Thank you, Laverne and Shirley

On coming of age at the tail end of the second wave

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Schlemiel, schlimazel, hasenpfeffer incorporated.”

I’m sitting in the bathroom after a night of cocktails with friends when this chant pops into my head. I have no idea why. I start singing the theme song to Laverne and Shirley. Loudly.

“What’s happening?” my husband asks as he passes the bathroom door.

I don’t answer. I’m not quite sure what’s happening. One of those overpowering moments of nostalgia. The image of Laverne and Shirley, arms linked, skipping down a Milwaukee street and chanting those words (apparently a Yiddish-American hopscotch rhyme from Penny Marshall’s childhood) is so vivid in my mind. But why is it popping into my head now, relatively late at night, as I’m sitting on the toilet having a pee? My friends and I weren’t talking about old TV shows we watched. There was no mention of Laverne and Shirley. It’s a mystery. A random firing of my brain.

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Laverne and Shirley was on the air from 1976 to 1983. I was two years old when it first aired and nine when it went off the air. That’s young, but clearly the theme song is still stuck in my head. I might have had to sound them out phonetically, but even the Yiddish words of the chant, which made zero sense to me as a child, are still there, bouncing around in my brain. I could tell my husband that Micheal McKean was in the show. “Was he Lenny or Squiggy?” he asked. “Lenny,” I said, instantly and with no doubt. Of course he was Lenny.

The show was a Happy Days spin-off, part of the 50s nostalgia that gave us Grease and maybe Ronald Reagan? I watched Happy Days, too, and Mork and Mindy (another spin-off). But it’s Laverne and Shirley that most sticks in my mind.

The show was set in the 50s in Milwaukee, but it’s a strange story for that time period. Laverne and Shirley aren’t housewives. They’re not June Cleaver. They’re two women who are not married. Who never get married. Two women who live with each other and only barely date. And yes, there’s Laverne’s dad, Frank, but other than that, these are two women who live outside traditional family life. They work to support themselves—at solid working class jobs. Laverne and Shirley, for a little girl in conservative, rural Kentucky, was radical, the two of them setting off at the beginning of every episode down the street of Milwaukee to a theme song about making their dreams come true.

Laverne and Shirley wasn’t the only show in the late 70s and early 80s with women who weren’t mothers or wives. There was Alice, which was on TV from 1976 to 1985. I can still here one of my best friends saying, “Kiss my grits,” over and over again. Alice had a kid, but he wasn’t the focus of the show. The women were. Mary Tyler Moore went off the air when I was four, so I have less memories of it, but I would catch reruns sometimes. I was young when these shows were around, but they were sending messages about what a woman’s life could be and some part of me absorbed it on a deep bodily level, burying itself into my head, to come singing back out in my bathroom at fifty.

The 70s, in addition to being the golden era of the sitcom, were also the tail end of one of the largest social movement cycles in American history. The second wave of the women’s movement. The civil rights movement. The anti-war movement. The gay and lesbian rights movement. We think of the 60s as the decade of hippies and protests, but the movements didn’t end when the calendar turned from 1969 to 1970. Those reverberations were still being felt in the 70s. Title IX was passed in 1972. Roe v. Wade is 1973.

A lot of the TV that came into my living room was influenced by the cultural changes of the decade before. Laverne and Shirley, with its physical comedy, echoes I Love Lucy, but Lucy couldn’t be a single woman. Laverne and Shirley could.

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What we had been talking about that night over cocktails were our own mothers. Our families. The generation that came before. We were talking about the people our mothers might have been if they’d been given more choices. If they hadn’t dropped out of college because their father or their fiancé told them they had to. If they’d kept up with the college classes they started taking before they had their first child and had to quit. If they’d stayed at the job that had the chance of moving up a ladder instead of switching to one that made it easier to get babysitting.

Some of our mothers seemed fine with the job of mothering and nothing more. But we could also see the price our mothers paid. Breakdowns. Hysterectomies. A deep, bottomless rage always simmering under the surface. It hurt them because it’s not a way to live.

My mother told my sister and I, “Don’t get married. Don’t have children.” It was a mantra and even as a child, I understood what she was saying. “I didn’t choose this.” She wasn’t telling us we had to choose something different. It was a prayer that we would have a choice at all.

