Women’s Liberation Rock Band, 1972–73. Photograph by Virginia Blaisdell.
Television incorporated some feminist themes quickly. At times feminism was negatively caricatured:
Maude, a sitcom that ran from 1972 to 1978, featured an overbearing, hectoring social worker/therapist
who preached women’s equality. But The Mary Tyler Moore Show offered a more complex and more
daring group of people. CBS told the show’s creators that “American audiences won’t tolerate divorce in
a series lead any more than they will tolerate Jews, people with mustaches, and people who live in New
York,” but the show broke all these rules. Moore was single, committed to her job, and not seeking
marriage; what’s more, she had strong female and workplace friendships but was not afraid to be in
charge. It took until the 1980s to get the first big-time female-buddies cop show, Cagney and Lacey,
which ran through 125 episodes with thirty-six Emmy nominations and fourteen wins; Helen Mirren’s
breakthrough role as the star of Prime Suspect could not have happened without this predecessor. One
African American woman, Teresa Graves, played a cop in Get Christie Love!, but the series did not last,
and the few sitcoms that showed blacks with respect, like the Cosby show, remained headed by men.
Hollywood roles for women had long presented only two main options for whites—beautiful “good
girl” or evil seductress. For women of color there was only one—faithful servant. Katharine Hepburn had
been an attorney, but she was unique. By the mid-1970s this changed. The stars still had to be young,
white, and beautiful, but their strength, independence, and complexity increased. Overtly feminist
Hollywood films did not appear until the 1980s; the most striking of them was 1988’s The Accused. In it
Jodie Foster, who got her start playing a teenage prostitute in 1976’s Taxi Driver, showed us a real
working-class rape victim. Based on an actual gang rape in a working-class bar that had prompted major
feminist protest, the film presented a feminist view of rape without polite euphemisms. It proclaimed that
neither flirtation nor sexy dress justifies rape, that the victimized woman need feel no shame, and that the
right response is to press charges and refuse to be intimidated by public stigma—making the woman a
hero rather than a victim.
It was far more difficult for the women’s movement to break into the male-dominated fine arts. The
witty feminist art group Guerrilla Girls created parodic posters and donned gorilla masks to ask, Why are
there so few female artists in the museums? Even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the
gains have been small. While women conductors and composers are becoming more common, men
continue to dominate all the major orchestras. Women had long been iconic stars in dance, and leaders in
modern dance, but in ballet women choreographers are still hard to find, with the exception of that
crossover from jazz dance Twyla Tharp. Judy Chicago created a sensation with her 1974–79 Dinner
Party ceramic installation that featured many vagina-like images, smoothing the way for Eve Ensler’s
Vagina Monologues in 1996. Perhaps the most influential group of women visual artists were Chicana