Word: prefeminist
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...POLES OF SUPPORT holding up Pat Buchanan are polar opposites. Bay, sister, spitfire campaign chairman, is the prototype of the postfeminist woman. She works round the clock, rears three kids on her own, yet insists that she's a traditionalist. Shelley, wife, constant campaign companion, is an unrepentant prefeminist. She defines herself almost exclusively through her husband and prefers it that way. For a premodern man like Pat, independence may be tolerable in a sister but never in a spouse...
...metaphysics of comedy, a working-class yin and yang who made that sitcom a peak experience of American pop culture. Gleason as bus driver Ralph Kramden was huge, bombastic, extravagant with feeling. Meadows as his wife was slight, cool, drolly down-to-earth. She imbued Alice with a prefeminist feistiness that rendered Ralph's threats of domestic violence ridiculous. Yet she was also tender in a worldly wise way, always ready to forgive Ralph his latest scheme to escape hardscrabble Brooklyn...
...made a string of B pictures not quite bad enough to attract a cult following, got his break with a TV tearjerker about a dying athlete and the mini-series The Blue and the Gray. Linda attributes her success in network television, one of the last remaining outposts of prefeminist thinking, "to the Bic pen and nothing else." She wrote 35 straight episodes of Designing Women, an indoor record in Hollywood. But after 150 episodes, the top-rated show about four intelligent women had won only one Emmy -- for hairdressing. So she wasn't surprised by Hillary's national reception...
...make it in a man's world. Many of them still feel that somehow they haven't made it on their own or will be dismissed if they step over some invisible line of appropriate female conduct. This is particularly touchy in politics, which remains a bastion of prefeminist expectations, even though more and more politicians' wives have professional careers. The little wife is still a Norman Rockwell staple of American campaigns. George Bush is not joking when he says more people turn out for his appearances when Barbara Bush accompanies him. Local newspapers are still filled with stories about...
Gone are the appealing men, comfortable settings, clean sheets and room service of prefeminist fantasies. There is no intimacy, comfort or consolation from the sex these women dream of, no momentary sensation of not being alone in the universe. Instead Friday's courageous respondents' heads are filled with thoughts of prisoners, children, animals (farm, zoo and domestic) and so much equipment that batteries ought to be included...