Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

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Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women Page 25

by Susan Faludi


  • • •

  LIBERTY GODSHALL wrote the “Weaning” episode; she is the wife of the show’s co-creator, Ed Zwick. A former actress with bit parts on television shows, including “Charlie’s Angels,” Godshall grew frustrated with always having to play “the blond bimbo girlfriend” and switched to journalism. Then she had a baby and, like Hope, quit work.

  In writing “Weaning,” Godshall says she indeed intended to urge women to stay home while their children were very young. In fact, Godshall says, the episode wound up making the point less strongly than she would have liked. “I think I probably wanted it to be more a celebration of staying home.” One day in the “thirtysomething” production offices in Studio City, she and her husband explain the development of that episode:

  GODSHALL:“I wanted to tell women, don’t try it—unless, one, you really need to, or you really, really want to. Because, while the successes are there, the failures and the guilt are there, too.”

  ZWICK:“What I loved about the episode was it was very deeply written

  from the inside. . . . It was hormonally written. The feelings had this rawness to them that pleased me. . . . This is a generation of women who, upon their adolescence, suddenly encountered Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan and they were told, ‘No, no, wrong, wrong. This way. Take a left turn.’ ‘Oh, okay,’ they said, and they did. And what they are discovering upon having the kid itself is there are some extraordinarily strong biological, and not just biological, attachments or bonding that supersede politics and rhetoric.”

  GODSHALL:“Raising a child is the most difficult thing in the world.”

  ZWICK:“The days I’ve spent an entire day with my son . . .”

  GODSHALL (SHOOTING HIM A LOOK):“Not too many.”

  ZWICK:“Well, more like taking a four-hour block of time so she could go out.”

  GODSHALL:“Fifty-fifty, I remember that concept. It was before I had my son. It doesn’t seem to be a viable thing anymore. . . . I call him [Zwick] Ward. It’s like instant sex roles.”

  • • •

  For Melissa, the single and struggling free-lance photographer in “thirtysomething,” no instant roles exist—only neurosis and the constant reminder that, as she puts it, “my biological clock [is] going off.” Melissa is the tear-stained version of the ’80s spinster—more pitiable, and so more likable, than her careerist single sister.

  “Poor Melissa,” her married friends sigh all the time. “If you were any closer to your feelings, you’d be molesting them,” says the single bachelor Gary, who is of course free of such afflictions himself. Stood up by a blind date on a Saturday night, Melissa tearfully takes a midnight oath by the full moon: “I swear I will not idolize married people such as Hope and Michael who have their own problems even though I don’t know what they are and want to kill them when they complain, especially Hope.”

  Mostly Melissa mourns her barren womb. “I want this baby,” Melissa moans when in the presence of baby Janey. “How am I ever going to have a baby?” Soon after, she falls for a gynecologist, but he already has a child and won’t have another, so she leaves him. “Well, I guess me and my eggs will be moving on,” she says. Later, she unsuccessfully recruits the carefree single Gary to play stud. In between, she has a nightmare in which she’s trapped on a “biological clock” game show.

  Incredibly, the role as originally conceived by the show’s creators was even more extreme. Actress Melanie Mayron, who played Melissa, recalls that when she first auditioned for the role, the producers explained her character this way: “She was just described as ‘man-hungry.’” Mayron asked them what kind of job she had. “No one knew. I mean, a single woman in her thirties ‘man-hungry’? C’mon. That’s what you do in your twenties. By your thirties you’ve got a career, you’ve got bills to pay; you’ve got better things to do than read the personals every day.”

  Mayron came up with the photography career and pushed for fuller character development and fewer mental afflictions. “I resent that message of, just because you’re a single woman, you must be miserable,” says Mayron, who is single herself. “That’s not like me or any of my friends.”

  At least Melissa gets some sympathy on the show. Ellyn, the hard-as-nails single career woman, gets none. Because she cares about her job as a City Hall official, she must forfeit a love life. In her biography, the show’s creators describe her as “a career woman whose career is ascending at the same rate as her sex life is descending.” Like Melissa, she started out as even more of a caricature, and was tempered only through repeated lobbying by Polly Draper, who played Ellyn. Draper recalls that when she auditioned for the role, the producers “described [Ellyn] as the kind of person who was so irritating you would walk out of the room whenever she walked in. And they wanted her to worship Hope and to want to be exactly like her. And I said, ‘Wait a minute, can’t she be okay in her own right?’”

