In I Love Lucy, a 50’s sitcom voted Best TV show of all time, Lucille Ball plays a devoted wife, expert cook, and attentive mother. Outside this housewife role, she was portrayed as tone-deaf, naïve, and clumsy, unlike the real-life Lucille Ball who owned the production studio and was a leader in Hollywood. Today women play varied roles in sitcoms: teacher, vice president, head writer, detective, park director, doctor.
We’ve come a long way baby – in sitcoms and in life.
Mom and Dad in young families today have more balanced responsibilities, with Dad’s fuller participation in household chores and kids, and Mom’s contribution to finances. We are reaching equality. Both parties are more empathetic and appreciative of the other, which draws the family closer and bodes well for future generations.
Feminine strengths outside the home benefit everyone. Women lead from collaboration, empathy, and multi-tasking, and through their firsthand experience with the day-to-day challenges of being a woman. Women connect dots, they see the big picture and tend to weigh factors like environment and inequality. Women-run companies tend to examine these issues and seek ways to address them in positive ways.
As Sandra Day O’Connor said, “As society sees what women can do, as women see what women can do, there will be more women out there doing things, and we’ll all be better off for it.” Andy Dunn said: “The next hundred years will be referred to as the female takeover. And by ‘takeover’ I don’t mean ‘Run for the hills, guys!’ I mean, ‘Your life will be improved by the ascendance of women.’”
Roughly 200 years “after” Andy Dunn’s quote, 2266 in Star Trek years and 1966 on earth, the USS Enterprise embarked on a mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no (hu)man has gone before.” Gene Roddenberry the creator of Star Trek wanted to show humans and aliens working together, solving problems brought about by war, authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, economics, racism, religion, human rights, and technology. All while practicing altruistic values.
Roddenberry wanted Star Trek to reflect the 60’s counterculture and show how humans can learn from the past and end violence, though he did not tout this. To attract investors, he positioned Star Trek as a Space Western. He failed to attract funding. The show was viewed as not marketable because the spaceship had a racially diverse crew, the first in US television history.
Star Trek the Original Series, the show with a positive view of the future that became a worldwide phenomenon, was backed by Ms. Lucielle Ball. A brilliant businesswoman and ultra-talented actor who played a klutz—a role outside dutiful wife and mother that the public could accept in showbiz in the 50s.
We’ve come a long way.
I am grateful to Lucille Ball. Women today “see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.” Lucille Ball is the biggest, loveliest, most luminous giant, and that is why I love Lucy.
Ps. While Star Trek the Original Series showed a positive view of the future, it was in the 90s when women’s roles became less sexist. In 1995 Star Trek: Voyager’s Captain Janeway, featured the first female captain with her own spaceship and show.
