2020 Election

[yvo]

Joan would vote Biden/Harris, amirite?

[Admin]

Nov 9, 2020 3:05:14 GMT -6 yvo said:

Joan would vote Biden/Harris, amirite?

Love that meme! But I'm not so sure you're right! We can never know, of course, but from my reading, Joan had a "pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps" sort of philosophy, which is more in line with Trump's meritocracy/iconoclastic thinking than with Biden's Deep Swamp reliance on old ways of thinking. Here, for example, is a 1970s quote from "Conversations" re Women's Lib (not quite #MeToo):


I don't think stronger characters like me or Kate or Roz Russell were ever intimidated simply because we were women. (God knows Bette Davis wasn't; look at the great battle she put up with Jack Warner.) We all knew 101 ways to say "Go fuck yourself!" without ever, or almost ever, being vulgar.

I don't think Women's Lib came on very attractively. The leaders not only weren't feminine, they looked as though they'd parked their semi's outside when they came in to go on TV. Men didn't like them, naturally, and a lot of women didn't associate and didn't want to. I wasn't exactly what you'd call a housewife, but I wonder how many housewives wanted to be told they were leading useless lives and working as unpaid slaves. Later on they toned down a bit and issues like--oh, equal pay for equal work began to mean something. But at first--well, the wrong people led the parade.

As far as the film industry is concerned, Women's Lib is a laugh. The strong parts are still being written for men. The casting couches have moved from movie studios to TV studios, and from what I hear they've moved in dozens more. Are any more women producing, directing, editing, or whatever, than in my day? I'm not anti-feminist, but I'm inclined to agree with Adela Rogers St. Johns, when she said that Women's Lib is a lot of hogwash, that women have always had their rights, but they were too dumb to use them. She says that any woman with intelligence and ambition has always been able to make it in the so-called man's world. I think she's right. Now that I've set the Movement back five years...

That said: Joan tended to "go with the flow" politically. In the '30s when she was with the liberal Franchot Tone, she associated with those liberal folks and supported FDR (while later mocking Tone and friends' penchant for being served out by her pool while simultaneously touting the rights of the working class). In 1960, she went along with the glamorous Kennedy. But by 1968, she was a Nixon supporter.

[yvo]

Nov 15, 2020 4:52:34 GMT -6 Admin said:

I know of her love for Kennedy since she kept his picture, but I either willingly forgot or never picked up the Nixon thing! She was definitely always changing.. Maybe she would be drawn to that populist rhetoric at first and then shift away/ that sounds better in my mind:)