as she was born in and came of age in the South and she has been trying to make sense of it ever since. The research for her latest book, Why Any Woman: Feminism and Popular Culture in the Late Twentieth-Century South, started with the self-centered question of how, against great odds, she became a baby feminist during the Reagan era in the region that gave birth to the modern Right. The answer she found was popular culture.
Williams applied the “Page 99 Test” to Why Any Woman, and reported the following:
The first time I heard the word “feminist” was on the weekly sitcom Designing Women. Page 99 is in the middle of Chapter 3, which charts the New South, neoliberal feminist ideology of this show. Page 99 offers an analysis of one of the most controversial episodes of the show on which the four main characters watch the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991. Law professor Anita Hill’s detailed testimony in the hearings regarding Thomas’s history of sexual harassment did not tank his nomination, but it did spark an unprecedented public discussion that helped to bring about “third-wave” feminism.Learn more about Why Any Woman at the University of Georgia Press website.
Designing Women joined this conversation. On ”The Strange Case of Clarence and Anita,” Mary Jo Shively, one of the titular characters, delivers this monologue:Oh, come on…The polls say too that most women aren’t feminists. But if you ask women about individual feminist issues, the majority of them are for them. They just don’t want to call themselves feminist because George Bush and Phyllis Schlafly want to make people believe that feminists are all these big-mouthed, bleeding heart, man-hating women who don’t shave their legs.... If believing in equal pay and mandated childcare make me a feminist, then I am damn proud to be one!The Page 99 Test works very well in this instance, because these scenes from Designing Women get at the heart of how the show's "belles with briefcases" navigated gender politics in an inhospitable region and era. Mary Jo’s textbook “second-wave” feminism targeted the early 1990s “I’m not a feminist, but…” crowd, and the show’s take on the Thomas hearings was classic white feminism: Mary Jo and friends are the authoritative voices who position sexual harassment as the sole issue in the hearings, thus completely eclipsing discussions of the racial dynamics of Hill’s experiences. Page 99 gives readers a taste one of the many forms of complicated, confusing, and sometimes contradictory southern feminisms on offer by popular culture in the late twentieth century.
--Marshal Zeringue
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