Mary Tyler Moore Show & Feminism

Mary Tyler Moore and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The First True Popular and Televised Representation of Content Women Outside of the Home

        The year was 1962 when Moore met Grant Tinker, an executive at 20th Century Fox; the couple was married the same year in Las Vegas. In the late 1960’s, they merged their creative capital and formed MTM Enterprises. Her and Tinker pitched a show to CBS about a recently divorced woman living on her own who found a job in order to secure her independence. And the network took to it well. Network researchers had one reservation, however, about the lead female’s divorce, which was not yet allowed on network television. In 1970’s America, researchers agreed, there were four things that mainstream viewers could and would not welcome into their living rooms --- New Yorkers, Jews, divorced women and men with mustaches (Kovalchik). Producers settled that the lead would be newly single, but not divorced, having recently broken off an engagement. And so The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Mary Richards were born. The show was broadcast from 1970 to 1977 and is one of the most popular shows in television history (Heffernan).

        Mary Tyler Moore was cast as Mary Richards, an “incomparably spunky [woman] who….  expressed both the exuberance and the melancholy of the single career woman who could plot her own course without reference to cultural archetypes” (Heffernan). Mary was an associate news producer at WJM in Minneapolis. At the time, single, workingwomen were either portrayed as ineffective aged maids or “just too pathetic to show on-screen” (Lindsay & Heffernan). It was revolutionary enough for her to effectively exist outside of her home in the 1970’s. Even more, Mary was beautiful. She had a cozy, enviable apartment in the city. She was expressive and vulnerable, and more valuable for it, not weak or hysterical. She was sexual in ways that pushed men out of their allocated comfort zones for single women. Mary was funny, offering a source of ironic ingenuity and humor in a male dominated workforce. She was dynamic and she was gracious. She was, on the whole, respected and needed for more than her domestic capabilities. She had fun in her relationships; they were real and honest in ways that women (and men) in the 1970’s had never before seen on television.

        Moore as Mary was a “feminist icon” (Armstrong.) At a time when the women’s movement was taking hold in America and transforming traditional womanhood, Mary was a representative voice and role model. Moore’s show was the first to legitimately claim that a woman’s work was not merely “a prelude to marriage, or a substitute for it, but could for form the center of a satisfying life for a woman in the way that it presumably did for men” (Dow). She was living out Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) that encouraged female housewives’ imaginations to wander to the workplace. In 1972, the Pill first became available to all women, regardless or marital status, and Moore’s show was the first television show to ever mention it. She expressed outrage over unfair treatment of women in the workplace. She, through irony particularly, demanded equality. She owned her sexuality. In a poignant space in American history, Mary was championing women’s rights by realistically living out its tenants. It truly was the first time that a woman’s perspective was not only important and highly regarded, but also entirely integral to a show’s success. (Reese) Women had someone representing them in the popular culture they consumed who did not limit their aspirations, but fostered them. In Mary, “a balm to widespread anxieties about women in the work force” (Heffernan) instead humbly pushed them into the mold of a newer era of female empowerment that they could follow.

In the first episode of season 3, The Good-Time News, for example, Mary discovers, while going over old budgets in preparation for a meeting, that a former associate producer earned $50 more a week for her job solely due to the fact that he was a man with a family to provide for. Mary and her male colleagues asserts with confidence that she is doing a better job than he ever did. She marches right into Mr. Grant’s office to discuss the measure with him. “I’m upset and you’re just ignoring it…. No Mr. Grant, it’s not just one of those women things” (Brooks) Mary proclaims. Her humor and sincerity, along with naïve confusion, point out the absolute and apparent injustice this situation possessed. It is empowering and strikingly realistic. “Financial need has nothing to do with it” (Brooks) Mary reasons.

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        Aside from Mary herself, there were four other repeating female characters. Rhoda Morgenstern, Mary’s self-depreciative, single neighbor who broke two of the four unforgivable rules of television seeing as she was a Jewish New Yorker. In The Good-Time News, Rhoda is dating an airline steward, and the comedy is not lost on Mary and her that it is assumed he is a pilot. Phyllis Lindstrom was Mary’s landlady. Georgette Franklin and Sue Ann Nivens (Betty White,) also played significant roles. The supporting female characters were as well constructed as the male supporting characters, in some episodes far outrunning the men for total screen time. They were all unique from Mary and, though arguably less dynamic, collaged together into the patchwork quilt of womanhood.

        The men of The Mary Tyler Moore Show also defied traditional gender stereotypes. Aside from the fact that the show was the first to explicitly label a man gay, it is apparent that the men of the show’s dominance in culture was a source of irony more so than power and control. Lou Grant was typically masculine. He was a tough-skinned, traditional boss. But the show revealed a more tenderhearted side of him that respected and needed Mary to operate the news station. He ultimately pays Mary the $50 salary deficit and does not hide from sexism in the work place, bluntly acknowledging she was paid less because of her gender. Murray Slaughter was a very plain news writer. And Ted Baxter was a vain, schmuck of a man. Often his lack of intelligence grabbed the most laughs from viewers. No longer was a woman’s flightiness and, frankly, stupidity the only source of humor in a sitcom.