You’ve got your life in pretty good shape if the biggest wrinkle in a given week, as was the case for Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington on Thursday, is that you’ve got the clear the furniture out of your newly-redecorated apartment to convene a group of women to discuss what Huffington calls the “Third Metric,” a definition of success that goes “beyond money and power.” A wide-ranging series of panels and interviews, the conversations suggested an interesting tack. Given that many of the women leading and participating in conversations about work-life balance, including Huffington and Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg are women who already have quite a lot, we might all be better off shifting the conversation from the mechanisms of how women strive to have it all — we’re not all going to be able to afford the same nannies and personal assistants, and we won’t all be soothed by the same morning meditations or supported by sharing a facialist with Candace Bergen — to the question of what actually constitutes “it all,” and who has access to different visions of it.

Over and over again, the panelists talked at least as much about what they’d decided they could do without, let go, and leave behind, as what they incorporated or added to their lives. For Sen. Claire McCaskill, (D-MO), it was housework. “I found myself divorced with three young children as the elected prosecutor in Kansas City,” she explained. “My oldest child was only six. Not only was I handling 8,000 to 10,000 felonies a year, I also had these three children, and I also had to appear absolutely invincible day in and day in….I didn’t give a shit if there were dust bunnies under the bed…All the things I’d been taught as a young girl about everything being straight and neat, I said screw that.”

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Obama, said she’d learned a valuable lesson when she was working for then-Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, and he asked her one day what she was worried about. “I said, in just this moment of honesty, the Halloween Parade starts in 20 minutes and it’s 25 minutes away. And he said, ‘Then what are you doing here? Go,’” Jarrett explained, saying that because the parade was a particular priority for her daughter, it gained significance for Jarrett. “If I had not been there when my little darling came out with her little costume looking for me, I would not have forgiven myself. I did not make a lot of open houses, but the Halloween Parade was important to her.”

And actress Ali Wentworth and director Tanya Wexler offered contrasting explanations for their decisions about work and family. Wentworth said she had been offered a second lead role in a show that was picked up by a network this fall, and the network had said they could concentrate her filming in Los Angeles for 13 weeks to make it easier for her to accommodate her family in New York. “And I was very excited and I called George [Stephanopoulos] and said it’s 13 weeks, we can totally do it. He said, ‘You’ll cry all the time. I know you’re all pumped up.’ And [I realized] I’m going to be at LAX crying because my daughters are crying because I’m not there for the ballet recital…I think you redefine what having it all at any point in your life is.” And Wexler, who most recently directed the period romantic comedy Hysteria, said that for her, continuing to work and letting her wife be the primary caregiver for their four children had been the right choice. “I love my children, but it is a pain in the ass a lot of the time, because it’s a maintenance job. It’s a lot of work for ultimately your child to become their own person and their accomplishments,” she explained. “And going out and making stuff is awesome. I love being busy. I was talking with my assistant, who is one of the two people I mentor, and I was saying, I love making stuff. And my brain is on 24 hours day. I can’t unplug because I don’t want to.”
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Yesterday, my colleague Rebecca Leber reported that “Seven days after Women Action and the Media, the Everyday Sexism Project and activist Soraya Chemaly called on Facebook to remove content that condones hate speech and violence against women, Facebook responded that it will update its policies that add a new emphasis to taking domestic violence seriously.” Promising to work closely with the coalition of groups that organized the campaign that got 15 companies to drop their advertising from Facebook as long as the social media service continued to treat memes encouraging or praising domestic violence as if they didn’t qualify as gender-based hate speech, Facebook pledged to “review and update” the guidelines for what constitutes such speech, retrain the teams that respond to flagged items, tie users verified identity more closely to some content that qualifies as “cruel or insensitive,” and to establish more formal working relationships with women’s organizations. This is a significant victory for Women Action and the Media, Everyday Sexism, and Soraya Chemaly. But the same day, an event happened that illustrated how far technology and social media companies have to go in accommodating themselves to the realities–and limitations–of the communities that make them valuable.

To much less notice on Tuesday, Anita Sarkeesian, the feminist culture critic who was relentlessly harassed and threatened for the simple act of Kickstarting a project to examine the representation of women in video gaming, posted the latest video in that series, Tropes vs. Women. What followed was predictable. “Looks like my harassers abused YouTube’s flag function to get my new Tropes vs Women video removed. Not the first time it’s happened,” Sarkeesian wrote on Twitter. “An hour after our video went live I got an email saying ‘The YouTube Community has flagged one or more of your videos as inappropriate.’ Here’s the “community flagged” removal notice from YouTube. I appealed and 45 mins later my video was restored: pic.twitter.com/wilya1PHsF.”

