Margaret Thatcher, Annette Funicello and the spectrum of sisterhood
"It's difficult to imagine former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former Mouseketeer and pop music star Annette Funicello sharing much beyond today's obituary page — Thatcher died Monday, at 87, of a stroke; Funicello, at 70, of complications arising from multiple sclerosis. But as disparate as their careers and legacies were, they each contributed to shifting ideals of femininity and a modern women's movement often as dismayed by its successes as its failures.
For many women who came of age in the 1960s, Funicello was the last of the wide-eyed good girls. She was perky rather than sassy, pretty in a non-threatening and enthusiastically demure way that the crosshatched forces of the women's and sexual liberation movements took great pleasure in parodying.
"Would you pull that crap with Annette?" asks "Grease's" Rizzo in the show's most socially aware song, eternally linking Funicello with that era's other symbol of repressed womanhood, Sandra Dee.
Funicello was the girl we left behind before we found greater truth at the feet of Janis Joplin. Eternally imprinted on the cultural imagination in her Mouska-ears and bobby socks, then her modest "Beach Blanket Bingo" two-piece, she was the black-and-white portrait of a nation's carefully groomed and hypocritical moments of innocence before it gave way to the psychedelic world of protest placards and love beads, questionable hygiene and reconsideration of everything."
More at:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-funicello-thatcher-femininity-20130409,0,7323465.story
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