Popular Culture Review 30.1
INTRODUCTION
Today when people look back at television in the 1960s and 1970s , they cringe at its portrayals of women . A popular advertising campaign for Virginia Slims cigarettes claimed , “ You ’ ve Come a Long Way , Baby ,” but like that slogan , messages that seemed to be progressive at the time were merely smokescreens in a patriarchal world view . Nevertheless , changes in culture had to begin somewhere , and for an audience of post-World War II baby-boom females , television provided a lens for growing up . In America between 1946 and 1964 , roughly seventy-six million babies were born , about half of them female , with the high-water mark for births occurring around the mid 1950s , which was also a key period for the expansion of the television audience . Prime-time network television programs targeted different segments of the population , but very little was available , in the early age of the Barbie doll , for baby-boom girls growing up and looking toward their futures . Beginning in 1959 , Mattel Toys took to the air waves to advertise Barbie directly to girls on children ’ s television . In the words of its creator , Ruth Handler , Barbie assured little girls that they would someday grow up , enabling them to imagine their future selves and truly dream their dreams ( Stern ).
So too did three popular prime-time television sitcoms , The Patty Duke Show , That Girl , and the Mary Tyler Moore Show , which aired in an era when few shows were built around the lives of young single women who , for their time , demonstrated agency , ambition , and professional aspirations . The Patty Duke Show , which ran on ABC from September 18 , 1963 , to April 27 , 1966 , became the first television show to be named after a teenage girl . In it , Duke played identical cousins Patty and Cathy Lane , high school students in Brooklyn
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