With the iconic Mary Tyler Moore honored for lifetime achievement at the Screen Actors Guild awards this past Sunday, it got us thinking about about her TV show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the influence it had on women’s role in the work place.
Mary Richards, the show’s title character played by Moore, quickly became the woman’s role model of the 1970s. Never before had a happily single, 30-something working woman been portrayed on television. Ask your grandmothers — she was quite the revelation.
Smart, independent, and making it on her own, she fought for what she believed was right — including equal pay for equal work. In one particularly memorable episode, Mary confronts her boss, Mr. Grant, after learning the male producer she replaced was paid a higher salary. Not only did she get her raise, but she shed a light one of the most pervasive issues for women in the business world — one we’re grappling with even today.
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By the time the 1980s rolled around, working women had no shortage of on-screen roll models. First came the hit comedy movie, 9 to 5, starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton. While completely outlandish (the main characters hold their egotistical, sexist boss hostage while they turn the company into a profitable, enjoyable place to work), it was one of the first times Hollywood had ever dared to show women in charge — highly competent and capable of running a business, even if they had to pretend it was all their boss’s doing to get it done.
Eight years later came Working Girl, and Melanie Griffith’s iconic Tess McGill, a New Jersey secretary with big ambitions. She, too, has to steal the reins from her boss. Only this time, it’s a female boss, something that at the time was still a rarity in the real world.
The same year Working Girl hit theaters, Murphy Brown came to the small screen, enjoying a run well into the late 90s. Candice Bergen played the title role; she was tough, uncompromising, and ok, sometimes a bit of a mess. But like her predecessors, she became a hero to working women by reflecting their struggles — in this case, by helping to reveal the “superwoman” personae for the myth that it really was.
What women gained in power in the real-world of business during the 90s, their on-screen counterparts seemed to lose in hem length. Shows such as Ally McBeal and Melrose Place left us a little lacking in the role model department, even if they did influence what we wore to work everyday.
Television’s on-screen fashion has always influenced our at-work style. (If you want to see just how much so, you’ll enjoy this retrospective by InStyle magazine, looking at the fashion of TV’s most popular career women over the last 60 years.)
Of course, that statement has probably never been truer than for Sex and City. And while each of those four oh-so-fashionable women did give us their own unique spin on what it means to be a woman in business, we wouldn’t define them as “role models” necessarily. Rather, they were more accurately reflections of who and what women really are, rather than portraying anything we strive to become.
Today, as we fly through our TiVo play lists, Netflix cues and occasionally make it to the movie theater, we’re hard-pressed to identify any characters we would describe as role models for young, career-minded women.
And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that means women have finally reached a place in the business world where we no longer need fictional heroes, because we have plenty of real-world women to look up to. Women in power are no longer novelty acts — the fodder of sitcoms and screenplays — but just a normal part of who we are today as a culture.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have more to achieve. But maybe that means we no longer have to fight quite so hard to get there.
Even so, we all still need “Mary’s” — women who inspire us to take chances, carve a new path, and reach beyond what we thought we could achieve. For right now, we’ll keep looking for ours. But more importantly, who is yours?
