to the latter position than to the

former, our cultural history reveals a mass media that did present new
women, that inflated our aspirations Hke a balloon,
possibilities to

then choked them off with a big knot before they got too big, and,
at times, exploded them.
The same media that operated the accelerator stepped on the

brakes. Because the news media cover what is new, disruptive, and
threatening, they also provide puWicity for alienated rebels who
regard the status quo as something to be destroyed. The coverage
such rebels get, however, is a mixed blessing, for it usually seeks to

discredit their more extreme positions (even if they're right) while

folding into the mainstream what can be carved out and held up as
moderate. The entertainment media also look for new, rebellious
styles, fads, and language as a way to invigorate old formulas and

enliven a pop culture with a rapidly shortening shelf life: hence, the

use of rap music, for example, to sell breakfast cereal v/hose major

ingredients are corn syrup and purple dye. Here, too, opposition gets
 I'm Not a Feminist, But . . .
293

domesticated, processed into fads and fashions, its politics sucked

out, its stylistic flourishes pumped up, so that rap isn't about mner-
city rage, its about square-top afros, new dance steps, and harem

pants for men.

We have seen the media do this with feminism, first anticipating

It, then representing and containing it. Both the news and entertain-

ment media have had enormous power to set the agenda about how
people consider, react and accept women's changing roles and
to,

aspirations. Frequently, and without obvious collusion, the various

media have managed to setde on what becomes the prevailing com-
mon sense about women's place in the world. Having that common
sense repeated and reenacted in sitcoms, movies, and newscasts has a
powerful effect on women's self-perceptions and on men's perceptions
of them. To point out that these dominant images are perforated with
rifts and contradictions that have sometimes emboldened women
does not undercut their basic power.
^^ The media have helped insti-

gate change for women while using a host of metaphors —women

with magical powers, the catfight, the choked-off female voice — to

contain and blunt that change.

So, for us, the question about whether the mass media lead social

change or lag behind it sets up a false dichotomy, for we have seen

and them do both at the same time. Yet sometimes the mass
felt

media lag much more than they lead, and today we Hve in an espe-
cially conservative media environment, in which ownership of
media
outlets is increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer megacor-
porations and the voices of those not smack dab in the moderate
political center are vilified or silenced. Images of scores of women in
satin teddies and garter belts hopping in and out of bed with
whomever is handy suggest, to some, an overly "liberal" media when
such images are, in fact, deeply reactionary. And one of the most per-
sistently conservative elements we women face is the story, the nar-

rative, which continues to be structured around boys taking action,

girls waiting for the boys, and girls rescued by the boys. In these sto-
ries, someone, usually the girl, is a victim, and someone else, usually
294 Where the Girls Are

the boy, is an actor in the world, while we feel ourselves to be both

active agents and ongoing victims of stories we never wrote and
images we never drew.
If you look for where the girls are today, you will find fragments

of many of them in each of us. We remain shattered into so many

pieces, some of them imprinted by femininity, others by feminism.
But they don't yet fit together into a coherent whole. One piece
might be from Roseanne, another from Thelma and Louise, another
from those noxious Oil of Olay ads. And we still fmd ourselves rid-
dled through with "on the one hand, on the other hand" responses
to Hillary Clinton, reports on date rape. Glamour, Cher's face-lifts,
and Madonna. We feel our insides to be in a constant state of roiling
suspension, our identities as women always contingent.
The only advice I have for women today is to purchase two
things: extra slippers, for throwing at the TV set, and extra stationery,

for writing letters to soda companies telling them we'll never buy
their swill again and will organize boycotts if they keep pitting Cindy
Crawford against older women and keep pitting us against one
another. We can also reclaim the word feminist from the trash heap it's

been relegated to by the media and remind them and ourselves that a

woman who says, "I'm not a feminist, but . . .

," is, in fact, a feminist.

I agree with Susan Faludi, who women are feminists. It's

said, "All
just a matter of time and encouragement."^^ And despite their best

efforts to keep feminism a dirty word and women under control, the

media will continue, often inadvertently, to play a critical role in pro-

viding that encouragement. They are still our worst enemy and our
best ally in our ongoing struggle for equality, respect, power, and love.
 nope
/:"

Mommy, hurry, come quickly nowl'' implores my

Mommy,
daughter at 8:16 A.M. on Saturday This is the one time of the

week she's allowed to watch commercial television, and the

price is heavy. I drag my hungover and inadequately cafFeinated butt
over to the TV set. Her eyes shine like moonstones as I see what's
on the screen. "Can I get that. Mommy can I, puleeze? Please,
Mommy" I see before me some hideous plastic doll, or pony or troll,
being pitched by a combination of elated Htde girls, flashmg hghts,
and rap music. Everything seems to be colored hot pink or lilac.
Sometimes it's one of these dolls you can put fake jewels all over,

other times it's a troll doll in a wedding dress, or it's something really

bad, like Kitty Surprise or Cheerleader Skipper. It is always some-

thing specifically targeted to Htde girls. She is four years old, and she

understands, completely the semiotics of gender differentiation. She

never calls me when they're selling Killer Commando Unit, G.I. Joe,

and all the other Pentagon-inspired stuff obviously for boys. She
knows better. She knows she's a girl, and she knows what's for her.
Twenty years of feminist poHtics and here I am, with a daughter
who wants nothing more in the whole wide world than to buy
Rollerblade Barbie.
Having grown up with the mass media myself, and considering
what that has done for me and to me, I bring all that to bear as I raise
my own Htde girl, who wiH, in her own way, and with her own gen-
eration, have her hopes and fears shaped by the mass media too. Ever
296 Where the Girls Are

since she was old enough to understand books, kids' movies, and
Sesame Street, I have looked, in vain, for strong and appealing female
characters for her to identify with. With a few exceptions, Hke The
Paperhag Princess, shrewd, daring girls who outsmart monsters and
value their freedom and self-esteem more than marrying some prince
are hard to find. There's Maria, who knows how to fix toasters and
stereos, on Sesame Street. But little kids are, at first, most drawn to the

Muppets, and until recently, not one of the main stars —Big Bird,

Kermit, the Count, Elmo, Snuffy, or Oscar —was female. Children's

books are not much better. Even if they feature animals as the main
protagonists, stories for kids too readily assume, automatically, that

the main actor is male. Television cartoons, from Winnie the Pooh
(no females except Kanga, and she's always doing laundry or cook-
ing), to Garfield to Doug, not to mention the more obnoxious
superhero action ones, still treat females either as nonexistent or as

ancillary afterthoughts. We have the csirtoon James Bond, Jr., but no

Emma Peel, Jr. And it goes without saying that nearly all the Httle girls

she sees on TV and elsewhere are Avhite.

And then there are the movies. When mothers cling to Tlu Little
Mermaid as one of the few positive representations of girls, we see
how far we have not come. Ariel, the little mermaid in question, is
indeed brave, curious, feisty, and defiant. She stands up to her father,
saves Prince Eric from drowning, and stares down great white sharks
as she hunts for sunken treasure. But her waist is the diameter of a
chive, and her salvation comes through her marriage — at the age of
sixteen, no less — to Eric. And the sadistic, consummately evil demon
in the movie is, you guessed it, an older, overweight woman with too
much purple eyeshadow and eyeUner, a female octopus who craves
too much power and whose nether regions evoke the dreaded vagina
dentate.
Belle, in Beauty and the Beast, dreams of escaping from the narrow
confines of her small town, of having great adventures, and has noth-
ing but contempt for the local cleft-chinned lout and macho beef-
cake Gaston. Her dreams of a more interesting, exciting Hfe,
 —
Ep i I ague 297

however, are through marriage alone. The most impor-

also fulfiUed

tant quahty of these characters remains their

beaut\^ followed closely

by their selflessness and the abiHty to smg. There are

gestures to

feminism—Ariel's physical courage, Belle's love of books, and, m

Aladdin, Jasmine's defiance of an arbitrary law that
dictates when and
whom she must marry These are welcome flourishes, and many of

us milk them for all they're worth— "See how strong she is,

l^oney?"—but they are still only flourishes, overwhelmed by the age-

old narrative that selfless, beautiful girls are rewarded by the love of a

prince they barely know. Nonammated movies for kids are no better.

Hollyw^ood simply takes it for granted that Htde heroes, Hke big ones,

are always boys. So Htde girls get Home Alone and who knows how
many sequels. Cop and Vie Karate Kid, Rookie of the Year, Free
a Half,

Willy, and Dennis the Menace, all with Htde boy leads, Htde boy adven-
tures, and Httle boy heroism, while gutsy smart, enterprising, and
remain, after aU this time, absent, invisible, denied.
sassy Htde girls

Even my daughter, at the age of four, volunteered one day, "Mommy,

there should be more movies with girls."
The one movie that I was happy to have my daughter embrace

was made over fifty years ago, and judging from anecdotal evidence,
it's been enjoying an enormous resurgence among the preschool set.

No narrative has gripped my daughter's imagination more than The

Wizard ofOz. And why not? FmaUy, here's girl who has an adven- 2.

ture and doesn't get married at the end. She runs away from home,

fHes to Oz in a cyclone, kills one wicked witch and then another

although never on purpose — and helps Scarecrow get a brain, Tin
Man get a heart, and Lion get some courage, aU of which Dorothy
already has m spades. Throughout the movie, Dorothy is caring,
thoughtful, nurturing, and empathetic, but she's also adventuresome,
determined, and courageous. She tells off Miss Gulch, slaps the Hon
while her male friends cower in the bushes, refuses to give the
witch

her sHppers, and chastises the Wizard himself when she feels
he is

bullying her friends. Of course, when she's older, my daughter wiH

learn the truth about Dorothy: that Judy Garland had to

have her
298 Where the Girls Are

breasts strapped down for the part and was fed bucketfuls of
amphetamines so she'd remain as sHm as the studio wanted. This, too,
I think, will speak to my daughter.
Shortly after seeing a few of the Disney fairy tales, both old and
new, my daughter announced, at age three and a half, that she would
no longer wear the unisex sweat suits and overalls I'd been dressing
her in. It was dresses or nothing. Her favorite pretend games became
"wedding" and "family," with her as either the bride or the mom.
She loved playing Wizard of Oz — she was always Dorothy, of
course —but she also loved playing Snow White, dropping Hke a sack

of onions to the kitchen floor after she'd bitten into the pretend
apple. The blocks, the Tinkertoys, and the trucks I had gotten her lay

neglected, while the Barbie population began to multiply Hke fruit

flies.

One of the things that feminist moms, and dads, for that matter,
confront is the force of genetics. In the 1970s, I was convinced that
most of the differences between men and women were the results of
sociaHzation. In the nature-nurture debate, I gave nature very Httle
due. But now, as a parent, I have seen my daughter, long before she
ever watched television, prefer dolls to trucks, use blocks to build
enclosures instead of towers, and focus on interpersonal relationships
in her play rather than on hurling projectiles into things. But at the
same time, I have seen children's television (which, if anything, is

even more retrograde than it was in the 1970s) reinforce and exag-
gerate these gender differences with a vengeance as if there were no
overlap of traits at all between boys and girls.

Back in the 1970s, when Action for Children's Television, under

the leadership of Peggy Charren, and feminist activists were pressur-
ing advertisers, the FCC, and the networks to reduce TV violence,
eHminate sexism, and stop pushing pink and purple sugar balls as a

nutritious breakfast, there seemed to be a few moments when it actu-

ally looked Hke children's television might improve. After aU, "Free
to Be You and Me" was one of the biggest hit records for kids, and
Sesame Street was drawing viewers away from commercial television.
 Epilogue 299

But if you turn on Saturday morning TV now, it's as if none of

that ever happened. In fact, kids' TV is worse than ever, and certainly
more crass, more and more nutritionally criminal than much
sexist,

of the programming pitched to adults. In addition to all the war toys

that train Htde boys to be cannon fodder and/or gun collectors, and

the makeup kits and dolls that tram Htde girls to be sex objects and/or
moms, the overall message is about regarding yourself and everyone
else you know as a commodity to be bought and sold. Ads geared to

each gender encourage kids to dehumanize themselves and one

another, to regard people as objects to be acquired or discarded. "Get
the right boyfriend! Get the right friends!" commands an ad for a
game for girls. Spring Valley High School (or maybe it was called

Shop 'Til You Drop). To be a desirable commodity, a Htde girl must

herself consume the right goods so she can make herself pretty and
ornament herself properly Being able to sing and smile admiringly at
boys is highly desirable. Being smart, brave, or assertive isn't. On Sat-
urday morning, boys are "cool"; girls are their mirrors, flat, shiny

surfaces whose function is to reflect all this coolness back to them and
on them. Girls watch boys be "awesome" and do "awesome" things.

Girls aren't awesome; they're only spectators.

Already I see my Htde girl, at the age of four, managing the mixed
messages around her. I see her process them, try to control them, and
allow them into her sense of her place in the world. She wants to be

at the center of the action, and she dictates the precise direction of
her pretend games with the authority of a field marshal. In the books
she has about rabbits, cats, alligators, and the Hke, she insists that I

change all the pronouns from he to she so the story will be about a

girl, not a boy. Already, she is resisting, v^thout yet knowing it, cer-

tain sexist presumptions of the media. But she succumbs to them too.
For it is also important to her that she be pretty, desired, and the one
who beats out the ugly stepsisters for the prince's attention. She
wants control and she wants love, and she is growing up m a culture
as confused about how much of each a woman can have as it was in
the 1950s and '60s. So she will be surrounded by media imagery that
30'0 Where the Girls Are

holds out promises of female achievement with one hand and slaps
her down with the other. Already she knows we have a smart,

accompHshed first lady, because that's what her mother tells her.

