Marcy Rhoades and the Paradox of Reagan Feminism

(This essay is a revised and slightly expanded version of a post written for my old blog Trash Culture).

If you’ve followed me for a long time, you might have picked up that one of my favorite sources of nostalgia is Married…With Children. Watching it as the sort of vulnerable young mind moral guardians should have been protecting shaped not only my sense of humor, but also, much like The Simpsons, it gave me invaluable lessons about cynicism and hypocrisy. It helped prepare me for a world where people who try to push prudery upon the world might be perverts in private and where those who hold fast to noble ideals might have more than a bit of a sadistic streak. And in the show’s universe, no character better taught those lessons better than Marcy Rhoades D’Arcy.

Marcy has a reputation as a straw feminist in a show that tends to be more remembered for Al Bundy’s NO MA’AM club/activist group and for an audience audibly leering at Kelly Bundy’s skimpy outfits than for biting social satire. It’s a view that’s simultaneously fair and unfair. Al Bundy has had the same appeal to people who don’t get the joke as Archie Bunker from All in the Family, and in our current era, when questions of gender are more politically fraught now than they have been at any time since arguably the 1960s, more than a few of the jokes (like when Bud Bundy says he’d rather be a man than a cook in one episode) have more of a bitter taste than they probably would have when their episodes first aired. That said, the show was much more clever with its commentary about than it’s usually given credit for. If you peek behind the curtain, that shouldn’t be too surprising. The show’s creators, Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt, were both men, but out of the 15 writers who wrote more than 17 episodes for the show throughout its entire run, eight were women, about half* the episode directors were women (including Amanda Bearse, Marcy's portrayer), and the show also had eight female producers, including Katherine Green, who was an executive producer along with Moye and Leavitt for most of the show’s run. Compare that to another hit comedy of the era, The Simpsons, which only had one regular female scriptwriter out of thirteen scriptwriters through the period roughly lining up with Married…with Children’s run. This is even true for The Golden Girls. Out of the fourteen scriptwriters who wrote for more than ten episodes of The Golden Girls, only four were women, and only one episode was ever directed by a woman (in case you're wondering, that was the season six episode ""Henny Penny—Straight, No Chaser"—yes, the one where the Girls get roped into performing in an elementary school play—and it was directed by Judy Pioli).

*[In the first version of this article, I said a majority of Married...With Children's episode directors were women. That might still be technically true, depending on how you count regular crew directors on the show versus those who just directed or co-directed one or two episodes, but even then it would be a very slim majority, and in that case saying "a majority" would be misleading since it would imply a larger ratio than it would be no matter how you get the numbers.]  

I don’t think there’s a better example of the show’s commentary about politics, class, and gender than one of history’s greatest annoying sitcom neighbors, Marcy Rhoades (later Marcy d'Arcy). Played to perfection by Amanda Bearse, who herself was an out-lesbian, Marcy was indeed a feminist. However, she was also a Republican, something that tends to be unknown by both the show’s detractors and Al Bundy’s unironic admirers. But wait, you may be asking, my hypothetical reader who is too wrapped up in the present-day culture wars, a character who is both Republican and feminist? I’ll explain, but first, let’s try to capture the essence of Marcy Rhoades.

At first, Marcy along with her husband Steve Rhoades is part of a naïve, newlywed couple, in contrast to the long-married and bitter Bundy couple. The joke was to contrast the progressive idealism of the Rhoades with the ugly reality of the Bundys. However, by at least the end of the first season, the characters were evolving beyond the original concept. The difference was no longer the span of their marriages. The Bundys were working-class and militantly apolitical, beyond Al Bundy’s broad distaste for feminism and vague hatred of France, while the Rhoades were an upper middle-class couple that worked in banking and clearly identified as feminists and social progressives while also holding conservative ideas. This wasn’t something just made up for comedic convenience or to serve as a foil for the Bundys. The Rhoades, especially Marcy, represented something of the ‘80s and ‘90s that the audience would have recognized: the Reagan-era feminist.

