Liberating Bicentennial America

Abstract

With popular 1970s television programs Wonder Woman (ABC 1975—1976, CBS 1977—1979) and Isis (CBS 1975—1977) as its primary focus, this article explores the ways that network television utilized images of liberated women to revise its aesthetics, ensure audience capture, and produce fictions about American cultural coherence and political superiority. These television programs expressed fantasies of a viable American society during the mid- to late 1970s, a time of uncertainty and flux in American cultural coherence and global political might. Both fantasy superheroine series illustrate the ways representations of America's “progressive” gender politics worked to the economic advantage of TV networks, formulated reassuring messages about the state of the nation, helped manage America's less progressive attitudes about race and other nations, and justified America's imperialist impulses.