What she doesn't know yet, but will soon learn, is the price that first

lady has had to pay simply for refusing to sit by the sideHnes, cheer-
lead once in a while, and serve refreshments to the boys. My Httle girl
will have to learn that if she wants nothing more than the same
opportunities, access to power, freedom, and autonomy as any Httle

boy in her preschool, sooner or later, she will pay a price never

expected of them.
Because of the women's movement, and the ongoing vitahty of
feminism in the United States, my daughter will also grow up seeing
women reporting the nightly news, women on the Supreme Court,
women in the House and the Senate. She already has a female doc-
tor, and when we go into town she sees female poUce officers, shop
owners, and mail carriers. She knows women who are lawyers,

reproductive rights activists, writers, college professors, corporate

vice presidents, filmmakers, and video artists. Some of them are mar-
ried, and some of them are not, some of them are straight, and some
of them are lesbian or bisexual. She has seen women change a flat

tire, assemble bookshelves, and operate a power saw. I never knew

women like this as a child. When I was her age, all of this was nonex-
istent, completely unimaginable. As she grows up, she'll get to know
these women, my friends whom I regard with awe and pride, and she
will learn about the routes they have taken, the many accompHsh-
ments they have achieved, and she will learn that it wasn't all easy, but
that it was worth the fight. This was something most of our mothers
were unable to give us, and it is a precious legacy we can bequeath to
their granddaughters.

It is especially important that we protect this legacy because the

other lesson our daughters will learn from the mass media is that if

they aren't pretty and aren't thin, no matter what their other gifts,

they will be thought of as less than they are. If my daughter wants to

be a journalist, an actress, a politician, or a tennis champion, looks
 1

Ep ilogue 30

will matter much more for her than they will for any boy aspn-mg to

the same occupations. It will still make a big difference if she's pretty.

It will also make a difference, as it won't for the Utde boys she plays
with now, if she is outspoken, honest about her needs, expectations,
and desires, and wiUmg to fight for principles she values. For most of

the media images that will surround her as she grows up will equate

not just thinness and beaut>^ but also a soft-spoken, deferential voice

with her right to be loved, admired, respected. She will learn that to
be Hstened to, she will be expected to speak poHtely and in a nonin-
flammatory^ manner, but she will also learn that whether she shouts
or whispers (and how many ad campaigns have urged women to

whisper?), she'll barely be Hstened to at all, because she's just a girl.

I see her now, so unself-conscious about her body, so completely

happy and comfortable m it, and already I grieve for the time which
will come all too soon when she regards that body with self-hate, no
matter how fit and healthy it is, and wdll not get rid ot that self-hate

for the rest of her fife. She and her Httie girlfriends cavort about

fiakedly with glee, so beautifiil, so ffee, so unaware of what is to

come,. of the alienation they will learn to feel against the bodies that
^Dw^ give them so much pleasure and joy. But when they watch Fern-

Gully togeth^i, md see the fair>' Crystals waist, even narrower than
Ariels, or play with their Barbies, the campaign on them has begun.
Mothers who interv^ene— "Isn't her waist really silly and way too
smaU? No .real .person, has a waist hke that and always walks on her
toes" — ^^do so fearing that this is an ideological batde they can't w^n.
We read (wiii knowing resi^ation) of the major drop m self-esteem
^nong girls once they reach adolescence, and we know all too well

where much of this comes from.^ And instead of giving our daugh-

ters less emaciated heroines, the media moguls just tell us smugly to
shut off the TV buy what you don't Hke, as if it's so easy to
and don't
insulate your child fiom the semiotic sea in which she and aU her

friends swim. Nor do we have the money, technolog>; or access to fill

in the representational blanks in their fives, to give them the heroines

they deserve.
 —
302 Where the Girls Are

One recourse we do have is to teach our daughters how to talk

back to and make fun of the mass media. This is especially satisfying

since, thanks to Nickelodeon, we sometimes see them watching the

same stuff we grew up with. In an episode of Lassie my daughter and
I watched one morning, a ranger comes to the house to warn the
mom that there are some mountain lions in the area. As he tries to

show her, on a map, where they'd been spotted, she demurs, confess-
ing that she can't read maps and they just confuse her. Then, on her
way to meet Dad and Timmy at a Grange dinner, she gets a flat

which, of course, she hasn't a clue how to change —and then gets

caught in one of the traps set for the mountain lions. Lassie— dog a

has more brains than she does and has to save her. Such scenes pro-
vide the feminist mom with an opportunitv^ to impart a few words of
wisdom about how silly and unrealistic TV can be when it comes to

women.
But this was an exception. I don't want to momtor my daughter's
TV viewing on Saturday morning, I want to go back to bed. How
many mothers have the time or the energ\' for such interventions?
Why should such interventions be so constantly necessary-? And even
the most conscientious and unharried mom can't compensate for the
absences, the erasures, of what their daughters don't see, may never
see, about women and bravery, intelligence, and courage. And this is

just what Httle white girls don't see. What of my Httle girl's best

friend, who is Asian? She will confront even more erasures, and more
ghb stereotv^pes. Of one thing I am certain. Like us, our daughters
will make their own meanings out of much that they see, reading

between the lines, absorbing exhortations to be feisty side by side

with exhortations to be passive. Like us, they will have to work hard
to fend off what cripples them and ampHfy what empowers them.
But why, after all these years, should they still have to work so hard

and to resist so much?

What will be dramatically different for my httle girl is that she

will be less sheltered ffom images of violence against women than I

was. Rape was virtually unheard of in the mainstream media m the

 Epilogue 303

1950s and '60s. Now the actual or threatened violation of women

permeates the airwaves and is especially rampant on a channel like

MTV, winch caters, primarily, to adolescents. The MTV that imtially

brought us Culture Club. "Beat It." and Cvndi Lauper s^^-ltched.

under the influence of market research, to one of the most relentless

showcases of imsog\-nv m America. If MTV is still around in ten

years, and if its images don't change much, my daughter will see

woman after woman tied up. strapped down, or on her knees m front
of some strutting male homimd. begging to service him forever.

These women are either garter-belt-clad nymphomamacs or whip-

wielding, castrating bitches: they all have long, red fingernails, huge

breasts, buns of steel, and no brains: they adore sunken-chested,

sicklv looking boys with ver\- big guitars.' \Xbrse. thev either want to

be or deser\'e to be violated. Anyone who doesn't think such repre-

sentations matter hasn't read any headhnes recently recounting

the

hostiht\'with which all too manv adolescent boys treat girls, or their
eagerness to act on such hostiHties. especiaUv when thev 're m groups
with names Kke Spur Posse.
To be fair, between these Htde pieces of corporate sewage on
in

MTV mv daughter may also see female performers ^^-ith guts and tal-
ent who det\- such imageiy If she is lucb.-. she'll have her own gen-

eration's version of Lennox. En Vogue. Tma Turner. Cyndi

Anme
Lauper, Salt 'n' Pepa, and Man.--Chapin Carpenter. Her generation

may even have girl groups like we did. voung women smgmg
together about the ongoing importance of girls sticking together and
giving a name to what hurts women.
The other drama my litde girl has alreadv witnessed, and has

enacted in her own pretend play, is the silencing of the temale voice,

the amputation of voic^ from desire. In TJic Link Mermaid, the cen-
tral stor\' involves Ariel's bargain with the sea witch Ursula: Ariel gets

to be a human to meet the prmce Eric. but. m exchange. Ursula takes

awav her voice. Feehng voiceless, and experiencing a severing

bet\veen their true feehngs and their own voices, is also, it turns out.

a central psychological drama for adolescent girls m .America." But

304 Where the Girls Are

the culprits are hardly individual women. Rather, they are an entire
system, buttressed by media imagery, that urges young girls to learn
how to mute themselves. It is therefore especially incumbent on my
generation to help our daughters claim their voices. This is why
music for women continues to be so important. Thirty years after
"Will You Love Me Tomorrow," I remain convinced that singing
certain songs with a group of friends at the top of your lungs some-
times helps you say things, later, at the top of your heart. I want to

introduce my daughter to the music that got me through, because it

is through this music that female resilience, camaraderie, and wisdom

are often most powerfully and genuinely expressed. For every time
she hears "Someday My Prince Will Come" I want her to hear "Sis-

ters Are Doing It for Themselves."

I want my daughter to Hsten to Martha and the Vandellas, the

Chiffons, and the Marvelettes, and I want her know that girl talk
to

didn't die out when the Shirelles stopped making hits. The early and
mid-1970s (and beyond) would have been a lot bleaker and loneHer
for me if it hadn't been for Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Aretha
Franklin, Bonnie Raitt, Bette Midler, the Pointer Sisters, LaBelle,

MeHssa Manchester, and Carole King. When I got totally fed up with
news stories documenting women's "fear of success," or the endless

rapes on prime time, or the ads that used the words freedom and liber-

ation to sell douches, I could Hsten to women sing about the sexual
passions, political outrage, strength, and defiance we shared Hke a

secret pledge. All these singers were acknowledging that with the
women's movement, girl talk mattered more than ever. Some of these
women wrote their own music and played their own instruments;
their music was more knowing, more sexually frank, and more poHt-
ically inflected than girl group music had been. But it shared that
same sense of irrepressible optimism that, no matter what, women
would endure and prevail, and this is a powerful tradition. to pass on
to little girls who all too soon will be awash in the misogyny of heavy
metal and rap.
 Epilogue 305

This music will do nothing less than help my daughter survive.

Women's music has acknowledged that we would indeed bob below

the surface from time to time, sometimes
feeHng as if we wouldn't
we'd come, resurfaced, renewed. Melissa
rise again, but then up

Manchester insisted, in songs like "This Lady's Not Home," "Home

and "Talkm' to Myself (And FeeHn' Fine)," that certain
to Myself,"

women (and a lot more women than men thought) craved solitude

and that they needed to be alone as much as, and sometimes more

than, they needed or wanted be with any man. The Divine Miss
to

M exuded a totally confident, authoritative sexuahty, not just in

her
infamous reteUing of
music but also in her costumes, stage talk, and
those bawdy Sophie Tucker jokes. Long before Madonna, Bette
Midler trashed the notion that had to be or should be sexu-
women
ally innocent and demure. Bonnie Raitt, by
covering the Sippie Wal-

lace songs "Women Be Wise (Don't Advertise

Your Man)," "Mighty
Tight Woman," and "You Got to Know How," reintroduced us to a

female blues tradition that demanded recognition and preservation

exuberant assertion of female sexual desire. In songs

because of its

hke "Give It Up or Let Me Go" and "Ain't Nobody Home," she

made it clear that women Hke her expected men to cut the bullshit or

take a hike. In "I'm a Radio," Joni MitcheU indicated that women

like her were just as comfortable with casual, nonbinding relation-

ships as men were. These were take-control women, at least in their

music, reinforcing in positive terms what the rest o( the mass media

were castigating as negative.

The most poetic of these women was Laura Nyro, and already
one of my daughter's favorite songs is what she calls "Wash You Up
and Down," her tide for Nyro's feminist call to arms, "Save the

Country." Nyro's songs affirmed that women usually found them-

selves in the grip of forces beyond their control but that women also
fataHsm and
shared a form of knowledge, a wisdom combined of
stance toward fate and
feistiness, that helped them assume an ironic
of her piano
helped them triumph over its cruelties. The exuberance
306 Where the Girls Are

playing and the unyielding survivalism of her lyrics insisted that

women, despite the odds, were simply too resilient, too dogged, too
optimistic, to be kept down. Twenty years later, Mary-Chapin Car-
penter makes the same claims for women in "I Feel Lucky," "I Take
My Chances," and "The Hard Way" Women do have to struggle and
put up with suffocating stereotypes, but we often get lucky as well,

usually because of our spirit, our wiUingness to try again, and our
capacity for love.
These are the voices I want my daughter to sing along with. This
is what I know about the women who came before her.
want her to
These are women who claimed their voices, and sang about what too
many of us have felt we couldn't say in regular speech: our pride in
ourselves, our anger, our sexual desires, our weariness of always hav-
ing to compromise. I hope that she will relate this music to real

women she knows, to her grandmothers who never quit, to her

mother's friends who gamely dance around the living room with her
to this music, and to her mother, who periodically turns this music
up to house-shaking levels to blow out the self-doubt, the guilt, and
the fear.

I don't believe I can insulate my daughter from the mass media,

nor do I want to. There are pleasures there for her, ones she already
knows and ones she will learn. The sitcoms, records, magazines, and
movies she grows up with will form, for better and for worse, the
culture she will share with other people she barely knows. Yet there
is much in this culture I find pernicious, revolting, and, increasingly,
dangerous, especially since she is a girl. She will be treated a certain
way precisely because of how boys —and even other girls —apply
their media lessons to everyday Hfe. I will try to teach her to be
a resistant, back-talking, bullshit-detecting media consumer, and to
treasure the strong, funny, subversive women she does get to see. I

will also remind her that any time a performer or a cultural form
especially loved by young girls is ridiculed and dismissed, she and her
friends should not be embarrassed. Instead, they should be suspicious
about just who is feeHng threatened, or superior, and why.
 Epilogue 307

Yet despite my interventions — and, given how kids are, probably

because of them— I fear that she will experience the same amputa-

tions I have experienced, between my mind and my my desires

body,

and my voice, my past and my present, my old self and my current

self. And I know that what she sees and hears on television, on the
radio, in magazines, newspapers, and movies, will reinforce and jus-
economic, and social reaUties she will Hve with
tify the poHtical,

when she becomes a woman. But I also suspect that she and her gen-

eration may get wiser to all this sooner than we did —look at what

knows already, and she's only four— and that they will be less
she
patient and less willmg to compromise. This, at least, is my hope. For

she will see with her eyes and feel m her spirit that despite all this,

women are not helpless victims, they are fighters. And she wiU want

to be a fighter too.
 APPENDIX

M ow to Talk Back

my book tour for the hardcover version of this book,

During
dozens of people —men and women aUke— asked whether there

wasn't some more meaningful form oi protest against sexist

media imagery besides throwing sHppers or uneaten food at the tele-

vision. "How do we talk back?" people asked. Well, there are at least

two ways: refuse to buy products whose advertising seeks to keep

women in the dark ages, and write, phone, and/ or fax media oudets
them know how
to let you feel, and what you intend to do about it.
They understand one thing: not buying, and telhng all your friends

not to buy either.

