Clark is back in the spotlight during and after the conclusion of the TV series that brought new and old audiences to the Simpson-Brown story. She watched her personal nightmare play out on FX week after week for more than two months, dramatized and rendered in soft focus by Hollywood. “It’s painful to watch,” she tells McFadden. “Maybe if I was over it, it wouldn’t be.”
With the launch of the FX series, Clark has given countless interviews and appeared on Ellen and The View. Everyone wants to discuss, for the first time, the misogyny she experienced, and how they didn’t see it then, but so clearly do now. The Cut proclaimed that Clark is “set to become a feminist icon.”
“The way you were treated in comparison to the way the male lawyers were treated,” McFadden says. “I was shocked at myself that I was not more aware of this at the time.”
“No one really talked about it,” Clark says. “And neither did we. Women in the 90s doing a man’s job had to be tough. And if you call sexism, you’re a lame excuse for a whiner. It’s all about your weakness. You can’t take it. So I never complained.”
Clark and the actress Sarah Paulson, who played her in the series, became fast friends during the show’s taping. They even text each other Bitmojis while Clark and I are having lunch. Later, she’ll attend the Emmys as Paulson’s date and watch Paulson win a best actress award for portraying her.
While Clark’s feminist redemption seems in full force, there is also a fresh round of criticism. When NPR’s Terry Gross interviewed Paulson about what it was like to play Clark, the actress recalled the journalist Jeffery Toobin—whose book The Run of His Life was the basis of the new series—sharing his views of Clark on set. “I like him very much, I just don’t agree with some of his opinions about Marcia,” Paulson told Gross. “He said something to me in person about her arrogance or something and I just excused myself politely and went back to my seat and mumbled something to Sterling, who plays Darden. I was like, ‘Ugh. I don’t want to talk to him if he’s going to talk to me that way about this person that I’m playing that I’ve come to revere and feel so much empathy for and compassion for. Also he’s a man. What does he know? Get out of here.’”
When I ask Clark how this new fandom feels, she assures me that she wasn’t anticipating it. “I never expected anyone to pull out the rampant sexism in the trial,” she says. “I just hope this new awareness continues so it will help all women.”
ADORABLE DOPES
By the late 90s, as Living Single was canceled and Murphy Brown was signing off for good, it seemed like strong working women on television might be a short-lived phenomenon. The educated, distinguished career woman was becoming absent from the airwaves unless she was “sexless, old and a bitch,” according to one talent agent quoted by the Chicago Tribune. Instead, television favored a new working woman: the “Adorable Dope,” as coined by That ’70s Show creator Bonnie Turner. A fleet of women characters popped up in sitcoms and dramedies who were dismissed as ditzy, dopey, hapless, daffy, and easy prey. Journalist Nancy Hass described the Adorable Dope in the New York Times in 1998: “She is young, perennially confused, perpetually underemployed and adorably confounded by men. In her teens and early 20s, she is smart and spunky, but approaching 30 she is mysteriously stricken with an unnamed disease that renders her increasingly incompetent. Miraculously, her cuteness is left intact.”
The Adorable Dope was a “dizzy girl-woman who represents an updated, politically correct version of yesterday’s bimbo,” explained the Los Angeles Times. And on late 90s television she was everywhere. Because she was hyperfeminine, her ineptitude was darling. She needed men to make decisions for her. Adorable Dopes were known for “having hearts of gold and brains of mush.” And, perhaps most loathsome was their “scarfing down low-fat Doritos.”
Adorable Dopes held jobs specifically sanctioned for women—waitress, sex writer, head of a panty company—and their careers were often a sideshow to their love lives. Rachel Green of Friends is the archetype. She struggles to cut up the credit card her daddy underwrites, and can’t, as a waitress, fulfill a simple coffee order. Other Adorable Dopes were powerful on paper—executives, business owners, and attorneys—but they were all hapless when it came to life’s basics. Kirstie Alley’s Veronica in Veronica’s Closet is a lingerie CEO who can’t run her own life, let alone a global business. Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City pioneered a certain type of third-wave feminist antihero and reinvented a struggling HBO, but was scoffed at for her sex column, romanticism, and shopping addiction. Jenna Elfman’s Dharma Finkelstein, the free-spirited child of hippies in Dharma & Greg, taught yoga and trained dogs, but was mocked for being too nice. Calista Flockhart’s Ally McBeal was an Ivy League-educated lawyer, but she was an Adorable Dope nevertheless because of her coquettish demeanor in the office and her incessant dating and personal problems.
