Ask Marie C. Wilson to name television’s most realistic working woman and she’ll direct you to outer space.
“Captain Janeway on the Star Trek sequel is the most wonderful, decisive woman on TV,” says Wilson, president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, which invented Take Our Daughters to Work Day. “If I had to send my daughters to work with someone on TV, I’d take them to see her.”
Television has entered the frenzy known as “sweeps month,” and as the networks trot out what they consider their best shows, Wilson and others took a look at how prime-time television has portrayed working women and whether the latest pictures being broadcast are realistic ones.
Some observers say outer space isn’t far enough to go for accurate images because they don’t exist at all.
“It’s completely unrealistic,” says Pat Quinn, a talent agent with Metropolitan Talent Agency in Los Angeles. “All of the women are 28-year-olds who are successful lawyers with 13-year-old children. Women are never seen as having any kind of education or skills needed to get those good jobs. You’re never going to see someone like (former Washington Post publisher) Katharine Graham on television. And if you do she’ll be sexless, old and a bitch.”
Even some of the new shows that seemed to promise realistic portrayals of today’s work environment have fallen short, says Ellen Bravo, executive director of 9to5, National Association of Working Women.
” `Temporarily Yours,’ (which traces a woman’s experiences with various temp jobs), completely glamorizes temp work,” she says. “It makes it seem like people work temp jobs because they’re interesting or fun, when in fact it’s often because they can’t find anything else. The show makes it look like just another fun thing young singles can do.”
The list of unrealistic workers rolls on: Caroline whines and waffles through her half hour in the city; Brooke Shields in “Suddenly Susan” takes the ditsy prize; and even Elaine, always smart and sassy, got her high-powered position in “Seinfeld” only by default and alienated her entire staff her first day as the boss. Although Phylicia Rashad (attorney Clair Huxtable on “The Cosby Show”) is often named as one of the few good television role models for black women, critics note that she never actually seems to work.
Other observers point to real strides in characters like Murphy Brown, a successful broadcast professional; Roseanne, who brought blue-collar work to television; and Cybill, who in one episode gave up an important acting job after her boss put her head on a thinner woman’s body for a billboard.
“We’ve come a long way from `Charlie’s Angels,’ where women detectives were running around in bikinis,” notes Iris Grossman, vice president of talent and casting at Turner Network Television.
Hour-long dramas generally rate high marks for their multi-dimensional women. Agent Dana Scully on “The X-Files” for example, comes across as a strong professional, respected by her male counterpart.
“Most of the sitcoms leave women just below the glass ceiling,” says Laurie Crumpacker, dean of Susquehanna University’s School of Arts and Sciences, who researches women’s roles on television. “But (the character played by) Christine Lahti on `Chicago Hope’ . . . lets us look at the problems and conflicts inherent in the transformation of the work force that has brought women forward.”
There’s no doubt that television has made some significant changes to reflect those shifts in the work force. Television women of the 1950s and 1960s didn’t work much at all, although plenty of real women did. June Cleaver was strictly a stay-at-home mom, and we knew vaguely that Laura Petrie had some sort of dancer’s job before she married Rob.
Things began to change in the 1970s, when middle-class women began entering the work force in droves.
That’s when Mary Tyler Moore turned from quavery-voiced Laura into that seminal working woman, Mary Richards, whose hat-tossing optimism signaled a thumbs-up for thousands of working-women wannabes who watched her.
“She symbolized the career girl,” remembers Grossman, who is president of Women in Film, an organization of women in the entertainment industry. “She was the one I wanted to be.”
“In the 1970s the women’s movement was reflected on TV; women finally started doing different things,” says Cristina Pieraccini, a professor of communication studies at the State University of New York at Oswego. Unfortunately, she notes, they were doing too many things. “They were all superwomen, with the most extreme example being the `Bionic Woman.’ The networks were saying, `Oh yes, women now have jobs, so let’s put them in jobs now on TV.’ But it was a really distorted view.”
To Pieraccini, the shows of 1980s best captured the realities of working women.
“That was when TV responded to some of the criticism about the shows of the ’70s,” she says. “My favorite show is `Cagney and Lacey,’ not just because the two women were police officers, but because every show had a secondary theme about other aspects of their lives, like day care, or menopause or divorce.”
It’s also a show that illustrates how hard it is to get networks to run something real about working women on television, notes Julie D’Acci, author of “Defining Women: Television and the Story of `Cagney and Lacey’ ” (University of North Carolina Press, $16.95) and an associate professor of communication arts and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin. The show’s writers and producers had to wait nearly a decade before a network (CBS) would take a look at their pilot, she says, and then the show went through many changes.
“If you watch the (series) from its beginning to its end,” she says, “you see a lot of the struggles that writers and producers and actresses have in trying to portray working women in a more realistic way.”
