Defining Women

Television and the Case of Cagney and Lacey

Julie D'Acci

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807860960
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Defining Women explores the social and cultural construction of gender and the meanings of woman, women, and femininity as they were negotiated in the pioneering television series Cagney and Lacey, starring two women as New York City police detectives. Julie D'Acci illuminates the tensions between the television industry, the series production team, the mainstream and feminist press, various interest groups, and television viewers over competing notions of what women could or could not be--not only on television but in society at large. Cagney and Lacey, which aired from 1981 to 1988, was widely recognized as an innovative treatment of working women and developed a large and loyal following. While researching this book, D'Acci had unprecedented access to the set, to production meetings, and to the complete production files, including correspondence from network executives, publicity firms, and thousands of viewers. She traces the often heated debates surrounding the development of women characters and the representation of feminism on prime-time television, shows how the series was reconfigured as a 'woman's program, ' and investigates questions of female spectatorship and feminist readings. Although she focuses on Cagney and Lacey, D'Acci discusses many other examples from the history of American television.

CHAPTER 1
WOMEN CHARACTERS AND “REAL WORLD” FEMININITY

During Cagney and Lacey’s creation and the whole of its network run, the key players involved in production and reception continuously battled over what women on television should and should not or could and could not be. These players included those we would expect to be part of any negotiation of television’s meanings—the TV network, the production company and production team, the television audience, the press, and various interest and pressure groups.

All these groups, of course, supported definitions of woman, women, and femininity that suited their particular interests, whether those were political, economic, cultural, “personal,” or some combination thereof. Many network executives, for instance, wanted the show to include topical and relevant representations of women while they simultaneously hoped to preserve the conventional ways of depicting female characters. Despite the examples set by a number of 1970s sitcoms (which I discuss below), these conventions still presented women as primarily young, white, middle class, stereotypically “attractive,” and domesticated. They specifically portrayed women as wives, mothers, heterosexual sex objects, subsidiaries of men, and as “vulnerable” and “sympathetic” characters; in addition, women were traditionally cast as the protagonists of situation comedies rather than prime-time dramas.¹

In contrast, Cagney and Lacey’s independent production company, Orion Television (formerly Filmways), appeared at least somewhat committed to generating more innovative representations. Richard Rosenbloom, Orion Television’s president, in fact had a reputation for producing the highest percentage of work written by women in Hollywood at the time. The series’s production team (the creators, writers, producers, and main actresses), for its part, was powerfully influenced by the liberal women’s movement and explicitly fashioned Cagney and Lacey (especially in its first few years) on early feminist terms. A significant segment of the women’s audience for the series, as well as for other working women–targeted programs of the time, was looking for progressive, multidimensional, and “real” female depictions. (The oft-cited term real will be discussed at length in Chapter 5.) The mainstream press, as can be imagined, demonstrated extremely varied interests: One sector, very much affected by feminism, agitated for a wider range of women characters on television and, specifically, for roles shaped by women’s movement concerns. Other media factions called for a return to “tried and true” femininity.²

Similarly, a number of interest and pressure groups weighed in according to their own stakes in divergent meanings and portrayals: The National Gay Task Force, for example, vehemently protested the network’s effort to shield the series from connotations of lesbianism by replacing one actress portraying Cagney with another “more feminine” one. The National Right to Life Committee fiercely opposed Cagney and Lacey’s support of a woman character who chose to have an abortion, while Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) applauded the program’s embrace of reproductive rights. And spokespeople for the U.S. liberal women’s movement generally and consistently championed the series for depicting “independent” working women and emphasizing the women’s friendship.

