Mary Tyler Moore’s guide to leaning in
Maybe I’m biased. Like Mary Richards, producer on “The Six O’Clock News” at WJM-TV in Minneapolis, I’m a single female journalist in her 30s who works out of a big Midwestern city.
But as played by Mary Tyler Moore, who died last week, Mary was more than a faded symbol of second-wave feminism.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show ended its seven-year, mostly top 10 run on CBS three years before I was born in 1980. I first saw it on “Nick at Nite” when I was 12, curled up with blankets and the penciled pages of my half-written “novels” by my side.
I saw something I wanted in the world that Mary Richards built for herself. Her home had personality and was filled with friends. Romance was part of her life, though not her priority.
While I wasn’t yet thinking of journalism as my future, she gave it allure. She was passionate about her work on a local news program. It seemed like a public service that earned her respect. And as unconventional as Mary’s life was in the 1970s, the hostility toward women in media today, from violent online harassment to belittling by political candidates, makes it seem quite contemporary even now.
Don’t let those adorable neck kerchiefs and pleated miniskirts fool you. Forty years after she went off the air, Mary Richards’s commitment to job, her colleagues and, most of all, to herself still ring true for young women like myself who are trying to “make it after all.”
Some episodic lessons:
You can be nice – and strong.
She “turns the world on with her smile.” She’s insistently pleasant and earnest. It’s not a facade to make people like her; it’s her authentic self. She calls her boss Mr. Grant, while everyone else calls him Lou. She’s good humored and honest, terrific qualities in journalism, even if it took awhile for some people to realize that. Once, an established reporter told me I wasn’t cynical enough to make it. I had a sudden vision of Lou and Mary’s first meeting. “You’ve got spunk,” he infamously tells her. “I hate spunk.”
Stand up for others, and yourself.
When Mary has a chance to hire a sportscaster, she picks a woman, a former Olympic swimmer. Lou hates it. The news writer Murray assumes she’s just a “dummy in a tank suit.” Mary calls them out. “The idea of hiring Barbara Jean Smathers to do sports is not dumb,” she tells Lou. “What’s dumb is rejecting the idea because of some stupid prejudice. That is dumb.” (The live studio audience goes “oooohhh” and applauds.) We’re nearly two generations past the enactment of Title IX, but Mary’s gambit is just as fraught today. Women are relatively rare in sports media, and often relegated to sideline interviews. It wasn’t until 2015 that Jessica Mendoza became the first woman to broadcast a Major League Baseball game on ESPN.
Ask for what you deserve.
Mary makes a disturbing discovery in Season 3: She’s paid less than her male predecessor. She considers every explanation, but the reason is all too familiar even to present-day viewers. “Because he was a man,” Lou explains, with characteristic bluntness. Mary’s pushback doesn’t go over well, but she does eventually get pay equity. In later seasons she’s promoted from associate producer to producer (and fights back when she’s assigned a co-producer). She asks for more challenging responsibilities, and gets them. (“I think it’s probably good for me to ask for what I believe in.”) These days, the media industry has the fifth highest gender pay gap in the United States. The way I see it, each time I ask an editor for a better rate, I’m nudging the needle a little closer to what Mary and I would agree is basic fairness.
Forty years ago, a woman demonstrated strength and honesty each week
Fight the war, not every battle.
You don’t have to react to every preposterous thing the doltishly egotistical anchorman Ted Baxter says, every offensive joke Lou makes, every dig from the cheerfully brutal Sue Ann Nivens, host of WJM’s other big show, “The Happy Homemaker.” An eye roll will often suffice.
Honor your foremothers.
Mary’s Aunt Flo was a famous groundbreaking journalist of a generation earlier. Much of her battle is familiar to Mary, but Flo has a hard edge that is decidedly un-Mary-like. Lou explains it well: “You see, Mary, when your aunt started out, she was a pioneer. All working women were. Pioneers have to be tough. They don’t win popularity contests.”
In the first episode of Season 5, Mary goes to jail when she refuses to reveal her source on a story. Two years later, the case is still chasing at her heels, and she has to lawyer up to face her contempt charge. In the end, she’s vindicated because
Stay true to your values.
of the credibility she’s earned in Minneapolis after years of doing her job with integrity. Mary never gave up. It’s clearer than ever that our democracy (and our self-respect) depend on her kind of courage. The writer is a journalist and Knight-Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan.