The New Republic

How the mighty have fallen. Four years ago the face of Ally McBeal

graced the cover of Time magazine over the headline "IS FEMINISM

DEAD?" "[F]eminism," wrote reporter Ginia Bellafante, "has devolved

into the silly" with "powerful support" from "a popular culture

insistent on offering images of grown single women as frazzled,self-absorbed girls." And no one embodied that support more

powerfully than Ally, "the most popular female character on

television." But times change. As of last week Ally's a goner--not

only not the most popular female character on television but, after

the twentieth of May, no longer a character on television at all.

What happened? The causes are complex. But one thing we know is that

in the last season, Ally grew up. Having spent every Monday night
for

the last four and a half years looking for love, she finally found

it--just not with any of the maladapted men she spent those years

chasing. Rather, she found it with a kid. Of her own. A

child--created from an egg she donated for an infertility study--now

ten years old, smart, sassy, and sophisticated. What's more, Ally
was

made the first female partner in her law firm's history. Capping off

her run of good (if decidedly implausible) fortune, Ally even found

someone to stay home and take care of leaky pipes and perky child,
to

plan birthday parties, offer romantic advice, and pop open a bottle

of wine at the end of a long day. So what if, technically, he's the

handyman and she pays him to hang around? He's the perfect
wife--with

the face of Jon Bon Jovi to boot (literally: the '80s rocker has put

aside his guitar to play TV's hunkiest Mr. Mom).

In short, what's happened to Ally this season is a feminist fairy

tale about how women's lives should work. And the feminist analysis

is clear: As soon as Ally got everything the movement hoped for her,

she got canned. In a way, that's probably right. The problem with

Ally in the end was not, I suspect, that "audiences have tired of
her

frazzled single woman," as the New York Times Style section
suggested

this Sunday. (The author of the Times obit was none other than

Bellafante herself, who we know had already tired of the frazzled

Ally years ago.) Rather, the people who enjoyed watching Ally cope

with her hand-wringing, hair-twisting,

hallucinating-about-dancing-babies doldrums were the millions of

viewers who gave up on Ally when she grew up. And one reason we gave

up was that the old Ally and the issues that engaged her were simply

more interesting--more true to our lives--than the new, improved

version.

Partly this is because the new Ally is living out a familiar and

oddly dull narrative that so many working women already follow: Rush

to work, fire the junior staffer to meet budget, rush home, deal
with

the kid. But it's not only that the old Ally was more entertaining

when she was tripping over her tortured self; she was also,
strangely

enough, more engaged in questions of feminist politics than the

I've-got-it-together reincarnation, who makes being a single working

mom look like a piece of birthday cake. Contrary to Time's

suggestion, the movement had a pretty good ally when Ally was going

out of her mind on a regular basis; it lost her when she reached the

end of the self-fulfillment rainbow.

From the get-go, the hour-long drama made serious efforts to make
the

political personal. Certainly any woman in a coed office wonders

whether it creates a hostile working environment when her male

colleagues ogle a pretty delivery girl (two episodes during season

one); and six years after Anita Hill, we were still interested in

watching Elaine, the firm's secretary, try to sue her employer on

those grounds. We also still worry about workaday fashion--any

working girl will admit it's a neat trick to find a balance between

looking attractive and drawing attention--and the flaps over Ally's

postage-size mini or her roommate Renee's visible cleavage sent us

back to our closets with a sharper eye. Should a woman feel guilty

for discarding a man after a one-night stand (an episode entitled

"The Blame Game")? Can a woman sue for sexual harassment after

refusing to have sex with her boss, when all the other women in the

office did--and got promotions ("The Playing Field")? How should a

man feel when the woman he falls for turns out to be a man

("Homecoming")? In the explicitly feminist circles I moved in when

the show premiered, we talked about these things, and things like

them, and a TV show opening up the discussion--with sympathetic

characters in the mix--was more than half-welcome.

But what made the early "Ally McBeal" episodes appealing wasn't just

that this scrawny young woman was living out our political

discussions. It's that she--and the entire make-believe firm--was

living proof (OK, make-believe proof) that the personal and the

professional are not necessarily divided by a Berlin Wall; indeed,

they interact in messy, and sometimes helpful, ways. Ally was

forced-- by the power of her own overwhelming personality--to

accommodate the demands and foibles and wisdoms that we mostly carry

only as far as our office doors. Indeed, such flexibility helped her

understand her clients, and her clients helped her understand

herself. Sure, Ally's emotional life often did more than spill

over--it burst the dam. And sure, the life lessons she brought to
the

office mainly had to do with how to handle the man of the moment and

her own inner loneliness. But her struggles, however psychically

distorted, did give her compassion. Had she learned those lessons

from her daughter or her mother--as, say, star and Executive
Producer

Amy Brenneman does on another popular drama, "Judging Amy"--people

would have praised her for her hard-earned wisdom instead of

despising her for loving her navel.

Let's be clear: I, for one, am not looking for a boundaryless
office.

But arguably, unwillingness to confront the personal--more
precisely,

the feminine personal--is the biggest failure of the Second Wave.

It's why the movement has refused to deal with the fact that even

after the Revolution, many women want to marry men and bear their

children. It's why there's little effort to understand office
romance

except through the prism of sexual harassment law. It's why day care

is nowhere on the feminist (and consequently the national) agenda,

and it's why the emotional and practical tolls of having no one

tending the home fires has gone completely unremarked by the

movement. It's why, just this month, Time ran on its cover yet

another installment of the Baby vs. Career story that drove women I

know to tears for reminding us of the incredible double bind. When

Pat Ireland hung up her hat as head of the National Organization for

Women last summer, she told The Washington Post she hadn't had

children because "I decided that I couldn't do what I wanted to do

with my career and have children. Maybe it's because of the way I
was

raised--very 1950s ... but I couldn't see how you could do all that

and have kids.... And to be honest, I still don't." Makes you wish

there were a feminist like Ally still hanging around.

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