"Friendship and the Single Girl: Exploring the Changing Image of Single Women in American Situation Comedies of the 1960s and 70s," is the topic to be discussed by Cindy Conaway, American culture studies-media, film and culture, CDL, and Mentor Peggy Tally at the next session of Dialogues at Noon, Friday, Feb. 28, 325 Hudson Street, NYC.

This presentation discusses the ways in which single women were portrayed in situation comedies of the 1960s and '70s, particularly in "That Girl," "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Rhoda," and how these representations were both a reaction to and coincided with larger societal changes for women in U.S. at that time.

"Our work is comparative in terms of both generational differences that we draw on, as well as the ways in which ethnicity was both elided in earlier portraits of single women, while more explicitly dealt with in later representations," says

Conaway. "In addition, we posit that there are inherent comparative distinctions being made in these shows between women who are married and chose a conventional path towards acceptable models of femininity, with those 'single women' who strayed from the earlier models as they attempted to carve their own paths."

This paper was presented at the Popular Culture Association Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. and at the International Popular Culture Association Conference in Warsaw, Poland, last year.

A chapter based on this presentation will be published in an upcoming book from Lexington Press.

Dialogues are co-sponsored by the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Center for Labor Studies and the Metropolitan New York Center. The monthly series is held at 325 Hudson Street, NYC, and streamed via esc-tv.

Questions are welcome at dialogues@esc.edu. The session will be streamed at www.esc.edu/esc-tv. For more information, contact Bob Carey.