When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins

Author:Gail Collins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: HIS000000
ISBN: 9780316071666
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-10-13T21:00:00+00:00

10. “You’re Gonna Make It After All”

“YOU WALK INTO A MEETING�� AND NOW THERE’S ANOTHER WOMAN.”

In September 1970 Mary Tyler Moore—the actress who had broken television’s no-pants rule on The Dick Van Dyke Show—returned with a new show in which she played Mary Richards, a thirtysomething single woman living alone and working for a local TV station. In the first episode, she fled from a broken engagement, driving tearily down the highway to Minneapolis, renting an apartment, and meeting neighbors and fellow workers who would become her surrogate family in the years to come. “You might just make it after all,” the theme song promised. (It was changed after the first season to the more optimistic “You’re gonna make it after all.”) The show became one of the best-loved situation comedies of all time, and it ran through the decade. Mary, who spent much of the first year sitting around with Rhoda bemoaning their single state, became more assertive as time went on, proficient at her job, comfortable with her life, and more clearly engaged in sexual relations with her various boyfriends—who came and went without making any long-term impact. In a fractious decade, she became a cheerful symbol of the fact that a woman did not require a husband or children or a glamorous career to be happy, as long as she had people and work to care about and a healthy sense of humor.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show was, of course, only one program. TV in general was still a man’s world—three-quarters of the characters in prime-time dramas in 1973 were men, and the women who did show up on the screen usually seemed to be in charge of answering telephones. But it’s interesting to chart the difference between The Mary Tyler Moore Show and an earlier television series about a single woman living on her own. In 1966 ABC had unveiled That Girl, starring Marlo Thomas, which followed an aspiring actress named Ann Marie through her adventures in New York City, many of which involved funny jobs (Ann wears a chicken suit, Ann is a meter maid) or mistaken identities. Ann lived in a residential hotel—one step beyond a college dorm—while her parents hovered in a nearby suburb. She spent an inordinate amount of time explaining to her worried mother and father that despite evidence to the contrary (dual hotel-room occupancy, pants in her closet), she was certainly not sleeping with her boyfriend, Donald. Ann was spunky and good-hearted, but she was not really a grown-up.

Like Mary Richards, American women in the 1970s were figuring out how to use their new powers to craft a good life. When viewed from above, it might have seemed that the big story was the backlash against the women’s liberation movement. But on the ground, things looked much different. It was in the 1970s that American women set off on a new course. They went to college thinking about what work they wanted to do, not what man they wanted to catch, and flooded professional schools with applications.

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