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The first time I remember coming across the word feminist was in an essay by Camille Paglia, of all people, in TIME Magazine, our slender lifeline into the outside world. It was a review of her latest book. All I remember is that she agreed with Freud’s assertion that all women are bisexual by nature. I thought about my best friend, how much I admired her cupid-bow lips and her round face. “Yeah,” I thought. “That doesn’t sound wrong.”

When I got to college, I fell in with the feminists, which felt natural. This was Mississippi in the 90s, so it was still a very second wave sort of feminism. I read Audre Lorde and bell hooks and this amazing third wave anthology by Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker’s daughter. But our feminism was white. And tough. We were like a girl gang. We told dad jokes. We objectified men. One year we each picked a cute freshman boy. We didn’t make a game of hooking up with them, but we might as well have. Also, we were all in a sorority together. The 90s were complicated.

By the time I began teaching gender studies, hardly any of my students identified as feminist, even the women who, as far as I could see, quite clearly were. They didn’t like the label. It was scary. It was stigmatizing. Maybe it was a little dangerous.

These were women who at the time were only ten years or so younger than me. And yet their attitudes toward feminism were so different. I was going to women’s studies conferences. Half of those women I went to college with were lesbians now. I had my own attractions to the women in life. Why wouldn’t I? The women were awesome. The men…only so-so.

What had happened in the ten years between me and this next generation of young women?

Well, Ronald Regan. The pro-life movement. The 80s. Backlash. It wasn’t coincidence that these women were scared of feminism. It was the result of a large-scale attempt to reverse all the cultural and political gains of the 60s and the 70s. History is like that. Two steps forward, one step back. Dialectical. We work our asses off to create some progress. Other people work their asses off to roll it all back. Repeat.¹

Most of the sitcoms of the 80s and 90s were about families. Nuclear families. The women were wives or mothers again. Claire Cosby. Elyse Keaton. Maggie Seaver. The women had jobs, too, but their jobs weren’t that important. What was important was their role in the family.

There were some exceptions. The Golden Girls. Women are allowed to be alone and feisty and empowered at the end of their lives. Designing Women, yes, but most of the women were also mothers and wives. If you wanted to see women living independent lives, you mostly had to look to reruns.

When you live in a small town in Kentucky, TV is your main window into what the world is and what it should be. Even when I was two or three or four, I was soaking in what I saw. Women on their own. Women existing outside the family structure. Thriving, even. Laverne and Shirley seemed pretty happy and they didn’t get married. They didn’t have children. There were possibilities. There were choices. All that mostly disappeared in the 80s and the 90s.

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We tend to think of history as neat and contained. Boxed off in discrete units of time. If I was only two when Laverne and Shirley debuted and nine when it stopped, could that really have mattered so much to my life? Is it really why I had no problem calling myself a feminist even through the decades when it was literally referred to as ‘the f-word’? I have no memory of Title IX being passed² or Roe v. Wade. Does that mean it didn’t matter for forming who I am? Are we not absorbing the shock waves of those events into our bodies and minds, even if by the time they reach us in our small towns and suburbs, they’re only the gentlest of vibrations?

I don’t know. I suspect the answer is yes. I hope it is. What I know for sure is that the memory of Laverne and Shirley setting off down the street is blazed into my brain and with them, a whole set of very specific associations. I knew these women were embarking on an adventure together. I knew they were hopeful. I knew they were strong. Funny. Maybe misguided sometimes, too. But they were still willing to take chances and break rules (it says so right in the theme song!).

“And we’ll do it our way, yes, our way.

Making our dreams come true.

For me and you.”

So, yeah, thank you, Laverne and Shirley.

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1. That some of that progress gets rolled back doesn’t make it all for nothing. I think that’s important to remember, especially right now, in this election year. There’s this thing in the study of social movements called social movement abeyance. It’s the time between big social movement cycles, when a core, but often smaller, group of people keep the ideas and tactics of the movement alive. There were women who bridged the first and second waves of the women’s movement. They kept the flame alive. It matters that people tried, even when they fail. The Easter Rising is a big deal in the history of the Irish nationalist movement and they lost. Like, really badly. But their loss really mattered.

2. To be fair, not a lot of people were paying attention to the passage of Title IX. No one really understood how far-reaching the law would be and the smart women (and a few men) behind the law wanted it that way. They sort of snuck it by Congress. Thank goodness for that sneakiness.