It’s interesting for me to watch this show in terms of feminism. Not just my mother’s (this was her era) but mine ala 80’s and the differences.
I haven’t really been interested in watching television until this show — seriously. Probably because it has so much design power. I love the designer’s work above and also the costumes and sets. They really bring alive that era.
Last night was most interesting — in terms of the dilemma between the office “baby doll” ala Monroeqsque type and the more serious almost pre-feminist type at work.
In that era this was on my mother’s bookshelf:
In the 70’s as a young teen I was reading Eric Jong. So, I’d say that she informed my generation, perhaps.
The book above is one of the first little books of poems I bought.
In those days I thought I might try for an Ivy League school, but that isn’t what happened.
Like my mother, I went into fashion at first — as a job, and college came second.
I’d like to read Greer, now, to see what my mother thought. She was very much a feminist in her own right — albeit in the world of fashion in those days. That was one place that women had some sway.
My mother’s feminism was related to Dorothy Parker’s Sunset Gun. And this:
Simone was on my syllabus for one of the first classes in Women’s Studies I took at UCSB.
It was an elective in the History department at that time.
Here is an interesting look at a timeline on that…
1978: Congress includes educational services in the Civil Rights Act designed to eliminate sex bias in school and society.1979: The first meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) discusses the subject of whether women’s studies was a discipline in its own right.1980s: Women’s studies undergoes an intensely self-reflective period as it grapples with the issues of how to identify the concept of “women,” which had largely been defined as white, middle-class, heterosexual, Christian, education women of privilege.
VALENTINE BONNAIRE - WRITER 