Dear Mary Tyler Moore,

My book, What Would Murphy Brown Do? How the Women of Primetime Changed Our Lives, was essentially a love letter to Mary Tyler Moore and those who came before and after her on TV.

I was once honored to see her up close and personal in an amazing night at the 92Y. As a women and television historian (yes that’s a thing), Mary Tyler Moore is my Jesus and my Buddha. She started her television career in that pre-feminism era and then helped usher in feminism itself with the toss of her cap and the issues addresed on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

I couldn’t say it better than I already have, so what follows is the first chapter of What Would Murphy Brown Do? titled “A New Breed: The Life of the Unmarried Sitcom Woman.” I’m sure you can’t guess who it’s about.

Tonight every woman who lived through the last half of the 20th century, should raise a glass to the lovely, gracious, brilliant, hilarious, incredible woman who we watched change everything.

A New Breed

The Life of the Unmarried Sitcom Woman

In 1988, a new television series premiered, introducing the world to America’s first female sitcom broadcast journalist. Her name was Murphy Brown, and her creator, Diane English, invoked both the spirit of feminism as well as the many issues women face in pursuing their personal and career goals. To introduce the character, Murphy Brown producers used visual aids — magazine covers — that told us, with just a few words, who this woman was. The three covers of the magazines read:

She’ll Ask Anything.

Fabulous at 40.

Who is man enough for this woman?1

In a matter of seconds, the audience knew they were seeing a new kind of woman TV character, one who would stop at nothing to get a story, one who worked hard and had the years of experience to prove it. (Thank God, the networks couldn’t convince Murphy Brown’s producers that a successful reporter could be in her twenties.) In many ways, she exemplified how far sitcom women had come since the early days of television.

To understand the evolving role of women in society, turn on your TV and start to watch. You need only survey the last five decades, from June Cleaver to Murphy Brown to Carrie Bradshaw, to witness social history in the making. From the moment Americans started buying television sets, the situation comedy has mirrored attitudes toward the status quo: periods when we’ve accepted it, periods when we haven’t, periods when we’ve fought for change.

The sitcom functions as a societal barometer because it is essentially a female genre. The first and most famous, I Love Lucy, both was produced by a woman and featured a precocious female character. The sitcom’s twenty-two minute, two-act structure has changed little over the last fifty years, but its female characters have undergone significant transformations. Because both I Love Lucy, in the early years of television, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in the ’70s, were so successful, TV has built a foundation of sitcoms starring and featuring women. They have reflected the evolving place of women in our society, albeit often late and tentatively. From marital status to career to child rearing, television has reflected notions old and new, the conventional and the trailblazing, and everything in between. Most notable, though, has been the evolution of the sitcom’s single woman.

In the ’60s, Sally Rogers, played by Rose Marie on The Dick Van Dyke Show (which premiered in 1961), embodied the quintessential single woman. Sure, she was funny and sassy and worked with the boys, but hers was not a fate most women would envy. She was rebuffed by the men in her world . . . and even by television critics. Consider this passage from The Great TV Sitcom Book:

There was one classic episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show . . . in which Sally, the ugly-duckling, man-hungry staff writer, was on a talk show asking eligible men to send her a postcard because she was looking for a husband. That was nearly twenty years ago, but you can be sure that Rose Marie’s still looking.2

Not only was a single woman in her thirties or older described as an “ugly duckling” (and believe me, there were worse monikers I’ve spared you), it was assumed she would be single forever. Although the structure of situation comedies leaves little room for characters to change much about their “situations,” early TV’s single women were destined to end up wrinkled, bitter cat fanciers. As historian Susan Douglas puts it, “Old contradictions don’t die, they just get new outfits.”3

While this may be true, we cannot deny the extent to which women’s lives have changed since the advent of the TV sitcom. While television shows of the ’50s weren’t necessarily representative of real life, they reflected conventional views of women and the nuclear family. Being a single woman back then was akin to having an unexplained mental disorder or worse. In fact, in 1957, 53 percent of the American public believed that unmarried people were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic,” while only 37 percent viewed them neutrally.