Yes, it's time consuming, and between working, raising kids, run-
ning a household, maintaimng a relationship and trying desperately
(and usually in vain) to see our friends more than once every six

months, there is zero time left to read a magazine, let alone mite to

one. But if everyone in this country who is fed up v^th the glamor-

ization of anorexia, the relendess ageism of the media, or the

marginaHzation of women in the news sent two letters or two faxes

or made two phone calls a year, it would make a difference. Now, I

hasten to add that it is also important to praise media oudets when

they've treated women with fairness and respect. This kind of talking

back matters too. And my sense from the people I have talked with is

that many folks are ready for some media activism, if not for their

own sakes, then for their children's.

310 Appendix: How to Talk Back

What follows is a necessarily partial list of addresses, phone num-

bers and faxes. I have not Hsted the names of company officers, since

the revolving door of corporate America could make such names

outdated all too quickly. And there are major offenders whose
addresses do not appear here. So let me give you some additional
sources. Obviously, you have the Hstings for your local media outlets
in your phone books. For national media outlets not listed here, try

the Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media, edited by Karen

Troshynski-Thomas and Deborah M. Bureck. This should be avail-

able in most libraries. You can also call FAIR — Fairness and Accu-
racy in Reporting, a watchdog group on the news media with a

terrific women's desk —

to alert them to bias and to get addresses,

phones and They are in New York City at 130 W. 25th Street,
faxes.

10001, and the phone is (212) 633-6700. For the addresses and
phones of businesses whose advertising you wish to castigate, check
Standard & Poor's Register, Ward's Business Directory, or Hoover's Hand-
book of American Business, which offers juicy tidbits Hke how much
corporate CEOs make every year (hint: a stupefying amount). You
can address your comments to those in charge of pubHc affairs/pub-
lic relations, or you can go straight to the top, to the president/ chair-
man/CEO. Don't be shy, and don't worry about imposing on these
guys' time (and yes, they are nearly all guys). Their annual salaries

could finance the launching of the next space shuttle.

TELEVISION

If you want comment about a particular show, Hke 20/20 or This

to

Week with Connie Chung, you may want to call first and get the pro-
ducer's name and the direct fax Une. But here are the main numbers.

ABC
7 Lincoln Square
New York, New York 10023
Phone: 212-456-7777
 Appendix: How to Talk Back 311

ABC IS owned by Capital Cities/ ABC Inc., which has the same
phone number.

Capital Cities/ABC Inc.

Attention: Programming
77 W. 66th Street
New York, New York 10023

CBS
51 W. 52nd Street

New York, New York 10019

Phone: 212-975-4321; to leave a recorded comment:
212-975-3247

NBC
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, New York 10112
Phone: 212-664-4444; to leave a recorded comment on
program content: 212-664-2333

WOMEN'S MAGAZINES

Cosmopolitan
224 W. 57th Street

New York, New York 10019

Phone: 212-649-2000
FAX: 212-307-6563 (editorial content)

FAX: 212-265-1849 (advertising)

Glamour
350 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10017
Phone: 212-880-8800
FAX: 212-880-6922
312 Appendix: How to Talk Back

Self 2ind Vogue have the same address and phone as Glamour:

Self FAX: 800-228-7353

Vogue FAX: 212-880-8169

Harper's Bazaar

1700 Broadway
New York, New York 10019
Phone: 212-903-5086
FAX: 212-262-7101

Ladies' Home Journal

100 Park Avenue, 3rd floor
New York, New York 10017
Phone: 212-953-7070
FAX: 212-351-3650

Seventeen
850 Third Avenue, 9th floor
New York, New York 10022
Phone: 212-407-9700
FAX: 212-935-4236 or 212-935-4237

New Woman
215 Lexington Avenue
New York, New York 10016
Phone: 212-251-1500
FAX: 212-251-1590

Sassy
437 Madison Avenue, 4th floor
New York, New York 10022
Phone: 212-935-9150
FAX: 212-935-0457
 Appendix: How to Talk Back 313

NEWSMAGAZINES

Time
Time, Inc.

Time & Life Building

Rockefeller Center
New York, New York 10020
Phone: 212-522-1212
FAX: 212-522-0323

Want to write to Sports Illustrated about the bathing suit issue?

Use same address as for Time. People also has the same address.

FAX: 212-522-0320 (Sports Illustrated)

FAX: 212-522-0331 (People)

Newsweek
251 W. 57th Street
New York, New York 10019
Phone: 212-445-4000

NEWSPAPERS

The New York Times

229 W. 43rd Street

New York, New York 10036
Phone: 212-556-1234

The Los Angeles Times

Times Mirror Square
Los Angeles, CaHfornia 90053
Phone: 213-237-5000
314 Appendix: How to Talk Back

The Washington Post

1150 15th Street NW
Washington, DC 20071
Phone: 202-334-6000

CORPORATIONS

I heard more complaints about Calvin Klein advertising than about

any other company. People especially hate his reHance on the v^aif
look and the endless promotion of unbridled teen sexuaHty. Guess
Jeans was a close second.

Calvin Klein
205 W. 39th Street, 14th floor
New York, New York 10018
Phone: 212-719-2600
FAX: 212-221-4541 (Advertising Dept.)

Guess, Inc.
1444 S. Alameda Street

Los Angeles, California 90021

Phone: 213-765-3100
FAX: 310-247-8493 (Advertising Dept.)

Revlon, Inc.

625 Madison Avenue

New York, New York 10022
Phone: 212-572-5000

Max Factor
11050 York Road
Hunt Valley, Maryland 21030
Phone: 410-785-3330
 Appendix: How to Talk Back 315

Elizabeth Arden
1345 Avenue of the Americas, 35th floor
New York, New York 10105
Phone: 212-261-1000

Really sick of all those Special K ads with the red K stamped on the
offending portion of the woman's thigh? Write/call:

KeUogg Company
One KeUogg Square
Box 3599
Batde Creek, Michigan 49016
Phone: 616-961-2000

Diet soda ads making you crabby?

The Coca-Cola Company

PO. Drawer 1734
Atlanta, Georgia 30301
Phone: 404-676-2121

Pepsico, Inc.
Purchase, New York 10577
Phone: 914-253-2000
Phone (consumer relations): 800-433-2652

Want to correspond with the makers of Secret deodorant, Mr. Clean,

Cover Girl, and Bain de Soleil?

Procter &
Gamble
One Procter& Gamble Plaza
Cincinnati, Ohio 45202
Phone: 513-983-1100
316 Appendix : How to Talk Back

Let's not forget toy manufacturers, especially Mattel, makers of

Totally Hair Barbie and Baby Rollerblade, and Hasbro, maker of
G.I.Joe:

Mattel
333 Continental Boulevard
El Segundo, California 90245
Phone: 310-252-2000

Hasbro
1027 Newport Avenue
Pawtucket, Rhode Island 02862
Phone: 401-431-8697
FAX: 401-431-8695

And last, but not least:

Walt Disney Company

500 South Buena Vista Street

Burbank, California 91521

Phone: 818-560-1000
J fhowhdgiiinits

really was minding my own business when Paul Golob of Times

1 Books called to talk about a book project on women and the

media. I had been working on such a project, m various incarna-
tions, for an embarrassingly long time, and with decidedly mixed
results. It was Paul who envisioned this book, in its current form and
tone, and who helped me envision it too. Without his initial support,
and faith, this book simply would not have been written m this way
And then, once he got me going, he turned out to be one ot the

finest editors I've ever met, or even heard of tough, critical, astute,

fun, and always in your corner. I am deeply grateful to him. I also

want to thank my agent, Lizzie Grossman, who stuck with me

through thick and thin, and whose advice and enthusiasm have been
invaluable.

This book IS, m part, an attempt at translation, an effort to relay

some of the vers^ important thinking about the mass media and
women that has circulated in the academic commumrs'. With trans-
lations there are always slippages and gaps, when one form ot lan-
guage simply fails to capture the ideas and nuances of another. So my
apologies to those whose elegant theoretical work I have plundered,

distilled, and reworked. The writings of several people have been

indispensable to me and to the field: Janice Radwa); George Lipsitz,

Linda Wilhams, Mary Ann Doane, Judith Mayne, Sut Jhally, Justin

Lewis, Todd GitHn, Susan McClar)', John Fiske, Barbara Bradby,

Larrs^ Grossberg, and Chantal Mouffe.

318 Acknowledgments

During the years that I spent letting this book gestate, I incurred
many debts. Mari Jo Buhle guided my first tentative studies of the
representation of women in the media, and Paul Buhle encouraged
my journalistic writing on this topic. Two grants from the National
Endowment for the Humanities provided time and money for initial

research. Susan Bell helped shape this research and got me thinking
in more visual terms. Jeff Reid and Sheryl Larson at In These Times

gave me my first opportunity to do more journalistic writing, and

their encouragement and sense of play allowed me to experiment
with different styles and topics. I have been blessed by this same spirit

of generosity at The Progressive, where Matthew Rothschild, Erwin

Knoll, and Linda Rocawich have encouraged media criticism from a

feminist perspective. I am also grateful to the staffs of the Museum of

Radio and Television, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, the

Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Johnson Library at

Hampshire College, and the Frost Library at Amherst College.

Teaching at Hampshire College has introduced me to hundreds
of smart and energetic students whose ideas, questions, and enthusi-
asm have kept me on my toes and inspired my work. Several of these
students served as research assistants on this project, and I thank Jane
Gerhard, Jill Pierce, CoHn Loggins, Kara Knott, and Lisa Davis for
their endless trips to the library and the Xerox machine, as well as for

their suggestions and their company.

I would also like to Wendy Wolf, whom I met when she
thank
was an editor at Pantheon. Wendy saw an early version of a proposal
for a book on the representation of women in the media, and she
grilled me somewhat mercilessly about its focus and analytical pur-
pose. Because of that grilling, I came to realize what I did —and did
not —want to write about; I threw out the old proposal and wrote a

new one, which became the basis for this book. That kind of honest
and time-consuming criticism is hard to come by, and I am grateful

to her for providing it in the midst of a very busy schedule. I am also

indebted to LesHe Mason and Mary Ellen Burns, who provided

 Acknowledgments 319

detailed and invaluable readings of the manuscript that focused my

thinking and boosted my spirits. And my daughter, Ella, with her

decapitated Barbies strewn about the house, her insistence that all the

personal pronouns in her books be changed to she, and her refusal to

be passive about anything, has profoundly fortified me and my faith
in female defiance.

Three women in particular have had a powerful impact on my

thinking and writing, serving as much as mentors as they have as

friends. The fact that all three of them are my colleagues at Hamp-
shire College is one of Hfe's small miracles. It was Joan Braderman
who dragged me, kicking and screaming, into the world of feminist
film criticism and who opened me up to a whole new way of think-
ing about images and our love-hate relationship to them. By teach-
ing with her, having her read my work, and watching her various
video pieces, I was pulled into an intellectual and artistic realm that

demanded, simultaneously, more sophisticated and more playful

thinking. Mary Russo opened up cultural theory for me, and her
widely cited essay on female grotesques, as well as our many con-
versations and her intellectual generosity, transformed my ideas
about gender and representation. Meredith Michaels, probably the
most principled and gutsy woman I know, helped my understanding

of narrative theory and theories of subjectivity, and dissected my

work as only a trained philosopher can. Joan, Mary, and Meredith
have been constant sources of support, insight, and refreshingly hon-
est criticism. I never could have written this book without them,

so I dedicate it to these three extraordinary women, with gratitude

and love.

I also dedicate this book to my husband, T R. Durham. It was

TR. who found the topic for the first journaHstic piece I ever got

published; TR. who gave me the confidence to find, and use, my

voice; TR. who did the grocery shopping, the day-care drop-off,

and the endless runs to the office supply store so I could write. And
it was TR. who Hstened when no one else could or would, who sus-
320 Acknowledgments

tained me when I got discouraged, and who has tolerated Uving in a

house overrun by teetering stacks of videotapes of Charlie's Angels

and Bewitched, Glamour magazines from 1967, and alluvial fields of

note cards, pads, Post-it notes, and computer printouts. His unbri-
dled enthusiasm for this project, especially in the face of other losses
and challenges, has meant the world to me.
 otu
n
INTRODUCTION

1. Claudia Wallis, "Women Face the '90s," Time, December 4, 1989, p. 81.
2. Wini Bremes explores these contradictions as well, and focuses on the roots
of femimsm m the 1950s. See Young, White and Miserable: Gromng Up Female in the
Fifties (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).

3. Various feminist scholars have studied and documented women's

contra-

dictor>^ responses to the mass media. See Jamce Radway, Reading the Romance
(Chapel Umversity of North Carolina Press, 1984); Linda Wilhams, " 'Some-
Hill:

thing Else Besides a Mother': Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama," in Chris-
tine Gledhill, ed.. Home Is Wliere the Heart Is (London: British Fihn Institute, 1987);

Judith Mayne, "The Woman at the Keyhole: Women's Cinema and Feminist Fihn
Criticism," m Mar)' Ann Doane et al., eds., Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Crit-

icism (Frederick, MD: Umversity PubHcations of America, 1984); Susan

McClary,
Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (MinneapoHs: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1991). Femimst video artists also were some of the first to explore

these contradictory relationships to the media. See Joan Braderman, Natalie Didn't
Drown, ©1983, distributed by Video Data Bank, Chicago.
4. For a summary of the media's power, and of viewers' resistance to
that

power, see Justin Lewis, The Ideological Octopus (New York: Roudedge, 1991).

5. Chantal Mouffe, "Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Toward a New

Concept of Democracy," m Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and
the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 94-95.
For scholarly analysis and documentation of the biases and impact of the
6.

news media, see Herbert Cans, Deciding VVliat's News (New York: Vintage, 1980);
Todd Githn, The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley: University of Cahforma Press,
1980); Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986); and

Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann, Manufacturing Consent: Vie Political Econ-

omy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

 .

322 Notes

7. Landon Jones, Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation

(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980), p. 73.

