Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
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Female viewers consistently . . .: Jean Gaddy Wilson, “Newsroom Management Commission Report,” Sept. 15–18, 1987, p. 7.
It was terrific . . .”: Personal interview with Esther Shapiro, Nov. 1989. (Subsequent Shapiro quotes are from interview.)
And the network’s . . .: Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985) p. 251.
When such right-wing . . .: Ibid., p. 251.
“The original script . . .”: Personal interview with Barbara Corday, 1988.
“These women aren’t soft enough . . .”: Personal interview with Barney Rosenzweig, 1988. (Subsequent Rosenzweig quotes from interview.)
“I said I can’t . . .”: Personal interview with Harvey Shephard, 1991. (Subsequent Shephard quotes from interview.)
“Meg Foster came across . . .”: Personal interview with Arnold Becker, April 1991. (Subsequent quotes from Becker are from personal interview unless otherwise noted.)
An additional $15,000 . . .: Julie D’Acci, forthcoming dissertation on “Cagney and Lacey,” Chapter 2, pp. 35-36.
On one segment that dealt . . .: Ibid., p. 35.
Becker complained at . . .: Gitlin, Prime Time, p. 9; D’Acci, p. 55.
Another CBS executive . . .: Frank Swertlow, “CBS Alters Cagney, Calling It ‘Too Women’s Lib,’” TV Guide, June 12-18, 1982, p. 1.
“Cagney and Lacey” producer April . . .: D’Acci, p. 37.
On a talk show . . .: Lorraine Gamman, “Watching the Detectives,” in The Female Gaze, p. 25.
When a women’s studies . . .: Ibid., p. 25.
Nesting will be a crucial . . .”: “Changes,” TV Guide, Oct. 1-7, 1988, p. 83. also Andy Meisler, “Baby Boom!” TV Guide, Dec. 30-Jan. 5, 1989-90, p. 4.
Bill Cosby brought masculinity . . .”: Boyer, “Hard Boiled Male,” p. 1.
“I do believe in control . . .”: Dan Goodgame, “Cosby Inc.,” Time, Sept. 28, 1987, p. 56.
“You see, the wives . . .”: Bill Cosby, Fatherbood (New York: A Dolphin Book/Doubleday, 1986) p. 49.
“Single-woman leads . . .”: Gitlin, Prime Time, p. 23.
Early television actually . . .: Meehan, Ladies of the Evening, p. 154.
She had real . . .: Ibid., pp. 174-75.
In “Mary,” she writes . . .: For excellent critique, see Joyce Millman, “What Are Big Girls Made Of?” Boston Phoenix, Jan. 14, 1986, p. 5.
Under pressure from the network . . .: Mark Harris, “Smaller Than Life: TV’s Prime-Time Women,” New York Woman, Oct. 1988, p. 104.
Maddie’s coerced matrimony was . . .: Joyce Millman, “Is the Sun Setting on ‘Moonlighting’?” San Francisco Examiner, April 5, 1988, p. E1.
It mirrored a behind-the-scenes . . .: Louise Farr, “The ‘Moonlighting’ Mess—Behind the Feuding That Almost Killed the Show,” TV Guide, Jan. 14-20, 1989, p. 9.
“I felt ill when I received . . .”: Ibid., p. 8.
The show “Murder, She Wrote” . . .: Sally Steenland, “Prime Time Power,” Report by National Commission on Working Women, Aug. 1987, p. 9.
“Ten years ago . . .”: Personal interview with Mary Alice Dwyer-Dobbin, Feb. 1988.
In daytime TV . . .: Deborah Rogers, “AIDS Spreads to the Soaps, Sort Of,” New York Times, Aug. 28, 1988, p. 29.
NBC Entertainment’s . . .: Mark Christensen, “Even Career Girls Get the Blues,” Rolling Stone, May 21, 1987, p. 66.