By the 1960s, marriage as a national ideal, an enforceable teenage daydream, had lost some of its appeal.4 In fact, the 1960 census reported that eighteen out of every 100 households were headed by women. Though many of these independent women were widows, almost two million were divorced, 900,000 were separated, and amazingly 1.4 million women had never wed at all.5 As available housing increased, younger women were no longer forced to live with their families. As the ’60s rolled on, more and more women entered the workforce.

With the emergence of the women’s movement in the 1970s, single women became “a serious, permanent social fact.”6 Betsy Israel’s Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century underscores the huge changes women experienced:

By the mid-1970s, single women would emerge as among the most economically and socially significant of all the onetime shadow population groups. Being single, like being openly gay, would finally lose any lingering taint of ugly character weakness, any hint of pathology, and come to seem an entirely viable way to live–what someone back in 1925 had first called a “lifestyle.”7

Changes that began in the ’60s started to affect women’s lives both in reality and in the way they were depicted on television. As Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (published in 1963), and other feminists led the Women’s Strike for Equality, “a 24-hour general strike . . . of all women in America against the concrete conditions of their oppression,” our first overtly feminist TV icon — Mary Richards of The Mary Tyler Moore Show — was taking the national stage.8 Single womanhood was being redefined. The next thirty years of television would offer an enormous array of single women, old and young, neurotic and calm, desperate to be married and happily single. Even though television would remain a bastion of traditionalism in some ways, in other important ways it would also never be the same.

The Single Stigma

I live in New York City, a place seemingly accepting of just about any lifestyle. But it still boggles my mind how many times I have been asked (in a tone more accusatory than enquiring), “So, how come you’re not married?” My mother recalls that back in the early ’70s, the first question people would ask her was, “What does your husband do?” Some things change, some things don’t. We may no longer assume that most women are married (or that only their husbands have a career), but it’s not uncommon for a single woman to still feel like a social leper at a dinner party.

The stigma of being single hasn’t disappeared, but it’s certainly lessened since the days of Sally Rogers. Most women today don’t feel pressure to marry until they’re in their thirties, instead of in their early twenties. But nine out of ten Americans still get married. So even though it is culturally acceptable to spend your twenties dating and working on your career, the pressure to march down the aisle intensifies as you enter your thirties.

When the world wonders why I haven’t “found a man,” I search for inspiration and find it where I’ve always found it — on television, where my sitcom buddies are out there working for themselves and staying single for, at least, a while. Sex and the City addresses many of the issues single women deal with, whether we live in the city, the suburbs, or a small town. As a gauge of how much our cultural version of the single woman has improved, one need only look from Sally Rogers in the fifties to Carrie Bradshaw today.

But in between them, there was Mary Richards. The Mary Tyler Moore Show featured the sitcom world’s first unmarried heroine. The show’s debut, and subsequent success, is always referred to as a historical event. As one encyclopedia of sitcoms explains, “And then, suddenly one Saturday night in 1970: The Mary Tyler Moore Show, starring Dick Van Dyke’s ex-wife. It was funny, it was intelligent, it was moving. What a relief from the sixties.”9

Mary Richards embodied the “career woman,” a term surprisingly still with us, even as gender employment rates continue to equalize. Work wasn’t the only important part of the new career woman’s life. She was also single — by choice. Prior to Mary Richards, single by choice didn’t exist on television. Sally Rogers and goofy over-the-hill characters were single by circumstances beyond their control and usually depicted as desperate and unfulfilled. But Mary escaped the clutches of suburban marriage because she had an aching feeling that she wanted more — more experiences with men, more independence, just more.

The popular culture catalyst for the acceptance of single women wasn’t their entertainment value. Instead, it was a response to the times — or a delayed response. The Mary Tyler Moore Show broke from the sitcom status quo by making a decidedly political effort to show the 1970s “new woman” in her natural habitat.

In her job interview at WJM-TV’s newsroom, Mary is asked a series of questions by her ornery future boss, Lou Grant. Even Mary can’t escape the marriage question:

LOU: How old are you?

MARY: Thirty.

LOU: What religion are you?

MARY: Mr. Grant . . . I don’t know how to say this: You’re not allowed to ask that when someone’s applying for a job. It’s against the law.

LOU: Wanna call a cop? Are you married?