Not surprisingly, one study found that television does its best job with working women when there are women behind the scenes.
“When you have at least one woman in a position of power, they create more powerful on-screen portrayals,” says Martha Lauzen, an associate professor of communications at San Diego State University. Her study of the 1995-96 prime-time season examined 65 series and concluded that female characters tended to be defined by their marital status, instead of their jobs. But when at least one of the show’s writers, directors or producers was a woman, Lauzen discovered, female characters were more likely to speak, introduce topics, have the last word, interrupt and advise others.
It is hard to get an accurate reflection of working women onto the screen, agrees Joanna Kerns, an actress and producer who played Maggie Malone Seaver on “Growing Pains” in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Still, television has gotten a lot better, she adds, citing the way her character grappled with tough issues about work and family. “A woman can work all day and get tired on television now,” she says.
That’s true, but she’s usually a middle-class, white woman with a professional job, notes Karen Nussbaum, director of the AFL-CIO’s working women’s department. “There are a few, often successful TV characters who aren’t just professional women,” she says.
Roseanne, for example, has worked as a telemarketer, a waitress and in a factory. She always asserts herself and often demonstrates how badly women in such positions can be treated.
“But you’d be hard-pressed to find any actual secretaries who, after all, are still the largest sector of the work force in this country,” Nussbaum says, adding that one out of four women who works has a clerical job. “The Drew Carey Show” does feature a secretary, but merely a green-eye-shadowed, poorly dressed parody, critics say.
And although there are a lot of female police officers on the tube these days, “police are about 5 percent of the population,” Nussbaum says. “We’re glad the shows are there because they at least indicate that women are part of the work environment, but it still means it’s hard for girls to find realistic role models and for women to see themselves reflected on TV.”
That’s especially true for minorities, Nussbaum and others say. But that gap isn’t limited to portrayals of working women, notes Rose Catherine Pinkney, vice president of comedy development at Paramount Network Television.
“You just don’t see that broad a perspective of African-Americans or minorities in general,” says Pinkney, who is black. “I don’t think there’s any prejudice against women of color who work.”
Even Murphy Brown, whose realism sparked so much debate in past years, seems exaggerated to some critics.
“Women who are seen as being fulfilled and successful at work are very dysfunctional when you take them out of that setting,” Lauzen notes. “Murphy Brown pays for her success with her absolute failure in the domestic setting. Ultimately she loses, and I think that’s a very interesting message.”
But is the message wrong if it’s real?
“I think the writers made a brave choice to show a woman who can’t have it all,” Kerns says. “It doesn’t always all work. We were sold a bill of goods when people said it did.”
And the alternatives, the new young women on the scene, are certainly no better, Crumpacker says. “The newer sitcoms have women who are not only subordinate but ditsy,” she says, adding that we may be seeing a backlash against successful women like Murphy Brown.
We’re also seeing what advertisers apparently want to see–younger characters for a younger market, D’Acci notes.
“By the 1980s the big three networks saw Fox taking away a young audience with shows like `Melrose Place,’ she says. “So in the ’90s we’ve seen them scrambling to get a share of the Generation Xers.”
That might not be so bad, critics say, if television would take the opportunity to show some career realities to young, female viewers.
Instead, it gives us glitz or, at best, a glimpse at something most women never see.
“Now we see some characters getting pregnant, like Sharon Lawrence (on `NYPD Blue’) and Helen Hunt on `Mad About You,’ ” says Bravo.
She had hoped to hire one of the actresses for a public-service announcement that would tell young women about a federal law that lets them take a maternity leave and keep their jobs.
“But then both characters quit their jobs to have their babies,” Bravo says. “For most women, this is not a choice.”
Still, television often does reflect, with a distorted mirror, what’s really out there.
“Television doesn’t set the standard for society; it always lags behind,” Lauzen says. “But it does focus like a laser beam on situations, making them larger than life. The workplace is still quite treacherous for women, so I can’t say things in the real world are much better than they are on TV.”
And much of prime-time television exists, after all, to entertain. If you remember that, says Wilson, it can be used as a tool.
“One of the reasons women should take their daughters to work is that it’s a way for girls to measure reality against the world of television,” she says. “You should watch TV with your daughters. When they watch `Friends,’ for example, you need to sit down with them and say, `I wonder how they pay for that Central Park apartment when nobody really works. Hmmm. Somebody’s got a trust fund.’ “
QUESTIONABLE WORK
Unrealistic portrayals of women at work, perhaps epitomized by “Charlie’s Angels,” continue to the present day.
SUCCESSFUL WORKING WOMEN
Landmarks in women at work on TV: Mary Tyler Moore as an independent career woman, Phylicia Rashad as one of the few black professional women, Roseanne representing blue-collar workers and Gillian Anderson, whose X-files character is identified with her job and talent instead of her gender.