I made her neurotic . . .”: Personal interview with Jay Tarses, 1988. (Subsequent Tarses quotes are from interview.)
Talk shows even . . .: Personal interview with Mel Harris, 1988.
Therapists hailed . . .: Diane Haithman, “Therapy Takes to TV,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1988, section VI, p. 1; Patricia Hersch, “thirtytherapy,” Psychology Today, reprinted in San Jose Mercury News, Jan. 4, 1989, p. 1F; Aurora Mackey, “Angst Springs Eternal: Modern-day Therapy Gets Couched in ‘thirtysomething’ Terminology,” Los Angeles Daily News, Dec. 6, 1988, p. 4.
As a professor reported . . .: Bette-Jane Raphael, “ ‘Thirtysomething’: Can This TV Show Help Your Marriage?” Redbook, Oct. 1988, p. 18.
Clergymen used the show . . .: Haithman, “Therapy.”
Dating services. . .,: Susan Faludi, “There’s Something Happening Here. . .” West Magazine, San Jose Mercury News, Feb. 26, 1989, p. 4.
Even George Bush . . .: Ibid.
All this excitement . . .: Howard Rosenberg, “That Made-Up Feeling of ‘thirtysomething,’” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 27, 1987, section VI, p. 1.
The majority of “thirtysomething” viewers . . .: Faludi, “Something Happening.”
Jif peanut butter . . .: Ibid.; James Kaplan, “The ‘thirtysomething’ Sell,” Manhattan, inc., Dec. 1988, p. 78.
“Watching that show . . .”: Personal interview with Marcia Greene, Feb. 1988.
“Hope is so hard . . .”: Personal interview with Ann Hamilton, May 1988.
Hope is married to . . .”: “Biographies,” “thirtysomething” production notes, MGM/UA, 1987.
A former actress . . .: Personal interview with Liberty Godshall, May 1988.
One day in the “thirtysomething” . . .: Personal interview with Godshall and Edward Zwick, May 1988.
She was just described . . .”: Personal interview with Melanie Mayron, Jan. 1989.
Draper recalls that . . .: Personal interview with Polly Draper, Jan. 1989.
Yeah, Ellyn’s a mess . . .”: Personal interview with Liberty Godshall, May 1988.
“We opted for a much more . . .”: Personal interview with Edward Zwick, May 1988.
When you look at the characters . . .”: Personal interview with Ann Hamilton, May 1988. (That Hamilton was even writing for “thirtysomething” is, in itself, a story of the backlash. Her specialty was actually writing action-adventure scripts—and “for a while I got assignments because some of these all-male shows were under pressure to hire women.” But, as she notes, “that’s all let up now.” When she took her action screenplay around to the studios in the mid-’80s, she was roundly rejected. The script wasn’t the problem: When she changed the author’s name to “Buck Finch” and had her husband pitch it, the studio executives optioned it at once.)
“I think I’m a . . .”: Personal interview with Mel Harris, Jan. 1989; Raphael, “ ‘Thirtysomething,’” p. 26.
“From my perspective . . .”: Personal interview with Patricia Wettig, Jan. 1989; Dan Wakefield, “Celebrating ‘the Small Moments of Personal Discovery,’” TV Guide, June 11, 1988, p. 35.
In the show, when Nancy . . .: Joy Horowitz, “Life, Loss, Death and ‘thirtysomething,’” New York Times, Arts and Leisure section, Feb. 10, 1991, p. 29.
ABC market research vice president . . .: Personal interview with Henry Schafer, Jan. 1989.
I think this is a terrible . . .”: Stephen Fried, “What ‘thirtysomething’ Is Saying About Us,” Gentlemen’s Quarterly, April 1989, p. 267.
The “All New Queen for . . .”: Personal interview with Janet Katelman, 1988.
CHAPTER SEVEN. DRESSING THE DOLLS
The pushed-up breasts of . . .: Julie Baumgold, “Dancing on the Lip of the Volcano,” New York, Nov. 30, 1987, p. 36.
