‘Murphy Brown’ Became a Political Hot Potato During the 1992 Presidential Election
As we mercifully approach the finale of the 2024 election cycle, motherhood has once again found its way to the forefront of conservative platforms. Not only should women see their pregnancies to term no matter the circumstances or health risks, but Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance has derided women who choose not to become parents in the first place as “childless cat ladies.”
What a difference 30 years makes. In 1992, sitting Vice President Dan Quayle had a very different take on the subject of women and their pregnancies — and used a popular sitcom character to make his point.
The character was CBS’ Murphy Brown, a single career woman who worked as a journalist for FYI, a 60 Minutes-style news program. During the 1991-1992 season, Brown became pregnant, and the father, an underground radical, was unwilling to take responsibility as a parent. After much consideration, Brown decides to have the baby and raise it on her own. While Vance might have cheered the decision, Quayle did not.
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“Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong. Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong, and we must be unequivocal about this,” Quayle said at the time, as reported by CNN. “It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”
Quayle’s criticism was met with resistance from many who questioned just whose “family values” the Vice President represented. “Everybody we knew was going through this at the time,” says Barnet Kellman, one of Murphy Brown’s directors. “Some people were adopting and raising children by themselves. Some people were marrying friends. People were doing all kinds of things … to continue the joys and responsibilities of parenting while being in the workforce.”
Attacking Murphy Brown was a weird rhetorical choice for Quayle, whose speech that day was about riots and looting in Black communities. Fatherless families were the root cause of such violence, Quayle argued, and stories like the one on Murphy Brown only normalized such relationships.
CNN noted, however, that many understood “Quayle’s explanation of the riots as a racist dog whistle, coupled with a critique of the so-called ‘Hollywood elite.’” His awkward fingerpointing at Murphy Brown “absolutely short-circuited any possible serious consideration for the merits of anything he said,” according to Kellman.
Instead, many women in 1992 took Quayle’s Murphy Brown criticism as an attack on their own choices about work and family, an insult likely remembered at the polls.
Quayle’s criticism also seemed in opposition to his anti-abortion stance. Did he want it both ways? “If the Vice President thinks it’s disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child, and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he’d better make sure abortion remains safe and legal,” read a statement by the show’s creator, Diane English.
Murphy Brown opened its fifth season by addressing Quayle head-on, just weeks before the election he and George Bush would lose to Bill Clinton and Al Gore. The character invited non-traditional families to join her on a segment of FYI and fired back. “I’d like to introduce you to some people who might not fit into the vice president’s vision of a family. But they consider themselves families nonetheless,” Brown said. “They work. They struggle. They hope for the kind of life for their children that we all want for our children.”
Candice Bergen, who played Brown, addressed the differences between Vance and Quayle at last week’s Emmy Awards. “Today, a Republican candidate for vice president would never attack a woman for having kids. So, as they say, my work here is done. Meow!”
