Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 143

Loud-Mouthed and Liberated:
The Women of Norman Lear
In the 1970s, television producer Norman Lear introduced a new
kind of heroine to viewers. The Lear woman, who combined the
zaniness of Lucille Ball and the shrewdness of Molly Goldberg,
"packed a wallop," and had a sharp tongued sarcasm all her own.
Most earlier sitcom comediennes portrayed middle or upper middle
class women whose problems focused on family disputes or failures of
communication. In the decade following the tumultuous sixties,
however, the women of TV sitcoms experienced some remarkable
changes. Female characters began to break out of their shells.
Working mothers and even welfare mothers filled the "tube"; cutting
humor often was used by these women to soften the harsh reality of
the true life situations presented on their shows each w eeksituations such as poverty, racism, alcoholism, child abuse, and rape.
These were subjects rarely portrayed in television comedy before;
previously the world of sitcoms had been filled with inoffensive
characters and stories that were laundered before they ever got on the
air (Lichter et al. 54). However, with the introduction of Norman
Lear's socially relevant themes and vibrant mosaic of female figures
such as Edith Bunker, Maude Findlay, Louise Jefferson, Florida
Evans, and Ann Romano, the world of television situation comedies
was turned upside down.
According to authors Andrew J. Edelstein and Kevin McDonough,
the 1970s is often thought of as a pernicious period in American
cultural history. In their book. The Seventies: From Hot Pants to Hot
Tubs, they claim that people remember this decade as the time of
malaise, disco, polyester, and pet rocks. While tasteless excesses did
abound, this era is far more fascinating than it might first seem. The
notion that the Seventies was merely the "calm" after the storm of
the frenetic Sixties simply is not true. This ten-year span witnessed
the explosion of the women's movement, the legalization of abortion,
the blossoming of the sexual revolution, the growth of gay liberation,
and the end of the Vietnam war. It was also the decade in which the
values and styles of the Sixties counterculture merged with society at
large, and American culture explored both its military defeat and the