8. This point has been emphasized by Barbara Ehrenreich, EHzabeth Hess,

and Gloria Jacobs in Re-Making Love: Tlie Feminization of Sex (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Doubleday 1986), p. 29.
Press,

9. Carroll Smith Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian

America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). See Wini Breines's discussion of the
contradictions surrounding girls in the 1950s in Young, White and Miserable.
10. Gitlin, Tlie Wliole World Is Watching, p. 29.

11. John Fiske has been one of the most important advocates of viewer resis-

tance to mass media images. See "Television: Polysemy and Popularity," in Critical
Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 3, December 1986, pp. 391-408; Television Cul-
ture (London: Methuen, 1987); and "British Cultural Studies," in Robert Allen,
ed.. Channels of Discourse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
12. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen, Autumn
1975, pp. 6-18.
13. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. 46-47.
14.Mirra Komarovsky, "Cultural Contradictions and Sex Roles," American
Journal of Sociology, vol. 52, 1946, pp. 184-189; Maren Lockwood Garden, The New
Feminist Movement (New York: RusseU Sage Foundation, 1974), p. 23.
15. Much of this work on cultural contradictions within the media was
inspired by Jiirgen Habermas, Beacon Press, 1975).
Legitimation Crisis (Boston:

For an impressive apphcation of these ideas to popular culture see George Lipsitz,
"The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class and Ethnicity in Early Network Televi-
sion," in Lipsitz, Time Passages (MinneapoHs: University of Minnesota Press,

1990); and T
J. Jackson
Lears, "From Salvation to ReaHzation: Advertising and

the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930," in Richard

Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds.. The Culture of Consumption (New
York: Pantheon, 1983).

CHAPTER 1 : FRACTURED FAIRY TALES

1 Walter Lippman quoted in Webster's Guide to American History (Springfield,

MA: G. & C. Merriam, 1971), p. 555; "Sputnik II: The Surge of Soviet Science,"

Newsweek, November 11, 1957, p. 73.

2. "Walt Disney: Imagineer of Fun," Newsweek, December 26, 1966, p. 69.
3. For a discussion of the notion of "the surveyor" and "the surveyed" as
installed in the heads of women by advertisers, see John Berger, Ways of Seeing

(New York: Pengum, 1977).

4. Rita Lang Kleinfelder, When We Were Young: A Baby-Boomer Yearbook (New
York: Prentice Hall, 1993), p. 175.
 .

Notes 323

5. Les Brown, Les Brown's Encyclopedia of Television (New York: New York
Zoetrope, 1982), p. 344.
6. "Jackie," Time, January 20, 1961, p. 20.

7. "First Lady Puts on a Water-Skiing 'Show,' " U.S. News and World Report,
January 15, 1962, p. 12.

8. "Stunning Egghead," Newsweek, February 22, 1960, p. 29.

9. "Jackie," Time, January 20, 1961, p. 25.

10. "First Lady Gives a Lesson in Diplomacy," U.S. News and World Report,
January 1, 1962, p. 52.
11. Cited in Ralph G. Martin, A Hero for Our Time: An Intimate Story of the

Kennedy Years (New York: Macmillan, 1983), p. 354.

12. Cited in Paul F Boiler, Jr., Presidential Wives: An Anecdotal History (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 363.

13. "How the PubUc Rates the Nation's First Lady," U.S. News and World
Report, October 8, 1962, p. 28.

14. "Queen of America," Time, March 23, 1962, p. 13.

CHAPTER 2: MAMA SAID

1 For during this period see Susan Ware, Holding Their

a history of women
Own: American Women 1930s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982); Susan
in the

Hartmann, Vie Homefront and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston:
Twayne, 1982); William H. Chafe, Tlie American Woman: Her Changing Social, Eco-
nomic and Political Roles, 1920-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972);

and Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty (New York: Free Press, 1989).
2. Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman, A History of
Women in America

(New York: Bantam, 1978), p. 306.

For an excellent presentation of this material see the film by Connie Field,
3.

The Lfe and Times of Rosie the Riveter, ©1980, distributed by Clarity Educational
Productions.
4. Ginette Castro, American Feminism: A Contemporary History (New York:

New York University Press, 1990), p. 7.

5. For an excellent discussion of this film see Linda Williams, "Feminist Film
and the Second World War," in E. Deidre Pribam, ed.. Female
Theory: Mildred Pierce

Spectators: Looking at Film and Television (New York: Verso, 1988), pp. 12-30.
6. See E. Ann Kaplan, ed.. Women in Film Noir (London: British Film Insti-

tute, 1980).

7. Susan Faludi makes this point in Backlash: Vie Undeclared War Against Amer-
ican Women (New York: Crown, 1991), p. 54.

For a discussion of these 1950s sitcoms, see Mary Beth Haralovich, "Sub-
8.

urban Family Sitcoms and Consumer Product Design: Addressing the Social Sub-
324 Notes

jectivity of Homemakers in the 50s," in Phillip Drummond and Richard Paterson,

Television and Its Audience (London: BFI, British Film Institute, 1988), pp. 38-58.
9. Eleanor Roosevelt, "If You Ask Me," Ladies'Home Journal, January 1946.
10. E. Sager, "Profile Home Journal, April 1946, pp. 32-33.
of Success," Ladies'
11. B. H. Hoffman, "How Much Should They Earn?," Ladies' Home Journal,
July 1946, p. 22.
12. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, "Queens Did Better Than Kings," Ladies'

Home Journal, July 1946, pp. 115-16.

13. See Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War
Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), pp. 20-22.
14. George Lawton, "Proof That She Is the Stronger Sex," New York Times

Magazine, December 12, 1948, pp. 67-68; "Women May Control U.S.," Science

Digest, August 1947, p. 29.

15. CHfford R. Adams, "Making Marriage Work," Ladies' Home Journal, April

1948, p. 26, and September 1948, p. 26.

16. James F. Bender, "What Sends People to Reno," Ladies' Home Journal,
April 1948, p. 26.

17. Letters to the editor. Ladies' Home Journal, March 1948, p. 4.

18. Leland Stowe, "What's Wrong with American Women?," Reader's Digest,

October 1949, pp. 49-51.

19. Fred Schwed, Jr., "Woman — Foibles of. Etc.," Reader's Digest, August
1951, p. 54.
20. Agnes E. Meyer, "Women Aren't Men," Reader's Digest, November 1950,

pp. 80-84.
21. The two classic studies of women and housework are Ruth Schwartz
Cowan, More Work for Mother: Tlie Ironies of Household Technology from the Open
Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983); and Susan Strasser, Never
Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982).
22. "Employment of Women Reaches All-Time High in 1955," Personnel

Guidance Journal, February 1956, p. 339.

23. Ariie Hochschild, Vie Second .Shift (New York: Avon, 1989).

CHAPTER 3: SEX AND THE SINGLE TEENAGER

1. William I. Nichols, "Let's Not Panic at the 'New Morahty,' " Reader's
Digest, July 1966, p. 75.

2. On sexual mores for women in the 1950s and 1960s see Elaine Tyler May,
Homeward Bound: American War Era (New York: Basic Books,
Families in the Cold

1988); and Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe
V Wade (New York: Roudedge, 1992). For changes in dating practices see Beth L.
Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth Century America (Balti-
 Notes 325

overview of changing sexual

more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). For an
Matters: A History of Sexual-
mores see John D'EmiHo and EsteUe Freedman, Intimate

ity in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).

Ann Landers, "Straight Talk on Sex and Growing Up," Life, August 1961,
3.

pp. 74ff.
4. One example was Arnold Maremont, the director of Illinois 's Public Assis-
Engross the U.S.," Lfe,
tance Program. See "Birth Control Devices and Debates
May 10, 1963, pp. 37-45.
"The Second Sexual Revolution," Time, January 24, 1964, pp. 54-59;
5.

"Sexual Behavior of CoUege Girls," School and Society, April 3, 1965, p. 208;
"No
60-61.
Moral Revolution Discovered, Yet," Science News, January 20, 1968, pp.
Buck, "The Sexual Revolution," Ladies' Home Journal, September
6. Pearl S.

1964, p. 43.
7. "Second Sexual Revolution," p. 55.
8. Virgil G. Damon and IsabeUa Taves, "My Daughter Is m Trouble," Look,

August 14, 1962, pp. 26-8ff.

"Unstructured Relations," Newsweek, July 4, 1966, p. 78.
9.

10. David Boroff, "Among the Fallen Idols, Virginity, Chastity and Repres-

sion," Esquire, ]u\y 1961, p. 98.

11. "The Free Sex Movement," Time, March 11, 1966, p. 66.
Review, June
12. Donald A. Eldridge, "More on Campus Mores," Saturday
20, 1964, p. 58.
Had Only Waited," Reader's Digest, JAnu^ry 1965, 87.
13. "If They p.

14. "Second Sexual Revolution," p. 54.

15. Boroff, p. 98.

"How to Stop the Movies' Sickening Exploitation of Sex,"
16. D. Wharton,
Reader's Digest, March 1961, pp. 37-40; J.
Crosby, "Speaking Out: Movies

Are Too Dirty," Saturday Evening Post, November 10, 1962, pp. 8ff.;
K. Arm- O
strong, "Must Our Movies Be Obscene?" Reader's Digest, November 1965,

pp. 54-56.
17. A reconsideration of Brown also appears in Barbara Ehrenreich, Ehzabeth

Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, Re-Making Love: Vie Feminization of Sex (Garden City:

Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1986).

18. Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (London: Frederick Muller

Ltd, 1962), p. 98.

19. Ibid., p. 15.

20. Ibid., p. 13.

21. Gloria Steinem, "The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed," Esquire,

September 1962, p. 97ff.

22. Gael Greene, Sex and the College Girl (New York: Dial Press, 1964);

Greene interviewed 614 students, 538 girls and 76 boys from 102 colleges
and um-
versities in America. Quotations on pp. 39-41.
326 Notes

23. Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American

Movies in the 1950s (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 54.
24. PJta Lang Kleinfelder, When We Were Young: A Baby-Boomer Yearbook
(New York: Prentice HaU, 1993), p. 408.
25. Ibid., p. 432.
26. See Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen,

Autumn 1975, pp. 6-18.

27. Here I draw from Linda Williams's arguments in " 'Something Else
Besides a Mother': Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama," in Christine Gled-

hill, ed.. Home Is Where the Heart Is (London: British Film Institute, 1987).
28. The phrase describing woman as having the quaHty "to-be-looked-at" in
films was coined by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in "Visual Pleasure and Nar-
rative Cinema."
29. Janice Radway argues that this fantasy about the femimzation of patri-
archy is central to the success of romance novels. See Reading the Romance (Chapel
Hill: University of North CaroHna Press, 1984).
30. A study done in 1964-65 by Mervin Freedman at Stanford established
that three-fourths or more of America's unmarried coUege women were virgins
and that premarital intercourse among college women was usually restricted to
their fijture husbands. A later study also estaWished that the Sexual Revolution
really began in the 1970s. See "Sexual Behavior of College Girls," School and Soci-

ety, April 3, 1965, p. 208; Sandra L. Hofferth, Joan R. Kahn, and Wendy Baldwin,
"Pre-marital Sexual Activity Among U.S. Teenage Women over the Past Three
Decades," Family Planning Perspectives, vol. 19, March-April 1987, pp. 46-53.

CHAPTER 4: WHY THE SHIFLELLES MATTERED

1. See the chart Hstings in Norm N. Nite, Rock On Almanac (New York:
Harper & Row, 1989).
2. Charlotte Greig, 1^17/ You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (London: Virago Press,
1989), p. 33.
3. Cited in Ed Ward et al., Rock of Ages: Tlie Rolling Stone History of Rock &
Roll (New York: Summit, 1986), p. 275.
4. My thinking has been greatly influenced by Barbara Bradby, "Do Talk and

Don't Talk: The Division of the Subject in Girl Group Music," in Simon Frith and
Andrew Goodwin, On Record: Rock, Pop, & the Written Word (New York: Pan-
theon, 1990); Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Min-
neapoHs: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); and Greig, Will You Still Love Me
Tomorrow?
5. The power of music, primarily classical, is explored in Anthony Storr,
Music and the Mind (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 7.
 Notes 327

6. Greig, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, p. 121,

7. This point IS emphasized by Barbara Bradb^-.

CHAPTER 5: she's GOT THE DEVIL IN HER HE.\RT

1. "It's All Jake," Glamour, March 1963.

2. '"Teens Grow as Top Target for Many Products."" Printer's Ink, Februar\- 15.

1963. p. 3.

3. See Glamours "Back to School"" issue. August 1966.

Pango and John."" Sewsweek, February- 24, 1964. p. 54.
4. "George. Paul.

5. Ibid.

6. "Beatlemania," Newsweek, November 18. 1963, p. 104.

7. Da\nd Dempsey. "Why the Girls Scream. Weep. FHp," New York Times
Magazine, February- 23. 1964, p. 15+.

8. The other major feminist rereadmg of Beatlemama is in Barbara Ehren-

reich, EHzabeth Hess.and Gloria Jacobs, Re-Making Uwe: Vie Feminization of Sex
(Garden Cit\': Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1986).
9. Ibid., p. 35.

10. Da\^d Reisman, "What the Beatles Prove About Teenagers," LIS. News &
World Report, February 24, 1964, p. 88.

11. "George, Paul, Ringo and John," p. 54.

12. Cited in Ehrenreich et al., Re-Making Love, p. 36; see also Anna Qumdlen.
"A Paul Girl,"' in Lii'ing Out Loud (New York: Random House), pp. 6-9.

13. Ehrenreich et al., Re-Making Love, p. 11.

CHAPTER 6: GENIES AND WITCHES

1. "The American Female."" Harper's, October 1962. p. 117.

Marjone Hunter. "U.S. Panel Urges Women to Sue for Equal
Rights."
2.

Neil' York Times, October 12, 1963. p. 1.

3. Publisher's I^eefe/y, January- 18. 1965. pp. 68, 72.

4. Paul Foley. to Women's Rights," Atlantic Monthly,

"Whatever Happened
Don't Do
March 1964, pp. 63-^5; Foley, "Women's Rights— and What They
About Them.'" Reader's Digest, May 1964. pp. 22-23.
U.S. News & World Report,
5. "How Women's Role in US. Is Changing.""

