Doris Day Icon

 WIP

Doris Day seems to be a popular topic amongst feminist writers and academics. More often than not ,the essays, with few notable exceptions ( see Molly Haskells’s work), are not flattering to Doris Day. She is seen as the quintessential  fifty’s housewife  who is a cheery and  eager to please her man, or, she is perceived as the perennial virgin. Both images being undesirable to second wave feminists.

In 1963 Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique came out and set in motion profound changes in society. This book was a reaction to the oppressive status of women in society.  Doris Day at the time was the number one female star in Hollywood.

When did the feminist backlash of Doris Day start?

Positive feminist essay or essays?

What’s written about Doris Day today?

British Film Institute dossier, Move Over Misconceptions: Doris Day Reappraised: must read

  Journal of video and film, winter 1990. College course file  star images, star performances Jeremy G. Butler. Feminism and the star system

As she was beginning to be rediscovered by feminist critics, including a 1980 British Film Institute dossier, Move Over Misconceptions: Doris Day Reappraised

Natalie Hancock writing in the Courier

“By this time, as the feminist movement grew in strength, her role as the sweet ingenue become outmoded and, for the first time since the 40s, states: Doris had fallen out of favour with the film world. Now, after years of exile, the post feminist, post politically correct posse, have finally realised there is nothing wrong with good clean fun. Doris Day has now found herself very much back in vogue, with films like Down With Love paying homage to the particular brand of romantic comedy that Day made her own. Whatever your view, one thing seems clear. It seems fickle fashion has come full circle and Doris Day is back where she should be—on top”. But still the irrepressible Day held on. “There were times when I wasn’t always up,” she admits. “Everything could be calm and peaceful, then the next day the bottom dropped out. What can you do? Moan and groan and feel sorry for yourself? No, you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you get on with life.”

Doris Day the Feminist And Other Film Women By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Published: January 3, 1997 HOLDING MY OWN IN NO MAN’S LAND Women and Men and Film and Feminists By Molly Haskell

