50 fearless, confident, all around badass women on television

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Mary Richards – The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Mary Richards is the sweetest, most mild-mannered of the badasses on this list, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t kill it everyday. Mary Tyler Moore created this iconic character that young women could aspire to, and her influence spans time and generation.

Mary muscled her way into the mostly-male newsroom and proved herself over and over. Determined and with pluck to spare, Mary lived a very unconventional life for a single woman in the 1960s. It may silly to applaud a female character for being single and working a job, but Mary Richards bucked the gender boundaries by refusing to perform like a good little girl.

Mary wasn’t married and wasn’t interested in starting a family until she had her own professional life sorted out. This was an unorthodox lifestyle for a young woman. It’s hard to imagine a time when a show about a single woman living and working in the city would have been significant – especially in an age of television in which we’ve seem most of our TV heroines’ genitals. But Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards made Carrie Bradshaw, Hannah Horvath, Meredith Grey, and Grace Adler possible.

Without Mary standing up to her male bosses, demanding a seat at the table, putting a major crack in the glass ceiling, none of these other female characters would be taken seriously. Mary Richards blazed a trail for all working women, normalizing a situation that, frankly should have been normal all along. Brave, Mary. Brave.