Women's Rights & Issues
Related: About this forumEqual pay for women issue. The Mary Tyler Moore Show season three, episode one.
It's titled "The Good Time News". That episode must have aired in 1972. The show starts out with Mary discovering she makes $50 less per week that the guy who previously had her producers job. Murray tells her she does a much better job as well.
Mary confronts Lou about the wage disparity and Lou gives the predictable answer. He was a man and had a family to support and tells Mary to come back when she has a reply to that. She immediately comes back with, you'd have to pay a married man with more kids more, or a single man less, but you don't do that! She gets her money eventually.
It's an otherwise pretty ordinary episode from a great show. They were also experimenting with making the news more entertaining, which explains the title.
I just thought I'd throw this in here since I happened to run across it. I'm working my way through all the episodes.
Cleita
(75,480 posts)working woman, although I had married by then. I had the same weird dates and problems with BFFs. There were differences, of course. I would never had been an assistant producer but would have been her secretary, except she would have been a man. My clothes nor my shabby studio apartment were as cute as hers. The wage difference, I was still suffering through, and that episode brought it home to me.
Incidentally, I went to high school with the real MTM although I never was friends with her because she was a couple of classes ahead of me.
Wait Wut
(8,492 posts)I don't remember that particular episode, but it is kinda funny when you realize MTM turned into a teaper and Ed Asner is a Democrat (not sure if he qualifies as Liberal).
Cleita
(75,480 posts)She went before Congress a few years back to lobby for stem cell research.
Wait Wut
(8,492 posts)...but, a Republican who thinks Sarah Palin is a 'great lady'.
Cleita
(75,480 posts)I don't think Mary is really very political and probably has been drinking the same Kool-Aid dished out by Fox News. She's still friends with Betty White and even did a cameo on Betty White's sitcom, "Hot In Cleveland". The only references I could find about this and Ed Asner dissing her about her politics were on "Free Republic", which makes the veracity of it suspect already.
Wait Wut
(8,492 posts)I don't really care, one way or the other. I was never a fan of hers, though I did love that show.
Cleita
(75,480 posts)Whatever.
brewens
(13,620 posts)I think it get better when Mary White joins the cast. Rhoda is gone by then.
HockeyMom
(14,337 posts)as a young, single woman in NYC. I worked for a corporation as a secretary. I lived alone in a NYC apartment. Imagine that today w/o a couple of rommates? I made $8/hour (above minimum wage TODAY) and rented a $125 a month West Village apartment.
Damn, have we really come a long way, baby? It doesn't sound like it from my past.
HERVEPA
(6,107 posts)brewens
(13,620 posts)They don't waste any time about establishing that, and it's a re-occurring theme. He pulls the bottle out during Mary's interview and offers her a "blast".
Ed later played a surgeon with a drinking problem in a made for tv movie. It may have been a guest star role in one of the medical drama's even. I can't remember that one for sure.
noamnety
(20,234 posts)Where I teach, we had paycuts a couple years ago. It was suggested that I voluntarily offer to take less pay for doing the same work since I have a husband. I was speechless.