Several weeks ago, the actress/singer Doris Day passed away. She was ninety-seven years old. Much to my surprise, very little was made of her death. Perhaps this should be attributed to the fact that she has been out of the public limelight for many years. But I think something else was involved.
For me, Ms. Day was an icon. When I was growing up, she was the epitome of what I thought a woman should be. Pretty, sweet and perky, she represented my ideal of femininity. Indeed, I took my cues as to what heterosexual relationships should be from what I saw of her on the silver screen.
When she and Gordon McCrae hooked up in movies such as On Moonlight Bay, we in the audience knew they were made for each other. Both were physically attractive and morally commendable. They did not lie, or cheat, or ever behave in a mean manner.
These folks were intended to be role models—and they were. While their characters were amazingly naïve, they were meant to serve as paradigms. Often harking back to an earlier era, they told us that we should strive for the personal purity of a bygone age. In short, they brought romanticism into our lives.
In the wake of World War II, many of us wanted romanticism. We hungered for love and security in the world that had just escaped the horrors of Hitler and Tojo. I certainly wanted these things in my private life and regarded Doris as providing a roadmap to them.
But then the world became more complicated. Women started going to college and getting responsible jobs. Doris Day followed suit. By the nineteen-sixties, she was a career woman and a liberated female. In films such as Pillow Talkshe was even beginning to have sex without being married.
Although no longer virginal, Ms. Day’s characters remained extremely moral. Libidinous males such as Rock Hudson might pursue her, but she was anything but promiscuous. She still retained an admirable puritanical streak.
Even when she became pregnant out of wedlock, we knew that in the end she would marry the father of her child. The only question was whether this would be before or after the baby was born. Most of us were rooting for before.
My wife, who is a decade and a half younger than I am, had a very different reaction to Ms. Day’s career. She regarded her as old fashioned and prissy. Whereas I was slightly scandalized by extramarital dalliances, my wife found qualms about sex to be rigid and anti-woman.
If we step back and look at Doris’ career in context, it is clear that she was a transitional figure. Her period of fame coincided with the sexual revolution. Whereas she became a star while neo-Victorian attitudes were prevalent, she ended it when free-sex was becoming the ideal.
Despite that, Doris Day never fully represented sexual liberation. Her characters always had too many scruples to fully embrace the emerging feminist standards. They were never, “I’ll do whatever I want” sorts of women.
But herein lies the rub. The sexual revolution did not work out as planned. Free love was never free. It took its toll on the individual psyche and devastated the stability of marriage. As a result, we are still struggling with figuring out the role of sex in a society where women have more rights.
Doris Day, in other words, did not represent a seamless transition. It is not as if we went smoothly from a form of life that worked for our ancestors to a different style the works for us. The ride has been too bumpy. In fact, were we comfortable with where we are, we would be more comfortable with where she was.
Nonetheless, I loved Doris Day. While the archetype she epitomized was hopelessly unsophisticated, so is the ideal epitomized by Beyoncé. Even so, hers provided hope at a time when I desperately needed hope. The kind of love she promised may never have existed, but dreaming about it transported me away from a harsh reality.
So I say, let us remember Doris Day fondly. She was a real star and a very talented performer. True, her beauty—of face, figure and disposition—were a figment of Hollywood’s imagination. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t blame her if social change occurs more slowly and less completely than we would like.
Doris Day is a reminder that the ideals of one generation might not be those of another. We may not like to be reintroduced of this mutability—but there it is.
Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Kennesaw State University
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