May 30, 1966, pp. 58-60.

'

of the monstrosity of female sexualit>- see Linda Wil-

6. For a discussion

hams. "When the Woman Looks."" m

Mary Ann Doane et al, eds.. Re-]'ision:
Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Frederick. MD: Umversm- PubHcations of

America, 1984).
328 Notes

7. Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network
TV Shows (New York: BaUantine, 1979), pp. 62, 806-808.
8. The term and concept of the female grotesque comes from Mary Russo,
"Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory," in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist
Studies/ Critical Studies (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986).

9. Brooks and Marsh, Complete Directory, p. 205.

CHAPTER 7: THROWING OUT OUR BPJ^S

1. Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975

(MirmeapoHs: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 93.

2. Ibid., p. 105.

3. Valerie Solanas, "Excerpts from the SCUM Manifesto," in Robin Morgan,

ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful (New York: Vintage, 1970), pp. 514-519.
4. U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States
(Washington, DC: Government Printmg Office, 1975), p. 385.
5. Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975),

p. 170; Daniel Boorstin termed such news stories "pseudo-events" in The Image: A
Guide to Pseudo-events in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1961).
6. Ed Ward et al., Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll (New
York: Summit, 1986), p. 256.
7. "Sibyl with Guitar," Time, November 23, 1962, pp. 54-60.
8. Ward etRock of Ages, p. 256.
al..

9. For accounts of the emergence of feminism out of the

civil rights and anti-

war movements, see Sara Evans, Personal Politics (New York: Vintage, 1979); Judith
Hole and Ellen Levine, Rebirth of Feminism (New York: Quadrangle, 1971); and
Echols, Daring to Be Bad.
10. For the importance of such communications networks to the success of
socialmovements see Jo Freeman, "On the Origins of Social Movements" and "A
Model for Analyzing the Strategic Options of Social Movement Organizations," in
Jo Freeman, ed.. Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies (New York: Longman,
1983).
11. Rita Lang Kleinfelder, When We Were Young: A Baby-Boomer Yearbook
(New York: Prentice HaU, 1993), p. 472.
12. Todd GitHn, The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley: University of Cah-
fornia Press, 1980), p. 121.
13. See ibid., pp. 47-52 and pp. 90-94.
14. Ibid., p. 6.

15. "No More Miss America!" in Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood is Powerful
(New York: Vintage, 1970), pp. 521-524.
 Notes 329

Charlotte Curtis, "Miss America Pageant Is Picketed by 100 Women,"

16.

New York Times, September 8, 1968, p. 81.

Kathie Amatmek, a radical feminist,

changed her named to Kathie Sarachild.

17. Echols, Daring to Be Bad, pp. 98-99.

18. "The Big Letdown," Newsweek, September 1, 1969, pp. 49-50.

CHAPTER 8: I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME ROAR

1. Maren Lockwood Carden, Vie New Feminist Movement (New York: Rus-

sell Sage Foundation, 1974), pp. 32-33.

2. Judith Hole and Ellen Levine, Rebirth of Feminism
(New York: Quadrangle,

1971), p. 266.
3. Ibid., pp. 397-398. See also the various writings m Robin Morgan, ed..

Sisterhood Is Powerful (New York: Vintage, 1970).

4. For accounts of the pohtics and history of the women's

movement see Hole
and Levine's Rebirth Feminism; Carden's
of New Feminist Movement; Ginette Castro,

American Feminism: A Contemporary History (New York: New York University

Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America,
Press, 1990); Alice Echols, Daring to
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); and Marcia
J9^7_^^75
and Wlio
Cohen, The Sisterhood: Vie Inside Story of the Women's Movement
the Leaders

Made It Happen (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989).

"The New Feminists: Revolt Against 'Sexism,'

" Time, November 21,
5.

1969, pp. 53-56.

6. Susan Brownmiller, "Sisterhood Is Powerflil," New York Times Magazine,

March 15, 1970, p. 27.

Sandie North, "Reporting the Movement," Atlantic, March 1970, p.
106.
7.

"Other Voices: How Social Scientists See Women's Lib," Newsweek, March
8.

23, 1970, p. 75.

9. "Reporting the Movement," p. 106.

10. "Very Volcanic," Newsweek, August 31, 1970, p. 47.

16-21.
11. "Who's Come a Long Way, Baby?," Time, August 31, 1970, pp.
Linda Charlton, "Women March Down Fifth in Equality Drive," New
12.

York Times, August 27, 1970, p. 1, p. 30.

New York Times, August
13. "Leading Feminist Puts Hairdo Before Strike,"

27, 1970, p. 30.

Day Was Just Topic of
Grace Lichtenstein, "For Most Women, 'Strike' a
14.

Conversation," New York Times, August 27, 1970, p. 30.

Women's Lib," New
15. Lacey Fosburgh, "Traditional Groups Prefer to Ignore
York Times, August 26, 1970, p. 44.
York Times, August 27, 1970, 34.
16. "The Liberated Woman," New p.
330 Notes

17. "Women on the March," Time, September 7, 1970, pp. 12-13.

18. "TheWomen Who Know Their Place," Newsweek, September 7, 1970,
pp. 16-17.

CHAPTER 9: THE RISE OF THE BIONIC BIMBO

1. See Todd GitHn, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1983); and
Horace Newcomb and Robert S. Alley, TJie Producer's Medium (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1983).
2. Joreen, "The 51 Percent Minority Group: A Statistical Essay," in Robin
Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful (New York: Vintage, 1970), pp. 39-43.
3. Marcia Cohen, Vie
Sisterhood: Tlie Inside Story of the Women's Movement and

the Leaders IVlio Happen (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989), p. 329.
Made It

4. Philippe PerebinossofF, "What Does a Kiss Mean? The Love Comic For-

mula and the Creation of the Ideal Teen-age G\x\" Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 8,
Sprmg 1975, pp. 826-827.
5. CaroHne Bird, "What's TV Domg for 50.9 Percent of Americans?," TV
Guide, February 27, 1971, pp. 5-8; Leonard Gross, "Why Can't a Woman Be More
Like a Man?," TV Guide, August 11, 1973, pp. 6ff.

Judy Klemesrud, "TV's Women Are Dingbats," New York Times, May 27,
6.

1973, p. D-5; Stephanie Harrington, "Women Get the Short End of the Shtick,"
New York Times,November 18, 1973, p. D-21; Gail Rock, "Same Time, Same Sta-
tion, Same Sexism," Ms., December 1973, pp. 24-28.
7. See Gaye Tuchman et al., Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass

Media (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1978); Jean McNeil, "Feminism, Fem-
ininity, and the Television A
Content Analysis," Jowma/ of Broadcasting, vol.
Series:

19, 1975, pp. 259-269; Nancy Tedesco, "Patterns in Prime Time," Jot/ma/ of Com-
munication, vol. 24, Spring 1974, pp. 119-124.
8. AHce E. Courtney and Thomas W Whipple, "Women in TV Commer-
cials," Jowmd/ of Communication, vol. 24, Spring 1974, pp. 111-113.
9. Erving GofiBman, Gender Advertisements (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1979).
10. Carol Tavris and Toby Jayaratne, "What 120,000 Young Women Can Tell
You About Sex, Motherhood, Menstruation, Housework —and Men," Redbook,
January 1973, pp. 67ff.

11. "Big Bea," Time, October 1, 1973, p. 66.

12. For an account of interviewees' responses to the show see Andrea L.
Press, Women Watching Television (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1991), pp. 77-79.
13. Gerard Jones, Honey, Fm Home (New York: Grove Press, 1992), p. 194.
14. Ibid., pp. 230-231.
 .

Notes 331

15. George Gerbner, "The Dynamics of Cultural Resistance," in Tuchman et

al, Hearth and Home, pp. 48-50.
16. Sue Cameron, "Police Drama: Women Are on the Case," Ms., October
1974, p. 104.
17. "TV's Super Women," Time, November 22, 1976, p. 69.

18. Ibid.

19. For a discussion of mascuHnity as masquerade see Carole- Anne Tyler,

"Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag," m Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/ Out: Les-

bian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Roudedge, 1991).

CHAPTER 10: THE ERA AS CATFIGHT

1 For and hilarious feminist analysis of Dynasty, including the

a provocative

Joan
catfight, see Braderman's videotape Joan Does Dynasty, ©1986, distributed by
Video Data Bank, Chicago, and Women Make Movies, New York.
2. Amy Erdman Farrell, "Self-help and Sisterhood:
The Limits to Feminist
Discourse in Ms. Magazine, 1972-1989," paper delivered at the Berkshire Confer-

ence on the History of Women, June 12, 1993.

3. See Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 201-218.

4. Herbert Cans, Deciding Wliat's News (New York: Vintage, 1980), pp. 50-51.

5. Mary Russo, "Female Grotesques: Carnival and

Theory," in Teresa de Lau-

retis, ed., Feminist Studies/ Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1986), p. 213.
6. to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America,
Alice Echols, Daring
1967-1975
(Minneapohs: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 210.
7. "Gloria Steinem," Newsweek, August 16, 1971, p. 51.

8. Marcia Cohen, The Sisterhood: The Inside Story of the

Women's Movement and

the Leaders Who Made It Happen (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989), pp.

235-238.
9. "Women's Lib: A Second Look," Time, December 14, 1970, p. 50.
10. Millett wrote about her encounters with fame and the media in Flying

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974).

11. Paul Wilkes, "Mother Superior to Women's Lib," New York Times Maga-

zine, November 29, 1970, pp. 27ff.

12. "Bellacose Abzug," Time, August 16, 1971, pp. 14-15.
13. Sheila Tobias points this out in Cohen, Tl^e Sisterhood, p. 321.

14. Ibid., p. 320.

15. For a more in-depth analysis of why the amendment failed see Mary
Frances Berry, Why ERA Failed (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1986);

and Mansbridge, Wlty We Lost the ERA..

 .

332 Notes

16. "Is Equal Rights Amendment Dead?" U.S. News & World Report, Decem-
ber 1, 1975, p. 39.
17. Joseph Lelyveld, "Should Women Be Nicer Than Men?," New York Times
Magazine, April 17, 1977, p. 126.
18. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA, p. 224; Berry, miy ERA Failed,

p. 82.
19. "Anti-EPJ^ Evangehst Wms Agam," p. 20; Lelyveld, "Should Women Be
Nicer?" p. 126.
20. The most notable example is Joan Braderman's videotape, Joan Does
Dynasty, ©1986.
21. My discussion draws from len Ang's Watching Dallas (New York:
Methuen, 1985); for quotations from these episodes see pp. 126-128.
22. Kim Schroder, "The Pleasure of Dynasty: The Weekly Reconstruction of
Self-confidence," in PhiUip Drummond and Richard Paterson, eds., Television and
Its Audience (London; British Film Institute, 1988), p. 73.

CHAPTER 1 1 : NARCISSISM AS LIBEPJ^TION

1. For a funny and very' smart discussion of ehte culture in the 1980s see Deb-
ora Silverman, Selling Culture: Bloomingdale's, Diana Vreeland and the New Aristocracy
of Taste in Reagan's America (New York: Pantheon, 1986).
2. Naomi Wolf, Vie Beauty Myth (New York: Doubleday 1991), p. 109.
3. Ibid., p. 99.

4. Melissa Stanton, "Looking After Your Looks," Glamour, August 1993,

p. 233.
5. "A Better Butt, Fast!" and "Why 15 Million Women Own Guns" in Glam-
our, May 1993, p. 270fFand p. 260flf.

6. Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 232.

CHAPTER 12: I'm not a feminist, but . . .

1 For recent overviews of the status of feminism in America see Johanna

Brenner, "U.S. Feminism in the Nineties," New Left Review, July-August 1993, pp.
101-159; and Wendy Kaminer, "Feminism's Identity Crisis," Atlantic, October
1993, pp. 51 ff.

2. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New
York: Crown, 1991), pp. 76-77.
3. Claudia WaUis, "Onward, Women!," Time, December 4, 1989, pp. 81-89.
4. Susan Douglas, "The Representation of Women in the News Media,"
EXTRA!, March-April 1991, p. 2.
 Xotes 333

""What
As Marion Goldin. former producer of 60 Mmutes, quipped.
5.

woman [on TV] looks like Morley Safer?" Quoted in Judy Southworth,
"Women
Media Workers: No Room at the Top," EXTRA!, March-April 199L p. 16.
6. Naomi Wolf. TJie Beauty Myth (New York:
Doubleday. 1991). p. 35.

7. On the '"sisterhood of motherhood" see Anna

Quindlen, 'The Days of

Gilded Pagatom" in Vunkiug Out Loud (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 83.

8. Faludi, Backlash, pp. 81-82.

See Judith Ma^Tie's analysis of Kramer vs. Kramer in "The Woman at the
9.

Keyhole: Women's Cinema and Feminist Film Criticism" in Mary Ann Doane et
al., eds., Re-l'ision: Essays in Feminist Film Crittasm (Frederick, MD: Universit>'

Pubhcations of America, 1984), pp. 61-62.

10. Faludi, Backlash, p. 143.
11. Susan McClar\; Feminine Endings: Musk, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapo-
lis: UniversitN- of Minnesota Press. 1991). p. 150.
excellent
12. My discussion of Madonna draws hea\ily from Susan McClar\-"s
analysis in Feminine Endings.

13. "Robertson Depicts Witches and Killers m a Femimst Ettort." Sew York

Times, August 26, 1993.

14. Justin Lewis, Vie Ideological Octopus (New York: Roudedge. 1991), pp.

203-205.
15. Ruth Conmff, "An Inter\-iew with Susan Faludi," Progressive, June

1993, p. 35.

EPILOGUE

Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol GiUigan, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's
1.
Press, 1993).
Psychology and Girb' Development (Cambridge: Harvard Umversit\-
2. For a critique of MTV
that argues that many ot these videos promote a

rape culture in America see Sut Jhally's \ideotape Dreamworlds, ©1990, distributed

by Mediated, Northampton, MA.