In other words, the YouTub system worked exactly like the women’s coalition would like Facebook’s system to work. The content was reported as offensive was taken down quickly and preemptively, and the person who created it was required to go through an appeals process to get it back online, but after an adjudication, Sarkeesian’s video did get back in front of the audience who wanted to see it. The problem was, it worked to the detriment not of content that advocated or minimized the impact of violence against women, but to the harm of content that is explicitly aimed at the opposite.
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The musician Grimes, at the conclusion of her world tour, has written a terrific post on her Tumblr that’s basically a catalogue of the things she finds exhausting about being a woman in the industry she’s in. I’ve reproduced most of it here because it’s so striking:

i dont want to be molested at shows or on the street by people who perceive me as an object that exists for their personal satisfaction

i dont want to live in a world where im gonna have to start employing body guards because this kind of behavior is so commonplace and accepted and I’m pissed that when I express concern over my own safety it’s often ignored until people see firsthand what happens and then they apologize for not taking me seriously after the fact…

I’m tired of men who aren’t professional or even accomplished musicians continually offering to ‘help me out’ (without being asked), as if i did this by accident and i’m gonna flounder without them. or as if the fact that I’m a woman makes me incapable of using technology. I have never seen this kind of thing happen to any of my male peers

I’m tired of the weird insistence that i need a band or i need to work with outside producers (and I’m eternally grateful to the people who don’t do this)

im tired of being considered vapid for liking pop music or caring about fashion as if these things inherently lack substance or as if the things i enjoy somehow make me a lesser person

im tired of being congratulated for being thin because i can more easily fit into sample sizes from the runway

im tired of people i love betraying me so they can get credit or money

I’m sad that it’s uncool or offensive to talk about environmental or human rights issues

I’m tired of creeps on message boards discussing whether or not they’d “fuck” me

I’m tired of people harassing my dancers and treating them like they aren’t human beings

I’m sad that my desire to be treated as an equal and as a human being is interpreted as hatred of men, rather than a request to be included and respected (I have four brothers and many male best friends and a dad and i promise i do not hate men at all, nor do i believe that all men are sexist or that all men behave in the ways described above)

Her objections break down into a very clear dichotomy. In Grimes’ experience, she’s expected to be one of two things. The men who grope her, or her dancers, or who assume she has no real input in creating her music and that someone else must be behind it—and that they could be that someone else—or who discuss her as if she’s a merely penetrate-able object, or women who treat her like a conveniently-sized clothes rack assume a kind of emptiness to her. Her lack of agency is a plus for them: if she can’t have opinions, she also doesn’t have consent to give that would interfere with people’s actions or fantasies, opinions about her body that would prevent stylists from treating her a blank palette, or a distinct creative vision that might get in the way of other people using her as a vessel for their own musical ideas.
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This post discusses plot points from the February 27 episode of The Americans.

It’s not new for The Americans to discuss marriage, but this is the episode in which the show’s main theme ran most strongly through all three of the main storylines in play. When Elizabeth visits Udacha, she uses his widower status to make him emotionally vulnerable. “I’m very sorry about your wife. It was 35 years, right?” Elizabeth asks. “And eight months,” the man reminds her. She may be playing him, but when Elizabeth remarks “That’s really something,” you sense that she means it.

But what that “something” means, she isn’t exactly sure. After the defense contractor she’s seducing beats her badly with a belt under the cover of adding a little BDSM to their encounter—”It’s supposed to hurt,” he tells her—Phillip, newly enlightened to Elizabeth’s experiences with sexual trauma, refuses to accept that what’s happened to her is simply one of the consequences of her job she has to accept. But just because Phillip found out with Elizabeth in training doesn’t mean she’s ready to accept his protection. When he tells her “I’m going to deal with it,” Elizabeth is dismissive. “You’re going to deal with it? If I wanted to deal with him, you don’t think he’d be dealt with? I wanted the intel and I got it,” she tells him. “I don’t need you to fight my battles for me. It’s over.” But he isn’t willing to accept her independence in this matter. “Somebody beat the shit out of my wife,” he insists. “I’m not your daddy. I’m your husband, Elizabeth. What do you think husbands do?” “I wouldn’t know,” she spits back at him. And she’s still skeptical when, after their caper with the car (the best action sequence the show’s filmed so far), Phillip comes after her instead of leaving her to extract herself. “You didn’t have to pick me up,” she tells him. “I didn’t have to bring you coffee, either,” he explains. “Or a vanilla cream donut.” Left unsaid is that husbands, at least in Phillip’s conception, do the little things as well as the big ones. And when Elizabeth asks Phillip to “Show me another way” to live her life, she’s telling him that she’s willing to listen to what he thinks marriage means, and to accept some of his desire to be good to her.

