Comic books, like television, are a generally conservative mass medium, reflecting social change only after it’s taken hold in the culture at large. And that makes it interesting to track the course of women’s rights in comics.
Mary Marvel, Bulletgirl, Miss America, Namora, Golden Girl, Doll Girl, Batwoman, Batgirl, Supergirl, Superwoman, Aquagirl, Miss Arrowette, Fly Girl, Hawkgirl, Power Girl, Ms. Marvel, Spider-Woman, even She-Hulk … the female knock-off of the dominant male superhero was a venerable tradition from the 1940s on, one that paradoxically paralleled American society’s growing recognition of female power even as it kind of condescended to the idea.
Take Fly Girl, for example.
Introduced in Adventures of the Fly 13 (July 1961) as a traditional damsel in distress, actress Kim Brand didn’t play that role for long. In Adventures of the Fly 14 (September 1961), she was granted a magic ring by extra-dimensional emissary Turan that enabled her to duplicate the powers of attorney Thomas Troy, the Fly. She co-starred with him thereafter while appearing in solo stories in the Archie comics Laugh and Pep.
The trend even continued outside comics, with Six Million Dollar Men spawning Bionic Women.
Those female copies sometimes served as guinea pigs, trial balloons for plot developments that would later be visited on the more established male hero. Supergirl was “killed” before Superman, and Batgirl was physically disabled before Batman.
The 1979 movie Alien featured a female lead besting a space predator after her male crewmates had failed. And Joss Whedon’s innovative 1997 TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer marked a shift in the culture, featuring a no-nonsense superheroine in the lead who had copied no one, and whose adventures balanced the traditionally male mission of monster hunting with traditional female concerns about high school relationships.
And the permanent cultural shift that has taken place is even more apparent now. Thor’s original love interest, Jane Foster, gained the powers, the hammer and the name of the thunder god.
Melody Ivins wrote: Speaking of Buffy, Josh Whedon also gave us the variously powerful women of Firefly: an amazing warrior, a genius mechanic, a brilliant hetaira nicknamed The Ambassador for her social and political skills, and finally a psychic who is the deadliest fighter of all and whose IQ is off the charts, even if she is a little whimsical in the brainpan.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course he had a hand in creating the bad-ass women of the Avengers and SHIELD in their latest incarnations. Thank you, Joss.
A particular delight of these characters is that their strength and independence does not make them unloving, unlovable, or asexual, a matter with which many pioneering women and queer sci-fi authors struggled. Joanna Russ informs us that Lesbian authors of her generation could not at first envision egalitarian love relationships between a man and a woman, or heroic love relationships between two women, so they turned to gay fanfic about male characters. Among the earliest Star Trek fanzines were women-written accounts that slashed Kirk and Spock as an ideal couple.
I think I've just persuaded myself to read Joanna Russ again. And to watch Firefly again. :)
William Weber wrote: Don’t forget the Girl From U.N.C.L.E.!
ReplyDeleteBob Doncaster wrote: Some former male roles have been changed to females in remakes of shows like Battlestar Galactica and Hawaii 50.
ReplyDeleteEdward Lee Love wrote: I mentioned in another post, this seemed to be more of an issue in the 50s and 60s whereas the 1940s the heroines often subverted a lot of the expectations and roles. Where male heroes used secret identities as covers and the masked identity to get around legal niceties and personal liberties, for the female characters it was often a way to assert their equality or even superiority to the men who'd try to keep them in gilded cages. The exceptions would tend to be the women sidekicks.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say Miss America was a knock-off as the others. She wasn't created to be just a female version of the male character and had no narrative ties to a male character.. In fact, there were three Miss Americas in comics of the time.
Harmony Gates wrote: Very thought-provoking post. IMO there seemed to be a different view of what powerful/strong women were like prior to the past few decades, so while they could be 'strong' they didn't tend to be as physical as today (I still remember when this was the general view my country...and it is still held by my parents). I think this is natural in economies where physical strength is employed/required more often. And, of course, any generation that experienced the horrors of a world war is also likely to view men/women very differently when it comes to physical confrontations/violence.
ReplyDeleteWhen martial arts became 'a thing' (particularly in the 60s/70s) it made it a bit easier to accept/believe women (and smaller guys of course) as action characters - particularly when we thought MA gave people almost superhuman abilities.
The inclusion of superpowers, sci-fi (like bionics) and the supernatural also meant we (men and women) could more readily accept action female heroes, but while it seems men enjoyed writing about (and watching) such characters there was a long time when many (I dare say most) women simply didn't like science fiction/fantasy and it actually took a long time to 'bring them around'. Many of my female schoolteachers (and other women of their age that I spoke to) openly despised sci fi, comics and other 'trash'. I do remember a number of women liking Bionic Woman - though I must admit they tended to prefer the Six Million Dollar Man (Lee Majors was very popular)
I absolutely recall Buffy being a breakthrough tv series that (unlike the movie) was able to successfully incorporate martial arts and supernatural powers together with a particular characterisation that actually appealed to a young, female audience as well as the traditional male one. We then had Charmed etc and the ball really started moving.
Things have got to a point now where we see small framed women in lots of media regularly beating much stronger (and often skilled opponents) and only some of us (often those who didn't grow up with the 'waif fu' trope) sometimes have difficulty sufficiently suspending disbelief to accept it
The main audience for action comics tend to be male (they often appeal more to male minds) so there wasn't such a market for female action heroes - if there was the publishers would have flooded the markets. Some strong women in early comics that are still remembered would be Sheena (constantly rescuing her male friend) in the 40s and the early Lois Lane. The first Phantom strip actually featured his girlfriend boxing against a male opponent in 1936. In the early sixties there was Modesty Blaise. A favourite of mine was Nyoka the jungle girl, who (in both her movie serial and comic books incarnations) often got into physical confrontations). Wonder Woman, of course, was famously created for the female audience from the mid-forties - though most of her fans/readers were probably male for much of the time.