3. Brown and GilHgan, Meeting at the Crossroads, pp. 4-7.
 ndex
i
ABC News, 163-64, 178-79, 184-85, Albert, Eddie, 197

189, 194-96, 277 Allen, Gracie, 50

ABC-TV, 106-107, 127, 163, 212, All in the Family (TV show), 196-97,

235 202, 203

abortion, 167, 174, 184, 186, 203, American Bandstand (TV show), 96
American Women (report), 124
272, 277
Abzug, Bella, 167, 196, 222, 228-32 Andress, Ursula, 72

Action for Children's Television, 298 "And Then He Kissed Me" (song), 92

Adams, CliflFord R., 52 Angels, 94

Adam's Rib (movie), 49 Anka, Paul, 8, 116

Acidams Family, The (TV show), 126, antifeminism, 193-94; of 1940s-1950s,

137 47-56; of 1970s, 193-94, 202-19,

Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, TJie 221-22, 232-37, 245; of 1980s,

(TV show), 36 245-68

advertising, 11-18; of 1940s, 46, 48-54; antiwar movement, 145, 150, 153,

of late 1940s-early 1950s, 54-56; of 155-56

late 1950s-early 1960s, 24^27, 56-57, April Love (movie), 71

69; of mid-late 1960s, 99-105, 115, "April Love" (song), 86

131, 152; of 1970s, 188-89, 199, Arden, EUzabeth, 250

200, 225-28, 245-46, 304; of 1980s, Arnold, Roseanne, 284-85
245-68; of 1990s, 269, 271, 279-82, Arthur, Bea, 202

290, 292, 294, 299 AT & T, 16

affirmative action, 275, 277 Atkinson, Ti-Grace, 174, 175

African American culture, 276; of late Atlantic Monthly, 125

1950s-early 1960s, 33-36, 95-97; of Avalon, Frankie, 116

mid-late 1960s, 143-46, 151; music, Avengers, The (TV show), 12

95_97, 144; of 1970s, 182, 188,
"Baby, It's You" (song), 90
204, 209, 231
Agnew, Spiro, 154, 163, 164, 184 baby boom, 22
Aladdin (movie), 297 Baby Doll (movie), 71
 4

336 Inde:

Bachelor Father (TV show), 285 Bonanza (TV show), 127

Baezjoan, 143, 146-52, 160 Bond, James, 61-62, 72, 152
Bailey, Jack, 32-33 Boone, Pat, 28, 84, 86
BaU, Lucille, 50 Bourbon Street Beat (TV show), 107
Balmaseda, Liz, 277 Brady Bunch, The (TV show), 4
Barbie doU, 24, 298, 301 Brannigan, Bill, 184-85
Bardot, Brigitte, 151 bras, 25, 140, 182, 159; burning of,
Barrie, James, 30 139-40, 159-60
Beach Blanket Bingo (movie), 8, 14, 73 Breakfast at Tiffany's (movie), 104-107,
Beach Boys, 96 120
Beal, Frances, 188 breast cancer, 272
Beades, 3, 4, 5, 98, 102, 112-20, 123, breasts, 32, 48, 49, 80, 105, 139-40,
126, 140, 141, 142, 149, 156, 270 173, 258, 259, 262, 263
beat poetry, 15 Breck shampoo, 1

Beatty, Warren, 71, 78 Brine, Ruth, 168, 169

Beauty and the Beast (movie), 296-97 Brinkley Christie, 11, 264
Beauvoir, Simone de, 66, 256; Tlie Sec- Brothers, Dr. Joyce, 115
ond Sex, 50 Brown, Helen Gurley, 126; Sex and the
Beech, Keyes, 41 Single Girl, 68-69
"Beechwood 4-5789" (song), 90 Brownmiller, Susan, 167, 168
Beer, JacqueUne, 107 bubble gum music, 149
"Be My Baby" (song), 92 Buck, Pearl, 65
Bender, Dr. James E, 53 Buckley, WiUiam E, Jr., 167
Berry, Chuck, 117 Buns of Steel (video), 259
Beverly Hillbillies, Vie (TV show), Burns and Allen Show, The (TV show),
196-97 50
Bewitched (TV show), 4, 18, 108, Bush, Barbara, 244
126-38, 141, 142, 161, 216, 219, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
239, 274 (movie), 201
Big Chill, The (movie), 247 buttocks, 1980s image of, 247, 258-66
bikini, 5, 61 Byrnes, Edd, 3, 107
Billboard ni^g2izine, 113
Billy Jack (movie), 202 Cagney & Lacey (TV show), 12, 274,
Woman, The (TV show), 191,
Bionic 286
211,216,218-19 Camel News Caravan (TV show), 144
Biotherm, 259, 265 "Can't Buy Me Love" (song), 114
Birch (John) Society, 235 Carmichael, Stokely, 151
Bird, Carohne, 199 Carpenter, Mary-Chapin, 303, 306
birth control, 61-66, 70 Carroll, Diahann, 204
birth control pill, 61-65, 172 Carson, Johnny, 12
birthrate, 23-24, 61, 278 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, 143
Blackboard Jungle (movie), 5 Carter, Jimmy, 236
"Blowin' in the Wind" (song), 148 Carter, Lynda, 216
 Inde X 337

catfights, female, 221-44, 270 Communism, 47

CBS News, 10, 155, 164, 166-67, Como, Perry, 84, 86
171-75, 182-83,236,277 competition, female, 221-44
Congiess, 23, 40, 124, 125, 167,
"Chains" (song), 93-94, 117 8,

Chanel, 252 172, 232-36, 270, 300

Chaney, James, 144 Connery, Sean, 72, 278

Charlie's Angels (TV show), 19, 191, Conrad, Bob, 106

consciousness-raising groups, 169, 190,
193, 211-17, 239, 270, 273, 289,
291 225
consumer culture, 56
Charlton, Lmda, 180
"consumer" vs. "producer" ethos, 18
Charren, Peggy, 298
Checker, Chubby, 93 Convy, Bert, 75
cheerleaders, 3, 6 Cooke, Sam, 144
Cher, 260, 264, 294 Cookies, 93

Chicago Daily News, 41 coonskin caps, 24

Chicago riot (1968), 154 Cop and a Half {movie) 297 ,

Chiffons, 89, 270, 304 Cops (TV show), 269

child care, 11,47, 124, 174, 184, 186, cosmetics, 19, 25, 37, 51,100, 103,

234, 236, 272, 277, 283 104, 147, 148, 152, 156, 177, 189,

China Beach (TV show), 286 227, 232, 272, 291, 294; 1980s

Chishohn, Shirley, 167, 188, 196, 221 advertising, 245-68

Christie, Lou, 96 cosmetic surgery, 266-67, 294

Chung, Connie, 272, 277, 278 Cosmopolitan magazine, 68, 151, 177,

Cinderella (movie), 27, 28, 41, 88 250, 259

civil rights movement, 26, 27, 33-36, Couric, Katie, 273, 277
Craft, Christine, 278
95, 142, 143-46, 160, 187
Clark, Claudine, 92-93 Craig, May, 124

Cleopatra (movie), 62 Crawford, Cindy, 294

Clinton, BiU, 7, 289 Crawford, Joan, 48

Chnton, Hillary Rodham, 7-8, 244, Cream, 150

270-71,288-89,294,300 Cronkite, Walter, 145, 164, 173, 175,

Coburn, Judith, 211-12 182, 278

Coca, Imogene, 50 "crv'pto-feminism," 123-24

Cold War, 15,21-22,47 Culhane, David, 171-75

Collagen Corporation, 256-57 cultural schizophrenia, and mass media,

coUege, 22-23, 58, 65, 69-71, 140, 8-20, 100, 165, 274
demon- Curtis, Charlotte, 158-59
142, 145, 147, 153-54, 172;
strations, 153-55
Dallas (TV show), 11, 19, 238-43
Collins, Judy, 147,242
Colorforms, 24 dancing, 93-94, 141

Columbia Universit\' protest (1968), ,

date rape, 79, 80, 294

153-54 Daughters of the American Revolu-

comics, 48, 198-99 tion, 181
 1

338 Index

Davis, Skeeter, 94 Easy Rider (movie), 201

Day, Dons, 71, 86, 94 economy, 11, 14, 18, 56; of late
Dean, James, 5, 291 1950s-early 1960s, 23-25; of mid-
"Dedicated to the One I Love" (song), late 1960s, 102-103, 123; of 1970s,
90 169-72, 176, 186, 234
Dee, Sandra, 3, 34, 74, 76 Eden, Barbara, 134
Deliverance (movie), 201 Edison, Thomas, 17
deU'Olio, Anselma, 174 Ed Sullivan Show, Tlw (TV show), 114
Dempsey, David, 115 education, 22-23; of late 1950s-early
Denham, Alice, 173 1960s, 22-24, 58, 69-71; of mid-
Dennis the Menace (movie), 297 late 1960s, 124, 140, 142, 145, 147,
Dennis the Menace (TV show), 27 153-54; of 1970s, 172, 184, 222-23,
Denver, John, 222 234;ofl990s, 272, 300
Designing Women (TV show), 286 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 120, 277
"Devil in Her Heart" (song), 102 Eisenhower, Mamie, 38
Dickinson, Angie, 209-10 Eisley, Anthony, 106
Diet Pepsi, 263, 265 Ehzabeth, Queen of England, 39
Disney, Walt, 19, 27-32, 298 Empire Strikes Back, Tlie (movie), 254
Disneyland (TV show), 28 employment, female, 261; of
divorce, 7, 54, 187 1930s-1940s, 45-49; of 1940s,
Dixie Cups, 86, 97, 98 46-54; of late 1940s-early 1950s,
Dixon, Luther, 84 50-52, 54-56; of late 1950s-early
Dolce Vita, La (movie), 65 1960s, 37-38, 43-45, 51-64; of
Donahue, Troy, 3, 74-76, 107 mid-late 1960s, 103-104, 107,
Donna Reed Show, The (TV show), 36, 124-25, 142; of 1970s, 169-76,
51, 143 184-86, 196, 199, 204-209, 213,
"Don't Make Me Over" (song), 90 219, 231, 235; of 1980s, 273-74; of
"Don't Mess with Bill" (song), 90 1990s, 272, 282-83, 286, 300;
Doors, 150 wartime, 46-47, 54
Dos Passos, John, 1 Engberg, Erik, 236
Double Indemnity (movie), 48 environment, 11
Dr. No (movie), 72 envy, 17, 30, 31, 173
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (TV show), Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974),
286 235
Dreyfuss, Pachard, 278 Equal Employment Opportunity Act
Dudar, Helen, 170-71 (1972), 235
Duke, Patty, 108-10 Equalizer, The (TV show), 285-86
Dylan, Bob, 143, 149 Equal Pay Act (1963), 124
Dynasty (TV show), 19, 222, 238, 239, Equal Rights Amendment, 167,
241-43, 250, 268 178-79, 223, 226, 231-38, 275
Esquire magazine, 53, 66, 67, 69, 100,
"Easier Said Than Done" (song), 88 228
Eastwood, Chnt, 278 Evans, Linda, 241
 Ill de X 339

Evers, Medgar, 144 Foley Paul, 125

"Express Yourself" (video), 288 folk music, 145-50

Fonda, Jane, 201, 259

face-lifts, 266-67, 294 "Foolish Litde Girl" (song), 90

Falcon Crest (TV show), 239 '•For What It's Worth" (song), 150

Faludi, Susan, 294; Backlash, 12, 273 Four Seasons, 96

Farmer's Daughter, Vie (TV show), 108 Four Tops, 12
Farrow, Mia, 104 France, 39-40

fashion, 3, 100, 103, 148; of mid-late Francis, Connie, 10, 79

1960s, 103-105, 116, 131, 139-40, Frankhn, Aretha, 6, 12, 304
147. 152; of 1970s, 166, 215-16, Frankhn, Benjamin, 17

227, 232, 237-38; of 1980s, 246-47, "Free to Be You and Me" (record),

258, 261-68; of 1990s, 271, 293 298

Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (movie), 222 Free Willy (movie), 297

Fatal Attraction (movie), 193, 286 Freud, Sigmund, 173

father, 73-74, 77, 110, 175, 225, 280, Friedan, Betty, 19, 49, 125, 167, 172,

282, 285 180, 221, 228-31, 276, 277; Vie

Father Knows Best (TV show), 36-38, Feminine Mystique, 125, 130, 245

51,58 F Troop (TV show), 143

feminine mystique, 49, 55, 58, 125 Full House (TV show), 285
femininity: of 1940s, 48-49, 52-54; of Fund for the Feminist Majority, 268

late 1950s-«arly 1960s, 25-27, Fumcello, Annette, 31-32, 73, 95

61-81, 219; of mid-late 1960s, Funny Girl (movie), 59

99-112, 119-20, 128-38, 148, 156,

157; of 1970s, 166, 200, 206, 209, Gabor, Eva, 197

218, 227-32; of 1980s, 245, 249; of Gandhi, Indira, 196

1990s, 279, 294 Garland, Judy 297-98

feminism, 6-20, 68; backlash, 192-219; genetics, 298

competition in, 221-24; of late Gerbner, George, 209
1950s-early 1960s, 68-70; of mid- Get Christie Love (TV show), 209
late 1960s, 104-20, 123-38, 139-^1, Get Smart (TV show), 4
217-18; "mihtant," 188; news media Gidget (TV show), 4, 102, 108,
on, 163-91, 193-96, 225-38, 244, 110-12, 120
292-93: of 1940s, 47-54; of 1970s, Gilligan's Island (TV show), 143
163-91, 193-244, 304; of 1980s, Ginsberg, Ralph, 195

245-68; of 1990s, 269-307 girl group music, 83-98, 148-49

Field, Sally 109, 110-12, 137, 278 Gitlin, Todd, 16, 155-56
Firestone, Shulamith, 174 "Give Him a Great Big Kiss" (song), 92

fitness movement, of 1980s, 258-68 "Glamour Girls of 1943" (newsreel), 46

G/^mowr magazine, 4, 12, 99, 103-104,
flat-chestedness, 105
Flintstones, Tlie (TV show), 27 108, 142,250,251,263,271,294
Flying Nun, Vie (TV show), 109, 126, go-go girl, 98, 141

