Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

  As the ’80s television backlash against independent women proceeded in fits and starts from season to season, a few shows managed to survive its periodic surges—“L.A. Law,” “Designing Women,” and “The Golden Girls” are some examples. But overall, it succeeded in depopulating TV of its healthy independent women and replacing them with nostalgia-glazed portraits of apolitical “family” women. This process worked its way through television entertainment in two stages. First in the early ’80s, it banished feminist issues. Then, in the mid-’80s, it reconstructed a “traditional” female hierarchy, placing suburban home-makers on the top, career women on the lower rungs, and single women at the very bottom.

  FROM CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING TO CHEERLEADING

  For a brief period in the mid-’70s, prime-time television’s domestic series tackled political issues—and with them, a whole range of feminist subjects. They weren’t just restricted to single “issue” episodes; discussions about women’s rights were woven into the series’ weekly fabric. The Bunkers argued about women’s liberation constantly in “All in the Family,” Maude openly discussed abortion and, on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Lou Grant’s wife, Edie, went to consciousness-raising sessions and eventually left her husband.

  By 1978, these programs had all been canceled; and the few programmers who tried to sell the networks on programs with feminist themes encountered fierce resistance. In 1980 Esther Shapiro, ABC’s vice president for miniseries (one of the few women ever to attain such a post), tried to interest her male colleagues in a script based on Marilyn French’s novel The Women’s Room. The script’s author had come to Shapiro after CBS had turned her down. “It was terrific,” Shapiro recalls. “And I thought, this is something we have to get on television.” It also seemed like a guaranteed hit. The book was a huge best-seller; women had loved the story of the liberated housewife who leaves home.

  But convincing the network turned into what Shapiro recalls as “the most grueling experience” of her career. The men were monolithic in their opposition. No matter what argument she used, “all I got back was an absolute no,” she says. Not only would they personally stonewall the idea, they assured her, no advertiser would touch the feminist-tainted subject matter either. Shapiro launched a campaign on the show’s behalf, sending telegrams to the most recalcitrant executives, even hanging signs on the men’s bathroom door that read WOMEN’S ROOM. But the men just responded with the ratings argument: “They said it wouldn’t get more than an eleven share,” she says. “They treated it like its audience was a minority, which seemed strange to me. I mean, women are fifty-four percent of the population.”

  Finally, she persuaded the network’s executives to run “The Women’s Room” simply to set off another show that they were very eager to air, a stock sexploitation number called Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. The network men agreed but instructed her to shrink “The Women’s Room” from a miniseries to a one-night special. And the network’s Standards and Practices division insisted it air only with a disclaimer assuring viewers the show was set in the past and not meant to be relevant to current times. When such right-wing groups as Reverend Donald Wildmon’s National Federation of Decency heard that ABC would be dramatizing this women’s liberation drama, they inundated the network with boycott threats, and advertisers canceled all but four minutes of the fourteen minutes’ worth of commercial spots. Nonetheless, “The Women’s Room” finally aired, and it received a huge 45 share (the highest rated movie on TV that week), prompted a raft of positive mail, and won an Emmy.

  caught in the first waves of the backlash, too. They figured they had an original concept when they first drafted “Cagney and Lacey”: two strong, mature, and fully formed female characters, one single, one married, who are partners on the police force. “The original script was kind of an outrageous boisterous comedy; we even had a ring of male prostitutes,” Corday recalls. “What we were trying to do was turn everything around to a feminist point of view.” But even after Corday toned down the script and brought on her husband, influential producer Barney Rosenzweig, to pitch it, “Cagney and Lacey” took six years to sell. They were turned down everywhere: movie studios, independent production companies, the networks.

  Rosenzweig recalls hearing the same complaint wherever he went: “These women aren’t soft enough. These women aren’t feminine enough.” The Hollywood executives were even upset that the women used “dirty words,” even though it was nothing more than a few damns and hells. As he struck out again and again, Rosenzweig recalls, “[Barbara] Corday said to me, ‘The women’s movement is going to pass me by [before the show gets sold].’” She wasn’t far wrong.

