My collection of essays Progressive in Polyester: A Tribute to the Women of Saturday Night Fever is now available! Please enjoy this excerpt from chapter 5: “I Might Even Get a Job Myself”.

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It is perhaps the most quoted scene in the movie: Tony and his family have sat down to dinner, and a heated fight breaks out over pork chops, culminating with Tony’s father Frank Sr. (Val Bisoglio) loudly smacking his son across the head. “Will you just watch the hair!” Tony replies. “You know, I work on my hair a long time and you hit it. He hits my hair.” (Fun fact: Travolta was improvising here and his comic timing is impeccable.)

          The scene is remembered humorously: Tony, wrapped to the chin in a white bib to protect his “beautiful” shiny shirt, fretting over his hair. The vain peacock. Lost in the shadow of this cinematic memory however is the anxiety over gender roles that led to that smack in the first place.

          When we first meet Tony’s parents, we almost don’t see them. His mother Flo (Julie Bovasso) is setting the table for supper: clad in a house dress with a matching blue apron, comfortable shoes on her feet and her hair in those pink foam curlers that you can still find today at the local dollar store, she is probably the most realistic looking housewife I’ve ever seen in a Hollywood movie. Her husband is in the foreground, slouched on the sofa, drinking a beer; his dowdy beige sweater blends in with the shabby floral chesterfield (you can just feel the itch of that acrylic tapestry). Coming home, Tony doesn’t even acknowledge them. He ignores their inquiries (“Where you been?” “Your mother’s asking you where you been?” “Your father’s asking you where you been?”), eventually offering up a scowl in response. It feels symbolic that this scene takes place right after Mr. Fusco (Sam Coppola), Tony’s boss at the paint store, tells Tony that he can’t “f*ck the future” and warns him that “the future f*cks you. It catches up with you, and it f*cks you if you ain’t planned for it.” (Ain’t that the truth, Mr. Fusco, ain’t that the truth!) For Tony, life is Saturday night and everything else is just filler. His father, in particular—with his clean yet shabby house and wife in curlers—must seem to Tony as the ghost of masculinity past and perhaps, most frightening of all, the ghost of Tony’s future if he isn’t careful. It’s not that he doesn’t love his parents—he does—but where do these two humble, plain working-class people figure in Tony’s disco dreams? Indeed, when his father enters Tony’s bedroom to tell him it’s time for supper, Tony—gyrating before the mirror in tight pink pants—doesn’t look at him at all. There is something very touching in the way that Frank Sr. hovers around the edges of this scene; his Eisenhower-era brand of masculinity—sturdy, taciturn, unadorned—at odds with his beautiful, glamorous son (you can practically smell sex every time you look at Travolta in this movie) and the men who adorn Tony’s wall: Bruce Lee. Al Pacino. Sylvester Stallone. Traditional masculinity in shiny new packaging. Relegated to the doorway of Tony’s fantasy world, Frank seeks solace in the nipples of Farrah Fawcett. 

          The argument about pork chops comes about because of Frank Sr.’s unemployment: “Whattya mean you got more pork chops? I’m outta work!” Flo responds that she always makes sure that they eat well in the Manero household and, furthermore, she’s been thinking that she “might even get a job myself.” “Like hell you will,” Frank sneers. “Twenty-five years in construction work—I always brought home a paycheck. What—six, seven months I’m out of work and all of a sudden, you’re hittin’ me, talkin’ back—talkin’ about getting a job and hitting me!” Gently, Flo reminds Frank that he was the one who had started the supper table slap-fest, but she lets the subject drop just as Frank shifts his anger towards their pretty-boy son and his treasured hair.

          Flo’s interest in finding outside employment is for practical—not necessarily feminist—reasons. In The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality, author Thomas Borstelmann writes that most women “went to work in response to financial pressures rather than for personal fulfillment.” A June 1975 Good Housekeeping poll found that while 85% of housewives wanted to stay at home (and found that “being with their children was as challenging as other work”), only 41% agreed that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’: most women, the poll found, “wanted to alternate outside work with housework, depending on the ages of their children and their need for more income.” This certainly applies to Flo—her sons are both adults now and her daughter is almost a teenager (Flo and Frank Sr. are older, unhip parents—in other words, they are the absolute best kind of parents) and her husband has been on the unemployment line for at least half a year. Tony works full-time at a paint shop but how much of his paycheck does he share with his parents? Clearly, Saturday nights at 2001 Odyssey are his priority.

          It’s a myth that women didn’t work outside the home before feminism’s second wave. Women—particularly working-class women—have always worked outside the home, albeit often in jobs that were gendered and which didn’t pay that well. The Good Housekeeping Woman’s Almanac of 1977 points out that many “outside jobs considered ‘women’s work’ involve helping or serving others. Often, they are low in pay, status, and promotion possibilities.” My maternal grandmother Daisy worked as a maid (for Timothy Findley no less!), as did her mother Nellie. Nellie was a widow, but Daisy was married to my handsome grandfather—an NDP voting union man. I don’t know how my grandfather felt about his wife having to work outside the home; I am guessing he put practicality over pride: the bills, after all, needed to be paid. On some level, Frank must understand this, too. Watching the supper scene in Saturday Night Fever, it is clear to me that Frank is feeling more defeated than angry. Thanks to deindustrialization and the loss of manufacturing jobs, “the economic value of a blue-collar husband was declining,” Borstelmann writes in his book. With factories closing and unemployment lines growing, Flo would hardly be the first housewife in Bay Ridge to seek paid employment. If the small yet multi-generational family (Tony’s grandmother also lives with them) could afford to go half a year without their patriarch’s paycheck then Frank is blessed to have such a clever, cost-cutting wife. As the Good Housekeeping Woman’s Almanac says, “setting up a workable household budget is an awesome task.” You hear that, Tony? Your mother is flippin’ awesome.

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