Janice Lester grievance....

Once it was incorporated into "The Menagerie", you can't call "The Cage" an outlier anymore. It was seen, in all its 'Number One is running things' glory, and NBC actually let it on the air. Which is surprising enough, given that they turned it down as a pilot. But Majel seeing it, and there being no outcry from NBC or the viewers regarding her portrayal of Number One, must have known something was up. The real question is, why didn't she call GR on it, especially in such a way as to give the female characters going forward more agency?

 

It's not surprising at all - NBC paid A LOT of money for its production (and money/profit IS the bottom line here); so they were overjoyed the production staff found a way to make use of that expensive footage. It also made the series look like it had a bigger budget than it did to the average viewer.

Also, remember, it wasn't the character of 'Number One' - or the fact that a female was second in Command. The problem tehn Execs had were with the person cast to play the role (Majel Barrett <- still just GR's mistress as he was married to someone else) because:

- They didn't feel she had the 'cjhops' to carry a lead series role on such an expensive series.

- She WAS the mistress of the Executive Producer. What happens when (this was 1960ies Hollywod) either she or GR part ways on said relationship and the series is a hit. They didn't need that 'time bomb' waiting to go off for again, such an expensive series.

It's now know that they said, he could KEEP the 'Number One' character AND the alien 'Spock' character, as long as he recast the 'Number One' role to another actress the studio was more comfortable with. But GR being GR he instead started circulating the fable that the 'male oriented' Execs HATED a female as second in Command. <--- He also thought that would look better to Majel (although given how she was a smart business woman - and that's been shown by what she's been able to produce over the years herself since Star Trek, I'm sure she knew the actual reasoning the Execs had, and probably understood it.)

 

Hahahaha. Hahahaha.

That's like saying Enterprise has an influence on how we interpret Star Trek.

In other words we can freely ignore Discovery because it doesn't take place in the same continuity, no matter how hard some people want to shoe horn it in.

Where she and all the rest of her Enterprise ilk should be.

Seems like a cheap way to cop out of the implications. "Well, it's true but only really applies to this teeny-tiny minority group."

Well, perhaps Spock's line is par for Vulcanians. After all, for Vulcanians women are property of their husbands.

I get how people wish that Star Trek ideals conformed to our present day values, but cultures don't work like that. Cultures are never static. And when you bring in groups with vastly different values (i.e. alien civilizations) maybe 23rd century values are sexist.

Oh no. Burn the heretic.

I think it's sad that the Star Trek franchise has to conform to our ideals rather than be able to explore vastly different philosophies and their implications.

 

By the time "The Menagerie" aired, Majel's chance to be a lead on Star Trek was over with. That ship had sailed. And as for helping other women, that wouldn't do a thing for her. If anything, it would be embarrassing to play little Nurse Nobody while another actress had a power role. If you're going to play Nurse Chapel, it's far better to do that on a ship where women aren't allowed to be leaders. Because then your low status isn't about you, it's "the system" that's to blame.

 

Yeah, but if women are being empowered, Chapel gets better lines, and perhaps a promotion during the series to doctor status, something that didn't happen until TMP. Anything that's good for women is good for any one woman.

Also, so she wasn't going to be the lead. She was good friends with the one woman most likely to be that female lead, Nichelle Nichols, and would probably have been happy for her, especially as it would have been empowering for people of color as well. There's something to be said for that particular killing two birds with one stone.

 

That's how women want to be. It's how women say they are. But that's not how people are. In practice, in their own actual careers, they care about themselves. They look after Number One. And they're not wild about the idea of a peer shooting to the top rather than themselves. This is probably more true in show business than anywhere else, because success there is incredibly conspicuous by it's very nature.

 

That's actually a really good point.

 

I've just rewatched much of TOS, keeping an eye on how the show treats it's female characters. After the pilots there was definitely a drop off in both the agency and efficiency of female crewmen. Most of the female crew are patronised and marginalised by the male characters, few of them ever do anything significant related to their qualifications and we usually only know their qualifications because they are stated in dialogue before the women go on to be primarily a love interest for a male character.

If you look at how Kirk is portrayed as Janice Lester, one has to ask why other female crew were not portrayed as smart, active participants in the stories. Then you look at Janice Lester as Kirk and understand that the writers deliberately wrote the other women to be useless and awful. They made a choice after Number One got too big for her boots to make the featured women space secretaries, nurses, and purveyors of the 'soft sciences'. In some ways Janice Lester embodies the Trek writers' active decision to keep the women in their place for being emotional and irrational.

 

Voyage Home had a female captain of the Saratoga , I believe. But that is years after Janice Lester. Still, you'd think she was on the career path to captain long before that time.

 

If an "ancient Rome in space" like the Romulan Empire has women commanding starships, then surely Starfleet does too.

Kor

 

Good point but we never saw a Klingon female command a D-7 either did we?
JB

 

Klingons are shown to be sexist in later movies and shows, possibly because they value strength and Klingon women are weaker. Romulans value intelligence, ruthlessness, and obedience more in their military at least. However, human women are only weaker than men due to different hormone exposures during development. This is not true of every species on Earth, nor should it be true of every Trek species, nor should the characters be in any way surprised by this.

 

According to TNG, Klingon women are not allowed to sit in council or take the reins of the empire yet earlier on in The Undiscovered Country, Azetbur takes over in wake of her Father's death!
JB

 

If Starfleet had an overall rule forbidding women being Captains, then Number One shouldn't have been able to take command after Pike left the ship in "The Cage". Even of it was OK for her to be second in command, once Pike had left the ship or have been indisposed then one of the men should have been appointed over Number One.in a Starfleet that didn't allow women to command Constellation starships.
Although Pike also said in "The Cage" he wasn't used to seeing a woman on the bridge. Maybe Number One was an exception because she wasn't a regular emotional, unstable woman (sigh). Maybe non-crazy women were allowed to be Captains in Starfleet?

 

Apparently women were not being assigned as starship captains. That doesn't mean a female first officer would not take over temporarily once in a while as part of her second in command role. Anyway, #1 was made out to be some sort of bizarre special case. They had to make her (from their perspective) un-womanly, to justify her being as high as first officer... specifically that unemotional quality that, confusingly, was presented almost as if it was an alien quality, when #1 was apparently as human as any human. The idea was that she had to overcome and master her supposed innate womanly weakness of overemotionalism in order to command, and as a result, was stiff, unfeeling, and "not a real woman". We are not meant to judge or be against this in #1 though... we are meant to respect her.

Gene Roddenberry on the subject of women was bizarrely all over the map. He had his own individual take on it which seems to be part sexism, part anti-sexism, with his not ever having noticed the contradiction.

Ideas about gender were in flux, with no real way to tell yet what ideas would turn out to be "valid" until more time passed, more evolution took place, and the dust settled a bit. We're all at least a little bit clueless about the opposite sex. Gene was fumbling around like everyone was, and made some very individual interesting mistakes along the way.

 

I think Gene had to struggle with his own noble ideals of gender equality and his real-life where he was taking advantage of women.

 

Kind of like how he insisted on no smoking in the future, even though he smoked himself.

Kor

 

Ideals are complicated things - you can acknowledge an ultimate goal without actually embodying it fully yourself. It's something to strive for (even if you can't start today)

 

Pike's statement about not beiny used to having a women on the bridge is so odd because there are exactly three women on the bridge when he says that.

 

Pike may accept it while not being comfortable with it.