  In the show, Ellyn leads what the character herself describes as “this faked rented existence;” her apartment makes the single woman’s quarters in Fatal Attraction seem downright homey. “Mine is rented,” Ellyn says of her surroundings. “All of it. The couch. The artwork. Even the salt shaker.” Her career leaves little room for shopping—and none for companionship. She hasn’t even had sex in fifteen months. “Between work . . . and this exercise class,” she says, “I don’t even have time to have a relationship.” When a man does come into her life, she can barely stand it. She grumbles, “My work is suffering.” When he tells her “I love you,” she snarls, “I can’t handle that.”

  Her work life doesn’t sound too appealing, either. “Man, I’m tired,” Ellyn tells Hope. “I’ve been in the office till ten every night this week. Look at the bags under my eyes.” Serene Hope rocks her baby and asks, “How’s your stomach been?” Ellyn moans: “Terrible. Stress. Total stress.” When Hope’s baby begins to whimper, the unmaternal Ellyn snaps, “Won’t she just stop crying?”

  Liberty Godshall had a strong hand in shaping Ellyn’s unattractive personality, too. “Yeah, Ellyn’s a mess,” she says, laughing. “In fact, she might get messier. We’ve been playing around with the idea of making her a drug abuser.” She even proposed adopting the pop tune “Addicted” as Ellyn’s theme song. Another fate she and her husband contemplated seriously for the career crone: a total nervous breakdown. Finally, as Zwick explains, “We opted for a much more sophisticated event.” Ellyn develops a bleeding ulcer, collapses, and winds up in the hospital. The boyfriend dumps her soon after, announcing, “I feel sorry for you because you do such selfish, self-destructive things.” In the last scene, Ellyn is back at her family’s house, lying on her girlhood bed, surrounded by stuffed animals. Her womanly side reawakened, she does the right “feminine” thing: she reaches for the phone and dials a psychiatrist.

  It’s hard to imagine a less flattering portrait of a single woman, but by the second season “thirtysomething” had, in fact, produced one: Susannah, the humorless feminist. Susannah is a social activist who works full-time in a community-service center in the city’s ghetto, tending to homeless men and battered wives. Despite her selfless work, the show manages to portray her as inhumanly cold, a rigid and snarling ideologue with no friends. Everyone in the Steadman circle dislikes her and makes fun of her “excessive” independence and unhip political commitment. Even the angelic Hope sneers behind Susannah’s back.

  Finally, the feminist shrew is tamed by bachelor Gary. When he impregnates her, she is determined to get an abortion. But then, at the clinic, she hears the biological clock ringing. “I’ve always put things off,” she confesses to Gary, tearily. “I just can’t make assumptions about the future anymore.” He is triumphant, and she has the baby.

  “When you look at the characters on this show,” “thirtysomething” staff writer Ann Hamilton observes, “you get the sense that all single women are unhappy. You look at these women and you think, ‘God, I wouldn’t want to be single now.’ . . . When I think of how seriously people
out there seem to be taking this show, it’s scary.” In production planning meetings, Hamilton argued unsuccessfully against the “Weaning” episode. Pregnant herself at the time, she had no plans to quit work after she had her baby. “It made me feel awful because it was saying, ‘If you go back to work you are a bad mother.’” And it made her angry because it slyly endorsed wifely obedience: “It seemed that Hope made the decision Michael wanted her to make.”

