Sexist

The subtlety of treating a woman as an inferior who should be protected is there. Yes, it's all political correctness, but there's always a truth beneath. I'm sure there are a lot of women who would love to be molly coddled by their men in this way, but I find it distasteful. The point of the women's movement was to have choices in your life, and not be persecuted for it. Back then, it was a given women wanted, and should be, looked over like a child. The benevolent father figure making all the decisions. Some of us want to, and have, grown and grown up. ;)

That said, obviously, not all men were kindly uppers towards their women.

In a modern show, the woman would be actively involved in solving the mystery as a real person... without balloon boobs and super natural powers, ala the 80's, lol.

@memboy7

Yeah, it was sexist---there's that one episode featuring Mary Ann Mobley--"Five Widows Weeping", I believe--when her character keeps seeing these terrible nightmarish visions, and her father and her husband basically treat her like she's some silly little girl who can't be taken seriously unless they say so. At least Dr. Rhodes treated the female characters like grown,intelligent women with minds of their own,even though he did fall back a little bit into the sexism,but not as much as the other men--I think being what he was made him a little more openminded than the usual guys on the show. Basically,the series, like the majority of TV series back then, was written by mainly men to begin with--men who still had that mindset from the era where women were supposed to be pretty little helpless not-too-bright things to be seen and not heard. As much as women have accomplished in real life these days--running countries,corporations and becoming powerful politicians running cities---there's nothing politically correct about showing women as independent and acting on their own nowadays without always needing a man's help, because that's exactly what they have proven they can do in REAL life, thank you.

I totally love 70s shows, but agree with the much if WillysGirl's points. A good little thread.

You got that right. I can't even imagine being an adult female and tolerating the attitude.

And, what exactly is wrong with being saved by a strong man? The intensity goes both ways -- yes, the damsels in distress will probably saved by strong men more often back then. However, at the same time, the women were also doing more for the men back then -- and doing more for their own kind as well. I think that people are summarizing this incorrectly. Just because women weren't strong in the exact same way as they are now, it doesn't mean they weren't strong. Every head of the household mail would admit back then that they might bring home the bacon, but the woman RULES the house! Now, what so helpless about that?!

See, it isn't that women were thought of as useless, helpless creatures. But, it is that men and women were thought of as having specialized domains. So, when the woman stepped out of her specialized domain, of course, should be thought of as out of place in needing to be taught a thing or 2. But again, it goes both ways -- if you ever saw a man on television trying to do a woman's work, he was always depicted as a bumbling idiot.

So, truth be known, the problem with women (and many men too) today is that they're constantly on the lookout for problems -- even in old TV shows! But the sort of sexist attitudes that you refer to is exactly one of the reasons why I love old shows like this, much more so than the new ones. I don't ever watch new TV, because I don't like today's attitude on hardly anything! Hence, not everyone is comfortable with the whole woman's Lib attitude -- and some of us do not consider the attitude of Gary Collins or anyone else in those older show to be particularly sexist (though, there are always exceptions, of course).

Please excuse typos/funny wording; I use speech-recognition that doesn't always recognize!