Jennifer Keishin Armstrong on Jennifer S. Clark’s *Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women’s Liberation*

Women’s presence behind the scenes of the U.S. television industry in the 1970s fundamentally changed the way the medium worked, pushing it toward a more feminist agenda. This is what Jennifer S. Clark argues effectively in Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women’s Liberation. Clark takes readers beyond the glitz of Hollywood and into the labor ranks, but her case studies are often as heroic and dramatic as anything seen on screen, from the female executive who helped women’s sports break through to the mainstream, to fascinating, if ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to bring “serious” women’s programming to public and regional airwaves.  

Clark begins with the simple fact that TV was all but obliged, in the ‘70s, to respond to the women’s movement that had been fomenting for some time. This is the beauty, or the curse, of popular media, depending on how progressive your stance: it must respond to its surroundings at some point. The ‘70s were beyond the unrest of the ‘60s, beyond the Summer of Love, beyond the birth control pill, and at the center of Women’s Lib in full force. Feminism could no longer be denied, as evidenced by mainstream hits centering women such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, about a single, working woman, and Maude, about an outspoken, middle-aged wife and mother unlike any TV housewife we’d seen before.

Clark’s first case study comes from the offices of CBS, where, in the early 1970s, female workers formed a Women’s Advisory Council that staged a “pants-in” protest—in which women defied corporate dress codes by wearing pants for the day—and was effective in negotiating with network management in areas such as promotion opportunities and training programs. Significantly, the group was less successful at pushing for changes in how women were depicted on the air.

The next chapter focuses on the rise of women’s sports as “a convergent site for a number of feminist concerns,” as Clark writes. The women’s movement itself largely scoffed at this: activist Flo Kennedy said, “Women have real problems that cannot be solved by I Love Lucy and The Dating Game and some sports event or some other jockocratic endeavor.” (Let us pause to appreciate that phrasing.) Still, it was hard to deny that tennis star Billie Jean King’s “battle of the sexes” with Bobby Riggs made a major cultural impact; with her win, King became an instant icon and sex symbol, not to mention a well-paid TV commentator championed by ABC producer Eleanor Sanger Riger, though this lasted only for so long.

Clark next focuses on the strange phenomenon of the sitcom/faux soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, which was somehow both a flop and a sensation. Created for Norman Lear’s production company by Ann Marcus, a former soap opera writer, the show parodied that genre and was infamous for, as 60 Minutes once explained, tackling, “satirically, we are assured … mass murder, exhibitionism, impotence, venereal disease, and the yellow waxy buildup on Mary’s kitchen floors.” While Lear was known for pushing boundaries, the show ultimately proved too much, too soon, for America. Audiences apparently liked to talk about how scandalized they were by the show more than they liked to tune in regularly. In fact, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman would be far more at home on a streaming service today. 

Finally, Clark delves into a handful of experimental feminist shows on regional public broadcasting stations that were pioneering, if short-lived—created by women, run by women, and often staffed by mostly or all women, an almost fantastical situation in the 1970s. In one extraordinary case, Boston’s WBZ-TV ran Yes, We Can, for a total of 16 hours on one day, on January 18, 1974. It was entirely produced and staffed by women, with only women appearing on air, discussing women’s concerns. All of this programming took women’s lives seriously, a rarity for television up to that point (and often after, as well). 

In the end, Producing Feminism shows the ways that women’s liberation in television has been a story of stunted growth, the ways that women and their genuine concerns have often gotten moments in the spotlight only to be snuffed out. This is, in fact, typical throughout the history of women in TV, going back to the very beginning, and stretching forward to today. Many of these women’s behind-the-scenes stories have not been told because they don’t follow neat or uplifting narratives, but, as Clark shows, they are still worth telling to understand the struggles that have slowly, frustratingly, and messily led to eventual progress.