Ally McBeal & Her Sisters

...Two sequels and a movie are planned...

...Another episode, with Ally defending a college boy who punched out the man who insulted his date, seemed to argue that even in our enlightened times women secretly want a man who will defend their honor...

...The sudden cult popularity of Ally and Bridget, however, suggests that we have moved beyond all that to a full-blown cultural obsession with single women...

...change the world...

...I just want to get married first...

...The percentage of single people has been increasing much faster than that of married people, and the number of women who waited until their thirties to marry and have children has also risen steadily...

...Although she professes to be a feminist, Bridget can only briefly maintain the pretense, for feminism simply has nothing useful to say to the reality of her life...

...Notwithstanding feminist theories to the contrary, it has been discussed and alluded to tactfully in the press and debated in journals of opinion...

...It's feeling that you have to attend a boring party when you'd rather be home in your pajamas watching televi-sion—the feeling that you have to put on mascara and high heels to run to the drugstore, just in case you happen to meet a guy...

...Ally McBeal has attracted some harsh criticism...

...One explanation may be demographics...

...The disillusionment is compounded by the feeling of "Nobody told us...

...In England, Bridget Jones has produced an even greater public response...

...As if this weren't heretical enough, the female attorneys on the program openly discuss the role of sexual allure in their careers and worry about the day they won't be young and cute anymore...

...Told that marriage is an artificial construct designed to oppress women and fed a steady diet of popular slogans like "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle," they have been told the way to be happy and fulfilled is to have a career...

...Millions of women watch her show devotedly and call one another afterwards to talk about what happened...

...There are newspaper and magazine debates between real-life singletons and smug marrieds, and between single thirtysomething women and their male counterparts...

...The book has introduced several neologisms into the language, including "singletons" for spinsters and "Smug Marrieds" for married friends...

...What both the author and the readers of Bridget Jones seem to realize is that in certain fundamental ways the modern professional woman has changed little from her eighteenth-century foremothers...

...The basic problem, she thinks, is that "as women glide from their twenties to thirties, the balance of power subtly shifts...

...Slightly flaky, risque behavior is described as "very Bridget Jonesy...

...Darcy...

...Noting that the show is written and produced by a man, David Kelley, the Village Voice denounced the program's "contempt for women" and called Ally "transparently a male producer's wet dream of the kind of postfeminist career woman a fella could really set his cap for—sensitive, beaten down, and not-so-secretly hungry for a good man to fill the aching void of her life...

...In the United States, Ally, despite her irritating demeanor, is being described simultaneously as a new role model, a groundbreaking postfeminist, and a giant leap backward for womankind...

...Unlike Ally's high-powered work, Bridget's dead-end job in the publishing industry is far from the challenging employment that women are supposed to have in the postfeminist era...

...But Bridget Jones is a far more comical, endearing, and unpretentious figure than Ally McBeal...

...It's not just the psychologically debilitating feeling that you are always, somehow, waiting...

...In one recent episode, Ally and her opposing counsel—a woman with toothpaste-commercial teeth—engage in a smiling competition to appeal to the judge during a sidebar conference...

...Helen Fielding indulges not just her own but every thinking woman's fantasy when she lifts her plot straight out of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, complete with Bridget's very own Mr...

...Begun as a series of columns in the Independent by journalist Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones chronicles a year in the life of a slightly neurotic thirtyish woman obsessed with her weight and finding a boyfriend...

...If Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones can be popular feminine icons, then radical feminism has finally lost all the credibility it spent the last thirty years trying to build...

...The idea that women, even highly educated, successful women, still want marriage and family is something most people have realized for a considerable time...

...In fact, Ally McBeal's desire to get married would be even more understandable if the work of young associates in a law firm were portrayed accurately—if she were shown doing library research, document review, and proofreading for fourteen hours a day, instead of arguing high-profile cases in court...

...But the better explanation is probably that there is now an entire generation of women who grew up expecting the tenets of feminism to be true...

...According to her gay friend Tom, "homosexuals and single women in their thirties have natural bonding: both being accustomed to disappointing their parents and being treated as freaks by society...

...Completely exhausted by entire day of date-preparation...

...It conveys, for instance, its heroine's concern about the ominous ticking of her biological clock with periodic hallucinations of a computer-generated dancing and rollerblading baby...

