The sentiment expressed many years ago by Miss Kitty of TV’s “Gunsmoke” is true enough, in most cases.
But I’ll admit there are some things about women that I don’t know, and some of what I don’t know I’ll be able to learn beginning Saturday when the Museum of Broadcast Communications, that playfully informative oasis in the city’s Cultural Center, kicks off a three-month exhibition called “From `My Little Margie’ to `Murphy Brown’: Images of Women on Television.”
It starts with a benefit luncheon at the Hotel Nikko that will feature a seminar with such gray-haired stars as Gail (“My Little Margie”) Storm, Jane (“Father Knows Best”) Wyatt and Betty (“The Golden Girls”) White.
As part of the whole shebang, some woman named Mary Ann Watson, Ph.D., has written an essay titled “Women’s Lives on the Small Screen.”
It contains such observations as:
– “Storytellers, by and large, kept women in their prescribed places until women themselves started to reinvent their worlds.”
– “Throughout the history of television, women characters have, by far, most often been portrayed as people whose lives are lived vis-a-vis their husbands and children.”
– “As women gained creative clout in the television industry, it’s clear that female characters grew more authentic, and women’s lives on the small screen more valued.”
That’s all a bit academic for me. Trying to chart the course of changing women’s roles in TV is a massive undertaking, and the museum has organized a number of seminars and special screenings toward that end.
In one way, the story of women in TV is a history of how men have presented them and, on a personal level, how I have responded to them.
In a nutshell I think that no matter what sort of recent realistic role models have been offered by such producers-and prominent FOBs-as Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, women have always, and continue to, come in all TV shapes and sizes and attitudes.
Look at “Roseanne” and ask yourself if what happens in that popular half-hour is so different from the wisecracking on “Make Room for Daddy.” Look at Janine Turner on “Northern Exposure” and ask yourself if she doesn’t evoke images of Miss Kitty from “Gunsmoke.”
There have always been forceful women on TV, as well as women who were mere objects. As a man writing about this subject, I’m burdened by my previous viewing and fantasies.
I know I didn’t care for one second about whether June Cleaver was a proper role model or realistic portrait of American momdom. I was, I recall, more interested in how Jeannie got into and out of her magic bottle than whether the character might be harmful to the minds of teenage girls.
TV, especially in its fictional facets, is meant to be a diversion, not to provide a forum for debate. When it is dragged into academia, much of the fun is left behind.
That doesn’t mean the museum seminars, even with their weighty look,won’t have their playful moments.
The seminars and some of their participants include “Images of Wives and Mothers,” with Barbara Billingsley of “Leave It to Beaver” and Shirley Jones of “The Partridge Family,” at 2 p.m. Sept. 26; “Images of Teenagers,” with Elinor Donahue of “Father Knows Best” and Kellie Martin of “Life Goes On,” at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 7; “Images of Super Heroines,” with Barbara Bain of “Mission: Impossible” and Julie Newmar of “Batman” and “My Living Doll,” at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 21; “Images of Working Women,” with Blair Brown of “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,” at 2 p.m. Nov. 20; and “Images of African-American Women,” with Esther Rolle of “Good Times” and Regina Taylor of “I’ll Fly Away,” at 6:30 p.m. Dec. 16.
This is an interesting package ($25 per seminar, $10 for students and senior citizens), and among the other seminar participants are critics and academics.
I imagine that most of the people attending will be doing so to see and hear the stars and not to listen to Ph.D.s and critics debate the psychological implications of Cat Woman or Marge Simpson. I’ll probably hang around and listen to some of what the panelists have to say, all the while thinking of my favorite TV women:
– Amanda Blake, Kitty Russell on “Gunsmoke.”
What was she exactly?
She was the owner and operator of the Longbranch Saloon, and for 20 years she had an ill-defined relationship with Matt Dillon. But she wasn’t-flying in the face of film and TV tradition and the “Gunsmoke” radio serial-a prostitute or former prostitute. She was a woman in charge.
In the face of TV contemporaries such as Margaret Anderson (Jane Wyatt) in “Father Knows Best” or even the mothers of one’s own neighborhood, Kitty Russell was an attractive rarity, a socially and economically independent woman not about to bat her eyes at the sight of any tall, strong marshal. And those weird frilly dresses! Who else dressed like that?
– Elizabeth Montgomery, Serena in “Bewitched.”
Of course, it would be more obvious to choose her cousin Samantha; Montgomery played both characters. But what always bothered me about “Sam” was why such an attractive and resourceful woman (she was a witch with considerable powers) would marry such a drip as Darrin Stephens (Dick York and later Dick Sargent). Talk about disturbing images: Darrin was a typical white-collar wimp, slavishly cowing in the face of his boss.
So while Sam may have been some person’s idea of dishy domesticity, Serena was infinitely more intriguing than her cousin. She was a vixen-mean, spiteful and out for her own pleasure, even if that meant tormenting Darrin or anyone else who got in her way.
In her giggly self-indulgence, she was a percursor of Me Decade mania-a party girl-and far from how Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” characterized TV images of the American woman in a 1964 TV Guide article: “a stupid, unattractive, insecure little household drudge.”
– Mary Tyler Moore, Laura Petrie in “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and Mary Richards in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
In the first show, as the wife of writer Rob Petrie (Van Dyke), she helped form the couple that was the TV version of Jack and Jackie Kennedy (or at least the image I had of them then). They were handsome, modern and, for TV, sophisticated. And is there a young boy of the time who doesn’t remember Laura in tights-as safely sexy an image as TV could muster at the time.
No less attractive by the time she was on her own in Minneapolis in the latter show, Moore’s Mary Richards was vastly different but still accessible.
I’ll borrow a bit of $5 thinking to explain this. It comes from Gerard Jones in his book “Honey, I’m Home! Sitcoms: Selling the American Dream.” He writes that “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” “spoke not to the New Woman, not the self-conscious feminist but to the woman in between-the nice girl groomed to be June Cleaver or Samantha Stevens and then suddenly required to be an independent adult.”
