Being Rhoda

In early 2021, following a fall in the shower, I was immobilized in bed for some weeks. There wasn’t much I could do. But I could still operate a TV remote, so I started watching favorite feel-good sitcoms from my youth. I was soon fascinated by the cultural milieu these shows portrayed—the one I grew up in. It was like stepping back in time, visiting the world I was born into. With some focus, the cultural messages that shaped my view of the world and myself became clear.

I began with The Andy Griffith Show. Aunt Bea declared that she wanted to buy a car and learn to drive (in her fifties) to increase her level of independence. Andy Taylor and his friends tried to steer her away from her ludicrous plan. She persisted, and by the end of the episode she had dented her new car. Flora temporarily stepped into a job at the filling station to help out her boyfriend Goober in his absence. She did such a good job that Goober’s boss decided to keep her on instead of bringing him back. Up in arms, the menfolk colluded and all but bullied her into quitting the job so that Goober could return. They drove home the lesson that she could either be marriageable or employed, but not both. Andy’s girlfriend Helen often (but good-naturedly) strained at the ropes intended to keep her in her woman’s place, but she never managed to loosen them much, and she certainly never managed to untie them. These were lessons I was learning before I ever started school.

Another series I watched at about the same time was The Dick Van Dyke Show. Rob Petrie was (relatively) enlightened, and the messaging here was less constrictive. Still, Laura (and even Rob) found it necessary to defend her right to make choices. Rob’s and Laura’s roles were still sharply defined by gender, but Laura’s role as a woman on this show was broader, more honorable—more equal to men’s—than that of Mayberry’s women. Rob was still the man of the house, but he respected his wife, her individuality, and her desires, and she had quite as much say as he did in the way she managed her life and her home. Surely these lessons tempered what I was learning in Mayberry.

Logical progression took me into the world of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the blast from the past that I’m watching now. The show’s influence on advancing feminism in popular culture is well-documented. If the prepubescent (Andy Griffith/Dick Van Dyke) years are critical in shaping kids’ views of the world, the teen years frame how they feel about themselves, while the transition into the first phase of adulthood emphasizes learning to navigate the self they have formulated. Mary Richards and company escorted me through my teens, beginning at 14, and ushered me into early adulthood until I was 21. Mary and friends showed me what life was like through a superimposed mirror of myself, teaching me how I measured up and what aspects of myself needed tweaking, as I learned the machinations to expect and possible strategies to employ in the adult world of work and (hopefully) more mature relationships.

I felt and still feel more affinity with Mary’s friend Rhoda than with Mary herself. Rhoda was unconventional, with flashy dark eyes, sleek hair, and a flair for flamboyance that she totally pulled off. She struck me as the most charismatic character on the show. And yet Mary was the show’s proposed ideal. Most notably, Rhoda, despite her free-spirited, individualistic exuberance, ached to attain the body aesthetic promoted at the time, greatly influenced by Twiggy’s arrival on the U.S. scene just a few years earlier. Mary met that aesthetic. By current standards she is painfully thin, almost gaunt. But for the era (and still for many who were raised in it), that thinness was the ideal. Rhoda carried more weight—a weight she was obsessed with. Although she was the image of an active, healthy young American woman, she strove for the thinness that Mary projected. She was continually the butt of her own fat jokes, which no one countered. It was the dialog, the storyline, rather than Rhoda’s body that made clear she was overly fleshy, and therefore as unacceptable to herself as to others. The jokes about Rhoda’s weight and continual diet, her constant striving to meet the cultural standard and her inadequacy because she didn’t, flew thick and fast.

In Episode 6 of Season 3, an episode titled “Rhoda, the Beautiful,” everything changes. The plot is summed up in an accompanying description: “Even though she’s lost 20 pounds, Rhoda still feels fat and hopeless, but then Hempel’s Department Store invites her to enter a beauty contest.” (Fat and hopeless. Indeed.)

So after years of striving, Rhoda has finally attained her goal weight. This episode documents her difficulty adjusting her self-critical attitude to one that embraces her new image. The episode’s writer cried as she wrote of Rhoda’s emotional state. As reflected in the show—and not just this episode—the centrality of a woman’s weight to her sense of self could not be overstated. Every teenage girl and young woman of that era was able to relate to it.

Since the 1970s, women have tremendously advanced in terms of our place in the world. Many strictures that have historically limited women’s accomplishments and self-confidence have been identified, called out, and addressed in both the public and private spheres. True parity has not yet been obtained, but a lot of ground has been gained, and efforts to increasingly cover it are still in the works.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is the cultural demand that women shape their bodies to conform to whatever image their era requires of them. In this 21st century, girls are endangering their mental health and their very lives in response to pressures transmitted through social media. The messages they ingest about their bodies matters. In my 60s, I still feel the self-defeating, demoralizing, coercive call to conform to the physical ideal promoted by my culture. My sense of self is still swayed by the bathroom scales and the mirror. I recognize not only the futility and fatuousness, but also the injustice, of defining acceptable womanhood through a popular image, and yet I am still affected by it—as are most women I know. We have become more forgiving of our inability to conform to that image, but we are still aware of it and it still affects our self-satisfaction. At this age, we tend to emphasize health over beauty, since beauty is (as ever) defined by others who are at best dismissive and at worst contemptuous of our bodies. But we still feel the foot on our backsides, pressing us to do better.

American women, overall, have been able escape the shackles of Mayberry and even most of the kinder restraints of New Rochelle. But in 2022, even little girls are still pressured to determine self-worth according to the degree to which they comply to an ideal mostly achieved—when achieved—by unhealthy diets and self-flagellation. For those of us who came of age in the ‘70s, the lessons we learned from Mary and Rhoda continue to be our living inheritance and our lasting legacy.