...The fervor for Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones in the late 1990s is proof that a critical mass of women have been forced to relearn old lessons the hard way...

...Perhaps because they are finally willing to tell it as it is, Ally and Bridget are riding a seismic wave of popularity...

...It turned out that many jobs involve no more than going to the office every day and sitting in front of a word processor in a cubicle...

...Being a woman is worse than being a farmer—there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturized, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised...

...The whole performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to go to seed...

...As the Guardian observed last September, "It's as if single women in their thirties were a new discovery...

...All agreed that Ally's story is "the story of my life...

...Her lengthy list of New Year's resolutions—"reduce circumference of thighs," "learn to program video"—includes the promise not to "sulk about having no boyfriend, but develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend...

...Her dithering and startled Bambi act detract from the serious questions the show raises about male and female roles...

...But the message is in more than the visuals: Ally McBeal is the woman of the 1990s who turns aside from time to time to say things like, "I want to A lawyer turned stay-at-home wife and mother, Melinda Ledden Sidak lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington...

...Even the most outrageous minxes lose their nerve, wrestling with the first twinges of existential angst: fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian...

...Three decades of established feminism in the United States has guaranteed that women believe few of the old-fashioned warnings about the perils that lie ahead...

...Bridget Jones's Diary perfectly captures how exhausting it is to be a single woman...

...She is subjected to regular rejection by "commitment phobic" men and to endless queries and tactless remarks about her single state from parents, family friends, and "Smug Marrieds...

...To help her through the low moments, she takes comfort in smoking and drinking, reading self-help books, eating chocolate, and "feminist ranting" with her girlfriends, Jude and Shazzer...

...Called the "cult publishing phenomenon of the 1990s," the book has been at the top of the British bestseller list for months and will be published in America by Viking this summer...

...Last month the Washington Post profiled a group of single girlfriends who get together each week to watch Ally...

...The heroine of Bridget Jones's Diary also wears ridiculously short skirts and worries about getting married...

...Have finally realized the secret of happiness with whelming sense of defeat" that she men," writes Bridget Jones...

...Then there's the equally demanding job of keeping up the physical plant...

...There are serious interviews with scholars and psychotherapists about the anxieties of single women, and lighthearted profiles of real-life Bridget Joneses, complete with numerical standings for how they compare to the book's character...

...The loneliness and longing of her single state are magnified by the presence in her law firm of her childhood sweetheart Billy and, worse, his lawyer-wife...

...When Shazzer's denunciations of irresponsible men become too loud at their local hangout, Bridget and Jude immediately shush her and sink down into their coats because, "after all, there is nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism...

...And between the two of them, they may reveal at last, for all to see, the failure of the feminists to capture the hearts and minds of women...

...Indeed, the wonder isn't that a lot of women in their thirties are desperate to get married, but how many succeed...

...As the television show portrays her, Ally McBeal is a Harvard-educated and amazingly successful lawyer, but she also happens to be an anxious neurotic, unfulfilled because she lacks those crucial ingredients of female happiness: a husband and children...

...Ally's short skirts and little-girl twittishness make her unbelievable as a top-tier attorney...

...Who today knows that she should look for a husband while in her twenties because the pickings and the opportunities to meet men get slimmer with every passing year...

...And it is admits the moral of her story: "Do as with deep regret, rage, and an over- your mother tells you...

...In England, there is Bridget Jones's Diary, the bestselling comic tale of a year in the life of an unmarried working woman in her thirties...

...Bridget's diary entry for January 15 says it all: 6 p.m...

...Some complaints about the show are justified...

...When they grew up and spent some time in the real world, however, things turned out to be different...

...Heavily influenced by the dream-logic visual effects of the hip music videos, Ally McBeal is notorious for its computer-generated graphics and wild filming techniques...

...Sisters Feminism Isn't What It Used to Be By Melinda Ledden Sidak In America, there is Ally McBeal, the surprise TV hit about a young, quirky, unmarried woman at an elite Boston law firm...

...Ally's anxieties as an ambitious, professional woman would have greater impact if she stopped acting like a flustered teenager— more forcefully revealing the fact that even successful, real-life women lawyers who behave in a mature and competent manner long to get married and have babies...

...They have been encouraged to have sexual relations with men without demanding or expecting emotional commitment in return...