These were clothes . . .: Jennet Conant, “Oh La La, Lacroix,” Newsweek, Nov. 9, 1987, p. 60.
The Lacroix price tags, however . . .: “Christian Lacroix,” Current Biography, April 1988, p. 39.
Lacroix’s bubble skirts . . .: Bernadine Morris, “Lacroix Fever Spreads to New York,” New York Times, Oct. 30, 1987, p. A16.
The Luxe gowns . . .: Martha Duffy, “Fantasy Comes Alive,” Time, Feb. 8, 1988. “High Femininity” was one name fashion trendsetters gave to the look, “Fantasy Fashion” another.
After Lacroix’s July 1986 . . .: Kathleen Beckett, “The Frill of It All,” Vogue, April 1987, p. 178; “La Gamine: Fun and Flirty,” Harper’s Bazaar, April 1987, p. 86.
Between 1980 and 1986 . . .: Data from Market Research Corporation of America, Information Services; Trish Hall, “Changing U.S. Values, Tinged
with Caution, Show Up in Spending,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 1988, p. B1.
In one poll . . .: Martha Thomases, “Why I Don’t Shop,” The Village Voice, Dec. 27, 1988, p. 37.
Then, in the High Femininity year . . .: Trish Donnally, “Gloomy Fashion Forecast,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 23, 1988, p. B3.
That year, even with . . .: Woody Hochswender, “Where Have All the Shoppers Gone?” New York Times, May 31, 1988. Statistic on 4 percent drop in dress sales comes from Soft Goods Information Service, Market Research Corp. of America. As MRCA notes, total dollar sales of women’s apparel increased in the first seven years of the decade only because the cost of women’s clothes was rising so fast; the unit sales of apparel items ranged from flat to slightly depressed.
Even during the height . . .: Aimee Stern, “Miniskirt Movement Comes Up Short,” Adweek’s Marketing Week, March 28, 1988, p. 2.
And this was a one-gender phenomenon . . .: Ibid.; Jennet Conant, “The High-Priced Call of the Wild,” Newsweek, Feb. 1, 1988, p. 56. Mail-order men’s clothing catalogs profited most, boosting revenues by as much as 25 percent in this period. At Ruff Hewn, a mail-order business hawking gentrified country wear, sales rose 275 percent a year, and by 1988, this small North Carolina company had expanded production into seventeen factories and was planning a nationwide retail chain. The cast of characters in Ruff Hewn’s catalog were backlash archetypes: “Barclay Ruffin Hewn,” the company catalog’s fictional hero, was depicted as a late-19th-century gentleman and highly decorated war veteran who rode with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. His wife, “Elizabeth Farnsworth Hampton Hewn,” as company president Jefferson Rives named her, was “a very traditional and feminine lady who stays home to take care of Ruff and the children.” (Ruff Hewn catalogs and brochures; personal interview with Jefferson Rives, 1988.)
In the spring of 1988 . . .: Hochswender, “All the Shoppers;” Donnally, “Gloomy Fashion;” Barbara Deters, “Limited Fashioning a Turnaround,” USA Today, May 20, 1988, p. B3; Stern, “Miniskirt Movement Comes Up Short,” p. 2; Susan Caminiti, “What Ails Retailing: Merchants Have Lost Touch With Older Customers,” Fortune, Jan. 30, 1989, p. 61.
By the second quarter . . .: By contrast, sales of men’s clothing in the same period rose by nearly $1 billion. Data from Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Personal Consumption Expenditures.
They were pushing . . .: Blayne Cutler, “Meet Jane Doe,” American Demographics, June 1989, p. 24; Thomases, “I Don’t Shop,” p. 37. By ignoring the 30 to 40 million women wearing size 16 and over, the fashion industry was passing up a $6 billion industry. See Jolie Solomon, “Fashion Industry Courting Large Women,” The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 27, 1985.
