Why were there so few divorced male protagonists, beyond the sad sacks of “The Odd Couple”? Perhaps because divorce represented lower economic hurdles for male characters, who were presumably already in the work force and had long enjoyed lives outside the home. The potential for new experiences is minimized.
Besides, divorced men are often seen as less sympathetic. (Want sympathy? Write a widower.) If women are taught to desire marriage, the conventional wisdom goes, a wife must have had a good reason to want to end one. And if the marriage is ended for her, then she seems even more deserving of compassion. Men’s liberation carries less social heft.
In the ’70s and early ’80s, divorced and divorcing women became the heroines of numerous situation comedies such as “One Day at a Time,” “It’s a Living,” “Alice,” “Maude” and “Rhoda,” a “Mary Tyler Moore” spinoff. In these shows, which center on working-class and middle-class urban women, divorce often constitutes a financial and social injury that a heroine or sidekick weathers with heart and pluck.
In the early 2000s, a new kind of divorced woman emerged. From Charlotte of “Sex and the City” (which debuted in 1998) up through “The Starter Wife” (2007-8) and “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce” (2014-18), portrayals of divorce became more glamorous, more privileged. In shows that included divorce as a major plot point, splits offered women a chance to reinvent themselves, though their emancipation was often narrowly focused on luxury lifestyle choices and their pursuit of new partners. These shows divorce women not only from their spouses but also from broader political concerns. (One fulcrum show: “Designing Women,” which ended in 1993, included one divorced character, Annie Potts’s Mary Jo, who had an active investment in women’s liberation, and another, Delta Burke’s Suzanne, who did not.)
Suzanne Leonard, a professor of English at Simmons University and the author of “Wife, Inc.: The Business of Marriage in the Twenty-First Century,” sees such shows as exemplars of postfeminism or “choice feminism,” an ideology in which any choice a woman makes is seen as potentially empowering. “There was a lot of discussion during the second-wave feminist movement about the financial consequences of divorce,” she said. “And those consequences become really glossed over.”
This focus on women’s personal emancipation continued in shows like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” whose heroine becomes a comedian only after a split; “Grace and Frankie,” about frenemies whose lives are enlarged after they divorce their husbands; and “The Good Wife,” in which a politician’s wife flowers professionally (and reveals her own questionable ethics) once her marriage ends.
Alexis Soloski
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