Never Getting It Right

Well, Grey’s Anatomy is back. The two-hour season premiere (Sept. 22) focused on a couple who literally fell into a sinkhole while having an argument as they drove down a Seattle street. The medical part of the episode’s narrative was about saving them, while “sinkhole” was a not-so-subtle metaphor for where the doctors’ personal lives were at.

As expected, Meredith was in deep trouble for messing with Derek’s clinical trial. Early in the show, the hospital board fired her, which led to repercussions in their effort to adopt one of the orphans that Karev brought from Africa. Meanwhile, Cristina and Owen were on the outs over her desire to have an abortion.

April is now chief resident, and her first day didn’t go so well. Newlywed Teddy had a meltdown when the guy she married, and then decided she loved, had minor surgery. At least Miranda Bailey, now one of the regular doctors, was doing well—liberated from the pressures of being chief resident and wanting no part of holding April’s hand.

Looking at this critically, the Meredith-Cristina paradox over motherhood is obvious. Meredith, raised by a mother who wanted a career rather than a child, deeply regrets jeopardizing her own chances at keeping baby Zola. Cristina, portrayed as an overachiever, is pregnant but doesn’t want to be. Meredith herself sees the similarities between her mother and Cristina. Raised by “a Cristina,” she tells Owen, she knows what it’s like to be a child unwanted by a mother who is afraid she’ll lose her career.

Could this be any more heavy-handed? Although it’s a good thing that the writers let a woman say that she honestly didn’t want to be a mother, it seems they are still stuck on career versus motherhood. This is straight out of 20th-century media anxieties over “two-job wives” and “superwomen.” As in the past, it makes “work” and “woman” opposites. And that’s troubling, particularly when fatherhood makes new (or potentially new) dads Derek, Mark, and Owen more appealingly without harming perceptions of their commitment or competence—playing into stereotypes about fatherhood and careers.

The subplots about April and Teddy bothered me more. April, who got the head resident job in part because she made soup for a patient, can’t get people to listen to her and messes up the surgery schedule. Teddy, the heart surgeon who is Cristina’s mentor, is called “cute” when she worries about Whatshisname that she married.

There’s something troubling going on at the intersection of race and gender construction here. White women, it seems, can never get it right. Meredith is a flake, April is an incompetent, weak-voiced airhead, and heart surgeon Teddy is a basket case over minor subcutaneous surgery. In contrast, Miranda and Cristina know exactly what they want and mince no words.

It's important to remember that oppression has historical roots. For white women, it's (in part) the "Angel in the Parlor" and the "Cult of True Womanhood" from the 19th century. For all the show’s good efforts to give major roles to racial minorities and to gay-lesbian characters, it seems to play out at the expense of white women, whose traditional (flaky, cute, angelic, airhead) femininity is safely reaffirmed. This is classic Woman as Exception.

I’m happy for Miranda and for Cristina for knowing what they want and saying so. And I see that Cristina is portrayed as an Asian stereotype. But I have to ask: Would one of the white female characters be allowed to be so plainspoken? It seems not, and I have to wonder what that’s about.

Troubling Nostalgia

I know I haven’t posted in a while. The new semester began, and I’ve been busy with that. (Excuses, excuses….)

Taking the advice of a friend who read my earlier posts, I’m going to try to be more conversational. I teach an Opinion Writing class that blends traditional columns with blogging, and I have the students get feedback from a peer. So, thinking I should do what I say and not what I (usually) do, I asked a friend to comment on my blog. The verdict: I don’t quite have the hang of this blogging thing. Maybe I should be less structured, less didactic, and more natural.

So, okay, I’ll try.

A couple of people have sent me good stuff to write about lately. My friend Randy Nichols sent this link to an “In Media Res” clip about the new show Pan Am: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2011/09/19/never-been-flown-fall-tvs-paratexts.

And Michelle sent this link to a Business Insider story about sexist ads from the bad old days: http://www.businessinsider.com/vintage-sexist-and-racist-ads-2011-6

In the first one, Randy’s colleague Jennifer Gillan has some good comments. I particularly like her comment that networks have “dispatched their female casts on paratextual containment duty.” There’s a troublingly bemused nostalgia that often accompanies media retrospectives on sexist portrayals. What’s that about? Is it actually part of what we might call the process of post-feminism—the ongoing temporal denial of sexism that actually keeps it firmly in the present by constantly placing it in the past?