  CBS executives finally decided to air “Cagney and Lacey” as a television movie in 1981. When it received a smash-hit 42 share, the network agreed to produce the series. Rosenzweig cast Meg Foster to play the single woman. After two episodes, CBS executives canceled the show, claiming bad ratings. Rosenzweig convinced them to give the show another try—but they complained that the women were “too tough” and Foster, especially, wasn’t sufficiently genteel and would have to go. “I said I can’t review the show unless we have a casting change,” Harvey Shephard, then senior vice president of programming, recalls. “Meg Foster came across in this role as being masculine,” CBS vice president Arnold Becker explains later. “Mind you, they were policemen, and the notion of women policemen is not easily acceptable.” Rosenzweig replaced her with the blond Sharon Gless.

  Still the network programmers weren’t satisfied. CBS executives were obsessed with the single-woman character, pestering the show’s writers with endless demands to enhance her femininity, soften her rhetoric and appearance, make her more respectably “high class.” An additional $15,000 was budgeted for “classier clothes,” her feminism muted, and a genteel Westchester County upbringing added to her family background.

  The CBS executives were especially distressed by the character’s varied romantic encounters. “Cagney’s sexual habits were constantly under scrutiny, not only by the network but by the head of programming,” Rosenzweig says. “I would say, ‘You don’t mind when Magnum P.I. has sex,’ and he would say, ‘That’s different.’ That Cagney slept with some-one cheapened her, he thought.” Shephard, CBS’s programming chief, says he was worried that she would “come off as promiscuous,” which would be a problem because then she wouldn’t be “a positive role model.” CBS executive Becker explains the anxiety and interference over Cagney’s behavior this way: “Well [Lacey], she was married, and so they did have occasion to show her in her home being tender. But [Cagney] was single so that opportunity was not there, so it became more difficult to portray her as being vulnerable.” And why did she need to be portrayed as vulnerable? “Because that’s the way the vast majority of Americans feel women should be. . . . I wonder how many men there are in the U.S. today who’d be anxious to marry a hard boiled female cop.” Becker then notes, somewhat sheepishly, that “my daughter might kill me for saying that.” She is a lawyer, he says, and such an “extreme feminist” that she actually corrects him when he refers to grown women as “girls.”

  The network really clamped down on episodes that centered on feminist issues. On one segment that dealt with the ERA, Rosenzweig wanted to ask feminist leader Gloria Steinem to play a bit role. As appalled as if the show’s creators had selected Son of Sam for a cameo, executives in the network’s Standards and Practices division barred her appearance. Then several affiliates pulled the whole episode anyway, a few hours before air time, contending that the women’s rights subject matter would offend female viewers.

  An even greater furor erupted over an episode in which Cagney was to become pregnant and consider whether to have an abortion. The script provided that she would miscarry in the closing scene so she would never actually have to make the decision, but this was still too unsavory for CBS programming executives. Finally, the show’s writers reworked the script to duck the whole issue. In the final version, titled “Choices
,” Cagney only mistakenly thinks she is pregnant. Lacey chastises her for not behaving more responsibly—and tells her that if she had been pregnant she should have gotten married. Abortion is never offered as a choice.

  In a later episode, about the bombing of an abortion clinic, the network’s broadcast standards officials sent Rosenzweig a three-page single-spaced memo “filled with thou-shalt-nots,” he recalls. They were especially upset that both women on the show were supporting a woman’s right to an abortion. Rosenzweig pointed out, to no avail, that the script was simply reflecting working women’s views in the real world, where 70 percent are pro-choice. Meanwhile outside the network, as soon as word leaked out about the upcoming episode, anti-abortion protesters mobilized and picketed local affiliates around the country. The controversy wound up on national talk shows and radio programs.