Like her sitcom feminist predecessor, Maude Findlay, Marcy is cosmopolitan and intellectual. She enjoys going to Moroccan restaurants and watching PBS pledge drives and hates sports. Also her feminist bona fides are impeccable, even if in the show they mostly come across in her opposition to Al Bundy, who is, in her words, “a cheap, sexist, primitive throwback of a human being.” She encourages Peg Bundy to get a job in more than one episode, much to Peg’s chagrin, and encourages her husband Steve to be a more gentle and modern man, telling him on one occasion with disappointment that “under that sensitive, caring façade, you’re nothing but a…a man.” In one episode, she is proud that Steve got a promotion at the bank he worked for, but admits that she hoped a woman would get it instead.

However, just under Marcy’s post-1960s liberalism, there’s the sort of primitive impulses that she urges her husband to oppress. First, she has a violent streak, vowing to hunt down a neighborhood peeper, smash his toes with a hammer, and then “turn the hammer around…” Second, even though she disapproves of pornography and smut—to the point she even calls a male strip joint “immoral” and “degrading”—she has a rich and rather perverse sex life. She nearly gets arrested when she role-plays as a prostitute getting picked up by a sailor played by Steve, lusts after high school football players in a game (“Spike me, baby. Spike me”), it’s strongly implied that she and Steve engage in S&M (“Oh, Steve. I’ve been bad”), she objectifies television fitness guru Jim Jupiter alongside Peg on a regular basis, and she rents movies with titles like Judy’s Big Date. One episode even has Marcy losing her wedding ring down the pants of a stripper at the aforementioned male strip club (which Peggy dragged her to, naturally).

Marcy’s little hypocrisies are part of the show’s humor and also what makes her a relatable character, but then there’s Marcy’s brand of feminism, which is consistently portrayed throughout the series (no small feat for a '90s sitcom). She’s a feminist who prides herself in her sensitivity toward social issues, but she also savors her upper middle-class lifestyle. If anything, that’s an understatement. When her marriage with Steve is on the rocks, in no small part because Steve has gone full Pamela Anderson and has embraced animal rights activism to the cost of his economic lifestyle, she yearns for the older Steve who was “money-grubbing” and “would step on an old lady for a dollar.” The joke here is Marcy represents the compromises many feminists made with the conservative “greed is good” decade, finding ways to reconcile their struggle for egalitarianism and progress in gender roles with their acceptance of the inequality when it comes to income and class. She’s an exaggerated representation, as all representations of real-life types would be in a comedy like Married…With Children, but there is more than a glimmer of the real world in a woman who disdains the Bundys’ crude and self-indulgent worldview yet is delighted when her husband promises they will “punch up some of our old classmates credit ratings on the computer and make love by the flickering ashes of their lives.”

But does this mean that Marcy, the nemesis of Al Bundy and NO MA'AM, is a Republican? Well, yes. It’s not a fan theory or my own interpretation; it's solid canon. In one episode, when reminiscing about her youth in the 1960s, one of the things Marcy remembers with fondness is Young Republican meetings. The real clincher is the seventh season episode “Al On The Rocks.” Peg has exiled her sick children Kelly and Bud out into a freezing Chicago night so that they don’t endanger Peg's ill-fated adopted child Seven. Bud begs Marcy for help, but she shrugs and says, “I can’t. I’m a Republican.”

So there you have it. Marcy was more than just an obnoxious neighbor, but also the embodiment of the uneasy yet still sustainable truce some individuals hold in their own minds between cultural progressivism and outright economic Darwinism. Thankfully that’s no longer a readily identifiable type today, right?

With word coming out that Married...With Children is going to be revived as an animated series (although who knows if it's going to be a reboot, a sequel series, a soft reboot, a "requel",  etc., etc.), I have to wonder: how can the character of Marcy work outside the context of the '80s and '90s, the halcyon days of Reaganism and its gentler, kinder cousin, Clintonism?

I think with some tweaking she could make her mark even in the 2020s, when more of us feel like the deeply impoverished and hopeless Bundys. Off the top of my head, I just imagine a b-plot where Marcy has exiled her second husband Jefferson from the house because he liked a Bernie Sanders tweet or an episode where Al ruins Marcy's women's group's plans for a talk by J.K. Rowling. So let Marcy Rhoades d'Arcy step proudly into the present, likely wearing a pussyhat and walking over a dying homeless person on the way.