It’s nothing new. In poring over 1920s women’s magazines for my book, I found a similar bemusement at Victorian attitudes. We wouldn’t have such bemused nostalgia for Jim Crow-era attitudes. Why is it okay when it’s women?

Efforts like Ms. Magazine’s “No Comment” column took a lot of heat (mostly in the form of ridicule and scorn) for helping to raise consciousness about sexist advertising. I, for one, thank them.

Behind the Glamour

The first time I flew on an airplane, my parents made me wear a dress. Not a school dress, but the kind of dress that I had to wear to church, with the scratchy underskirt and patent leather shoes that pinched.

I was 7, and we were flying from Nashville to Philadelphia. That we were going for my mother’s business meeting and that she’d be working while my father and I saw the sights and went shopping (he loved to shop) seems incongruous, given the depiction of the era not too many years before that on ABC’s new show Pan Am, which premieres this fall.

The show is about the supposedly glamorous lives of “stewardesses,” as flight attendants were once called, in the early 1960s. All young, white, and female, they are depicted, as Caitlin Flanagan pointed out in a July 2, 2011 Wall Street Journal column, as “uniform in every sense of the word—young and pretty, thin and unmarried, well-groomed and white-gloved.” (See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304314404576413983035235742.html).

Despite dull story lines, she predicts the show may be popular because we’ve reached a “new cultural era” when we’re not horrified, as we might have been if the show had come out twenty years ago, by the obvious sexism of such depictions. She writes,

"Like millions of other women of their proximate age and social class in that era, the stewardesses of Pan Am move through a series of airtight compartments: the college education, the fun and adventurous career, the betrothal that ends in the transformation to homemaker. That this sequence is no longer regarded as a bullet train to what Ms. [Betty] Friedan called ‘the problem that has no name,’ but rather as the substance of dreamy, wish-fulfillment television, tells us just how far behind we've left the old battles and barricades. What once looked like oppression now seems heavenly."

Flanagan compares this world to that of Mad Men—a world “mesmerizing in its surfaces: the gleaming blond wood of the terminal's ticket counters, the shiny airplanes, the elegant passengers, dressed to the nines.”

But Mad Men offers cultural critique of sexism. Pan Am appears to glorify it.

Unfortunately, such depictions gloss over the years of effort that it took women to make the radical move from “stewardess” (or “sky girl”) to “flight attendant,” undoing decades of blatant discrimination that prescribed race, weight, marital status, and overall appearance—not to mention completely missing the point of the job, which has always been safety, not sex. As Kathleen M. Barry notes in Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants (Duke University Press, 2007), women used to be grounded (presumably without pay) if they weighed too much at unannounced inspections. That they had to be white and heterosexual went without saying. Marriage meant the end of the career, if turning the ripe old age of 32 (which meant mandatory “retirement”) didn’t end it first. Interestingly, back in the 1920s, the airlines considered employing African American men to do the job, modeling them after railroad porters, but young women were thought to be more reassuring to a public not yet comfortable with air travel.

Changing all this, as Barry shows, meant the hard work of changing people’s ideas, along with the help of the EEOC in changing policy.

That said, what is behind the current focus on the early 1960s? Mad Men is no doubt part of it. After all, the show’s image is making a lot of money, what with all the tie-ins like Banana Republic’s Mad Men clothing line. Admittedly, there is something tremendously appealing about all the accoutrements of that time. I love looking at my parents’ old stuff—my dad’s tie clasps and shoe-shine kit, my mom’s neat little box of what she called "earbobs" (the clip kind). They speak of a world that was simple, solid, and optimistic. And I think we miss looking nice. I’m all for elastic waistbands, but people go everywhere these days as if the word “unkempt” isn’t in the dictionary.

But we don’t want to return to the uniformity and rigidity of those times, not to mention the blatant discrimination. It was in many ways a world of façades in which women’s work was invisible and underpaid, when there was a fine line between pride in appearance and rigid social codes. I was lucky because knowing it would be my mother who brought home a steady income (however meager) and my father who took me shoe shopping meant I would grow up to question outward appearances. It’s a skill not to be forgotten.

