I think for 6 you can just write "Brenda."
But in all seriousness, I think that one of the most impressive and underappreciated aspects of this show is the way in which it redefined the definition of feminism and created three completely different and nuanced female characters who all spoke to self-empowerment and sovereignty.
I'm of course referring to Claire, Brenda, and Ruth, although there are a host of other wonderful female characters who traveled through the show. Nevertheless, just the way in which they took the three of those characters, all at drastically different stages of their life, and allowed them to be undeniably and unabashedly themselves, was wonderful. While David and Nate were great characters, I do think that the female characters on this show were largely more interesting.
More specifically, what I love the most about each of the three women is that they all had vastly different notions of independence and empowerment, and yet they were all completely valid and legitimate. Like I said, redefining what it means to be a strong women in the modern age.
Beginning with Ruth, how many shows, especially at that point in television, were interested in exploring the sexuality and reemergence of a 50+, post-meopausal woman who no longer defines herself within the confines of her husband or children. Now of course much of Ruth's characterization was coming to terms with this independence, and moving away from those pre-established caregiver gender norms, but her character was undeniably a testament to the way in which our society forgets about this demographic and ignores it in favor of something shinier and prettier.
As for Brenda, while some may see her development as the opposite of empowering and independent, conforming to the white-picket lifestyle that she detested for so long, I don't see her path as a resignation of her sovereignty. It first should of course be noted that she was deeply unhappy and deeply unhealthy in the early potions of the series. That being said, I never viewed her decision to marry Nate and have Willa as an abandoning of her ideals, but rather her understanding that she is allowed to change her mind, she is allowed to develop and grow, that she's not tied down to the schema of the isolated manic-pixie girl who's doomed to spend her life alone.
And then of course, there's Claire, who I think exhibited the most traditional and standard of developments with regards to her development as a woman. Of course there were plenty of terrible romantic choices on her part, and a part of her early character was absolutely Claire's defining of herself through her relationships with various men, but I absolutely think she outgrew that pattern.
With all of this in mind, like I said, each character had their own varied progression and development over the course of the series, but the show never shamed them from finding their own truths and establishing themselves in whatever way they saw fit. While they may all have gone through periods of relying on their relationships for definition, it was never treated as an endgame trait as much as it was something that they were in the process of overcoming. There was never a period where we were to view Ruth's fluctuating from Nathaniel, to Hiram, to Nikolai, to Maya, as something to be praised or desired. It was (at least in my opinion) our desire for the character to move away from these sorts of dependent relationships.
In the end, Ruth moved in with Sarah as opposed to reverting (at least residentially) to her relationship with George, Claire left for New York without Ted and by herself for the first time in her life, and Brenda (although not ideally, of course) ended both pursuing a career in a field that she had rebelled against for her entire life, and serving as a mother, another aspect of her life that had seemed simply unfathomable earlier on in the series. And the key to all three of these outcomes was that they were treated with praise and pride from a storytelling perspective, treated as self-sufficiceny as opposed to loneliness or sadness.
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