MARY: Presbyterian.10

Ah, how refreshing that Mary occupies the same world many of us live in — one where we would rather discuss our religious affiliation than explain our personal decisions about marriage, dating, and being single. Mary’s response to Mr. Grant’s interrogation sets the tone for the show: a woman doing her best to swim upstream in a society that still wants the womenfolk in their traditional place downstream. Seventies audiences didn’t find Mary intimidating, and she was just vulnerable enough to take revolutionary steps on TV without alienating traditionalists. We have the series’ creators to thank for recognizing the difficulties and excitement of a single woman taking a different path. Yet she was hardly strident about her choices. In a memorable scene from the first episode, she and her fiancé realize their relationship is over. As they part, he says, “Take good care of yourself.” Mary softly says, “I think I just did.”11 It was new for television, a single woman who “took care of herself” by eliminating her boyfriend from her life.12

Most of the women I’ve met, particularly baby boomers, think of The Mary Tyler Moore Show as quintessentially seventies. As Bonnie Dow points out, if television scholars established a canon of “great works” as is done for literature, The Mary Tyler Moore Show (MTM) certainly would be included. In addition, the show is generally acknowledged as the first popular, long-running series to overtly feature the influence of feminism. MTM wasn’t the first single-working-woman sitcom, but it asserted that work (and independence) was not just a prelude or substitute for marriage. Work was central to a satisfying life for a woman, just as it was for men.13 “To me, Mary represented a new attitude,” says one MTM writer, “that you could be single and still be a whole person, that you didn’t need to be married to have a complete life.”14

The Mary Tyler Moore Show set a precedent and spawned generations of “single girl” series. Even as many shows have explored the theme more progressively, “the shadow of MTM hangs over them.”15 It began a “quiet revolution.”16 According to The Great TV Sitcom Book, “Mary Richards was single. And she didn’t mind. She didn’t chase after men. In fact, she’d often rather spend a night in with best buddy Rhoda than go out on another boring date (she once calculated that 90 percent of her dates were bad).”17

If more than half of people in the 1950s thought single life was unnatural, attitudes had changed dramatically by the ’70s, when studies found that only 33 percent of people had “negative attitudes and expectations” of the unmarried. Fifty-one percent viewed them neutrally and 15 percent approvingly.18 By 1974, a study in The New York Times found that young, single women held themselves in higher regard than they had the year before, and felt self-assured, confident, secure.19 By 1975, 25 percent of U.S. households were headed by single women. Over time, not only did it become it okay to be single, but the twenty-one-year-old wife archetype of yesterday came to be seen as more and more of an anachronism. She was seen as a woman who had skipped out on an important part of her young life.20

The single stigma was changing in real life and the television sitcom was trying to catch up. With MTM, the small screen was finally acknowledging a cultural shift. The networks and programmers felt that the nation was “ready” to see this change. In fact, many felt that the ideas of the ’60s had progressed slowly in terms of actual change. But by 1970, things had “really crashed,” wrote Betsy Israel in Bachelor Girls. “The changes started seeping out from there, and there was no going back.”21

In the case of MTM, the networks were certainly right. Its success was not only about content but about schedule. In Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite TV Shows, Nora Ephron describes her own relationship with The Mary Tyler Moore Show:

All I want to say, without being too mushy about it, is that it meant a lot to me the second time I was single and home alone on a Saturday night to discover that Mary Tyler Moore was home, too. . . . Thanks. You made it possible for millions of Americans to stay home on Saturday night and not feel they were missing anything. For that alone I loved you.22

For a show to do so well on the biggest “going out” night of the week proved that there was certainly something about Mary. The show made it “respectable to stay at home on Saturday nights.”23 This had previously been the domain of the single woman, eating ice cream alone while couples dined in romantic restaurants. That is, until married couples and single women alike wanted to know what Mary Richards, a single girl, was up to each week. She was the kind of character you wanted to hang out with on Saturday nights, even if she could only stay for thirty minutes.24

Since MTM, a variety of shows have addressed the single stigma, most often when younger and older generations clash. Some of the funniest exchanges on Ellen occur between Ellen and her mother, a caricature of June Cleaver, who happens to have a daughter who never wears dresses nor has a boyfriend. In one episode, when her mother suggests that maybe the reason Ellen is alone is because of her constant joking (which is why we love her, by the way), Ellen responds:

LOIS (ELLEN’S MOTHER): So . . . how’s your life?

ELLEN: Fine . . . fine, fine.

