Conventional Portrayals of Women on TV Can Have Feminist Potential
Susan Douglas is a professor of media and American studies at Hampshire College. She has just written a book “Where the Girls Are,” that looks at women in baby-boomer pop culture. She explains how the media’s alternating images of stereotypical femininity and feminism created a kind of “schizophrenia” in American women. She talks about how this confusion has caused ambivalence in American women about what feminism means. In her book, she deconstructs such TV shows as “Bewitched,” whose female heroines have magical powers, and “Mary Tyler Moore,” whose heroine remains permanently poised between and assertiveness and submissiveness.
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