137-38, 216 Goldbergs, Vie (TV show), 26, 50

340 Index

Goldstein, Marilyn, 171 "Heat Wave" (song), 92

Goldwater, Barry, 28 Hefner, Hugh, 167
Gomer Pyle (TV show), 150 Hendrix, Jimi, 150
Goodman, Andrew, 144 Hepburn, Audrey, 105-107
Good Times (TV show), 204 "He's a Rebel" (song), 92
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 243 "He's So Fine" (song), 10, 83, 90-91
Gorbachev, Raisa, 243 "He's Sure the Boy I Love" (song), 92
Gordy, Berry, 95 Hill, Anita, 9, 270, 289-90
graduate school, 23, 222-23 Hill Street Blues (TV show), 273
Graves, Teresa, 209 Hoffiiian, Abbie, 234
Great Balls of Fire! (movie), 5 Hoffinan, Dustin, 285
Great Depression, 23, 45 Hogan's Heroes (TV show), 143
Green Acres (TV show), 197-99 Hole, Judith, 165
Greene, Gael, Sex and the College Girl, Holly,Buddy 6
70-71 Home Alone (movie), 297
Greenwich, Ellie, 86 Honeymooners, The (TV show), 26, 50
Greer, Germaine, 19, 167, 222, 230, Hootenanny (TV show), 3, 147
232; The Female Eunuch, 189, 230 housework, 44, 53, 54, 57-58,
GrifFm, Sunny, 256-57 127-36,231,276
Griffiths, Martha, 167 Howe, Irving, 228
Griswold, Estelle, 64-65 How to Marry a Millionaire (TV show),
Gross, Leonard, 199 50
Gun Crazy /Deadly Is the Female Hughes, Dorothy Pitman, 231
(movie), 48 Hullahalloo (TV show), 98
Huntley- Brinkley Report, The (TV
hairstyles, 38, 116, 147, 245, 289 show), 145
Hamilton, George, 80 hysteria, 112-20
Hand Tliat Rocks the Cradle, The
(movie), 290 "I Am Woman" (song), 6, 19, 165,
Hanes, 248-49 218-19
Hard Copy (TV show), 269 "I Can't Stay Mad at You" (song), 94
Hard Day's Night, A (movie), 123 I Dream ofjeannie (TV show) 4, ,

Harper's Bazaar Tn2Lga.zme, 123-24, 250, 126-27, 134-37, 141

256 "If I Had a Hammer" (song), 147-48,
Harrison, George, 118, 119 161
Hart, Dolores, 80 / Love Lucy (TV show), 26, 50,
Have Gun Will Travel (TV show), 43 127-28, 200
Hawaiian Eye (TV show), 106-108 Imitation of Life (movie), 33-36
headlight comics, 48, 198 "I'm Worth It" campaign, 245, 268
health care, 8, 236, 253, 272 income, female, 276; of 1940s, 52; of
health food, 260 late 1950s-early 1960s, 43-44; of
health insurance, 236 mid-late 1960s, 124; of 1970s,
 Index 341

169-76, 185, 189, 196, 235; of King, Coretta, Scott, 145

1990s, 272, 276 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 145, 153-54
individualism vs. sisterhood, 221-24, Kingston Trio, 148
283-84, 290-91 Kinsey Reports, 63
Inge, William, 78 Kiss Me Deadly (movie), 48

Inside Edition (TV show), 269 Klute (movie), 201

"It's All Jake" column, 100-101 Knots Landing (TV show), 239
"It's in His Kiss" (song), 90 Kohner, Susan, 34
Ivins, Molly, 277 Kojak (TV show), 4, 209
"I Want to Be Bobby's Girl" (song), 6 "Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your
"I Want to Hold Your Hand" (song), Comb" (song), 107

113, 114 Kramer us. Kramer (movie), 285

/ Was a Teenage Werewolf {moVit) , 71 Kudryavka, 21
"I Will Follow Him" (song), 85, 88, Kuralt, Charles, 278
90, 141 Kurtis, Bill, 183

Jackson, MahaHa, 35 Ladies' Home Journal, 51-53, 66, 123,

James Bond, Jr. (TV show), 296 166-67, 250

Jeffersons, The (TV show), 204 Lady and the Tramp (movie), 28, 30

Jetsons, The (TV show), 26 Lady Sings the Blues (movie), 201

John, Elton, 6 L.A. Law (TV show), 273, 274, 281

Johnson, Lyndon B., 113, 119, 150, Lancome, 246, 253, 255, 257
153, 151 Landers, Ann, 62-63, 78, 81, 145

Johnson & Johnson, 49 Lands' End, 265

Joplin, Janis, 150 Lange, Jessica, 278

Julia (movie), 225 Lasch, Christopher, Tlte Culture of Nar-

Julia (TV show), 204 cissism, 247-49

Junior League, 181 Lassie (TV show), 302
Last Detail, Tlie (movie), 201

Karate Kid, The (movie), 297 Last Tango in Paris (movie), 201

Kate &Allie (TV show), 286 Lauper, Cyndi, 19, 110,303

Keaton, Diane, 278 Lauren, Ralph, 246-47
Kennedy Florynce, 188, 231 Lawrence, D. H., Lady Chatterly's Lover,

Kennedy Jacqueline, 39-41, 105, 141 61

Kennedy, John F., 23, 27, 38-41, 118, Lawrence Welk Show, The (TV show), 150

124; assassination of, 113, 114, 119; Lawton, George, 52

-Nixon debates, 26 "Leader of the Pack" (song), 83, 92
Kennedy Robert, 153, 154 Leave It to Beaver (TV show), 26, 36,

Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, 143 45,51,57,58

Khrushchev, Nikita, 22 Lennon.John, 117-19, 161
King, Billie Jean, 259 Lennon Sisters, 86, 95
King, Carole, 86, 304 Lennox, Annie, 303
 1

342 Index

lesbianism, 7, 19, 228-29, 235, 236, 199-201, 223-28; of 1980s, 250-51,

268, 275, 300 258, 261, 263-64, 268; of 1990s,
Levine, Ellen, 165 271, 275-76, 282, 283, 286, 288,
Lewis, Gary, and the Playboys, 1 290; see also specific publications

Lewis, Jerry Lee, 5 magical female powers, 126—38

Libbey-Owens Ford Company, Toledo, Magic Markers, 24
Ohio, 167 Mahogany (movie), 59
Lichtenstein, Grace, 180 Mailer, Norman, 229
Life magazine, 62, 63, 64, 66 male falsetto, 96
Line Fill, 252 Mama (TV show), 50, 139
Lippmann, Walter, 21-22 "Mama Said" (song), 90, 91
Little Mermaid, The (movie), 296, 303 Manchester, Melissa, 304, 305
Little Pachard, 117 Mannix (TV show), 209
Lorimar Productions, 16 "The Man That Got Away" (song), 59
"Love Me Do" (song), 113 March, Peggy^, 4
Love Me Tender (movie), 71 Mark Eden Bust Developers, 19, 105
Love's Baby Soft, 152 marriage: of late 1950s—early 1960s,
Love with the Proper Stranger (movie), 74 68-70, 77, 80; of mid-late 1960s,
Lundberg (Ferdinand) and Farnham 104, 120, 123-25, 128-36; of 1970s,
(Marynia), Modern Woman The Lost 164, 166, 174, 175, 187, 200, 221,
Sex, 47-48 231, 234; of 1980s, 193; of 1990s,
Lunden. Joan, 16, 277, 279, 280 272, 278-79, 300
Martin, Dean, 146
McBain, Diane, 107 Martin, Mary, 31
McCaU's magazine, 228, 250 martvTdom, 32-36, 42
McCarthy, Eugene, 153, 154 Marvelettes, 91, 144, 304
McCarthyism, 15 Mary Poppins (movie), 29
McCartney Paul, 4, 116, 119 Mar}' Tyler Moore Show, The (TV
McClanahan, Rue, 203 show), 19, 167, 193, 200, 204-209
McGee, Frank, 182 AfM'^S^H (movie), 201
McGuire, Dorothy, 75, 76 masochism, female, of late 1950s—early
McUughlin Group, Vie (TV show), 289 1960s, 32-42, 55
MacMurray, Fred, 91 mass media, 3—20; and cultural
McQueen, Steve, 74 schizophrenia, 8-20, 100, 165, 274;
Mademoiselle magazine, 99, 108 of late 1940s-early 1950s, 49-51,
Madonna, 11, 287-89, 294, 305 54^56; of late 1950s-early 1960s,
magazines, 10-15, 20, 24, 291; of 24-42, 55-98; of mid-late 1960s,
1940s, 46, 51-54; of late 99-161; of 1940s, 46-54; of 1970s,
1950s-early 1960s, 38-41, 61-69, 163-244; of 1980s, 245-68; of
71; of mid-late 1960s, 99-104, 108, 1990s, 269-307; see also advertising;
123-25, 136, 142, 146-47, 152; of magazines; movies; music; news
1970s, 166-71, 178, 181, 194-95, media; radio; television
 Index 343

matermn.- leave, 272 Motion Picture Associaaon of Amer-

Mathis, Johnny, 117 ica, 72

Maude (TV show), 202-204 Motown, 95
Maverick (TV show), 43 mo\4es, 13-18; Disney, 27-32; of
Mead. Margaret, 65. 168, 178, 256 1940s, 48-50; of late 1950s-«arly

Meir. Golda, 196 1960s, 27-31, 33-36, 54, 59, 61, 62,

Mickey Mouse Club, Vie (TV show), 67, 71-81; of mid-late 1960s, 102,

21, 31-32 104-107; of 1970s, 199, 201-202,

Midler, Bette, 12, 287, 304, 305 222, 225; of 1980s, 247, 268; of
Midnight Cowboy (mo\'ie). 201 1990s, 269, 271, 273, 278, 295, 296,

Mildred Pierce (mo\de), 48 290, 293, 296-298, 303; see also spe-

"militant" feminism, 188 cific movies

Miller, Henrv', Tropic of Cancer, 63 Mo\-ie Stars magazine, 38

Millett, Kate,' 191, 221, 227, 228-29. Mr. Ed (TV show), 11, 27, 143

232; Sexual Politics, 167, 178, 228 My magazine, 4. 194-95, 224, 225
Mimieux, Yvette, 78, 80 MTV 303
mimskirts, 6, 18, 103, 152 Munsters, Vie (TV show), 137
Miss America demonstration (1968), Murphy Broum {TV show), 273, 285
139-40, 142, 150, 151, 155, 156. music. 5-6. 13, 14. 15. 61: bubble
157-61, 173. 176 gum, 149; folk, 145-50; girl group,

MitcheU, Jom, 6, 304, 305 83-98; of late 1950s-mid 1960s,

Modern Saeen magazine, 38 83-98; of mid-late 1960s, 103,
Monroe, Marilyn, 8, 40, 42. 195 112-20, 141-43, 145-51; of 1970s,
Montagu, Ashley, The Natural Superior- 222, 304; of 1990s, 269, 273, 286,
ity of IVortien, 49 287-88, 292, 303-306; popular,
Montgomery', EUzabeth, 128 5-6. 13. 14, 15, 61, 83-98, 112-20,

Moonlighting (TV show), 274, 285 149; rock, 5-6, 13. 14, 15, 149-51;

Moore, Juanita, 34 see also specific performers and songs

Moorehead, Agnes. 132 "My Bo>-h-iend's Back" (song), 86, 90

Morgan, Robin. 139, 140, 157-61 My Favorite Martian {TV show), 26,

Morton, Bruce, 155 143

mother(s), 67, 72, 151, 278-79; of "My Guy" (song), 90
1940s, 46-54; of late 1940s-early My Viree Sons (TV show). 143, 285

1950s, 49-50, 54-56; of late My Two Dads (T\^ show), 285

1950s-early 1960s, 43-60, 67; of
mid-late 1960s, 101-102, 110, 120, narcissism. 27; of 1980s, 245-68
123-25, 137; of 1970s, 166, 174, National Council of Women. 181
175, 187, 225, 231, 233, 234; of National Defense Education Act
1980s, 274, 278; of 1990s, 269, 272, (1958), 23

276, 278-85. 295-307; teenage, 63; National Organization for Women,

working, 43-60, 187, 282-83 160, 165, 229
Morion Picture magazine, 38 National Plan of Action, 236
344 Index

National Women's Conference (1977, Oprah (TV show), 283

Houston), 235-37 Orbison, Roy, 96
NBC-TV, 155, 145, 166, 175-77, Our Bodies, Ourselves (book), 253
180-82, 277 Our Miss Brooks (TV show), 50, 200
Nelson, Ricky, 117 Owens, Shirley, 84-85, 92
New Left, 151, 155, 160
Neii^lywed Game, The (TV show), 150 Page, Patti, 86, 95
Newsday, 171 Pagha, Caniille, 244
news media, 10, 26, 268; on feminism, Paperbag Princess, The (book), 296
163-91, 193-96, 225-38, 244, Parents magazine, 283
292-93; of 1960s, 144-45, 150, Parent Trap, The (movie), 29
154-60; of 1970s, 163-91, 193-96, Parks, Rosa, 145

225-38, 277, 304; of 1990s, 269, "Party Lights" (song), 92-93

272-78, 282, 284, 292-94, 300; see Pat and Mike (movie), 49
also magazines; mass media; specific Patty Duke Show, The (TV show),
publications; television 108-10, 113, 120, 143
Newsweek magazine, 22, 38, 39, 66, Paul, Alice, 177

