Title: Patty Duke, Marlo Thomas, and Mary Tyler Moore--Three Stars, Three Iconic Shows, and a Young Generation of TV-Watching Females
Abstract: ABSTRACT Today when people look back at television in the 1960s and 1970s, they cringe at its portrayals of women and see that messages that seemed to be progressive at the time were merely smokescreens in a patriarchal world view. Nevertheless, changes in culture had to begin somewhere, and for an audience of post‐World War II baby‐boom females, television provided a lens for growing up. Prime‐time network television programs targeted different segments of the population, but very little was available for baby‐boom girls growing up and looking toward their futures. However, three popular prime‐time television sitcoms, The Patty Duke Show, That Girl , and the Mary Tyler Moore Show , aired when few shows were built around the lives of young single women, demonstrated for their time agency, ambition, and professional aspirations of females. Although antiquated by today's standards, each of these shows–driven by an attractive woman with a flip hairstyle, lots of warmth, and endless determination‐was groundbreaking. Collectively, they comprise a single narrative of female maturation from high school student, to job seeker, to young professional, showing steps a woman can take to navigate a male‐dominated world, achieve independence, and establish an identity and career.
Publication Year: 2019
Publication Date: 2019-01-02
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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