From the POV of this thread, the novel and character Friday is problematic. I mean the character often acts out the trope that a “powerful, independent” woman acts just like a male - sexual-seeking, aggressive (her actions with her earlier family co-op). And despite her education, skills, and training, she was somehow hopeless in handling the practicalities of the “real” world after the loss of her father figure.
Despite that, there were some interesting social/technological elements about corporate/business culture and control that seem very appropriate today. But I would agree than none of the female characters stand out in a good way (maybe Janet, she seemed strong and willing to fight to the death for herself, her friends, and her family). Honestly, I pretty much disliked almost everyone in the novel, by authorial intent, or in spite of it - though my desire for strangulation was pretty much spread across the genders!
Starship Troopers barely has anything to say about women at all. Both males and females earn citizenship through service, though there are ways outside of active combats roles (very strenuous still) to earn citizenship. But the military forces were apparently totally segregated, and one of the perks of Rico’s later career was to be able to see females from the Fleet service as part of his duty as a guard.
The Ibanez character does indeed meet Johnny ONCE during the course of the novel, when she seeks him out while he’s in officer training, and they have an remarkably romance free evening where they talk of the past and missing friends.
Granted it’s a novel on the border of his juvenile and adult transition, but it really has almost no female involvement at all.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has a strong female character, Wyo, who operates on terms of equality and seems to contribute as much as Manny and the Prof. The fact that the three of them form the B cell at the top of the revolution is significant. There was also the senior wife in Manny’s line marriage. She seemed far more significant than the senior husband, who was getting senile.
Star Trek was a font of faux progressivism WRT respecting women.
Nomad: That unit is defective. Its thinking is chaotic. Absorbing it unsettled me. Kirk: That “unit” is a woman. Nomad: A mass of conflicting impulses.
Most of the female characters fit the equivalent of Hays Code archetypes. Hell, the last episode was about a wowan who wanted to be a man, in order to advance her career. The whole series was the shallowest of enlightened.
I knew I’d started a thread about this very topic, and while looking for it, found this one started by someone else. Yes, I did post in it, with a link no less.
Other people said they never had the boss over, but they did have other authority figures like the pastor or a teacher.
Amy Vanderbilt’s Book of Etiquette in 1958 apparently considered “having the boss over to dinner” to be still a fairly common phenomenon, although perhaps on its way out:
“I’m bringing a client (or the boss) home to dinner.” How often such news—usually delivered at the last minute—strikes terror into the young wife […]
These last-minute business invitations are often psychologically correct from a man’s point of view. He has made some progress with a difficult associate and feels now is the moment to apply a little personal pressure from the social angle […]
Business dinners are often best handled outside of a man’s home unless he and his wife are really willing and happy to accept the business associate and, necessarily, his wife on social terms […]
Heinlein frequently has strong, independent female characters. They’re in The Puppet Masters, The Star Beast, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Rolling Stones, and plenty of others. The problem is that a lot of people don’t find them believable. I admit that there’s something – off – about them that I can’t quite put my finger on. Watch Project Moonbase sometime. The movie has all the bad traits of Heinlein Women, but somehow amplified.
By the way, it shows strong discipline to name one of your characters “Wyoming Knott” and then not having anybody comment on or joke about the obvious “Why Knott?” construction until well into the book, and it’s just the computer trying to understand the concept of “humor”.
Actually, I think the trope mostly post-dates the Vanderbilt reference. Most are 1960s-70s TV shows. I think what we are mostly seeing is a reflection of a custom common among TV writers who had casual but still quite hierarchical social relationships with their bosses. Bringing the boss (show runner, head writer, show star) home for dinner was a way to get the boss alone so they could pitch their ideas with the only audience being their supportive family and not a room full of competing writers. These writers mistakenly thought this custom was more widespread than it really was was so they wrote scripts where it is also the custom among ad-men, astronauts, and quarry workers.
This thread topic really pinged right now as I’m watching The Manchurian Candidate.
Fran Sinatra has a sweaty nervous breakdown on the train from DC to NY. Instead of avoiding him as IRL, Janet Leigh lavishes concern and attention on him, and gives him her address and phone number. Later, he’s arrested for beating up a Korean valet, and she comes to bail him out and continues to nurse him through his crisis, claiming that she’s dumped her fiancé the moment she’d learned Fran Sinatra needed her.
A lot of people interpret this absurdity as her being an agent sent by Washington as his handler, especially given the weird conversation openers she uses on the train that sounds like code words. But the more believable take is that he’s Frank Sinatra, and the broads are all just cuckoo for him. Naturally.
There really are women who are rescuers. Women who fall for guys in prison they’ve never met. It happens now, it happened then.
Having said that, those women are very very tiny minority of all women. But one can build quite a snow-boulder of BS behavior around that tiny sand grain of truth. And that’s just what the screenwriters did. And society recognizes all that and found (finds?) nothing odd in it.
I’ve seen it suggested that this is why so many TV and movie plots involve “that big presentation at work.” In real life, very few jobs hinge on making a high-stakes presentation to one’s superiors - but film and TV writing does.
I never had my boss over to my house, but on the other hand one of my bosses used to regularly invite her team over to her house for dinner parties. She was a good cook!
Is there a cite for show business people being especially likely to invite their bosses to dinner socially, more so than businesspeople in general, in order to “pitch” their ideas?
Is there any logical reason to think that this phenomenon of entertaining one’s boss at a home dinner wasn’t actually a well-known reality in midcentury America, given that a popular American etiquette manual of 1958 refers to it as a very familiar situation?
While I agree with you that screenwriters in the 1960s and beyond probably kept this trope going in fictional portrayals for its comedic value long after the custom was effectively extinct in real life, I think you’re way off base when you speculate that it wasn’t previously a widespread recognized custom in real life.
I think your theory’s contradicted by historical evidence.
Here’s a 1950 town newspaper reporting jokingly (p. 3) that it was fortunate a local couple who suffered an electric oven mishap “weren’t having the boss to dinner.”
Here’s a 1945 ad for Packard Cable (pretty irrelevantly) portraying what was obviously a cliche situation of a husband bringing the boss home to dinner when his wife was unprepared for entertaining.
I could go on, but yeah. Inviting the boss over for dinner was an extremely familiar social situation in popular culture well before the screenwriters of the 1960s got hold of it.
My father was a salesman, and when his boss (who worked at headquarters in another city) was in town, he’d have him over for dinner. However, when a client was in town, he and my mother would take the client and his wife out for dinner at a good restaurant.
In fact, one time my father was sick and asked me (a college student) to escort my mother and keep the business/social engagement.