  The network’s executives said they were meddling with the show’s content only out of concern for female viewers, who might feel “intimidated” by working women like Cagney and Lacey. Rosenzweig told them: “ ‘I’ve got four thousand fan letters on my desk from women who don’t seem intimidated. What’s your research?’ They didn’t have any.” (In fact, the evidence in Becker’s own living room pointed in the other direction. His wife, a home-maker of thirty-five years, was a “big fan” of the show, he admits.) It was the CBS male programmers, not female viewers, who were uncomfortable with the two strong women of “Cagney and Lacey.” Becker complained at the time that the show’s women were “inordinately abrasive, loud, and lacking warmth.” An-other CBS executive told TV Guide that the heroines “were too harshly women’s lib. . . . These women on ‘Cagney and Lacey’ seemed more in-tent on fighting the system than doing police work. We perceived them as dykes.”

  Ultimately, the show’s staff tried to save the show by disavowing its own politics. For public consumption, they began denying that the show had any feminist content—even though the show regularly took feminist positions on employment discrimination, sexual harassment, domestic violence, women’s health, and prostitution. “Cagney and Lacey” producer April Smith assured the press that the show’s crew had “no desire to turn it into a women’s lib vehicle.” On a talk show, the show’s co-star, Sharon Gless, asserted that “Cagney and Lacey” was not a “feminist” show because that label was too “limiting.” When a women’s studies scholar wrote in with some questions about the show’s stance on women, she received a chilly letter from the show’s appreciation club director, informing her, “We do not wish to be involved in discussing our views on feminism.”

  Recantation, however, wasn’t enough to appease the network. In 1983, CBS canceled “Cagney and Lacey.” After tens of thousands of letters poured in from loyal viewers (an avalanche out-stripping the last leading fan-mail recall campaign, for “Lou Grant,” by ten to one), after Tyne Daly (Lacey) won the Emmy for best dramatic actress, and after the show scored number one in the ratings during summer reruns, the network backed off and put the show back on the air. The program went on to win five more Emmys, including best dramatic series. Nonetheless, in the fall of 1987, CBS pulled “Cagney and Lacey” from its regular time and reassigned it to a doomed time slot. By the following season, “Cagney and Lacey” was gone for good.

  NESTERS AND PATRIARCHS

  “Nesting will be a crucial theme this year for returning shows,” TV Guide announced at the start of the 1988 fall season, an observation that turned out to be something of an understatement. On prime-time series from “Cheers” to “Beauty and the Beast,” “Designing Women” to “Newhart,” “L.A. Law” to “Night Court,” dozens of female characters succumbed to “baby craving,” charged off to infertility clinics, and even gave birth on air. One show fed off another’s fever. “Thirtysomething” devoted an entire episode to a delivery. Then, on the season premiere of “L.A. Law,” the expectant mother discussed this “thirtysomething” birth sequence in her Lamaze class. That same night, on “Cheers,” another mom went into labor. And that same week, on the “Cosby” show, the men fantasized that they were pregnant.

  The birthing festival itself was benign enough, if a little monotonous. But the networks weren’t just bringing on the babies; they were bringing back regressive fantasies about motherhood and marriage. TV programmers began recycling their childhood memories of ’50s television; before long, “retroprogramming,” as it was dubbed, ruled the airwaves. The networks brought back ’50s television quite literally, with a deluge of reruns and “new” fare like “The New Leave It to Beaver,” “The New Newlywed Game,” and “The New Dating Game,” none of which exactly offered progressive views of womanhood. At the same time, the networks revived the ’50s family shows more subtly, inside a modern shell. On a few of the programs, the mothers ostensibly have jobs, but their employment is in title only. The wife in “Family Ties” has a “career,” but regular viewers would be hard pressed to name it. (She’s an architect.) The wife in the “Cosby” show may be the first attorney to hold down a full-time job without leaving home; when she does ply her trade, it’s only to litigate domestic disputes in the family living room. These women are the same old TV housewives with their housecoats doffed, their “careers” a hollow nod to the profound changes in women’s lives.

