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  • Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture by Katherine J. Lehman
  • Rasa Baločkaitė
Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture. By Katherine J. Lehman. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2011.

Those Girls by Katherine L. Lehman targets significant social and cultural issues, i.e., representation of single women in the popular culture of the sixties and seventies. The concept of the single girl appeared in 1960s as a trendy alternative to [End Page 100] “spinster” and became soon a “pivotal figure in post war popular culture.” The author examines the gradual shift in the grammar of representation (to rephrase a concept by St. Hall) of American female singles. The volume reveals how female characters are gradually transgressing both moral codes and constraints of the genre, i.e., they appear initially as largely comic characters whose “extraordinary incompetence exceeded only by their monumental stupidity” (119); later occupy central roles in sitcoms, and are elevated to leading dramatic roles only in the mid-1970s.

As entertainment industries aimed at producing narratives that are both profitable and politically relevant, pop culture became an arena where feminist ideas are contested. By negotiating public tensions and producing an acceptable picture of the “single girl,” American media often sent contradictory messages, or “sexual puzzles,” to their audiences. Still, pop culture was giving “lip service to feminism, countering negative perceptions of the movement circulating in society” (207). By incorporating glamour and strength, sexual appeal and independence, it symbolically resolved the contradictions and diffused the excesses of political feminism. It contributed to the development of “lifestyle feminism,” where feminist ideals are dissociated from political agendas and presented as personal and individualized choices.

Since the 1960s and 1970s, the “single girl” was portrayed as a threat to social and sexual order. The images of singles were presented as an alternative to domesticity—alluring, exotic, promising, but also risky, unstable, and unsafe. The “single girl” was a sensationalized subject, varying from independent hero-seeking self-actualization to aggressive, pitiable neurotic. Although media was “harnessing feminism for commercial ends” (117), glorifying single lives as commercially successful projects and as the road to upward social mobility, the sensationalized accounts contained possibilities both of self-discovery and self-destruction, i.e., desperate need for both sexual and emotional fulfillment, radical experience of displacement, alienation, non-belonging, and emotional (sometimes also physical) death.

The author is examining “fictional women from the silver screen” and omitting other key figures of pop culture, such as celebrities, actresses, singers, TV and radio show hosts, models, etc., so the question “what constitutes pop culture” remains unanswered. The volume is descriptive, containing long passages of film scenes and lots of trivia, and the author is quite reserved in making her own statements or conclusions. The author is omitting the fact that fictional female characters from the 1960s and 1970s represent not only the experience of second wave feminism, but the general experience of modernity. It includes the experience of personal autonomy, displacement and non-belonging, absence of communal ties, anomy, individualisation, where self-identity emancipated from the bonds of traditions becomes an act of self-discovery. “I don’t know who I am, or what I want. I only know I have to find it out” (109)—the quote illuminates well A. Giddens’ concept of reflexive modernity.

The book is written in candid, easy style, and it is a good read for anyone interested in media, pop culture, feminism, and psychoanalysis, although this aspect is not accentuated. It presents rich empirical accounts and sheds new light on contemporary popular culture. In this light, the phenomenally successful Sex and the City merely [End Page 101] replicates the old grammar of representation, exploits the old plot where single life is the site of deadly despair and glamorous success.

Rasa Baločkaitė
Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
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