industrial revolutions

So I'm watching this amazing interview with Marlo Thomas, who starred once upon a time in the landmark sitcom "That Girl," which I'd never heard of until a few days ago. And it's blowing my mind.
I look at the dated aesthetic in the clips, and I see things I never expected. It's about an assertive single woman with a career and opinions and an unmarried romantic life and reasonably complex relationships--it's ahead of a lot of the stuff I see on TV today, honestly, though you can see the work of the censors. There's PSAs the star clearly thought were necessary about daycare co-ops in Watts.
Apparently they wanted her for a star (it's no surprise, as she's enormously appealing onscreen, and clearly talented), and she found all of those wife/mother/secretary/pretty face roles insufficient. So she mailed the producers a copy of "The Feminine Mystique."

It really gets at the meat of things, for me, though, when Thomas starts talking in interview about the women's movement, about how she wasn't on the phone with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, that it was a feeling, a "wave," that these things all began happening at once and swept everyone along whether or not they knew that what they were doing was connected. There were letters to her from young women saying they used her TV character to justify to their parents striking out on their own.

I thought, "It must have been so exciting." And then paused. I'm not sure it was, at the time, in the thick of it. I'm not sure how many women in the movement thought of themselves as in "the movement," how many knew that their efforts would join an aggregate and change the whole of society--from comic TV actresses to authors of theory to working women with shoes on the ground. How many of the authors we now treat as touchstones and foundations saw themselves as connected to each other? How many people watching "That Girl" really processed everything going into it, and how many just laughed at a sitcom displaying current trends that seemed like background? I sure didn't think "Roseanne" was funny when I was younger--it mostly made me uncomfortable--and now when I look back, I see it as making a difference, as being a part of the cultural watershed of the time, as setting precedents that mattered.
How conscious are we of these watershed moments? What will my efforts, and yours, be called on the whole, by our children? What "wave" are we caught up in?

Some of us have ideas about it. We're consciously part of movements, the way Steinem was and is, the way Marlo Thomas was and is, too. But those will be distilled and changed by hindsight. What we call "Third Wave Feminism" or the transgender movement or the antiracist movement, what we see as extensions of prior movements, will be seen as predecessors to future movements, movements who will be boggled by our limitations and nearsightedness. They'll see us as laying foundations for what they do, same way we look back at suffragettes and appreciate their legacy while deploring, say, their tendencies toward eugenics or their contributions to Prohibition. And I know I forget, and I think I'm not alone there, that they were thinking of themselves as the vanguard carrying flags handed to them by the people who went before, and could never have predicted what we are now. Some of them would have been downright horrified.
And then I add in pondering the self-consciousness and near-corporate organization of the current gay movement, for instance. How organic was "Will & Grace" in its inception, as opposed to "That Girl"? The Gay Games versus, say, the Special Olympics? I wonder what sorts of differences it will make, both for posterity and for these movements' function for us, here on the ground, right now. Are we co-opted, or better served? The more aware we are of our connections, our memberships and classifications, are we more served--better networked, better organized, better focused--or less, as we separate ourselves from people history will call our allies and cozy up to those that the ones who follow us will be confused that we did not see as opposed to our goals? Is the ascetic urge of activists to turn up our noses at sponsors and labels more likely to preserve or suffocate us?

I'm not rightly sure, myself, but watching this dated TV show and being amazed at how much it glows in the light of retrospect, I have to wonder what of ours they'll be looking at--with pride, and with horror--in thirty years.
"It must have been so exciting."
What's the exciting thing we can't see ourselves doing?