  The “Cosby” show may present a black family, but it was the show’s presentation of the nuclear family more than its racial makeup that network executives—and Ronald Reagan, one of its most loyal fans—found so appealing. “Bill Cosby brought masculinity back to sitcoms,” NBC entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff told the press. In episode after episode, Cosby’s Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable—who is, appropriately, an obstetrician—reasserts his role as family potentate, quelling all insubordination with his genial but authoritarian voice. Political concerns are absent; teaching children to obey dad is the show’s primary mission. Some typical “issues” examined in this upper-middle-class family: a daughter’s reluctance to change out of a party dress and a son’s five-minute tardiness from basketball practice. “I do believe in control,” Cosby told Time. He also believed in a “traditional” division of domestic duties, judging by the advice he dispensed to men in his ’80s best-seller, Fatherhood. “You see, the wives pretend to turn over the child-raising job to us fathers, but they don’t really mean it,” Cosby assured male readers.

  Other TV programs didn’t even bother with these shallow acknowledgments of working women. Some of the mid-’80s shows were so packed with suburban moms tending cheaper-by-the-dozen broods, they seemed like reruns. “I’m becoming June Cleaver,” sighs one woman in “Full House,” accurately enough. Some shows literally were set in the past, like “The Wonder Years,” where it’s okay to show mom slaving over a hot stove because the era is the prefeminist ’60s.

  Other nesting shows escaped the world of working women by retreating to fantasy countrysides. In shows like “Blue Skies” and “Just the Ten of Us,” dad packs the family in the station wagon and heads for a “better” life in rural America—where mom can stay home with a full litter of children and dad can return to sole-earner status. More than one of these TV families heads to Amish country, where women don’t work outside the home. Here, the bad city women learn “old-world” values. On “Aaron’s Way,” for example, an Amish aunt gives a pregnant girl a stern lecture on the virtues of female sacrifice; the reluctant teenager finally faces up to her “responsibilities” and agrees to have the baby. The men on these shows, meanwhile, regain their brawn: they are showcased chopping wood, renovating old water mills, and joining other strapping country fellows for old-fashioned barn raisings.

  The pastoral retreat might be interpreted as a mild rebellion against the capitalist rat race—though the characters’ homes are cluttered with enough consumer goods to assure advertisers that the revolt is not serious. But the march to the country is more forcefully a repudiation of American women’s changed standing in the work force. And typically in the nesting shows, it’s the housewife who serves as mouthpiece for the program
s’ periodic anti—career women tirades. Like late-’80s filmmakers, prime-time programmers resurrected the catfight. In “Just the Ten of Us,” the stay-at-home wife blasts “a rabble-rousing feminist.” She proves that she’s more of a woman for having stayed home, even if it does mean her poorly paid husband, a gym teacher at a Catholic school, must serve as solitary breadwinner for the overflowing household. A similar homage to the housewife at the career woman’s expense occurs in “Family Man.” A nasty female lawyer asks the home-making heroine how she can bear to stay home all day; that evening in bed with her husband, the housewife dramatizes the sort of tongue-lashing she’d like to give that career woman: “You are an idiot! You are a jerk! You big, fat yuppie phony!” Then she bursts into tears and, gazing up at her husband’s benevolent visage, whimpers, “You don’t care that I’m just a housewife?” He beams back. “I love it, I love it,” he assures her.

  At the same time that ’80s TV was busy saluting the domestic angels of ’50s TV, it was maligning mothers who dared step outside the family circle. The quest of the liberated wife who leaves home in “Raising Miranda” is reduced to a pathetic joke. Mom ran away after attending a “self-improvement workshop,” snickers Miranda, the superior daughter, an adolescent who becomes the dutiful surrogate mom to her macho blue-collar father. Her abundant housekeeping skills serve as a not-so-subtle rebuke of delinquent mom who, Miranda tells us disparagingly, “couldn’t do a load of laundry.” On “Blossom,” another deserted daughter is similarly disgusted with her indulgent mother. “She’s supposed to be in the kitchen, waiting for me after school,” she decrees, not “on the road, fulfilling her needs.” The rare shows that included working mothers tended to present them as incompetent, miserable, or neglectful. In “Who’s the Boss?” the mother is so selfishly self-absorbed by her professional ambitions that her muscular male housekeeper has to take charge of her kids.