National Post (National Edition)
Mary Tyler Moore used the sitcom to further women’s issues.
HOW FEMINISM FOLLOWED MARY TYLER MOORE’S WONDERFUL AND IMPERFECT LEGACY
Before there was Detective McNulty, Tony Soprano, Walter White, Francis Underwood or Don Draper, there was Mary Tyler Moore.
Long before “prestige TV” shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, House of Cards and Mad Men, women knew television could do more than merely offer entertainment. They didn’t need critics or Emmy voters to tell them that television could comment on and even inspire social progress. They didn’t require anyone telling them which shows to take seriously.
In fact, the most empowering TV shows weren’t meant to be very serious at all. They were sitcoms that radically normalized the female experience while subversively reassuring viewers with the comforts of punch lines and laugh tracks.
It took men decades to discover that shows watched in the intimacy of living rooms could profoundly affect the way viewers think and act outside the confines of private homes. Perhaps women got the jump on them because, initially, they were the ones spending all the time at home.
As evidenced by the outpouring of grief and praise over Moore’s death, the 80-year-old star was more than just an actor. She was a feminist icon who pioneered the sitcom as a medium to progress the women’s movement. Inside Amy Schumer, Girls, Parks and Recreation, The Mindy Project, Sex and the City, Roseanne and Golden Girls all owe a heaping debt of gratitude to Moore, without whom they very well might not have existed.
In the beginning, it was as simple — and complicated — as wearing pants. Prior to Moore’s role on the Dick Van Dyke Show as stay-at-home-mom Laura Petrie, all the stay-at-home-moms on television wore flouncy skirts and impractical heels. In a revolutionary move, Moore opted to wear capris when the sitcom premiered in 1961.
She told Variety in 2012 that she wanted the character to represent “what I do in real life, what my friends do, and that’s be a realistic wife who wears pants and doesn’t care how she looks.” Moore refused to be a man’s idealized version of a subservient housewife who was seen but not heard. At first, CBS resisted the wardrobe alteration, only allowing Moore to wear pants in one scene per episode. Sponsors also complained to the network about the “fit” of her pants.
However, Moore and the Dick Van Dyke team continued to sneak capris into more and more scenes until they became her character’s trademark. Women across North America were inspired and the pants became a major trend. For the first time, wives began to reclaim fashion for themselves and not just as costuming for their husband’s return from work. By the time Carrie Bradshaw spent her dubiously large writer’s paycheque on a closet full of Manolo Blahniks and wore imprudent pink tutus in the streets of New York, it was taken for granted that women dressed for no one but themselves.
Where Moore really made her impact, however, was on her namesake series The Mary Tyler Moore Show. When it premiered in 1970, women on television were still supporting characters in their own homes. They were always married, rarely capable of more than uttering a few humorous quips and certainly weren’t career women.
Moore took the airwaves by storm when she appeared as Mary Richard, a single 30-something woman who lived alone (and liked it!) while making it on her own as an associate producer in a male-dominated TV newsroom. A man or children didn’t define her happiness — she was independent, smart and complicated long before Blanche Devereaux or Hannah Horvath.
A lot of men expected the show to fail. Network execs doubted it would succeed and scheduled it in the least desirable time slot. To say critics disliked it would be an understatement. Time magazine called the show a “disaster,” and the St. Petersburg Times dubbed Mary a “spinster.” Obviously, they were wrong — the show ran for seven successful seasons.
By the time The Mary Tyler Moore Show concluded in the spring of 1977, the program had fearlessly tackled women’s issues like birth control, abortion and pay equity — all for the first time on television. The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s feminist politics didn’t end on screen, either. It would still (sadly) be considered progressive today for its team of female producers and writers. In her book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: And All the Brilliant Minds Who Made The Mary Tyler Moore Show a Classic, Keishin Armstrong writes: “Producers learned to skilfully walk a line between innuendo and explicitness that often allowed them to push boundaries while acting innocent.”
It was a delicate balance that could never have been achieved by a drama, despite it often being considered a more impactful genre. It’s no coincidence that other marginalized voices have often found their first major television moments in the non-threatening world of sitcoms.
Moore herself was a complicated woman. Despite her wins for women, she refused Gloria Steinem’s invitation to join the feminist movement, saying she “believed, and still do, that women have a very major role to play as mothers. It’s very necessary for them to be with their children.” Later in life she became an ardent supporter of Fox News. She openly battled diabetes and alcoholism, writing about her struggles in her 1995 autobiography After All long before it became de rigueur for women to publish immensely personal essays about everything from drug use to mental health issues and their sex lives.
While some have held this up as a blight against Moore’s iconic status when it comes to women’s rights, there’s something about it that’s actually perfectly suited to modern ideas of feminism. Ultimately, feminism isn’t about forging a more perfect woman. It’s about allowing women to be imperfect in ways men have always been permitted to be.
Often, to achieve this, women have also had to be funny. Moore tapped into that secret early on, and feminists have followed in her footsteps ever since.