January 27, 2017

I've been reflecting on the death of Mary Tyler Moore.  I didn't think her passing would affect me as much as it has, but it has seeped into my soul.  I can't get The Mary Tyler Moore Show's theme song out of my mind.  And I see her in my mind's eye everywhere I turn.  She was 12 years older than I,  and most of us baby boomer women appreciated her brave, impish, but often self-conscious optimism.

I had forgotten that "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" began the same time that I began my first full-time job--in the fall of 1970.  I was 22, recently married,  freshly out of college--and looking forward to giving birth to my first child in a few months.  This was a time in rural Kentucky when teachers did not dare wear pants to school, where women had no paid maternity leave.  And we were all suffering through Nixonian America and a raging war in Vietnam.  In a couple of years Nixon would implode because of Watergate, and the Vietnam war would end in 1975, not with a bang, but a whimper.

But during that first semester of my being a high school librarian, things looked rosy to me.  Bob and I moved into a nice apartment and bought our first car.  Even though I looked only about 12, my pregnancy helped me appear older, I think, and my colleagues seemed to accept me readily.  All was right with the world to me in those heady days.

Television had up to this time been pretty unyielding as to how women were portrayed.  On "The Dick Van Dyke Show" in the '60's  Mary Tyler Moore had been a break-out star,  even though she wore those new capri pants which made the network nervous (because they might appear too sexy.) But in that series Mary, though spunky, nevertheless inevitably defaulted to her husband's wishes.  However, in 1970 she was to play a divorced 30-year-old woman.  And that was too risqué for the men who ran the television networks, so the premise was changed to her being a young woman recently jilted by her fiancé.  I remember this controversy and recall thinking how silly that in 1970 there couldn't be a TV show about a divorced woman.

In the early 1960's I remembered another incident concerning my favorite TV show, "Dr. Kildare."  There was to be show aired that had to do with what was then illegal abortion.  Since this was a taboo subject at that time, however, this episode was abruptly pulled by the censors.  As a teenager, I was angered that a medical topic like this couldn't be discussed on TV.  I doubt I knew much about the issue at the time, but I certainly did educate myself, so the TV censors' wish to prevent my knowing about this issue  failed in my case.  And even though I didn't really consider myself a member of the women's liberation movement, when Roe v. Wade made abortion legal for the first time in 1973, I remember thinking, "It's about time!"

All this is to say that even though I didn't think much about it at the time, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was historic in its portrayal of changing women's roles.  My marching with the Indivisible women's march last week end and Mary Tyler Moore's death this week somehow underline for me how very far we have come.  Possibly the powers that be will try to stuff us back into Pandora's box, but, of course, they will not succeed.  That box has been opened, and we know all too well what we could lose.

Love, Sylvia