116, 159, 166, 170-71, 178, 181, Pauley,Jane, 277, 280

227-28, 283 Pawnbroker, Tlie (movie), 72
New York Herald Tribune, 21 PBS, 6
New York magazine, 194 Peace Corps, 23, 142
New York Post, 170 Pearl Harbor attack, 46
New York Radical Women, 157-60 penicillin, 66
New York Times, The, 52, 71, 124, 155, penis envy, 173
158, 180-81, 201, 243, 258 Peppard, George, 106
New York Times Magazine, The, 39, perfume, 11, 100, 104,251
115, 167,229 perkiness, 108-12, 270
Nickelodeon, 302 Perkins, Frances, 11
Nightline (TV show), 277 Perot, Ross, 17
Nineteenth Amendment, 177 Peter, Paul, and Mary, 143, 147-49
Nixon, Julie, 139, 154 Peter Pan (movie), 28, 30-31
Nixon, Pat, 173 Peyton Place (movie), 71
Nixon, Richard M., 4, 139, 154, 163; Photoplay magazine, 39, 100
-Kennedy debates, 26 Phyllis (TV show), 204, 208
Nixon, Tricia, 28, 139, 154, 161 Pillow Talk (movie), 71
Northern Exposure (TV show), 274 Planned Parenthood League, 64
Norton, Eleanor Holmes, 188 "Playboy" (song), 91
"Nowhere to Run" (song), 83, 93, 94 Playboy Clubs, 173
nuclear weapons, 22 P/ay/joy magazine, 139, 158, 215
Nyro, Laura, 6, 304, 305-306 Play Misty for Me (movie), 201
"Please Mr. Postman" (song), 90, 117
Oh! Susanna (TV show), 50, 200 "Please Please Me" (song), 114
"Open Your Heart" (video), 287 Pointer Singers, 304
 Index 345

Police Woman (TV show), 200, 209-12, Randolph, Jennings, 163, 181
215 Randy and the Rainbows, 96
politics, 7-8; of late 1950s-early 1960s, rape, 202, 210-11, 236, 244, 302-303;
23, 26-27, 38-41; of mid-late date, 79, 80, 294
1960s, 113, 119, 124, 125, 131, Rather, Dan, 16, 277
140-61; of 1970s, 167, 169, 178-79, Rawhide (TV show), 43
186, 196, 203, 226, 232-37; of Reader's Digest, 53-54, 61, 64, 66, 125
1980s, 246-47, 273; of 1990s, 244, Reagan, Nancy, 243
269-70, 273, 275, 277, 288-90, 300 Reagan, Ronald, 247, 249, 254, 260
Pollitt, Katha, 277 Reasoner, Harry, 178, 189, 194-96,
popular music, 5-6, 13, 14, 15, 61, 268
83-98, 112-20, 149; see also music; rebellion, 5, 14, 58, 81, 84, 85, 87, 92,

specific performers and songs 97, 98, 112, 118, 128, 138, 141-42,

population growth, 61, 64, 278 152, 292

Poseidon Adventure, The (movie), 201 Rebel Without a Cause (movie), 5, 71
Postman Always Rings Twice, The Redbook magazine, 200, 201
(movie), 48 Reddy Helen, 165, 218
pregnancy, 63, 73; films, 73-80; see also Redford, Robert, 278
mother(s) Reed, Donna, 36, 51, 137, 151

premarital sex, 61—81 Reeves, Martha, 92, 94, 304

Prentiss, Paula, 79 Reid, Natahe, 52
Presley, Elvis, 4, 5, 6, 84, 85, 116, 117, rehgion, 62
291 Remington Steele (TV show), 273
Pretty Woman (movie), 286 Repubhcan party, 8

Printer's Ink, 102 Rescue 911 (TV show), 269

Private Secretary (TV show), 50 Revlon, 246
"producer" vs. "consumer" ethos, 18 Reynolds, Debbie, 62
Pro vine, Dorothy, 107 Reynolds, Frank, 178-79
puberty, 60—62 Rhoda (TV show), 204, 208
pubHc demonstrations: of 1960s, Rifleman, Tlxe (TV show), 43, 285
139-40, 153-60; of 1970s, 163-64, PJggs, Bobby, 259
167, 177-85 Roaring Twenties, Tlie (TV show), 107
Robertson, Pat, 290
Quaid, Dennis, 5 rock music, 5-6, 13, 14, 15, 86,
Quarles, Norma, 175, 176, 181 149-51; see also music; specific per-

Quayle, Marilyn, 34, 244 formers and songs

Queen for a Day (TV show), 32-33, 36, Roiphe, Katie, 244
42, 270 Rolle, Esther, 204
Quindlen, Anna, 277 Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll,
The, 86
radio, 15, 46, 146; of late 1950s-early Ronettes, 92, 117
1960s, 83-98 Rookie of the Year (movie), 297
Raitt, Bonnie, 304, 305 Rooney, Andy, 278
 9

346 Index

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 51, 124, 151, 256 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,
Roseamie (TV show), 273, 284-85, 294 149
Rosie the Riveter, 45, 46, 49, 54 Shangri-Las, 86, 92, 94, 97
Ross, Diana, 18-19,96,201 "She Loves You" (song), 114
Ruckelshaus, JiU, 234 Shepherd, Cybill, 245, 274
Shindig (TV show), 3, 98, 108
Saannen, Alme, 175-78, 181 ShireUes, 3, 6, 83-85, 90, 92, 95, 97,

Sahnger, J. D., Tlie Catcher in the Rye, 98, 140, 142, 144, 291

143 Shrimpton, Jean, 3

Salt'n'Pepa, 303 Silly Putty, 24
Sands, Tommy, 116 Simon, Paul, 6
Sanford and Son (TV show), 204 Sinatra, Frank, 113
Sarandon, Susan, 278 Sing Along with Mitch (TV show), 26
Sargent, Dick, 131 Singing Nun, 113
Saturday Night Live (TV show), 12 Single Wliite Female (movie), 290
Saturday Review, 67 Sirens (TV show), 286
Sawyer, Diane, 272, 277 Sirk, Douglas, 33—36
Schakne, Bob, 182-83 Sisterhood Is Powerful (book), 224
Schary, Mrs. Saul, 181 sisterhood vs. individualism, 221-44,
Schlafly PhyUis, 199, 221, 222, 232-37 283-84, 290-91
Schwerner, Michael, 144 Sisters (TV show), 286
science and technology, 253; of late skin-care ads, 246-68
1950s-early 1960s, 21-22; of 1980s, Sleeping Beauty (movie), 28
252-56 Shck, Grace, 6
SCUM Manifesto, 141 Smeal, Eleanor, 234
self-help books, 237 Smith, Howard K., 163-64, 178-79,

Se/f magazine, 250 191, 195-96,235

Sesame Street (TV show), 296 Snow White (movie), 27, 28, 41, 55

Sevareid, Eric, 164, 184 Solanas, Valerie, 141

Seventeen magazine, 6, 99, 103, 108 "Soldier Boy" (song), 90

77 Sunset Strip (TV show), 107 Soviet Union, 21-22, 64
Sex (book), 288 space race, 21
sex discrimination, of 1970s, 167, Splendor in the Grass (movie), 78
176-77 Spock, Dr., 153
sexual harassment, 289-90 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, 1 1 , 262
sexuaHty, female, 15; of late 1950s-early Springfield, Dusty, 94
1960s, 25, 61-81, 84-98; of mid- Sputnik, 21, 22, 23, 25, 36, 55, 270
late 1960s, 99-121, 126-61; of Spy magazine, 10, 288
1970s, 166, 188, 201-19, 227-32; of Star Is Born, A (movie), 59
1980s, 258-68; of 1990s, 272, Starr, Ringo, 1 1

287-88, 301, 303; premarital, 61-81 Stemem, Gloria, 19, 69-70, 167, 199,

Sexual Revolution, 61—81, 85, 221-22, 227-31, 276; "The Moral

140-41, 270 Disarmament of Betty Coed," 69-70
 Index 347

Stevens, Connie. 74-75, 106-107 Vielma and Lxmise (movie). 278, 294
Sting, Vie {movie), 201 Viey Live by Xight (movie), 48
thighs, 1980s rniage of, 247, 258-66
Stone, Sharon, 290
Streep, Mer^'l, 278, 285 thirtysomething (TV show), 274

Streets of San Francisco, Vie (TV show). Thomas-Piill hearings. 289-90

209 Threlkeld. Richard, 183, 184

Student Non- Violent Coordinating Time Inc.. 166

Committee (SNCC), 142, 151 Time magazine, 7, 38, 39, 65. 67,

Students for a Democratic Societ\- 146-47, 167-70, 178, 181. 202.

(SDS), 142. 151, 155-56 228-29, 235. 275-76

Sugarfoot (TV show), 43 tomboys, 37
Sullivan. Ed, 114 "Too Many Fish m the Sea" (song). 91

Summer Place, A (movie), 10, 74, 76-77 Totenberg. Nina. 272, 273

Supreme Court, 65, 289-90, 300 Travers, Marv; 147-49, 160, 161
Supremes, 95, 96, 149 Trotta, Liz, 175, 176, 181

Surfside Six (TV show), 107 True Confessions, 63, 100

Susan Slade (movie). 74-75 Turner, Kathleen, 278

Swayze, John Cameron, 144 Turner. Lana, 34

"Sweet Talkin' Guy" (song), 83, 89-90. Turner, Tina, 6, 303

241 Turning Point, Vie (movie), 222

TV Guide, 199-201
"TaU Paul" (song), 84 T\ Radio Mirror magazine. 38
"

Taylor, James, 6 20/20 (TV show), 283

Taylor, Liz. 39, 62, 71 Twiggy, 103, 104
teach-ins, 4 "The Twist" (song). 93

'Teen magazine, 25, 99 "Twist and Shout" (song), 114

television, 3. 4, 10-11, 15. 16, 17, 24,

72. 291; coverage offemimsm, "Under My Thumb" (song). 97

163-91, 193-96, 225-38, 244, 292; umsex fad. 104-108

Disney 27-32; oflate 1940s-€arly "Uptown" (song) 92
1950s, 49-51; oflate 1950s-early USA Today, 243
1960s. 24, 26-33, 36-39, 43-44. 52. U.S. Xeu's and World Report. 39. 40. 125

68, 96, 98, 106-107; of mid-late

1960s, 102, 106-14, 125-38, 139-41. Valens, Ritchie. 6
Valley of the Dolls (movie). 59
147, 150, 153, 156, 157; news, 10,
26, 144-45, 150, 154-57, 163-91, Vanity Fmr magazine, 12. 290
193-96, 225-38, 272-78; of 1970s, Variety magazine, 72

163-67. 171-91, 193-219, 222. VCR, 28, 29

225-44, 297-98; of 1980s, 250, 258, Victoria's Secret, 263

268, 273-74; of 1990s, 269, 271-86, ViemamWar. 145, 150. 143. 155-56

293-96, 298-303; see also specific shows Village Voice, Vie, 259
"Tell Him" (song), 88, 161 violence against women. 235. 272,

Temple, Jean, 173-74 302-303

348 Index

Virginia Slims, 245-46 Wilson, Fhp, 204

Vogue magazine, 9, 20, 151, 250, 251, Winters, Katy, 166
259, 271 "Wishin' and Hopin'" (song), 88
Wizard ofOz, The (movie), 297-98
WACs, 46 Wolf, Naomi, 253
Wagner, Lindsay, 218 Womanpower (radio show), 46
Wagon Train (TV show), 26 Women, Men, and Media Project, 277
"Walk On By" (song), 88 Women's Christian Temperance Union,
Wallace, George, 145 181
Wall Street Journal, The, 10 Women's International Terrorist Con-
Walt Disney Presents (TV show), 28 spiracy from Hell (WITCH), 177
Walters, Barbara, 277 women's liberation movement, 6-8, 10,
Warhol, Andy 141 125, 142, 270, 275-76, 291, 300,
Warner Bros., 107 304; of 1960s, 156-61; of 1970s,
Warwick, Dionne, 88 163—91, 193—94; see also feminism
Washington Times-Herald, 39 Women's Strike for Equality, 163-64,
WAVES, 46 167, 177-85, 195
weddings, 37—38 Wonderful World of Disney The (TV
Weekly Readers, 21, 22 show), 28
WeUs, Mary 98, 117 Wonder Woman (TV show), 211,
West, Mae, 287 216-18
westerns, 43 Wood, Natalie, 3, 71, 74, 78, 291
West Side Story (movie), 72 Woodstock, 5
What Makes Women Buy, 56 Wordham, BiU, 185
"Where Have AH the Flowers Gone" work ethic, 18
(song), 148 Working Mother magazine, 283
Where the Boys Are (movie), 78-80 working mothers, 43-60, 187, 282-83
White House, 40 World War II, 13, 23, 45-47, 54, 63;
Who, 150 female labor force, 46-47, 54, 55
wife abuse, 236, 272 Wouk, Herman, 71
Wild One, The (movie), 5
Wilkes, Paul, 229 York, Dick, 131
Williams, Andy, 85, 117 "You Can't Hurry Love" (song), 91
Williams, Maurice, 96 "You Don't Own Me" (song), 90
Willis, Bruce, 274 Young, Lynn, 170
"Will You Love Me Tomorrow" (song), "You're Having My Baby" (song), 8
84-85, 92, 304 Your Show of Shows (TV show), 50
 Ihiit Ih lutlor

Susan Douglas is 3i professor of media and American stud-

J.
ies at Hampshire College and is the media critic for The Progres-

sive. She has also written for The Village Voice, The Nation, and
In These Times, and is the author o{ Inventing American Broadcast-

ing: 1899-1922. A graduate of Elmira College and Brown Uni-

versity, she lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her husband,
T. R. Durham, and their daughter, Ella.
 Media/Popular Culture U.S. $15.00
Can. $21.00

Praise for

fkrdk^irlsk
SELECTED AS ONE OF THE YEAR'S

TEN BEST BOOKS BY NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO

AND ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

'Provocative. ..rollicking. ..peppy and indignant. ..The most

original and engaging parts of Where the Bids Are are Ms.

Douglas's irreverent and sometimes very funny readings of

specific television shows and pop songs."

— The New York Times

'Her finely honed wit and sense of the absurd will keep you

turning the pages.... After reading Susan Douglas's media

history, you'll never regard television as an innocuous

^ ^ — The Detroit News and free Press

'What a pleasure it is to find Susan Douglas. ...Engagingly

written, Where the Girls Are provides a first-rate analysis

of the music, movies and TV imagery that helped shape

female psyches." — Newsweek

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2011