And down the block, Phillip’s raquetball partner is having trouble living up to his own standards for what it means to be a good husband. When Stan’s wife comes downstairs in a new nightie, she tries to tear him away from his study of Cyrillic—meaningfully, given his mix-up in tone with Nina from earlier in the episode, he appears to be taking them from a robot—with memories of what their relationship used to be. “You know, a few years ago, before your long stint undercover, we used to go line dancing, you and I,” she tells him. “And we used to drink Chianti at the bar at the old Spaghetti Factory, and host bridge nights once a month. And we used to have those family double bubble blowing contests. And you knew your son’s three best friends’ names. Life was pretty frickin’ great, wasn’t it? Remember?” Stan has ideas about what it means to be a good husband, telling Chris that he should try to be nicer to Martha if he wants to win her back, and later snapping at him “What you don’t know about marriage, and family, and responsibility, and obligation, and answering to people on a one-on-one personal level for 23 years? I could fill a goddamn warehouse, Chris.” What’s harder for him is that he knows who he wants to be, and he’s failing to be it. Part of him got lost out there with the white supremacists, and he still hasn’t managed to recover it.
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Last night, PBS aired Makers, a documentary about the history of the feminist movement, exploring everything from the relationship between women’s liberation and the struggles for black and gay civil rights to the rise of the eighties power tie as women entered previously male-dominated professional fields. While some of the subjects may be familiar to those of us who ended up in women’s studies classes at some point, Makers is a reminder of how much feminist history has been forgotten or obscured over the years, starting with the rumors of bra-burning at the Miss America protests. Because part of the goal of Makers was to spark discussions about the state of feminism today, I spoke with one of the subjects whose work is of particular interest to anyone who cares about the portrayal and employment of women in popular culture: Marlo Thomas.

As the star of the groundbreaking sitcom That Girl, Thomas fought to preserve the integrity of the show’s portrayal of a single woman’s life—and to hire more female writers. And as the creator of Free To Be You And Me, the book, album, and television special for children that challenged pre-existing notions of gender norms, Thomas fought to give children entertainment that would change the way they saw their possible futures. We spoke during the Television Critics Association press tour in January about the evolution of sitcom roles for women, Brave and princess myths, and the struggles women—and men—face to have it all. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’m excited to talk to you in part because my first job as a critic was when I was eight years old for my local paper—I wrote children’s books.

You were a critic at eight years old? How cute!

I was, my author photo has me in little pink glasses and the world’s largest lace collar. I was proof that women, even at eight years old, aren’t paid enough. I was paid in five-dollar gift certificates to the local bookstore. So I was really curious to talk to you because Free To Be You And Me was inspired by the lack of good books for boys and girls alike. What do you think about the rise of young adult fiction? It seems to me that there are many more options for young female readers today. Have we made enough progress if what young girls get offered is Twilight?

Well, you know, far be it for me to tell people what to write. I must say that after we did Free To Be You And Me, and its phenomenal success, and its continued success, I’m surprised that more and more people aren’t writing about that. I saw the movie Brave, which is taken right from Atalanta [a princess story from Free To Be You And Me], which is exciting to me. And I just wish more people would follow, not just follow the path, but find the path to children’s imaginations that is going to open up their horizons and their minds. It just seems that—my husband has two grandchildren, they’re now 16 and 17, the girl is 16—and I’ve noticed with her stuff, it’s all princesses, and the boy’s stuff is all violence. All violent games from the GameBoy on up. And I look at it, and I try very hard to bring other things in, but that’s what all their friends are reading, and watching, and playing. I’m disappointed, I really am. Somebody, some book company has to make it their job, or part of their imprint, part of their conscientiousness to say “Why aren’t we putting out books that do this?” The Free To Be You And Me classic, when it came ou,t there was nothing like it. We’ve already paved the way. Why doesn’t someone pick it up? I can’t do it all.

