Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture

Long before Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, there was Mary Richards in The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Every week, as Mary flung her beret into the air while the theme song proclaimed, “You’re gonna make it after all,” it seemed that young, independent women like herself had finally arrived. But as Katherine Lehman reveals, the struggle to create accurate portrayals of successful single women for American TV and cinema during the 1960s and 1970s wasn’t as simple as the toss of a hat.

Those G...