  The actresses on “thirtysomething” have been uncomfortable with the show’s treatment of working mothers, too. After all, they have been putting their toddlers in day care so they can star in a program exalting homemakers. (The show’s production company, like every studio but one in Hollywood, has no on-site child care.) Mel Harris, who played Hope, returned to work nine months after having her son. “I think I’m a better mother and a better person because I work,” she says. Patricia Wettig, who played Nancy, the show’s other stay-at-home mother, has a career, marriage, and children. (She’s married to the actor who played Hope’s husband, Michael.) She says, “From my perspective all three things are extremely important and I’m not willing to give up any of them.” In the show, when Nancy makes tentative moves in the direction of a career as a children’s book illustrator, she promptly falls ill with ovarian cancer—becoming, as Wettig put it, “Queen for a Day.”

  Even women watching the show were troubled by its attitude. ABC market research vice president Henry Schafer, who surveyed “thirtysomething” viewers, reports that “one of our key findings” was that female viewers didn’t want Hope to stay home. “They said, ‘Move her out of the home, get her into other arenas.’ We tested different ways—having her do volunteer work, having her get a job. And the job won out.”

  The show’s female actors and viewers weren’t clamoring for full-time nesters, but the show’s male creators were. They were the ones distressed by the women’s movement and its effect on them. “I think this is a terrible time to be a man, maybe the worst time in history,” “thirty-something” co-creator Marshall Herskovitz complained in a men’s magazine. “Men come into the world with certain biological imperatives,” he said, but they no longer have any “acceptable channels” to express these needs. “Manhood has simply been devalued in recent years and doesn’t carry much weight anymore.”

  • • •

  WITH SACRIFICE for one’s husband and children once more a woman’s highest calling, perhaps it was only a matter of time before TV makers got around to resurrecting quite literally the 1950s game show “Queen for a Day.” That notorious contest, in which women compete for the title of most martyred housewife, seemed relevant again to Fries Distribution, which announced plans to release the “updated” show in 1988. Like the return of Spelling’s “Angels,” this revival was presented as progress for women. The “All New Queen for a Day” will be “a show that has changed with the times,” Fries’s publicist Janet Katelman announced.

  In the ’50s format, each weeping contestant was a Stella Dallas saint. Each described her pitiful self-denying lot and the audience voted on the most hanky-soaking tale. The lucky winner took home a prize—usually a washing machine or a frost-free refrigerator. In the ’80s pilot, the three contestants selected for the new show (which as of this writing has yet to air) are as follows: a burn victim, a woman whose daughter was killed by a street gang, and a woman with no children who turned to adoption. And just like the old program, the women will trot out their tales of woe before a voting audience. How then has the new “Queen for a Day” “changed with the times”? Katelman explains: “Every one of the women will get a prize. There will be no losers.” None, that is, unless you count the millions of female viewers—faced with yet another distorted image of themselves in the backlash TV mirror.

  7

  Dressing the Dolls:

  The Fashion Backlash

  JUST TEN DAYS after the October 19, 1987, stock market collapse, French fashion designer Christian Lacroix unveiled his “Luxe” collection at a society gala on Wall Street. The setting, aptly for a postcrash event, was the ground floor of the towering World Financial Center. As brokers upstairs sorted through the shambles, hollow-cheeked models with crosses around their necks drifted down the courtyard’s runway, their clothes-hanger bodies swaying under the weight of twenty pounds of crinoline and taffeta. The pushed-up breasts of “Maria, Mounia, Veronica, and Katoucha” blossomed with roses the size of cabbage heads; beneath their tightly laced waists, pumpkin-shaped skirts ballooned. Three layers of bustles brought up the rear. These were clothes, Lacroix said, for women who like to “dress up like little girls.” The Lacroix price tags, however, were not so pint-sized; they ranged as high as $45,000—among the costliest raiments ever to come out of Paris.

  When the lights finally came up, the fashion writers leaped from their seats to litter the runway with pink carnations. Applause was deafening for the “Messiah” of couture, as the fashion press had anointed him a year earlier, when he displayed his first “Baby Doll” line in Paris. As fireworks burst outside in a Revlon-funded salute to the sartorial savior, the well-heeled guests adjourned to a $500-a-plate meal in the Winter Garden atrium. There, surrounded by three thousand votive candles, couture-industry boosters served up reverential testimonials in strategic earshot of the fashion press: Lacroix’s bubble skirts exuded “independent strength and sensitivity;” it was like being “in a room full of Picassos,” a designer told the New York Times.

