Tough broads and the recession

The detective appeared to be allied with the police, and he had a female "assistant" who went along with him on cases. I assume police departments didn't really operate like that, but the show didn't seem to be aiming for "The Wire"-style verisimilitude.

A couple of times, the detective warned her not to accompany him because the situation was too dangerous for a woman, but she would have none of it.

He solved the case, but she actually ended up doing the heavy lifting. In a climactic scene, she conked the murderer over the head with a hammer as he was trying to strangle the detective, knocking him unconscious. What a gal!

I don't know when that particular episode was made, but I assume it was the 1930s or later. The tough-talking female sidekick was around before then, but the '30s was the decade when she really elbowed herself a spot at pop fiction's bar and demanded a shot of whatever the boys were drinking.

I don't think it's a coincidence that it happened during the Great Depression.

A while back, I read a biography of Peter the Great in which writer Robert K. Massie described life in 17th-century Russian before Peter's modernization efforts. The wealthy upper classes treated women like breeding mares -- locked away in isolation for most of their lives, and let out to be impregnated as the need arose.

That kind of sexism was a luxury the peasants literally couldn't afford. Peasant men, living on the raw edge of subsistence, needed the brain and muscle power that their wives and daughters could provide. Paradoxically, by virtue of their poverty, peasant women exercised more power in their lives than noblewomen.

It reminds me of a conversation I once had with an older gentleman from North Carolina's Appalachian mountains, who as a child helped his bootlegging parents operate their still.

Back in the bootlegging days, he told me, any man who tried to put Appalachian women "in their place" did so at his own peril. By necessity, the women were just as tough as the men. Life was hard, and you didn't survive by being a submissive Donna Reed type.

That could be why the Depression is when tough broads such as "The Thin Man's" Nora Charles suddenly showed their steely-eyed faces in pop culture. It reflected a trend in society as a whole, where survival demanded that everyone pull his or her weight.

In the 1940s, of course, women had to work the factory jobs on the homefront -- a task every bit as important for American victory as that of the men fighting abroad.

After accomplishments like that, women simply weren't going to settle for the roles of demure servants. And thus the nascent feminist movement grew to maturity and became mainstream.

If only the fight for women ended then. But it didn't, of course. Each successive generation of women has found it necessary to vigilantly guard their rights.

I remember when a male friend of mine became a Reagan-era fundamentalist back in college. He liked to bluster about how our society went off-track by allowing women into the workplace, and how men had a moral obligation to keep them at home looking after the kids.

Of course, he abandoned that line of reasoning soon after getting married and weighing the consequences of living off a single paycheck. (I suspect a night or two of sleeping on the couch might have played a role, too.)

So if anything good does come out of this recession, it may be another reminder for men that trying to work through the tough times alone is a daunting proposition. You've always got a better chance of cracking the case with a gutsy dame on your side. Especially if she's good with a hammer.