I think you’re describing two different challenges. It’s hard to ask individuals to take on all the work for anyone else. And you mentioned the persistence of the pricness myth. I felt conflicted about Brave. I like that she’s a different kind of princess, but the victory at the end is that she gets to choose her own husband, who will still be dyanstically important. A princess is still a princess.

Right. But it’s just that she was athletic, and she ran, and she took some action. That’s a big difference from the other princess, from Cinderella. But it’s true. In our princess story, Atlanta at the end decides not to marry, and go off to explore lands. We were feminists writing that. I don’t know that the people from Brave got our whole message, though they took a lot of it…I don’t know, it’s sort of a surrendering to a happy ending, or what you consider to be a happy ending. When I was doing That Girl, they wanted me to have a wedding at the end of the series. And I refused. I refused to have a wedding, to have her get married at the end of the show. And they said “It’ll be great! It’ll get huge ratings.” And I said, “But then I’m copping out to every girl who loved this show…This was the first girl to say “I don’t want to get married, I want to work. I want to have a career. I want to live in my own apartment.” All of those things. And the mail was extraordinary about girls wanting to be just like her, and grandmothers saying “Don’t marry Donald!” They really were very invested in this single girl. The idea of betraying them at the end of the show and getting married just seemed like a true betrayal. I wouldn’t do it. Even that, Clairol was the sponsor, and they wanted a wedding, and ABC wanted a wedding, the producers wanted a wedding. It took a feminist to say “No, no wedding!”
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The breaking news in the Hollywood Reporter’s profile of Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy is how she talked J.J. Abrams, who was reluctant to take on the work, into directing Star Wars Episode VII. But to me, the really fascinating part of Kim Masters’ reporting is the portrait it paints of the ways Kennedy’s balanced her work and her family—and the work Kennedy’s done over the years to make sure Steven Spielberg has everything he’s needed to make his movies. As much as there are structural barriers to women getting opportunities in Hollywood, I also think a major challenge is that it’s not easy for a lot of women to pick up and leave their families for three months at a time:

In her new position, she will split her time between the Lucasfilm offices at Disney and the company’s headquarters in the Presidio of San Francisco. Usually Kennedy flies to the Bay Area on a Tuesday and returns to Los Angeles on a Thursday evening — a schedule she says allows her to spend more time with her family than she could during long film shoots. On the heels of War Horse, which had her living in England for three months, Kennedy spent another three months away from home in Richmond, Va., for Lincoln.

It’s easier to make sacrifices when you have people accommodating your needs and making you feel comfortable and supported, something Kennedy’s done for other people for a long time. When she went to work for Apocalypse Now writer John Milius:

Kennedy’s first task was cataloging Milius’ gun collection. “I consequently know the difference between a Colt .45 and a Colt .45 Gold Cup,” she says. “I know what a Winchester Over Under is. Things that I have no desire to know, I know because of John Milius.” Milius is one of Hollywood’s larger-than-life characters, and Kennedy acknowledges, “There was a fair amount of insane things going on. I tried to ignore the things that I didn’t find particularly appropriate and carried on,” she says. “I did have thoughts every now and then of, ‘Is this really what I want to do?’ But I knew I wanted to make movies, and I knew it was somewhat of a means to an end.”

And it’s clear that, in a more respectful, less exploitative way, Spielberg’s leaned heavily on Kennedy over the years, too:

Given that, it’s hardly surprising that Spielberg seems to feel some sense of grievance that his old friend Lucas has taken Kennedy away. Lucas called to raise the issue during a dubbing session on Lincoln. “He actually asked for her hand in business,” says Spielberg. “I wasn’t going to stand in her way.”…She and Spielberg say their parting is not permanent. One project that could reunite them would be a fifth Indiana Jones, but Spielberg is clear: “I will not make another Indiana Jones film unless it’s based on George’s story.” Lucas intends for that to happen, says Spielberg, though the timetable is unclear — the gap between the previous two movies was 19 years. “Kathy and I will figure out some way to work together again,” he says, before adding, as if counting the days, “She has a five-year contract.”