Because the women’s movements were such fundamental forces in U.S. social history of the 1970s and 1980s, and in the controversies surrounding Cagney and Lacey, I need to say a few things about them here. The taxonomy of the different “camps” that I will draw upon has been well critiqued—among other problems, it tends to ignore the countless overlaps from camp to camp and to oversimplify a wide diversity of viewpoints. But because many feminists in the seventies and eighties defined themselves in relation to its terms, it warrants discussion. As I have already indicated, the camp that most influenced Cagney and Lacey is generally called the liberal women’s movement. In America, this segment is associated with Ms. magazine, Gloria Steinem, and the National Organization for Women (NOW). Its primary emphasis, especially in the 1970s, was on equality under the law and in the labor force, with a focus on white, heterosexual, middle-class women; its programs for social change were oriented toward “reform” rather than a radical structural reorganization of American political and social life. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, due to the efforts of women of color and lesbians, the movement became more attentive to groups beyond the white middle class, and it also recognized the existence of structural reasons for women’s oppression that required more than personal solutions. By and large, the movement has worked to train public attention on the social and cultural problems that women face involving wages, labor conditions, abortion and other reproductive rights, rape laws, women’s safety, childcare issues, educational opportunities, female solidarity, and the importance of mass media in bringing about social change.

But feminism during the 1970s and 1980s was represented by other segments and theoretical approaches in addition to the liberal one. These various approaches have been profiled in other works, and I just want to flag four major positions—radical, cultural, socialist, and poststructuralist feminism. Many early radical feminists engaged in a sound critique of liberal feminism, made the oppression of women and the operations of patriarchy their central concerns, and favored the elimination of sex differences. But throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, some radical feminists drifted toward a belief in a natural female essence. This approach, which came to be called cultural feminism, evolved into a celebration of, rather than a challenge to, “essential” sex differences. Associated with such groups as Women against Pornography, such feminism often valorized a biological femininity that was life- and nurturance-oriented and that was universally oppressed by a dominating and conquest-oriented patriarchy.

Socialist feminism, on the other hand, argued for the social construction of both femininity and masculinity and focused on such issues as the relationship between women’s relegation to the domestic sphere and the maintenance of capitalism. Poststructuralist feminism argued for myriad differences within the seemingly coherent categories “woman” and “women” and for the notion that these concepts encompass a multitude of heterogeneous meanings produced in language rather than nature. Although liberal feminism plays the most active role in my case study of Cagney and Lacey, the other strands surface in some of the media and scholarly criticism I draw upon and discuss.³

THE REPRESENTATIONAL CONTEXT

Cagney and Lacey’s earliest period, from its conception in 1974 to its production as a made-for-TV movie in 1981, seethed with conflicts over definitions of women and their many negotiations. But it was not the only project so beset. Generally speaking, representations of women in motion pictures and television programs were highly contradictory throughout the 1970s. Films such as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Julia, The Turning Point, and An Unmarried Woman expressed tensions between the emerging interests of the women’s movements and more traditional notions of femininity. On prime-time television, a number of industry and social conditions combined to spawn a collection of amazingly paradoxical depictions. As Eileen Meehan demonstrates, by 1970 the A. C. Nielsen Company (which measures the television audience and publishes series “ratings”) had changed its fixed group of designated Nielsen “families” from a sample that dated back to its surveys of radio audiences, replacing it with younger and more urban households. Also, CBS discovered that, although its programming was bringing in more total viewers than the other networks, its five “owned and operated” stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and St. Louis were doing badly in ratings and revenues. The implications of this discovery, along with the Nielsen Company’s changeover to a younger, more urban ratings sample, helped to alter the face of prime-time television.⁴

It is important to understand that Federal Communication Commission regulations at the time allowed each network to own five VHF-TV stations.⁵ Called the “O and O’s” (for owned and operated), these stations were responsible for a large share of the networks’ actual profits and were located in highly lucrative metropolitan markets. Some CBS executives realized in 1969 that their schedule was heavily weighted with country programs such as Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, Mayberry RFD, Hee Haw, Petticoat Junction, and Gunsmoke. These programs, although extremely popular in the United States at large, were not popular (or, because of ratings, were presumed to be unpopular) with the urban audiences of the O and O’s—or, more precisely, with the newly designated Nielsen households. In a bold and internally contested move, CBS canceled its winning country schedule and oriented its programming toward what Jane Feuer has called “socially conscious sit-coms,” and Todd Gitlin, “relevant” programming. Some network executives thought that these series would appeal not only to the desired eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old, upwardly mobile target audience, but also to the urban, eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old, upwardly mobile audience.⁶

