Dec. 7, Rhonda Garelick, distinguished professor of English and journalism at SMU Dallas, for a column about the shows created by the late Norman Lear that celebrated everyday women. Published in Garelick’s Face Forward column in the New York Times under the heading The Quiet Feminism of Norman Lear’s Middle-Aged Women: https://tinyurl.com/3crjzy7f
Amid the 1970s television landscape selling obvious sex and youth, Norman Lear understood the magnetism of older everyday women.
Mr. Lear, who died on Tuesday at 101, has long gotten credit for being the first to train the television spotlight on issues of racism and class, war and poverty, to create plots centered on hot-button feminist issues such as equal pay or abortion. He deserves all of those accolades. But little has been said about the much quieter feminism expressed simply through his choice of leading ladies and the characters they portrayed.
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