No one claimed that lingerie company CEO Veronica in the NBC series Veronica’s Closet was a feminist role model. Alley’s character is bossed by underlings and chauffeured by her father. She marries a creepy stranger while she is blackout drunk in Atlantic City. “Her indecision and compelling need to please others are curious personality traits for the chief executive of a multimillion-dollar lingerie company,” observed San Diego State University professor Martha Lauzen in the 1999 Los Angeles Times article “Alpha Females Still Trail Adorable Dopes.”
Veronica’s Closet was one of the only shows on air at the time with a female lead over forty years old, which is still a rarity in primetime. Turn thirty-nine and women “simply drop off the primetime planet,” according to Lauzen, who found that thirty-something women made up 40 percent of all characters on television. Women in their forties made up a paltry 15 percent. Though Veronica was forty, she acted like a child. In one scene, for example, she prefers to be dragged on the floor with her deceased dog’s leash rather than part with it. When Veronica lays the physical comedy on thick, critics accused her of seeming “to have lost both her mind and much of her simple motor coordination.”
SHE KILLED FEMINISM
Probably the most infamous Adorable Dope was the one who was presented as a bellwether of the modern woman, but was then accused of killing feminism when she wasn’t progressive enough for viewers. Because Ally McBeal had the Harvard law degree, the sparkling career, and the freedom of no spouse or kids, women had high hopes for her. Show creators presented her as a reflection of the modern, ambitious career woman delaying marriage by choice in the 90s. “If women wanted to change society, they could do it,” Ally says in the show’s 1997 pilot. “I plan to change it. I’d just like to get married first.”
Ally quickly attracted the dope label because she had the “emotional klutziness of a teenager and the same level of self-involvement,” snarked the Chicago Tribune. She won in court, but was “regularly defeated by her neuroses,” wrote the Denver Post. The “lawyer in a miniskirt” was easily felled by a cursory look from her ex-paramour, and constantly mothered by her wiser, more womanly roommate. She hallucinated all manner of things, including dancing babies she’d never have. Feminist cultural critic Jennifer Pozner lamented that such a “wimp” was positioned to speak for feminism, and called her “a shallow, bratty, willful adolescent with an adult woman’s career, a supermodel’s miniskirts, and a high school girl’s dating anxieties.” Flockhart’s shrinking figure and assumed eating disorder didn’t help matters. She was labeled a “postfeminist icon” representing the “me generation” of women taking their privilege for granted.
The Denver Post reported that Flockhart was “frustrated by feminist arguments that her character is ditzy and a poor role model for professional women.” In an interview, Flockhart said of Ally, “I think she’s got flaws and she’s certainly not politically correct all the time. That to me is interesting.” She points out that her male costars hadn’t become role models for men, adding, “But people put Ally in this bracket of ‘she must be a role model, she must be a good one.’ It’s not
really fair.”
When Ally wasn’t dopey, she was jealous and catty, calling a female courtroom opponent a bitch because she is pretty. She even beat up her crush’s wife in kickboxing class. Ally was often a walking catfight waiting to happen.
The agita surrounding Ally came to a head when she appeared on a June 1998 cover of Time magazine along with images of iconic feminists such as Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem. Beneath Ally’s head, in red letters, the cover asked, “Is Feminism Dead?” According to the magazine, the answer was yes; short-skirted Ally McBeal had killed it. Women had gone from “bra burning to ohmigosh, I just wanna have sex!” as the Orlando Sentinel mockingly put it.