LOIS: Do you have a boyfriend?

ELLEN: No . . . nope . . . nope, nope.

LOIS: Are you seeing anyone?

ELLEN: You know, you know, Mom, we have lunch every Friday . . . and every Friday you ask me the exact same questions: How’s your life? Do you have a boyfriend? Are you seeing anyone? How’s your job? . . .

LOIS: Oops, how is your job?

ELLEN: It’s fine, Mom.

LOIS: (Disappointed) Fine.25

Having to defend not being married seems to be a pretty common monkey on the backs of many women on TV and in real life. I have to defend my own choice to be single more than I ever thought I would. Just as on TV sitcoms, these defenses often happen when I’m with a group of my parents’ friends. I reply with the usual stock answers of “choosing to be single.” Many women I know want to get married “one day” — tomorrow, next year, or eight years from now. For countless reasons, we choose to be single for a time or forever, even if that includes tense conversations with our mothers or friends.

Ellen, Fran Fine on The Nanny, and Jackie, Roseanne’s sister on Roseanne, are forced to stave off blows from their mothers about their choice to be thirty (gasp!) and single. Fran confronts her mother about the intense pressure she feels to get married:

FRAN: My therapist says I have to get to the root of the problems that plague me, so naturally I came to see you.

SYLVIA (FRAN’S MOTHER): I don’t even know what your problem is. (Mumbling) Over thirty. Not married.

FRAN: You know, my therapist is making me realize I don’t need to be married to feel good about myself.

SYLVIA: That’s nice–why don’t you book an appointment on New Year’s Eve . . . (hitting her) when you’re alone?26

Some of us are lucky enough not to feel stigmatized for being single women in our own homes, assuming, of course, none of us live with our mothers. Watching Mary Richards as “the single woman archetype,” a woman determined to “make it on her own,” we could bask in her limelight. Her experiences added elasticity to our notions of a woman’s “place.”

Following cultural trends, television featured increasing numbers of single-women in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. According to a 1991 census, both the rising age for marriage and the frequency of divorce had resulted in men and women spending, on average, more than half their lives unmarried.27 So for every time Fran complains about being an over-thirty single woman, for every time a single woman on TV goes on a bad date and wishes she never had to go on one again, we know these women are dealing with the same laments and difficulties we face ourselves. We are all out there experiencing it together. If Alice and Ann Romano from One Day at a Time, Kate and Allie, Murphy Brown, the women from The Golden Girls and Designing Women, and countless others can stand up to the singles stigma, I can too. Do I still feel that my single-by-choice attitude is seen as a kind of cover for my failure to “find a man” and get married? Absolutely. Do I defy that stigma every day I continue to live a happily single-in-my-thirties life? Absolutely.

By the 1990s, TV characters like Ally McBeal and the women from Sex and the City had clearly internalized their acceptance of the single life of the career woman. It was no longer an overtly politicized choice; they simply saw it as normal — not a “lifestyle,” but a life. This was often publicized by the media as a new type of feminism, in which women could embrace traditional values and attitudes because they had already established their independence. In essence, shows like Living Single (the African American precursor to Sex and the City), Girlfriends, Caroline in the City, and Suddenly Susan allowed women to covet marriage because it was a choice they made after they’d been single. Friends and Will & Grace begin with female leads deciding that they are not ready to get married. Of course, this is the world of sitcoms, so the characters invariably reach this life-changing decision while dressed in their wedding gowns, veil and all.

Though we’ll probably never be able to completely rid society of the single stigma, the world is slowly moving forward, as is television programming. TV sitcom writers want to represent the status quo because viewers relate to it and find it realistic. Today, television is filled with single women: some working, some not, some divorced, some not. TV represents being single as an option, and not simply for women in their twenties. Shows like Cybill, Once and Again, and Judging Amy explore the lives of unmarried women over thirty. Television, over time, has shown us possibilities for our lives, possibilities beyond what we hear — inside and outside our own heads — about our prescribed roles as women in America. Presenting singlehood as culturally acceptable encourages women toward all kinds of independence. Every night on television, we see that being a wife and mother aren’t our only options.

