the west wing’s feminist wing

SAM: There are bathrobes in the gym?
CJ: In the women’s locker room.
SAM: But not the men’s?
CJ: Yeah.
SAM: Well, that’s outrageous. There’s a thousand men working here and fifty women…
CJ: And it’s the bathrobes that are outrageous!
- The West Wing, Season 2 – “Bartlet’s Third State of the Union”

Jezebel’s list of the Top 20 Feminist TV Characters is mostly awesome, but they are, in my humble opinion, missing two very important feminists from The West Wing:

Amy Gardner

How could The Jez leave out Amy frickin’ Gardner? Played by the incomparable Mary-Louise Parker, she kicked ass all over this show. In her first appearance on The West Wing, midway through the show’s third season, she rendered the famously arrogant and verbose deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman (played by Bradley Whitford) utterly speechless, and then proceeded to completely outmaneuver him politically throughout the series even while they were seriously dating. On top of that, she was funny, sassy, gave brilliant defenses of feminist issues, and looked hot as hell while doing it. Every single woman I know who watched this show came away from her performance saying “Dammit, I want to BE Amy Gardner.”

CJ Cregg

This show was such a gold mine for strong women, beginning with the brilliant but relatable CJ, played by Allison Janney. She consistently stood up for herself when she felt like she was not an equal contributor to the discussion, and it often turned out that her analysis was exactly right (for instance, in the first season, she was the only one who correctly predicted the president’s polling bump, even after the other cast members had mocked her “optimism”). Like Amy, she passionately defended women’s rights at several points on the show, and her provocative point about how American foreign policy often ignores gender violence (in the season 3 episode “The Women of Qumar”) still gets me choked up.

What really hit home for me, though, was CJ’s height (or rather, Allison Janney’s height) and the way she carried herself. As an exceptionally tall woman, I rarely see women on TV who are taller than the men they work with or date (seriously, stop and look sometime – it’s spooky). CJ’s two love interests on the show, reporter Danny Concannon and special agent Simon Donovan, were both shorter than her, and it didn’t make a bit of difference. She was even taller than her boss, who also happened to be the president of the United States. She knew how to use her physical presence to make herself worthy of attention, rather than hiding it out of a misplaced fear of looking “too strong.”

Update: I neglected to mention some of the other feminist contributions to the show – the First Lady, Dr. Abigail Bartlet (Stockard Channing), who was portrayed sympathetically as she struggled with the way her medical career “got eaten” by her husband’s political one; executive assistant Donna Moss (Janel Moloney), who by the show’s final two seasons had found her own voice away from her boss; National Security Adviser Nancy McNally (Anna Deveare Smith), a woman of color who held what is often considered a (white) man’s job; and polling strategist Joey Lucas (Marlee Matlin), whose deafness was smoothly incorporated (and rarely mentioned) and who easily won over the bossier men on the show with her smarts and savvy.

Aaron Sorkin isn’t quite Joss Whedon, since the show revolved chiefly around the male leads and only occasionally on CJ Cregg. But he expertly wove strong women and feminism into the fabric of the show in a way very few other screenwriters have been able to do. With the exception of Amy Gardner, who was a professional women’s rights activist, none of the female characters were explicitly identified as feminist or given an “other” distinction; they weren’t set up against “traditional” women as negative foils. Their leadership, authority and intelligence were considered inherent in their roles on the show. The women were complex and human – just like the men. And Sorkin did not shy away from having serious sexism call-outs within the dialogue. It’s one of many reasons why I miss this show so much. At least I’ve got my DVDs to content me…