The problem with Ally, it seems, is that she was something new for television viewers. She was extremely flawed and neurotic, but also likable and relatable, and often fun to watch, even now. Her downfall was that she was hoisted up as an icon for progressive women to embrace, while not being progressive enough for some women and being far too progressive for many men. Television offered so few complex women characters for women viewers (its main audience, by the way) to savor, so it was painfully easy to pick apart a character like Ally McBeal, and to dismantle her for not perfectly embodying feminism’s ideals.
Like Ally, Sex and the City’s Carrie was also called ditzy and slutty for enjoying singledom and sex. The show premiered the same month and year as Ally’s Time cover. It featured Carrie and her three friends dating, shopping, and living glamorous, single lives in New York City—lives that were relatively newly available to young women with careers and no spouses. As with Ally McBeal, the uniqueness of the show and its complex, independent women made it controversial. The characters were called vapid, trampy, and selfish. Carrie and company called pretty women younger than them bitches, foreshadowing possible catfights to come. Much attention was lavished on their wardrobes and how, in reality, they wouldn’t have been able to afford them. “The show’s shoe fetish has given way to more Fendi bags per episode than you can shake a trust fund at,” ribbed the Los Angeles Times.
The women are criticized for their “hostility” toward the men they date, and for trying to emulate a prototypically male lack of attachment to casual sex. “For all the frantic coupling, no one seems to be having any fun,” wrote conservative author Wendy Shalit. The sexual liberation the women of Sex and the City represented was duly shamed by the Washington Times: “The four protagonists, for all their cool urbanity, experience feelings of loss and sadness and loneliness that are real and typical for women in the age of liberation.” The subtext seemed to be that they should pay for being free by being miserable.
Carrie and Ally were authorized to tell their own stories on mainstream television with the potent tool of voice-over. This was new power, but commentators ridiculed what women thought and talked about. Critics accused women’s voice-overs of focusing on topics that were too boldly sexual, girly, selfish, and shallow. Ally struggles with work and loneliness, but her internal monologues and character are maligned as dopey, selfish, and too smitten with men to be taken seriously. Sex and the City’s Carrie saw much of the same criticism—a peek into her inner thoughts revealed a petty, boy-crazy, shopaholic narcissist.
Indeed, from television to boardroom to courtroom, women working in the 90s were subject to a galaxy of ridicule, and ultimately bitchification, stemming from the double bind. Display competence and you were criticized for lacking femininity. Appear too feminine and you were obviously incompetent. And often, rather than address these biases and the discrimination they allowed, the media narrative dug into stereotypes like the erotomaniac, the pushy babe, the Adorable Dope, and—of course—the bitch. It was as if these stock characters were the only kinds of women 90s America knew.
5
Bad Mom
The double bind was particularly acute for mothers, who faced an additional set of challenges and inequalities at work in the 90s. Policies and culture discouraged women who had earned powerful positions at the top of their fields from identifying as mothers in the workplace. If women were successful at work, it was assumed that they were neglecting their kids. Poor mothers on government assistance were accused of bilking the system to avoid work entirely, often because they were young, single, and black. These disparities and misconceptions coalesced to form entrenched stereotypes that dogged working women throughout the 90s. Bitchification expanded to include the “bad mother.” Working moms, the culture concluded, couldn’t be good moms. Women could publicly use their wombs or their brains, but not both.
Marcia Clark was one such mom. She filed for divorce from her husband, Gordon Clark, three days before Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman were killed. Sure enough, during the trial, Clark’s home life interfered with her job in a way that became very public. It began when Clark asked Ito to reschedule the questioning of a key witness because she had to pick up her kids.
“I have informed the court that I cannot be present tonight because I do have to take care of my children, and I don’t have anyone who can do that for me. And I do not want proceedings to go before a jury when I can’t be here,” Clark said. News reports emphasized her teary eyes and strained voice.
The defense was quick to hector Clark. She wasn’t prepared to question Simpson’s neighbor’s housekeeper, Rosa Lopez, and was using her kids as an excuse, Cochran said. Surely the judge would see this request for what it was: a ploy for more prep time. Some mother Clark was, scapegoating her kids.