  The Luxe gowns went on sale at Bergdorf Goodman, and, with Lacroix on hand to sign autographs, seventy-nine society matrons hurried to place their orders for $330,000 worth in two days. Maybe the Messiah would convert women after all to the look of High Femininity—or “frou-frou,” as less worshipful observers dubbed the fashion world’s sudden detour into frills and petticoats in the spring of 1987. At least designers and retailers hoped he had converted them. After Lacroix’s July 1986 Paris “fantasy fashion” debut had won rave reviews from Women’s Wear Daily, twenty-one of the twenty-four couture houses had rushed out their own versions of High Femininity; apparel makers had begun promoting “the idea of women as dressed-up dolls;” retailers had stocked up on poufs, miniskirts, party-girl gowns and body-squeezing garments that reduced the waist by three inches. And the fashion press had smoothed the way, promoting “the gamine look” and declaring 1987 “the Year of the Dress.” But all the preparation was for naught. That spring, women just quit buying.

  Lacroix’s messianic appellation was more fitting than intended; by the end of the ’80s, it would indeed have taken divine intervention to resurrect the women’s apparel market. Black Monday, which dampened enthusiasm for conspicuous displays of wealth, was only the latest blow to an industry staggering from foreign competition, massive merger debts, record costs for raw materials, a declining dollar overseas—and then that final indignity, the rebuff of American women.

  That so-called feminine ardor for clothes shopping had been flagging for some time. Between 1980 and 1986, at the same time that women were buying more houses, cars, restaurant dinners, and health care services, they were buying fewer pieces of clothing—from dresses to underwear. The shaky economy played a role, but mostly women just didn’t seem to enjoy clothes shopping as much anymore. In one poll, more than 80 percent said they hated it, double from a decade earlier.

  Throughout the decade, apparel makers and retailers tried to make up for a shrinking shopper base with rapidly inflating clothes prices. But the more stores marked up the tags, the less likely women were to take them to the register. Then, in the High Femininity year of 1987, dress prices jumped as much as 30 percent. Women took one look at the tickets, another at the thigh-high dresses—and fled the stores. That year, even with higher prices compensating for lower volume, total sales dollars of women’s apparel fell for the first time in a decade. In the so-called Year of the Dress, dress sales alone dropped 4 percent. Even during the height of the Christmas season, fashion sales fell; that hadn’t even happened under the 198
2 recession. And this was a one-gender phenomenon. In fact, that same year, men’s apparel sales rose 2.1 percent.

  The women’s “fashion revolt” and “sticker shock rebellion” of 1987, as the media came to call it, nearly decimated the fashion industry. And the more the dress merchants tried to force frills on their reluctant customers, the more their profit margins plunged. In the spring of 1988, after another season of flounces, bubble skirts, and minis, and another 40 percent price hike, apparel retailers’ stocks plunged and quarterly earnings fell by 50 and 75 percent. Department stores—where apparel accounts for 75 percent of sales—lost tens of millions of dollars in profits. By the second quarter of 1988, the apparel industry was drawing more than $4 billion less in annual women’s clothes sales than in the period just before the High Femininity look was introduced.

  Perhaps the designers should have expected it. They were pushing “little-girl” dresses and “slender silhouettes” at a time when the average American woman was thirty-two years old, weighed 143 pounds and wore a size 10 or 12 dress. Fewer than one-fourth of American women were taller than five foot four or wore a size smaller than 14—but 95 percent of the fashions were designed to fit these specifications. Of all the frilly and “retro” fashions introduced in 1987, only one really caught on: the peplum, an extra layer of fabric that hung from the waist and concealed broadening hips.

  How could the industry make such a marketing blunder? As Goldman Sachs’s retail analyst Joseph Ellis pointed out a year later in his analysis, “The Women’s Apparel Retailing Debacle: Why?,” demographics “have been warning of a strong population shift to older age categories for years now.” Yet designers, manufacturers, and retailers went “in exactly the wrong direction.” Ellis charitably concluded that the industry must have lacked the appropriate consumer research studies.

 

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