To Read

When Everything Changed by Gail Collins
"Perhaps to underline their heterosexuality, the Cartwright men had plenty of romances. But the scriptwriters killed their girlfriends off at an extraordinarily speedy clip. The family patriarch, Ben, had been widowed three times, and his three sons all repeatedly got married or engaged, only to quickly lose their mates to the grim reaper. A rather typical episode began with Joe (Landon) happily dancing with a new fiancée. Before the first commercial, the poor girl was murdered on her way home from the hoedown."
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Is that why Lady Gaga kills her boyfriend at the end of Paparazzi...
(She also seems to have a real fixation with putting her fingers in her mouth.)
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"Another reason the nation ignored the fact that so many housewives had outside jobs was that working women tended not to be well-represented among upper income families. The politicians, business executives, editors and scriptwriters who set the tone for the public discussion usually felt that not working was simply better...Esther Peterson, the top-ranking woman in the Kennedy administration, asked an auditorium full of working-class high school girls in Los Angeles how many expected to have a 'home and kids and a family' and the room was full of waving hands. But when Peterson wanted to know how many expected to work, only one or two girls signified interest. She then asked how many of their mothers worked and, she recalled later 'all those hands went up again.'The girls were disturbed by the implicit message. 'In those days nine out of ten girls would work outside the home at some point in their lives,' Peterson said. 'But each of the girls thought that she would be that tenth girl.'"
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"Along with teenage fiction about Cherry Ames the inexhaustible nurse, the stewardess novels were virtually the only girls' career books around -- unless you counted the girl detectives, who didn't seem to get paid for their efforts."