Barbie and Elizabeth Zott – Sisters Against the Patriarchy!
When I was a preteen in the early 1970s, I went to a sleepaway camp in the Sierra foothills of California. Every morning, we gathered in the corral to select our activities. The founder of the camp, a grandmotherly woman with cat’s-eye glasses named Joy, invariably offered a choice called sun prints where we roamed the grounds looking for objects with interesting silhouettes – leaves, feathers, oddly-shaped sticks – and sandwiched them between a piece of glass and a sheet of chalky paper taped to cardboard that we set in bright sunlight for five minutes. When the paper was washed in water, the objects burst to life, pure white against a background of deep blue. The results were delightful and slightly odd.
This memory came alive for me as I was thinking about Elizabeth Zott, heroine of Bonnie Garmus’s best-selling Lessons in Chemistry, and Great Gerwig’s box-office hit Barbie. Both these authors leverage an offbeat charm to bring their proto-feminist heroines into stark relief against the patriarchy – a word that once tripped so easily off our tongues but dropped out of fashion as second wave feminism assimilated and adapted into the larger culture.
But sometimes, as certain forms of nostalgia remind us, it’s good to get back to the basics.
When Roe was repealed last year, women across the US woke up to the reality that we now have fewer human rights than our sons, husbands, lovers and the average man on the street. We swung our collective legs out of bed and understood it was time to start rolling the rock back up the mountain, again. Angst. Struggle. Headaches all around.
Into this moment of shared cultural panic step Elizabeth Zott and Barbie, heroines cast in a time before the internet, cell phones, extreme income inequality, the opioid crisis, and attacks on the capital. In other words, Elizabeth and Barbie come to us from a world of relative innocence when the issues of feminism were stripped bare of the overlays of cultural impasto heaped onto it today. In Barbie’s “real world” and Zott’s everyday reality, women suffer from the mere fact that they are women, pure and simple.
And suffer they do. But in spite of all the darkness that lurks under the surface for these fictional characters, we leave their stories feeling buoyant. These badass women undermine the prevailing gloom and doom narrative with page-turning humor, great costumes and a gloss that says, we can do it! It’ll be ok! I’m not sure I believe them, but that’s not really the point. The point is Elizabeth and Barbie take control through humor and joy — an approach that in 2023 feels deeply transgressive.
In the Barbie movie, our heroine doesn’t directly encounter the tragedies of the patriarchy until she leaves Barbieland and enters the “real world”, but the underlying genius of this trope is that Barbie — with her tiny waist, inflated boobs and permanently arched feet — is the last character any of us expect to be a feminist hero. But that’s kind of the point. If Barbie can fight the patriarchy, any of us can. As Susan Faludi said to New York Times writer Jessica Bennet, “Only Barbie could say, ‘By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power!’ and turn it into a laugh line.”
But Barbie is not alone in turning humor against the patriarchy. When we meet Elizabeth Zott, a frustrated chemist in late 1950s southern California, we encounter a quirky, deeply serious and lovable character whose life has been marked by a series of dark tragedies. Her conman father is in prison, her mother absconded to Brazil to avoid taxes and her beloved older brother hung himself in the shed. She is raped by her chemistry advisor at UCLA, forced to abandon her doctorate, and lands a role in as an underpaid research assistant at a lab where the only other women are lowly secretaries or work in the feminine ghetto of HR. Into this depressing set of circumstances, an incandescent love story unfolds that ultimately leaves Elizabeth alone, unmarried and pregnant – very off brand for the world she inhabits.
And yet, as dire as this all sounds, the always pragmatic Elizabeth soldiers forward until, almost against her will, she becomes a hero to women everywhere as the host of the wildly popular cooking program Supper at Six, where she subverts the patriarchal norms wrapped in a sensible apron and whipping up nutritious and delicious meals based on the principles of chemistry. Her take no prisoners approach becomes a national sensation as she advises women to follow their dreams, demand respect and equal rights, and buck the social norms. Her signature signoff line is “Children, set the table. Mother needs a moment to herself.”
So this is where we find ourselves, women in 2023, somehow leaping beyond the righteous anger of Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan, no longer burning bras and raising fists, but returned once again to the place where we have less bodily autonomy while sinking into the reality that we also have little personal control over the despoiling of our great mother, the earth herself. But this time, we are asked to fight the great battles with a smile on our faces. At the very least, this approach might make the fight feel less threatening and more inviting and widening the circle.
Let’s hope so. For all our sakes.