Gonna Be an Engineer

Former student (and really cool person) Michelle Willard posted this Peggy Seeger song "Gonna Be an Engineer" on my Facebook wall: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCRRe72mwwY&feature=youtu.be. It made me think of an article from the old magazine Literary Digest that I talk about in my book. "A Girl Engineer in Kansas City," published in 1923, tells the story of Miss Clare Nicolet, whose four and a half years of college "left the native feminine qualities undisturbed in their development" so that she is at home among "big turbines" and "uses waste as deftly as a powder puff" ("A Girl Engineer in Kansas City," Literary Digest, 7 July 1923, p. 29).

I talk about the article as an example of the "exception" pattern in media representation of women's employment. In this pattern, women who do jobs considered "masculine" such as engineering are described in terms that make them seem odd for their sex, even if the article praises their accomplishments. Readers are reassured of the woman's femininity, despite her "odd" choice of employment. Since most of us don't want to be seen as odd, the overall effect is to reinforce status quo gender norms. It's like tokenism, but the "exception" pattern crosses class boundaries (female doctors and female plumbers have both been portrayed as "exceptions") and it always carries the reassurance of femininity.

I'd like to think we're past all this (sometimes I wonder what's really in my younger female students' heads about gender and careers). After all, Peggy Seeger isn't young, and in some ways her lyrics about having a profession being the opposite of motherhood (and being a "lady") seem dated. But the thing is, I hadn't heard of her until Michelle posted this YouTube clip. It's kind of like Virginia Woolf's essay in A Room of One's Own about Judith Shakespeare, William's hypothetical sister, who was his intellectual equal and "as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was," but who wasn't sent to school and had no chance to write her plays. Peggy Seeger is Pete's sister, and clearly she has had a chance to write and sing, but without the media fanfare of her famous brother (too bad; I like her voice). I think that's how it is with a lot of women's accomplishments. If they haven't even been held up as "exceptions" (read "oddities") they're invisible. And if they're invisible, it's hard for them to be role models for the next generation and we have this constant sense of starting over.

After all, Peggy Seeger was born a decade after Miss Clare Nicolet earned her engineering degree, yet this song was written in the 1970s--as if women in engineering was a new idea.

Mad Men and Working Women

This next Wednesday morning (Aug. 10) I'll be on a panel titled "Mad Men, Working Women, and History" at the AEJMC convention in St. Louis--an annual conference for journalism and media educators. Joining me will be Erika Engstrom from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Tracy Lucht from Simpson College, and Kimberly Wilmot Voss from the University of Central Florida. The panel was my idea. I love Mad Men, and wanted to think about ways that it ties to my historical research on women's employment.

(Despite my previous post about "Working Women" being a problematic term, I used it anyway. It sounded good. It went with "Mad Men." And because it's in common use, people understand it, which is what makes language hard to change.)

Anyway, my part of the talk will focus on secretaries in Mad Men, specifically on how images of the secretary's body evolved over the decades preceding the 1960s. Some of this relates directly to my research in my book, Business Girls and Two-Job Wives. A job primarily for men until the mid-19th century, secretarial work was gendered female with the invention of the typewriter after the Civil War. After that, women (who had been machine operators in the textile industry) were hired as low-paid "typewriters" (the word for both the machine and the women who worked on them) beginning in the 1870s. Gradually the job became overtly sexualized. By the 1920s, women were "office wives" and "business debutantes." Women's magazines told readers that secretarial work was a way to use their brains and take initiative. Men's magazines, meanwhile, advised readers to choose women they didn't mind looking at. (This is, of course, no surprise.)

These stereotypes are pretty obvious on Mad Men. In the talk, I will argue that it is the women at Sterling-Cooper that make "Don Draper" possible. Draper is, I think, both a producer and a product of advertising; selling "Don Draper" is the main project of Dick Whitman--a man who lives by his wit and his wits. He is also the typical 20th-century businessman, emblematic of modern masculinity that relied on constructing women as "Other," reinforcing the domestic social structure of the "office wife."

I have a lot more to say. I'll probably run over my allotted time, which I seem to always do.