As Goldman Sachs’s . . .: Joseph H. Ellis, “The Women’s Apparel Retailing Debacle: Why?” Goldman Sachs Investment Research, June 8, 1988.
“What’s the matter with . . .”: Personal interview with John Molloy, 1988.
Or, as Lacroix . . .: Personal interview with Christian Lacroix, May 1991.
As fashion designer Arnold . . .: Personal interview with Arnold Scaasi, Feb. 1988.
At a Lacroix fashion . . .: “Lacroix Triumphant,” Women’s Wear Daily, July 27, 1987, p. 1.
Designers wanted to be in . . .: “Christian Lacroix,” p. 38.
Women who had discovered . . .: Weibel, Mirror Mirror, p. 209.
The fashion industry fell into . . .: “Counter-Revolution,” Time, Sept. 15, 1947, p. 87.
More than three hundred thousand women . . .: Jeanne Perkins, “Dior,” Life, March 1, 1948, p. 84.
In a poll that summer . . .: Hartmann, Home Front, p. 203.
“The women who are loudest . . .”: “Counter-Revolution,” p. 92.
And they were obeying . . .: Weibel, Mirror Mirror, p. xvi.
If you want a girl . . .”: Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) p. 182.
In the last half . . .: Robert E. Riegel, “Women’s Clothes and Women’s Rights,” American Quarterly, XV, no. 3 (Fall 1963): 390–401; Elizabeth Ewins, Dress and Undress (New York: Drama Books Specialists, 1978) p. 89.
The influential Godey’s Kinnard, Antifeminism, pp. 289, 304.
“A lot of women . . .”: Personal interview with Bob Mackie, 1988.
Women have realized . . .: Personal interview with Arnold Scaasi, Feb. 1988; Bernardine Morris, “The Sexy Look: Why Now?” New York Times, Nov. 17, 1987, p. 20.
“We were wearing pinstripes . . .”: Personal interview with Karen Bromley, July 1989.
Wells Rich Greene . . .: Personal interview with Jane Eastman, executive vice president of strategic planning at Wells Rich Greene, Feb. 1988.
You must look as if . . .”: Bernadine Morris, “Self-Confident Dressing,” Harper’s Bazaar, November 1978, p. 151.
“Dress for the job you want . . .”: Amy Gross and Nancy Axelrad Comer, “Power Dressing,” Mademoiselle, Sept. 1977, p. 188.
Its September 1979 . . .: “Your Dress-for-Success Guide,” Mademoiselle, Sept. 1 p. 182.
That earlier book . . .: John T. Molloy, Dress for Success (New York: Warner Books, 1975).
A former prep school . . .: Personal interview with John T. Molloy, 1988; John T. Molloy, The Woman’s Dress for Success Book (New York: Warner Books, 1977) pp. 23–26.
He even dispatched . . .: Molloy, Woman’s Dress for Success, pp. 40–48. 187 “Dressing to succeed . . .”: Ibid., p. 21.
A child of . . .: Ibid., pp. 25, 20–23.
“Many women . . .”: Ibid., p. 22.
When Molloy’s book . . .: Susan Cheever Cowley, “Dress for the Trip to the Top,” Newsweek, Sept. 26, 1977, p. 76.
Retailers began invoking . . .: Molloy, Woman’s Dress for Success, p. 30.
Newsweek declared . . .: Cowley, “Trip to the Top,” p. 76.
And for the next . . .: “Your Get Ahead Wardrobe,” Working Woman, July 1979, p. 46; “Power!” Essence, March 1980, p. 68; “What to Wear When You’re Doing the Talking,” Glamour, Oct. 1978, p. 250.
“The success of suits . . .”: “A Well-Suited Season,” Newsweek, Nov. 5, 1979, p. 111.
They had good reason . . .: Ibid.