When Molly Haskell’s book ‘’From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies'’ first appeared in 1974, it created something of a stir. While hard-core cineastes were skeptical of Ms. Haskell’s focus on movies as a social index, hard-core feminists were skeptical of her reluctance to toe a strict ideological line. She was taken to task for arguing that films made under the studio system during the 1930’s and 40’s frequently accorded their heroines more respect than films made in the supposedly liberated 60’s and 70’s. And she was also denounced as a heretic for suggesting that those old-fashioned movies, which forced women to make a choice between family and career, were not simply the propaganda products of a male-chauvinist establishment but reflections of ‘’a deep polarity within women themselves.'’ If anything, the passage of time since the publication of ‘’From Reverence to Rape'’ has vindicated Ms. Haskell’s levelheaded assessments and her refusal to take a dogmatic feminist view ‘’of a form as complex, as full of contradictions, as hooked into the secret closets and shadowy recesses of the viewer’s psyche, as movies.'’ Her latest book, ‘’Holding My Own in No Man’s Land'’ — a collection of essays, reviews and profiles — is a sort of addendum to the earlier book, a coda of ruminations enabling her to amplify her views on women and film. Like many collections, ‘’Holding My Own'’ is something of an arbitrary hodgepodge defined by the vagaries of freelance assignments. It includes pieces (like a review of a Truman Capote biography) that have virtually nothing to do with the volume’s central theme ('’women and men and film and feminists'’) and slight, hokey pieces (like an article on the meaning of cosmetics) that should have been edited out. For the most part, however, the book makes for fluent, intelligent reading: at their best, Ms. Haskell’s essays not only make us rethink the history of women in film, but also provide a fresh, ideology-free look at the noisy gender wars. Rambling through several decades of film history, Ms. Haskell finds signs of feminist thinking in some unexpected places. She argues that Doris Day — to many women, ‘’a 100-watt reminder of the excessively bright and eager-to-please feminine masquerade of the 50’s — was actually ‘’challenging, in her working-woman roles, the limited destiny of women to marry, live happily ever after and never be heard from again.'’ She writes that those 60’s femmes fatales, Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot, heralded ‘’a new era, a new kind of woman who rejected bourgeois conventions and went after what she wanted.'’ And she contends that Lucille Ball (reincarnated on television as ‘’Lucy'’) cut ‘’a wide swath through the preserves of maledom,'’ puncturing overinflated egos from ‘’her sweet sitting-duck babalu husband'’ to such icons as Richard Widmark, John Wayne and William Holden. While Ms. Haskell offers positive reappraisals of the careers of Doris Day and John Wayne — two actors regarded in many liberal circles as unfashionable dinosaurs — she does a thorough job of debunking Lina Wertmuller, who at the time (the mid-70’s) was the toast of New York for movies like ‘’Swept Away'’ and ‘’Seven Beauties.'’ Her Wertmuller interview, which took place at the posh Pierre Hotel in Manhattan, slyly sends up the director’s left-wing politics, while at the same time exposing the blatant sexism of her movies. Ms. Haskell writes: ‘’Wertmuller’s gallery of female grotesques — the whores in ‘Love and Anarchy,’ the huge fat woman in ‘The Seduction of Mimi’ (the concentration camp commandante to come in ‘Seven Beauties’),'’ and ‘’that arch-villainess cherished by Old Left and Macho Right alike, the frigid blond tease — are such that she can claim to have challenged the stereotype by exaggeration while indulging it with a relish she shares with male members of the audience.'’ She adds that while Ms. Wertmuller’s women are ‘’treated as nonpersons, as types,'’ the central man in her movies (usually played by Giancarlo Giannini) ‘’is always treated as a person, a character who extends by virtue of his emotional complexity beyond the class or sexual function that defines the others.'’ Indeed, Ms. Haskell pulls no punches when it comes to exposing the male favoritism she sees animating so many movies. She observes that Bergman films tend to imprison women in ‘’their ’superior,’ traditional roles as mothers and nurturers,'’ while the American buddy movie bypasses women altogether to focus on male bonding, gratuitous violence and gross-out humor. In another essay she argues that the American genre known as the ‘’male weepie'’ — perhaps best exemplified by ‘’Kramer vs. Kramer'’ — is openly misogynistic, allowing father and son to ‘’regress into an ideal world of all-male permissiveness,'’ while putting down women as selfish careerists who would put their own search for an identitybefore the welfare of their children. While the reader may or may not agree with all these arguments, it’s impossible not to see Ms. Haskell as fair-minded. In fact some of her strongest words are reserved for radical feminists who want to view all movies through a reductive, ideological lens, who regard romanticism as ‘’the ultimate heavy, the opposite of honesty, sexual freedom, autonomy,'’ who would deny women’s ‘’own ambivalent yearning for some kind of straightforward symbol of virility.'’ ‘’Though there’s plenty to object to in the representation of women in the male-dominated art form of the 20th century,'’ she writes, ‘’I've increasingly come to look for and cherish the heroic or contrary images of women that go against the grain of oppression — either slipping cunningly through the cracks of a patriarchal world order or defying it outright. As glorious monsters, Muses, femmes fatales, worker bees, queen bees and sweet and sour dames, movies are full of women in convention-stretching roles that contravene a simple dialectic in which the active male gaze transfixes and objectifies the supposedly passive female.'’

Jacqueline Megow  Ph.D. Student      Areas of Interest           •   female subjectivity and the romantic comedy heroine           •   the femme fatale in neo-noir           •   song and dance as “text” in American movie musicalse           •   Doris Day as mid-century cultural icon           •   theorists Mary Ann Doane, Tania Modleski, Slavoj Zizek           •   directors Nora Ephron, Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Robert Altman   We’re all Doris Day now Louisa Pearson , The Scotsman aug.27 2003

When Doris Day snuggled up to Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk back in 1959, the film was billed as a “sophisticated sex comedy” and posters warned “leave the children at home for this one”. As an interior decorator working in New York City, Day represented a thoroughly modern girl, irate at Hudson’s bachelor who ties up their party phone line with his constant phoning of girlfriends. By the end of the film they realise they’re made for each other, but Day doesn’t give up her independence without a fight. Pillow Talk was the first of several bedroom farces which tuned into the loosening of morals in Middle America. Fast forward almost half a century and the Doris Day-style heroine is back with a vengeance. If Doris Day and US TV sitcom goddess Lucille Ball are back in fashion, perhaps it’s because modern women can share their best traits - the fast-talking, smart-dressing, businesslike behaviour - without feeling constrained by them.

