Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture (Culture America) Review

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Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture (Culture America) ReviewI can remember as a young teenager cringing when Mary Richards in the Mary Tyler Moore Show demanded a raise with a quivering voice. It was played for laughs, but I worried about how I would handle similar situations. TV, as it happens, is not real life, and by the time the men at my first real job tried to needle me by saying the job was so easy that "even girls can do it," I had learned to at least bluff the confidence I didn't really feel and retort that "if a bunch of old men can do it, so can I." Lou Grant may have hated "spunk" but most non-TV guys seemed to enjoy sparring.
In Those Girls, Katherine Lehman examines TV shows like Charlie's Angels, That Girl, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, along with movies such as Peyton Place and The Stepford Wives, and novels including The Valley of the Dolls, Fear of Flying, and Coffee, Tea, or Me. She looks at how popular culture portrayed young single women during two decades when women's roles changed faster than many people could handle it.
Many of the early examples Lehman finds are cautionary, such as the 1960 movie Where the Boys Are in which women who stray too far from "good girl" behavior are punished severely. Even in 1977 in the movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar we could find the same sort of attitude that women who color outside the lines get what they deserve, in this case, to be brutally murdered.
Few of the media examples are very realistic, so the point of the investigation isn't to look to TV shows, etc. as a mirror of society, but to see which images of young single women in the 60s and 70s were considered entertaining and more important, acceptable. Professor Lehman researched not only the finished books, movies, etc., but also the drafts and production notes, showing the changes made along the way. For instance, Mary Richards was originally going to be a divorcée, but that was nixed in favor of her having just broken up with a long-time boyfriend. In 1970, being a divorcée was not all that shocking in real life, but not considered acceptable for a sitcom heroine. By 1976, it was perfectly acceptable for Rhoda, a Mary Tyler Moore Show spinoff character, to be divorced.
As I read about books, movies, and TV that I hadn't seen, and reevaluated the ones I had, I also wondered about the shows and books that Lehman didn't address in her book, such as Laverne and Shirley, who despite being slapstick buffoons, were making it on their own.
Lehman did briefly address Honey West, a one season (thirty episodes) series in 1965-66 that featured a young, single woman who ran a detective agency. I saw the series when it came out on DVD last year and was bowled over by how ahead of its time it was. According to Lehman, that's why it was canceled. It ran opposite Gomer Pyle, USMC and lost in the ratings war. That's right, it took a whole platoon of Marines an entire TV season to beat one girl detective. If she'd been able to hold out a year, she and Emma Peel from The Avengers, which debuted in America in 1967, would have kicked their butts.
Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture (Culture America) Overview

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