Mary Richards seems a bit naive in today’s light, but her life as a single professional woman by choice has helped successive generations view female singlehood in different, more expansive ways. Regardless of the waves of backlash that have affected women through the last four decades, it is now distinctly possible that there are generations of women who will not experience “single-illness” and will instead find a fulfilling life without being a wife or mother.28 Television’s single women have, at least, helped trigger some skepticism about societal marriage pressure and, at the most, even helped viewers feel confident about rejecting married life altogether.

One of my favorite examples of both how far we’ve come and how some things never change is an exchange between Monica Geller and Rachel Green on the pilot episode of Friends. After not seeing each other since high school, Rachel meets Monica in a coffeehouse in Manhattan. When Rachel asks Monica if she is married and Monica says no, Rachel pauses and says, “Well, that’s okay.” Monica responds, with a wonderful simplicity, as if stating the obvious, “I know.” To me, her answer is both matter-of-fact and proud, making the implied question seem almost ignorant. As if Monica is thinking, “Duh, it’s been okay for female lead characters to be single since 1970. Where have you been?”

Single in the City

Of the mosaic of images we conjure when we think of single women, we tend to place their species most often in a city. Gloria Steinem, who waited until she was sixty-five to get married, explained to a reporter that she never felt much pressure to get married because she created her own kind of family/support system without being married. She looked for support from her peers, students, and friends, the way women traditionally took solace in their husbands. She also said she didn’t feel immense marriage pressure because she lived in New York City. It is no surprise that there tend to be more singles in urban areas and fewer in suburban areas.

In the ’50s, many television sitcoms were set in white upper-middle-class suburbs, emphasizing nuclear families and white picket fences. By the ’70s, shows, particularly those featuring single women, were located in metropolises. Once again, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, set in Minneapolis, was out in front on this trend.

Later, Rhoda was set in New York, The Golden Girls in Miami, and Designing Women in Atlanta. City-dwelling singles became a staple of prime-time entertainment. Cities offer a wonderful mystique and anonymity of living, and shows about single women made use of the city as a background for their experiences.

In many ways, it was more acceptable to be a single woman in an urban environment because more singles exist in cities. These shows also represent how different kinds of people with different kinds of lives are forced to live together. We’ve seen how Mary was able to find camaraderie with Rhoda and Phyllis, how the women on Friends and Sex and the City found support and strength in each other. There’s some comfort in knowing that no matter what you are going through as a single woman — loneliness, excitement, first dates, relationship breakdowns — a million other women in the same city are going through the same thing.

Television sets its own precedents and repeats the same formats over and over. Once again, we can thank Mary for setting a precedent, this time the urban one. Through the decades, Alice, One Day at a Time, Murphy Brown, Friends, Caroline in the City, Suddenly Susan, and countless other series followed suit.

No sooner had the first wave of TV’s single women moved to the city than a backlash hit, trying to make women feel threatened and scared. This paved the way for the success of cop dramas like Cagney & Lacey, in which women helped other women who were threatened in the big city. As some were persuaded to leave for the safety of the suburbs, millions of others living alone or together braved the crime-ridden streets of the city — and loved it.

The Dating Game

A subject well explored by TV sitcoms is the issue of women and dating. Imagine all the dates you and your friends have been on and think of the comedic possibilities for a television show. Whether the man is a mismatch or “the one,” TV’s sitcom women have done a lot of dating. The “dating scene” elicits both excitement and agony for the characters and for the audience as well.

Murphy Brown, professionally accomplished, was insecure about her personal life but open to a date when the prospect presented itself. She didn’t just date, either. She was attracted to a variety of men, one of whom was the character Peter Hunt, a foreign reporter. Because his career required constant travel, he couldn’t make a relationship work with Murphy. In an episode titled “It’s Just Like Riding a Bike,” Peter returns to the news magazine FYI and to Murphy, unbeknownst to her friends and coworkers. When she first sees Peter again, Murphy is her usual brisk self.

MURPHY: Let me guess. You were in the neighborhood and just stopped by to use the phone. Outside the building and two blocks down. Better take an umbrella, looks like rain.

(Murphy walks toward her office. Peter follows her and seems about to ask, “What is going on here?” when Murphy grabs him and pulls him into her office for a very passionate kiss.)

PETER: So, I’m guessing you haven’t told the others about us?

MURPHY: I like to keep my personal life personal. At least, that’s what I always thought if I had a personal life.

PETER: Did you get my letter?

