I just didn’t get it. Being working-class, the women in my family already worked, long before it was cool, albeit in jobs short on witty repartee and groovy outfits. And hadn’t anyone else ever seen a movie? What about Joan Crawford’s “shopgirls,” or even the uniformly beautiful brunet “lady scientists” in every other B-movie “creature feature”? (Seriously, these characters all look so similar that you’d think there was a lost “origin story” sci-fi flick about how they were all really clones…)
No, I was more impressed, and felt more validated, by Mary Tyler Moore’s most famous big-screen characterization, the grieving mother Beth in 1980’s Ordinary People.