Shopkeeper, Newswoman

I spent Sunday afternoon with B., my 96-year-old cousin who lives in rural Tennessee.

Despite her age, B. is intelligent, articulate, opinionated—as she has always been.

It wouldn’t seem like a visit to an elderly relative would have a place in a blog about women, work, and media, but I think it does.

Engaged to be married when she was young, B. lost her fiancé in World War II. She kept his Purple Heart and his photo, and went on with her life, running a small but well-stocked grocery on the typically Southern town square. There, she provided not only food items (bologna was a specialty) and glass knick-knacks (which she liked) but information. She knew everyone in the surrounding towns, all about most people in the county, and all of their stories.

When people came to the county courthouse for information, they were sometimes told to go across the street to the store before bothering to look up the papers. B. probably had the information they needed. The store was often our first stop when we arrived on our annual August trek from Oklahoma to Tennessee when I was a child. For one thing, I was the world’s pickiest eater and bologna was one of the few things I’d eat. Mostly, I think, it was a way to catch up on news before making the round of relatives.

The tie between news and trade is an old one. In media history class, I always ask students to think about where they’d get news (and how they’d define “news”) if they lacked formal sources. They realize, then, that they’d go to places people congregate—coffee houses, student unions or libraries on campus, and, particularly, marketplaces, where “news” has long been a by-product of the exchange of goods.

B. ran her store until well into her 80s—until age and nearby “big box” stores pushed her out. Every day for 40 years, she wore a suit to work. In her own way, she was a newswoman.

Good Wife, Old Story

Would somebody please explain to me the appeal of The Good Wife?

I just started watching it, and admittedly have seen only a few reruns. People kept telling me it’s good, despite the cliché initial promos when it appeared in 2009. So I thought, okay, I’ll watch it. Now I’m not sure why.

Of course, I get the obvious. The show is a fictionalized take on the recurring news stories in which a male politician is discovered in an extramarital affair. Dutifully shoring up her husband’s public image, the “good wife” in such stories stands stoically beside him, doing her best to feign a Nancy Reagan-style loving gaze in a scene that is clearly PR-orchestrated damage control. The show is an attempt to look behind that two-dimensional construction at the real life of such a woman. In this case, she’s an attorney named Alicia who has been forced (can’t have her do it by choice) to return to work. She spends her days fighting crime and her nights worrying about her teenage kids—Superwoman with a double meaning.

It’s good, of course, to see a show in which the main character is a hard-working, capable woman who does her job well. Alicia is smart, sensible, sincere. It’s also good to see a show that builds, to some extent, on people’s awareness of media manipulation. So far, so good.

But as someone interested in media portrayals of women’s working lives, I don’t see anything so new here. Instead of any kind of in-depth exploration of character, we get another version of two-dimensional stick figures—in this case, more so than usual. Alicia and Peter are media stereotypes of media stereotypes. There’s no hint of love, or even sexual chemistry, between them. (Was there ever?) We are directed to root for Alicia as if we’re watching a prize-fight instead of a romance. But why?

The answer is by no means a new one. As in almost all media portrayals of women’s employment on some level, the theme here is home vs. work and the spectacle of female suffering. It’s “Stand By Your Man” with a twist—updated with a business suit and a question mark. (“Stand By Your Man?”) No matter what case Alicia’s law firm is pursuing, audience attention is directed to her role as Wronged Wife and the question of whether she’ll Take the Bastard Back. We accept her power as an attorney only because she has been sacrificed on the altar of female victimhood, which reinforces the femininity that might be in question if she were simply a capable female attorney.

Even the symbolism is heavy-handed. In one episode, she spends the day doing legal work on the king-sized bed she no longer shares with her husband. Of course, we’re all for her helping the innocent prisoner escape execution, scheduled for that night, but it’s clear she’s gotten a bum deal—forced to replace sex with legal papers. The real story is what she’s not doing on that bed.

Ho-hum.

Media have traditionally reworked representations of women’s wage-earning jobs and careers into dramas about domestic life, reinforcing old clichés. This show is no different. How nice it would be, once in a while, to have a show about a successful woman in which her femininity wasn’t reinforced through suffering.

At least, could she do the legal work at the kitchen table?