MURPHY: Yes, very steamy stuff. And a nice touch, rolling it inside a shell-casing.

PETER: There’s something about artillery fire that makes me think of you.

MURPHY: So many people say that.

PETER: I see you got the lock fixed on your door?

MURPHY: I have to be in editing in two minutes.

PETER: I can do two minutes.

MURPHY: You know, Petey, most women wouldn’t consider that a selling point. You know, some of us even like to be wooed: flowers, a little trinket bestowed by the wooer on the wooee.

PETER: You think I can’t do romance? I can do romance. How about tonight? I’ll wear clean socks.29

In dating, Murphy is like many women; she knows that Peter is not the right man for her, but can’t resist his adorable charm and immense sex appeal. In the end, the relationship doesn’t work out, but we live through Murphy’s experiences and compare them to our own.

Sex and the City focuses on dating and sex. Just thinking about the array of men the four main characters — Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha — have dated can make a woman feel better about her own prospects. After all, Charlotte marries a man who turns out to be impotent. Carrie dates everyone from a bisexual to a college stoner who lives with his mother to a politician whose greatest fantasy is to pee on her. With these experiences, women get to vicariously date idiots and good men as well as weirdos and neurotics. The New York dating scene certainly gets a once-over from these four women. Not only do we see their dating lives, we see how that part of their lives affects their friendships, their feelings about themselves, and ultimately their decisions about their personal lives.

Many episodes of Friends also deal with the subject of dating. Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel date, have relationships, and have sex. In one episode, Monica and Rachel vie for the attention of action star Jean-Claude Van Damme. In another, the girls leer at politico George Stephanopoulos, whom they can see through their apartment window. In yet another, Rachel dates a dead ringer for her friend Ross. Throughout these dating experiences, just as on Sex and the City, viewers get to hear what others think about the men these women choose. In the third episode of the series, Monica confides in a coworker that she is nervous about her friends meeting her new guy, Alan, since they tend to hate all the men she dates. The twist in this episode is that they adore him, which would be perfect if only Monica felt the same way.

MONICA: (To Alan) Thanks. I’ll call you tomorrow. (Alan exits; to all) Okay. Okay, let’s let the Alan-bashing begin. Who’s gonna take the first shot, hmm?

(Silence)

MONICA: C’mon!

ROSS: I’ll go. Let’s start with the way he kept picking at . . . no, I’m sorry, I can’t do this. We loved him.

ALL: Loved him! Yeah! He’s great!

MONICA: Wait a minute! We’re talking about someone that I’m going out with?

ALL: Yeah!

JOEY: Know what was great? The way his smile was kinda crooked.

PHOEBE: Yes, yes! Like the man in the shoe!

ROSS: What shoe?

PHOEBE: From the nursery rhyme. “There was a crooked man, who had a crooked smile, who lived in a shoe, for a . . . while . . .”

ROSS: So I think Alan will become the yardstick against which all future boyfriends will be measured.

RACHEL: What future boyfriends? No . . . no . . . I think this could be, ya know, it.

MONICA: Really!

CHANDLER: Oh, yeah. I’d marry him just for his David Hasselhoff impression alone. You know I’m gonna be doing that at parties, right?

ROSS: You know what I like most about him, though?

ALL: What?

ROSS: The way he makes me feel about myself.

ALL: Yeah . . .30

The irony here is that the first guy her friends like is someone Monica cannot see herself with. A further irony is that although Alan really likes her, he can’t stand her friends. While they are disappointed with the breakup, Monica doesn’t reveal Alan’s true feelings about them. All three female characters date throughout the ten-year run of the show until each finds her “it.”

Suddenly Single

It wasn’t only women who had put off marriage to a later date who were filling up the increasing ranks of singles. Many women joined singlehood as widows or divorcées. (Interestingly, the Mary Richards character was originally written as a divorcée, but the producers decided divorce would give the character too much of a past. Mary had the clean slate of just having left a relationship, which they felt was more appropriate for the times.) The bonds of marriage, even for women who had been married, were loosening. After the exposé of women’s dissatisfaction with their roles as housewives and mothers in Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, being separated or divorced was also losing some of its stigma. Women were actively declaring their divorced status. One of television’s first divorcées, Ann Romano, wasn’t embarrassed by it.