Between 1980 and 1987 . . .: Statistics from Market Research Corporation of America; personal interview with John Tugman, vice president and general manager, MRCA, Soft Goods Information Services, 1988.
The $600 million gain . . .: Statistics from MRCA.
Between 1981 and 1986 . . .: “Women’s Coats, Suits, Tailored Career Wear, Rainwear and Furs,” report in Fairchild Fact File (New York: Fairchild Publications, 1987) p. 20.
“When this uniform . . .”: Molloy, Woman’s Dress for Success, p. 36.
In 1986, U.S. apparel . . .: “Women’s Coats,” in Fairchild Fact File, p. 12; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Industrial Reports, 1987, “Quantity of Production and Value of Shipments of Women’s, Misses’, and Juniors’ Dresses and Suits: 1987 and 1986,” Table 8; personal interview with Judy Dodds, analyst with Current Industrial Reports, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Commerce Department, 1988.
The sudden cutback . . .: “Women’s Coats,” Fairchild Fact File, p. 30.
And this reduction . . .: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Industrial Reports, 1987, “Quantity of Production and Value of Shipments of Men’s and Boys’ Suits, Coats, Vests, and Sports Coats: 1987 and 1986,” Table 2.
Soon, department stores . . .: Mark Potts, “Thirteen Britches for Women Stores to Close,” Washington Post, Dec. 9, 1989, p. 10; personal interview with Harold Nelson, vice president and general manager of Neiman Marcus’s Washington, D.C., store, 1988; Cara Mason,” Paul Harris Stores Rebounds from 1988 Losses, Indianapolis Business Journal, March 12, 1990, p. A13.
When Molloy . . .: Personal interview with John T. Molloy, 1988.
“Bye-bye to the . . .”: Terri Minsky, “The Death of Dress for Success,” Mademoiselle, Sept. 1987, p. 308.
As a fashion consultant . . .: Betty Goodwin, “Fashion 88: Dressing Down for Success,” Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1988, V, p. 1.
John Molloy was the obvious . . .: The defrocking of John Molloy recapitulates in many respects the attack on Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, the original designer of the power suit in 1920. Chanel fashioned her classic boxy jacket and comfortably low-waisted skirt after the male business suit, and, like Molloy, she spoke to the aspiring New Woman on the lower rungs of the class ladder. (She was one of these struggling women herself, having been consigned to an orphanage as a teenager after her father deserted her.) Her era’s backlash put her out of business, and when she tried for a comeback in the early ’50s her fellow designers unleashed unmitigated scorn—most especially Christian Dior, who reportedly told her that a woman “could never be a great couturier.” See Weibel, Mirror Mirror, pp. 201, 213-14; Lois W. Banner, American Beauty(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983) pp. 275-76.
A major daily . . .: Personal interview with John T. Molloy, 1988.
His book did not champion . . .: Molloy, Woman’s Dress for Success, pp. 43, 52.
And a whole section . . .: Ibid., pp. 27–29.
My book recommended . . .”: Personal interview with John T. Molloy, 1988.
With the suits . . .: Martha Duffy, “Fantasy Comes Alive,” Time (International Edition), Feb. 8, 1988, p. 44.
Instead of serving . . .: Louis Trager, “Nordstrom Abuzz,” San Francisco Examiner, Oct. 6, 1988, p. C1.
“We made a conscious decision . . .”: Personal interview with Harold Nelson, May 1988.
For inspiration . . .: Duffy, “Fantasy,” pp. 46–47.
In 1982, while chief . . .: “Christian Lacroix,” p. 37.
(As Lacroix explains. . .): Personal interview with Christian Lacroix, May 1991.
Nonetheless, he clung . . .: Duffy, “Fantasy,” p. 47.
He timed the grand opening . . .: “Christian Lacroix,” p. 38.
While the fashion press . . .: “Patou’s Baby Dolls,” Women’s Wear Daily, July 25, 1986, p. 1.