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with visionaries—or even folks who aren’t visionaries, but mostly really solid, middlebrow directors—needing help. You don’t transform ideas on the page into convincing flesh-and-blood realities without producers. That’s a role some people are suited to spend their whole careers fulfilling. But that doesn’t mean that women who have bigger plans should get stuck supporting other people’s careers, rather than pursuing their own, just because they’re good at that. It means that we need to think about not just what it takes to get women in Hollywood the opportunities to chase those dreams, but the conditions they need to chase them, given that the choices they face about work and family may be influenced by difference forces than those choices are for men. I have my doubts about Star Wars Episode VII. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not rooting for Kennedy to succeed to the utmost.

The Super Bowl comes just once a year with its orgy of wings consumption, its highly-anticipated halftime show, the football, and the multi-million dollar ad spots. The latter are a fascinating exhibit of whatever America is thinking about gender—or what advertising executives think America is thinking about gender—at any given moment. And as is always the case, there were babes, beers, and Danica Patrick chipperly selling out the rest of her fellow women for a lot of GoDaddy’s money. But for once, it wasn’t all apocalyptically terrible. Here’s what the Super Bowl taught me about gender in 2013, from best to worst:

The Good:

1. Ladies? We’re just as capable of being passionate sports fans as men—and just as capable of being devious if we think we can snag our team an advantage. Bonus points for turning household chores into a tool of team loyalty:

2. Princesses can lead armies:

3. Real men play princess with their daughters rather than blowing them off to hang out with their bros—even if they need Doritos as incentives:

The Bad

1. Ladies: overly-attached to their mothers:

When 30 Rock premiered on October 11, 2006, I wasn’t a television critic. I barely had the credential that Tracy Jordan would later use to try to sell his Thomas Jefferson biopic, “television watcher.” I was newishly single, living in a newish city, and had recently become the first person in my family to acquire a subscription to cable. As I settled into the rhythms of adult life, one of the things I learned was how to watch television*, whether I was marathoning Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (a useful source of valuable tips for how to avoid being murdered in the big city), scarfing down Sex and the City, which I got on disc from the Blockbuster that once stood on a corner two blocks away, and discovering the wonders of my first broadcast television season.

30 Rock was the first network show I fell in love with, the first thing—in the days before I got a DVR—that I made appointment viewing, that I introduced to my parents. In retrospect, it was perfect training for a television critic. 30 Rock was a clinic in how to balance long-arc character development with a mind-boggling joke density and quality A, B, and C plotting week to week. But it was also a show that taught me how television got made, and that ended up informing my reporting about what happens along the way from a show’s conception to its arrival and survival on the air.

30 Rock didn’t just have a novel-for-television setting: it drew its procedural elements from actual and substantial issues in television. Over the past several years, and aided by the rise of social media and the infiltration of general-interest media sites by trade reporting about everything from ratings data to showrunner hirings and firings, knowing a lot about the business of television has become part of being an engaged television fan. But for me, and I’d imagine for a lot of other people who were watching the show simply as fans rather than as reporters, 30 Rock was an early introduction to a lot of the facts about how the television industry worked. 30 Rock got episodes out of the fact that product integration is both a cost savings for shows, and the result of corporate consolidation that made media companies part of larger conglomerates; that women and people of color in television writers’ rooms are often paid by diversity fellowships that get them their initial jobs, but are structured such that studios have disincentives to promote them to positions where their salaries wouldn’t be covered by fellowships; that Standards and Practices departments can be enormously arbitrary places that question everything from the intensity of the yellow in a urine sample to a couple’s shift in position during sex. The show made clear that these rules and practices were hilariously arbitrary, but also that they were something you had to accept if you wanted to work in the business, and the only way to live with them was to laugh at them, very hard, and to see what space it was possible to create around them.

But for all that 30 Rock could be hilariously pessimistic about the conditions under which television was created, and the extent to which those conditions ground down even the people who had the greatest hopes for what they could do with the form on network, the series has gone out on a subtly hopeful and ambitious note. Sometimes, it suggested, when Jack Donaghy turned NBC over to Kenneth Parcells, people who adore television get to make it for a living. And even if Kenneth represents a kind of cheerful mediocrity—he presented Liz with a long list of “TV no-no words” when she tried to pitch him a new project after TGS ended—30 Rock suggested that progress will continue anyway.
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This post discusses plot points through the January 27 episode of Downton Abbey.

I was on the road when the January 20 episode of Downtown Abbey aired, so this week, I’ll consider both hours of television together. And while the show does have a tendency to skip around—in time, in location, in tone and quality—these two episodes, taken together, offer up a strong illustration of the difficulties of making yourself heard, whether it’s across the gender barrier, upwards across class lines, or through an arbitrarily-imposed bureaucracy. The consequences of those enforced silences, as we saw this weekend, are fatal.