This article: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/s2.cfm?id=940602003   In the 2002 Graduate Quarterly ?:

„A. Film and TV graduate student Michele Schreiber would like you to consider a striking proposition: Doris Day, the virginal icon of film comedies in the fifties, has something in common with the adventurous women of HBO’s Sex and the City. Sure, Doris might blush at some of the conversations Carrie has with her girlfriends, and certainly, they would find her attitudes hopelessly coy and prim. But Doris played bright, strong-willed women, often in careers where she and the HBO crowd might cross paths. And, most important, all of they are working the same turf: romantic comedy 

“In Praise of Doris Day.” By Tobin Siebers.  Evenings at Rackham: The Power and Pleasures of the Movies. Rackham Graduate School. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, December 11, 1996   get article

Tobin Siebers is a professor of English and aficionado of Doris Day movies Department of English Language and Literature,  Philip Gentry, UCLA: “Doris Day, Calamity Jane and the Sound of Whiteness” … Feb. 2006  get article Dr Tamar Jeffers McDonald She was awarded a PhD from Warwick University in May 2005 for her dissertation on representations of female virginity in 1950s Hollywoodfilms. Her main research interests are Doris Day; romantic comedy;film costume and filmic representations of virginity, and these interests are reflected in current and forthcoming publications.   Monographs (2007, forthcoming) Costume in Film. London: I B Tauris. (2006, forthcoming) Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. London: Wallflower Press.   Edited Books (2007, forthcoming) Virgin Territory: Representations of Sexual Inexperience In Film. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.   (2007, forthcoming) The Limits of Representation: Realities and Remediations. Co-edited with Elizabeth Wells. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.   Book Chapters (2007, forthcoming) ‘Doris Day’s fluctuating filmic virginity’ in Virgin Territory, Jeffers McDonald, ed. (2007, forthcoming) ‘Costume clues in A Tale Of Two Sisters’ in The Limits of Representation, Jeffers McDonald and Wells, eds.   (2006, forthcoming) Entry on ‘Slapstick’ for the Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, Barry Keith Grant, (editor inchief) Schirmer Reference.   (2006, forthcoming) ‘Visible Virgins: How Hollywood Showed The Unshowable in Late 1950s Films’ in Kylo-Patrick Hart (ed), Screen Media and Sexual Politics. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.   (2005, forthcoming) Mother’s Day: Taking the Mother Out of Motherhood in The Thrill of it All'’, in Elaine Roth,Heather Addison, Mary Kate Goodwin-Kelly (eds) Hollywood Motherhood. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.     (2005) ‘Under All Those Dirndls: Pillow Talk’s Repackaging of Doris Day’, in Rachel Moseley (ed) Fashioning Stars: Dress, Culture, Identity. London: British Film Institute. ISBN 1-84457-068-1. pp50-61. Phyllis Scrocco Zrzavy roles in modern-day society,  …case that the Doris Day Show has been overlooked by critics and television…. www.sunypress.edu/pdf/61180.pdf State university of new york press albany 2005   

Despite the popularity of the sitcom, one of the oldest and most ubiquitous forms of television programming, The Sitcom Reader is the first book to offer critical essays devoted specifically to the form. The contributors address important topics in relation to sitcoms, such as conventions of the form, the family, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, work and social class, and ideology, and they do so from a variety of perspectives, including cultural studies, feminist theory, queer theory, and media studies. “Because situation comedy is often a window into the culture of the day, as a genre it is important not only as entertainment but also for the view it offers of society and social classes … Those familiar with the programs discussed will profit most from this book, which is an important contribution to the literature, particularly since more and more academic courses include discussion of the culture and content of television.” — CHOICE “As a field of study this topic is essential. Prime time television remains the most influential medium, helping formulate cultural sensibilities, attitudes, values, and assessments of the social world. As a genre, the situation comedy is one of the most prevalent formats on television, and this book builds on a strong foundation in media studies that seeks to understand and evaluate the social significance of these forms. The various approaches to this topic offer the widest range of intellectual rigor.” — Robin Andersen, author of Consumer Culture and TV Programming “I like the scope of the book and the fact that the essays are written from a variety of perspectives—theoretical, historical, and industrial. The book raises an important central question: how has the genre historically constructed their subjects in relation to the dominant ideology?” — Stephen Tropiano, author of The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV

PART SIX WORK AND SOCIAL CLASS 16 Women, Love, and Work: The Doris Day Show as Cultural Dialogue Phyllis Scrocco Zrzavy