Supplemental Post #1 - Andrea

The readings this week have made me think back to one of the few older shows I watched as a kid, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and particularly the politics surrounding the show's lead female star, Mary Tyler Moore. In the Mellencamp reading, the author pits the two main female characters under analysis - Gracie and Lucy - against Mary Tyler Moore's character, Laura Petrie. Gracie and Lucy are defined as "humorous rebel or well-dressed, wise-cracking, naive dissenter who wanted or had a paid job," whereas Moore's character is oppositionally defined as the "contented, if not blissfully happy, understanding homebody." 

While I can't remember why exactly I enjoyed the show (I think the fact that I could share in my mother's nostalgia from her childhood definitely played a large role), this characterization of Laurie shocked me. On one hand, I felt ignorant and manipulated for liking a character described almost as an empty vessel filled with domestic bliss (I was pretty young when I watched the show, so I don't feel that guilty. Also Moore and Van Dyke were very attractive people, and she even popularized trousers!). On the other, I know vaguely of Moore's "feminist" legacy in regards to her own show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was confused with how this gap between Laura Petrie and Mary Richards could be possible - how did Moore get her own show in which she played a largely independent, "modern" woman when Laura Petrie has been described as a retrograde housewife. This lead me down a little rabbit hole into Mary Tyler Moore's own political affiliations, and what I found out about Moore was equally as confusing as her shift in star image. 

After reading a few articles online, I found that while The Mary Tyler Moore Show carries with it a feminist legacy that has inspired multiple celebrities and influential personalities (even Michelle Obama), Moore herself refused the labels of feminist or liberal. While Moore's eponymous show aimed to portray the "real" lives of working women, women with ambitions outside the home, Moore herself believed that women shouldn't prioritize career over family or reject the home for the working world. Perhaps increased conservatism in her older age is to blame for this cognitive dissonance, or perhaps we (namely I) have conflated Moore's character in TMTMS with her own image, but I find it interesting that Moore herself has come to represent such different archetypes of women in sitcoms. Perhaps Moore did possess both Laura Petrie's content domesticity and Mary Richards desire for independence, or perhaps she was just a talented actress who pretended to be women completely different from herself in every way.

Articles: 

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/feminist-legacy-mary-tyler-moore-show

https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/the-real-feminist-impact-of-i-the-mary-tyler-moore-show-i-was-behind-the-scenes/275875/

https://www.thoughtco.com/mary-tyler-moore-show-3529017

https://www.dailysignal.com/2017/01/25/why-mary-tyler-moore-refused-to-join-the-feminist-movement/