The new socially relevant sitcoms were produced primarily by Norman Lear’s Tandem and TAT Productions, by Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM Enterprises, and by Twentieth Century-Fox (M*A*S*H), and Warner Bros. (Alice). The civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, the antiwar movement, the women’s movements, and the accelerated entry of women into the labor force were all tapped for subject material. The effort to simply keep its programming up to date had already led ABC (in the late 1960s) into the social ferment of the times with such programs as Mod Squad and Judd for the Defense. (To some degree, NBC’s Julia [1968] may also be seen as part of this trend.) But the push to attract specific upscale urban audiences intensified CBS’s mining of thematic material that it thought would appeal to young, educated city dwellers. The move had enormous repercussions for the ways women were represented; programs featuring working women, African American women, older women, divorced women, single mothers, and working-class women filled the 1970s home screen. The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Maude, One Day at a Time, Alice, and All in the Family were prominent examples of the new fare. Controversial women’s issues such as abortion, rape, equal employment opportunities, and racial and gender prejudice were featured subjects. At least in some prime-time programs, “woman,” “women,” and “femininity” were no longer conceived solely in terms of young, white, and middle-class characteristics. Because this new “urban and sophisticated” programming was such a success at CBS, the other networks followed suit with a number of clones.⁷

However, as Lauren Rabinovitz, Serafina Bathrick, and Bonnie Dow have pointed out, these programs often produced contradictory and troubling representations of femininity and “independent” women, and most of the social issues raised were domesticated—that is, they were represented as contained and resolvable at the level of the family. With regard to their treatment of African Americans, Donald Bogle argued that these comedies “take authentic issues in the black community and distort them.” Esther Rolle, who played the character Florida on Good Times, quit the show because of differences with the producers over the portrayals, which she called “an outrage, an insult.” And the National Black Feminist Organization charged that the representations of blacks and other “minorities” in these comedies were “slanted toward the ridiculous with no redeeming counter images” and that the programs gave the impression that black people did not perform effectively in professional positions. The issues raised by these series regarding both African Americans and women–problematic, delimited, racist, and sexist as they were—nevertheless became part of negotiated public discourse, introduced a measure of visible difference into television’s repertoire, and challenged prime time’s equation of women (since the 1953 disappearance of Beulah and Amos ‘n’ Andy) with white and upscale characteristics exclusively.⁸

Beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing into the next decade, different conditions in society and the television industry combined once again to generate even more paradoxical female characters. This time, pressure on the networks from groups such as the Parent-Teachers Association (PTA) to reduce incidents of televised violence led directly to the display of women’s bodies as sexual attractions: “If you can’t have Starsky pull a gun and fire it fifty times a day on promos,” said Brandon Tartikoff (at the time vice-president of NBC’s programming), “sex becomes your next best handle.” Before this period, images of women on prime time had not been charged with the sexual display of motion picture imagery; instead, female TV characters were generally domesticated. However, from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, female sex objects dominated the TV landscape in what is often called the “jiggle” era, or in the industry’s noneuphemistic tag, the “T&A” (“tits and ass”) period. It is, of course, no accident that these representations coincided with the ever-mounting backlash over the concerns and demands of the women’s movements.⁹

One of the main paradoxes of this period is that, during it, women starred in more dramatic programs than at any other time in television history. Series like Police Woman, Get Christie Love, Charlie’s Angels, and Wonder Woman are major offspring of that era. Each of these programs could be squarely classified under the jiggle category, and each promoted sensationalism by providing raw material for setting up the classic “woman in distress” situation. The women protagonists ultimately were either rescued by male colleagues or used superhuman capabilities to resolve their predicaments. Other jiggle examples ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• DEFINING WOMEN
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 WOMEN CHARACTERS AND “REAL WORLD” FEMININITY
• CHAPTER 2 A WOMEN’S AUDIENCE
• CHAPTER 3 A WOMAN’S PROGRAM
• CHAPTER 4 NEGOTIATING FEMINISM
• CHAPTER 5 FEMALE/FEMININE/FEMINIST AUDIENCES, SPECTATORS, AND READINGS
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• CAGNEY AND LACEY “A CRY FOR HELP”
• INDEX