The Role Of Women In The Mod Squad

The 1970s was an era of great innovation in the television industry in regards to broadcasting politically and socially relevant fictional programs; however, despite its progress in representing social and political movements and more complex minority characters, television’s representation of women remained stagnant, if not regressive. In an era of highly visible second wave feminism, how can that be? One possible reason is evident in the case of The Mod Squad, in which the emerging contemporary crime drama genre renegotiates women’s role in television programs masking their immobility and rendering its regressive feminine politics of inferiority and adherence to traditional gender norms more overt through narrative and plot adjacency, thus

The genre renegotiates the role of Julie as a woman and her importance in these situations, adhering to gender norms by choosing to make Julie’s strengths more feminine instead. She is permitted the power of intuition and emotion which are meant to replace her physical inability in helping to catch the criminal. For instance, Julie instinctively seems to know that the victim’s girlfriend did not kill him, leading the squad to catch the real criminal, without subjecting Julie to physical activity, thus reinforcing gender norms and ideas of male physical superiority by, again, placing Julie adjacent to the action without subjecting her to masculine activity of characteristics. On the other hand, in I Love Lucy, Lucy is incredibly physically active, even more so than Julie, despite her relegation to the domestic sphere, often adopting more masculine personas while partaking in these activities, which is also antithetical to the physical representation of Julie as beautiful and feminine, making her character arguably, more progressive than Julie even in the context of the