MAN: Mrs. Romano?

ANN: It is Ms. Romano.31

A variety of shows in the last thirty years have focused on women who are dealing or have dealt with divorce or separation. Cybill, an actress and mother, is constantly surrounded by her exes, each with his own issues and quirks. Cybill has already been a wife (more than once) and a mother (to two daughters). She is a semiworking actress, well into her fifties, and her motivation to date doesn’t seem to have slowed. Not only is Cybill an example of the mature, been-through-it-all single woman, so is her best friend Maryann (though with more cynicism and daring than Cybill). These aren’t the Golden Girls. These are vibrant women living a self-reliant life, and they are anything but spinsters. Growing up watching these shows, I never thought it “abnormal” for a woman in her fifties to live alone.

This is not to say that life for single women on TV has been a cakewalk. For instance, Grace Under Fire doesn’t only deal with a single, divorced mother of two, it also addresses how freeing divorce can be, especially since Grace’s ex-husband is an abusive alcoholic (facts taken from actor Brett Butler’s real life). Whether they are single with children, single and lonely, or married and miserable, women have found more and more programs that speak directly to their experience. To go from a world in which divorce is discussed in hushed tones to a world in which divorce is par for the course has been a journey that, in my mind, has helped women face their own choices and learn that there are options outside of marriage.

Kate and Allie, both divorcées with children, make a life together as a makeshift family in the ’90s, when divorce is increasingly common.

ALLIE: Kate, do you want to get married again?

KATE: Someday.

ALLIE: It wasn’t a question. It was a proposal.32

Dating in midlife has created a subgenre all its own. In Once and Again, Sela Ward plays a recently divorced single mother who is starting a late-in-life relationship with a single father. This isn’t The Brady Bunch. These characters are complex and the series addresses the difficulties of dating, while also being a mother in your forties.

Stepping Stone Singles

I remember a particularly funny episode of Friends, in which Chandler asks his platonic friend Monica if she is not married by the time she reaches a certain age to marry him. Monica’s panicked response makes us laugh at the uneasiness women have with the idea that they may never marry. Monica goes on to ask Chandler so many times why he thinks she won’t be married that he dives over a chair to escape the conversation. Of course, many women want to get married “one day,” but some live with a stifling fear that what they want — marriage — may never happen.

Both on TV and in real life, the term “stepping-stone singles” refers to women who are single, but desperately seeking marriage: women who buy the books about how to “land a man” or play by the dating “rules.” On TV, they are vestiges from an age when being single was “deviant”; but unlike the Sally Rogers–esque characters of the past, they mock the society that romanticizes the institution of marriage. In one episode of The Nanny, Fran is contemplating asking her boss, and love interest, out on a date.

GRACE: Fran, Daddy asked you out on the first date. Why don’t you ask him out on the second?

FRAN: Mom raised me to believe that it’s the man that should do the courting of the woman.

SYLVIA (FRAN’S MOTHER): Sweetheart, I didn’t know what I was saying. It was the sixties. I was taking a lot of antacids.33

Certainly, one of the most memorable characters desperate to get married is Rhoda Morgenstern, Mary Richards’ neighbor. Like Mary, Rhoda is a single woman in the big city, but she has a very different attitude about being single. While Mary is happy with her independence, Rhoda and her mother lament the fact that Rhoda’s not married. Most of the comedy is based on that very personality trait. When hearing about any man at all, Rhoda’s response is, “Is he married? Sorry, force of habit.” On her own show, Rhoda eventually gets her wish and marries her boyfriend, Joe. As viewers, we are happy to see our favorite character get what she wants, even if it isn’t what we want.

I wasn’t particularly happy, when Sex and the City ended, that the women who had been single and free for six years, all settled down in one form or another. But at the same time, all their years of dating woes, marriage fears, and personal decisions represent the many ways women can be single and the many ways our choices about men, relationships, and sex affect our lives. Even if their experiences culminate in marriage, I doubt many women, especially Carrie Bradshaw and friends, are unhappy about all the years they learned about themselves and what they wanted out of life before becoming part of a couple. No matter how much these women need men, they prove that they can, if they have to, live without them.

Single as a State of Mind

I know that there would be no single life on TV without Mary Richards and a lot less validation of that life without Sex and the City.

