Golden Ages

Carrie Snodgress, "Diary" Star

My life is changing
in so many ways
I don't know who
to trust anymore
There's a shadow running
thru my days
Like a beggar going
from door to door.
--Neil Young, "A Man Needs A Maid"

We are enjoying a golden age of television.  There are simply so many series available on Netflix and Amazon Prime, dating back to 2000: The Wire, West Wing, Newsroom, Doc Martin, House of Cards, Justified, Mad Men--the list goes on. 

During some eras, you know you are in the midst of something significant, for others it's only in retrospect. 

One era, which may not be quite as lustrous, but which was a boiling cauldron of ideas is, in retrospect, the early 1970's:   A wave of novels by women about the experience of being a woman in a new age swept through. Why this genre appealed to me, I am not sure, even today, but likely because the challenges women faced during this transition period entailed the most conflict, the most complexity and the most drama. The 60's had established the principles of the sexual revolution--the 70's would deal with the consequences in real lives. 

So I read "The Bell Jar"  (actually written much earlier but popularized then) and was captivated by that stunning opening line, "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York." I never got much into Sylvia Plath's poetry, but her novel blew me away. Her casual intelligence and her vulnerability and honesty and the way she took personally events which did not affect her personally just slayed me.

Then there was "Diary of a Mad Housewife," written by the wife of a physician at my hospital.  I knew the doctor who was the model for the husband in the book, and he was sort of prototypical Upper East Side aristocracy, confident, successful, Brooks Brothers suits, doctor to the rich and famous. I could imagine how insufferable he must be at home, and he was not happy about the book or its success. He was probably better than the book's protagonist, and had more redeeming qualities, but there it was, in print for the world to see. 

Things just got darker from there, with "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," which chronicled the downward spiral of a twenty something woman as she compulsively lived the pick up scene in New York. She  had corrective surgery for scoliosis as a child, and never really believed she was anything but physically crooked and the scoliosis permeated her self image as something flawed and unattractive and she sought expiation through one night stands.

If you were feeling glad to be born male, then "Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen" sealed the deal, as you followed the trials and indignities of trying to execute womanhood as a path through life, with stops for venereal disease, abortion, divorce along the way. 

For women in the 70's, it appeared, if these works were any guide, they had been stricken by that old Chinese curse, the misfortune of living in interesting times.

Finally, there was some relief when Erica Jong came along with "Fear of Flying."  For Ms. Jong there was a spit in your eye solution--just do not capitulate, do not accept the strictures your parents and teachers taught you: Enjoy your own sensuality unapologeticly, don't allow others to make your rules for you. It was a pot boiler, full of exuberant sex, but it carried a serious load--women embraced it and, for me, it seemed well argued. 

I'm not sure those seventies novels of the emerging "new woman" were great literature, but they did shape my perception of women, what they could be, what they ought to be, what they were not yet and why they are interesting.