Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture by Katherine J. Lehman (review)

Katherine J. Lehman's Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture explores the ways that unmarried women were portrayed in TV shows and movies of the era and relates those portrayals to the period's quickly changing attitudes toward female sexuality and independence. Lehman's thought-provoking original research shows how Hollywood and 1960s and 1970s public opinion worked symbiotically to expand female roles while also binding women to traditional images.

To offer her readers an insider's look at how changing commercial pressures influenced producers' and writers' portrayals of unmarried women of the era, Lehman uses magazines, novels, ads, and unpublished correspondence and scripts from films and television shows. This rich range of sources gives readers an almost voyeuristic insight into the conversations that formed the iconic single women we still remember today. For example, Lehman has uncovered correspondence from Charlie's Angels producer Rob Austin to the writers demanding: "The Angels must do more and be smarter. The Angels seem to be winging it (no puns please). They should be on top of the situation." Yet, alongside this command to script strong, in-charge women, Austin also told his writers to play up their sexuality in various scenes, including one from the two-part "Angels in Paradise," where he wrote, " 'To give our audience a kick...why not open with dancing (with grass skirt) hula girls?'" He also suggested a scene in which a "'dancer singles the Angels out for a sensuous, Hawaiian dance.'" This contradictory pull between embracing strong single women, on the one hand, and then restricting them to traditional and sexualized ideals, on the other, is a major theme in Lehman's study.

Lehman uses her filmic sources to illustrate the time's changing attitudes toward women's sexuality and developing images of young womanhood. Early movies such as Where the Boys Are (1960), Boys' Night Out (1962), and Sex and the Single Girl (1964) serve as a backdrop for discussing the emerging single woman and the public's need to confine her sexuality and independence to traditionally feminine roles. Her second chapter draws together screen images of young women leaving home for the alluring big city, such as the 1966 television show That Girl and the film Valley of the Dolls (also 1966), to show how the developing "singles scene" forced women to walk a fine line between being too sexually assertive (or not feminine enough), and too feminine (or not forceful enough). Other chapters examine images of the "liberated" woman of the 1970s, including the iconic Mary Tyler Moore Show and Virginia Slims' "You've Come a Long Way Baby!" advertising campaign, and the balance between sexuality, power, and violence in narratives ranging from police dramas, such as Police Woman and Get Christie Love, to the female superheroes of Charlie's Angels and Wonder Woman.

One theme that follows Lehman through her entire narrative is an overwhelming public discomfort with the sexuality of single women and a popular need to constrain that sexuality through images of danger and violence. While earlier films portrayed young single women as victims of crimes, later films of the 1970s blamed single women by portraying sexualized females as self-destructive and suicidal. In other words, the public apparently believed that women who sought sex as freely as men were deliberately asking to be harmed. Several films, from For Singles Only (1968) to Looking For Mr. Goodbar (1977), display precisely that view of what happened to women who were too "masculine" in seeking sexual pleasure. In the first example, the woman who embraced her sexuality was raped and abandoned while her "good" friends who remained virginal achieved their goal of marriage. In the second example, the heroine was brutally stabbed by a lover she picked up in a singles bar.

Lehman is conscious of racial divisions in images of single women and tries to develop a comprehensive narrative that includes both black...