On the very first episode of Sex and the City (SATC), Carrie Bradshaw, a writer, examines the state of being single today in New York City. “Welcome to the age of un-innocence. No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s, and no one has affairs to remember. Instead, we have breakfast at seven am and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. Self-protection and closing the deal are paramount. Cupid has flown the co-op. How the hell did we get into this mess?”34 We all can agree with Carrie that sometimes single life feels like a mess we have gotten ourselves into, but it is also amazing to hear a woman talk about seeking love and happiness through singlehood in the same way men do. Asserting that women should be self-protective, but can also indulge in “affairs,” is something that many women today can relate to.

Single women in sitcoms have given us a great deal to work with. At the end of SATC’s first episode, Carrie meets Mr. Big and introduces herself as a writer working on a column about women who have sex like men. What an introduction. Even when Carrie realizes that she wants to be in love and doesn’t want to feel guilty about her sexual conquests, she spends the next five years doing just what she was examining in her column: living a single life with no regret, embarrassment, or stigma.

Today, single adults without children compose the majority of the population, and this doesn’t seem to be changing. Unlike previous generations, we aren’t booming with babies. In fact, being single in America today isn’t half as embarrassing as it was before 1970. Television is entertainment, and entertainment makes things appear better, more interesting, and even more glamorous than they really are. In a way, this has helped single women feel less ashamed of their situation as they see wonderful dynamic, women like Carrie Bradshaw, and the women of Living Single and Friends. My own New York City apartment may barely compare to the rent-controlled luxury of Monica and Rachel’s pied-à-terre, but like those fumbling, funny, driven characters, I too have a space of my own to live my single life. I have pushed alongside them through the ups and downs of being single (without any plan in sight to get married).

In The Improvised Woman: Single Women Reinventing Single Life, one of my favorite books about the experience of being a single woman, Marcelle Clements explains the confusion and difficulties single women face:

Many single women sporadically careen back and forth between being viewed (and perceiving themselves) as distinctly rejected–”pathetic” is the word that comes up–or as possessing the eminently enviable aura–”glamorous” is the euphemism. My guess is that many women feel both, depending on whom they’re with. After all, as a rule hardly anyone feels particularly talismanic to themselves, unless they’re in the manic phase of their cycle. Conflicting messages proliferate from the same source: “In my department . . . most people are married,” said one woman, “and they like to have me as this sort of wandering, sexy, romantic figure, but they would also like to have me married because they think it would make me happy and because it would make me less threatening.35

The truth about women’s history is that regardless of the choices offered to them in their time and place, women always feel the push and pull of tradition versus progression. It is one thing to watch self-reliant single women on TV, but quite another to be one yourself. These TV shows have externalized all those internal struggles many of us feel. Ally McBeal may be a successful single lawyer, but she is an emotional roller coaster. Some find her annoying — no one likes to listen to anyone complain without taking action — while others find her inspiring. (Ally works in the same office as her ex-boyfriend and his new wife, setting herself up for misery.) Ally McBeal actually made the cover of Time with an accompanying feature story that asked if she was the face of “new feminism.” In my opinion, she is just one of the faces, and for me, she is bolstered by a lifetime of single female TV icons living the lives they chose for themselves.

So many women in my TV family have helped expand the available options for women’s personal lives. Sex and the City feels like the culmination of years of struggling to show everyone that being married is no better than being single. As opposed to being seen as old, desperate, and pathetic, the SATC characters are hot middle-aged women who live in a world where being single is not only a choice, it’s often the preferred one. As Marcelle Clements remarks, single women can seem almost “glamorous.” If the SATC women are anything, they are definitely that. Even if single life isn’t a party-hopping, fabulous-clothes-wearing romp around New York City, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte give us a glamorized version of ourselves, the same way Leave It to Beaver once offered 1950s America a sanitized version of the wife and mother. As the oft-quoted Virginia Slims advertisement boasted in the late ’60s, “You’ve come a long way, baby!”

Wow! At the end?! If you wanna hear more, check out my interview on the podcast Advanced TV Herstory with the wonderful Cynthia Bemis Abrams!

What Would Murphy Brown Do? 2nd edition:
https://advancedtvherstory.libsyn.com/placeholder-for-allison-klein-1-do-not-publish#gZ0cuCUu3sQJlAoD.03