Clark’s estranged husband publicly rebuked her mothering skills. He was suing for custody and tried to win sympathy for his case by claiming Marcia “misled” the court. “She has no childcare problem . . . I think it’s inappropriate to use our children as an excuse in court,” he said.
“While I commend her brilliance, her legal ability and her tremendous competence as an attorney, I do not want our children to continue to suffer because she is never home, and never has any time to spend with them,” Gordon Clark said in a statement. “I have personal knowledge that on most nights she does not arrive home until 10 p.m., and even when she is home, she is working.” The statement echoed Donald Trump’s assertion, made less than a year earlier, that “putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing.” He blamed his wife Ivana’s job for the dissolution of their marriage.
Not only were Clark’s opponents in court and the presiding judge questioning her fitness as a parent, her ex-husband took these complaints—that she was a workaholic mother who neglected her kids—to the press. Gordon Clark seemed to invite the public to comment on his custody battle, and they did. The tension between women’s work and domestic responsibilities reentered the national conversation.
“Sorry, Marcia, Kids Come First,” scolded the New York Daily News. “What’s the trouble if Clark loses custody for now?” asked the Chicago Sun-Times, as if losing custody of her children was akin to losing the house keys. A writer harrumphed that Clark wouldn’t be “winning any Good Mother awards this year” in the Boston Herald, and speculated that her work prevented her from reading to her kids. “‘Nurturing’ is not a word in her lexicon,” said another paper. “People were weighing in on whether or not I should get custody,” Clark says. “It was like, are you kidding me?” Like her makeup, legs, and sexuality, Clark’s motherhood would become a national fixation during the trial.
FATHERS’ RIGHTS
Clark joined the long list of mothers savaged for pursuing careers. Her public battle dovetailed with a handful of news-making custody cases in the 90s in which mothers lost their children as a perceived punishment for their success. A lawyer in the office of Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch publicly lost custody of her kids to her husband, who earned less than she did. The judge reasoned that her career seemed to take precedence over her kids, so therefore they were better off with their father. In another much-publicized case, a Michigan woman lost custody of her child to the birth father, with whom the baby had never lived, because she had enrolled in college and
intended to put the child in day care while she was in class. In a similar case the year prior, a child was taken away from a mother whose boyfriend watched him part-time while she attended law school.
Women’s groups expressed outrage that these women, and countless others, were so severely penalized for working hard to create better circumstances for their families. A 1994 study by the Families and Work Institute found that relatives didn’t actually care for children any better than paid babysitters; in fact, they were sometimes worse. In the wake of these cases and this study, women’s advocates and custody experts criticized judges for holding “lingering bias that penalizes mothers in custody disputes for working or going to school.”
The fathers’ rights movement shot back that custody rulings had too long prioritized mothers. “Any and all excuses are used by the justice system to perpetuate the myth that women should have the children in a custody case at any cost,” wrote a father in the San Jose Mercury News. Dads had become disposable and scores of moms now practiced “dump a dad, get a check,” according to a column in the Washington Post.
Fatherhood advocates seized on the plight of nanny iconoclast Mrs. Doubtfire to represent their cause. The 1993 film stars a divorced father, played by Robin Williams, who disguises himself as an elderly British nanny to surreptitiously spend more time with his kids. The story demonizes the career-oriented mother, played by Sally Field, who seems to exist solely as a blockade between Williams and his kids. This was precisely what Clark was doing, the dads’ rights set charged. She was just another Sally Field, obstructing a good dad from seeing his kids. States like California and Maine proposed “Mrs. Doubtfire” laws, which prioritized fathers over other babysitters when mothers needed childcare, no matter the circumstances.
Bias against moms who worked outside of the home was deeply ingrained in the justice system. A 1990 survey revealed that half of Massachusetts probate judges believed mothers should be home waiting for their kids after school, and that preschoolers were somehow at risk if their mothers worked. This was the cultural climate complicating the lives of working mothers in the 90s, and Clark’s celebrity put her mothering in the spotlight.
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