Anna and Bates’ story has fairly definitively stalled out for me at this point in Downton Abbey‘s run, but Bates’ stint in prison has been a nice little parallel to events at Downton itself. He’s a different kind of downstairs now, bound by a different set of social constraints. Inmates have different routes to influence than they did in the big house, where service to one of the principals of the household gave them direct access to air their opinions, if they were carefully stated. And the principals of the household had been raised from childhood to be used to having power, and to exercising it in certain ways, whether it’s to smooth the advancement of certain members of the household staff within the house, or to make interventions in their health and welfare outside the realm of service, as with the surgery for Mrs. Patmore’s contacts or Cora’s promise that Mrs. Hughes would be provided for even if cancer treatment failed to prove effective. But in prison, the guards and wardens are new to power and are primarily concerned with aggregating it. Where the Downtown residents’ acts of kindness to the people they have power over don’t constitute a wholly reliable social safety net or engine of upward mobility, they at least provide a reliable set of cues about incentives and rewards. In prison, something like the withholding of Bates’ letters is meant to enforce the arbitrary nature of his position, to encourage him to be utterly cowed lest he break an unwritten rule or violate a norm. It’s yet another one of Downton‘s reminder that however limited the opportunities are for people in service, falling out of that hierarchy can be even worse.

But it’s one thing to fall out of a hierarchy that provides you with a minimum of status, and another to reach the top of your privilege and find that some of the marginal gains aren’t worth the sacrifice that goes along with them. After Lady Edith found herself jilted at the altar and committed herself to a useful spinsterhood, I emailed a friend that I thought she might break out of society’s role for her, albeit in a more sedate way than Sybil had by eloping. Some of her initial changes are small. “Why don’t you have breakfast in bed?” Matthew asks her when she comes down to dine with him and Lord Grantham. “Because I’m not married,” Edith tells him shortly. It’s a position that provides her with some embarrassment, but it also puts her in the position of being the lone young woman in company with the men of her household, and in a position to voice frustrations about things like suffrage. “I don’t have the vote,” she tells Matthew, bitterly. “I’m not over 30 and I’m not a householder. It’s ridiculous.” His suggestion that she write to the Times may be flip, but it’s certainly more productive than Lord Grantham’s reminder that Edith really ought to talk to Cora about how she can help with the evening’s dinner. The Dowager Countess may tell Edith that “You’re a woman with a brain and reasonable ability. Stop whining, and find something to do,” but I don’t know if she recognizes that dinners and local charitable patronage still might leave Edith empty.

And so there’s something tremendously exciting about seeing Edith take Matthew’s advice, and for once, get rewarded for making extra effort by the Times, if not by her family. “No lady writes to a newspaper,” Violet declares, before amending that statement to remind Edith that one who does is “A Churchill. The Churchills are different.” Cora tells Edith that “It’s good to have strong views, but noteriety is never helpful.” In other words, Edith is entitled to her feelings, but not the exercise of them, and should accept her gilded cage. And when the letter is published, under the title “Earl’s Daughter Speaks Out For Women’s Rights,” Edith may still be categorized by her relationship to her father, but for once, she’s using that power to get what she wants, instead of letting it define her sphere of influence. So what if “That’s what he’s buying, your name and your title,” as Lord Grantham puts it: Edith is getting something out of the bargain, too.

And as it turns out, “the problems faced by the modern woman rather than the fall of the Ottoman Empire,” aren’t an “even so.” They become urgent when Sybil goes into labor and Lord Grantham quashes the voices of women and Dr. Clarkson when it comes to their care, opting for class and gender solidarity instead. It’s awful to hear Lord Grantham say “I don’t want to hurt Sir Phillip’s feelings,” as if that were the most important issue at stake here, even when it seemed like Sybil’s delivery would go normally. And it’s worse to find out that Sir Phillip is essentially in agreement with Lord Grantham on the importance of his own expertise and status. His snapping at Dr. Clarkson, who has know Sybil her entire life, “Maybe she has thick ankles. Lots of women do,” is the Downton equivalent of advocating an aspirin between the knees as a contraceptive. It’s a refusal to see Sybil as a specific person, and to embrace the actual practice of medicine in favor of the performance of sagacity. And it kills her.
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