{"id":2361,"date":"2014-11-24T00:56:19","date_gmt":"2014-11-24T00:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=2361"},"modified":"2016-08-12T17:07:50","modified_gmt":"2016-08-12T17:07:50","slug":"where-have-all-the-wonder-women-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/where-have-all-the-wonder-women-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"Where have all the wonder women gone?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Elana Levine<\/a>, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee<\/em><\/p>\n

In the epilogue to Jill Lepore\u2019s new book<\/a>, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, we learn about Wonder Woman\u2019s importance to the American feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Lepore briefly notes Wonder Woman\u2019s place in US television in the same period. But in skimming over the character\u2019s TV life, she misses a key step in her cultural significance. In the history of Wonder Woman on television lies a story about the ways that popular culture in general \u2013 and representations of \u201cwonder women,\u201d in particular \u2013 seek to reconcile feminism and femininity at different historical moments.<\/p>\n

The New Original Wonder Woman premiered in 1976 alongside two other action-adventure series with female leads, Charlie\u2019s Angels and The Bionic Woman. This super-women trifecta made clear that the winds of cultural change were influencing America\u2019s most popular (and often most conservative) medium.<\/p>\n

In Wonder Woman\u2019s first season, the program was set in the 1940s \u2013 staying true to the comic\u2019s origins \u2013 with the superheroine battling the Nazis. Tied to her patriotism was her feminism.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny civilization that does not recognize the female,\u201d Wonder Woman warned in one episode, \u201cis doomed to destruction. Women are the wave of the future and sisterhood is\u2026stronger than anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

And in an episode titled \u201cThe Feminum Mystique\u201d \u2013 a play on the title of the bestselling feminist book \u2013 we learn about a mysterious, powerful matter buried deep in the earth of Wonder Woman\u2019s Amazonian homeland: feminum. Her bullet-deflecting bracelets are made from this impervious metal.<\/p>\n

The TV program\u2019s creators were directly influenced by the character\u2019s popularity as a feminist icon, but when the show switched networks in 1977, the story\u2019s feminist message was diluted.<\/p>\n

The setting was changed from the 1940s to the 1970s, and Wonder Woman became more overtly sexualized: she wore more revealing clothing, and stopped making the same explicit declarations about gender and power.<\/p>\n

This shift was most directly an attempt to copy the hugely successful Charlie\u2019s Angels. Like the Angels, Diana Prince could now go undercover in a number of titillating roles, including pop star and glamorous jewel thief.<\/p>\n

But the 1970s TV version of the Angels regularly tempered its characters\u2019 sexualization with mainstream, women\u2019s lib-style references to \u201cmale chauvinists,\u201d or showed that women could do what male characters did: shoot guns, fly airplanes, and drive 18-wheelers.<\/p>\n

The later seasons of Wonder Woman tried for a similar balance, but more often than not, the message devolved into a celebration of the fundamental difference between the sexes. Wonder Woman\u2019s compromised negotiation with feminism made the character\u2019s femininity a stand-in for her power, a tendency that the Angels sometimes shared.<\/p>\n

In other words, their power came from being sexy.<\/p>\n

By the late 1970s, even the half-hearted attempts at championing feminism began to wane. Television delivered characters who were little more than sex symbols: Daisy Duke<\/a> (Dukes of Hazzard) or Chrissy Snow<\/a> (Three\u2019s Company) were primarily defined by their sexy femininity. Only the non-sexy characters (Chrissy\u2019s roommate, Janet, or the brainy Bailey<\/a> from WKRP in Cincinnati) needed to worry about equality.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, we can see this transition away from powerful \u201cwonder women\u201d characters as part of the rise of a postfeminist cultural sensibility: the idea that explicit feminist activism is no longer necessary in a world changed by feminism. Because this sensibility values the contributions of feminism, it can seem progressive. However, because it places feminism in the past, it suggests that past injustices have been resolved. It can work to perpetuate those very injustices by leaving them unchallenged.<\/p>\n

One of the best recent examples is the series of Charlie\u2019s Angels feature films, which present its heroines\u2019 sexiness and power as one and the same. Explicit acknowledgments of an ongoing need for feminism has no place. This sort of subtle, but crucial, difference from the more overt feminist messages of the 1970s has dominated much of early 21st century media culture.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen: modern day Wonder Woman?<\/span>
\nwikia.com<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

However, in recent years we\u2019ve seen challenges to this thinking \u2013 and even an explicit embrace of feminism. Culturally, this has resulted in glimpses of the original \u201cwonder women.\u201d We might point to The Hunger Games\u2019 Katniss Everdeen and the planned film<\/a> that will feature superheroine Captain Marvel.<\/p>\n

Even Wonder Woman is going to have a big-screen resurgence; her forthcoming appearance <\/a>in Batman v. Superman will be an important test of whether the character\u2019s feminist origins will return.<\/p>\n

Today, however, feminist voices are more often being heard not in action movies but in TV comedies \u2013 perhaps a safer, more subtle space to introduce challenges to social assumptions. Some characters even overtly identify as feminists, like Parks and Recreation\u2019s Leslie Knope. Others challenge the tenets of the postfeminist sensibility. In Lena Dunham\u2019s Girls, Comedy Central\u2019s Broad City, and even NBC\u2019s The Mysteries of Laura, TV women critique postfeminism, satirizing its less-than-liberating consequences.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Laura Diamond is the protagonist of The Mysteries of Laura. She doesn\u2019t battle Nazis or have superpowers, but she nonetheless offers a 21st century version of feminist sensibilities.<\/span>
\nDavid Giesbrecht\/NBC<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

A single mother and police detective, Debra Messing\u2019s Laura does not \u201chave it all,\u201d as postfeminist thinking argues. Instead Laura has an ex-husband who fails to share responsibility for their children (he also happens to be her boss). She longs not for haute couture or male admirers but for time alone to eat what she wants and watch reality TV.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it is these deliberately ordinary, flawed, often un-powerful women who may be today\u2019s unconventional \u201cwonder women,\u201d subtly giving voice to the feminism we still need.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Elana Levine has received research funding from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, the Walter Jay and Clara Charlotte Damm Fund, and the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Elana Levine, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee In the epilogue to Jill Lepore\u2019s new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, we learn about Wonder Woman\u2019s importance to the American feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Lepore briefly notes Wonder Woman\u2019s place in US television in the same period. But in skimming over the character\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":5668,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,36],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2361"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5669,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361\/revisions\/5669"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}